Feeling overwhelmed and short on time? Discover how tapping, a simple yet powerful stress-relief technique, can help you reclaim your days.  In this episode, Penny Zenker delves into the transformative practice of tapping with renowned expert Brad Yates, co-author of the books Freedom at Your Fingertips: Get Rapid Physical and Emotional Relief with the Breakthrough System of Tapping and EFT for Everyone: Life Changing Techniques At Your Fingertips. Explore how tapping, rooted in acupuncture, can effectively alleviate stress and improve overall well-being. This episode offers valuable strategies to help you live a more focused, productive life.

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Escape The Stress Cycle: Innovative Methods For Stress Relief With Brad Yates

On the show, we’re looking for unique perspectives. We’re looking for people who can shed light on maybe something that you hadn’t thought about, give you a tool, a resource, or a way of thinking that might be new for you. I think our guest might bring something that maybe you hadn’t heard of before. Brad Yates is with us in this episode and he is known internationally for his creative and often humorous use of the Emotional Freedom Technique. That’s EFT, also known as tapping.

Brad is the author of the bestselling children’s book, The Wizard’s Wish, and Co-author of the bestseller Freedom at Your Fingertips. He is also featured as an expert in the film, The Tapping Solution. He’s been a presenter at a number of events, including Jack Canfield’s Breakthrough to Success, and has done many teleseminars with The Secret which stars Bob Doyle and Joe Vitale. He’s been heard internationally on a number of different internet radio talk shows like this one. He’s had over 1,000 videos on YouTube that have been viewed over 47 million times. We are in for a treat. Brad, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Penny. I’m happy to be here.

Understanding Tapping

I’m going to go out on a limb that most people don’t know what tapping is. I do and I’ll share a little story about why I do it in a little bit. What is tapping? They’re all scratching their heads like, “Is that tapping like dancing?”

We’re not tap dancing and are not tapping off the buffalo or doing a times step. Tapping is a process of tapping with our fingertips on key points, primarily around the face and torso. I know that if you’re new to it, it sounds very strange, but there’s a very good reason why we do it. Traditionally, it’s based on acupuncture. For thousands of years in Chinese medicine, they’ve said there’s a flow of energy through the body, and it’s along these pathways that are called meridians.

When the energy flows naturally, we experience our natural state of health and well-being, physically and emotionally. When that energy gets disrupted or blocked in some way, we don’t feel so good. We don’t think as clearly. We don’t make the best choices. It has all kinds of unfortunate consequences for us, including how we manage our time.

In traditional Chinese medicine, the doctor would stick needles in these key points to stimulate that healthy flow of energy and we’re doing that by tapping on these points. It’s primarily a stress relief technique, but when you consider that most, if not all of the issues that trouble us are either caused by or worsened by stress, then you can see that tapping on these points can be beneficial for almost anything.

I’m fascinated about different techniques. I have done acupuncture and it helped me when my ankles swelled up after birth. It looked like it was one straight leg down there. There was no ankle. It’s amazing. I did tapping. You said it’s for stress relief. My son had a terrible anxiety. It was affecting him. He very rarely left the house. We were looking for different techniques and I’ve done some behavioral psychology and neurolinguistic programming. I have mastered some of those techniques. The minute I tried anything with him, he goes, “Stop it. I know what you’re doing,” because our kids know us so well.

I said, “Why don’t we explore something that neither of us know about?” We found tapping. I found it to be very relaxing. My first thought was that when you tap you say different things, and I found that there’s a school of thought that if you say things about, “I’m so stressed and overwhelmed,” or something like that, I had the feeling that if you say something like that, aren’t you bringing more of it to you? I wanted to unpack that a little bit about what you say and why you say it while you’re tapping. Is that cool?

That’s an excellent point and that’s one of the things that throws people off a lot of the time when they first see EFT demonstrated because we generally start off by tapping on the side of the hand and saying, “Even though I’m experiencing this stress, or even though I feel this anger,” or whatever it is, people go, “Stop. We have to focus on the positive.”

Yes, in general, I would say you do that, but what we resist persists. We’re all addicted to using that four-letter F word, Fine. “I’m fine. I’m only going to talk about the positive.” If you break your leg, you’re not going to go to the doctor and say, “Let’s talk about my arm. My arm feels good. Let’s focus on the positive.” We have to address it.

