Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Ten – Anchoring: The Neurological Triggering of Specifically Designed Behaviours
Hello and welcome back to Brain In The Game, the podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who want to do their sport a little smarter. Brain In The Game is a lesson in putting the mental back in to reliable. And I’m your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode, I’m going to walk you through an exercise later on. So I want you to grab a pen and a piece of paper, so that you can jot down a few notes as we go.
One of the programmes we offer is a mentoring and mastermind group. Now, this is a group of 10 athletes and coaches from a diverse range of sports who come together in a virtual meeting place every week over a 6-month period. During that time we discuss the most cutting-edge neurological programmes and exercises for these athletes. We look at cognitive behaviour; we look at management of emotions; and we also look at what’s working in specific sports, so we can cross-platform ideas.
So in this episode of Brain In The Game, I want to discuss something that came up in one of my groups last week -- and that was the misunderstanding of anchoring. Anchoring is one of those really cool techniques that we use a lot. It’s creating an association between one event and another, or between one event and an emotion or a belief. So anchoring is one of those techniques we use frequently within our coaching and within our education.
During last week’s mastermind group, some of the misunderstandings about how anchoring works and why we use anchoring and where to use anchoring, encouraged me to do this podcast so that everybody has a better understanding of this really useful and very accessible mental skill.
Anchoring is one of those innate skill sets that we learn from the time we are born to create an association between one or two or multiple events, how one thing can trigger a different action, reaction or a response can trigger a belief, can trigger an emotion based on our interpretation of that, based on the trigger point that’s created from past experience or our understanding.
So creating associations is something that we do innately. The earliest cavemen understood that by covering our skin with an animal hide, it created warmth and enabled us to survive the harsh winters. So we created an association of feeling really good by covering our skin with something that kept us warm. Or by hearing that the saber-toothed tiger was outside the cave, we associated that with the emotion of being fearful for our life. If we hadn’t have learned to make these associations, to make these cognitive links, then we probably wouldn’t have survived as a species and wouldn’t now be the top of the food chain.
So how does all that feed in to what I want to talk to you about today in the sporting world - because clearly we don’t necessarily have to worry about covering our skin with animal hide because of the weather or worry too much about saber-toothed tigers. But the concept and the process of linking events and emotions with triggers is what we do today.
If you think about when you go and train, do you have the same emotional state as when you go into a competition?
When you go out and you try a new skill for the first time, is that the same emotional state to a skill that you’ve done numerous times?
Well, probably not. The familiarity lowers your anxiety and the comfort level, so you have a different state, a different emotion that’s going through your body.
Understanding our emotions create our catalogue of events and our memories, obviously managing our emotions is vital when we’re looking at creating sustainable and replicable blueprints to follow. So anchoring is a vital skill for us to understand, to be able to manipulate, and to be able to manage if we want to produce replicable and desirable neurological points of reference. Those blueprints enable us to respond rather than react. So anchoring is innately designed to protect us and enable us to evolve, to be able to create an environment so we can understand what the consequences are. And anchoring, it’s simply creating a link, an association between two or more events.
Now, as I said, those events can be in a physical event, they can be an emotion, they can be a state, they can be a behaviour, even a thought or a belief. Probably the most widely understood concept about anchoring came from the Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov. Now, when we was studying the digestive system of dogs back in the 1900’s, he was looking at the salivation process of a group of dogs in his laboratory. What he did recognise at that time was when the dogs heard the bell, which meant the food was coming, they began to salivate before they could even see or smell the food. That created an association, a link between hearing the bell and the anticipation of the food coming. That subconscious understanding enabled the digestive system to kick in long before it was required.
Pavlov named this a conditioned reflex process and that process is what we all go through, not just as dogs in his laboratory but all of us. When you’re walking to work or you’re walking to school or you’re walking to doctors and dentist, you have a conditioned response, you have an emotion that’s evoked in your mind that floods your body with that template of your response. Pavlov’s conditioned reflex is the association between an action and another action. Pavlov’s dogs just demonstrated what we all do since birth and that built-in connection between multiple events and how that makes us feel.
