Does the same strategy apply when you want to go from problem-solving to actualizing possibilities? Part of the human condition is to know that we could be better than we are. We can always see higher than we can reach. Can energy interventions help us become all that we can be? Can they help us achieve our goals and visions? Can they enhance our effectiveness in the world? Can they help us cultivate our finest potentials? They can. This tutorial shows you how. It teaches you by asking you to apply the techniques to your own personal issues, goals, and aspirations.

Directed psychological change is not only about healing old wounds and repairing emotional problems. The skilled psychotherapist uses language to inspire, to open the perception of new possibilities, to shift beliefs that limit you, and to expand your self-concept so latent potentials may flower. Energy psychology approaches each of these by combining the use of language and visualization with the stimulation of energy points that shift your neurochemistry. You will learn in this tutorial how energy interventions can be the missing link that might cause some of the most promising programs for pursuing one's potentials to be far more effective.

Core Beliefs and the Sense of Self

Studies of hypnosis, guided imagery, cognitive restructuring, and related procedures have established that suggestion and self-suggestion are powerful interventions for changing feelings, beliefs, and behavior. Combining these methods with the stimulation of energy points appears to make them even more potent. But with or without energy interventions, the use of positive images and affirmations are not always effective. If there is a contradiction between the person’s deep beliefs or self-image and the new suggestion, the core sense of self tends to prevail.

One way to transform a self-image that is limiting you is to employ energy methods to neutralize the unwarranted self-doubts and negative feelings that may echo within you. These are like passengers on a bus where you are at the wheel. These passengers are "back-seat drivers," telling you to stop and get gas when the tank is full, to watch out for unicorns on the road, or to turn left when your desired destination is straight ahead. They are operating according to maps and guidebooks that are no longer valid and perhaps never were. The EFT Basic Recipe is a way of getting them off the bus. Apply it to them whenever you hear their voice. If you can remove them, along with all their luggage (aspects), they usually do not get back on. And without them and their baggage, you emerge as a more positive and self-assured person

The features of the Basic Recipe that make this approach plausible are, again:

1. Each round of tapping requires only about a minute.

2. While you need to identify the hidden aspects of an issue, they

1. do tend to reveal themselves as you proceed and

2. are finite in number, and

3. Once you have fully resolved an issue and all of its aspects, it tends not to return.

You can, in fact, readily identify many of the obstacles to living a more fulfilling life and address them, one by one, using the methods presented in the Basic Basics module and the "Focusing on Problems" tutorial. That tutorial zeros in on these issues after they have become a problem that is evident because of its symptoms. This tutorial begins with a "personal peace procedure" for identifying and resolving obstacles that are less obvious but that hold you back nonetheless.

Overcoming the Negatives

It is not necessary to search deep and hard to find these obstacles. What is instead required is to stay alert and open as they present themselves. As self-limiting feelings, thoughts, or behaviors appear, rather than meeting them with avoidance or denial, recognize and confront them. When you identify a feeling, thought, or behavior that limits you, apply the Basic Recipe to it. You will find it a surprisingly powerful tool for freeing yourself from its grip. Treat each aspect of the self-defeating feeling, thought, or behavior as it emerges. Resolve any psychological reversals. In identifying the areas that are ripe for your attention, you need not make a list. Life presents them every day.

The Personal Peace Procedure. However, you can make a list. In Gary Craig’s "Personal Peace Procedure," he suggests making a list of every bothersome specific event from your past and every unwanted emotional response, and systematically applying the Basic Recipe to them, one at a time, until they no longer exert a negative emotional impact. Rather than starting with a problem and seeing where it leads, you go for a deep psychic cleansing. You can think of each self-limiting emotion or event from your past as having left a stagnant pool that is leaking toxic substances into the water supply. Whatever their origins—such as past failures, rejections, abuse, fears, or guilt—cleaning them up, one at a time, is going to gradually improve the water supply.

Let’s assume there are 100 of these toxic pools on your property. You clean out one of them. While you are likely to gain some noticeable and freeing emotional relief around the issue of concern, you still have 99 pools draining toxins into your water supply. But what would happen if you methodically cleaned one pool each day? Eventually, you are drinking clean water, your self-esteem increases, and a new, more positive self-image emerges.

Fortunately, you do not even have to clean all 100 pools to get this effect. Pools with similar origins are connected by an underground system of waterways. If there are ten pools in the area called "failure experiences," take the dirtiest and deepest one first, and clean it and all its aspects. Then go to the next one. Once you have fully cleaned three or four of them, you will have cleaned all ten of them because of the underground system connecting them. This is the same generalization effect we have seen in clearing traumatic memories and other issues. Then go on to the next theme. Perhaps it is "rejections" or "abusive experiences." Begin to clean these interrelated pools, and again the generalization effect will ease the task. In this way, all 100 pools may be cleared by working directly with perhaps only 20 or 30 of them.

Does this lead to enlightenment? Does it purify the well so you are free of emotional toxins forever after? Personal development has sometimes been likened to an upward spiral where you revisit the same issues, again and again, but because it is an upward spiral, you meet them from a new vantage point, a new level of development.¹ The more effectively you dealt with the issue during the previous round of the spiral, the more the issue becomes a source of wisdom rather than limitation. Cleaning all your pools over the next two months cannot insure that new psychological challenges will never again emerge. But by systematically addressing every issue you can identify, you can shift personally limiting elements of your self-image, remove the roots of many emotional problems, and greatly enhance your personal level of inner peace. This is of course a substantial undertaking, and we are not suggesting that you stop your pursuit of the Energy Psychology  Interactive program until you have completed it. Subsequent concepts and techniques do not depend upon your having completed the Personal Peace Procedure. But there may be a time that is right for you to undertake such an "emotional cleansing," and when that time comes, the following instructions can guide you.

The First Step. The first step is to make a list of every past unwanted emotion or troubling experience you can think of. Include every time you can remember having felt fear, rejection, guilt, anger, betrayal, jealousy, etc. Include both the big ones and the little ones. Organize them into categories or themes: e.g., humiliations, losses, accidents, relationship failures, etc. Within each category, put the most intense ones at the top of the list. By neutralizing these first, you strengthen the generalization effect. You probably won’t think of every relevant incident or feeling in one sitting. You can add to the list as new incidents occur to you as you go through the process.

The Second Step. Then choose a category from your list and apply the Basic Recipe every day to the top item within it. Work with each item separately. Bring your response down to 0 or near 0, neutralizing aspects and psychological reversals as necessary. Some items will require several days. Others will respond so rapidly that you may be able to clear two or three at a single sitting. Once an item is down to 0, go to the next item in that category. Continue one item at a time until there are no additional issues in that category, and you can think of none to add. Then move on to the next category you are drawn to address. If it is difficult for you to group the items into themes, you can skip the use of categories, organizing your list by placing the most intense items at the top and working your way down the list, clearing one item and all its aspects at a time, until every item has been cleared either by the tapping routine or the generalization effect.

