If you’ve ever felt stuck in self-sabotage—whether through procrastination, perfectionism, or people-pleasing—this episode is for you. Dr. Tim sits down with Carol Look , the author of The Yes Code: Transforming Sabotage into Success, to explore why we unconsciously block our own progress and how we can finally break free. Carol shares her personal journey, raw insights, and the powerful tool of EFT tapping—a scientifically-backed technique that rewires the brain’s stress response. Learn why your self-sabotage is actually an attempt to keep you safe and how you can finally shift from self-criticism to self-compassion. If you’re ready to unlock your “yes” and step into your fullest potential, don’t miss this transformative conversation.
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Carol Look – Author Of The Yes Code: Transforming Sabotage Into Success
Carol Look is a psychotherapist, founding EFT master, bestselling author, international speaker, and creator of The Yes Code. It’s her signature coaching method. She combines her traditional training as a psychotherapist with clinical hypnosis and advanced applications of Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, for unprecedented results. Known for her laser-like focus and state-of-the-art approach, Carol has used EFT tapping for over 25 years to help clients release their limiting beliefs and emotional conflicts so that they can enjoy lives of exceptional success and fulfillment. Carol is a world-renowned EFT workshop presenter. She is a regularly featured energy medicine expert on leading global telesummits and documentaries.
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Carol, welcome. Thank you for joining me this morning.
Thank you, Dr. Tim. Wonderful to be with you.
I’m excited. I’m really looking forward to your telling us about your new book, The Yes Code: Transforming Sabotage into Success as the subtitle. It’s a delightful book. Thank you for sending me a copy. I’m very glad to be able to have this conversation with you. I hope you can let us know what brought you into the process of writing this book and the key points you hope people take away from it.
The Transformative Process Of Writing The Yes Code
After years of working on myself, seeing it in my practice, and seeing people get continually frustrated with themselves, I thought, “Wait, we’ve got to back up and say, stop criticizing yourself for your sabotage behaviors and start figuring them out.” That’s how people come to me. I’m so sick and tired of my, fill in the blank, procrastination, my addictions, my people-pleasing that gets me in trouble. We really have to change that model and say, “Is the criticizing and beating yourself up doing you any good?” “No.” “Let’s ask the right questions and get to the bottom of it.” Out of my own frustration, that’s what happened for me.
I just kept digging and digging until I went, “Got it. Now I get why I would do these things and why I would get in my own way when I consciously say of course, I want to be successful. Of course, I want to do A, B, C and then not follow through.” It’s very frustrating. When you’re in it, and you’re the person, it is frustrating. You feel critical of yourself, but it’s time to change that around. I had lots of stories, lots of personal experience, and dug into my own history. I have, of course, for years doing that to figure out how we change this. How do we move forward differently around our sabotage behaviors?
One of the things that you do in the book that I really enjoy when people do it is you put plenty of your own story in there. It’s a person would have to work really hard to miss that. These tools that you’ve used and work for yourself, and now you’re sharing that with others.
There was a lot of information. There was a lot of material from my own life. We all have it but we uncover it in layers. I’ve been in the field a long time as you have. The first decade, you’re a psychotherapist. You don’t uncover everything. The first decade of getting help for yourself. You don’t uncover everything. It was a process. Dr. Tim, let’s just say that. It was a long process and a very satisfying one. That probably answers the first question, too. Why did I want to write this for other people? It’s because it’s super satisfying to get it and to figure it out and to be on the other side and to have compassion for yourself.
To have the flexibility to choose differently. Instead of being driven by these unconscious impulses. While you say we’ve all got our stuff, and that’s true to a certain level. There are also periods of time in some of our lives where we it seems there’s like a Gatling gun of challenges is being spit at us. One of the toughest things for me when I’m working with somebody in a situation like that is to help them understand this too shall pass.
Even if it goes ten times longer than you thought you could tolerate it. We’re going to get through this probably far better than we ever imagined, and yet we cannot figure out how that’s going to happen at the conscious, logical level. Perhaps you could start us off by giving us an overview of what you think is the effective mechanism that makes the EFT tapping such a useful tool for us.