We understand that how we feel, our emotions or our sense of perception of what’s going on, impacts on our performance, impacts on the decisions that we take, the processes we decide to follow. And as I said, these come from the minute we’re born, from the touch of our mother to the sound of a school bell to a telephone, even a location. All these events have connections that we’ve created, have associations to how we feel, our emotions, our understanding, our perception, and even down to the different types of blueprints we choose to follow.
We even have the same conditioned reflexes to our emotions. So if somebody is happy or sad or somebody is angry or excited, we have a conditioned response in order to manage that interaction. So when you come up against somebody who’s angry, your conditioned response is different if you come up against somebody who is excited or happy. Their emotion triggers a set response in us. We think of this innate skill set as predominantly a positive thing for protecting us. It’s the same process for the negativity too. So that same anchoring process that fires off our sense of joy or self-preservation is also the same process that fires off our doubts, our fears, and our sabotaging performances.
So as an athlete, I’m sure you can recall a time when you stepped down to perform where your emotions became far more powerful than your desire to perform. They overwhelmed you. That’s a conditioned response. That’s an anchor that you’ve created either through your imagination or through a past event.
So the importance of understanding and mastering for an athlete is incredibly important. It’s also a vital skill set for a coach to understand and master – because when you understand and you master the anchoring process and you can anchor through specific triggers, a past emotion that’s positive and an outcome or a skill set that you’ve created through the imagination, through the visualisation process, you as an athlete and coach take back control of your performance. And you do this through state elicitation, by understanding what state or emotional tag you’ve applied to something. We’ve discussed before that our emotions are part of our memories. They’re part of our categorisation process. When we think of something that’s happened or we recall something, it’s tagged with a specific emotion to help us categorise that and recall that blueprint.
Now when we talk about blueprints or we talk about neurological points of reference, what we’re really talking about is a concoction of different chemicals our brain uses to create that blueprint, to create that memory. When we fire off specific triggers to recall that blueprint or that neurological point of reference, what we’re trying to do is get our brain to dump the same chemical compound, the same chemical DNA so that we replicate that emotion or that response.
Now I want you to think of this in a bit of a bizarre context. Think about somebody who specialises in using explosives. What everybody else sees when they stand there and watch is the big bang or the firework display or the desired environment once the dust is settled. In reality where the skill lies is in the preparation and the execution. I mean if you just threw a whole bunch of TNT in a hole and expected it to go bang and you have a perfectly designed objective or outcome, then you’re kidding yourself. The same concept is in our mind. If we just tried holding that and wait for it to happen, we have little control over what we produce. So the skill set really is in creating that reliable and replicable process, that performance that we can turn on time after time after time.
And we do that by recognising what we want to achieve. We need to build that sequential pattern that we want to trigger. We want to lay those neurological cables so precisely that every single time we fire the anchor, it follows the same neural pathways. We want to create the charge which are the triggers so that every single time we trigger that, it knows that’s what I’m going to do, that’s a replication of what I’ve tried to do before. And we need to lay the explosives or the stimulants in such a way that it fires a very precise chemical compound, that chemical cocktail that we’re trying to replicate.
So that’s where the skill set lies, it’s in crafting that whole process. It’s not necessarily in the big bang. It’s, as I say, in the detail. Of course, I really am talking about building the performance here, about managing the emotions and creating a state anchor and firing them in a specific fashion to get a desired performance result.
When you’re an athlete and you step up to perform, how do you know that you’re going to replicate the perfect performance, the performance that you’ve practised, the performance that you’ve seen a squillion times in your head? What trigger do you have to fire that specific chemical compound that you’ve got in your brain, that blueprint, that neurological point of reference? How do you know that that’s the one that your brain is going to select at that precise time? Of course you don’t know unless you fire the specific trigger. So we have to create an anchor, we have to create the association between the trigger, the emotion and the performance. That is anchoring.
Just because we do it naturally, it doesn’t always mean we do it particularly well. Pavlov didn’t invent conditioned reflex, he just recognised and labeled it. This has enabled us today to manipulate and control it and give it the best possible outcome we can. So the trigger is a specific word or phrase that we associate to that performance, to that response. How many times as an athlete have you looked back on a performance and gone, oh, you know, I should have done this or I could have done that or why didn’t I do this. I know when I was performing, that was one of the things you’d walk away and go, ah, next time I need to and why didn’t I do that this time or I didn’t finish on the podium because I didn’t do that.
