By Steve Wells

"Riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or no hard work. You and every other person ought to be interested in knowing how to acquire that state of mind which will attract riches."

- Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

 

EFT can help us to acquire this state of mind, to overcome our own internal barriers to becoming rich and to realize the abundant riches that exist within us and around us. In this post I would like to discuss some of the ways I have learned to apply EFT to overcome emotional barriers to financial success and prosperity. Although I know I am still in third grade in terms of my progress in this area, my mentor Frank Farrelly taught me that those in third grade can help those in the lower grades. So if you feel you are in lower elementary school or even kindergarten in terms of your financial development and success, you will very likely benefit from this post.

The starting point for this work is to identify any negative and blocking beliefs you have about riches and do some tapping on those beliefs. The easiest way to do this is to simply insert the belief statement into the set-up statement and then repeat that belief statement mentally or out loud as you tap on each of the EFT points.

Way back in February 1998 at Gary's Ultimate Therapist workshop, Gary took us through some general tapping on financial blocks. I volunteered one of mine at that time, which was that I felt I would be unspiritual if I were to become rich. Just a few rounds of tapping on that belief in the seminar and a bit of follow up tapping later, and I was able to double my income in the next year. That's how helpful identifying and tapping on a specific blocking belief can be.

Since that time the ongoing work I've done with EFT has enabled me to continue to increase my income every year, to both spendand save, to both save and invest, and more importantly to realize the true riches I am surrounded by every day (such as the love of my family), and the wealth that resides within me. Most importantly, I've come to see my finances in perspective as only a small part of my true wealth.

Along the way, I've realized that the issues I was having with money also reflected how I approached many areas in my life, which was with a sense of scarcity and lack. My feelings of not having enough and not being (good) enough permeated every aspect of my being. Now, a few years and many rounds of tapping down the track, I realize that everything I really need I already have (thanks Roy McDonald).

Here are some of the more important things I've learned about how to apply EFT to resolve financial blocks:

The information on how to become financially rich is freely available in books, seminars, tapes, and people who have been there and done that who will freely share this information (and some who will share it for a fee). The challenge is taking advantage of this information, being able to accept it, assimilate it and act upon it. While your mind/body is full of blocking beliefs around money and financial success it won't matter how much information you cram into it, you won't be able to translate that into action because the emotionally connected blocks will drive it away - or get in the way of your being able to even see how it can manifest in your life.

In my experience, the reason most people don't attract riches is because they have both a positive and a negative associated to the idea of being rich, and/or to the process of becoming rich - and this negative association has a repellant effect which manifests as self-sabotage, procrastination and inertia!

When treating the belief barriers which are behind our lack of progress, it will often be necessary to identify specific events where we learned these beliefs and apply EFT to those memories. When we do so, tapping often allows us to reprocess those memories, allowing us to move beyond the original association and towards more expansive ways of thinking and being. When we release the blocks that are holding us back, energy is freely available, and our progress towards our goals undergoes an incredible acceleration.

In my workshops and in my one-on-one sessions with clients I like to work on several different types of beliefs. Three that are relevant to this discussion are:

 

1. Specific beliefs, in this case beliefs around money and financial success.

2. Identity beliefs, which are your beliefs about yourself, what you are capable of, and what you feel you deserve based on who you think (know) you are.

3. Values beliefs, which are your beliefs about what is most important to have, do, be and experience in life.

To significantly improve your progress in the financial area, I strongly suggest you start by identifying the specific beliefs you currently have about financial success and abundance. The following steps will be useful:

 

• Identify your significant childhood experiences around money and what you learned from them (Many of these now inform your current money beliefs).

• Identify all the things your parents and significant others said about money that affected you, and all the things that you observed them doing (These have also influenced your current beliefs around money)

 

Once you have identified these beliefs and memories, you can go through a two-step process. Firstly, apply EFT to the things you were taught about money by repeating the belief statement or simply remembering what was said/taught as you tap on each of the EFT points. Secondly, go back through the memory of each of the key experiences, and apply EFT to any intense parts of those memories, using the "Run the Movie" or "Tell the story" technique. This very simple but powerfully effective technique is outlined on Gary Craig's website at:http://www.emofree.com/tutorial/tutorltwelve.htm)

 

An example from my own life was the statement "Money doesn't grow on trees" which I recalled being said often by my parents in exasperation when I asked for things. After tapping repeatedly on this statement and the memory of my parents saying it (and in particular the way they often said it!), my beliefs shifted such that I now believe money is freely available to me, that by generating money-making ideas I am willing to act upon I can ultimately have as much money as I want, and Ican also grow as many money trees as I want by planting money that I earn to invest to grow more money.

When I began this work, I noticed that whenever I thought about money I came up with feelings of lack and not having enough. When I looked at where these feelings came from, they were rooted in past experiences of not feeling loved, of not feeling like there was enough of most things, including food, such that I never felt full - and which lead to (among other things) stuffing myself with food whenever it was available, and spending all the money I earned as soon as I earned it. My memories of money were that money was easily spent and there was never enough to go around. One specific memory that came up was of my sister and I having to raid our (almost empty) money boxes so that Mum would have enough money to take us into town on the bus. Tapping on memories such as this and in particular on the feeling of lack which accompanied them has enabled me to now feel (and be) less needy, more satisfied with the life I have and the life I had, less worried about my money and finances, far less anxious generally, and overall much happier being in my own skin.