Rewiring The Brain Through EFT Tapping
They’ve done the research now. We know in the beginning, we were all excited about it, and I wasn’t even in the beginning of the field. We were thrilled and excited, and our clients would say, “This is amazing. I quit smoking. I lost weight. I don’t have these issues with my relationship anymore.” There was no research to back it up. We were enthusiastic, and that’s lovely, but it didn’t cut it with doctors and psychiatrists, even though they would send us people.
The research started coming out, looking at the curative agent, the curative agent of tapping on acupuncture points that calms down the fight, flight or freeze response in your brain. What we do is we bring up a topic that frustrates us, hurts us, distresses us. Bring up a topic. We open the file. We pair it with tapping, which calms down that file that’s open, which is agitation, stress, or upset. That’s the pairing that happens. I’ve had people say, “This is just placebo.” If it’s just a placebo, great, let’s keep using it. It’s not.
They have found out that’s not how it works. We’re getting into the amygdala in the brain. The smoke alarm that gets hijacked when we’re upset. The curative agent, as David Feinstein will say, the curative agent is tapping on the points and getting into that part of your brain to do some rewiring. As I said in the beginning, we were like, “This is so wonderful, and isn’t it great? It feels better.” That’s lovely. It wasn’t enough. Now they’ve really studied and done studies on post-traumatic stress disorder, non-cravings, non-pain relief, and on other issues. The studies are all coming out saying, “No, this is not placebo, and it’s much better than other techniques.”
You mentioned David Feinstein and his wife, Donna, and Gary Craig did a book together, The Energy Psychology. They might have another one after that, but he’s a psychologist who has found tremendous benefit in this work and other energy, mind, body, energy work. As you say, he has been involved at least in monitoring the research, if not doing his own.
Yes. Gary Craig started the whole EFT version, which is the simplified algorithms compared to what was a little more complicated way back when.
We have field therapy and those things, yeah.
He had a different issue. You would tap on different points. Gary just said, “Forget it. I’m going to do the same routine every time.” He didn’t do the research. David and Donna have been involved in the research and so as Dr. Peter Stapleton in Australia. It’s exciting. It’s exciting to read it and just feel that upliftment that people, agencies, hospitals. They’ve always been involved, but now to have the research backing it is gratifying for sure.
What you’re describing is that there’s a conditioned response that I can build in myself. If I bring up a memory of something distressing from the past, the unconditioned response is I get flooded with the stress hormones, and maybe I’m in the stress response or all the way up into the fight or flight response.
What you’re suggesting is that by bringing that consciously to the surface, here is this upset that I have physically, mentally, or emotionally, and I’m going to pair that with a thought that it might get better, even though I don’t know how. I’m going to do this breathing and tapping, which brings on a rest and digest response, the parasympathetic response. Over time, that can become a new conditioned response to having that thought come up of whatever this situation was. It was traumatic.
Very quickly, it can rewire that response. That’s what they found that was so shocking in the beginning is I was part of the veteran’s trauma week with Gary Craig. How many years ago that was, and it was shocking. I didn’t know how to respond. It was so fast. It doesn’t take months and months of rewiring. Let’s pair this with a new technique, and let’s pair this with tapping. It’s quick. When done right, and you get to that trigger, it’s very fast.
I think that’s part, in a way in the beginning, that even hurt it a little bit because we were all saying, “This is the most wonderful thing we’ve ever seen.” It was. There was no science to back it up. Now, I can still say this is the best tool I’ve ever found. Now, there’s science to back it up. When you have a veteran say to you, “I’ve never felt this way. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t want to hurt myself anymore. Yes, the memories are true, and I remember them, but I’m not feeling sick over them.” As you put in your work, you listen, and your ears perk up.
The goal for most of us who are in this work trying to help others is to have them reach that position where they feel differently about something that, minutes ago, was very connected in their minds to tremendous upset or avoidance. To come back to the focus of your book, why did you choose The Yes Code as a title?
The Yes Code Framework
The Yes Code is the simplified version of my coaching and therapy, which is to clarify your vision, get really clear about it, then ask those questions. If that’s your vision and that’s what you want, why aren’t you there yet? The tool of EFT comes in to clear the blocks, clear your sabotage, clear what’s in your way, and then find out what your next step is. What is your next yes? That’s just what I use with clients and in workshops. It just cuts out a lot of extra steps, cuts out a lot of noise, and just says, “Let’s just cut to the chase here. What do you want? What’s in your way, and how are we going to get there?”
