The Stories We Have Been Told About Success

July 25, 2010 By Gene Monterastelli 2 Comments

photo by Jen Watson

Many times we are making choices and responding to the world based on the expectations that we have received from friends, family, and cultural norms. These expectations might not be useful to who we would like to become. In many cases they can stop our progress. Here is a very simple Emotional Freedom Techniques(EFT)/tapping technique that can be used when dealing with the expectations that we have received from others.

I have been working with “Martin” for a while. He wanted to see transformation in what he did for a living. He felt as if there was a higher calling for his life that he had not been able to figure out. After a number of very successful sessions Martin plateaud.

Martin had come to a much clearer vision of what he wanted his life to look like, but for some reason he just couldn’t act. As we were talking about this the wall he had bumped into he said, “I know what I need to do, but I am stuck on all these stories of what at 35 year olds life is suppose to look like.”

The instance he said those words I had the flash of a book in my imagination. I instructed Martin start tapping and to image that we was sitting at a table with a blank book and a pen on the table. I then asked him to start to write all of the stories that had been given to him about what a 35 year olds life should look like.

I told him to take his time, to write as much as he needed, if he needed another book because he had filled the first it would just appear on the table, and asked him to let me know when he was done writing.

I check in with him ever few minutes for the next 20 minutes as he wrote and wrote and wrote.

After filling five books he let me know that he was done.

I then asked him what we should do with these books. “Do we lock them away? Put them on a shelf for later use? Destroy?”

He replied, “I am not one who thinks that it is a good idea to burn books, but in this case I will make an exception.”

[Important Note: Early in my practice I would have simply instructed my client to try to destroy the book in his imagination because that is what I would have wanted to do. I have learned over time that client’s system knows what is the best way to proceed. I will give options, like I did in this case, to spark the clients imagination, but I leave the next step up to them.]

In his imagination he poured gasoline on the books and lit them. I asked Martin if the books were burning. He said, “No”.

At this point we started to explore the different reasons why it was hard to let go of the stories in those books. We discovered that part(s) of him felt:

If the stories were let go then the people who passed those stories along would also be let go.
If the stories were let go then there would be no guidance at all.
What if the stories were let go, but needed later they couldn’t be found?
What if the stories were really right?

One at a time we tapped on these issues. After we cleared all the issues Martin tried again to burn the books. This time he was successful and felt a great sense of relief and freedom.

The Process
The process itself is very easy to be repeated.

Start tapping and just move from tapping point to tapping point every few seconds.
Image yourself sitting at a table giving yourself permission to write all the stories that have been given to you about what the world thinks success is for you.
If you need more books they will appear.
After the writing is done ask your system what you need to do with these books so that you can be free from others stories so that you can write your own.
If you are unable to complete the step of freeing yourself tap on the issues that are making it difficult for you to let these stories go.
Do what your system needs to release these stories.

Living Up To My Calling

August 18, 2009 By Gene Monterastelli 2 Comments

photo by pensiero

One of the things I find so enjoyable about my work is the type of clients I get to work with. Many of them are motivated to become, for lack of a better description, their ‘higher self’. Based on their background and belief system they may use many different terms and phrases to describe this desire, but the core desire is basically the same. Many of them use the term “calling” for this, believing that there is something higher compelling them to live in this way.

Often my clients find themselves struggling because they feel they are falling short of their goal, or because they believe they don’t understand what their true calling is.

It’s very common to be quite hard on one’s self for falling short. I have observed with many clients that the way they beat themselves up is often far harsher than the failings they are beating themselves up for. It’s so easy for us to believe that because we can see the vision of our higher selves that we must become our higher selves right now.

This is not the case. Whatever our motivations, we need to understand that there is a process we need to go through to reach this vision.

This is a struggle I have experienced in my own life: wondering if I am living to become all that I can and wondering if I am even clearly seeing this vision of all that I can be. When I bump into this I am brought back to the words of Thomas Merton. I have found them very useful to pray and to tap to.

