Do you get to the end of your day and wonder where it went? You're doing #allthethings, yet you don't even remember what you did because the stress is constant. How to keep your nervous system resilient using EFT tapping so you can have satisfyingly productive days.
In This Episode You'll Learn
- How to use EFT tapping in the moment so you don't lose your shit.
- Using EFT for procrasti-habits.
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Transcript
Meg Brunson
Hey. Hey. FamilyPreneurs, thank you for joining us again for another episode of FamilyPreneur. Today we are with Sara Whiteside. We are talking about going from a procrasta-Princess to an action Queen. So Sara is a certified EFT practitioner and an intuitive business coach who specializes in working with online entrepreneurs who are stuck in a loop of personal development, Imposter syndrome, and perfectionism. Sarah's ARISE coaching framework and EFT skill set help you eliminate procrastination and step into confident action in your business. She helps to identify procrasta-habits, repeating life patterns and limiting beliefs, and works to rewire these systems with EFT tapping so that you can make maximum impact with your business. Sara lives in Virginia with her chef's husband and two sons and spends her free time reading, working out and taking tap dance classes. Sounds so fun. Sara, thank you for being with us today.
Sara Whiteside
Thank you for having me. Meg. It's such a pleasure to chat with you today.
Meg Brunson
Oh, well, we connected before and I got to experience a little mini EFT session with you. For those of us who are listening, who may not be completely familiar with tapping, or maybe they have seen it before, but you know how people don't normally get it the first time. Can you kind of break down for us what EFT tapping is and how it can be used to help us?
Sara Whiteside
Sure. I will try to keep this brief, but there can be a lot to explain. And so if people don't understand it completely, I would love for them to message me anywhere they can find me. And on Instagram is my favorite place to be @SaraWhiteside19, so you can catch me there on Instagram to ask me follow up questions if I don't explain this well enough. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. So it's a collection of techniques where we use the Meridian endpoints, this energetic system in the body, the system that is utilized by acupuncture and Eastern medicine for thousands of years. And so we are now tapping into that system with our fingertips and tapping on points on the head, the face and the upper part of the body to help send the calming signals to the amygdala and the brain stem to calm down that fight or flight response. And that allows us to actually access some more creative and critical thinking frontal cortex part of the brain. So when we are in fight or flight, all common sense tends to go out the window. And so if we can use this technique not just in times of high stress, but in our regular daily lives to help to ground ourselves, to calm down that fight or flight response, we are going to be more adept and more ready to handle the stresses that are coming our way on a daily basis.
Sara Whiteside
And sometimes it's not even daily. Sometimes it's literally as a mom, minute by minute or hour by hour.
Meg Brunson
I love that you led with the science. I feel like when we dive deep into science for somebody who's not really scientific, it can feel overwhelming. But at the same time, even the little bits and pieces where I kind of get lost talking about cortexes and things, it's nice knowing that this isn't just some woo thing that people do, that it's actually tied to science, even if you may not understand it right now that there are scientific reasons that these things work. So I appreciate you bringing the scientific talk to us today.
Sara Whiteside
Absolutely. And that is one of the things that drew me into becoming a certified EFT practitioner is that there was a research base to it. I am a certified athletic trainer by College profession. And so being an allied health profession, I've been taught to make sure there's research there to prove what we're doing, that we're not just like throwing spaghetti at the wall. And so coming into EFT, which did feel very woo to me when I was first exposed to it, hearing that there was a book called The Science of Tapping by Peta Stapleton, a doctor who a PhD doctor who is a researcher in Australia and other areas where there's so much research that is starting to come together to support using EFT in so many different areas. And it has been approved by the VA, the Veterans Administration, as a modality for mental health care practitioners to use for PTSD in veterans because it's been proven so effective. So that's great. That doesn't happen to be the type of people that I work with. I work with busy moms who tend to have both a job and a business and a family of whatever shape or form it's taking at the time.
Sara Whiteside
But they are very busy, and they need something to ground themselves to be able to make those clear decisions that make the most sense for them at the time, even if that decision is one that feels contradictory to what they've learned growing up or what everybody else is telling them that they should do.
Meg Brunson
I always have identified as a procrastinator, always. And I feel like in one weird way, I just work better under pressure. And so if that pressure is the time that something is due, I seem to work better that way. But then as I became a mom and my family grew and my responsibilities grow, sometimes I don't know if it's like procrastination or just overwhelm. Right. That causes some of my issues or my failure to act. So let's talk a little bit about procrastination and how that shows up and how EFT can actually help with that specific issue.
