Anchoring

A process in which a specific stimulus or trigger is paired with a particular internal state or response. Anchors may be set deliberately or inadvertently, and can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, or gustatory. Once established, the anchor can be fired to reliably re-access the associated state. Anchoring is one of the foundational techniques in NLP, derived from Pavlovian conditioning and refined through the work of Bandler and Grinder.