There’s an ongoing, I’ll call it a discussion, debate between people who say that when you have a script for tapping on something, it’s the best thing ever or the people who say, “No, the scripts don’t really work for me. I need to have it. You individualized to myself.” Can you talk a little bit about your position on that?
The scripts are great. If you can be flexible and say, “That wording that Carol wrote out is close, but not exactly what I’m going through.” You can switch the words, and you can tweak the words and say, “That’s the topic. I’m in the ballpark here, but I’d like to tweak it a little bit.” I had someone this week saying, “I cannot do what you do by myself in my living room.” Of course not, because I’ve got a second pair of eyes and ears for you.
I hear and see things that someone cannot do on themselves, but you can get far with scripts. You can get far with videos and scripts and what’s in the book and say, “I’m in the right area, and that’s close.” It’s about feelings. When I was working in the weight loss part of this field, people would say, “You cannot possibly understand me. You’ve never been obese.” For me, I was 25 pounds heavier, didn’t feel good, and didn’t look good, and I didn’t like it, but I was not medically obese.
I would say to them, “No, I’m not and have not been. However, we have both felt shame. We have both felt guilt. We have both felt rage. We have both felt deep pain and trauma.” That would drop their resistance to me being the one helping them because I didn’t know what I couldn’t possibly get in their shoes because people get hooked on what’s the trauma, what’s the problem, smoking, weight, relationship issues, yelling at your kids. They get focused on that.
People often focus on the problem—smoking, weight, or relationship issues—rather than the shared emotions. That’s why scripts work: you can tap on guilt, even if its source differs. Share on XForm an identity from it.
Instead of what do we have in common here? That’s why the scripts work. You can work on your guilt when someone else is working on guilt, even if your guilt is about something completely different. Would I always like to have that personalized psychotherapist or trained EFT practitioner in front of me working on me? Absolutely. We all, I think we all would. The scripts work, and figuring out your own way to do it works.
I love helping people with that. Sometimes in my office, they’ll say, “I couldn’t possibly do it. I don’t know how to do it.” I say, “I want you to take me through one round of tapping on your issue.” They’re like, “I couldn’t possibly.” I just walk them through it, and one round and they say, “That wasn’t as hard as I thought.” They have to be in that seat and do it on me, and then they say, “I could do that. It’s close.” Our perfectionism gets involved in this too, of course.
You list seven of the most common self-sabotaging behaviors, and perfectionism is number two on the list.
It’s a big one.
I really like the ideas that you’ve pulled together here because while it may not cover everybody, there’s a lot of commonality. When you list these seven, procrastination, perfectionism, people-pleasing, addictions, clutter, relationship drama, and self-care neglect, that may not cover everything for everyone, but boy, everybody’s got something of those seven in their lives to one level or another. Maybe not to the point where they consider it a problem, but there’s going to be a way to identify with so much of what you brought out in the book. That’s one of the big benefits I see.
Thank you. Somebody might say or they might not identify as an addict or alcoholic in any way, but they’re spending three hours on Facebook when they could be doing something else. There’s an addictive quality, and maybe someone isn’t a full-fledged people pleaser, but you can see how they do not honor themselves and their feelings around their boss or around their father, their mother, or somebody specific in their family. You can see shades of all of this. There’s pathological procrastination, and then there’s just a little bit of procrastination around tax time or around a project you need to send in. Human beings are complex, and we’re always on a continuum with our behaviors.
One of the things that I think is so beneficial about a book like yours is that if people are willing to read it, they’ll discover they’re not alone. That’s one of the big things. There’s this very well thought out template for beginning to look at where I might be stuck and why. You go through so many things, like procrastination being the biggest first one you have. You’ve got examples of people you’ve worked with and the template for analyzing where they’re stuck. Step by step, the template for tapping through it and giving people the scripts for tapping through it.
I find that people are always surprised. The feedback I’ve been getting about the book is, “Carol, I don’t feel alone, and thank you for sharing your story.” I thought, of course, my story, there’s not enough trauma, there’s not enough terrible things that happened. I was raised by alcoholic parents, and a lot happens with alcoholism. You get messages with alcoholism as much as my parents loved us, and I knew it and I felt it, and we had so many advantages, then they would drink. That gives a message. They wouldn’t stop.
