My boss is a moron. He makes my life miserable. I’ve tapped on the issue, but it’s not getting any better. What can I do?

photo by redteam

Before we decide how to deal with this problem, I need to explain how to use truth phrases.

I’m a big fan of using truth phrases when working with emotional issues. With truth phrases we rate how true we think a phrase is. These phrases differ from the standard rating of intensity.

For example, with the phrase, “How angry do you feel?” we are rating the intensity of the anger. With the phrase, “I get angry when my partner doesn’t listen to me,” we are rating how true this statement sounds, 10 being completely true and 0 not being true at all.

At first, rating how true a phrase is can be a little tricky. Just remember how odd it felt to rate anger on a scale of 0 to 10. There is a reason we call the scale “SUBJECTIVE” units of distress. It’s just a benchmark to see if progress has been made. It’s more an art than a science.

Truth phrases can be very helpful because they incorporate what we feel (anger) and why we feel it (because my partner doesn’t listen). When we know what the emotion is and why it’s there, we are more likely to be tuned into the core issue of the emotion. The closer we are to the core, the more effective our work is going to be.

Examples of truth phrases are:

When I’m worried I eat to soothe myself.

I feel unvalued when my voice isn’t heard.

I’m worried because I don’t think I’ve done enough work for tomorrow’s meeting.

I’m sad my family doesn’t care about the work I do.

I’m angry that our government is so corrupt.

For truth phrases to be effective we need to have both parts of the phrase. We need to state what emotion we feel and what the causes of the emotion are.

Note: Many times we have no control over what is happening around us. Whether people refuse to hear us, whether they don’t care about our work or that our government is corrupt, we may just have to live with these facts. It would be great to believe that someday our family is going to be as passionate about our work as we are, but we have no control over the emotions of others. Usually all we can change is our emotional response to these states of the world.

A common mistake with truth statements is that we forget to add our emotional response, tapping only on the state of the world.
For example, the statement “My boss is a moron!” might rate as a 10, but no matter how much tapping we do, our boss is not going to get any smarter. This phrase is not properly structured because it’s missing the emotional response.

A more useful phrase is, “I’m very frustrated because my boss is a moron.” When this rates as a 10, we can then investigate why this is frustrating. (e.g., it creates more work. We look bad to the rest of the company. I have to do his tasks over after he messed them up).

As we tap and make progress on the reasons that cause frustration, we can come back to retest “I’m very frustrated because my boss is a moron.” Once this statement no longer feels true, we know we’ve done what we can. Our boss is still a moron, but this is no longer emotionally controlling our lives.