Cheming Martinez. Huge congrats to you winning BET New Faces! We all knew you were gonna do big things. From being in the tabloids as Janet Jackson’s new man, to Soul Plane, to Destiny’s Child “Soldier” video, to whatever else you’ve hustled for and got. Just don’t forget us little people. We all still have fond memories from acting class. When you and me danced like fools to Prince or, that scene where I was trying to borrow a cup of brown sugar, to that famous scene where you stood in the doorway asking Angela “Where’s the baby?”
One of the main reasons why I started this self journey of transformation is because of a critique I received in acting class about my lack of self confidence. My self confidence waivers. In certain situations I can come off cocky or overly self confident, but for the most part I do struggle with self confidence - especially in acting. So today I listened to Anthony Robbins talking about self confidence in his Personal Power II series. He talks about a NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) technique called anchoring. The easiest way to explain anchoring is this: have you ever been somewhere and heard a song which brought back strong memories of a specific time in your life and the emotions you felt at that time? Well those emotions are “anchored” to that stimulus, the song. NLP uses this fact to deliberately anchor specific emotions and feelings to a specific stimulus. For example, NLP would ask you to close your eyes and go back to a moment in your life where you felt completely self confident. The emotions and memory have to be strong in order to be most effective. Once you can feel yourself back in that situation and feel the emotions you had, then anchor it with a unique physical stimulus - for instance, squeezing your thumbnail. Then open your eyes and let go of the memory. You would then repeat this process a couple times anchoring the emotions. Once the emotions and confidence are anchored, you will be able to recall those feelings instantly by squeezing your thumbnail.
What’s fascinating about this process is how close it is to method acting techniques. We are taught in method acting to be able to anchor emotions to actions and words in a script. We are also taught to anchor feelings to objects and our scene partners. So this NLP technique looks like the perfect tool to help me in confidence and in acting. Tonight I will try anchoring some emotions of confidence and see what happens.