My mother would go to rehab and come home and drink again after a rehabilitation facility for 30 days. You get messages that way. People have said, “I don’t feel so alone and know our stories are not the same, but I felt lost also.” Some version of lost or in pain. They’re always surprised by the questions and that they’re afraid to be visible. They’re always surprised. “I’m afraid to shine? I didn’t really get that. Is that why I’m putting a lid on myself? My comfort zone is because I don’t want to stand out again.” There’s always an again.
I don’t have to know them, and they can say, “I’m afraid to stand out now.” I will ask, “What happened last time?” They’ll say, “How did you know?” It’s because you would not be afraid of shining and standing out now if there wasn’t a significant event in your life where you got hurt, got in trouble, got scolded, target of jealousy. We all have these issues from our past in 6th grade, 5th grade high school, college doesn’t matter. There’s something back there that says, “You are safer.” The main issue in the book is talking about safety, meaning our sabotage behaviors are to keep us safe. Start there. The shame goes away, then you want to scold yourself, then you have to be on yourself, “Here I go again.” You can just say, “I’ve been trying to keep myself safe in this odd, interesting, unhelpful way, but it is helpful.” Once they get that, something really shifts in their view of themselves and their view of their behavior. Our culture is very obsessed with behavior and often misses the beliefs and the feelings that would drive the behavior. If you want different results, we have to go to the feelings and the beliefs. Clean up the clutter. Sure. Lose the weight. Sure. Put the alcohol down. What about the beliefs and the feelings?
Our culture is obsessed with behavior and often misses that beliefs and feelings drive it. To get different results, we must address the feelings and beliefs. Share on XThat was driving the whole situation. As you just alluded to, if you don’t clear that up, you have paid professionals to come in and take away all the clutter. Wait six weeks, it’ll be back.
The Role Of Beliefs In Driving Behavior
Six weeks. I have a client who is in debt $50,000, and someone paid it off for her, and it took three months to get back up. She was shocked. I have seen it, and we have to get to that bottom line. You were talking about beliefs in the beginning, and I always say beliefs are compulsive. We cannot help it. The way someone might be a compulsive drinker or compulsive gambler. Compulsive means you cannot control the beginning or the end of something. You’ve lost control over that. Our beliefs are compulsive, too. We have to follow them. If you can tweak your beliefs, a negative belief would be, I’m not worth it. I’m not worth the time and attention. I don’t deserve this. I’m not something enough. I’m not smart enough, good enough, young enough, something.
It’s too late. I cannot undo all the damage. There’s not enough time left in my life.
You start switching those, you cannot help but follow the new belief. When I ask the questions, they come up with, “I didn’t realize I was so convinced of this.” Again, things start to percolate. Things start to happen when you ask the right questions and get to the bottom line rather than, “I need an organizer to throw this stuff, all my junk, out. I need a nutritionist to put me on a diet. I need to just put the alcohol down and stay away from bars.” It’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s a good start. If I don’t get to whatever the thing is that I’ve labeled as a symptom, if I don’t uncover how that’s actually been a solution, then it will probably come back as a solution and look to be, to me, a failure or a symptom of failure. One of the things that, especially in trauma work, they talk about is people who remember all kinds of gory details about a trauma, but it just keeps coming back.
What if you conceptualize that I’m remembering all kinds of horrible things about it except what was the actual worst part for me? The concept of the T minus one in a countdown right before the biggest thing. I remember everything right up to the last moment before the worst thing happens. I don’t remember the actual worst thing because some part of my mind has made the decision to say, “Tim, this is too much for you to handle. You wouldn’t survive remembering this.”
I’m stuck in the loop of remembering all of the gory details right up to that moment and then shutting down. When I can calm the system with something like the EFT tapping and reassure myself that, “Wait a minute, if I’ve already lived through it, it cannot hurt me anymore than it already has.” There’s probably this error in thought behind this loop of pain that just keeps replaying.
If I can get myself with a coach like you or with a book like yours, if I can get myself to be willing to use the tool and bring down that agitation and that overstimulation in my central nervous system and then invite this thing like, “How do I invite it?” You ask questions like you’ve got all over your book. These beautiful questions are laid out in terms of themes for different problems like procrastination or, people-pleasing or, perfectionism, or the addiction issue. The book’s been out since, what, October of last year of 24. What’s some of the most rewarding feedback you’ve had so far about the book?