Observe Carefully. Because improvements occur much more rapidly with issues such as phobias than the deeper shifts in self-image and core beliefs that will result from the Personal Peace Procedure, observe carefully how your life changes. While the results of cleaning out each area will immediately be evident in your feelings about the specific issue, more far-reaching changes may require closer observation. They tend to be more gradual and subtle, and you may not even realize significant shifts are taking place. Notice, however, how you handled a recent rejection more matter-of-factly than before, or how you speak up more often, or how you are taking better care of yourself, or how your conversations are taking a more positive tone. Noting such changes reinforces you to continue this relatively elaborate but enormously valuable process. Remember: practice this every day, do one item at a time, each round takes but a minute, changes last, and greater emotional freedom is the prize.

Consider Working with a Partner. While some people can carry out this process independently, making the list as if writing in a journal and moving forward with little external reinforcement, a good way to approach this periodic cleansing of your psyche is to find another person to share the process. Discuss and build your lists together. Reflect with one another on your experience as you apply the Basic Recipe to each item. Even if you do not meet every day, check in by e-mail or phone to describe what happened with that day’s session. Share your observations about subtle or deeper changes. This can be a powerful and important exercise for you. Working with a partner will help keep you on track and can be enormously supportive.

The Detective Work of Deep Transformation. A 56-year-old woman had been ritualistically abused as a child. Her therapist had been using EFT and other methods with her for several years, and she had enjoyed a great deal of progress. While she had literally hundreds of terrible memories, and they might intrude into her awareness at any moment, she had learned to work with them using the tapping protocol. When a memory or flashback would intrude, and she treated it, it would not return. She might later get another piece of information about the incident, but the exact same picture she tapped on would not torment her again.

A memory emerged while her therapist was out of town that she was not able to make progress with on her own, and she contacted Gary Craig. Before the memory became clear, she started to have intruding thoughts that she "would never completely recover emotionally," "would never heal," and that she was "too damaged to heal." When she went inside to explore these thoughts, a memory became vivid. Part of her abuse involved the use of electric shocks. The perpetrators would shock her and then implant thoughts within her by using repetitive statements. One of these statements was "You’ll never heal; you’re too damaged to heal."

Craig² asked her to describe what happened emotionally when she said "They shocked me electrically." She reported that her chest tightened and she felt fear. She gave the chest tightness a distress rating of 6 or 7 on the 10-point scale. She used the Setup Affirmation, "Even though I have this electric shock tightness in my chest, I deeply love and accept myself," as she tapped the karate chop points. Craig then gave her a second Setup Affirmation that had to do with recognizing that the perpetrators were ill and that she had responded like any child would to this difficult experience. This second phrase anticipated an aspect of the issue that Craig sensed was integral, so he addressed it right away. This was followed by a round of tapping using the Reminder Phrase, "Electric shock tightness in my chest."

When Craig asked her if the tightness in her chest was still a 6 or 7, she indicated that the chest tightness had improved but her body would "jump, like I was being shocked." Now when Craig asked her to say "They shocked me electrically" and rate the distress level, it was up to 10. This did not mean that tapping on the chest tightness didn’t work, but rather that it removed a layer and allowed a deeper distress to surface. In the woman’s words, "It moved from being a memory to when my body starts feeling it." So the next round used Setup and Reminder phrases centered around "Even though I have these electric body jumps," and this brought the distress level down from 10 to 4.

The next round used the same phrase, but introduced the words "still" and "some," as the Basic Recipe indicates for subsequent rounds working on the same issue: "Even though I still have some of these electric body jumps." Craig also introduced a new concept. The second part of the Setup Affirmation used one of the usual phrases, "I deeply and completely accept myself," the first time through. But this was then changed to "I honor them because they’re giving me a message and allowing me to heal them. If they didn’t show themselves to me, I might not even know they were there, except for the fact that they screw up my life, so I honor them." Notice that rather than a deviation from the formula, the new phrase simply shifts from a general statement of self-acceptance to a statement that specifically accepts and honors the symptoms and their constructive purposes. Most physical and psychological symptoms grow out of the body’s or the psyche’s efforts to solve a difficult problem.

The next round of tapping used the reminder phrase, "Remaining electric body jumps." This brought the memory, "They shocked me electrically," down to a reported distress level of 2. Here Craig asked how she knew it was a 2. She answered that there was a tight spot in her back. Craig explored with her whether this was different from the "body jump." While she believed it was also related to having been shocked, she realized it was not the same thing. The "body jump" sensations were no longer there, so the focus now shifted to the tight spot, which she rated as a 2. The new phrase was "Even though I have this electric shock reaction in my back, . . ." Notice that Craig is simply keeping her attuned to what is happening in her body, to the ways her feelings and sensations were changing.

Now when she said "They shocked me electrically," the spot in her back was down to 0, but she noticed tightness in her tailbone and hips, which she rated as a 4. The next Setup combined this new sensation with the important concept introduced earlier about the perpetrators being ill: "Even though I still have some of this electric shock in my body, and it is a tightness in my hips and tailbone, I fully accept that the perpetrators were ill." After checking that this statement made sense to her and that he hadn’t "put words into your mouth," Craig asked her to tap to the reminder phrase "Ill perpetrators in my hips and tailbone." Then asked if the tightness in her hips and tailbone was still at a 4, she indicated that the tightness was gone.

This was not the end of the session. Instead, Craig gave her the instruction to create a movie in her mind about one of the times she was shocked, a specific incident, and to run through the movie, but without dwelling on it in detail. Once she came to the end of the movie, she was asked to describe her emotional response on the 0 to 10 scale. Energy interventions are decisive enough that it is typical to test or challenge apparently successful results in this manner. She reported a distress level of 2, based on her body having tightened somewhat. The next round of tapping used the Setup "Even though I still have some residual electric shock body tightness, I deeply and completely accept myself and I recognize that the perpetrators were ill." The reminder phrase was "Remaining electric shock in my body and the perpetrators were ill."

Following this, she went through the movie again, and she reported no distress. So Gary returned to the original statement, asking her to say "I am too damaged to heal." This was now at a 6, from what she estimated was initially a 10. The focus now shifted from her stress response around the memory of the electrical shocks—which had by all available indications been cleared—to the perpetrators telling her she was too damaged to heal. While she felt this scenario had occurred many times, she worked with one specific flashback that involved three men. One of them in particular had made the statements about her being too damaged to heal. Some discussion ensued. Craig explained that what they did to her had elements of mind control as used in methods ranging from advertising to brainwashing, where statements are repeated continually and paired with an emotional charge, like an advertising jingle. She found it helpful to think of "You are too damaged to heal" as a "silly advertising jingle." Her next round of tapping was with the words "Here’s my silly jingle. You’re too damaged to heal." After this round of tapping, her distress rating after saying "I’m too damaged to heal" had gone down to 0. She reported having heard an internal voice say "not true" as she said these words aloud.

