Chapter 4

You’ve seen how a simple tapping protocol can be effective in overcoming a variety of emotional challenges. Does the same strategy apply when you want to go from solving an emotional problem to actualizing a personal potential? Part of the human condition is to know that we could be better than we are. We can always see beyond where we can currently reach. Can energy interventions help you attain an important personal goal? Can they help you become a more loving person? Can they increase your effectiveness in the world? Can they help you achieve your maximum potential? We believe they can. This chapter shows you how.

Directed psychological change is not only about healing old wounds and repairing emotional difficulties. The skilled psychotherapist uses language to inspire, to open the perception of new possibilities, to counter limiting beliefs, and to expand self-concept so latent potentials may flower. With energy psychology, you initiate such shifts in consciousness by combining the use of words and images with the stimulation of energy points. Stimulating these points alters your neurochemistry in ways that enhance the impact of words and images you focus upon. This can provide the missing link that turns commonsense approaches for personal improvement into truly effective strategies.

In the previous chapter you learned how to change the internal wiring in relationship to a clear-cut problem or symptom. This chapter begins by focusing on obstacles to living fully that may be less obvious, but that, nonetheless, hold you back. You will be examining how your self-image, core beliefs, and unresolved hurtful experiences may be getting in your way. The chapter then moves on to ways of envisioning what is possible for you and manifesting it through the use of affirmations, visualizations, and mental rehearsals—each augmented by energy techniques.

Core Beliefs and the Sense of Self

The clinical uses of hypnosis, guided imagery, cognitive restructuring, and related procedures have demonstrated that suggestion and self-suggestion are powerful interventions for changing feelings, beliefs, and behavior. Combining words or images with the stimulation of energy points appears to send signals to the brain that further boosts the potency of the methods. But, with or without energy interventions, the use of positive images and affirmations are often not effective if there is a contradiction between the person’s self-image or core beliefs and the intended change. When such a  contradiction exists, the self-image or core belief tends to prevail.

The EFT Basic Recipe is a way of getting these "back-seat drivers" out of your car. Apply it to them, as illustrated below, whenever you hear their voice. If you can remove them, along with their luggage (i.e., any "aspects" that emerge as you focus on them), they usually do not get back in. And without them in your car, you will simply be able to navigate more effectively. So a way to become more successful in your life is to identify the internal voices and images that block you and, using the Basic Recipe, confront them, one by one.

Using the Basic Recipe to Overcome a Self-Limiting Belief

The treatment actually took an interesting twist. After the first round of tapping following the Setup, "Even though I never can go better than 8^th, I deeply love and accept myself," the believability of the self-limiting statement 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 then seemed stuck. At this point, however, Dr. Vergini had a hunch that the meaning of the statement had shifted for the man. It turned out that the believability rating about the statement that he could never do "better than 8^th" had gone down to a 0 several rounds back, but had been automatically replaced in the man’s mind with a statement about an inability to place 1^st. This kind of shift is not unusual and simply needs to be noticed. Dr. Vergini explains, "We laughed and quickly zeroed in on ‘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 necessary to becoming a champion, it is an important one.

Transforming a Damaged Sense of Self

"Too Damaged to Heal"

The Positive Message in the Symptom

The next round used the same phrase, but introduced the words "still" and "some of," as the Basic Recipe indicates for subsequent rounds working on the same issue: "Even though I still have some of these electric body jumps." Gary 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 Gary then changed it 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. Many 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 Gary asked how she knew it was a 2. Glenda answered that there was a tight spot in her back. Gary 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 . . ." Here Gary was simply keeping Glenda attuned to what was happening in her body, to the ways her feelings and sensations were changing.

Reframing Past Events/Exploring the Meaning of Current Sensations

This was not the end of the session. Instead, Gary gave Glenda 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. Glenda 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."

How Was That Possible!

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

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

a) do tend to reveal themselves as you proceed and

b) are finite in number.

3. Once you have the sense of having fully resolved an issue, it tends not to return, and if
    it does return, you have the tools to focus on any aspects of the issue that still remain.

Chipping Away at Your Own Limiting Memories, Beliefs,
and Emotional Reactions

The "Personal Peace Procedure."

