Increasing your effectiveness with EFT, part 29.
If you are an EFT practitioner (or training to become one), you’ve probably had to deal with the challenge of how to find new clients. That means that at some point you’ll probably have to come up with ways to promote your services and “put yourself out there”. Sometimes we can find ourselves procrastinating on taking the actions that will help us do that. So today I want to deal with one aspect of this problem.
And what aspect is that? It’s what I find to be a very important distinction to keep in mind. The distinction is: Are we procrastinating doing something (that might help us grow our business) because it feels scary/unsafe, or is it because it feels unethical and it conflicts with our values? If it’s the former, I would recommend applying EFT on the reasons why it feels scary/unsafe to put ourselves out there. If it’s the latter, I wouldn’t recommend trying to “tap away your ethics”, but rather, keep looking for other marketing advice that resonates more with your ethics and values.
When it comes to marketing, there is all kinds of advice out there, and there are many business and marketing coaches you can look into. There are some that advocate for ethical/authentic mindsets and strategies, and others that advocate for manipulative/salezy ones.
A few examples of the latter:
- Creating false scarcity and using high-pressure sales tactics, forcing someone to make an expensive purchasing decision on the spot, without enough time to think it through or consult with a loved one;
- Trying to persuade the other person and make the sale at all costs, thinking “it’s for their own good”, rather than trying to establish whether your services are the right fit for them, or even if it’s the right timing for them;
- Offering people something for free (such as a webinar or a free strategy conversation) which is supposedly valuable to them, but doesn’t really provide them with any value and actually forces them to listen to a sales pitch for the whole time.
Basically, anything that has a relatively high chance of provoking buyer’s remorse and/or someone feeling ripped off by your actions (even if you never intended for that to happen).
Ethical and/or authentic marketing, on the other hand, has to do with sharing your perspective and point of view to see who resonates with that. By doing that, it not only helps you explore and articulate your own point of view (making you in turn a better practitioner), but it also (hopefully) positively impacts people, regardless of whether they ever become your clients and/or students. It’s about informing rather than persuading.
Using this kind of marketing sometimes might take longer than using the manipulative kind, but it’s more sustainable, and tends to feel better and also work better in the long term. Some people whose free content I recommend checking out if you resonate with these ideas are George Kao, Tad Hargrave and Caroline Leon.
What about when we are procrastinating out of fear?
Now, when it comes to procrastinating on doing something that might grow your business, not because it feels unethical or conflicts with your values, but because it feels scary/unsafe, how can you apply EFT? I’ll go into more details in future articles, but basically, you come up with specific scenarios in your mind of what might go wrong during or after the action you are procrastinating.
What do I mean by that? Let’s take the example of writing a blog post. Something that could go wrong during that activity is for example sitting in front of the computer, staring at the blank screen, and not knowing what to write. In other words, something like having to deal with “writer’s block”. Or even as you see yourself typing something, your “Inner Critic” starts harshly criticizing everything that you are writing. So these two are specific scenarios or events you can tap on.
And what about what could go wrong after you somehow wrote that blog article? Well, someone could read it and write a harsh comment criticizing what you wrote. Or maybe nobody reads it at all, and you feel bad about that. Or, you become ultra successful and now your friends are envious of you and you end up feeling very lonely. Again, these are all specific scenarios or events you can tap on.
That’s it for today. I hope this article was helpful to you. 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 (who speak English or Spanish) change their negative emotional reactions.
And, I’d love to know: What do you think about the importance of trying to distinguish whether we are procrastinating out of fear or out of feeling conflicted with our ethics? Do you have any questions or comments about what I wrote? Is there any particular topic you’d like me to write about? I’d love to know in the comments below.