A Sissy Thing
In the article, Confessions of a CEO, in Fortune Magazine, multi-millionaire businessman Dominic Orr said that he always considered therapy a “sissy thing.” In business, Dominic was “ruthlessly aggressive.” On the home front, when his marriage and relationship with his son were crumbling, he reluctantly agreed to meet with a therapist. To a lot of men and women in business, therapy implies weakness. So unless there’s a life crisis, there’s no therapist in sight. The problem with the word “therapy” is that it connotes something is wrong. The definition of therapy is “the treatment of disease or disorders, as by some remedial, rehabilitating, or curative process.” Often, business people don’t need therapy as much as a tool for dealing with everyday business problems that pile up. They need more coaching and tools for personal development rather than therapy.
Last week I taught three business people how to use EFT for business issues. The first one was a young woman we’ll call Rita who she had been mentoring someone she considered a friend and business colleague. Recently, the person had made some questionable, maybe even fraudulent, business transactions and suddenly moved out of state. Rita felt angry and “betrayed.” On a SUDS (Subjective Units of Distress Scale) level of zero to ten, Rita was a nine. We tapped on her anger and betrayal feelings. Then Rita’s eyes welled up from the feelings of sadness because she had really liked this person and couldn’t understand her behavior. After about five minutes of doing EFT, Rita was down to a one. She still wasn’t quite ready to forgive the person, but she now had a tool to use.
Marsha had a different issue. In the midst of giving an employee review to Victoria, Marsha was surprised that Victoria grew agitated and said, “If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to fire me.” Marsha, who prided herself in being a fair and positive leader, went from being angry to doubting herself. Marsha was tired of hearing Victoria’s excuses. The result was a severe headache. I asked Marsha what she wanted to “work on” and she said the headache. So we tapped on “Even though I have this Victoria headache …” After a few minutes of tapping, the headache went from a ten to a zero. Rita saw the correlation of bottled up feelings manifesting in her body as a headache and how a simple process like EFT could help release that energy. One of the signs that EFT is working is when a person yawns which is what Marsha did. There was a visible energy shift.
Lastly, Jeremy was stressed from driving to work everyday and enduring rush hour traffic. On this particular day, a woman had “cut him off” while he was merging into a lane. He rolled down his window and made a comment to her. Nine hours after it actually happened, Jeremy was still carrying his feeling furious at the woman. We tapped on his strong feelings and then my intuition hit on something else so we tapped on “Even though I have to be right …” The need to be right definitely hit a hot button with Jeremy and he laughed so we played around and even exaggerated his “righteousness.” By the time we were through, Jeremy was a zero. He laughed, said that he could barely recall the instance and it wasn’t even worth talking about.
How often do daily business issues mount up leading to stress that ultimately affects a person’s health? After these people learned EFT, they had a self-help tool to take the sting out of negative feelings.
One of the most important things I did with each person was to “test” the changes not once but several times during the time I met with them. I told them to amp up their feelings about the specific situation to get to a nine or ten. They couldn’t and were amazed that something as simple as EFT could be so powerful to use.
If you’re a business person, let me end this post with a tongue-in-cheek EFT setup statement:
Even though I think therapy is a sissy thing, I’m man enough [or woman enough] to try EFT … and I deeply and completely accept myself.
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