I would say people saying they read the questions and were shocked about their own answers. I recommend they read the questions, “What’s the upside of staying stuck?” “People, don’t be silly. There’s no upside.” I say, “Ask again.” They’re shocked by what comes up. They’re not horrified by their answers. They’re like, “I didn’t know I was operating that way.” Some people even take it with trauma. It’s not a trauma book, but you can use EFT beautifully for trauma.
They’ll say, “I didn’t realize I was using the trauma loop that you just described, using that to keep myself safe. If I get stuck in those ten details, I can stay away from my perception of the truth, which is that I’m afraid of what it means about me.” This idea of the safety people are saying to me and writing me, the a-ha moments on the safety, because the other batch of questions is, what’s the downside of reaching your goal?
“I’ve been trying to reach my goal for ten years. How would you tell me there’s a downside?” Have you asked yourself this question? They do. They find out information. As I said earlier, people saying, “Thank you for sharing your story because you have been through it. You haven’t been through what I’ve been through. Maybe my traumas are not as bad at all, but the suffering, the feelings being lost. A lot of grief, a lot of death.” People can relate to that, and they have. That’s been very rewarding.
I think when you mentioned safety, as I was reading the book, I have several people in my caseload who are stuck, really feeling overwhelmed, really agitated when they come up against their procrastination. Being able to shine the spotlight on this question of safety for them has been a real eye-opener. They’re just looking at it in terms of my lack, my unworthiness, my lack of skills or resources. That’s why I’m feeling overwhelmed rather than staying in this overwhelmed state, it is protecting you from something else over here. What is it that I can do to acknowledge what I’m doing is keeping me safe and the ways it’s keeping me safe? Perhaps find some different ways to enact that same level of safety that are a little bit more adaptive.
The Safety Mechanism Of Sabotaging Behaviors
I think when people hear the concept around safety and protection and that all these behaviors, even though your family’s criticizing you, your boss is upset with you, you’re upset with yourself, that the concept of you’re just trying to keep yourself safe does loosen this grip of the criticism and the shame. Something about it is like, “Oh.” I’ll say to them, 100 % of human beings and animals want to feel safe. You’re just doing what you’re programmed to do, and that’s never going to change.
What you need to see differently is what is safe and what is unsafe. Now, someone says, “I wasn’t safe as a child in all these instances.” They’ll say, “I’m older now.” I don’t want to hold on to the old belief. I’m the one who keeps myself safe now. A lot of people bring forward this feeling of a lack of safety with other humans because they haven’t resolved the trauma. Bessel van der Kolk says, “Trauma is resolved in community with other people. It cannot be resolved and healed on your own because traumas happen with other people.”
They need to be resolved and healed in a community. Even if the community is five people, it doesn’t have to be huge. This idea of safety and protection helped me certainly because it got my self-criticism. I shouldn’t be a perfectionist, and I shouldn’t took that away and get me curious. Why on earth would I procrastinate in this scenario again? Why on earth would I keep myself playing small?
Traumas happen with other people, so they need to be resolved and healed within a community. Share on XI don’t want to be small. How is that behavior protecting me from something that I haven’t looked at yet? People are just repeatedly saying things like that, “That opened up a door where I could walk in and take a look around, shine the flashlight.” Instead of saying, “There I go again. See, I told you I wasn’t filling the blank. What? Good enough. My father was right. He said I wouldn’t amount to
anything.” Whatever the phrases are that we heard that sometimes still here in our head. We’ve got to release those, and the safety conversation has helped a lot of people. As I say, it certainly helped me.
In reading the book, it echoes back to Diederik Wolsak’s work. He’s got a Choose Again worksheet where, essentially, he’s identifying a negative emotion in the moment and then asking oneself, “I went one of the first times that I felt this particular flavor of this emotion.” He says, “Just go with it. You ask the question like you’re saying, ask these questions and something will answer.”
If I remember, “This is a lot like what happened when I was eight years old, and this was happening in third grade or whatever.” If I go back and pretend that I’m interviewing my eight-year-old self, and I asked the question, “Tim, what did you make it mean about yourself that the teacher called you out in front of the class?” The meaning about me that got downloaded back then is part of what drives my response as an adult whenever that memory or trauma gets reactivated.