This still was not the end of the session. To test the results, Craig asked her to again go through a mental movie of the electric shock and the "You’re too damaged to heal" indoctrination, but this time rather than running it through briefly, he challenged her to play it vividly in her mind, actually exaggerating the sights, the sounds, the feelings, literally trying to make herself get upset about it. The instructions were clear that if she did get upset, she was to stop immediately. The point was not to cause unnecessary pain. Rather, this was a valuable test to see if they were done or if there were additional aspects of the memory needing their attention. And while she could bring up very little distress, it was still at a 2 and she reported a spot under her eye that had begun to hurt.

She next used the reminder phrase, "This 2 feeling," as she tapped. Craig asked her if there was a particular part of the movie that caused the "2 feeling" while she was replaying the memory. There was. In addition to programming her that she was too damaged to heal, another phrase they used was "You’re beyond help." Craig gave her the Setup, "Even though I have another jingle that says ‘You’re beyond help,’ I deeply and completely accept myself." This was used along with the Reminder Phrase, "You’re beyond help." Craig also reemphasized the illness of the perpetrators and her vulnerability as a little girl. After this round of tapping, she was able to vividly replay the movie without feeling distress. She rated it at 0. Craig asked her to once more go through the movie, this time trying to make herself feel upset, exaggerating the sights, sounds, and feelings. This brought her distress level back up to a 3. In this replay, she jumped high when she received the electric shock and remembered how much it hurt. After some exploration, the Setup Affirmation, "Even though I really jumped because it really hurt, I deeply and completely accept myself" was used and paired with other statements recognizing that she had no choice but to jump. The Reminder Phrase for the tapping sequence was "Big jump." Then when she went through the movie and tried to become upset by exaggerating some of the most difficult moments, she said she could watch it and she could watch it with compassion. While she of course wanted the scene to stop and be different, she no longer had a bodily reaction while replaying the scene, and she could not manufacture one.

The final test was for her to again say, "I’m too damaged to heal." This time her response when asked to rate it on the 0 to 10 scale was to calmly say "No, that’s not true." Craig acknowledged that it was not true logically and asked if it were also not true emotionally. She responded, "It doesn’t feel true emotionally either." She expressed enormous relief and gratitude by the end of the session.

This was, obviously, a huge piece of clinical work, and we are not suggesting that just any therapist ought to be applying energy methods with ritual abuse victims to treat disabling traumatic memories. Rather, we want to illustrate that even with a terrible traumatic memory, you can systematically move from one aspect to the next to the next and resolve large issues. This entire, extremely complex session required only 45 minutes. This synopsis is worth studying because it demonstrates several important skills you will develop as you apply the Basic Recipe to a broad range of issues:³

1. How energy interventions can be applied to address a deeply embedded and severely limiting aspect of a person's self-concept.
    

2. How to divide a complex issue into its aspects.
    

3. How to be guided by what just occurred as you choose the next step.
    

4. How to be specific.
    

5. How to approach emotional issues by starting with their physical symptoms.
    

6. How to tailor the Setup Affirmation to reframe a problem.

Aiming Toward Possibilities

Drug studies show that believing a medication can help overcome a physical illness will, on its own, reduce the person’s symptoms in up to 50 percent of the cases. Pills with no medically active  ingredients have the desired effect up to half the time, depending upon the illness. Known as the placebo effect, medical science attempts to control for this "complicating variable" so that research can establish that it was the action of the drug rather than the placebo effect that brought about the observed benefits. For psychology, however, the more pertinent challenge is to harness rather than work around the powerful force of a belief that something good is about to happen.

What You See Is What You Get. Our attitudes, opinions, self-image, and deep beliefs form the psychological atmosphere that sustains us. We breathe this atmosphere every waking moment, yet we rarely see beyond it. Its tint colors all our perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. We are so thoroughly immersed in this personalized version of reality⁴ that it is invisible to us, much as fish would be the last creatures on the planet likely to discover water. Until something brings us out of the water, we take it for granted. For us, it is reality.

This reality determines what we see, how we think, and what we become. You can sense the impact if one of the following core beliefs is setting the framework for your perceptions, feelings, and thoughts:

People who take risks get hurt.

My parents did permanent emotional damage to me.

Women like me cannot manage our money.

We men have to be strong no matter what.

If something good happens, something bad always follows.

Born poor, die poor.

I have never been in a good relationship, and I never will be.

I may make a good start, but I never succeed in the long run.

I never seem to have the right words.

I’m too old to learn how to use a computer.

I never have any fun.

I have a weak constitution and pick up every bug that comes around.

Using the Basic Recipe to Overcome Self-Limiting Beliefs. You can often use the Basic Recipe to overcome self-limiting beliefs by giving a 1 to 10 rating on how true the statement sounds to you at this moment, using a Setup phrase such as "Even though I believe a have a weak constitution, I deeply love and accept myself," and a reminder phrase such as, "This belief about my constitution." A broad spectrum of goals can be approached by focusing on the self-limiting beliefs that interfere with the goal.

Raul Vergini, M.D., an Italian physician who uses EFT, describes his work with a championship motorcycle racer. The man had recently placed 5th at the most recent world championship for 125cc motorcycles. The problem he wanted help with was that he always raced poorly in the French and Brazilian competitions. He had never placed better than 8th in those circuits in his five years of competing in them.

He could not identify a strong emotional feeling about this that would lead to a clear 0-10 intensity rating, so Dr. Vergini focused on a self-limiting belief. He asked, "How true is the affirmation, 'I never can go better than 8th in France and Rio circuits,' on a 0-10 scale?" The answer was "9" (very true).

After the first round of tapping following the Setup, "Even though I never can go better than 8th, I deeply love and accept myself," the believability score went down to 7. With some minor wording changes to address possible aspects of the issue, the score went down to 5, then 3, then 2, where it seemed stuck. At this point, however, Dr. Vergini had a hunch that the meaning of the statement had shifted for the man, from an inability to place better than 8th to an inability to place 1st. He checked this out. "We started with a 9 regarding the '8th position' phrase, but now we are at a 2 with 'I cannot win'? It is a completely different thing. How much now is the rating for the old '8th place' affirmation? He said: 'Oh, it went down to 0 some time ago!' We laughed and we quickly zeroed in on the 'I cannot WIN in France and Brazil' which, of course, was already at a low 2" and readily dropped to 0.

While changing your belief that you can't win isn't the only ingredient to becoming a champion motorcycle racer, it is a critical ingredient. This principle holds true for every area of your life, from your professional success to your relationships to your health. People who believed they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die from it as people with the same risk factors-including age, blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight-who did not hold this belief. Patients who were given aspirins or blood thinner medication and warned of possible gastrointestinal problems, one of the most common side effects of the medication, were three times as likely to experience stomach discomfort as people who were not given this warning. In medicine, this is called the nocebo effect, the "placebo's evil twin."⁵ Believing that something negative will happen has, it turns out, an even stronger impact than the placebo effect, the belief that something positive will happen.

