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Hi Everyone,
Sejual Shah and Lynne Shaner have brought EFT successfully into the corporate market and share their experiences in this well written article. They say, "Taking EFT into the corporate environment requires different handling and language skills than one-on-one therapy work. Here Sejual Shah and Lynne Shaner share their experiences in successfully doing this with three multinational companies: Merck & Co, Parker Hannifin and a large law firm headquartered in Washington DC."
Hugs, Gary
By Sejual Shah and Lynne Shaner
Introduction
Taking EFT into the corporate environment requires different handling and language skills than one-on-one therapy work. Here Sejual Shah and Lynne Shaner share their experiences in successfully doing this with three multinational companies: Merck & Co, Parker Hannifin and a large law firm headquartered in Washington DC.
Why Stress Management with EFT?
As layoffs and tension increase in the current economic climate, stress levels for remaining staff are reaching corrosive levels. The results for the business owner and management are a mix of poor performance, low morale, and increasing-costs in terms of health problems. This is not news—we all have personal experience of the cost of stress—how to deal with it effectively is the challenge.
EFT is a healing technology that provides breathtakingly-impressive results before our eyes. This is true in how it works on all the elements of stress that people experience: anxieties, worries, fears, and physical tension melt away when worked on with EFT. With this aim in mind, we’ve succeeded in introducing EFT into the workplace by billing the workshops as Stress Management Training.
We studied our clients’ websites and prepared ourselves to understand the live concerns in their business so we could speak with awareness of the pressures they’re experiencing right now. In times of economic difficulty, each business will have different pressures put on them. Speaking to them about their current concerns in the context of stress management helped us to build the working relationship. In the business world it is culturally permissible to deal with stress, rather than it being seen as a sign of weakness, partly as it helps improve performance-efficiencies and profits.
Secondly, we speak of delivering “peak performance” techniques. This again carries the promise of the possibility of increased profits and fits with business motives. High achievers are constantly wanting to “up their game.” We’ve avoided presenting ourselves as a therapist to the wounded—this would make them run away from EFT as they cannot be seen as weak in public. In the privacy and natural safety of one to one sessions we’ve found the same people have come to us with their personal concerns.
We’ve held introductory workshops for groups up to twenty; any more than this can be difficult to deliver meaningful results to. We’ve been paid for these workshops as they are valuable.
Building Bridges
When introducing EFT to this audience we have been deliberate to provide a handle that the business market finds relevant. Most people in these roles work in an environment that is mentally and emotionally heavily pressurized. Even if they have yet to accept the effect of their emotional wellbeing on their physical health, by billing our workshops as Stress Management with EFT we immediately “speak to their pain.”
The use of Stress Management as a label puts the emphasis less on our employing a “weird technique” and more on adding a new tool to their coping strategy. However, as seasoned users of EFT know, we so quickly can achieve lasting relief that management becomes a thing of the past. We deliberately use the term management rather than relief as people come to our corporate workshops not expecting to do away permanently with the root causes of their stress. So we start our presentation with language and concepts that are available and familiar to them. By meeting our audience from where they start we establish ready rapport and can progress to what can be compellingly possible with EFT.
A typical workshop will last between one and two hours. We use an introduction to EFT format, to start gaining acceptance and to build trust. We briefly introduce ourselves as “one of them.” Both Lynne and Sejual have had careers in the corporate world. Lynne was publishing director at two of the Smithsonian’s museums and other large academic institutions for fifteen years in Washington, D.C. and Sejual was an antitrust law barrister for five years in London and Brussels. We explain how we came to EFT to help cope with our high levels of stress in our former careers and found it a compelling enough technique to change careers to work full time with it and bring it into other corporate environments.
We explain that EFT has a strong track record of helping with physical pain, emotional upsets, and enhancing mindset and performance. Using language that notes the effect of the mind/body interaction we introduce the idea that we’re working with the body’s meridian system and stimulating it like an acupuncturist would do. However, from experience we know that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of invisible paths of energy flow, and so another approach we’ve devised is to talk about working with the body’s nervous system. We understand that each of the EFT points is centered on an accumulation of nerve endings more dense than at many other parts of the body. We explain this and note that by tapping on these points we’re stimulating the body’s central nervous system, and so are introducing beneficial electrical change whilst using the mind’s ability to focus.
We note some of the health/mindset issues we’ve had success with in client work and personally. However, given the critical-thinking nature of this audience we find it more helpful to emphasize that we wish them to gather their own personal evidence of EFT at work, as that will be more meaningful to them.
The First Workshop
During the first workshop we have found that two exercises and one “instant” EFT suggestion provide plenty of content. We first get them to write down their intensity around a stressful event that happened in the office a while back using the 0-10 intensity scale. It is helpful to suggest examples, which might include a computer crash, loss of a document, or the internal server’s going down at a critical time. Most have experienced such a problem, and they will be able to experience the effectiveness of EFT without having to go into anything personal, which is too intrusive in a work environment. They then put this to one side to come back to.
Second, we take them through the constricted breathing exercise. This illustrates EFT’s efficacy with nearly everyone. As it’s not at all personal people immediately start to relax. As this is the first time the group is tapping together, we leaven our language with humor. They usually feel silly and awkward tapping on themselves, and so we make a little joke of it. During the very first setup we use for the constricted breathing we include a script like:
Even though I can’t believe I’m in the conference room, tapping on my hand and body, I’m OK with this for now.
