Written by: Andrea Hunt, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
It’s no secret that a healthy mindset sets the direction of our lives in every area. With a powerhouse mindset and healthy emotional balance, we can lead a satisfying, fulfilling, and successful life. Likewise, with a weak and negative mindset and emotional imbalance, our lives can be filled with fear, stress, disappointment, stagnancy, and failure.
Without realizing it, we risk developing negative patterns of behaviors like self-sabotage and procrastination that ultimately lead to even more anxiety and stress.
Keep reading to learn how the Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT Tapping is the tool you've been missing to improve happiness, emotional health and stability, and success in every area of your life.
What Is EFT Tapping and How Does it work?
EFT Tapping, or the emotional freedom technique, is a mind-body technique for managing emotions and also correcting unhealthy thinking patterns. It involves an admittedly funny-looking tapping technique with the fingers (also known as psychological acupressure) along with cognitive techniques and neuroplasticity. Getting started with EFT tapping is pretty simple, as no special equipment or tools are required.
Here are the main steps involved in the EFT process:
Identifying the main issue (discomfort, resistance, fear, stress) and putting it into words
Taking a rating of the intensity of the feeling or emotional charge (to monitor progress during the process)
Physical tapping session round along the body points on the face and hands
Releasing or clearing the different issues that may arise during the process
Shifting the mindset with transitional thoughts around the issues with the biggest emotional charge
Reframing with healthier and more empowering beliefs as the tapping rounds continue
Taking another rating of the intensity of the initial feeling
The number of EFT tapping rounds in one session and also total number of sessions needed depends on the specific emotions or issues one is facing. Emotions like stress, anger, overwhelm, and frustration are quicker to release and calm. Limiting beliefs are based on past individual experiences that are layered and reinforced often over a lifetime. They need to be addressed separately to heal.
To develop and maintain a success mindset, there are three ways in which EFT helps us: gaining control of one’s emotional state and confronting one’s fears, resistance, and limiting beliefs.
How Can EFT Tapping Help You Improve Your Mindset?
When you have a negative mindset, you can consciously and subconsciously create consequences for yourself except your brain thinks it’s protecting you. It goes into fight, flight or freeze, and it will do anything to prevent failure, embarrassment, or outside judgment.
What happens? You avoid anything that could bring you discomfort or reinforce negative experiences and fears. Unfortunately, you cannot succeed in life and relationships if you don’t take risks.
This is the unfortunate power of the limiting beliefs that we hold in our minds about our confidence and abilities. EFT tapping helps us give those fears and negative and limiting beliefs a voice so that we can work to eliminate them.
But before we can do anything about these limiting beliefs, we must first identify them and understand what they are.
What Are the Most Common Limiting Beliefs People Have?
There are many different limiting beliefs people have created, learned, or experienced in their lives. However, there are some common themes. Here are some of the most common limiting beliefs people have, which make them feel stuck in unhappy cycles:
1. I’m afraid of changes and unpredictable situations that make me feel out of control
This belief centers around avoiding changes in life due to fear of the unpredictable.
However, avoiding change and unpredictability is impossible in the long run. And worse, it may even keep us in a bad situation for extended periods.
2. I’m not ___ enough (good, smart, experienced, attractive, etc.)
A common self-limiting belief people have is that they aren’t good, smart, or experienced enough and hence don’t deserve good things.
It is quite common in situations where we may stop ourselves from asking for a promotion or seeking a potential romantic partner.
We avoid such opportunities because we anticipate a negative outcome, which significantly limits our professional and personal growth.
3. I might hurt others by doing what I want
Sometimes people believe they’re keeping others happy or safe by making compromises and not doing what they want. They think if they are successful, people will be envious or judge them harshly. However, in the long term, it only keeps you from giving your best and getting the same in return.
4. The circumstances need to be perfect for me to take action
We often let go of perfectly good opportunities because we think we aren’t ready. We might even hold off making a decision until we’ve overanalyzed everything, waited until the very last minute to make a doctor’s appointment, or wait for a product’s price to go rock bottom before purchasing it. Then what happens? Sometimes the opportunity goes away all by itself. Or we create a problem that wasn’t there before. All these inactions stem from a deep-rooted fear of failure (or even success!) and can lead to a stagnant life.
5. I don’t deserve better or more than what I have right now
Most people, despite achieving success, feel undeserving or like an imposter. These beliefs keep them from fully accepting good relationships, job offers, and other good things as something they deserve. People might fear ‘the angry mob’ that will criticize them for wanting more in life.