The Neurochemistry of the "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy." For better or for worse, your expectations release a flood of chemicals in your brain. Patients with Parkinson’s disease who were given inactive pills as their "medication" released dopamine, exactly the neurological reaction the active medication would have produced. The fact is that every sensation, emotion, and passing thought causes millions of neurons to fire together, shaping our next response to whatever life presents. A group of college students participated in an experiment where they were told a small electrical current would be passed through their heads and that it might cause a headache. Though not a volt of electricity was actually used, two-thirds of the group reported headaches. People who were allergic to roses started wheezing when a convincing artificial rose was brought into view.

While each of these examples describes an expectation that was created in a moment and that had an immediate effect, core beliefs such as those listed earlier carry expectations that are far-reaching, decisive, and every bit as much part of your neurochemistry. If you are wanting to improve your relationships, increase your success, or enhance your joie de vivre, a self-limiting core belief may be the first place to target. Until it changes, all your other efforts hit against an invisible ceiling. If you know you are a person who fails at relationships or money or achievements, positive thinking or trying harder can be but puffs of noble intention breathed against an overpowering wind. It is little wonder that New Year’s resolutions are so notoriously unsuccessful.

Changing Your Self-Concept to Improve Your Life. A plethora of pop psych books combine affirmations, visualization, and positive thinking to attempt to change the core beliefs that psychologically shape most everything else. This approach seems to make a great deal of sense. If you can deeply program yourself so your self-concept, your core beliefs, and your perceptions are all organized around the idea that you are an excellent tennis player, when the ball comes over the net, you are more likely to get yourself into the right position, more likely to swing well, and more likely to place the ball where your opponent isn’t, then if you deeply believe that you are not very good at tennis and usually miss your shot. While it is of course also true that your performance shapes your self-concept, the feedback loop goes both ways. Your self-concept shapes your  performance. You can improve your performance by changing your core beliefs.

Inner disposition shapes experience. Two people witnessing the same accident often give substantially different accounts of what happened, even though the actual facts are identical for each. More so with those facts of life that are subtle and ambiguous, as most psychologically relevant facts tend to be. Vivid positive visualizations and affirmations can change your "inner disposition." They pull you in their direction. They seem to do this in at least three ways:

1. They attune you to opportunities for behaving in a way that is consistent with the image or belief. As the tennis ball speeds toward you, your focus may be on how it is traveling awfully fast and how your opponent is a better player than you anyway, or it may be on how to get into position so the ball will meet the sweet spot of your racquet, just as you expect it to. Life gives us endless opportunities to find the sweet spot, and our self-concept and deep expectations determine whether or not we get ourselves into position to take advantage of them.
    

2. They mobilize your biochemistry, or as Norman Cousins put it, "Beliefs become biology."⁶ Beliefs and deep images are neurochemically coded, and they also provide a foundation for the ways you code new experience. You tend to filter out perceptions that do not conform with your deep beliefs. And you tend to organize the perceptions that do filter in according to those beliefs. Your deep beliefs also mobilize your biochemistry in the most tangible physical ways, sending chemical messengers to your nervous, endocrine, and immune systems, as with the markedly increased incidence of deaths from heart disease among people who believed they were prone to heart disease as contrasted with people with equivalent risk factors who did not hold this belief.
    

3. They create an energetic that attracts circumstances that bring the deep expectation into being. While this is still implausible within the worldview many people in our culture still hold, the number of well-designed scientific studies demonstrating the impact of thought on physical events is persuasive for anyone who really looks. And we intuitively know that people who have a more optimistic outlook seem to attract more positive circumstances their way than people who have a more pessimistic outlook. While this may be explained in terms of the first two items, other intangible forces may also be at play, and if they are, it is well worth the effort to recognize and marshal them.

Aiming at the Right Target. Nonetheless, the pop psych use of affirmations and visualizations often proves unproductive and discouraging. While the methods are powerful and potentially effective, they are often applied incorrectly. Principles for using them effectively follow. But even more fundamental, the most frequent reason they do not work is because affirmations frequently aim at the wrong target.

What is actually affirmed is not the affirmation that is stated. It is, in fact, frequently the opposite. If the stated affirmation runs counter to a core belief, the psyche simply tags the core belief to the tail end of the stated affirmation. "I’m an excellent tennis player" is the conscious statement, but the affirmation is a trigger for the tail-ender, "But I’m very uncoordinated." Similar to a psychological reversal, you say the affirmation and you inadvertently reinforce the core belief. This is all subtle and outside your conscious awareness, yet the effect is powerful. So before addressing any other principles for creating effective affirmations and images, you need to learn how to identify and take aim at removing these "tail-enders."

Overcoming the Tyranny of the Tail-Ender. Positive affirmations are often stated in the present tense, as if they have already occurred. Gary Craig had the experience nearly three decades ago of permanently losing 30 pounds with the only intervention being a vivid, consistent affirmation that said "My normal weight is 160 pounds and that is what I weigh." He never dieted. His cravings and his biochemistry changed to conform with his "normal" body weight.

This same strategy can, however, activate a "tail-ender" and have the opposite effect. Donna Eden describes in Energy Medicine how a woman who was trying to lose twelve pounds gained  eighteen pounds while steadfastly, but without supervision, using a technique Eden had taught her that included an affirmation. When she finally met with Eden and angrily announced the outcome of having so faithfully used this new and apparently promising technique, Eden asked her to notice what thoughts were following the affirmation, whether her mind was wandering, or if any images were entering her awareness. It turned out that every time she said the affirmation, images of herself as an overweight woman intruded along with the thought, "Oh, hell, I’ve got a Slavic body, I’m always going to have a Slavic body, and I’m going to end up looking just like my [fat] Aunt Sophie." She was doing this five times every day. And it was working! The woman did, by the way, eventually shed the eighteen pounds she had gained along with the twelve pounds she originally wanted to lose, all without dieting. While a series of energy interventions was used for working with her self-image as well as her metabolism, addressing the tail-ender involving her Aunt Sophie was the first step.

Often tail-enders involve a limiting self-image that instructs you that the desired state is not possible. You are not capable of it. "I have a Slavic body, and that’s that." But they can also involve unacknowledged or unwanted consequences of reaching the goal. Staying with weight examples, unrecognized tail-enders that might show up at the end of a positive affirmation designed to bring a woman to her ideal weight might include:

"But if I lose the weight, men will hit on me and expect sex."

"But if I lose the weight, I will weigh less than Mom, and she will be jealous and angry."

"But if I lose the weight, I will feel emotionally vulnerable."

"But if I lose the weight, others will expect me to keep it off."

"But if I lose the weight, I will have to give up the comfort and pleasure of eating what I want."

"But if I lose the weight, I won’t know if a man loves me for myself or for my body."

The list of possible tail-enders or unspoken obstacles to reaching a goal is endless. The outcome, however, is that the affirmation that you think is aiming at your goal ropes in the tail-ender, and what is affirmed is not your goal but the reasons your goal cannot or should not be reached.

