Archive for the ‘EFT for Teachers’ Category

Many teachers are excited at the thought of teaching EFT to their students but are hesitant to try for a variety of reasons.  Some worry about objections from parents or administrators, while others are unsure of how to begin.  Here are some simple and practical ideas which I hope will encourage you to try tapping with your students.

When you introduce EFT to your class, make it useful, relevant and fun.  Try to hook as many of your students as possible. Most importantly, ensure that you have developed a strong rapport of trust and caring with your children before you begin.

I find that the best way to teach EFT is through test anxiety.  My students receive a weekly speed test in which they are expected to complete up to 100 basic math facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication or division in less than ten minutes.  After taking these tests for several weeks, we discuss how everyone feels about them. It is always surprising to me how much anxiety these tests create, even in a safe, nurturing environment, where students know that it is absolutely okay to make mistakes.

When asked to show their level of stress with regard to these speed tests, many children hold up ten fingers to signify that their anxiety is extremely high.  This discussion paves the way perfectly for introducing tapping.  I confide to my class that I have recently learned of a wonderful way to deal with my own worries and stresses.

Rapport is critical at this point.  As long as your children trust and respect you they will happily accept the idea of tapping and be willing to give it a try.

I introduce a large picture of a stream amidst a forest, surrounded by wildlife and trees. The stream is a metaphor for our minds.  When we are feeling peaceful and relaxed everything flows smoothly, just as the stream does.  Stress is represented by a detachable tree.  What happens to the stream when the tree falls across it?  The water stops flowing properly, debris builds up around the tree, back eddies form and the bank starts to erode. In other words, the stream no longer flows as it should.  This is exactly what happens in our minds (and bodies) once stress enters our system.

I suggest to my students that if they tap on specific pressure points, which are connected to emotions in our bodies, at the same time as they tune into their feelings, they may be able to relieve some of their anxiety.  In other words, they may be able to remove that “tree” which has entered their mind and is holding them back from achieving their best.

We place stickers on a student’s self portrait to demonstrate specific points to tap on, and then we practice tapping on those points without using any words at all.  Next I ask them to think about that math test once more.

It is important to personalize the tapping and incorporate their own words while you tap, so before you get started, inquire once more about how they are feeling.  Ask them where they are feeling those feelings in their bodies (stomach, throat, heart, etc).

After that, you are ready to begin with a set-up statement.  Add some humour to make it fun and use as many of the children’s words as you can:

Karate Chop: Even though I have to write this speed test and it’s the last thing I want to do…and  I feel stressed and anxious… and my legs are shaking and I feel like I’m going to be sick to my stomach….. I am still an awesome kid!

Continue by tapping on the following points, acknowledging their own thoughts and feelings:

Top of head:  I am SO stressed! I have to write this speed test!

Eyebrow: My legs feel shaky.

Side of Eye: My stomach feels SICK!

Under Eye: My heart is pounding!

Under Nose: My throat feels dry!

Under Lip: What if I fail?

Collar Bone: What if do worse than last week?

Under Arm: What if I don’t get 100%?

Top of Head: I know I am smart.

Eyebrow: But it’s hard to be fast!

Side of Eye: It’s hard to do your best when you’re stressed.

Under Eye: I wish I could let go of this stress.

Under Nose: Let go of this stress…

Under Lip: It feels good to relax…

Collar Bone: Relax…

Under Arm:  I’m just going to give it my best… That’s all I can do….try my best.

Karate Chop: And even if I am not perfect, even if I do make mistakes, I am STILL an awesome kid!

After completing and marking their tests, have your students compare the results with those from the previous week.  Ask them what they notice about the results of both tests.  Hopefully this lesson will allow your students to perceive that tapping can be a very effective tool for helping to relieve anxiety as well as improve test scores.

We tap every week before speed tests, and the results continue to impress us. Two weeks ago, one boy volunteered to tap in front of our class because he had been hampered by worries during his previous test and as a result, had only achieved 63%. His stress level, he stated, was “more than ten”. He informed us that stress made him feel wiggly and squirmy. I added that I had noticed his legs moving a lot during last week’s test. So we tapped on those squirmy legs.  Eventually, after tapping for a round or two, we reframed with, “What if I could transform all of that squirmy leg energy into my pencil….?”

Not only were his legs completely still while writing that test, but to his complete delight, he achieved 97%!

This week he was worried again but for a different reason. So we tapped on “Even though I did so well last week it will be almost impossible for me to get any better…I’ll probably just get worse….”

He was very proud to achieve his first 100% ever!

