The Benefits of Tapping with Brad Yates

eorge grombacher 0:02
Brad Yates has been helping people to become the best possible versions of themselves for over 20 years through tapping. He is a speaker, a coach, a writer and a YouTuber. Welcome to the show, Brad.

Brad Yates 0:16
Thanks, George. I’m happy to be here.

george grombacher 0:17
excited to have you on. Tell us a bit about your personal life more about your work, why you do what you do?

Speaker 1 0:25
Yes, so I, personal life I live my wife and Sacramento and our cat that we rescued at the peak of the pandemic. I have two grown kids who live very far away one in another country. And, and I spend most of my time tapping on my face help along with other people either on online or in person, trying to help them clear out what doesn’t belong, changing their minds about things so that they can feel better, do better and live better. Been doing this, as you said just over 20 years. I started out as an actor, and had traveled the world doing theater came to Hollywood to be a movie star as one does. And while there I met this woman fell in love and got married. And when our first child was on the way I thought I might need a secondary career. So I had I saw an ad for hypnotherapy school. I thought, well, wouldn’t that be an interesting career, started doing that and building a small practice alongside my acting career. And after a couple of years when our second child was on the way, I realized as much as I love acting, this is what I’m here for doing personal development work. And we left Los Angeles moved to Northern California to be closer to our families. And through some other hypnotherapist I heard about this, this energy psychology conference where they were doing this tapping thing. And I thought, Okay, that sounds interesting. I’ll try that. And especially, it was fascinating, especially when we tapped on chocolate cravings. And I went from being a chocoholic to not being able to chocolate for two years, and I did recover. But I thought, okay, there’s, there’s something here and and so I started introducing that into my sessions. And little by little, it became my main modality. And then here we are.

george grombacher 2:23
Excellent. What’s with your kids moving so far away?

Speaker 1 2:29
Try not dig dig in. Personally, George, it says it’s, and it’s not about their mom, either. It’s just they, my son went to school in Ohio and, and just got a job there. And my daughter was a minor in Irish studies and thought she wants to continue her studies in Ireland and just loves it there. So I can’t I can’t blame them for finding a place they love.

george grombacher 2:54
You want to be an actor go to Hollywood, you want to learn more about Ireland? Go to Ireland. Exactly. Awesome. So tell me a little bit more about tapping. How long have people known about this been practicing it?

Speaker 1 3:08
Yeah, so tapping is based on acupuncture. So for 1000s of years in Chinese medicine, they’ve said, there’s a flow of energy through the body along these pathways called meridians. And when this energy is flowing, naturally, we experience our natural state of health and well being physically and emotionally. When this energy gets stuck, or disrupted in some way, we don’t feel so good, we don’t think is clearly we don’t make the best choices. And that has all kinds of unfortunate consequences. So in traditional Chinese medicine, the doctor would stick needles in these key points to stimulate that healthy flow of energy. We’re using this tapping is around 1980 or so that a psychologist named Roger Callahan is working with a woman with a lifelong water phobia. And after a year and a half, working with her with traditional psychotherapy, wasn’t getting much movement on her water phobia. And she had been to other therapists throughout her life. And he was learning about acupressure. It’s expanding his horizons. And he said one day, what is the physical experience that you have? And she said, Well, it’s I got a knot in my stomach. And he said, let’s see if we could do something about that. And this endpoint for the stomach Marines right under the eye. Let me just, you know, tap here and see if that helps your stomach. And after a moment, she said, it’s gone. I said, what’s gone on? She said, the fear and she runs out of the house towards a swimming pool is running after saying Wait, stop. She was no, no. I know, I don’t know how to swim. I’m not going to jump in. But she got down by the water and start splashing water in her face and said, I feel fine. And so naturally, he thought, well, that’s interesting. Smoke starts experimented with different patients and finds that with different issues, he needs to tap different points in different algorithms and and within a year, he put himself out of business because all of his people coming to about a weekly basis were like, Hey, see a doc. So he starts teaching this what he called thought field therapy. And one of his first students was gentleman named Gary Craig, who had his degree in engineering from Stanford. And thinking, like an engineer used to look at all these complicated algorithms and said, what if we just, there’s only eight points that we’re using? What if we just tap them all in a in a line, and called this simpler version, EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques. And so that was around 1980, Roger Callahan discovered that I think Gary was learning from him in the summer in the 80s. And it’s been growing from there. And then we’re able to spread in all kinds of ways. It was around 2007, when YouTube was relatively new, and I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a tapping video, people could start their morning with, and I’ll call it, tap of the morning. And you can see why my daughter was in dire things. And put that out there with no expectation of ever making another YouTube video who’s like, Hey, I’ve got a video on YouTube. Now. I’m now in part of that. And that’s all there is. Six months later, I thought I should probably have one to end the day. And I’ll call it tap at the evening. And then I’m done. And now I have, like, 1500 videos on YouTube.