Think about a goal that you have held for a long time but that you have not achieved. It can be one you are actively pursuing or one that just kind of stays in the background. Most people have at least one, even if only dimly recognized. Bring it to the front of your awareness and put it into words. Write it down. Then describe what comes to you, if anything, as you think about completing each of the following statements:

• The thing about me that makes it impossible for me to reach this goal is . . .
   
• The thing about my past that makes it impossible for me to reach this goal is . . .
   
• If there were an emotional reason for me not to reach this goal, it would be . . .
   
• If I did reach this goal, the consequences would be . . .
   
• In order to reach this goal, I would have to . . .
   
• What I really want, rather than just this goal, is . . .
   
• Thinking about this goal reminds me of . . .
   
• I would be more willing to reach this goal if first . . .

These queries can bring the hidden tail-ender or tail-enders into view. They may reveal a chain of events, beliefs, and attitudes that are keeping the goal from becoming a reality. If you are not big on lists, one of our colleagues simply asks "How do you plan to sabotage your goal" and reports that people "generally know." If the goal is important to you, you can use the tapping protocol to remove the emotional charge on each of the tail-enders. You state your goal, identify any tail-enders, and neutralize each using the tapping protocol.

Tail-Enders and a Problem on the Job. Therapists generally do not work with friends or family members because the relationship itself is part of the healing process. The therapeutic relationship needs to be kept as objective and as untainted by conflicting interests as possible. Even an excessive desire to help can get in the way, interfering, for instance, with the client’s motivation. The experiences reported by energy therapists, however, are a bit different. Because the techniques can be taught and self-applied, some practitioners view bringing them to their own children as part of the educational role of parenting. A seasoned therapist with a great deal of experience in using energy interventions tells the following story about her then 23-year-old son, Jonathan:⁷

"Jonathan works for a banking company as a Customer Service Representative. He's the guy you talk to when you call about your credit card. He takes about 120 calls during his shift and helps resolve issues for customers regarding late fees, interest rates, lost cards, credit limits, etc.

"He finds the job to be fun and challenging. Except he hates to sell! One of his responsibilities is to offer eligible customers the opportunity to accept a ‘balance transfer.’ This means that the customer can transfer his or her balances from other credit cards to Jonathan's company and get a very low interest rate for a six-month period.

"The banking company encourages its people to offer balance transfers. In fact, they offer monetary incentives to people for achieving a 20 percent rate of successful balance transfers a month. That would mean averaging about 10 balance transfers a day for the entire month. Jonathan was averaging about two a day.

"On his own, he'd managed to ‘force’ himself to get about six a day, but he hated every minute of it. He felt stressed out. He had a headache. He hates to sell!

"Four days before the end of the month, when he realized that he was eligible for a monthly bonus in every other area of his work, but would not achieve that bonus because of his statistics in balance transfers, he asked me to help him. So, I asked him to tell me what's been his ‘hang up’ in this area. He told me the following:

"I don't like selling."

"No one wants to hear about it."

"I think about asking when I'm on the phone with a customer, but I just don't do it."

"People are upset when they call about a late fee and they don't want to hear about anything else."

"I get rejected when I ask."

"I'm afraid I'll get rejected."

"I wouldn't want someone to do this to me if I were calling in about something else."

"I'm pissed at this aspect of the job."

"I don't think it's fair that I have to do this in order to meet incentive."

"We tapped for each of these ‘tail-enders.’ He loved the session and laughed a lot as we worked. And then I decided to do some energy testing with him [a technique used within energy psychology to assess the body’s energetic response to a question or other input]. I asked him how many balance transfers he thought he could accomplish now. Remember, he'd never gotten more than seven in a day and usually got about two.

"He said he now felt confident that he could achieve 40 balance transfers a day. I asked if I could ask the body about that. He gave me permission. As I tested his arm, I had him say, ‘I can easily achieve  10 balance transfers a day.’ The arm stayed strong. I had him say, ‘I can easily achieve 15 balance  transfers a day.’ Still strong. ‘Twenty’ was strong, too. ‘Thirty’ was strong. The body took us to 36! The body said that Jonathan could achieve 36 balance transfers a day!

"I reminded him that having a goal does not always mean that we ‘get’ exactly what we've pictured, but that our goals ‘move us in a direction.’ He was very satisfied with that observation.

"The next day, Jonathan achieved 37 balance transfers! Every day until the end of the month, he averaged about the same number! He met incentive and received a bonus for his work. He said, ‘What have you done to me? I'm blowing them away here! They [his bosses and colleagues] can't get over the change in me! This is amazing!’"

A Four-Part Strategy. As in Jonathan’s case, simply erasing the tail-enders with the tapping protocol (e.g., starting with the first one on his list, using the Setup "Even though I have this ‘I don’t like selling’ attitude, I deeply love and accept myself" and the Reminder Phrase "This ‘I don’t like selling’ attitude") is often enough so you find yourself moving toward your goal with a whole new spirit and strength. Affirmations, visualizations, and mental rehearsals can further propel you toward a goal you wish to achieve. If applying the tapping protocol to tail-enders is the knife that cuts the cord to the dead weight that was holding you back, affirmations and images are magnets that pull you where you want to go,. Later you will learn how to apply the Basic Tapping Protocol to further energize your affirmations, visualizations, and mental rehearsals. But the next step in this four-part strategy is to formulate affirmations, visualizations, and mental rehearsals that will be effective with a particular goal. The four-part strategy is to:

1. State the goal.

2. Identify and neutralize the tail-enders.

3. Formulate affirmations, visualizations, and mental rehearsals.

4. Use the Basic Recipe to further empower them.

Affirmations, Visualizations, and Mental Rehearsals

After more than a century of modern psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy has taken its place as one of the most effective clinical approaches available for people who are motivated to overcome anxiety, depression, and numerous other psychological difficulties. Providing people with tools for effectively shifting the self-talk that is at the basis of their feelings and actions is among its greatest strengths.⁸ Often our internal talk is said so quickly and automatically that we don’t even notice it. It seems that the external situation is causing our feelings, but it is actually our interpretations about what we are experiencing that shapes our reactions. According to psychologist Edmund Bourne:⁹

• Emotional reactions usually occur without our noticing what we said to ourselves right before we reacted.
   

• We usually can see the connection between our self-talk and our feelings only after we take a step back and examine what we’ve been telling ourselves
   

• Self-talk is often in shorthand, where a word or image contains a whole series of thoughts, memories, and associations, so identifying our self-talk may require unraveling several distinct thoughts from a single word or image.
   

• Even irrational self-talk tends to sound like truth—it reflects beliefs we are scarcely aware of—so habitual irrational self-talk tends to go unchallenged and unquestioned.
   

• Negative self-talk perpetuates avoidance—you tell yourself a situation is dangerous and avoid it—and by avoiding it, you reinforce the belief that it is dangerous.
   

• Negative self-talk is a series of bad habits—we aren’t born with a predisposition for it, we learn to think that way.
   

• Just as you can replace unhealthy behavioral habits with healthy ones, you can replace unhealthy thinking with more positive, supportive mental habits.