Sara Whiteside
Absolutely. I also identified as a professional procrastinator, and there are times when procrastination serves us well. There are some personality types, or however you look at it, human design types that they do well with that time pressure. And I am also one of those people like, give me a deadline and I will meet it. But when I left my full time job and then it was my responsibility to set my own deadlines, it was like I didn't have the capacity to even know how to do that for myself. Having that external pressure always motivated me to get things done. So procrastination tends to actually be a fight or flight response for many of us. We feel this kind of unsafe feeling in doing a new thing in our business or having to have a new experience as a mom. And our brain is designed still to keep us safe, conserve calories, and reproduce. That is what the brain stem does, and it will do everything in its possibility to keep us safe in quotes here. And we just don't live in that world where most of us are not in the physical sense of danger the majority of the time.
Sara Whiteside
So we have to now rely on these other techniques to help signal to our brains that are kind of overreacting to all the stresses. And the stresses can even be text messages coming through on your phone or the phone is ringing off the hook because the bills are due or the messages are coming in from your mom or dad and you're like, oh, my God, what are they going to say now? Those stresses are coming from so many different directions, and we are just bombarded with constant, huge amounts of information and decisions to make that we didn't used to have to make 100 years ago. So, when we use something like EFT tapping to help regulate that fight or flight response, not only are you reducing your stress, reducing anxiety, you put yourself in a place where you are able to then take action and get the thing done that you have been procrastinating around. And I love in my quiz that will give people the link to talk about different types of procrastination styles. And I've associated them with some of the Disney princesses, which was just so fun, it just kind of fell into place.
Sara Whiteside
But they're different procrastination styles. Like, I would find myself scrubbing the kitchen floor when I needed to be trying to figure out how to write website copy or I dove into so much of the learning, and part of that was the conditioned response going to school for so many years and I have my master's degree, so six additional years on top of normal school. And so we're conditioned to keep learning. But the learning doesn't always mean that we're putting things into action because taking the action of what we're learning is really new and can feel really scary to us. And so there's procrastina-cleaning, procrastina-learning, procrastina-self care, even where there are so many different options these days. You can go to the spa and you can go to the gym and you can spend an hour in meditation and you can do your reading. And by the time you've done all of that, it's past noon. And you're like, well, now the kids are coming home from school, so there was no time to get anything done in the business. And then the last one, let's see, learning, cleaning, reading, and what's the last one?
Sara Whiteside
Can you believe? So much stress. I've forgotten the last one. See, the frontal cortex of my brain is not working completely correctly. So maybe we should do some tapping together.
Meg Brunson
So that brings me into, actually, another question I was just going to ask. How do you know when it's time to do some tapping? That's got to be a skill in itself.
Sara Whiteside
Oh, yes. And that is probably one of those questions that I do get asked the most is I don't know when to tap. And really, my answer for that can be anytime that you're feeling unsettled, when the anxiety is rising, when you're feeling overwhelmed or over stressed. I do a lot of tapping in the car because I'm stationary. I can have one hand on the wheel, and I can use my other hand to do my tapping, on my points. When the kids are driving you crazy and you lock yourself in the bathroom instead of bringing the cookies with you, just start tapping. When- you could use it as you're going to bed, especially if you have a hard time falling asleep. Tapping on the points can be a great way to help settle that brain from spinning by stimulating those Meridian endpoints and calming down that fight or flight response that's happening just as your brain is spinning. So really, anytime, any place. And it doesn't have to be for a certain amount of time. There are certain points that we hit on the body that we can talk about. And you would at least want to give yourself a minute to go through those points one time.
Sara Whiteside
You can tap up to ten or 15 minutes on your own. And then when I do sessions one on one with people, we tend to tap together for an hour because I would be here to guide that person and kind of ask them more probing questions as a chance to really go into some deeper work than the work that you would do on your own. Just tapping on your own at home.
Meg Brunson
Do you recite, like, do you say things out loud or in your mind recite things as you're doing the tabbing?
