The Art of Reading Minds

Words really can’t do it much better justice.

You should make a habit of using your joy anchor (a certain touch, combined with a certain word, spoken a certain way) the moment somebody is very happy, no matter who it is.

“Wouldn’t it be great if…? How would that make you feel?”

“What’s your favorite thing about…”
“Can you remember the last time you felt…”
“Imagine that you…”

“… Do you remember the feeling? Can you feel it right now? That’s the exact way I feel about this.”

“You know how you sometimes have an idea, that you just know you have to realize, or when you see something you just have to own at any cost? Know what I mean? When that feeling fills you completely, and you can’t stop thinking that you simply must have this thing? Or do this thing? Do you remember the feeling?”

Combining various sensory impressions in an anchor is even better. Instead of just saying a word, you do it with a specific tone of voice while making a gesture with one hand and touching her arm with the other hand. The more sensory impressions you can include in the anchor, the clearer and stronger it will be.

But as I wrote previously, anything we can perceive can make a functional anchor—a word, an image, a tone of voice, a particular gesture, a smell, a color, or a taste.

Unfortunately, we tend to touch people more when they are sad or upset. Richardson wonders if this might explain why so many people in our society don’t like being touched; they’ve simply learned, since their childhood, to associate touch with negative emotions.

We don’t actually even need to remember the event; we can bring back the emotions from events we’ve even forgotten.