A couple of weeks ago, I was amazed that about 80% of the people I worked with were dealing with various shades of “I can’t.”
Here are some of the beliefs people had:
I can’t because if I do I’ll lose my family.
I can’t because I don’t have the money.
I can’t because I might succeed.
If I do I’ll be ridiculed within the scientific community.
I can’t because I’ll make so much money the government or someone will take it way.
Thing, is, once you get at the underlying messages all these fears carry, you’ll have the courage, skill and knowledge to laugh and do what you choose.
Here’s an example….
“Joe” said, “My family wants me to stay in my job as a house-painter because it has a steady salary. I hate it, and I know I can be successful running a landscaping business.
“I’m good at it, but I just don’t have the credit to ask for a loan, and I can’t afford to buy the equipment I need. I’m afraid my family will think I’m nuts, that I’m endangering them, and I’ll never hear the end of it from my father-in-law if I fail.”
I asked him how big his fear of failure was on a scale of 1 to 10. “20!” he said. “It makes my knees weak to think of my wife screaming at me and my kids being disappointed in me.”
And how big was his fear of asking the bank or someone in his family for a loan. Off the charts. “I know they don’t think my ideas are worth anything.”
And his fear that he couldn’t provide for his kids?
Another 20.
I had him imagine this picture: a giant wheelbarrow full of all his fear. Two 20s and an off-the-charts overflow of all this I-CAN’T energy. Not to mention the weak-in-the-knees feeling, the queasy belly, the sweat down his back.
“I hate it!” he said, as he described it to me. “I don’t want to feel this way! I want to do what my heart loves, and what I know how to do really well! I’m furious!”
We added that to the wheel-barrow, too. He then made it into a dump truck to be able to hold it all.
I knew he expected me to take him through some tapping with EFT (the Emotional Freedom Techniques – info at EFTBooks.com ).
But I waited a bit, and had him really feel the energy inside all those fears, anger and frustrations. This is a bit different from most EFT sessions where you are ordinarily coached to not suffer through the intensity.
Instead, I wanted to point out to him the enormity of the energy he was carrying around.
I asked him, “What if all that energy you’re feeling, plus the energy it takes to resist and hate feeling that way, was available to you for creativity, confidence and power?”
What a concept, no? He’d never thought of it that way.
“It’d be huge!” he said. “Man, what a waste it is that I’ve used it like this!”
So now we tapped, starting with the Karate Chop Point. Here are a couple diagrams of the face and torso tapping points if you’re unfamiliar with EFT.
We said as we tapped: even though:
I’m afraid of failure
my wife will scream at me and call me a dummy
and a no-good
I’ll feel small and useless and
I’m afraid I’ll start drinking again
my father-in-law thinks I’m just a jerk
I’ll never have his approval
I’ve never had it anyway
I hate feeling this way
I hate how stupid I feel
I feel so unsupported
and angry at them all
especially myself
I’m so afraid to let go and trust that my heart is right
I feel like such a chicken
no one appreciates me
I’m afraid to start stepping out of my job
Pretty real feelings. Hard to carry around for so long.
It turned out, after we got through all that, that he did have occasional invitations from people to do some landscaping for them, but he’d been too afraid to take them.
So we went though fear of calling them back, fear of rejection, fear of them laughing at him – until he finally started laughing and said, “I get it! All I need to do is take one fear at a time and turn it around into usable energy. I can do that!”
At the end of our session, I had him look at the Fear Dump Truck again.
“It’s gone! It’s a huge mountain of energy now!” he exclaimed. “It looks like new snow, clean and sparkling, and I can use it any time I want!”
He saw himself running and jumping right into the heart of the mountain, surrounding himself with energy and power and confidence, and allowing his heart to fill with clarity and enthusiasm for his dream.
Joe called me last night. He had me laughing as he told me he’d realized that he’d been so closed down that he had ignored his wife saying she wished he would “just get out of that stupid painting job.” Fear makes us blind!
He said, “I never even heard her say it! She told me she’s been wanting me to do something else because I’ve been so unhappy I’ve been a jerk. No wonder my father-in-law has hated me!”
Take your fear, anger, grief, blame, shame, self-pity, resentment, and self-hatred energy, pile it up where you can “see” it, do some tapping and clean it off, polish it up, and use it for your dreams. It works.
Don’t tell me you don’t have any of that! WE ALL do. It’s a gift! Think of the power in it! Hunt for every inch of it and turn it inside out.
If you don’t know how to use EFT, I invite you to get the freebie book at EFTBooks.com – you’ll get a complementary audio to introduce you to how to use it.
You’ll be glad you learned EFT – it’s a tool you can use for yourself,your friends, family and loved ones, co-workers, dogs, cats…anywhere anytime for the rest of your life. Transform your backwards energy into power, confidence and pure creativity. Please.
aloha,
Angela Treat Lyon
I recently worked with a young friend who has just opened her first acupuncture clinic with another young woman. When they were setting up their business bank account, and the personal banker found our that yes, in fact, acupuncture was useful for headaches, she became a good referral source for them.