John, Carmen and Troy Just to pick up this thread again. I agree, J&C; anchoring is an art form and very powerful. I also agree that you can't not anchor. I elaborate on this statement in the paragraphs below. I work with a lot of people who have sat NLP Practitioner trainings with many different NLP schools  and make similar comments to Troy about lack of success with anchoring.  NLP Trainers have a lot to answer for here, with weak anchoring demonstrations and set up of anchoring exercises. Last week I was coaching a lady who was going to take NLP Trainers Training, who said anchoring never worked for her when being the subject. Every time she tried an anchoring as a subject the result was a bad feeling. I asked her some questions and found out that she took Practitioner training 5 years ago. In the first anchoring exercise the person she was working with violated the essential components of anchoring i.e purity of state, and timing and pacing. The person suddenly grabbed her knee, she jumped back, told him to get his hands off her and experienced a negative K. All future attempts at anchoring as a subject produced that same negative K, she hadn’t worked out why. In fact just talking about anchoring was sufficient to produce the negative K. She was competent at anchoring others and really wanted to experience anchoring work for herself as a subject. Having listened to the above, I said “the problem is anchoring has worked very successfully for you. Every time you try anchoring you unconsciously experience the same K as you did in your fist exercise”- she had an unconscious reflex to my statement, a burst of laughter which I tagged by leaning forward and a smile. She instantly changed her FA response to anchoring with the laughter and her f2 verbal response to so “I am very good at anchoring” then. I leant forward and smiled she laughed again. We looped through the me leaning forward/smile her laugh sequence a couple of times, while I chatting about anchoring to tag the laughter state to the anchoring discussion. She knew what I was doing and couldn’t believe her unconscious response. Another problem with anchoring is the way it’s set up on a lot of courses allows the conscious mind interference, especially when the Practitioner uses a script. The challenge we NLP Trainers face is, to set up a learning context where the learning process is conducive to the outcome of the anchoring exercise. Regards Michael