Instead of sitting here like a competent therapist with a doctorate and 50 years of experience doing therapy, I’m sitting here as a scared eight-year-old with only those resources. Maybe stammering, maybe fumbling, and it’s in that recognition of what I made it mean about me that only comes out with this softening, perhaps the EFT tapping to get the whole system calmed down, and then the asking with this willingness to hear what might bubble up. That’s transformative. That’s all through your book.
Identifying And Releasing Childhood Triggers
Thank you. Another question that I’ll ask people is if they’re on Zoom or in front of me or at a workshop, I can see something in their face that turns. You see that, what that’s like. Just a slight shadow comes over, and I’ll say, “How old do you feel?” They’ll always look surprised, and I’ll say, “Eight. Why?” You see it in their face, and you can feel it energetically. They can unpack what happened when they were a kid and say, “Oh.”
As you said, instead of acting like a competent psychologist with an incredible degree and experience, they’re regressing to this immaturity instantly. The relief of that, the number of times people will say, “I had no idea it was connected to that.” I love that phrase in the EFT. “I had no idea this had anything to do with what so-and-so, the teacher, said when I was in sixth grade.” I love that phrase because that means we’re on to something. We’re getting there. We’re getting to the reasons.
When you’re talking about that, I have a memory of a couple of people I work with. If they’re crying about something that’s actually happening in their life, there’s a certain set of tones and volume to it. When they’re crying because they’ve been triggered to something from the past, it’s dramatically different. I can hear it instantly. When I can bring their awareness to that, if they’re willing, they can start to hear it. What happens most often is they get defensive.
Even though I’m holding up the mirror so they can see, look at this. You’re clearly feeling like a five-year-old or an eight-year-old. It’s in your tone of voice, it’s in the volume. It’s in the shakiness. You were crying about this thing earlier, and it was just very different. It was very solid. There are actual tears without the voice quivering. One of the people I like to work with is Dr. Michael Rice, and he talks about willingness being the cosmic grease.
If we can get the willingness to come up within us, or if we got a really good coach like you or a book like yours, we might get enticed to allow willingness to start coming in. The questioning is so critical. It’s like Rilke talks about how we must learn to live in that questioning state without demanding an answer. That’s another great aspect of your book. It’s just loaded with questions at every level. If people are willing to pick up your book and find the target self-sabotaging behaviors that are biggest up for them, and then start reading these questions, the answers are going to start coming to them.
They do start coming, and that’s what’s fun, and that’s what’s gratifying, and that’s what I loved about working on myself. I always say I would never ask you something or do something for you or introduce you to something that I have not done on myself. I have been the guinea pig for my work for 30 years, which is appropriate and healthy, and boy, did I learn a lot. I’ll say these questions have been around forever, but no one ever asked me these questions about my behavior.
No one said, “Carol, you’re trying to protect yourself.” “No, I’m not.” No one ever asked me. Turning them around to the sabotage behavior, I just found it helpful and took, as I said, that shame away, took the shoulds away when someone is defensive, which they can be when I’ll say, “What’s the downside to reaching your goal?” That defensiveness comes up. All I know is they had to defend themselves a lot as a child. They had to go into that space. They were criticized and accused and scolded. Working with that is interesting.
Eventually, we hope to get them around and say, “Just guess if there was a reason that you are using food, alcohol, cigarettes, boyfriends, whatever it is, addictively. What would you be trying not to feel? I don’t know.” The first answer is, “I don’t know.” What do you think could be underneath that? It took me a long time to get to the extent of grief that I didn’t know I had in my life. How do you not know? It’s because you keep going. It’s because I was happy, because I was competent, because I had a great life. Underneath the eating and the smoking, I didn’t drink because my family was alcoholic, and I thought, “I’m not going down that road. What did that do for me?”
Had to find another way.
Just went the other way. Finding out that the grief and once I got through the grief, the compulsive wanting to use something went away. Now, instantly, no. The grief, I also talk about trauma versus big trauma, T as you work with, and little T trauma. What my bigger trauma was waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s helped a lot of people. I’m saying, “I didn’t have a car accident, and I wasn’t beaten. I mind nobody died when I was ten.” “No, for me either.” However, looking over my shoulder and waiting for the next thing to happen set up my nervous system and set me up to be hyper-vigilant and waiting and looking and what’s going to happen and cannot be safe.