6. I won’t be able to handle it If/When I move in a different direction
It is limiting to let the anticipation of mistakes stop us from taking action. Everyone makes mistakes and regrets making them. But the bigger regrets in life always stem from missed opportunities.
How does EFT tapping change limiting beliefs?
Identifying these limiting beliefs is challenging for any individual. It is even more difficult to understand how they’re sabotaging us and then deal with them one by one. First, we have to identify the belief, challenge it by looking for evidence, and replace it with a more empowering one.
Let’s look at an example. Say we can remember that during childhood, maybe we had a bad experience giving a presentation in class and we messed up. And everyone laughed. We were so embarrassed. A part of us vowed to protect ourselves no matter what
We learned the limiting belief: “I’m bad at public speaking.”
And we refused to give speeches, presentations, etc. But if we created a belief, we can create a new one. Sounds simple enough right? The problem is that many of us have ingrained negative beliefs that are simply not that easy to shake. We can say affirmations.
We can repeat: “I’m good at public speaking and I love presenting.” We can really believe it. But if we don’t clear the emotional charge of the limiting beliefs, we’re going to rebel against ourselves. And we will fail.
Do you know what happens then? Our brain says: “See?! I told you that you couldn’t do it. I was right!” And the limiting belief gets even more ingrained and stronger.
This is where EFT tapping helps release our stress and fear about our beliefs by clearing the emotional charge. It will also help us find ways of channeling them into positive beliefs. By rewiring the brain’s way of thinking and turning off the fight or flight response, EFT tapping helps us reframe beliefs to learn more empowering ones that help sustain us them in the long term.
Simply put by Tessa Cason,
“Once the dysfunctional emotions, experiences, and beliefs have been “deleted,” our body automatically gravitates to health, wealth, wisdom, peace, love, joy…”
How Can EFT Tapping Help You Gain Control of Your Emotions and Mental Health?
Having such limiting beliefs can keep us from getting out of a stressful situation, thus encouraging unhealthy coping strategies like procrastination and self-sabotage. These only lead to even more stress and anxiety.
It’s not anyone’s fault. Most of us don’t know efficient tools to manage our emotions. This is why stress and anxiety are so common these days. There are many tools available such as meditation, yoga, breath work, etc. But for a lot of people with severe mood swings and continued stress, they often find that in heightened emotional situations they lack the tools to deal with these vicious cycles, making it easier to get into spiral of stress, bad decisions, inaction, depression and hopelessness, and failure.
From severe stress to anxiety, EFT tapping has proven helpful in treating and managing various emotional and mental health conditions. Even chronic pain.
It helps us develop a healthy mindset that promotes emotional balancing and can even help prevent situations of emotional distress. It gives us the tools to tackle such downward spirals from the onset.
To do this, there are plenty of scripts online and videos for stressful situations that can be quickly mitigated.
Getting the Best Mindset Shifting Results with an EFT Practitioner
For smaller issues, such as work stress, EFT videos can be extremely helpful and easy to do on your own. But for deeper issues such as limiting beliefs (which take years to create) tackling EFT tapping all by yourself can be overwhelming and, unfortunately not as effective since creating the script and understanding which EFT technique to use is the most important part.
This is why working with an EFT practitioner can make a tremendous difference in the effectiveness and impact of the process. A transformation life coach can help guide you through the step-by-step process to better absorb these critical lessons. By understanding your situation and creating the script as the session unfolds, the intensity of the beliefs and the emotional charge can be lessened so that the brain doesn’t react in the same way.
What would you do if you could be more confident or stop procrastinating?
What would you do if you didn’t worry about being judged in life?
What would your life be life if you didn’t fear leaving your comfort zone?
EFT tapping experts are equipped to understand how these points work along with your emotional needs and will develop a tapping script customized to your needs.
Are you excited to learn more about developing a successful mindset with the help of EFT tapping? Get in touch today!
Andrea Hunt, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Andrea Hunt is an online transformational life coach & EFT Practitioner for expats and digital nomads. A US expat who's lived in 7 different countries, Andrea helps those who boldly took the road less traveled to thrive abroad with confidence. She understands the challenges of planning a move abroad, integrating into a new culture, finding new friends and social circles, rebuilding life after a job loss or breakup while living in another country. She helps you empower your mindset and erase your limiting beliefs to thrive.
