Today was a bad day. All the plans I had blew up in my face. It sent me into an emotional tailspin. I know EFT would have been useful, but I didn’t know where to begin. How can I use EFT when thing don’t go as planned?

photo by sonson

I had this very thing happen to me recently.

Another EFT practitioner and I have been creating a website to help EFT practitioners market and build their practices. We had done about a month of work. This included planning the contents, contacting people to interview for teleclasses, and doing some web design.

We had a great domain name that was memorable and descriptive. It was really perfect for what we were going to do.

I was about to make my first announcement about the launch of the web site. I went to my domain registrar to grab the domain name. The name we wanted (and had done a great deal of planning around) was gone. Not only had someone else purchased the domain, it had happened that morning.

At first I went into a bit of a funk. My self-talk went like this, “Why did I wait so long? I knew I wanted this name a month ago. I am such an idiot. Did the person who bought the name know we were going to do this and just snatch it up? Did they steal our idea? There are no other good names for us to use. This sucks! I am so stupid!”

Then I caught myself. I realized I couldn’t do anything about the fact that someone else has the domain name. I have no idea if someone tried to get it before us, and even so, there was nothing I could do about it. It was time to move on and make the best of it.

So I took a few deep breaths. At first I tapped with nothing particularly on my mind. After a few minutes, I continued to tap and asked myself, “What is the best possible outcome so that one year from now when I look back I will thank God someone beat me to that domain name?”

And I tapped.

And I asked the question again.

And I tapped.

And I asked the question again.

And I tapped.

And I asked the question again.

And I tapped.

Over the next few moments my mood began to shift. My energy moved away from “this sucks” to “this is not the end of the world.”

Then the possible domain names started to come, and come quickly. I pulled out a pad of paper and wrote as fast as I could.

After my creative burst came to an end, I moved on to another task. An hour later I came back. Some of the names were good and some weren’t.

One name stuck out: EFT Marketing Lab.

It really said everything we are about.

It says this isn’t just theory, but stuff we have tested in the real world with our own practices.

It says marketing doesn’t have to be life or death (which it can feel like). We can try a marketing experiment on a very small scale and learn from it so when we do it on a bigger scale we’ll do it more effectively.

We can create a lab notebook for each experiment to lead the students through the experiment step by step. This way the tasks won’t be so overwhelming. We will be able to provide feedback for each lesson so the students can learn from both their experience and our experience.

Suddenly we went from some EFT marketing ideas to real structure that will help us form our lessons and create a way for our students to really learn.

Instead of being annoyed I had lost my domain, I now had a new focus for our work.

Things that are out of our control are going to happen. The only thing we can control is how we respond. The next time you’re having a hard time getting out of a funk, take a deep breath, tap, and ask “How could this really be a blessing?”

PS: You should check out EFT Marking Lab