Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

by Jordan Belfort

Step #5: Set your anchor Now we’re at step five, which is where you actually set your anchor. What this entails is taking the intense state that you’ve just created and linking it to a word or mantra, or to some external sound or sharp feeling, like clapping your hands and screaming the word “yes”—which was when the entire process had begun to break down for me. It started with my struggle to find a sound or a word or a movement that felt extreme enough and unique enough to serve as an anchor that I could fire in any situation. For whatever reason, nothing felt right, nothing felt profound—until, one day, it did. Just how I came up with the idea to use sense of smell I don’t fully recall, although it definitely had something to do with my memories from childhood. You see, as an adult, it never ceased to amaze me how even the slightest whiff of something that I had smelled during my childhood—a freshly cut grass field in the Catskill Mountains during summer camp, low tide at the jetty where my dad took me fishing, or the musky, mothballed scent of my grandma’s house—was enough to send the most powerful memories rushing back, to the point where they viscerally hit me. Once I hit upon the idea of using the sense of smell to set an anchor, it didn’t take long to find the perfect product. There were two requirements: 1 It had to be a scent that was extreme enough, unusual enough, powerful enough, and pungent enough to meet Bandler’s criteria, yet still be pleasing enough to the...