george grombacher 6:28
So Emotional Freedom Techniques is the technical name for tapping. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it was energy flowing through the meridians of our body. Is it fair to think about this as as a software issue versus a hardware issue?

Speaker 1 6:49
Well, it’s a it’s a mixture, you know, it is. So what happens is, we have this part of the brain called the amygdala, and in the limbic system, and it looks for threats. So when we when we perceive a threat of some sort, then we go into fight or flight, really useful when our brains were first developing about 200,000 years ago, and they were, you know, Saber toothed Tigers or neighboring tribes with spears or things like that. And we’d go into fight or flight, but it’s still reacts, if, if somebody says something offensive to us, and our body starts pumping adrenaline and cortisol, and it has all kinds of effects on the body. And it damages our immune system, our digestive system. And we’re most of us are in a constant state of low level fighter flight, cortisol pumping all the time. So So while the tapping was originally based on acupuncture, we have a growing body of scientific research showing different things that it does, including down regulating stress. In several studies that have been done, cortisol levels have dropped by an average of 25 to 40%. Just so staggering, that the first time this the study was done, the lab technicians throughout the results, saying that’s not possible, something must have gone wrong, as we ran it, recalibrate the machines ran it again and found, oh, no, that’s actually what happened. So when you consider that most, if not all, of the issues that bother us physically and emotionally, are either caused by or worsened by stress, then you can see that having a very simple technique for down regulating stress can be so helpful in all kinds of different areas. Whether it’s having an uncomfortable emotion, like, I’m really sad about this thing that just happened, or I’m really I’m really angry at Bob, you know, he was such a jerk at work yesterday. And I’m feeling all this anger. And we feel these in our bodies. So often, it’s like, talk about a talk about okay, well, so we’re using our brain, but we’re not dealing with our body. And as Dr. Bessel, Vander Kolk, said, The Body Keeps the Score. So we want to have a somatic component that takes the process into our bodies where we can then release it. And then we have that freedom to feel better and make better choices. Because when we go into fight or flight, the prefrontal cortex, our higher functioning brain goes Bye, bye. And we’re running on instinct. And that’s when we make all kinds of unfortunate choices. Like, you know, I’m so upset about this, I’m gonna go eat an entire pint of ice cream, or I’m gonna go and break something. And so we want to calm ourselves down and get the forebrain back on line so we can start thinking about okay, what do I really want? How can I do that?

george grombacher 9:45
That makes a lot of sense. Somatic that. That means touch

Speaker 1 9:50
with the with the body. Yeah, in the body. Got it. Thank

george grombacher 9:54
you. All right. So and the idea that we Talk it out and have talked therapy, the popularity of that. It makes perfect sense that you would also incorporate the touch. So

Speaker 1 10:09
yeah, I growing number of therapists incorporate tapping in there. I, one of the most flattering things I ever hear is when therapists say, oh, yeah, I have my clients go and look at your videos as homework in between sessions.

george grombacher 10:22
It’s awesome. So what is what is happening? When when we’re tapping, and doesn’t matter how hard I’m tapping, I’m not shooting myself in the face. Obviously.

