In recent years, affirmations and the Law of Attraction have been popular self-help methods. Unfortunately, affirmations don’t generally change anything because of lingering self-doubt. Luckily, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can help erase self-limiting beliefs and aid in making lasting, positive changes.

While affirmations sound good and logical, they aren’t. They make us feel good, but the affirmation itself doesn’t make a big difference. We’ve been led to believe affirmations will change our beliefs about ourselves, our attitudes and our self-sabotaging behaviors. They should be used to create a template to our desire for the sake of using the Law of Attraction. But if we don’t believe what we’re saying, what do we think we’re attracting?

Let’s say a table represents your self-sabotaging behaviors about love. The table is held up by legs. The legs are your beliefs that have led you to your self-sabotaging behaviors. Using affirmations is like pounding the table top and trying to break the legs: the foundation of the legs is too set to break. You may be able to weaken a leg depending on the angle and where you put most of your force, but you can’t break the table. The only thing you’ll accomplish is exhausting yourself.

We have over 60,000 thoughts a day. If you’re lucky, you can control a handful of them. But what about the other thousands? They continue to affect your day, your relationships and creating your reality. More importantly, your thoughts primarily arise from the energy field of your subconscious mind.

Today, quantum physics teaches us that everything is made of energy. This means the beliefs that you have in your subconscious mind are also energetic. The way we respond in our life is governed by our beliefs, which were programmed into the subconscious mind from birth to age seven. You learned about morality, how the world works and how you should feel from your parents, teachers and society. The problem is, it was never your choice.

Since your subconscious and your programming is energetic, it makes sense that the only thing that will work to clear things so you can put what you really want there is by using an “energetic eraser.” After you’ve done the erasing, the affirmations will begin to actually work because you’ll be telling the truth. There won’t be a disconnect inside you between your conscious and unconscious beliefs. Once you clear the self-limiting default ideas about an aspect of your life, you begin to unfold more seamlessly into the reality that you want for yourself.

EFT, aka “tapping,” is an Energy Psychology technique that is based on the discovery that all emotional as well as physical pain is due to a disturbance in our energy field. EFT goes directly to the source of our issues and allows us to access blocks and quickly clear them. It is a simple, user-friendly and profoundly effective process that allows you to be free to truly live your affirmations. Now that’s power!

Shulamit Lazarus EFT, MRA, specializes in getting people unstuck in their health, self and success. She is an EFT specialist in the area of loss, trauma, abuse and the self-limiting beliefs and physical illness they create. To learn more, visit ShulamitLazarus.com.