Try tapping along:

“My Lord God. I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are always with me, and you will never leave me to face perils alone.” – Thomas Merton [How to use these phrases]

Tapping For Poker

June 20, 2009 By Gene Monterastelli Leave a Comment

photo by Christian Fortier

Some people aren’t comfortable with the idea of gambling, but my experience working with a professional poker player demonstrated how our emotions can override our logic, how this can be disastrous, and how easy it is to use tapping (EvEFT/EFT) to make changes.

There are types of gambling that are pure chance such as the lottery or slot machines. These games require no skill. The only choice the player makes is whether or not to play. With each play there is a statistical chance of winning and losing.

Poker is different from games of chance. There is a component of chance involved in the cards that you are dealt, but poker players make a number of choices on how to play their cards. A good poker player considers the playing patterns of his opponents as well as how the other players at the table think he plays. All of this is in addition to the cards he has been dealt. Because of this, it is much less about the cards that have been dealt and much more about how the cards are played. For this reason poker is not a game of chance, but a game of skill with chance elements.

Because there is an element of chance in poker, a player can run good or bad in a short period of time, (a small sample set of hands) based on the cards he/she is dealt, but over the long run a player’s skill is going to show. The more hands that are played, the more likely it is that the better player is going to be a winner overall.

Professional poker players understand this. They don’t think in terms of winning one hand, or of being a winner over one session of hands, they think in terms of their average over time. Very good players will know this right down to an average hourly wage. For example, a particular player might know that if she/he is playing in a game that has a minimum bet of $2, they will make forty dollars an hour – in the long run – because of his/her skill level.

A comparable example would be investing in the stock market. Stocks and markets move up and down each day, but over a long period of time they have trends. A good investor knows the longer he is in a certain investment, the more likely his long-term return is going to match the trend.

The way a poker player is able to combat this variance (up and down swings), is by playing as many hands as possible. The more hands they play, the more they are going to insulate themselves from up and down swings. With the advent of internet poker, players are able to play many games at the exact same time by opening multiple computer windows. To combat this variance some players are known to play as many as one hundred hands an hour… in six games at once… for stretches of ten or twelve hours straight. That’s as many as six thousand hands in one stretch!

You can imagine the amount of concentration it takes to do this. Not only is a player constantly recalculating the different statistical outcomes of a hand based on each new card, they are also having to keep track of the play tendencies of the eight other players involved in each hand.

As play unfolds it is possible for players to get very emotional. It is possible to lose a hand that you had a 90% chance of winning, causing great anger. It is also possible to win a hand you were a significant underdog in, causing great joy. Both of these circumstances can be very dangerous. When a player becomes too emotional (regardless of which emotions) he/she can start making poor decisions. In poker terms this is called going on ‘tilt’.

When a player is on tilt they are not paying attention to all of the factors they normally pay attention to. They begin to play very poorly, and they can lose all of the money they had won over a number of hours (or days) of play, in one or two hands.

Recently a professional poker player, “John”, who was having a major problem with his game, approached me. John plays six to eight hours a day, five days a week, and poker is his full time income. John understands how long he can stay focused. He never plays more than eight hours at a time because he knows that as his mind becomes fatigued it is harder for him to make the good choices that make him a winning player.

John’s problem: he was finding it very hard to get up from the computer after a losing session (meaning that on this day he had lost money overall). He understands the variance of his winning and losing. He knows that over the long term he is a winning player, but he had a mental block about getting up near the end of the losing session.

It’s easy to see how this problem would multiply itself. He would have a losing session, causing him to keep playing past his mental peak. Since he was past his mental peak, he’d play worse, causing him to lose more. This would push him on tilt. By being on tilt he would play worse, causing him to lose more. This cycle would repeat until he walked away in frustration after losing far too much money.