Speaker 1 10:34
It’s a self care technique, George. So we want to, we want to be gentle with ourselves. I did have there was there was a guy who came to a number of my workshops in Los Angeles, who is a karate expert, and he would be spamming on him. But hey, Frank. But no, it’s it’s a gentle, a gentle tapping on these eight different points, right here between the eyebrows, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, under the lower lip, right, your collarbones just about come together than that four inches below the armpit. And then the top of the head, and leaves the points we generally use, we generally tap each point between five and 10 times, but it’s not an exact number, you have to keep count while you’re tapping. And when we’re tapping, we can tap silently, you can even tap at any point. And it’s going to be calming down the nervous system. So I recommend people tap on a daily basis, because it’s energy hygiene. We have physical hygiene, like, you know, brushing our teeth, taking a shower, most of us do it on a daily basis, whether we are aware that we needed it or not, we just tried to stay ahead of it with maintenance. We don’t wait until someone’s holding the nose around us and going, Oh, I haven’t taken a shower in two weeks. But we stress most of us don’t have a way of dealing with that, and or at least not a healthy way of dealing it. Some people have some very unhealthy ways of dealing with their stress. And so this is just a great way of maintaining that, especially when most of us are walking around with a device that’s constantly telling us, Hey, here’s something else to be upset about. And we take that in and we think we’re fine, we’re fine. But we’re having all this stress and every bit of stress that we have, limits our cognitive ability. And so we’re not making the best choices. So there are various theories on exactly how the tapping is working. You know, originally, the idea that it’s stimulating the same points like acupuncture is there is a phenomenon in the body called piezoelectricity, where the stimulation creates an electrical circuit that sends a calming signal to the brain. They’re looking at how it interacts with the, the polyvagal system, the vagus nerve that runs up and down the spine interacts with the different organs, and manages emotion. So the the exact it’s not known as said, Okay, this is all it is, is this exact mechanism. But, but we do find with, like I said, the cortisol studies where cortisol has been dropped, there have been fMRI studies where you can look at the brain scans and see the activity in the brain, pre and post tapping where stress parts of the brain are highly activated. And then after the tapping, those parts have normalized. So we see a number of different effects. But the overall effect is, we feel calmer, we feel better, we feel more emotional freedom, thus, thus the name Emotional Freedom Techniques. It

george grombacher 13:48
all makes sense. I love everything we’ve been talking about the idea of energy hygiene makes a lot of sense to me. And that you would make this a Top of the morning and half of the evening. It’s just a daily practice. And I imagine that people come to you because they’re experiencing like the lady that had a fear of water, just some thing that they feel is missing, as opposed to general stress.

Speaker 1 14:15
It’s all kinds of different things. I have folks who show up asking they may be going through a difficult emotional thing could be a breakup, dealing with with past issues that they just feel are holding themselves back. It may be a lot of it is career and financial things. They know that wow, I really want more but I’m not doing what it takes. Because the extent to which we don’t have what we say we want, tends to be the extent to which we’re resisting it. We may say, you know, I have my vision board and I’ve got this all these great pictures of me on vacation and in my private jet. We say we want it but we’re not you know are getting low level jobs or not getting any jobs and going no, no, I just got to sit and think really hard about wanting it. But we’re and so we’ll say we’re not resisting it, but it’s like, okay, if I watch you throughout the day, am I going to see you, you know, making choices and doing activities that are moving you in the direction of what you say you want? Or am I gonna see you doing things that are moving you away from that, and it’s not that we’re bad or stupid, it’s that we have resistance based on ideas about, it wouldn’t be safe, it wouldn’t be right for me to have this money is the root of all evil, or whatever the belief is, you know, I shouldn’t make more money than my parents had. And so we have these thoughts in our head there, most of them are unconscious, we’re not consciously aware of it. But every time we try to take an action that would move us in the direction of that goal that we’ve decided to unconscious level is not right for us, we’re going to stop ourselves. So it’s like we have an electric fence around our comfort zone. And every time we get close to the border, we get a shock. And, and after time, we don’t even get close to the fence, we just stay a safe distance away from it. And that’s a stress response. So if we have a simple tool for relieving stress, we can start looking at the beliefs, I shouldn’t have more money, I shouldn’t be healthier, I shouldn’t be in better shape, because it’s not safe for me to be to feel more attractive. Because if I feel more attractive, I may start dating and then someone might break up with me like they did two years ago. So I’m just going to, you know, not be in shape, or there are all kinds of different thoughts and beliefs that are going on inside. So that’s the, my job, when I’m working with someone with the tapping is, let’s explore this, let’s look at these reasons why you couldn’t or shouldn’t have what you want. And as you allow yourself to get more comfortable with having that, then you feel the freedom to make the choices and take the actions. I had a woman say once, you know I’ve been to all the seminars about money, I’ve read all the books, and I just can’t make money. And I don’t understand and I say close your eyes, take a deep breath. And imagine the amount of money you’d like to have. And now sit feeling what goes on inside your body say it’s safe for me to have this much money. And she goes, Oh, and I said, what is that? And she goes, it’s like a two, two out of 10 that it feels safe to have that money said bingo. Now you know why you’re not doing it? Why you’re not allowing the money? Because if you had a young child who was invited to a birthday party, and you looked at where the party was going to be held, and you said on a scale of zero to 10? How safe is it for my kid to go to that party? If it was a two out of 10? Are you going to let your kid but hopefully not, right? And same with us. So when we’re not moving forward, it’s like, because at some part of us that saying it’s not safe and so. So when we take these actions that stop us, like, you know, oh, I, I forgot to go to that job interview today. What was I thinking or I or I, you know, ate that pint of ice cream or whatever it is. And then we beat ourselves up for being so stupid. We have to be compassionate with ourselves because self sabotage is simply misguided self love. What looks like a harmful act to ourselves is a self loving app based on our program. It’s like, no, remember, you didn’t go to that job interview because that job would have paid more money than your dad ever made. And, you know, you’d be disowned, or there’d be discomfort, you know, Thanksgiving would be so awkward. So it’s part of my brain is going You’re welcome. I helped you dodged a bullet there.