If I could have guaranteed as a performer to, every single time, perform the way I trained or perform the way that I wanted to, then of course I would have done. If I had understood back then how to create a neurological anchor, I would have done. If I had known back then how I could produce a performance with a specific word or specific phrase time after time, then of course I would have done. Often as an athlete when we are put under duress either by time constraints or by performance, we revert back to familiarity, the thing that we’ve done before. It doesn’t matter how many times we visualise, unless we create an anchor to fire that neural pathway that we crafted and created, then it’s more likely to pick that through that trigger. If we don’t, we’re going to revert back to familiarity, and that familiarity might be what we’ve done in the past. And of course if we do what we’ve done in the past, we’re not going to be able to expect different results.
So if you’ve done the best you’ve ever done and your performance is exactly what you want, then of course that’s what you want to replicate, that’s your familiarity. But if you want to do better, if you want to do something bigger and brighter and stronger, then you’ve got to create that neural pathway and fire that trigger to make your brain select that when it’s placed under duress, when it’s placed under that stressful situation of being in a competition.
The flip side of familiarisation is performing unpredictably or erratically, where your brain doesn’t know what to select. There isn’t a blueprint that it can pick up and use quick enough and often that erratic behaviour is where you perform – when you walk away, you go, I have no idea where that came from.
Familiarity and erratic are not really desired performance. What we want is to craft our skill set. What we want is to craft our performance and we do that by visualisation, we do that by association, and we do that by firing specific triggers as and when we need them. And the key ingredient in doing that is understanding the emotional tag that goes with that. It’s understanding what state to elicit. And neurological points of reference are those blueprints we choose to follow. So by choosing and associating an emotion and a trigger and a performance, we can replicate that chemical cocktail, we can replicate that blueprint each and everytime.
So now that we understand how it works, why it works and where it comes from, let’s put it into the sporting context. Let’s build an anchor. Let’s build a phrase anchor, using a specific phrase or a specific word. So this is where we get the pens and the paper out…
I want you to first think about a past event that you’ve performed in that was the best event for you, it gave you the best result that you’ve ever had. Now, I don’t necessarily mean position on the podium, but when you look back at that performance, you go, at that time, I was completely in control. I felt completely confident or I was calm or I was strong. Whatever it is, I want you to think about an event like that and just jot it down at the top of the piece of paper.
Now I want you to identify what specific emotion that made that event what it was. Was it confidence? Was it being in control? Was it feeling calm? Was it a focus? What specific emotion differentiated that performance among any other performances that you’ve done. Once we’ve identified an event, we’ve identified a specific emotion, we’re going to visualise that and we’re going to then be able to replicate that blueprint and then cross platform that into a framework that we place into our minds and place a specific trigger to fire that chemical concoction.
We’re going to engulf our senses. We’re going to make that blueprint something that is replicable, something that is reliable, and something that is in front of thought when our brain needs to select a blueprint. When we’re ready to fire it, it’s going to be the number one choice for our brain. So we need to make it memorable.
This is where the firing trigger, the word or phrase, needs to be specific to you. It needs to be something that you don’t use as an everyday occurrence. I mean if you use the word “hello” and then every single time you said hello, we’d be diluting that trigger, we’d be diluting that association between firing that trigger and that specific performance outcome. It needs to be unique, something that you do not use in everyday life. So if you are an ice-skater, you might think of the word “glide.” Or if you’re a sprinter, you might think of the word “explode.” Or if you’re a gymnast, you might think of the word “be strong.” Those kind of trigger words are very specific to the chosen sport, but they’re also very personal.
Now I asked you to identify a specific event that worked for you that got you the performance results that you wanted, and we’re going to visualise that. So you will be closing your eyes, so make sure you’re in a safe area where you’re comfortable and there’s nothing around you that you can fall over, and also don’t do this if you’re driving.