Before you know it you could be trying EFT on everything in your classroom, from math tests to bullying, to lice ( yes, we have even used EFT for lice.)

And if you feel hesitant or doubtful about whether tapping will be accepted by others in your workplace, listen to your heart and just try it. After all, as teachers, our intention is to give children all the tools and skills and encouragement that we possibly can to allow them to achieve their very best, unencumbered by worries, anxieties and fears. With EFT we not only allow our children to acknowledge, express, accept and release their negative feelings, we teach them to affirm that whatever they are feeling, whatever problems they are experiencing, they are still without a doubt, awesome kids.

Perhaps there is more value in teaching our students how to tap than there is in teaching them to answer 100 math questions in less than ten minutes…

Teaching Kids to Tap
by Ann Adams

Gary Craig’s Introduction:

Ann Adams was the Campus Director at a residential care facility for Severely Emotionally Disturbed children and, as such, has a challenging audience within which to deliver EFT. We can all learn from the story she provides below–even if we are applying EFT to adults. There are many lessons in both rapport and the “art of delivery” in this message. Please study it carefully.

About 4 o’clock, I walked onto the admissions unit. The kids were lining up to go swimming. The newest child, “Kinney,” asked who I was. Then, “What does she do?” [The new kids always want to learn the role of each staff member. They quickly learn and understand the chain of command.] I told him that one of the things I did was to teach kids how they can calm down quickly when they don’t want to be upset.

Kinney is tall for 13. He has light brown hair and a pair of sad eyes that competed for the saddest I’ve ever seen. He expressed immediate interest: “Can you teach me?”

“Sure.”

“Harvey,” a slender, African American nine year old in perpetual motion, was in line behind him: I want to know too.

“OK.”

“Ryan,” 11, one of those absolutely adorable blond headed, blue-eyed children with impeccable manners – very RARE for our agency – spoke next. “Ma’m, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to learn about that too.” “No problem,” I said, “I’ll teach all three of you after supper.”

When I returned to the unit the three boys immediately came up to me. “Teach me now,” said Ryan. We sat down on the couches and I told them that what we were going to learn was something that calmed people down very quickly most of the time–that it sometimes worked better when you worked with someone else but that it was something they could use for themselves, by themselves.

I said this really makes use of things we already do to make ourselves feel better but using this process we can focus what we do and make it work much better. Showing them as I went, I then asked if they had done any of the following: Palm to head, hand to chest, head in hands, rubbing under eye and under nose, wringing hands, chewing on fingers, rubbing back of hand. They all nodded. Harvey, Mr. Perpetual Motion, started showing everyone how he bites his nails!

GC COMMENT: This is a superb verbal bridge to help these kids make sense of these procedures.

ANN CONTINUES: I told them this is a way to use all those motions together while thinking about what they were upset about. And that most of the time it made the upset feelings better and lots of times the bad feelings were just gone. I had their attention – well, except Harvey – who had changed seats already five times. I decided to try the Cook’s Hook Up exercise to see if it would quiet him. He could not even hold his hands together long enough to follow the instructions. He wandered off – ah well, another day.

I asked Ryan and Kinney if anything had happened to upset them today. Neither could think of anything. This is often the case when I teach it to kids ‘cold’. My primary goal is to familiarize them with the process. Many times, the next interaction I have with them is: “Hey Miss Ann, will you do the tapping stuff with me. I’m mad/upset/sad.”

Harvey then wanders back and grabs at Ryan’s arm. Ryan shoves him away angrily saying to me: “Yeah, I got a problem; peers that provoke me. I get frustrated.” [We teach a whole new lexicon to young children: peers provoke, boundaries, negativity, levels, color drops, etc.]

Kinney also says he has a problem. “You don’t have to tell me, but do you want to share it?” I said. Kinney then tells me a very sad story of a mom in jail for drugs and how worried he is about her and that she also has ulcer problems and that he misses her. [There are many, many such sad stories in our residential facility. Wish I could teach all the moms and dads how to tap!]

I explained how problems were like puzzles and that puzzles have a lot of pieces. That the first step was to think about your problem and then pick what piece of it you want to work on. Then, when that piece of the problem was fixed you would pick another piece until all the bad feelings were gone.

GC COMMENT: An excellent metaphor!! Creative approaches like this often spell the difference between cooperative and uncooperative children/clientsANN CONTINUES: I told Kinney that his problem had a lot of pieces. He would need to tap for a lot of pieces of this problem. We talked about what his pieces might be. I said we also feel our problems physically in our body and when we were thinking about what piece of the puzzle we wanted to work on it helped to check out where we feel that feeling in our body. His hand went straight to his heart.