george grombacher 18:55
And so when we tap it is it is removing a block of energy, and therefore removing the electric fence and an electric fence, allowing me to step out of my comfort zone. Yeah.

Speaker 1 19:12
So when I start to think about having that amount of money, or being that healthy, or whatever it is, Oh, that feels more comfortable, that feels safer. That’s that’s doable. And as I feel comfortable that the actions that I can take like going to the job interview, like going to the gym, suddenly it’s like yeah, that doesn’t feel wrong. And I can see myself as the sort of person who would do that. You know, that’s the key is is the identity if we when we can see ourselves as the sort of person who does that. As I love the quote from Dr. Joyce Brothers, you will never perform consistently in a manner which is inconsistent with how you see yourself. If I if I believe I’m a couch potato exercise is always going to feel difficult at best. If I start to see myself as a healthy human being, maybe even an athletic human being, it’s like, no exercise is just what I do. It’s not a forced thing. It’s like, No, I just love moving my body.

george grombacher 20:13
So I spent a lot of time thinking about finding success and in whatever arena that we’re trying to find success in, and it’s determining what I want. It’s exploring limiting beliefs and blocks that I have in my childhood, and from those past experiences and the programming the conditioning, and then it’s finding people that are doing what it is that I’m doing, so I can identify it, and then it’s taking the aligned action. Yeah, this is a missing piece to that.

