Increasing your effectiveness with EFT, part 1.
Is EFT not working as well as it could for you?
Have you ever wondered why sometimes EFT doesn’t seem to work? In this “Increase your effectiveness with EFT” series of articles, I’ll provide some tips as to why that is and how you can make your tapping more effective.
My name is Bruno Sade, and I’m a certified EFT practitioner with a mental health background as a clinical psychologist licensed in Argentina. I use EFT as a tool to help people change their emotional reactions and also to help them overcome their fear of rejection.
Let’s get to it then.
In simple terms, EFT works by tapping on certain points in our face and body while focusing on something that makes us feel bad, and then usually the negative emotional intensity is released and we can think about the issue in a more empowering way. Now, the more specific you can be with this the better it’s gonna work.
So, when EFT doesn’t seem to be working or, in other words, the emotional intensity doesn’t seem to be coming down, it’s usually because we are not being specific enough or there are “shifting aspects” we are not aware of. Let me tell you what this means and how the “Gold Nugget” idea can help you with both of these.
A great way to make sure we are being specific enough is to tap on “specific events” as opposed to global or general statements. So, for example, tapping using the words “I’m afraid of rejection” might not be very effective because it’s too global, it’s like you are biting off more than EFT can chew.
However, if you were to tap on the memory of a potential client who refused to work with you yesterday, now we have a specific event. And it’s an event that’s probably contributing to your overall fear of rejection.
So with Basic EFT what you do is you notice what feelings or emotions you feel now when thinking about this memory, and if you feel them anywhere in your body (and it’s ok if you don’t). A setup statement might then be “even though I have this feeling of humiliation in my chest, just thinking about this person saying no to me yesterday, I accept how I feel anyway”.
Sometimes though, when checking in with yourself after tapping a round like that, it might seem like the intensity didn’t drop at all. You still feel just as humiliated as you did before. However, this may be due to “shifting aspects”.
In other words, perhaps your mind was originally focusing on one aspect of that memory, such as “the tone of voice he used when he said ‘no, thanks, I’m not interested”, whereas now that aspect doesn’t bother you as much, but instead you are now focusing on “I felt so awkward hearing him say no to me, I didn’t know what to say afterwards”.
So now you just have to tap on this new aspect that just showed up. The setup statement might be “even though just thinking about yesterday when this person said no to working with me, it was so awkward hearing him say no to me, I’m feeling all this embarrassment in my chest, I accept this is how I’m feeling now”.
So what’s the Gold Nugget idea? Basically, it consists of asking yourself, once you’ve come up with a specific event and how it makes you feel right now when you think about it, “what part of this am I focusing on that feels the worst?”. In other words, you’ve found a specific event to tap on with Basic EFT, but you are now zooming in even more by asking yourself “what aspect of this event am I gonna focus on for the next tapping round?”
By doing this, you are getting even more specific and it’s easier then to become aware of shifting aspects. Because of the added specificity, your tapping will be laser-focused and you will strike gold much more often.
This will also probably allow you to feel more motivated noticing the progress with those aspects that made you feel bad before and now they don’t anymore.
So this is it for today. Kudos to Craig Weiner and Alina Frank who taught me this Gold Nugget idea in their EFT training (which I highly recommend).
Have you ever struggled with how to make your tapping more specific or how to become aware of shifting aspects? What do you think about this Gold Nugget idea? Let me know in the comments below.