It’s not a matter of sitting and commiserating over and going, “My leg is broken.” It’s like, “I want to identify what’s there so that I can deal with it.” That’s what we’re doing. As we’re tapping, we’re processing that stuck emotion. We focus on what feels unpleasant, just so that we’re looking at it. If you are cleaning your carpet because you spilled some dirt on your carpet, you want to be able to focus on where the dirt is, as opposed to randomly walking all over the place and maybe missing where it’s at. That’s why we do it with the words.

I wouldn’t say focus on saying negative things in general, but while we’re tapping, we’re processing that so that those words no longer bother us. If we’re saying, “I’m stressed about this report that’s due next week,” I’m going to say those words, but I’m going to do it while I’m tapping. That stress about that report goes away and I can get to a place of “I’ve got that report. I’m going to focus on it.” It makes much better use of my time because I’m wasting my time if I’m getting upset about it and then refusing to look at it. As long as we’re doing the clearing process, then it’s okay and it’s beneficial to be addressing all aspects.

Tapping Demonstration

That makes sense to me. It’s helping you to process. You’re accepting it. You’re naming it. You’re allowing it to pass through. You said maybe we could do something on the show and you’ll walk us through it. Maybe now is a good time to see what that feels like and experience it.

Generally, we look at what might be troubling us. We can stick with the theme of taking back time. The concern that we don’t have enough time is one of the things that bothers us. We may be looking at something that we have to get done. It’s like, “I don’t have time.” I would then look at, “This feeling that I don’t have time, on a scale of 0 to 10, how troublesome is that?” “It’s an 8. It is an overwhelming thought for me.” I try to identify also how I physically experience that. “My heart races whenever I think I don’t have time.”

We would take the fingertips of our index and middle fingers. The meridians run up and down both sides of the body so you can tap with either hand on either side. For the sake of demonstration, take your dominant hand and gently tap on the opposite hand right between your wrist and your pinky. You gently tap there and we’d say, “Even though I don’t have time, I choose to love and accept myself.” We’d say that three times because we want to be able to say, “I’m acknowledging this issue rather than trying to run away from it.”

We’ll go through these eight points. We start right at the beginning of your eyebrow and gently tapping right near the center of your face and we’d say, “I don’t have time,” or whatever the issue is, this stress, this anger at Bob, or whatever it might be that’s bothering us. We’d repeat that there and we’re generally tapping these points between 5 and 10 times but you don’t need to keep count. It’s just a general idea. We’d say, “I don’t have time.” Follow your eyebrow out to the corner of your eye. We gently tap there. “This feeling that I don’t have time,” and then right under the middle of your eye, just above your cheek, “This fear that I don’t have time.”

Right under your nose, just above your upper lip, “I don’t have time.” Right under your lower lip, just above your chin, “I don’t have time.” Right where your collar bones, just about where it comes together, there’s a little bit of a U-shape at the base of your throat, just go ahead and tap with all the fingertips or even make a fist and tap over that whole area, “I don’t have time.”

The next point is about 4 inches below your armpits. That’s right about bra strap level and even the guys listening can figure out where that is, “I don’t have time.” Finally, at the top of your head. We are using all of your fingertips to tap around the crown of your head, “I don’t have time.” You take a deep breath and then you check in again and say, “I don’t have time.” You notice how stressful that feels.

For some people, it’ll go from an 8 to a 0 like that. It doesn’t usually happen that fast as possible, but more often it’ll be a more gradual thing and it may go from an 8 to a 7.75. It’s a little bit of relief, but what often happens is it is like peeling the layers of the onion. I might be tapping along and saying, “I don’t have time. Oh my goodness I remember when I was in the third grade and there was this test and everybody else was finishing the test and I didn’t have enough time to finish it. I got a bad grade.” Now, we’ve identified something that we’ve been hanging onto in our bodies for decades and we can start to release that. We can focus then on, “Even though I got that bad grade because I ran out of time,” we can start to clear out all of that stuff and it creates this greater freedom in our body.

That’s fantastic. I could feel it. Anybody who was following along could probably feel it because it was amazing.