We talked about how to figure out how much the problem bothers them. I showed them the arms outstretched method, counting from 10 to 0 as I moved my arms in to the prayer position.

Harvey wanders back into the group and sits. Lisa, an old hand at tapping comes to watch and adds her two cents: “I’ve done this, too.”

“Hi, Lisa, yes you have. Does it work?” “Yeah,” says Lisa. “I like it.”

“Well, you pick a problem you want to work on with us.”

“Let’s do it,” I said to the group. We tapped the side of the hand with simple set ups: “Even though I am sad about my mom/angry about my peer provoking me, I am a good kid.” I modeled each point. We used the finger points, too. I skipped the nine gamuts. We repeated the steps.

Harvey tries to tap but gets bored and leaves again. [It takes several times to get a child like Harvey through the entire process.] Lisa says: “You didn’t tap the gamut spot.” She tells Kinney; “That’s a good point for depression.” [As a child learns more about the process one of the things I do is to label each point with a feeling. [Dr. John Diamond's thing. Who knows if that is accurate but the kids like it!]

Melanie comes to join us. “You are doing that tapping stuff!”

“Yeah. You used it lately?” “No,” Melanie says, “I forgot.”

I smiled at her and said “It’s great stuff; we’ll go over it again.” Kris comes up and sits down. I smiled at him as he started tapping the side of his hand – “See,” he said.

I asked Ryan if the tapping fixed his being “frustrated at being provoked by my peer.” He nods and smiles: “Harvey’s just being stupid.”

I looked at Kinney: “Did it help any?” “Well,” he said, “I am not upset about it right now.”

“Tell me again which spot is for depression?” He looked into my eyes with such sadness mixed with hope that I wished I had been able to work with him individually longer.

One of the downsides of being the campus director is that I actually have little time with any one child. I work with a child in need and teach as many as I can. I have classes with the staff once a quarter and work with them to reinforce the children using the process. I teach the children EFT in groups not only because of my time constraints but also because it normalizes the process for the children to see other children tapping.

Ryan asks if I can write the steps down for him. Usually I have to suggest that! Since each child has a journal, I sent them to get their journal from their room. They did. In the six small journals of the six small children we wrote:

1. Think about your problem.

2. Pick one piece you want to work on.

3. Tap the side of your hand. Etc.

I usually end the finger points with tapping the side of the hand again and then the gamut spot. Why? No scientific reason, not even a good clinical reason.

Surprisingly, even Harvey brought his journal and actually sat there as I helped him write the steps. Each child either wrote the steps or asked me to. Ryan said: “What should I call it?”

“What would you like to call it?”

“I’ll call it Ryan’s Thinking Process,” he said.

Update: I saw Kinney at lunch the next day. He told me he had started getting depressed last night so he tried the tapping. “It really works!” He told me with surprise in his voice.

Ann Adams

Exam Stress
by Mel Trudgett

‘A’ is an 11 year old girl in Dorset that is regularly achieving a grade 5, which is above average, in both Maths & English. She is in the top few % of her year 6 class for her coursework in both subjects and is generally very happy and settled at school. However, during year 6 leading up to the SATs, her teachers became very concerned that she was seriously under achieving in ALL of her tests in these subjects – she was struggling to even get a grade 4 which is below average. They believed it was just a problem with nerves, but had tried talking to her about this and it had made no difference.

During tests she would panic, spend a long time answering a question that would give just one mark and then run out of time when it came to the 3 or 5 mark questions which made her panic even more. She also felt like she ‘didn’t know the answers’ which she clearly did because her coursework throughout the year was way above average.

After a simple 10 minute chat with ‘A’ about how she felt about her tests, I was able to put together a basic EFT script based around her feelings. We tapped a few rounds on her nerves, but also on her fear of failure, of hating getting low results which meant she comes last, of worrying that she might not know the answers in the test (she did!) and generally worrying that her teachers/parents/friends wouldn’t like her as much if she did badly. After each round of tapping we talked again about the emotions she was feeling and her insecurities about tests and then tapped down the intensity on each emotion that came up. All of the intensity had gone by the end of the short session. She said she felt a definite release of the worry that had been bothering her.

However, I wanted to be sure that she had a tool to use if any of these feelings came back so I advised her on a secret tapping process* that she could use during a test if the feelings of stress came back. It could be used to calm her worries and also to give herself some positive affirmations.

‘The tapping worked!’

The first day that she had a test after the tapping, she simply said that ‘the tapping worked – I was fine’. She used the discreet tapping process during the test, not to take away her stress because she didn’t have any – she said she wanted to use the tapping to improve her score!