Countering Negative Self-Talk. Bourne identifies four of the most common types of anxiety-provoking negative self-talk as being personified by the worrier, the critic, the victim, and the perfectionist. He suggests that the most effective way to deal with negative self-talk is to counter it with positive, self-affirming statements that directly refute or invalidate the negative statements. These positive statements are to be written down and frequently rehearsed. Among the distortions such positive statements need to counter are self-talk that overestimates the likelihood of a negative outcome ("what if" thinking), that overestimates the consequences if a negative outcome were to occur (catastrophizing), and that underestimates your ability to cope (pessimistic self-appraisal).

We have been speaking of introducing positive self-talk that can impact your self-image and core beliefs as the use of affirmations. The first step in using affirmations effectively, as you have seen, is to neutralize the tail-enders or negative self-statements that go along with them. If each time you state the affirmation, you are also triggering highly charged doubts, objections, or counter-arguments, you are reinforcing the opposite of what you are intending.

Affirmations that Work. Three other reasons, beyond tail-enders, that an affirmation may fail to bring about the desired outcome are that the affirmation 1) reflects what you think you should want rather than what you really want, 2) calls for too large a step or for changes that are too far beyond what you believe is possible, or 3) is being repeated mindlessly or is worded in a way that does not engage your enthusiasm. Someone who rotely affirms "I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy" is not likely to be inducted into the Happiness Hall of Fame anytime soon, even if all the tail-enders have been identified and neutralized. Here happiness is not a driving goal but rather a "wouldn’t-that-be-nice" sort of effort that lacks the passion of a motivating vision. For an affirmation to be maximally effective, its focus must have a "pulling power" that reaches you deeply and becomes a compelling force. A goal worth pursuing evokes your passion.

The goal needs to strike a balance between being achievable within your belief system and stretching you to another level, beyond your current limits. Stretching stimulates excitement. The goal of raising your annual income from $50,000 to $51,000 is not likely to get your juices flowing. The prospect of moving up to $80,000 or $100,000 may. Once these levels are reached, it is much easier to see $150,000 or $250,000, and these calibrations hold whether the goal is more money, less weight, better relationships, more vibrant health, or greater achievement.

In working with affirmations in this program, begin with small steps. Develop one goal at a time. Put an affirmation behind it. Adjust it as you move forward. Take small victories at first and then move onto larger ones. Once you have removed the tail-enders, you have cleared the path for an affirmation to lead to radiant new possibilities. Based on our own synthesis of various approaches that use affirmations, including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, hypnosis, and NLP, we offer ten guidelines for constructing an effective affirmation:

1. Affirm a want not a should.
    

2. Affirm your "wants" rather than your "don’t wants."
    

3. Affirm a goal you believe is realistically possible to attain, or adjust the wording so it is within the range of what you believe is realistic (If "I am healthy" feels beyond your reach for the time being, you can soften it with words like "becoming," "willing to be," or "learning to be.").
    

4. At the same time, affirm a goal that is a "stretch," a goal that is large enough to be exciting.
    

5. State your affirmation in the first person, present tense.
    

6. Keep your affirmation short, simple, and direct.
    

7. Augment your statement with a vivid mental image or inner rehearsal of the goal already having been attained.
    

8. Adjust your affirmation from time to time to eliminate boredom or to aim at different aspects of your goal.
    

9. Keep your focus on what you can do rather than what you hope others will do ("I am a warm, loving person who attracts love" rather than "John loves me.").
    

10. Keep your affirmations private (except for sharing them with a therapist or growth partner, announcing them to others diffuses their impact, interacts with the other person’s agenda for you, and invites premature judgments).

Here are some examples:

Formulate an affirmation you would like to call into reality. Go over the guidelines and examples above. State your affirmation with conviction and deep feeling. Bourke reminds us that "getting a new belief into your heart—as well as into your head—will give it the greatest power."¹⁰ He recommends becoming deeply relaxed and stating the affirmation slowly, with feeling and conviction. Repetition is another part of the formula. Among the techniques Bourke recommends are 1) to write the affirmation five or ten times every day for a week or two, 2) writing the affirmation in giant letters with a magic marker on a large sheet of paper and placing it so you see it frequently, 3) putting your affirmations on an audio tape and listening to them once a day for 30 days, and 4) having a partner say your affirmation to you (replacing "I" with "you") with conviction while looking you in the eye. Then you state your affirmation, looking your partner in the eye.

Adding an Image. The image you pair with the affirmation can amplify its effectiveness. Begin with an experiment. Take everything out of your hands but the book, sit back in your chair, and follow the instructions as you read along. Hold your free hand out in front of you and imagine you are holding a lemon that has been cut in half. Hold the lemon so you can see the exposed juicy part.

Use your imagination as vividly as you can and feel the texture of the lemon with your fingertips. Notice the little indent marks on the outer peel as well as the oily surface. Can you feel that? Now bring it up to your nose and smell it. Can you smell it? Okay, bring it back down.

Next, you are going to bite into this lemon. You probably knew that was coming. We’re just telling you now so you can be prepared. To do this correctly and get the true purpose behind this exercise, you must put your vivid imagination into it. That means you must really chomp into this lemon. Not a little nibble. Really bite it. Ready? One, two, three, bite. Now chew it.

Okay, now take it out. Notice whether you salivated? Most people do. By vividly involving your imagination, you create physical changes in your body and your neurochemistry. Your brain treated your imaginary lemon like a real lemon. Sensing a sour acid, it sent saliva to neutralize it. It salivated even though a real lemon was not present. The persistent repetition of an affirmation paired with a vivid image conditions body and mind toward perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors that conform to the newly envisioned reality.

In a study of the effects of imagery and mental rehearsal on basketball performance, volunteers at Ohio State University were divided into three groups. One group practiced shooting free throws every day for thirty days. The second group practiced shooting free throws every day for thirty days, but only in their minds. They did not touch a basketball. The third group was given no special instructions.

After thirty days, all three groups came back to shoot free throws. The ones who did not practice at all made no improvement. The ones who practiced with the actual ball, improved 24%. The ones who practiced only in their minds improved 23%, which is statistically the same as those who practiced on the court.¹¹ Vivid imagery and mental rehearsal involves your mind and body in your affirmation in ways that just saying or thinking the words cannot. If your affirmation is, "I’m at ease around new people and look forward to meeting them," imagine a situation where you are enjoying meeting new people. Be specific. Use the forms of imagining or rehearsing that are most natural to you. Some people easily see images. Others feel themselves in the situation. Others experience it more like a story. What matters is not which of these styles or combinations of styles you use, but that you be fully and vividly involved in the experience.

Before you move on to the next section, review the goal you selected earlier and the affirmation you developed around it. Be sure the wording of the affirmation follows the guidelines suggested earlier. Then develop an image or mental rehearsal that brings life to the words.