It downregulates stress, and most of us have more stress than we recognize.

 

It’s because we’re convincing ourselves that we’re fine, and stress compounds. Unless you are doing something to release it, and this is a great release mechanism and it doesn’t take long. We do that in 60 seconds, right?

It’s very quick. This is energy hygiene. This is why I say tap on a daily basis. You brush your teeth every day. You take a shower every day. You don’t wait until people are holding their noses around you and say, “That’s right. I haven’t bathed in a while.” With stress, most of us don’t have any kind of daily routine or we might have a routine that is not healthy. “Stress. I just smoke and drink. That’s how I deal with it. It’s fine.”

It works until it doesn’t. I love that expression of energy hygiene. In my first book, The Productivity Zone, I talked about energy management as the key to managing our time because it’s how we show up for our time. I love that energy hygiene. I like it so much better than management because it’s a great word for staying on top of something important to our health.

I like energy maintenance as well because, with our physical hygiene, it’s also physical hygiene maintenance that we do. I don’t wait until I know that I need to brush my teeth or take a shower. Tapping is a great way to help with that energy maintenance, which then leads to time maintenance because we’re then able to focus. We’re not able to focus because our minds are on so many different things. If I could let go of the stress of those things, I could be right here right now and be at my absolute most effective.

 

Do you recommend that as part of what you say when you’re tapping? “If I could be right here, right now, I would be most effective.”

That’s one of the videos I have. I was sharing that with someone. It’s being present right here and right now because here in this moment, now is the only moment we’ve got. With whatever tasks we have, anything on our to-do list, we can put them on a list and say, “I want to do that later,” but right now, this moment is the only moment we’re guaranteed. It’s the only moment where we can be effective. Tapping is a great way of allowing ourselves to get right here in the present and let go of what’s not here right now so that we can focus on what is here. I think it was Tolstoy who had the three questions what’s the most important thing to do, who’s the most important person, and who is right in front of you?

Reset Moments

I have a new book that’s coming out called The Reset Mindset. I talk in the book about reset moments. I want to point out that you said in the beginning that you would check in with yourself and say, “On a scale from 1 to 10, what’s the level of this feeling that I’m feeling?” I want people to understand that and I wanted to get your take on that. You did it at the end to say, “Where am I?” Now, that I took a baseline of, “Here’s where I started. Where am I now?”

These check-ins are what I call reset moments. They help us to get clear on where we are and as we do many of them as a feedback loop, we get to where we want to go faster because we’re doing these check-ins and timeouts. How does that terminology resonate with you and also see some of those practices as that?

That makes excellent sense because what gets measured can be dealt with. If we don’t check in with how am I doing or if we’re trying to get anywhere and we’re driving to the grocery store, how do I know if I’m getting there? Otherwise, we can waste a lot of time and it brings us back to refocusing on what it is.

Tapping on its own will be a great stress relief. You don’t need to say any words. We use the word so that we stay on topic if I want to deal with this fear about this report that’s due next week. I’m randomly tapping and a shiny object over here catches my eye, I might be thinking of something else. It’s still good. The tapping I’m doing is still going to downregulate the stress. I’m still going to be getting healthier even if I’m not aware of it.

You mentioned that you felt better after the tapping. Some people might say, “I don’t know that I noticed any difference,” but it’s like taking a vitamin. You may not notice the difference right away, but it is having an effect. I say that tapping is sometimes like a vitamin and sometimes it’s like a painkiller where we notice the effect right away.

Sometimes, tapping is like taking a vitamin. You may not notice the difference right away, but it has an effect. Share on X

Using those words helps us to stay on focus and then the check-in or the reset is looking at, “How am I doing? Am I on track? Do I need to refocus on something else?” I cleared this fear about the time and now I’m more aware of the bad grade that I got in the third grade so I can reset what I’m working on. That creates a reset for us in terms of our productivity and effectiveness.

For the people tuning in, come back to that rating because I use that in so many different areas of my life to rate things. When my son did have this anxiety, it was a way for us to communicate that. He would say, “I’m feeling this anxiety,” so I could say, “Where are you on a scale from 1 to 10?” I knew what place he was at. If he would say it’s a 6, then I know that it’s not as bad, how to handle him, how to support him, and all of that kind of thing by getting that figure. Even though one would say that’s not accurate, it’s good enough. What’s important is that people understand. Do you use that?