Sara Whiteside
So there are different techniques to use. And so certain techniques have different verbal cues that you use. And the verbal part of EFT tapping was one of the things that really made it feel like a very holistic modality for me, where meditation, I felt like I was so much in my head and trying to detach from my body kind of thing. And I love movement practices. I'm a dancer. I love to work out. So getting into my body was not a problem but kind of like connecting those two. There felt like a big disconnect there for a long time. And so when you utilize the vocal part of EFT tapping, it's a beautiful way to bring your body and your mind together. And that's why it really works is that we have these fears and these experiences that we have stored in our bodies. When you walk into a dark room and have that, like, frightened response, not necessarily because of something that you think of initially, it's kind of this bodily response that happens first, and you're like, oh, I'm scared that something might happen. There are so many stories I can tell. I'm trying to really stay on point so we don't get too far off track.
Sara Whiteside
But some of the verbal things, like what you really want to focus on with your verbalizations for tapping is the emotion that you're feeling. The other thing that you can also focus on is where you might be feeling it in your body. So if I feel anxiety as tightness in my chest, I would tap through those points and say: this anxiety in my chest and then to the top of the eye, this anxiety in my chest, the side of the eye, this anxiety in my chest. And it feels very initially, it feels very repetitive. But then there's this calming sensation that comes with it. And the calming sensation is really from stimulating those Meridian points, the calming of the brain stem and also kind of this you're becoming more aware of the emotion that you're feeling and having this acceptance of this is the emotion that I'm feeling right now. And it's okay to feel this because I'm a human being. I can be happy or I can be sad, I can be happy or I can be angry. And it is that broad variety of emotions that we experience that make us human beings.
Sara Whiteside
And there's been so much rhetoric of be happy, choose happy, do happy. Like, all the happy all the time. We choose joy. Well, like, you know what? Sometimes I'm going to choose sad, because if something in the world is happening that is really tragic, I want to maintain my humanity and choose to be sad for a few moments.
Meg Brunson
Does it make sense to go through, like, a full tapping practice, or can you introduce us? I know some people are going to be listening. Some people are going to be watching. So it might be easier for those watching, but if we can kind of explain what we're doing too so that people who are listening maybe can understand what that tapping process looks like, that would be great.
Sara Whiteside
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the tapping processes that we can do is just really orienting ourselves to space and time and being here in the now. And it's really just kind of a beautiful bringing yourself into the present time. And so what you want to do is, you know, if you're driving, don't close your eyes. But and typically with tapping, even though people are more inclined to close their eyes, I think because they feel like it's going to help them tune in. Sometimes it's actually safer to keep the eyes open. In this exercise. We're going to keep the eyes open because I'm going to ask you to kind of look around. So I want you to start tapping on the top of your head right at the center line. And I want you to just be aware of your body here in your chair and feel your legs sitting in your seat. And then move your tapping. And when you're tapping, you tap with one hand or two. You can tap with two or three fingers. There's no research behind using one hand over the other. So move your tapping to the inside corner of your eyebrow.
Sara Whiteside
Or you can go right in between your two eyebrows. That works well too. And I want you to just feel the sensation of your fingers tapping on your skin. It doesn't have to be a real hard pressure. And then move your tapping to the outside part of your eye and maybe notice if there is a smell that you can that is separate from what you would normally smell. Maybe you're in a different location, or if you're driving down the road, like around here, I might smell manure on the cow fields. Or maybe there's some sort of essential oils that you have going in your room. And then move the tapping underneath the eye. And I want you to see if there's any anything that you can hear aside from my voice. Or you can just pay attention to the sound of my voice right now. Can you hear a fan running in the background? Can you maybe hear your kids down the hall? And then move your tapping to underneath the nose? And I want you to keep your head stationary, but just kind of move your eyes around a little bit. Maybe look for something that is green or look for something that is red.
Sara Whiteside
Notice the color that is around you. Look out past your computer screen or your phone screen. If you happen to be watching this right now or just really look in the distance as you're driving down the road, then if you're tapping to your chin at the point is actually underneath your lip, and really feel the weight of your body there in your chair. Again, feel your legs touching the chair. Feel your feet touching the floor. Move your tapping to just below the collarbone and feel the air moving in and out of your lungs. If it feels good, you can take a nice deep breath or just keep breathing normally. And then the final point is underneath the arm, you're few inches underneath the armpit, right on the side of the ribcage, and just really notice any sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or anything that you can really feel. So those are all of the points that we use during a tapping round. Now, that is a very specific orienting technique. It's an incredible technique to help get you grounded as opposed to doing a certain type of breathing technique or opposed to doing some sort of meditation or going for a walk just to really take sight, sound, touch, taste, hearing, and really bring yourself back into that present moment.
