Raise your hand if you have never experienced a challenge! If you raised your hand, I suspect you are a wax model and your hand is ALWAYS in the air!

Yes, we all experience challenges in our lives. So how do we overcome these challenges? Or how do we go through them – how do we navigate the storm and find ourselves in calm waters again.

The story

Picture yourself as this beautiful yacht somewhere off an island. You have staff on the yacht, and a chef who loves spoiling you and your guests with beautiful meals, and you have stocked up on a lot of supplies recently and the plan is to just sail around the area and swim with the dolphins and soak up the sun and enjoy the relaxed conversation. Oh my, so much self-care and wellbeing here!

The picture is amazing and idyllic and if you were to close your eyes, you could hear the seagulls in the distance, hear the water gently lapping against the sides of the yacht, and it feels like paradise.

But, something went wrong, and the anchor chain broke (just go with me here, I am not a qualified skipper so if this can’t happen, just go with me here, ok! 🙂 )

As I said, while we were all sleeping, the yacht drifted off course & straight into a storm. Everyone wakes up and it feels like being on a rollercoaster – minus the safety rails! The wind is howling, lightning & thunder is going off everywhere & the rain is bucketing down.

This is the moment when panic sets in. Huge panic. The “I’m gonna die!” kind of panic.

Whew. That was just a made up story, but I bet you could imagine it & felt a little twinge around the ‘what if that happened to me’  and ‘that would feel really bad’ kind of thoughts.

The panic

Anyway, I am pretty sure no-one is finding themselves in this situation right now, but it does not discount the fact that your situation could feel exactly like right to you! Panic has set in & it can very easily escalate to HUGE panic.

So, what to do. How do deal with this kind of challenge?

Firstly, you need a way to get a grip on yourself.

The easiest way to defuse panic is to get the body to calm down. Interestingly working to calm the body down will help the mind to calm down also.

So how do we calm the body down?

Tapping!

The solution

In that moment of intense panic, tap on your tapping points. You don’t even have to say anything. We say words to help us connect to the emotion and the event, but if you are smack bang in the middle of the event, there is no need to say anything! Just tap.

Tap a few rounds, or tap until you feel calmer. Tap on all the points, or tap on a few. If tapping is too much, simply hold them, or rub them, and bring your attention to the points and to what you are doing & you can try and slow your breathing down as well, but it should start to slow down because you are tapping.

All the best & it is a great way to overcome an immediate challenge.