Keeping New Year's Resolutions With EFT

As the year ends, many of us look for a transition, a closing of one chapter and the beginning of the new. My family has a New Year’s Eve ritual where each of us lists those things we have accomplished in the past year, and what we want accomplish in the year to come. We review the previous year’s list of things we wanted to accomplish and compare it to what actually happened.

We are often proud when our progress met or surpassed certain goals, delighted by solutions that followed an unexpected path, or surprised to find we jumped tracks and all goals in a certain area had changed.

Then there are the goals where nothing budged. Again.

I lump difficult-to-accomplish resolutions into six broad categories:

Health (diet, exercise, weight control)
Un wanted habits (smoking, drinking, binge eating, etc.)
Relationships (personal, social, friends, etc.)
Abundance (wealth, free time, etc.)
Spiritual (relationship with God/Higher Self, daily prayer/meditation, etc.)
Status (career advancement, education, recognition, etc.)

What is it about one’s areas of “shortcoming?” Perhaps our identity is attached to the character traits they represent. We may assign various levels of self-worth and shame based upon how we live up to our ideals.

When we do this, however, we get it exactly backwards. Our self-esteem and shame are not caused by our bad habits. Instead, our bad habits are a perfect manifestation of the self-worth we accepted as a child.

This is good news. In order to change our lives, all we have to do is change the way we feel about ourselves. In short, we stop looking at what is wrong with ourselves and start seeing and focusing our attention on what is good about ourselves. This is half the battle.

Each of us has repressed emotions that subconsciously disrupt our thoughts and actions. I call this disruption static (like a bad radio signal). This static creates an emotional vibration that affects our life traits (the “way we are” - the way we feel to other people, which they respond to). Identifying and eliminating this static is the other half of that battle and can be done with EFT.

EFT practitioners recognize that static emanates from core issues. These core issues can range anywhere from attitudes projected upon us by our parents to traumatic events. In a way, this system is perfect. Just as pain alerts us to the need to repair a physical wound, the bad effects of static in our life grasp our attention so that we can identify and heal our emotional wounds.

The keys, then, to following through on our non-budging New Year’s resolutions are to identify the core issues and use EFT to release them, and to see the good in ourselves. This way, keeping our resolutions is much easier than when using sheer will power alone.

Actually, getting to the core issue may require the help of a skilled professional. The mental mechanisms that repressed an emotion in the first place are still in effect, blinding the individual to their own emotional static. In addition, once the core issue is identified, many aspects of the issue may have to be addressed. (See Core Issues and Aspects in my eBook, The EFT Quick-Start Method.)

May the New Year bring you all the good changes you desire.

&copy 2007 Chip Engelmann