Sara Whiteside
Because so much of the stress that we experience is because we are either thinking about things that happened in the past or we're projecting into the future the things that might happen and the what ifs. And we need to really just bring ourselves back to the present moment and feeling okay, feeling safe here in our own space, in our own time, in our own bodies.
Meg Brunson
I love that we were able to kind of go through that. Hopefully everybody played along, you know what I mean? Went along with the movements and got a feel for what that feels like. And you can always go back and watch the video to see those spots again. I'm curious. I'd love if you could give an example maybe of you said when you work one on one with clients, you're working with somebody for up to an hour. Do your clients come to you with a specific concern or like a decision they're trying to make or what does those things look like that our session can help them work through?
Sara Whiteside
Yeah. It's amazing to see what can come up. And a lot of times what comes up is totally unexpected. People will come with. They want to be able to kind of break through beliefs that they have around being able to earn certain amounts of money or being able to launch a business or be able to raise their prices. That's one that I've worked on a few times with people. And there are some pretty common themes that come up. When a business owner thinks about raising their prices. What are the possibilities that start to go through their head that prevent them from doing so? Am I offering enough value to raise my price? Will anybody want to buy my product at this new price? It's oftentimes tied to self worth and the value that we hold in ourselves, and that can come from a lot of different places in our lifetime. I actually just had a session with myself as a client this morning and realized that I have been holding myself back a little bit, tying my ability to earn money to feeling like it has to be hard work. And a lot of that is because I see my husband working so hard in what he does, and I feel a little guilty that I could have- I can make money having so much fun as an EFT tapping practitioner.
Sara Whiteside
I still do work in my College profession on the weekends. And that drains me. It feels hard. I get resentful of it. So we tapped on those feelings of resentment. We tapped on my feelings of guilt. We tapped on the sadness that I experienced. Like, there was this wash of sadness that came over me when I realized that I felt sad that my husband worked so hard and gets so physically exhausted in his job as a chef. I was feeling that guilt. But I feel energized when I do my work as a tapping practitioner. It's those experiences. And so you can use tapping. I think one good example is if you are fearful of maybe having a certain kind of conversation with somebody, it might be a sales conversation, it might be a conversation with your spouse or even a conversation that you have to have with your kids and you're nervous about having that conversation. I want you to really picture what you're imagining is going to happen in that conversation. Is it the look that that person is going to get on their face?
Sara Whiteside
Is it something that they're going to say back to you? What is it that you are dreading, fearful of, worried about and identify, like, what is playing out in your mind? And so that's where we start to do our tapping on. If we can be really specific about what it is that we are fearful of happening, we can work our way through the emotion and really shift it so that we're not afraid of going into that conversation anymore. So the tapping when you do tapping for something like that, it sounds like this, and we use a different point. We start on the side of the hand and we do the setup statement three times, and it would sound something like this. Even though I'm worried about having this conversation with insert whoever person, because I'm afraid they were going to respond in this way. I accept how I'm feeling about this. Even though I'm worried about having this conversation with so and so because I'm afraid they're going to say or do this thing. I accept how I'm feeling, and then we do it a third time. Even though I'm worried about having this conversation because I'm afraid this might happen, I accept how I feel right now.
Sara Whiteside
And then we go through the tapping point. I'm worried that they might say this. I'm afraid of having this conversation side of the eye. I'm afraid of saying this thing to this person under the eye. I'm afraid of having this conversation under the nose. I'm feeling worried about this. And really to do it the best the best way we can do EFT is to pick one emotion at a time. I was skipping around there, which is why I stopped myself. And sometimes I think when you hear a video online of tapping and they will change the statements that they use at a lot of the different points because they want to resonate with the broadest audience that they can. And that's the biggest difference between doing tapping one on one with a practitioner, where the practitioner is using your words and your emotion and exactly where you feel it in your body. And that makes so much difference. It has a deeper effect. It has a more lasting effect than a tapping that just kind of makes you feel good afterwards. Or they used a lot of positive statements and reframing, which those methods of tapping can feel really good in the moment, but they're not necessarily getting to that part where we're rewiring the emotional experience.