Combining Affirmations with Energy Interventions

Once you have properly worded an affirmation for a goal you consider worthy and realistic, have neutralized the tail-enders, have amplified the statement by saying it with feeling and conviction, and have paired it with vivid imagery, one further step will make it a power tool with few rivals among existing self-help inventions. You have already crafted the affirmation so it is logically believable to you. The final step is to make it emotionally believable. Once it is believable to your rational mind and your "feeling mind," changes to your self-image and core beliefs will be rapid, deep, and lasting. Conveniently, you already know the fundamental skills that are required to make a logical affirmation emotionally believable. You will be combining the Basic Recipe with a well-formulated affirmation and accompanying image.

State your affirmation while bringing to mind your mental picture or rehearsal, imagining that your aim has been achieved. Your goal is already the case. If your affirmation is "Peace is my companion" and you chose it because the pressures and stresses in your life tend to agitate you, say the words as you imagine being peaceful and centered in the midst of a potentially stressful event. Then give a rating, between 1 and 10, to how believable this statement and image are to you. Notice that in this rating the scale goes in the opposite direction from the distress ratings you have used up to this point. The more desirable the situation, the higher the rating. A 10 means the statement is completely believable. A 0 means it is not believable at all.

You will then apply a modified version of the Basic Recipe¹² for increasing the emotional believability of your affirmation. The Setup uses a slightly different format: "Even though I only believe [your affirmation] at a [your rating], I deeply love and accept myself." The Reminder Phrase is your affirmation combined with your mental image or rehearsal. Use the tapping points from the Basic Recipe and the same "sandwich": the tapping sequence, the Nine Gamut Procedure, and another tapping sequence. Then again bring your affirmation and image to mind and rate their believability. You may find adjustments in the wording or the image occurring to you between rounds. Incorporate them. Continue with additional rounds until you have increased the believability score to at least 8. Sometimes you need to experience the new response or behavior in a real life setting before you can get the believability above 8, but clinical experience shows that once 8 has been achieved, the translation from inner life to daily life tends to be relatively smooth. Here are the steps, along with a case illustration:

1. State a goal that is important to you. Bill, at 38, was a self-made success. Born to a poor family, he owned and ran a multi-million dollar software firm. While his own financial security was assured, he tirelessly tackled new opportunities and took on new projects as if he were still struggling to succeed. He regularly pushed himself beyond the limits of physical durability and good sense. As a result, he was usually tired, he did not exercise adequately, his blood pressure was too high, his family felt neglected, and he rarely enjoyed an inner sense of peace. He was always pushing himself. The goal he selected during an energy psychology class conducted by David was one he had been paying lip service to for years. He wanted to "slow down, smell the roses, and enjoy my children while they are still children."
    

2. Go through the earlier questions for identifying any tail-enders, and apply the Basic Recipe to them, one by one. Bill was able to identify many inner objections to slowing down. Following the phrase, "If I don’t continue to push myself so hard," he listed:

"I will wind up poor, like my parents."

"My employees will think I am lazy and taking a free ride."

"I will not get the satisfaction of innovating new, creative solutions to important problems within my field."

"I will be turning my back on the contribution I am meant to make to humanity." "Time that is now devoted to important pursuits will just be filled with trivia."

"I will find out that I am not as good a parent as I like to believe I would be if I had the time."

Working with a partner during a two-hour session, Bill found he was able to logically counter each of these objections, and he was able to clear their emotional charge using the Basic Recipe. For some of them, he had to address various aspects that arose. The fear that he would "wind up poor like his parents," for instance, led to resentment of his father for not having provided better for the family.

3. Formulate an affirmation of your goal using the earlier guidelines, and support it with an image or mental rehearsal as if that goal has already come into being. Bill worded his affirmation, "I enjoy an easy balance between my creative professional life and my rich personal life." In his behavioral rehearsal, he saw himself wrestling with his kids in the living room as his wife looked on with satisfaction, and he had a sense of peace knowing his business was running itself just fine without his micromanaging every detail. He was enjoying his family, undistracted by business concerns.

4. Rate from 1 to 10 the emotional believability of your affirmation and image. After having removed the tail-enders, the idea of having a better balance between his work life and his home life had become very plausible to Bill, but when he actually said the words and did the mental rehearsal, there was still a sense that this was not going to happen. He gave the believability rating a 2.

5. Apply the Basic Recipe to increase the emotional believability of your affirmation and image. Bill used the Setup, "Even though I only believe I can find a balance between my personal and professional lives at a 2, I deeply love and accept myself." His Reminder Phrase was his affirmation, shortened to "Easy balance" and combined with the image of seeing himself playing with his children while knowing all was well at the office. During the first few rounds, the believability only increased to 4. It was at this point that he introduced the part about knowing all was well at the office, and the score went up to 9 the next time through. One of the first things Bill did following the workshop was to hire a personal assistant to whom he could turn over many of the responsibilities that could be delegated. If you change your inner reality, opportunities for changing your external reality that had not occurred to you often become obvious.

Peak Performance. You can apply the methods presented in this tutorial to virtually any situation where you want to be at your best. You are about to ask your neighborhood association for an exception to its building code. You want to find the creative twist that will let you bring a perfect completion to the painting you’ve been working on. You are about to visit that high school sweetheart who dumped you so long ago, and you want to shine. You need to confront your boss.

By combining an affirmation, a mental rehearsal in which you visualize yourself having an optimal response in a challenging situation, and the tapping protocol, you can adjust your energies to support a better performance in any arena that matters to you. Energy psychology practitioners are taking these principles into every setting imaginable. Work with athletes is particularly instructive because the outcomes are so easy to observe. In an athlete’s mental rehearsal, a "personal best" performance is often a good initial image. It is believable. It was accomplished before. It is already wired in. The ability has been established. Whether in sports, art, business, parenting, public speaking, or any other arena that calls for a good performance, the goal can be to make your personal best become your next performance.

Steve Wells, an energy psychology practitioner in Australia who consults with athletes and corporate personnel who want to improve their performance, worked with Pat Ahearne, a baseball pitcher in Australia. Pat gives the following account:

"As anyone who has competed in athletics can say, the difference between the average athlete and the elite player is much more mental than physical. In an effort to bring my mental preparation for baseball to the same level as my physical preparation, I was introduced to EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) by Steve Wells, a psychologist based in Perth, Australia. Before working with Steve, I was able to perform well in training and some of the time in games, but I wanted to access my best performances more often and in the most pressure filled situations.

"Steve and I worked together using EFT to lessen or eliminate the mental and emotional barriers preventing my consistently producing my best games as a pitcher. The results were astounding. I had more consistency, better command of my pitches, and accomplished it in big games with less mental effort. There is clear evidence in the numbers when you compare my '98-'99 Australian Baseball League season statistics before EFT and after EFT."