Even though I’m doing this silly tapping thing in front of my colleagues, I’m not sure it’s going to work, but maybe I can give it a go.
Even though this seems really out there, and I’m a practical person, I’m OK with giving it a shot right now.
We use reminder phrases like “this looks so odd,” “hope the cameras aren’t rolling,” ”I can’t believe I’m doing this”. It is always worth using transitional phrases like “I’m OK with this now,” or “I’m ready to give it a go,” instead of “I love and accept myself” as is traditionally taught in EFT. It is important to steer clear of language that feels out of place or too personal in the office. And we find when we bring humor into the equation, everyone laughs as we voice what is going through their minds. Laughter has the great benefit of easing their worries and releasing things quickly for them.
In the second exercise, we have them come back to the incident they had picked at the beginning. We ask them to check their intensity scale, and allow them to switch to another incident if they prefer. By reassuring them that they will not need to voice their issue we provide more comfort. We choose a reminder phrase that will act as the vehicle, or umbrella term, for everyone, like “this stress event” or “that time,” and stress the clear benefit of being able to maintain privacy even though we are in a group setting. Sometimes we’ll use a rambling style that’s broadly about feeling tense about the unknown issue, picking up on the general ways of feeling anxious that come up for all of us (e.g. using visual, kinesthetic, and auditory cues). We facilitate the rounds of tapping to make sure everybody achieves some form of relief with tapping so as to buy in to the possibility that there’s more to it than they might have thought.
There are normally a lot of questions once people start getting changes, so we allow time for discussion. We provide them with a tapping chart handout, a generic script on “this stress,” and give them an ultra shortcut. We show them how to tap and breathe on their favorite spot, or gently tap on the hand points with hands in their lap so that no one can see what they’re doing. We call this “stealth tapping,” and everyone always wants to know about it.
Answering Questions about EFT
Once we have our audience’s awareness of change, the questions often start coming in about how EFT works. This is a highly logical audience and we’ve found in order to maintain rapport we find it best to be honest and say that science is still trying to conclusively understand how exactly EFT delivers results. However, we’ve found it helpful to draw on the work of Bruce Lipton, Candace Pert, and Dawson Church in referring to possible explanations. We’re also grateful to Carol Look for having brought the work of neurologist Dr Robert Scaer to the EFT community as the surge of adrenaline in “flight or fight” situations is a handle that most can accept with regards to the origins of high stress levels.
Having copies of these authors’ books with us allows members of the audience to flick through them afterward if they are interested enough—they also demonstrate our commitment as a practitioner of this stress management tool to finding out further answers.
Turning the question of how EFT works back on them can also be revealing; it allows them to offer suggestions about what’s happening based on their outlook. When presenting a Stress Management with EFT workshop at Merck Pharmaceuticals, Sejual found that staff decided it was a method for calming the body’s stress response which then helped them think more clearly and so logically. As a result her audience were more able to accept EFT as a tool they would like to explore further. This ongoing interest is important to helping them continue to grow in their EFT knowledge.
Public Stress/Private Concerns
In a work environment, it’s not possible to cover private issues as individuals are understandably loathe to admit to any of their weaknesses in front of colleagues. In normal EFT group shares within our private practices we’re not so restrained, as people come from unrelated backgrounds and so feel comfortable sharing more intimate details of their lives. In an office environment we showcase EFT in relation to the group’s shared stresses. This helps indicate how EFT can be used to improve team performance leading onto peak performance.
Peak Performance
In our workshops the introduction of peak performance as a subject is when we are able to have a lot of fun, inject humor again, and increase interest and desire for more change. We do this by talking about how EFT accelerates sports performance—we’ve referred to golf handicaps, tennis serves, weight workouts, stamina in running, and flexibility in yoga, so that we’re touching a broad range of interests. The group sees a “fun” benefit to the workshop, and that it’s not just about zapping stress so that they can be better office folks. These associations are positive and upbeat and we tie in sports language with performance at work language. By working on an area that’s personal but accessible in a work environment we are still able to clear limiting beliefs, or old worries. This information can be introduced in a couple of places—during the question-and-answer segment, as people often ask about what else EFT can help with, or during the closing comments, as we open up even further possibilities with the people in the workshop.
Bringing in the performance improvement element makes it permissible for staff to be seen talking with us, going to our workshops and talks, as they are demonstrating their desire to do something concrete that will increase their abilities. By doing this we keep EFT in a positive, “cool” space that encourages participation, ongoing interest, and pass-along value. This has even led to private visits to us for one-to-one work.
EFT has the potential to significantly reduce stress, increase effectiveness, improve morale, and reduce health care costs, as employees at all levels begin to use EFT routinely. Given the extraordinary stress levels people are under in the current economic climate, now is the best time for corporations to integrate EFT into their approach for success and wellness. Workshops are the simplest way for corporations to begin exploring the rewards of EFT because employees can personally experience the benefits on the spot. Lynne and Sejual offer workshops individually and are also starting to team up to offer workshops internationally. Companies find that by bringing in EFT, they gain a real competitive edge. EFT is also sweeping the social media world, particularly on Facebook and Twitter where business presence is growing, so it is simply a matter of time before EFT will be routinely used in the workplace. Until then, however, forward-thinking firms that adopt EFT will reap the significant advantage of being early adopters of a profoundly effective technology that their competition may not yet have. And that could make all the difference to their success and leadership within their fields in a still-challenging global business environment.
Sejual Shah and Lynne Shaner
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