Now, go ahead and get comfortable. I want you to go through this visualisation event. We’re going to close our eyes, we’re going to be relaxed, but we’re going to be stimulated. We’re going to stimulate all our senses as much as we possibly can. We’re going to ramp them up to a point that when they hit the roof, when they hit the top, the most vibrant colours, the most crystal clear sounds, the most emotional oomph that we’ve got, we’re going to fire off our trigger.
Ok. So let’s get in and do this…
Now, I want you to close your eyes. I want you to put yourself right back into that event, right back on – if it’s on the track, you’re on the track. If it’s on a field, you’re right on the field. If it’s on the ice, you’re on that ice. And I want you to be able to see what you saw at that time right through your own eyes. I want you to be completely associated to that moment, that event, that time, that placing that time in your memory. And as you do that, as you’re standing there right in that event, right there right now, I want you to notice that you start to feel the same emotions, you start to feel the same sense of success or being in control or being that calm performer. Whatever that emotion was, notice that starts to come into your body now. And as you look through your own eyes, seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard, feeling what you felt, even smelling what you smelt. I want you to notice how more real that event becomes, how more you feel like you’re right there right now. And if you do that, I want you to picture in the top right-hand corner of your mind there’s a dial and it’s a big black dial and as you turn that dial to the right, if you turn that dial up, the intensity increases. So what you heard at that time becomes even more crystal clear, what you saw at that time becomes even more vibrant and technicolor, what you felt seems to be bubbling more and more inside you, and what you smelt becomes even more precise. And then go ahead and turn up even more so that the clarity becomes even greater, the crystal clear sounds that you heard, the vision becomes crystal clear, almost high definition, the colours are so incredibly vibrant, what you feel inside your body is almost percolating in your body and is going to explode. Once you get to the top or you just have just that one more dial, so it’s almost going to explode out of your body. Now, fire that trigger. Say that keyword, that key phrase.
What you’ve just done is create an association between your trigger word and that specific chemical compound, that specific memory that your brain has of that successful event. And if you keep building that, if you keep replicating that process, more and more, the association between your keyword or phrase and that event become more and more interlocked, more and more connected.
So the concept for this is every single time you want to fire that specific response, that specific state, that specific emotion, that specific performance, you need to fire that specific trigger, and your brain will go, right, that trigger means that blueprint. Not only do these give us a better, more reliable, more predictable outcome, it enables us to lower our anxiety levels, it enables us to feel calmer and more controlled about the competition, about the outcome, about the performance. Dissipating that negative emotion, dissipating that negative anxiety gives us a clearer thought process anyway. It enables us to be more in control. It enables us to think more clearly. So not only do we have a blueprint that we want that we fire when we need it, it’s also got these other benefits where it’s starting to lower our anxiety, it starts to put us more in control, it starts to make us feel more like the performance we want to perform.
Anchoring is vital when we’re talking about performance. Anchoring is vital when we’re talking about managing our emotions. It’s more vital when we think about the pressure we place on our athletes to perform at key events. When we walk into a particular place, we have a preconceived emotional state that we go to. If we have an athlete who rocks up at an event and they become overwhelmed by that event, that’s them creating an anchor. When I go to this competition, whoa, I feel intimidated. When I go to perform this skill, I’m anxious. We want to create better connections. We want to create better associations. We want to control that and manipulate that as specifically as we possibly can to enable us to control the outcome, not allow the situation to control us.
When we were discussing this in our mastermind group last week, one of the key things that I found interesting as we went along was the amount of coaches that didn’t use this process in their everyday training. They understood the concept of it but didn’t understand the application of it. The overwhelming reality was most coaches were trying to completely reinvent the wheel each and every time. When they looked at the competition, they go, right, at this competition we need to create this, this, this and this rather than look at, ok, what blueprint do we already have that we can fire, what have we done in training that I want them to replicate, what have we done in a past event.