However, you can make a list. In Gary’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 aim for a deep psychic cleansing. You might think of each self-limiting emotion or event from your past as having left a stagnant pool that is leaking toxic substances into your psyche’s "water supply." Whatever their origins—such as past failures, losses, rejections, abuses, fears, or guilt—cleaning them up, one at a time, is going to gradually purify the water.

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 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, your well is refreshed, with your self-esteem making leaps, and a new, more positive self-image emerging.

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 effectively cleaned all ten of them because the underground system connecting them will no longer be overwhelmed and will be able to use its own natural filtering system for keeping the water clean. This is the same type of "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.³ The more effectively you dealt with the issue during the previous round of the spiral, the more the issue becomes a source of experience and wisdom rather than limitation. Cleaning all your pools over the next two months cannot insure enlightenment or 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 reading the book 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.

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 and support one another as you both move forward. Discuss and build your lists together. Reflect with one another on your experiences as you apply the Basic Recipe to each emotion or memory. 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 add invaluable support.

The Neurochemistry of the "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Beyond removing limitations in your self-image and core beliefs, you can create shifts that aim directly at bringing out your best. Medical studies show that believing a drug 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. A more pertinent challenge, however, may be to harness rather than work around the powerful self-fulfilling force of a belief that something good is about to happen. The drug studies have unwittingly established that, in some situations, "believing it" really does make it so.

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."⁴ 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.

For better or for worse, your expectations release a flood of chemicals in your brain. Every sensation, emotion, and passing thought causes millions of neurons to fire together, shaping our next response to whatever life presents. 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. 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. In another study, 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 we have been discussing 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, cultivating more self-affirming and optimistic core beliefs may be the first place to target. If you know you are a person who fails at relationships or money or career, positive thinking or trying harder can be but puffs of noble intention breathed into the wind. Until self-limiting core beliefs are transformed, all other efforts hit against an invisible ceiling, crumbling into oblivion like so many New Year’s resolutions before them. On the other hand, instilling core beliefs that support your natural capacities for love, joy, and success can be decisive steps toward deep fulfillment.

How to Uplevel Your Self-Image and Core Beliefs

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 good sense. If you can deeply program yourself so your self-image and core beliefs are 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 than 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 manner 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."⁵ Core  beliefs and 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 deepest  notions. And you tend to organize the perceptions that do filter in according to those notions. Your  core beliefs also mobilize your biochemistry in the most tangible physical ways, sending  chemical messengers to your nervous, endocrine, and immune systems, as with the greater  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 attract circumstances that bring the deep expectation into being. You have probably noticed 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 their perceptions, expectations, and past experiences, other intangible forces may also be at play. For instance, the number of well-designed scientific studies demonstrating the impact of thought and intention on physical events is persuasive for anyone who really looks (see www.EnergyPsychologyResearch.com), and if our intentions themselves do indeed impact the world, it is well worth the effort to marshal them wisely.

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, a primary reason they do not work is because affirmations often inadvertently aim at the wrong target.

A frequent problem is that what is actually affirmed is not the affirmation that is stated. It is, in fact, often the opposite. If the 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 mentally, you continue, "but I’m too uncoordinated to ever play well." This mental note that we add on after the affirmation is called a "tail-ender." Similar to a psychological reversal, you say the affirmation and you inadvertently reinforce the tail-ender, or core belief, instead of what you are stating aloud. This is all subtle and outside your conscious awareness, yet the effect is powerful. So before introducing other principles for creating effective affirmations and visualizations, we will focus on how to identify and take aim at these "tail-enders."

Positive affirmations are often stated in the present tense, as if they have already occurred. Gary 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 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 Donna had taught her that included an affirmation. When she finally met with Donna and angrily announced the outcome of having so faithfully used this new and apparently promising technique, Donna 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! She had gained eighteen pounds.

The woman did eventually shed those eighteen pounds along with the twelve pounds she originally wanted to lose, all without dieting A series of energy interventions was used for working with her self-image as well as her metabolism. But addressing the tail-ender involving her Aunt Sophie was the first step in making the other procedures effective.

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 inherited 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 so much your goal as 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 reaching 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.

Removing Tail-Enders

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 both with the therapist’s best judgment and 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:⁶

"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 for Reaching Your Goals

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.⁷ 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:⁸

• Emotional reactions usually occur without our noticing what we said to ourselves just 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

Affirmations introduce positive self-talk that can impact your self-image and core beliefs. 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.

