For people to be successful, in anything they endeavor to achieve, they need to be completely congruent in both their conscious and their subconscious minds. To understand why this is so important, think back to when you were learning to ride a bike.
For most of us, learning to ride a two-wheeled bike was a simultaneously thrilling and terrifying experience. We wanted the freedom that would come with being mobile. But somewhere in our primitive brains, we feared the pain we knew would accompany a fall. Because we were not completely congruent in both our conscious desire to ride a bike and our subconscious desire to remain safe, we had to practice over and over before we reached our conscious goal.
Where does that fear of falling and getting hurt come from? To a certain degree, we are born with it. All of us are born with an innate desire to survive. Our survival is our primary motivation in life. You may have learned about the “fight or flight” mechanism that exists in each of us. This is the mechanism by which we learn how to protect our lives. Whenever our brains receive a danger warning, they respond by flooding our nervous systems with hormones that are meant to give us the power to act in ways that will keep us safe. These hormones actually alter the way that energy flows through our body.
As children, we learned to overcome the flood of hormones that caused us to be fearful when riding our bikes by practicing. Some of us practiced for hours on end; some us extended those practice hours over days, weeks, or months. But we practiced until we no longer felt a fear response whenever we rode our bikes. We practiced until our conscious desire to ride a bike was completely congruent with our subconscious response to bike riding. We practiced until all of our energy was directed towards our goal, rather than being divided between our conscious goal of riding the bike and our subconscious fear of being two-wheeled.
Of course, in the case of learning to ride a bike, the brain’s perception of danger is a healthy, normal response. We would not want children to feel safe doing things that in fact are not safe. We want them to practice until they have developed the coordination to balance, steer, and stop whenever they want to. We only want them to feel safe after they have mastered these skills.
But, as I have explained elsewhere in this book, sometimes we perceive danger in places where there is not, or should not be, any. And we keep the memory of that perceived danger stored in our subconscious minds, where it consumes our energy and influences the actions we take on a daily basis.
If you have worked through one or more of the exercises in Chapter Two of this book, you very likely have identified one or more sub-conscious beliefs that you formed early in life at times you perceived your physical or emotional well-being to be in jeopardy. You may also have identified any number of self-sabotaging behaviors that prevent you from attaining your goals. These beliefs and behaviors should help you to understand your struggle to succeed in your academic pursuits.
Having identified these self-limiting beliefs, your next step toward achieving academic success is to remove any irrational subconscious fears and beliefs in order to bring your subconscious into alignment with your conscious goals. Doing so will allow all of your energy to be directed toward achieving these goals. Of course, at this point you might very well be wondering if ridding your subconscious mind of self-limiting fears and beliefs can be done through practice, just as you practiced when you learned to ride a bike. In other words, you might be wondering if your success in school depends only on your persistence.
My experience suggests that yes, persistence in school can lead to success, but only if you have a high tolerance for the failures that may precede it. But even if your emotional tolerance for academic failure is high, your financial tolerance for ever rising academic costs may not be.
Fortunately, there is another way. Western scientists have identified ways of altering the body’s flow of energy that have been understood in Eastern cultures for years. And they have given their new understanding a name—energy psychology.
The term energy psychology simply refers to the principles and techniques that are used to change the way the body’s energies respond to environmental stimuli. One of those techniques is the Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT.
EFT was developed in the late 1980’s by a man named Gary Craig. Craig, a Stanford-trained engineer, had been working with the psychologist Roger Callahan, who had been investigating ways to apply the principles of acupuncture to psychological issues. Craig discovered that tapping on specific acupuncture points could alleviate the stress and anxiety that was associated with traumatic memories. He developed a protocol for tapping on meridians while focusing on difficult emotions, troubling past experiences, and self-limiting beliefs, and urged people to “try it on everything.”
People listened. In the years following its development, EFT was being used by hundreds of professionals in helping fields who reported to Craig on the successes they were achieving by using EFT with their clients. As a result of their work, the original EFT protocol was refined so that today, most EFT practitioners generally begin with a simple, basic recipe for applying EFT. This basic recipe is presented below.
Since its development, understanding of EFT continues to grow. Recent discoveries in the areas of epigenetics, neuroplasticity and neuro-psychoimmunology, as well as studies that have been conducted on the mechanisms by which acupuncture is effective, have provided a more complete picture of the efficacy of this treatment.
If you are interested in learning more about the history of EFT and the research that supports its use, visit the EFT website at www.eftuniverse.com. This website is an excellent resource for anyone desiring more information about EFT.