Sara Whiteside
So I've had these experiences where I was afraid to have a certain conversation with typically it's a family member, one of a few family members, and I do the tapping around it, and the energy shifts around the topic at hand. And sometimes I don't even have to have the conversation. And sometimes it just always ends up in this outcome where they totally respond in a very different way than what I was expecting or what they would have normally responded, like before. So it's just so powerful because when you shift your own energy, you also affect the energy of the other people around you. So if I can be a calmer mom, it means my kids are going to pick up on that energy. I can be a calmer wife or partner. My partner is going to pick up on that energy, right?
Meg Brunson
Yeah. This is very timely. We recently had a conversation with Valerie Friedlander, and she was talking about toxic positivity. And so this fits in perfectly because I feel like a lot of what you just said, we're not trying to just focus on the positive. We're trying to acknowledge what we're feeling, even if that is negative. So it's not that toxic positivity of just choose happiness. It's acknowledge where you are now, respect where you are now, and then learn how to reframe things and move forward. So I love that. I feel like these two episodes are going to just couple beautifully.
Sara Whiteside
Absolutely. That makes me so happy to hear that you've had somebody come and talk about toxic positivity, because it is out there and it is rampant. And luckily there are some people who are really starting to talk about it. And it is so important to understand that you can't think your way out of everything. If we could think our way out of every problem that we had, we wouldn't have these problems. The world wouldn't have these problems. It's changing also the emotion. And it's like if I say I'm happy 500 times during the day, that could feel like a total lie. And it's not going to resonate with my body. Affirmations for a long time felt like a complete and utter BS to me. I was just totally anti affirmations. Now there's a really beautiful way to use tapping with affirmations and especially to help figure out where that affirmation maybe doesn't feel true to you. So if you have an affirmation that you love to use, you can tap on the points saying that affirmation. Like, I can make money having fun on a daily basis. I can make money tap on the top of the eyebrow. I can make money having fun on a daily basis. Side of the eye, I can make money having fun on a daily basis and go through the points under the eye, under the nose, under the lip, collar bones, and under the arm. And what you want to take note of is what we call tail enders. Does your brain pop in this little bubble of like, but Sara, hey, remember this thing that you really you know, there might be something in there where if you're saying that affirmation, but you've had an experience that has proven otherwise, your brain is going to remind you. And so then you can go back and you can do tapping on that previous experience. Like this morning, if I had tried to do that same affirmation of I can make money while I'm having fun, I would have had a really hard time doing that. But because I had that tapping session today where I really addressed some of the underlying beliefs and issues that were going on for me when I just did that right now, it feels true. It feels good. It feels like that is a total possibility.
Sara Whiteside
And any affirmation that you do use, you want it to feel completely true, even if it's not the happiest affirmation in the world. They're what we call bridge statements, like, how can you make that affirmation into a phrase, into a sentence that does feel true to you because you want to be speaking something that you really believe from in your heart, your soul and your mind, not just some words that some coach or Internet influencer told you to say five times a day.
Meg Brunson
Right. Well, I would love if you could share more about your quiz with us before we wrap up. Where can we find it? What should we be prepared for?
Sara Whiteside
Okay, so my procrastination personality styles quiz is located at my website, which is SaraWhiteside.com/quiz and it's very short. It's only eight questions. It is designed for someone who is a business owner. But you can kind of imagine, like, even if I'm not a business owner, if I'm working from home, it would be very pertinent to people who are working from home, too. And I just think it is a fun little minute or two to provide you a little bit of distraction and entertainment. But you will also then have the choice of joining me in my Facebook community. There is a link to that from my quiz. Also an opportunity to join my email list where I provide tapping videos once or twice a week through email and just it would be an honor to talk further with anybody who has questions about tapping. There are very many various experiences that people have with tapping out there and I would say that this is your first exposure to it. Don't judge tapping as a whole based on me. If you didn't like it, give somebody else a try or if you didn't really get anything out of a tapping experience that you may have had before, hopefully you got something out of our chat today.
Meg Brunson
Yes, thank you so much. I love that it's something that you can- but yes, there are benefits right for having a one on one practitioner working with you, but it's also something you can easily do wherever you are. You don't need any special tools or anything, just your hand and likely have that with you wherever you are. So thank you so much for being here with us today. I really appreciate.
Sara Whiteside
Thank you so much, Meg. I really have loved our chit chat today and hope that your audience has enjoyed it just as much as we have.
Meg Brunson
Oh, I'm sure thank you.