The Physical And Emotional Connection In Healing
There you go, the safe word. It’s not safe. For some reason, I’m not going to be safe unless I keep that heightened level of agitation.
Which, over the years, can do a number on your immune system. That’s the other door. We talk about doors in EFT. Gary Craig always talked that way, which was great. If you have a symptom, go in the door of the symptom or go in the door of the emotion or go in the door of what’s going on now that you feel limited by your diagnosis. Go in different doors. For me, going in those different doors was helpful.
Just saying, “Wait a minute, I have been hyper vigilant for years. What happened is I ended up with a tumor here and a hemangioma here and a polyp here and all sorts of medical stuff quite early that I wasn’t totally on board yet with the physical and emotional being all connected because I was in corporate at the time.” I got there quickly, saying, “What’s going on in my body? Is this a stress response?”
Just because I could stay up and not get a lot of sleep and I had terrible insomnia, just because I didn’t think I needed a lot of sleep doesn’t mean I should have done that. I have lived without that. Insomnia was the first thing that I cleared in myself by doing tapping. It was like, “Something’s happening here.” All I did was I didn’t focus on my own insomnia. I was tapping with everybody else. I was all excited and enthusiastic in the beginning, and I was a hypnotist also. When you’re a hypnotist, people come to you for, they say, “You’re my last resort.”
Smoking, weight loss, anxiety, panic disorder. That’s why they come to you when you’re a hypnotist. I would tap with them. New clients, old clients, just tap. “Yes, I’ll do hypnosis. I have found this new tapping technique.” It calmed down my general anxiety, stress, and hypervigilance enough that I started sleeping. I wasn’t even targeting insomnia. I woke up one day and said, “I fell asleep. I think I went to bed early last night.” I started, and I saw the pattern, but I wasn’t even identifying it as the big problem for my immune system or my functioning at work or anything. It was just, “Have insomnia. Do you?” I wasn’t seeing it that way.
When we’re at a certain younger age, the negative effects of that aren’t so blatant. They’re not right there in our face. Over time, that depleted immune system and that depleted reservoirs of energy start showing up in physical disruptions. I love that you put so much of that in your story about that in the book. It’s a real gift to people. Before we got started, you mentioned it’s a hard stop for you coming up here.
Let me ask you to get centered and just do a quick review of what we’ve talked about so far, what I’ve asked about. If there’s something in that you want to go back and highlight or something, an aspect of either your work with people or the book that we haven’t even covered yet. Just take a minute and get centered, and let me know what you want to make sure we get in here.
The Power Of Daily EFT Tapping For Consistent Healing
Thank you. What I feel bubbling up is hope. The hope that I felt because I changed so many things. The hope is that people who I’ve worked with over 30 years and I don’t know how many countries all over the world and all the other practitioners doing this work. The hope that they are told about and that people come up to them or write them emails. The hope is in transforming sabotage into success.
That’s really the key here. I don’t want people to say, “It’s not for me or my issues aren’t quote. They don’t quite fit into those categories.” There is so much hope here. There’s so much we could focus on that is not hopeful, but there is so much to change that’s exciting. It’s exciting about your health and about your relationship. Relationship drama is a big one in the book, and people don’t understand why three relationships, three husbands, and three wives in a row are the same personality because they’re not asking the questions.
Sometimes, you have to hit bottom before you say, “I’m done. I give. What’s going on? I think hope is the message that I want the transforming can happen and can happen with scripts, can happen in a book when you keep with it. I do my tapping as part of my self-care routine every single day. I didn’t used to do it every day. Tim, I would do a workshop, and I’d be doing my clients, and then I would work on tapping maybe when I thought there was something really big.
That’s not the way to address your life. You need to have self-care routines. I speed walk, I meditate, and I tap, and you need routines that make you feel better every day, not just when the chips are down. I think that’s something very common in our culture as well. When you’re in crisis, call a therapist, call a coach. When you’re in crisis, you better do your meditation. It’s those daily practices that can change your life. Even if someone says, “I don’t sabotage myself. I’m not an addict, I don’t procrastinate.”
