EFT is an efficacious intervention to significantly reduce anxiety for high-ability adolescents.

Traditional career education activities at the secondary level consist of academic, aptitude, skills, interests, and, less often, personality assessments that assist students in narrowing viable career options. Although this strategy is reasonable, its attempt to objectify the career decision-making process does not address two important components of career decision-making—personal values and social-emotional concerns. Because gifted students possess characteristics, such as heightened sensitivity, multipotentiality, and perfectionism, that might complicate this process, appropriately differentiated career education includes these dimensions, especially during times of transition. Due to gaps in preparation and training, school counselors may feel inadequate in meeting these students’ unique social-emotional needs. For gifted rural students, career decision-making may be especially difficult as parents, school counselors, teachers, and other adults in the community encourage students to leave their small towns to realize their college and career dreams elsewhere. Rural students often experience deep connections to family and place, further complicating this developmental task of adolescence. This study highlights the voices of 19 gifted rural students as they share their thoughts and concerns regarding K-12 career education, values, and attachments to family and community. Considerations for school counselors and teachers who work in rural settings are included.

Gifted students can encounter anxiety-provoking stressors throughout their day. Developing effective anxiety management skills allows them to better navigate these challenges. Concepts from neuroscience help us better understand responses to anxiety and can assist gifted youth and those working with them in recognizing how and when to best apply anxiety management strategies. This article reviews these concepts and integrating them into the classroom environment to assist with this learning process. In addition, it examines an evidenced-based anxiety management intervention that has been found to be efficacious for gifted youth, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). Results of recent EFT research are reviewed and the steps to learning EFT are outlined.

E motional Freedom Techniques (EFT), more commonly known as tapping, is an emerging, research-based intervention that has been found to be an effective stress and anxiety management tool for students and school personnel. EFT uses cognitive behavior therapy techniques, such as awareness building, imaginal exposure, reframing of interpretation, and systematic desensitization, while teaching the individual to self-stimulate protocol-identified acupoints (i.e., acupuncture points; Craig, 2011;Feinstein, 2004). Guided by a school counselor, psychologist, or social worker formally trained in EFT, students talk about their stress and anxiety. As they focus on the stressor and develop an awareness of their body's stress cues (e.g., increased sweating, clenched jaw, racing thoughts, difficulty breathing, pressure in the chest), the counselor teaches them to self-stimulate the EFT acupoints by tapping on them. Concurrently, the counselor assists the students in positively reframing negative self-talk associated with the stressor as they continue to tap. The use of EFT with children and adolescents is relatively new, and therefore, research on its effectiveness is limited. Within the last decade, initial results have indicated that EFT assists students in reducing anxiety (Gaesser & Karan, 2017;Sezgin & Özcan, 2009) and the fear of failure (Stapleton et al., 2017) and in