I don’t know how old your son was when he was going through this. With younger children, because 0 to 10 can be a little bit too hard to grasp, we’ll say, “Put your hands together and that’s a zero and you stretch your arms all the way out and that’s a 10. How big is this feeling? Is it this big or is it just a little bit?” Sometimes especially for younger kids, that’s a little bit easier for them to say, “Here’s where it’s at,” so we can see, “We’re getting some progress here,” or we may be way off track and we may need to look at something else to find out what’s going on there.

That’s a great point. He was twelve at that time so he was okay with the numbers. There are so many great ways to get to an answer. One of the things I learned in neurolinguistic programming is to be flexible to find different ways to approach something and get that answer. If one way you ask doesn’t work, then find another way to ask. That might not be something that they resonate with or it’s easier to do it with their hands versus their words.

There’s no one right way forever. There are eight billion people on this planet. Some people are always asking me, “Should I stick with watching one of your videos for a week or should I switch back and forth between others?” I said, “Experiment and find what works for you.” I can’t say, “Here’s the one way that’s going to work for everybody.”

Tapping Origin Story

Brad, how did you come upon tapping?

How does a grown man find himself tapping on his face for a living? I started as an actor. I had traveled the world doing theater. I went to Hollywood to be a movie star as one does. While I was there, I met a woman, fell in love, and got married. When our first child was on the way, I thought I might need a second career to help support this family.

I’d played a doctor on TV, but not enough to support a family yet. I had always been fascinated by the power of the mind and saw an ad for a hypnotherapy school. I learned hypnotherapy and a little bit of NLP in there and started doing that. After a couple of years when our second child was on the way, I thought, “I love acting, but this is what I’m here for. This is my calling.”

Through some other hypnotherapist, I heard about this tapping work. Sometimes when people are introduced to tapping, it looks a little strange and they’re like, “No.” As an actor, one of the things I had done was I had gone to Ringling Bros. Clown College. By the time I learned tapping, that wasn’t the strangest thing I’d ever done. I was a little more open-minded than some. One of the things we did was we tapped into chocolate cravings.

On a scale of 0 to 10, if I wanted the piece of candy that we were given, I had an 8. After a few minutes of tapping, I could not eat it. I didn’t eat chocolate for two years after that. I recovered. I got better but I could see that there was something to this. I started little by little introducing it into my hypnotherapy sessions until, little by little, it became my main modality.

Don’t you love it when it takes hold of you? Somehow by serendipity, it was something that you found and then it was meant to be.

I think it was George Bernard Shaw who was saying the great joy in life is being used for something that feels that powerful.

Defining The Reset Mindset

Let me ask you before we wrap up this session. I feel like I’ve been de-stressed. I know you don’t know anything about the reset mindset other than the reset moment. How would you define those words based on your experience and where you come from?

I love the expression. In terms of this mindset, we can reset because so many people are in a stuck mindset of, “This is the way. It’s always going to be. I can’t get better at anything. I’m not going to be able to do any better.” Having that mindset that I can do a reset and I can change things, and then use the mindset as a tool for benchmarking where I’m at and getting better.

For me, tapping is a great tool for that because when we try to make changes, part of our mind perceives that as a threat. It’s like, “My life might be crap, but it’s my crap. I know where it goes. I dealt with it yesterday so I’m pretty confident I can deal with it today. Something new is uncomfortable. When we face something that feels threatening, we go into fight or flight. It may be very subtle.

We may be saying, “I’m fine.” We convince ourselves we’re fine, but we’re making poor choices and we’re moving away from what we said we wanted to go towards. We might even talk about, “I’m going to reset,” but it’s, “No, I’m staying the course.” It was because I have this stress response going on inside my body, it’s like an electric fence around our comfort zone. If I start to get close to it, I get a sense of, “I’m going to need to back off from that.” That stress is like cutting the wires to the electric fence so I can now start moving towards that change and say, “I’m okay.” It allows us then to keep moving forward and expanding that comfort zone.

