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Rules: What are they good for?
Are you limiting your potential by following other people's rules?

At the heart of all personal growth is a process of defining the rules we live by: identifying the rules we have been following without realising it, adjusting or throwing out the rules that we no longer need, and creating new rules that reflect who we want to be now.  But why have rules at all? In his book "The Power of Myth", Joseph Campbell retells the story of the Lion and the Camel:

   "When you are a young person, you are a Camel. The Camel gets down on its knees and says "Put a load on me". ...This is receiving the instruction and the information that your society knows you must have to live a competent life. When the Camel is well loaded it gets up on its feet and runs out into the desert where it becomes transformed into a Lion. The heavier the load, the more powerful the Lion.
   The function of the Lion is to kill a Dragon. And the name of the Dragon is 'Thou Shalt'. And on every scale of the Dragon there is a 'Thou Shalt" imprinted. Some of it comes from 4,000 years ago, some of it comes from yesterday morning's newspaper headline. When the Dragon is killed, the Lion is transformed into a Child - an innocent Child living out of its own dynamic. ...The mature individual.  
   The 'Thou Shalt' is a civilising force...it turns a human animal into a civilised human being. But then the one who has thrown off the 'Thou Shalt' is still a civilised human being.  
   There comes a time of using the Rules and not being used by them."

Rules create a structure which allows some things and prevents others. Ideally, rules provide you with the structure that supports goals you have chosen. Rules should be in the service of Goals. But, many of us have turned that round, made rules our master and allowed them to define our goals. We remain Camels, long after we should have run into the desert to slay the Dragon.

The idea of throwing away rules is unsettling for most people. We fear a world of "No Rules".
But the alternative to following a rule is not anarchy or chaos. The alternative to following a rule is following another rule. (Even Anarchists have rules - there must be no leaders, all members of society must be treated as equal, for example.)

In fact, we change and ignore rules all the time. If you want to play football, then you follow the rule of not touching the ball with your hands. But then if you want to play basketball, what happens if you take the football rule into the basketball game? Firstly, you can never really play the game and can certainly never score. Secondly, you create conflict with the other players, getting angry with them for not following the rule you are following - or them getting angry with you.

Here is a more blurred, social situation: should you make eye contact with people you don't know? On the London Underground, the unwritten "rule" is to avoid eye contact, unless you want to be seen as either too threatening or too approachable. But in a job interview, the rule is to maintain good eye contact with the interviewer to build rapport and appear confident. Why are the rules different in these two situations? Because the goals are different. When the goal changes, so do the rules. When we change what we want, we MUST change the rules we follow  to get it.

The trouble is, we are brought up to think that "following rules is good" and "breaking rules is bad". And because we equate rule-following with moral "goodness", we then feel morally superior to people who don't follow the same rules as us. Or else we feel the need to follow the same rules as those we regard as superior to us, so that we can take on their "goodness". We adopt their rules.

Needing to have the same rules as someone else is a death knell to being able to define your own life.  Since rules define what's possible. Adopting someone else's rules means you have handed over the potential of your own life and limited it to what someone else has defined for you.

So how do we change our goals, and define new rules for ourselves, without all the internalised guilt or discomfort triggering us back into conformity? Coaching allows you to envision new goals for yourself in an environment where you won't be judged and you can be encouraged to imagine just a bit further than you can do by yourself. And EFT can be used to eliminate the negative feelings around "breaking" the old rules that aren't serving you anymore. It can also help you to create new choices about the rules you want to create for yourself from now on.

Rules are good for one thing - taking you towards a goal - so be careful which rules you follow.

New! Dating Support program for "Grown-up Singles"

A unique new program for 30+ singles entering the world of dating.

Looking for a committed relationship when you are in your 30's 40's or 50's can seem like a very daunting prospect. I know from my own experience that people in this age group (I call them Grown-up Singles) have three things in common:

- They want to learn from their past mistakes and not take their past mistakes into a new relationship.

- They have a strong sense of who they are and what matters to them and they want a partner who will complement that.

- They don't want to waste time on unsuitable people or casual relationships.

Whether you're thinking of joining a dating agency, placing a personal ad, joining a singles or dinner club or even giving online dating a try, essentially all these agencies can do is to introduce you to people. The tricky business of arranging dates, speaking to people you don't know and negotiating the early stages of a new relationship, are all left to you!

My Dating Support program combines ongoing coaching with EFT to do what agencies and clubs don't do:

- Identify and clear past relationship issues
- Clarify personal values and life purpose
- Define your relationship requirements
- Build confidence
- Choose suitable ways to meet people
- Support you during the dating process   including assessing prospective dates,   date "post-mortems", pacing involvement   and more.
- Keep you in good emotional shape and   handle the ups and downs of dating easily.

NB - I no longer run this as a specific program - but EFT and AFT can still help you clear past relationships and help main new ones.
6/10/2006  

Content-free EFT: using EFT on two unnamed problems at once.

Recently I was demonstrating EFT to a married couple in a social situation, and had decided to do them both at the same time. I asked them both to think of a specific issue that was causing them concern.  Usually this is a prompt for people to start talking about what's bothering them, which then gives me clues and insights about the problem and what sort of setup statements to use, but in this case they both just nodded and said nothing.

Perhaps it was because they didn't want to tell me or perhaps they didn't want to tell each other, but I decided to go ahead without asking for more information. The husband reported an intensity of 9 out of 10 for his issue, the wife reported 6 out of 10 for hers. I then did the setup with both of them, using the same general setup: "Even though I have this problem, I deeply and completely accept myself". After one round, the husband's intensity had dropped to a 6 and the wife's to a 3. We did a further round, with a slightly modified setup "Even though I still have this problem,...". His intensity was now a 2 and hers was a 1.

Since it was a demo rather than a real client session, we left it there. And by now the husband was eagerly describing how he now felt compared to before and starting to reveal details of the issue itself. It's often the case that once the "charge" has been taken out of an emotional problem it becomes easier to talk about - I took this as the best sign of all that EFT had once again worked its magic.
 

Gary's Corner

Gary Craig, the originator of EFT maintains an excellent website packed with real case histories. Each month I select one case history that really shows the power and range of EFT.

This month:

Taking relationships work to a new level--The Odd Couple

In this example, Gary uses EFT on both halves of an existing relationship with a seemingly insoluble problem.

Learn EFT now! You can start using EFT for yourself right now by downloading my EFT QuickStart manual.