You need self-care routines. You need daily practices that make you feel better every day—not just when the chips are down. Those consistent routines can truly change your life. Share on XYou can still go to the website and get the free downloads of the nine videos I have, and you can learn how to tap and tap for anything else in your life. I make it simple, and EFT is super simple. I don’t have anything to do with that, but you choose a target. Plug it in. Do the tapping. Use the curative agent, as David would say, and tap on the acupuncture points on your face and body and release and rewire. You’ll get incredible, important, and exciting results. That’s what I keep going back to. Here I am, however many years later after EFT, and still getting the results that are exhilarating.
I would teach an all-day class on the EFT tapping from 9:00 to 4:30 or whatever. On Saturdays, I would do it 2 or 3 times a year. It would come up on a regular basis, and people would ask me, “Do you use it now?” I say what I’ve noticed is, I offer it to every patient that I see in my office because it’s a tool they can be using between sessions that isn’t in lieu of therapy, but it’s in support of therapy, and it’s an empowering tool.
If I’ve got 4 or 5 patients coming in, new patients, and I’m teaching it to them and I’m tapping with them. I wake up in the middle of the night, and I have a bad dream going or something, and I remember to tap. I tap, and I’m right back to sleep, and everything’s great. If I’ve gone for 3 or 4 or 5 weeks and I’m not tapping on my own. I don’t have new people that I’m teaching, I’m not teaching the class, and I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m having a bad dream and I toss and I turn, I’m up for an hour, hour and a half, the next morning.
I sit and have breakfast and thinking, “What’s that all about?” I realized, “I didn’t even think to tap because it’s not top of mind.” The more I use it, the more benefit I get from that tapping routine. Also, the secondary or tertiary level of benefit is it’s going to stay top of mind for the next upset that crosses my path or that I decide is upsetting in life. Powerful benefits come from that sustained approach that you’re talking about, making it a part of my health self-care routine.
I also think that we get a little hooked on the tens. We start by saying, “On a scale of 0 to 10, where is your upset or your distress?” We get a little fixated on, “This is an eight, and this is a nine.” When you tap all that every day, and when you tap the way we do with our clients, there are a lot of threes and fours that need attention.
That can be very healing for your physiology and for your emotional makeup to not just look for the big traumas, the big thing that happened, which when you’ve been tapping for years and years, you’ve usually taken care of a lot of the traumas and the big things, but to work on something that still gets you. Work on something that’s a 3 or 4. Sometimes, people say, “Carol, what do you tap on at the end of the day? You’re tapping all the time with people, and you’ve done it for years.” There’s always something, Tim.
Especially when you just expand it to say, “Even if it’s a 2 or 3 or 4, I’m going to tap on it. It’s powerful.
I live in this life and have a life and family and work. We’re never going to run out of challenges, are we?
Not likely. It hasn’t been my experience, I’ll put it that way. I won’t say that I know for sure, but it hasn’t been my experience that I’m ever going to run out of stuff to choose an interpretation for that generates upset in me.
Choose. Lots of choices here.
Thank you so much for taking the time. I know we’re hitting that hard stop, but it’s a delightful book. It’s The Yes Code by Carol Look. The subtitle is Transforming Sabotage into Success. Is there a preferred way that you’d like to have people reach out to you if they want to touch base or give you a comment on the book?
They are welcome to go to TheYesCode.com. If they just put their name in there, they can get the freebies, all the free stuff. Email me at Carol@CarolLook.com. I love hearing from people.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. It’s delightful.
Thank you, Tim. It’s wonderful being with you.
Important Links
- Carol Look
- Carol Look Email
- The Yes Code
- The Yes Code: Transforming Sabotage into Success
- The Energy Psychology
About Carol Look
Carol Look is a psychotherapist, Founding EFT Master, best-selling author, international speaker and creator of The Yes Code, her signature coaching method. She combines her traditional training as a psychotherapist with clinical hypnosis and advanced applications of EFT for unprecedented results.
Known for her laser-like focus and state-of-the-art approach, Carol has used EFT Tapping for over 25 years to help clients release their limiting beliefs and emotional conflicts, so they can enjoy lives of exceptional success and fulfillment. Carol is a world-renowned EFT workshop presenter. She is a regularly featured energy medicine expert on leading global telesummits and documentaries.