I like that analogy of the electric fence. It’s so true that that often we’ll say, “Okay.” The New Year’s Resolution is a great example. “I’m going to reset. I’m going to join that gym and I even take action. I go that first time,” but we’re not in that mindset. We can use the words without following through with the practice or being in the mindset. The words don’t equal the mindset.

It doesn’t match our identity. As Dr. Joyce Brothers said, we will never consistently perform in a manner that is inconsistent with how we see ourselves. If I see myself as out of shape, a couch potato, or whatever it is, I can say, “Until the cows come home, on New Year’s Day, I’m changing everything. I’m going to the gym. I’m going to stop eating sugar,” but it’s not consistent with who I am.

Identity is another one of those comfort zones that has an electric fence around it. Tapping again is a great way of cutting them going, “Who I am?” Behind me is a picture of Michelangelo’s David. I have Davids everywhere. It was always my favorite piece of art but then it hit me, this is a great metaphor because Michelangelo said, “The statue is already there perfect inside the marble. All I have to do is chip away what doesn’t belong to reveal the masterpiece inside.”

To me, that’s the same thing we’re doing with EFT. The best version of ourselves is already in there, that version of ourselves that can do those things we resolve to do on New Year’s Day but we have all these old beliefs about why that’s not us. All these fears about the changes would mean the jealousy of our friends who might not like us getting better. All these fears are the excess marble that is containing our masterpiece. The tapping chips away and we can start to see, “I am that person who can do these things, who can have these things, who can live this life, and make the difference that only I can make.”

If you gave people one tip on how you believe they can build their reset mindset, how they can shift their identity to be whatever they want to be that New Year’s Day that they’re going to be able to be in line and take action, what’s the one thing? Is it tapping or is it something else?

It’s going to be tapping but when you find yourself not taking those actions, I tell people to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine that you already have this change and say, “It’s safe for me to have this.” You can rate that on a scale of 0 to 10. When people say, “It’s a 10.” I say it’s BS because the extent to which we don’t have what we say we want tends to be the extent to which we are resisting it.

Self-sabotage is simply misguided self-love. We’re stopping ourselves from something that feels dangerous. It’s looking at it and saying, “What would be the negative consequence of taking this action or reaching this goal?” I say I want to go to the gym, but my friends would hate me because now I am in better shape than they are or whatever it is. That’s the uncomfortable fear, “I’m afraid that people are going to be upset with me,” and then you start tapping.

All this fear that people are going to be upset with me and clear that stress and go, “That’s on them. If they’re upset with me, I’d rather be a role model for them and say, ‘Rather than both of us being unhappy, I’m going to go to a place that’s happier and healthier and I’m going to encourage you to come with me,’ because us both being stuck doesn’t help either of us.” Figure out what stops you, what’s the resistance, and then clear that with tapping and live the life you can.

Figure out what’s stopping you, and then clear that with tapping to live the life you can. Share on X

There are so many gold nuggets here in this show. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find more information about you and those videos you were talking about?

Thanks. Penny. The easiest is to go to my website, TapWithBrad.com. If you go there, there’s a free five-day program called Success Beyond Belief that helps you clear blocks to success. That’s a video program and then there are links to all kinds of different resources, including how to search my YouTube videos by topic.

Thank you so much for being here.

It was my pleasure, Penny. Thank you for having me on.

Thank you all for being here. This is probably a topic you’d never heard of before, and I promise you that this is going to make a huge difference in your life with the gold nuggets that you heard here. To recap one thing, self-sabotage is just a misguided self-love. Thank you all for being here. We’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Important Links

• Brad Yates
• The Wizard’s Wish
• Freedom at Your Fingertips
• The Productivity Zone

 

About Brad Yates

Brad Yates is known internationally for his creative and often humorous use of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), also known as Tapping. Brad is the author of the best-selling children’s book “The Wizard’s Wish,” the co-author of the best-seller “Freedom at Your Fingertips,” and a featured expert in the film “The Tapping Solution.” He has also been a presenter at a number of events, including Jack Canfield’s Breakthrough to Success, has done teleseminars with “The Secret” stars Bob Doyle and Dr. Joe Vitale, and has been heard internationally on a number of internet radio talk shows. Brad also has over 1000 videos on YouTube, that have been viewed over 47 million times. More info is available at www.tapwithbrad.com.

 

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