Setting a great anchor using NLP, or a stimulus response isn’t always easy. Here are a few tips that may help you.

1. In setting a kinesthetic anchor make sure it isn’t placed in a location of the body with a lot of (small) nerve endings, like the wrist. It becomes hard to replicate .

2. Make sure it is unique, it becomes much harder for it to be diluted that way.

3. Instead of sticking to the run of the mill kinesthetic anchor, consider a spatial, or visual anchor through gesturing, or auditory anchor by using certain words or tonality. Or a combination. If anything it prevents you from touching the client and allows you to set more unique anchors.

4. To make sure that the state of the client is as pure as possible, make sure that other states aren’t present.

5. Really crank up your state elicitation!  State elicitation gets better through practice. Be an academy award winning actor or actress!

6. Really become the Sherlock Holmes master of sensory acuity, where you can pin point that moment of setting an anchor so much better by noticing bodily/behavioral shifts in the client. You need to see subtle state changes, the full transition and the building of the resourceful state.

7. Repetition of setting it again, can become your best friend.

8. Spice up your own life setting anchors on yourself, or teach your clients to self-anchor.

9. Get permission from the client if you are going to touch them. If they aren’t expecting for you to teach them, you may horribly break their state and loose rapport the moment you touch them. Unless you want to set a negative anchor.

10.  Practice, a lot.

And as always, rapport, rapport, rapport. Doing any NLP technique works so much better if you have rapport.