Pat pitched 89-1/3 innings that season. In the 46 innings immediately prior to his work with Steve, Pat’s earned run average, the most basic statistic for measuring a pitcher’s performance, was 3.33 (the lower the better). In the subsequent 41-1/3 innings, it was a mere 0.87. He gave up 43 hits in his 46 innings prior to EFT, 15 hits in the 41-1/3 innings after it; 18 walks prior, 7 walks after. While these statistics are selective—a pitcher’s performance may vary this much with or without any outside help—the differences between his performance in the games immediately prior to his first EFT session and those immediately following it were so persuasive to Pat that he incorporated EFT into his regular routine. As he explains:

"With EFT, I found the mental edge that raises an athlete from average to elite. I used the techniques to capture the MVP of the Perth Heat and the Australian Baseball League Pitcher of the Year Award. I am so amazed with the effectiveness of EFT that I've made it as important a part of my baseball routine as throwing or running or lifting weights."

Shortcuts to the Basic Recipe

Since each round of the Basic Recipe requires only about a minute, you may wonder why we would even introduce shortcuts. After all, how much shorter than one minute do we need to get? But as you saw in the tutorial for Focusing on Problems, there are numerous situations where you might need to apply the Basic Recipe many many times.

It certainly will not hurt to use the full procedure. We have not even mentioned the notion of shortcuts until now because you need to have the full Basic Recipe as a foundation so that you can introduce shortcuts without undermining the process.

Two advantages of learning the shortcuts are 1) you can deepen your understanding of the Basic Recipe because you have to know the "hows" and "whys" of each piece you are considering deleting, and 2) if you are working on a complex issue where many trips through the Basic Recipe are needed, you are more likely to stay faithful to the process if you can get by with a 15 or 20 second version of the procedure. Shortcuts can be introduced into each of the basic parts of the process:

1. Eliminating the Setup. The Setup Affirmation addresses psychological reversals. But psychological reversals are not always present. While the Setup is not harmful in these cases, it is not necessary. We actually usually do include the Setup because it requires only a few seconds and is often necessary, but when there are multiple rounds, we may see if we can skip it. This is largely an intuitive guess, but you get instant feedback. A psychological reversal will stop progress in its tracks. If the distress rating stops going down, start doing the Setup again. Keep in mind that psychological reversal is almost always present in depression, addictions, and degenerative diseases, so the Setup should generally not be skipped when working with these conditions. Also, a therapist can use the Setup to accomplish other objectives than countering psychological reversals, such as to introduce a new way of thinking about the problem.

2.  Shortening the Tapping Sequence.  The Tapping Sequence is the main ingredient of the Basic Recipe. While we can’t eliminate it, we can usually shorten it. This is because the meridian energies that circulate through the body are all interconnected. Tapping on one meridian will often affect another. The tapping sequence from the Basic Recipe is, in fact, already a shortcut in the sense that it treats only a subset of the 14 meridians. This subset is usually able to bring the energies in all the meridians into harmony. That sequence can be reduced still one notch further. Through trial and error, we have found that doing only the first 7 of the 8 tapping points is generally still quite reliable. This minimal sequence includes:

EB = Beginning of the eyebrow.

SE = Side of the eye.

UE = Under the eye.

UN = Under the nose.

Ch = Chin.

CB = Beginning of the collarbone.

UA = Under the arm.

3. Skipping the Nine Gamut Procedure. The Nine Gamut Procedure is also not always necessary. We would guess, in fact, that it may be essential only about one-third of the time. Again, this is an intuitive call, and if you skip it but are not finding the progress you might expect, you can always re-introduce it. If it was necessary, progress should resume. By skipping the Nine Gamut Procedure when you can, you reduce the "sandwich" to a single slice of bread, a single round of tapping, shortening the process substantially.

4.  The Floor-to-Ceiling Eye Roll.  This is a useful shortcut when you have brought the intensity of the problem down to a low level, such as a 1 or 2 on the 10-point scale. It only requires about six seconds to perform and, when successful, it will take you to 0 without having to do another round of tapping. To do the eye roll, continuously tap the Gamut point (p. xx) while holding your head steady and slowly moving your eyes from the floor up to the ceiling and repeating your reminder phrase. You start with your eyes "hard down" at the floor and move up at a rate so it takes about six seconds to make the arc. During this time, breathe deeply and purposefully send the "old" energy outward through your eyes. Some people also routinely do the eye roll at the end of the Nine Gamut Procedure.

The Art of Doing Shortcuts. Because there is a degree of art involved, it is difficult to put down on paper when and how to introduce these shortcuts. The video and audio demonstrations in the EFT Foundational Course show shortcuts being applied in numerous situations and can give you a better feel for how to use them. Experience is the best teacher. This discussion simply acquaints you with the fundamentals. And please remember that since the Basic Recipe only takes about a minute, you don’t really need to do the shortcuts. They are faster and more convenient, but not essential.

The more important principles to keep in mind are:

1. Memorize the Basic Recipe.
    

2. Use it on any emotional or physical problem you wish by customizing it with an appropriate Setup Affirmation and Reminder Phrase.
    

3. Be as specific as possible and direct the technique at particular emotional events in your life that may underlie the problem (aspects).
    

4. Remember that persistence pays. Keep applying the methods until all aspects of the problem have been resolved.

And please do not limit your vision of what may be effectively helped by these methods. Try it on anything where it might plausibly work. If it doesn’t, nothing is lost. If it does, much can be gained.

Notes for the "Focusing on Potentials" Tutorial

¹ Robert Kegan, The Emerging Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

² This session was conducted over the telephone. A complete transcript of the 45-minute session can be found on in the Embedded Topics area. It is interesting to follow the questions Craig asked and the statements he formulated, sometimes deviating from the exact format of the Basic Recipe. While you can still get to the desired outcome without these on-the-spot modifications, they get you there more quickly. This is part of the art of the technique in the hands of an advanced practitioner.

³ Beyond the case examples offered in this book, viewing actual treatment sessions can help you further develop these skills. The EFT Foundational Course (www.emofree.com) includes dozens of demonstration sessions on audio or videotape.

⁴ This idea is further developed as a "personal mythology" in David Feinstein and Stanley Krippner’s The Mythic Path (available from www.innersource.net).

⁵ Brian Reid, "The Nocebo Effect: Placebo’s Evil Twin," Washington Post, April 30, 2002. The various published scientific studies mentioned in this and the following paragraph are described in this article.

⁶ Norman Cousins, "Beliefs Become Biology," Advances in Mind-Body Medicine (1989, 6, 20-29).

⁷ Deborah Mitnick is the therapist.

⁸ Edmund J. Bourne, The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook, 3^rd ed. (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2000). Chapter 9 of this superb self-help resource focuses on self-talk.

⁹ Ibid, pp.174 – 175.

¹⁰ Ibid, p. 220.

¹¹ Variations of this research design have been used many times and produced similar outcomes. See, for instance, K.A. Martin, S.E. Moritz, & C. Hall, "Imagery Use in Sport: A Literature Review and Applied Model," The Sport Psychologist, 1999, 13, 245–268.

¹² Patterned after the "Outcome Projection Procedure" developed by Fred P. Gallo, Ph.D. See his Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods (New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 175 - 177.