I Hate My Taxes - EFT For Task Aversion

This is the time of year in the UK when many self-employed people start to experience that heady mixture of anxiety and procrastination that develops when the January 31st deadline for our tax return looms.

In the past I have procrastinated, sweated and rushed to get everything together and submitted by the deadline date. One year I managed to submit the tax return on the evening of the last day. Ouch!

Happily, I’ve been getting better at it over the years. This year I decided to use the Getting Out Of Your Own Way process to take care of my limiting beliefs and responses to this necessary task. It says a lot about my level of resistance that I resisted taking care of this resistance for so long.

Finally, over the Christmas holiday (I know how to have a good time) I ran through the process and nailed quite a few limiting beliefs and responses about getting my accounts done in good time. I even felt like I wanted to get started right away.

When I got home after the holiday, the feeling of getting started right away seemed to have disappeared. I looked at the bulging file of receipts and bank statements still to be processed sitting in their folder and thought that I really should get down to the business of working my way through them, but did nothing.

Eventually, I became curious about what was happening with my resistance to doing this chore. I decided to do a little experiment.

I put the folder brimming with papers on the table and printed out a copy of the tapping worksheet. The tapping worksheet is a method I use for breaking down a problem into its component triggers to make tapping easier.

Briefly, you name the problematic situation giving it a 0-10 score, then complete sections on what you think about the situation, what you see, hear and feel, what you tell yourself about it and what the situation reminds you of. This breaks down the situation into tap-able aspects. You can read about the tapping worksheet in A Patterdale Terrier’s Guide To Stress Relief and download a copy from the resources section of my website.

I worked through each section of the tapping worksheet and found a couple of negative responses that I had to this task.

The main one was: “I hate this!” (scoring 8 out of 10).

I tapped out the “I hate this” with just a few rounds of EFT. Then I went back to check on all the other parts of the worksheet, every other unhelpful response had disappeared!

I immediately started working on the file and spent the next two hours sorting and checking receipts and bank statements without difficulty.

Did the task that I hated suddenly become fun and enjoyable? Sadly not, it’s still a chore (I’d never be a good accountant) but it’s stopped being a problem or something to avoid.

Is this the magical end of procrastination? I doubt it. I think procrastination and self-sabotage are usually quite a complicated mix of beliefs and responses, but I do think I have uncovered an important part of my task aversion towards this particular chore.

Now I’m going to investigate how many other tasks I’m slow to complete because “I hate them”.

You might like to see if the “I hate X” is stopping you from doing what you need to do.

P.S. I’m still working my way through the various remaining accounting tasks without problem or resistance.