She answered every question on the test which is something that she hasn’t managed to do for over a year and she no longer has any worries about taking the tests, including her SATs, in the future.

Mel Trudgett
EFT & Reiki Practioner, Dorset UK
www.eftforme.com

One teacher called him “My young Einstein”

By Brent Thomson, PhD

I recently worked with the entire Red Wing High School Girls Basketball team (in Minnesota), using EFT to improve team performance. I met with the team for a two-hour session. At that time their record was 5 games below the 500 mark.

Historically, the girls team has struggled, usually winning anywhere from 3 to 5 games in a year. We talked about the major problems with the team members and the coaching staff, and came up with the following hit list that needed to be chopped down:

Poor free throw shooting;
poor jump shooting;
poor use of the clock;
losing focus and concentration;
poor passing;
fear of making mistakes;
consistently playing below ability level;
easily intimidated by the other team; and
easily affected by crowd noise.

We put each of these in the familiar Even though format and proceeded to tap on each one. We did three or four rounds on each issue and then talked about other issues that surfaced. What I found by doing this is that individual issues started to surface for each of the players and we were then able to isolate those and tap them down on an individual basis.

GC COMMENT:  Getting to individual issues like this often spells the difference between good results and spectacular results.  All athletes have their individualized beliefs, idiosyncracies and other barriers to achieving their full potential.

BRENT CONTINUES:  I also found that the team really enjoyed doing the tapping as a team. A number of the players and the coaches noted a general sense of purpose, and a positive sense of team unity was a side effect of the group tapping.

Again, we kept track of the statistics as a team in terms of free throw percentage as a team before tapping, and again after tapping. Also, we kept records in terms of shooting percentages, both before tapping and after tapping.

Overall, the team has improved 87% in free throw shooting percentage since tapping. Before tapping, they were making a dismal 40 out of 100 as a team. Since applying EFT the team has played 8 games and in that 8 games they skyrocketed to a team average of 75 out of 100.

Overall shooting averages for the 8 games previous to tapping was 37 out of 100. Shooting percentage in the last 8 games since the EFT session is now 54 out of 100. Thats a 46% improvement.

Most telling, their record in the last 8 games is 6 wins with only 2 losses. One of the losses was by 3 points to a team ranked in the top five in the State of Minnesota. Earlier in the year, they were blown out by over 30 points.

Both the coaching staff and the players attribute the improvement in their performance to the addition of EFT into their training procedures. I am convinced that EFT has a significant place in training individual athletes and teams so that they can maximize their physical abilities and play with greater stamina, speed, strength, and co-ordination.

____________________

I also had the opportunity to work with, Katie Auge, the captain of her High School Gymnastic’s team in Red Wing, Minnesota (where I live).   She has been struggling this year with a nagging ankle injury and has been receiving physical therapy on an ongoing basis. This has significantly affected her scoring all year as well as her overall confidence throughout the year.

Katie is a senior and her wish is to make the state gymnastics meet in the All Around Competition. Her dad called me to ask if I would work with her. I had previously worked with her last year (Junior year) on three occasions, and she really enjoyed EFT. She had never made the state tournament previously.

I met her for one session the day of the regional meet that was to decide whether or not she would go on to the State Competition. We tapped on the following:

Even though Im afraid of falling and hurting myself on the vault;

Even though Im worried about my ankle holding up in the competition today;

Even though I have all this anxiety about performing well in front of friends and family (the meet was held at her High School in Red Wing);

Even though I have this fear of failure; and

Even though I have fears about sticking the landing on the vault.

The session was 90 minutes long. We were able to get all the aforementioned targets down to 0 (on a 0-10 intensity scale). In addition, we worked on planting an effective choice statement that would empower Katie to do her best. We decided on the following:

I choose to see myself performing in a graceful, relaxed, confident, and powerful manner in all my events today.

Katie was able to visualize this belief at a 9 level after tapping on this over a period of four rounds.

Well, Gary is always looking for statistics to indicate proof that EFT works, and I have some. I received a call on Saturday morning from a very excited Katie and her father saying she nailed the vault, and qualified for her first state competition in the All Around Competition category.

Katie says that there is no doubt that the EFT was the strategy that put her over the top. In addition, she said that her ankle did not bother her at all during the meet, and that her confidence was consistently high. She attributes this to the EFT work we did on the day of the regional meet. Think what we could have accomplished if we could have had a little more training time?

Sincerely,

Brent Thomson, Ph.D., L.P. drrelaxation@hotmail.com
Clinic Director Lifestyle Health Services
Bloomington, MN

from www.emofree.com