How To Be A Good Beginner
Sometimes, in my mentoring sessions, I hear practitioners expressing the ‘problem’ that they feel like a beginner when they are working with clients.
If you are new to being a tapping practitioner, this feeling may haunt you in every session. Even if you are an experienced practitioner, you may feel this way after a particularly challenging session.
Feeling like a beginner is not a problem, it is an inevitable stage of learning something new. Your short practitioner training may have given you the idea that you know everything you need to know to tap with clients, but it usually doesn’t take long to find out that there is so much more to working with clients than just knowing which tapping technique to use.
If you don’t have any formal experience in the helping professions before becoming a practitioner, finding out how to work with clients effectively can have a learning curve like the North Face of the Eiger!
There is no escape from being a beginner, when you are learning new stuff you will feel like a beginner, in fact, you should feel like a beginner.
Everyone … everyone … was a beginner once.
When you are starting out it’s easy to feel as if you don’t know what you are doing, that you are a beginner and that that is a bad thing, some practitioners still feel this way after years of experience.
Feeling like a beginner is not a sign that you are failing your clients, if they come back to you and report benefits from your sessions, then you are succeeding from their point of view.
How you feel is not a good measure of your effectiveness, your client’s progress is what counts.
Personally, I think feeling like a beginner is a good thing, I may be further along this road than some other practitioners, but I still feel like a beginner at times.
Humility prevents humiliation.
– Andrew T Austin
If you feel like a beginner I think that demonstrates a healthy humility. There is a lot to know and thinking that you know everything in my opinion is a big red flag. There are plenty of people in this world who are cosmically confident about their skills and simultaneously useless, and I wouldn’t go anywhere near them with any of my problems.
In my opinion, your level of confidence should walk a few paces behind your level of competence, not a few miles in front of it.
If we are stuck with feeling like a beginner, what can we do to become a good beginner so that we can get the best results for ourselves and our clients?
How to be a good beginner
Here are some guidelines to help you be the best beginner you can be:
- Acknowledge that you don’t know as much as you would like to. Whatever stage you are at in your tapping career, you now know much more than you did when you started. There is always more to learn, and there will always be things you don’t know when you need them. Reconcile yourself to stumbling around as best you can in a session trying to figure out what to do (I still do occasionally).
- Have a good intake process so you can work with clients who benefit from your current level of skills and screen out the clients who would be too challenging for you to handle. This is such a simple way to protect your potential clients and yourself. I am amazed that there are still practitioners who find out about their clients and what they want in their first session.
- Get mentoring. It’s lonely to be in a session where you are the person who has to figure out how to make the session work. Don’t try to figure it all out for yourself. Take advantage of the camaraderie of other people who are trying to get better in this challenging work. Mentoring and having a good intake process are the two most important practical things you can do to help you become a confident and effective practitioner.
- Being straightforward with your clients about what you can and can’t do. This will save you from all sorts of trouble, and, as a happy side effect, it also demonstrates your trustworthiness. As a fallible client, they might be glad of working with a fallible practitioner rather than a fake know it all. In short: never make a promise you can’t keep.
- Give yourself and your client a way out. If things get too difficult, admit to your client that you don’t yet have the skills to work on that issue and suggest a referral for them. This is not a defeat, it is a simple recognition that nobody can successfully work with everybody. If you have a good intake process, having to refer someone on should be a rare occurrence.
- Your client’s (emotional) safety is the most important consideration. Try to make your interventions as safe as possible for your clients. Premature enthusiasm to go for the deepest root causes of someone’s issues in your early sessions may not go well and could frighten off your clients. I made this mistake early in my career, and now I am much more careful about taking my clients out skating on thin ice.
- Each client session is an opportunity to learn, and there is a lot to learn. As long as you have your client’s safety in mind, you will probably not do too much damage. Difficult sessions may be difficult for both the practitioner and the client, but we have a lot to learn from them, use them to figure out what you need to change in yourself and what you need to learn.
- Work on your own stuff. You are a human too, the more sorted out you are the safer you are likely to be. If you think you are perfect and that there is nothing left for you to resolve, I suggest you get help as quickly as possible. No one wants a deluded practitioner.
If you are new(ish) to this work and feel concerned that you might hurt or damage your client, to me as a mentor, that demonstrates your integrity . You can use this concern to give you the motivation to explore and develop your skills. As a client, I would be reluctant to work with a practitioner who has never had that concern and thinks they are perfect.
Finally, you don’t have to be a ‘perfect practitioner’ (whatever that is), you just need to be good enough, and getting better, to help your clients
If you are interested working with me as a mentor, you can find out more on my mentoring page