Once you have identified and treated your own specific beliefs about money and finances, another important type of belief to work on is your identity beliefs. These are your beliefs about yourself which usually begin with "I am..." and "I am not..." Social Psychologist Robert Cialdini says, "The strongest need in the human personality is our need to act consistently with how we define ourselves." This is why your identity beliefs are such an important area to change if you want to effect positive change in your life. You can do a lot of work on your specific beliefs about money but if you believe that you are "undeserving" or "lazy" or "a stupid person" or worse, then you'll continue to unconsciously sabotage any progress you make and continue to feel miserable.

The challenge with our beliefs is that some of them are unconscious and we may ultimately need to work with others to identify and deal with them, however for those identity beliefs that you can identify, simply treat them in the same manner as outlined above for specific beliefs. That is, apply EFT to the identity belief itself (eg "I am stupid"), and to those specific events where you learned this belief, in particular to the emotionally intense parts of the memories which support the belief.

Another big area to work on is your valuesbeliefs. These are your beliefs about importance, and this is one of the key areas I work on in my peak performance workshops, because your values ultimately control your decision making process. A conflict between two values (such as security versus freedom) will leave you constantly pulled this way and that. In my experience, everyone has these internal conflicts. Churchill called it "internal civil war".

In working on my own values issues I uncovered a core belief that I would lose my family if I became successful, and also identified a conflict I had between my wanting to make a difference in the world and wanting to be present for my family. I have previously written about how I applied EFT to these values conflicts and the process I used for resolving seemingly irreconcilable differences such as these - To read about this, please visit part 2 of that article at:http://www.emofree.com/articles/peak-performance-series.htm

After you have done some important work on clearing your blocking beliefs and internal conflicts around abundance and success, your ability to clearly define what you really want, and to manifest what you truly desire will be much stronger. In tandem with the process of clearing your internal blocks and belief barriers, I recommend you use EFT to connect with your goals and manifest success. Before I explain how to go about this however, I want to caution you against a tendency I see for people to "rush to the positive". Beware. Leaving the negative beliefs untreated only means these same negative emotional attachments may rise up to "bite" you at a later time. Make sure you continue to work on applying EFT to these negative beliefs, associations and memories until you can go back to them and they no longer have the same power over you. Typically, as you apply EFT to the negative beliefs, more positive beliefs and feelings arise naturally, without prompting.

It is worth putting in the time for this work - and again you may need to do so with someone else, particularly if your tendency is to avoid doing work which may be painful (Not saying it has to be, just that this is our perception). We have been taught to "look on the bright side" and we want to be as positive as we know we should be... However... I strongly advise against doing such a bypass. At least initially I recommend that you conduct separate sessions of tapping on negative belief blocks and alternate sessions where you tap for positive creation and manifestation.

The process of moving to positive creation is quite simple. Let me illustrate with an example. I recently worked with a business owner who expressed a desire to make $40 million. This goal may seem ridiculously high for some, however there are many business owners who have achieved this goal and many who are well on the way to achieving it. That it can be achieved in the world with the right business plan and application is not in question. Whether this gentleman will be able to achieve that and manifest that sort of value is the only question - In fact the main question for him to answer is "How?" not "whether?"... Not knowing how stops many people but not as many as not knowing whether, believing that they might not be able to do this. This is where I started with this gentleman, having him tap on the belief that he couldn't do this, didn't deserve this, that it would be too hard for him to achieve this, all beliefs that held him back. Once we had created some shifts in these negative beliefs, we moved to the manifestation process.

What I had him do next was to visualize having already achieved the goal and being inside the picture of success experiencing the feelings of having achieved it, and to simply tap on the EFT points while he did so. After doing this for just a little while he was astounded when he suddenly felt a flash of realization that it could actually happen, for a few brief moments he was able to connect with how it would really feel being there and having manifested that. Having felt this success he accessed a great deal of energy and began to get many good ideas on how he could take action to facilitate progress towards his ultimate goal from his current position.

This is a simple process I call connecting with success. In the moment that you connect with the feeling of having already achieved your goal, you realize that success is possible, and in that instant it actually starts to manifest in your life. The more you do this and the more often you do this, the stronger the attractive process becomes. The tapping helps to settle down the barriers and blocks to believing in the positive possibility. And often, just tapping whilst holding the intention in mind is all that is required to get into this state...

As we progress towards the goal - and for many people at the moment of setting a goal - tapping on blocking beliefs will continue to be required. Some people have a huge amount of trouble visualizing success and putting themselves in the picture. The resistance and the objections that arise when we try to do this then become the target for our ongoing EFT work. As we continually tap on and progressively release these attachments, we begin to feel freer to allow our own abundance to manifest in the world. And ultimately, EFT becomes a tool we can use to help us manifest our positive intentions.

Steve Wells