We've all had this experience: a song comes on the radio and we're transported back to a time and place ten, fifteen, twenty years ago or longer. Maybe it was a song that reminded us of a time when we were struggling through a broken heart, or maybe it was just the opposite, the soundtrack for our first true love.



You drift back into your memories to that girlfriend or boyfriend, remembering that first date or the date you really wanted.

When I was about sixteen years old, I met my first wife. She lived east of Portland in a rural area. At the time we started going out, the song 'Twenty-five or Six to Four' by Chicago was popular. When that song comes on the radio now, I'm transported back to that time, driving my new Toyota Celica GT east on 84 through the Columbia Gorge toward my future wife's house, the new car smell still in the air, and Chicago is on the radio. I feel full of anticipation and power and I'm thrilled to be alive.

I'm taken back thirty years. . . okay, a little more than thirty years, to a crystal clear memory, to a palpable feeling.

Maybe right now in your marriage or with your significant other you have a song that when you hear it both of you say, 'Oh, that's our song,' or maybe you've had an 'our song' in the past that you can remember.

What is this? And what does it have to do with persuasion?

It's called anchoring and anchoring has everything to do with persuasion. Music can put you in intense emotional states. These emotional states are connected with the stimulus of the memory. They travel through neuro-pathways of emotions and memories that words and language cannot. And sometimes music affects us so intensely that we want to share it with others, but a song that touches me deeply may not touch you as deeply. It's extraordinarily individual and powerful. Aldous Huxley said, 'After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.' We're constantly exposed to things that we have been conditioned to react to. It's often been said that we are far more reactive than proactive. The human brain is really more on automatic pilot than it is a conscious device. We think we're conscious. We have a vested interest in thinking that. But we're really not.

Most of our activities in life are habitual. At our deepest core are things we do completely automatically. As an example, how long can you pay conscious attention to your breathing? Seconds? Minutes? Maybe if you're into meditation, you can sit for an hour and simply focus on your breath. But you certainly don't do it twenty-four hours a day. You can't. You have to sleep.

As this applies to persuasion, we simply need to elicit an emotion and get that emotion up to it's peak. We then pair that peak emotional response to a unique stimulus. And thereafter, every time we trigger that unique stimulus, our prospect or client is reminded of that peak state.

This is not to say we're going to elicit our prospect's musical history and play the songs and attach that special, happy, excited or calm feelings to ourselves, but if you can understand the way anchoring works through the example of 'our song', then you've internalized the concept of anchoring.

And, you can use this knowledge by eliciting your clients' strongest emotional states that are immediately usable for anchoring purposes and what would those be? Criteria. When a person tells you their highest criteria, it makes them emotional. They'll feel it. And when that happens, you can pair it with some unique state. It's just that simple.

Stay tuned for future articles on anchoring as one of the most important tools in your persuasion toolbox.