Speaker 1 20:41
I think so because most people aren’t aware of the blocks, they’ll they’ll go to the seminars, they’ll they’ll watch the folks do and it’s like, Oh, you just do that. I’m going to put that on my to do list. And I’ll do it tomorrow. didn’t get to today, but I’ll get I’ll do it tomorrow. And we don’t ever question Why Why am I not doing it? You know, it’s like I imagined the scale between motivation and resistance, when the motivation outweighs the resistance to take action, or the other way of looking at it is, you will have the why or why not? Or the willpower versus won’t power. So if we’re not taking the actions, because part of us is saying it’s not safe, it’s not okay. And so we want to take a look at that. And question, Why does it not feel safe? What am I, what am I resisting? Why am I not taking that action? But most of us, don’t we just say, Oh, well, you know, I just I didn’t have the time or things came up, or I’m just lazy, which I hate the word. There’s no such thing as lazy. Anytime lazy just means that I haven’t felt it doesn’t feel worth it to take this action, where, basically, we’re always running a cost benefit analysis. And if the benefits aren’t outweighing the cost, we’re not going to take the action. So if you find yourself going, well, I know what to do. But I’m not doing it because it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel safe. It’s like, okay, having a lot of money, Allah, consciously, I’m saying it’s all benefit. Unconsciously, unlike, you know, I have these issues with how much my dad made or, you know, I’m afraid that I’ll be robbed if I have a certain amount of money, because I know that there are people in the neighborhood who are watching my bank account, and the moment it gets to a certain level, that’s where they’re gonna come and rob me, or, you know, whatever that is. So as long as that we’re talking ourselves out of action constantly, because we are convinced that it would be more trouble than it’s worth. And so, and when we try to look at those changes, when we try to consider taking those actions, we have a stress response. And the tapping helps us calm that down. So we look at those past experiences, like you mentioned, you know, well, because in the third grade, I got passed over for hall monitor. And basically, I was told that I can’t hold a position of responsibility, and I’m not smart enough, or whatever belief we took from that. And then as human beings, we love to be right. So we will unconsciously go about creating situations in our lives that prove that. So it’s like, see, there’s another example proving that I can’t be responsible. And now I’ve reaffirmed the story. You know, so we have a conscious desires and our unconscious beliefs and our conscious mind is what five to 10%, in the unconscious mind is 90 to 95%. So you can see why why we blocked ourselves. So yes, the tapping allows us to go in and cut the wires to the electric fence and look at and go. Okay, maybe this belief about this is not is not true. Maybe, maybe there’s another reason why I didn’t get that hall monitor position in third grade. Maybe there’s another reason why these things happened. And it’s not that I’m not good enough, not smart enough can’t handle this.

george grombacher 24:09
I think this is really powerful. So having bookend in the day, tapping in the morning, tap of the morning, tap the evening. And then Is it is it learning specific protocols or strategies? As as these things are coming up through the day? Yeah, so

Speaker 1 24:28
I look at it again, going back to the idea of brushing your teeth. You know, we we, most of us brush our teeth early in the morning and late at night before going to bed. But then we don’t say you know, in the middle of the day, if we you know, eat some Oreo cookies and then say, Yeah, but I brush my teeth this morning, so I’ll just wait until this evening. It’s like as needed. And there’s different ways of doing it. I have created all these videos to make it easy for folks. They can just follow along on all kinds of different subjects on money issues, emotional issues. Relationship issues. But again, you can you can tap on yourself. It’s a very simple process. You. And again, even without words, if you just find yourself, you know, feeling some stress, like if I’m driving and someone cuts me off or something like that, or I hear something upsetting on the news, then I’ll just take a moment to calm down my nervous system. It’s like, it’s not doing me any good to get freaked out about this right now. There’s nothing I can do. This is a this is an overreaction. You know, even if the news is really upsetting, it’s like, okay, but the reaction that I’m having is not appropriate, because there’s nothing that I can do in this moment. So go into into fight or flight can’t help me, but it limits my cognitive ability. So I want to be thinking as clearly as possible so that I can say, is there something that I can do here?

george grombacher 25:54
getting stressed out while driving and getting stressed out from the news? Those are unrealistic things bread? Yes.

Speaker 1 26:01
I know I should have come up with more realistic stories of what when, when stress might occur,

Unknown Speaker 26:06
really unbelievable.

Unknown Speaker 26:09
For the average person find upsetting. Yes.

george grombacher 26:11
Read. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you? Where can they give us all the all the things now?

Speaker 1 26:21
Thanks, George. The easiest way is that my website, tap with brad.com. In fact, if you go to tap with brad.com, forward slash success, you can get a free five day program called success beyond belief. So it’s like wow, success beyond belief, so much success, but it’s also literally, it’s the success that’s beyond your current beliefs about what you can have. So if folks are new to this, I hope they find that a very useful dive into tapping and then on social media tap of Brad, especially on YouTube. Excellent.

george grombacher 26:56
If you enjoyed this much as I did show, Brad, your appreciation and share today show the friend who also appreciates good ideas or who you perceive is maybe a little too stressed out or you perceive could benefit from this, which is probably everybody. Go to tap with brad.com check out other great resources, go to tap with brad.com/success for that free five day program, and then find him on social media, particularly the YouTube channel with all the great resources and I’m excited to incorporate this into my life as well. So thanks again, Brian.

Unknown Speaker 27:32
Thank you, George. I

george grombacher 27:33
appreciate the opportunity to share this till next time, remember, do your part doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.