It’s nearly mid-February. How are the New Year resolutions coming along? Remember them? Those desires, dreams and aspirations for a better life that we so diligently and ardently wanted to embrace. In case you’d forgotten what one looked like, here is a smattering: “This year I am going to make under 100 in my golf score…” or “this is the year I am going to make the first team…” or what about “this is the year when I make the cut-off time for Comrades…”
So what’s happened? Does your resolution lie in a dusty and discarded pile along with all the other ones – not only from this year but also time gone by? Even though this was going to be your year! Even though this time you wrote your resolutions down: Even though: there could be any number of different ways you tried to get things to work this time. Perhaps even now there’s this growing feeling of resignation that no matter how hard you try, things will never change?
I usually work with sports people to help them achieve peak performance but the methods I employ will work just as well with anyone. You need a target to aim at (the goal or resolution) a desire to reach your goal, no matter what. Lastly you need the sensitivity to continually adjust your approach to reaching it. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? So why do we fail so miserably: why do we give up and go back to our old ways and habits when they seemingly make us less that what we would aspire to be?
There is no generalised rule of thumb to explain why we abandon our goals and give up; each one of us has a specific set of reasons uniquely wrapped up in who we are. Fortunately there is a tool that can be applied to each of these reasons. Systematically applying this tool will lead to amazing results, typically also in a short space of time. The tool’s name – Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). Using EFT you can discover and permanently root out all of the reasons why you stopped working towards your goal. Not only that, using EFT it is possible to analyse your resolutions and goals so you get the maximum out of them.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you want to improve your golf score by a few strokes. Your stated goal might be “I want to score at least 100 each time I play”. The goal is clear enough, but what about any hidden saboteurs? You know the thoughts that lurk beneath the surface quietly telling you all the reasons why this is impossible to do. One of these might be “but I don’t practice enough” or “I am not fit enough”. Internally and unconsciously your focus and behaviour will be diluted by these thoughts.
These current thoughts are literally hard wired into your brain and unless you do something to rewire them so the new behaviour can take root, you will more than likely snap back into the old way of doing things. In this instance, you may see an initial improvement in your golf score but like a rubber band stretched to its maximum eventually it snaps back and the old way of doing things resumes. Again we turn to EFT to assist us in removing the unsupportive thoughts and after a couple of sessions, they will be neutralised. Your goal is now parasite free.
There is also an additional step we can do. Using EFT we can make the goal more compelling to attain. Doing this will increase the attractiveness of the goal and consequently the likelihood of attaining it will go up by an order of magnitude!
Now everything will be internally aligned and instead of sitting on the couch wondering if you will ever achieve your goal you will be internally pulled to work towards it. So here’s to that golf score, first team achievement and the Comrades cut-off!
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