Coaching practices for Made to Stick Tap Test

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Made to Stick Tap Test, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • The distress is here right now and I’m restless with it
  • When I explain my work it’s all so obvious in my own head that I’m genuinely baffled when people look lost
  • There’s a big thing coming up
  • The name is right there on the tip of my tongue, I can almost taste it
  • I can name the deep fear that keeps me stuck

Practices that may help

  1. EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
    Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), developed by Gary Craig, combines tapping specific body points (derived from acupuncture meridians) while making verbal statements about a distressing experience. Multiple randomized trials report reductions in anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and cortisol, but study quality is variable and the control conditions rarely isolate the tapping component. The evidence suggests EFT produces real effects; whether the acupoints are the mechanism or whether the benefits come from the exposure, distraction, or somatic-attention components is genuinely unresolved.
  2. Make It Stick: The Science of Learning
    "Make It Stick", by Peter Brown with psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, distills decades of cognitive science into a few high-leverage practices: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and elaboration. Its central counterintuitive claim — that the most effective learning feels harder and slower than rereading — is backed by strong experimental evidence.
  3. Run the tapping sequence from eyebrow to underarm
    Tap each of the nine points in sequence while repeating a reminder phrase about the specific problem.
    EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
  4. Take the tap test before you present
    Literally tap out a melody and notice how obvious it is to you — but invisible to listeners.
    The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
  5. Apply EFT to specific performance anxiety triggers
    EFT has the strongest self-guided evidence for test anxiety, public speaking, and sports performance stress.
    EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
  6. Tip-of-tongue resolution practice
    When you feel you know something but can’t retrieve it, work the retrieval actively rather than giving up.
    Feeling of Knowing: Why Your Confidence Misleads You
  7. Test the big assumption behind your immunity
    Design a small experiment to check whether the assumption keeping you stuck is actually true.
    Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
  8. Work on specific aspects, not global emotions
    When EFT stalls, you have probably hit a different aspect of the problem — target it specifically.
    EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
  9. Beware illusions of knowing
    Don’t trust the feeling of fluency — it routinely overstates what you actually know.
    Make It Stick: The Science of Learning
  10. Identify your stuck points
    Name the specific beliefs about safety, trust, control, esteem, or intimacy that the trauma has frozen.
    Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT): Unsticking the Meanings That Maintain PTSD

Related concerns

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