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 affirms "I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy" by rote 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 reach you deeply and become 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 becomes easier to envision $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. Establish small victories at first and then move on to larger ones. Once you have removed the tail-enders, you have cleared the path for an affirmation to lead to substantial new possibilities. Based on a synthesis of various approaches that use affirmations, including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, hypnosis, and NLP, here are ten guidelines for constructing an effective affirmation:

1. Affirm a want, not a should (e.g., you may feel you should be pleasing your boss, but that may not be where you want to focus your efforts nor may it be the path for your highest development).

2. Affirm your wants rather than your don’t wants (e.g., affirm the achievement of inner peace rather than the avoidance of the obstacles to inner peace).

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 (e.g., if "I am healthy" feels beyond your reach for the time being, you can soften it with a modifier, as in "I am becoming healthy").

4. At the same time, affirm a goal that is a "stretch," a goal that is large enough to be exciting (e.g., rather than "I get by in my job," "I find the challenges in my work and I enjoy meeting those challenges every day.").

5. State your affirmation in the first person, present tense (e.g., "I am," "I know," "I feel," "I find").

6. Keep your affirmation short, simple, and direct (e.g., "I make a difference wherever I go.").

7. Augment your statement with a vivid mental image or inner rehearsal of the goal already having been attained (e.g., seeing yourself waxing eloquent in front of an enraptured audience).

8. Adjust your affirmation from time to time to eliminate boredom or to aim at different aspects of your goal (e.g., "I am healthy and vibrant," may focus for a while on "My muscles and resilience are growing stronger as I exercise every day.").

9. Keep your focus on what you can do rather than what you hope others will do (e.g., "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 a few examples:

• "I’m at ease around new people and look forward to meeting them."

• "I see the opportunity in every challenge."

• "Peace is my companion."

• "My book is finished, and I’m proud of it."

• "My blood pressure stays below . . ."

• "I am attracted only to healthy food."

• "I have a perfect balance of work and play."

• "I am making a full recovery quickly, easily, and joyfully."

• "I am wealthy" (or for easier believability, "I am becoming wealthy.").

• "I appreciate every moment" (or, "I am learning to appreciate every moment.").

1. writing 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/or

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

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 added life to the words.

Combining Affirmations with Energy Interventions

Once you have 1) properly worded an affirmation for a goal you consider worthy and realistic, 2) neutralized the tail-enders, 3) amplified the statement by saying it with feeling and conviction, and 4) paired it with vivid imagery, one further step will make it a power tool with few rivals among existing self-help interventions. You have already crafted the affirmation so it is logically and perhaps emotionally believable to you. The final step is to make it energetically compatible and more emotionally believable. Once an affirmation is deeply believable and energetically compatible, changes to your self-image and core beliefs will, according to many case reports, be rapid, deep, and lasting. Conveniently, you already know the fundamental skills that are required to make a logical affirmation energetically compatible and more 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. In this image, 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 staying peaceful and centered in the midst of a potentially stressful event. Then give a rating, between 0 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.

Making Peak Functioning Believable

You will then apply a modified version of the Basic Recipe¹¹ 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 same tapping points you learned in Chapter 2 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, identify 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 trivial matters."

"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 mental 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 0 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.

"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

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 prevent progress. If the distress rating does not go down or stops going down, start doing the Setup again. Keep in mind that a psychological reversal is almost always present in depression and addictions, so the Setup should generally not be skipped when working with these conditions. Also, as you saw in Gary’s work with Glenda, 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.

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 presented in Chapter 2 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 = Sides of the eyes.

UE = Under the eyes.

UN = Under the nose.

Ch = Chin.

CB = Beginning of the collarbone.

UA = Under the arms.

The Nine Gamut Procedure is also not always necessary. Gary, in fact, often omits it, going from the Set-up, to a round of tapping, to a new assessment of the problem, to a revised Set-up phrase. 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 the Nine Gamut Procedure was necessary, progress should resume. By skipping the Nine Gamut when you can, you reduce the "sandwich" to a single slice of bread, a single round of tapping, shortening the process substantially.

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 you can innovate from there. Virtually every practitioner we know has developed a style that includes a personalized set of shortcuts. Many of these, such as "Turbo Tapping,"¹² are highly innovative and are described on the EFT website. Also, keep in mind 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.

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.