For example, if your mother fed you chicken soup when you were ill as a child, you will always associate chicken soup to being loved and cared for.

On down side, if you once contracted food poisoning from eating tainted pickles, just smell of pickles will be enough to bring on a feeling of nausea many years after event.

How does anchoring work in relationships?

If you come home from work elated by a promotion and see your lover’s face, you will link that feeling of elation to sight of his or her face. By same token, if you hate your job and constantly talk about those feelings over dinner with your spouse, you'll unconsciously begin to associate bad feelings with him or her.

In that case, you must make a conscious effort to share more good times with them so you will more readily associate positive feelings to sight of their face.

Sharing good times creates positive anchors or associations. It helps you to weather less positive times that every couple experiences at some stage in their relationship.

Breaking up is often result of linking too many negative anchors to sight of your partner’s face, with no knowledge of how to counteract them by deliberately creating positive ones.

Here’s a common example. A young doctor whose wife works to help him through medical school may decide to divorce her after he graduates. This is because he associates sight of her face to hard times they experienced during those years. Of course this is all unconscious – all he knows is that he feels bad whenever he looks at her. He mistakenly takes this as a sign that relationship isn’t working.

Now that you know how anchoring works, use it intentionally to improve your relationship.

1. Plan positive events together and make sure you don’t let any negativity intrude on event. Save arguments or disagreements for a later time.

Word Count: 626 Character Width: 60 Resource Box: How To Do Life at www.BookShaker.com

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"The Importance of Emotional Intelligence"

- by Akasha Lonsdale

(c) Akasha Lonsdale. All Rights Reserved. http://www.BookShaker.com

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For centuries, emphasis has been placed on academic learning, qualifications and how intelligent a person was, ie: their IQ. Anything emotional was encouraged to stay hidden behind “stiff upper lip” rather than being acknowledged and expressed. Attending “the school of hard knocks” was character forming. When employee training was introduced in business world, programmes focused on areas relating to reason and logic – anything to do with interpersonal relationships was wishy-washy and classed as soft skills.

However all this is changing and not before time. The advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques have enabled scientists to confirm what we all suspected – that when we are confronted by situations that are life threatening or that we “perceive” are so, reason and logic fly out window and what emerges is a primitive, ready- to-fight Neanderthal in modern day attire. The section of brain responsible for this instant bypass is amygdala, hence new term “the amygdala hijack”.

So for first time, importance of emotions has been acknowledged. What we need to ensure is that those emotions are appropriate to circumstances and to do this we need to develop emotional intelligence, which researchers now consider to be far more important than traditional IQ.