My Gift – Lesson 3: Do It Differently

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first two parts of this bonus email course! I’ve been getting great feedback from people who have been applying the exercises and are getting great results. 🙂 Hopefully these little tips and tricks are helping take your tapping experience to the next level.

If you’d like to revisit the first 2 lessons, click the links below:

Lesson 1: Let’s Talk Mom and Dad

Lesson 2: Tell Your Body What Happened

In today’s lesson, we’re going to explore the over-arching theme of "CHANGE" and how to make it happen. Much of The Tapping Solution book was obviously focused on this topic, on how we effectively create change in our lives, how we move past old patterns, beliefs and circumstances and create a new reality. Today’s lesson takes those themes a little further, with a particular exercise that you will likely find very powerful.

You’ve probably heard of the statement regarding the brain that, "Neurons that fire together…wire together…" Attributed to Donald Hebb, a neuropsychologist, it means that every experience we have, and its associated feelings, emotions, physical experiences and so forth, become embedded in our brains, and the more an action is repeated, the stronger the connection between these "neurons" or brain cells.

Thus a professional golfer who has swung a golf club tens if not hundreds of thousands of times can do it without thinking, whereas if you’ve never played golf, your first couple (or thousand!) swings might be a little…uh… "interesting". 🙂

The same patterns apply to our daily experiences. We establish patterns and routines, some simple like brushing our teeth and others more "complex" (yet still simple in many ways!), like how we interact with people in our lives, how we react in certain situations, the emotional states we tend to live in, etc.

The tapping processes in the book are designed to interrupt these old patterns, release the stagnant emotional memories, energy and brain patterns and establish new ones. Today’s exercise is designed to do the same thing!

So here’s what you’re going to do, pick a single day where you’re going to "practice" this approach. The day before, identify the things you want to do the next day, but you think… "If past experience tells me anything, it tells me I’m going to ‘want’ to do these things, but I’ll probably put them off" for example, items on this list might include:

• Exercising
• Meditating
• Being more focused at work
• Skipping Facebook for a day
• Spending more time with your kids
• Working on your creative passions
• Being more patient with "X"

We’re looking for the things that at the end of day, on many nights, you say to yourself… "Shoot, another day when I didn’t do… "X"! Another day I said I was going to exercise and I didn’t! Another day I said I was going to be more patient and I wasn’t!" (And take a look at what you do every night as you review your day, you reinforce these patterns of "NOT" doing stuff! More brain neurons firing and wiring together, making the experience more likely to happen again).

OK, so you have your list (and you don’t have to be "perfect" – you can just pick one or two items), and your day begins. Your job for today, just this one day is to practice this, is to INTERRUPT old patterns, using tapping, and put new patterns in place.

Let me give you an example of how I used this the other day. I’ve wanted to meditate in the morning more often, even for just 10 minutes, to set a clear intention for my day and start it off right. And I’ve really been wanting to change the pattern of the way I’ve been waking up, which is checking my email right away, sometimes even just minutes after waking up! Things have been so busy and there’s always so many exciting things going on that I’ve gotten into this pattern of checking emails.

So what I did last night is set the intention to change this pattern and then when I woke up this morning…here’s what happened… (And it’s likely going to happen to you, so pay attention to the details of the experience)!

I had the mental pattern in place to check emails as soon as I woke up…it had become routine…so when I felt that pull (it’s weird, if you pay close attention to it, it almost feels like a craving!), to check my email, I stopped and did just a few minutes of tapping.

Here’s an example:

Karate Chop: Even though I want to check my email right now… I deeply and completely love and accept myself…
Karate Chop: Even though I have this old pattern of checking email… I choose to behave differently right now…
Karate Chop: Even though part of me wants to check email, it’s just what I do, it’s who I am, I choose to change this pattern and meditate now…

Eyebrow: Part of me wants to check email…
Side of the Eye: I’ve got this old pattern…
Under the Eye: That wants to keep running…
Under the Nose: This old pattern…
Under the Mouth: Of checking email…
Collarbone: And I choose to let it go now…
Under the Arm: It’s safe to make a different choice…
Top of the Head: And meditate now…

That’s it, nice and simple! You can obviously do more rounds, but sometimes just one round can be enough to take the "edge" off the old pattern and establish a new one. So play with this, use it throughout the day. Catch your brain when it’s looking to run the same patterns, and give it a different option.

And for me this morning, it worked! I sat down and meditated for ten minutes and it really helped propel me forward into a more productive and focused day. As evidence by my finally getting this course written for you. LOL!

Let me know how you do with this and if you have any questions or comments.

Until next time….

Keep Tapping!

– Nick Ortner