If we have to constantly recreate and reinvent the wheel, there’s a lot of expectation on our athletes because they don’t have that familiarity, they don’t have that comfort zone around, I know how to do this, I’ve done this a hundred times, I’m in control, I can produce this performance. Essentially what we’re doing, we’re sending these athletes out there to perform uniquely each and every time. We want to create the anchor. We want to create the anchor between feeling comfortable, feeling confident. We need to take what we’ve done before and replicate it. We need to unpack it, find what’s worked and cross-platform that, and we do that through firing specific anchors, creating that association between that sense of feeling in control, that sense of feeling calm, and that sense of that perfect state that was in that particular time. We have them already catalogued in our brain. We have them, we’ve been there before we’ve done it, we have it, we own it. If we don’t use it and fire it, then we’re not being smart about how we perform.
The other misconception that came out of our mastermind group was a lot of coaches and athletes thought anchoring was only about a skill, producing a performance. What we demonstrated through that process was that it’s an emotion, it’s replicating an emotion, it’s replicating a sense, a state that enabled athletes to take control, enabled athletes to lower their anxiety, enabled athletes to feel calm, to feel in control, to feel strong, to feel confident. All the things that we as coaches want our athletes to feel, want them to have in their tool belt but often don’t create.
So as an athlete and a coach, the last thing you want to do is constantly reinvent the wheel. It’s constantly going out there and creating something brand new each and every time. We want to add. We want to build. If I ask you to think about a performance, how much of that performance would you want to keep? Is it 60%, 70%, 80%. So there’s parts of every single performance that you do. Even the worst performances in the world, if you look at that performance and you compartmentalise it, there will be parts of that performance that you go, you know, I did that really well, I want to keep that. There will be parts of every single performance, even the best performances in the world, that you go, I want to do that a bit different. So if you’re understanding every performance, if we compartmentalise, if we unpack it, there’s bits that we want to replicate, there’s bits that we need to keep. I’m going to take that performance at nationals and I’m going to take that performance at state and I’m going to put them together so I fire that and that together. We get the opportunity then to fire multiple anchors. We can create a path of firing that anchor and then that anchor and that anchor. So it builds. These bridging anchors enable us to not only think about a particular skill or a particular state, but adding multiple skills and multiple states.
As I said before, we perceive anchoring as only being the positive. There’s a negative side to this too. If we create an association, a negative association to an event, to a skill, to a location, to an injury, we need to be able to collapse that anchor. We need to be able to unpack and break that anchor down and replace that with a more productive firing anchor. So we need to be able to build anchors and we need to be able to break anchors down to collapse an anchor.
And that’s something else that I notice when we were discussing this in our group last week. The people thought there was only one anchor, one anchor style, one anchor type. We have spatial anchoring, we have physical anchoring, we have phrase anchoring, we have stage anchoring, multiple step anchoring. All these different skill sets of anchoring are used for very very specific outcomes. Do we want to build an anchor, do we want to unpack an anchor, do we want to create multiple anchoring, do we want to create an anchor that’s physically fired off, do we want to create an anchor that’s audibly fired off, do we want to create an anchor that is locationally fired off. I often talk to athletes about when do you become the athlete. You become the athlete when you get strapped ready for a game. That is an anchor. The moment you get strapped, that fires I am now the athlete. That’s an anchor. Understanding it, managing it, manipulating it, and controlling it gives you the control when you become the athlete. Or when you walk into a location, that becomes the anchor, game on. Or when you walk out to the crease if you’re a cricket player, that becomes the anchor. We create these, we craft these, we fire the triggers, the specific triggers to give us specific emotions to give us specific sense of control.
Anchoring is what makes us able to do what we do, to give athletes control, to give coaches a tool that they can craft and create the performance, and then the athlete can control, craft and create the outcome. Anchoring is a vital skill set, something that every single coach and athlete needs to understand, needs to be applying in their processes, in their competition preparation, in their coaching. In managing an athlete’s emotions, their emotional state needs to be controlled and replicated. We want to create an environment for the athlete that enables them to do what they do.
And so that brings us to the end of yet another episode of Brain In The Game. I hope this has given you an understanding of what makes you follow certain patterns, why you choose certain actions over others, and what you can do to replace that, to manage that, to manipulate that outcome, to give you the best possible opportunity at performing at your optimum. I’ll put the link to the show notes of this episode on our website, which is www.BrainInTheGame.com.au. That’s BrainInTheGame, all one word.
And so until our next training session, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I am the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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