I had John tune into the feeling of not wanting to get up at the end of his most recent losing session. As we investigated the feeling, he described how he knew because of his skill and experience that he was better than everyone he was playing with. He knew intellectually about the swings of the game, but emotionally he couldn’t let these players get the best of him. We began by tapping on the facts of the situation with phrases like this (I don’t remember the exact phrases):

“I know I am a better player than most of the people I play with…I understand that poker does have chance elements in it…there are going to be times when players who are worse than me are going to get the better of me…because of the variance of the game…over the long term I am a winning player…there are ups and downs in the game…I never play in a game that I can’t afford…I am playing with players I can beat…it is okay to have one losing session because I know over the long haul I will come out ahead…I know I need to get up after 8 hours of play…because I lose my mental edge…and play worse…I give myself permission to know that I can get up after a losing session knowing I will come out ahead in the long run”

After doing the tapping I had John tune back into the feeling of needing to stay at the end of the losing session. He said most of the desire to keep playing was gone, but there was still something hanging around. I asked him what the feeling reminded him of. He then said the classic line, “I don’t know if this has anything to do with this, but…” and then proceeded to tell of a time when he was playing youth hockey and was screamed at by a coach after a loss. He talked about how much he hated losing.

We quickly used tapping to do some clean up on the emotions of that memory. I then had him once again tune back into the feeling at the end of the most recent losing session. He reported there was no desire to stay at the computer playing.

Six weeks later John reported that he had had some losing sessions during that time, but he had never once stayed past his mental prime of six to eight hours. This resulted in an increase of his profitability, more than he expected. He hadn’t realized just how much this problem had been affecting his game.

When Reward Systems Go Bad: Food As A Reward

May 29, 2009 By Gene Monterastelli Leave a Comment

photo by Infidelic

We are all familiar with reward systems (even if we don’t use that name). “If you clean your room you can watch TV.” “I will read one more chapter and then take a walk.” “Once I pay the bills I will go get a smoothie.”

Reward systems are very effective as a motivator to get a task done, but they can also become problematic unless they are carefully created and used. Sometimes they can be created and we don’t even realize it is happening.

Here is an example of how a reward system had become transformed. Although at one time it was beneficial, it had become a problem.

My client “Linda” was trying to change her diet. For some reason she was craving and eating sweets and carbohydrates, even when she was not hungry. Normally when I encounter cravings and mindless eating it’s because the food is being used to fill an emotional hole of some sort. Even though that was my assumption I knew we needed to check in with her system to see if this was the case.

After doing a few minutes of investigation using a guided imagery technique and a parts technique it became very clear that the food was being used as a reward system. Every time she did something good she got to eat something that was sweet.

But this is not how things were playing out.

She was having these cravings in the evening when she was watching TV. These cravings weren’t coming after she had done something that deserved a reward.

With a little more investigation it became clear that the evening was her lowest emotional point of the day. This was her least busy time, and therefore she was free to let her thoughts wander to all the limiting beliefs she had about herself as well as to her worries about her life.

This is when the reward system kicked in, but it did it in reverse. It started to work like this:

When I do something that is good it means I have value as a person
I get a treat when I have done something good
The more treats I get the more good I must be doing
The more good I am doing the more value I have
If I am eating lots of treats it must mean that I am really good and have lots of value
I am feeling bad about myself so I am going to have a treat because the only reason I would get a treat is because I have value

This is a really subtle shift. All of a sudden treats go from being a reward to becoming a way to feel better.

Through another technique we are able to take the reward system and transform it into a more useful resource.

Lessons form this session:
1) Your expectations can be wrong
Because of my past experience I had a strong belief why a particular action/belief was happening. I was wrong. Just because we believe we know the cause and effect doesn’t mean we do. Even when you are certain you know why a belief exists, ask the system for information. We think we know, but the body truly does know.

2) The issues and beliefs that are hindering us exist because in some way we think they are helping us.
This is a perfect example of this fact. The reward system created to remind Linda she was doing good, may have improved her self-worth, but eating enough junk to keep her self-worth high made her feel worse because of her poor eating choices. Trying to understand why it was being helpful, we came to understand the issue and transform it. If we had approached it from the point of view of, “It’s bad. It must be eliminated”, we never would have understood why it existed, making the fast transformation an impossibility.

3) Resource that were once helpful might not be helpful today
Our point of view changes, our lives change, and our circumstances change. For this reason we need to revisit why we act the way we do to see if it’s still serving us.