Understanding The Subconscious Mind

A long time ago a mentor told me that teaching the basics of human growth and development creates wealth and success, but that I'd be tempted to teach advanced topics and neglect the basics. 

He was completely right. My wife Angie and I were having a discussion this week and I recalled my mentors words. I realized that I don't teach enough on the most basic wisdom for why people grow or remain stuck - the infinite power of the subconscious mind. 

So here we go! Let's get to the root element of human development. 

The Conscious and Subconscious

There are basically two parts to the human mind - the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind is the part of your mind that you're fully aware of - it's the "thinking mind". You contemplate, problem solve, think, rationalize, visualize - and anything else you are aware of - with this part of your mind. The conscious mind influences about 5% of who you are, how you behave, decisions you make, and how you perceive life. That's not a lot. 

The subconscious mind lies buried beneath your immediate awareness. Deep inside of your subconscious are your beliefs, perspectives, expectations, and fears. You have no immediate access to what resides in your subconscious, but it controls 95% of how you think, react, and behave, the actions you take, and way you perceive life. 

Think about that - you don't immediately control 95% of what you do in this world. Most of what you do is completely unconscious, and you're simply carrying out programs that are built into your mind and burned into your neuropathways. Your subconscious is like the operating system running in the background, while your conscious mind is the application that you're currently using. You're just living "unconsciously" through your subconscious. 

How Did It Get There?

Between the ages of 0-7 you do not possess the ability to differentiate truth from non-truth. You only comprehend and absorb what those you love tell you as truth, and you comprehend and absorb what you experience in life as the only reality. Your subconscious mind doesn't discriminate. It constantly programs your subconscious with what it sees, hears, and experiences by wiring your neuropathways to recognize everything as truth and reality. You were born with 2 natural fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. The rest were put there by someone or something else. 

I'll give you a few examples from my own life:

I grew up in a relatively violent home. My brothers were constantly fist fighting, my father believed that the outcome of a fist fight determined who was right, and all of my brothers constantly bragged about fighting. Fights would randomly break out, threats were thrown around very loosely, and disagreements often ended physically. From these experiences I grew up believing the entire world was as violent as my home. 

My father was a union steelworker. He learned from his father and taught me that hard work was your duty, you needed to suffer to make money, and that the rich were greedy and evil, and always sticking it to the middle class. If someone didn't work hard they were lazy, and if they didn't work hard and were making money they were stealing. From these beliefs I made work hard when it wasn't, and I felt guilty and shameful when I began accumulating wealth. 

Once when I was very young, my father and I were walking back from playing ball and a cop car drove by with its light on. I remember saying to my dad "I'm glad you'll never get locked up." I vividly recall him saying these exact words: "Mike, you never know. Even the best people go to jail." From that day forward I worried about the inevitability of being accused of something I didn't do. 

The environment you grow up in and the beliefs that you are taught about life program your subconscious, and your subconscious shapes who you are and how you perceive the world... until you become aware of your deeply held unconscious beliefs and begin to reprogram them. 

Reprogramming Your Beliefs

Once you realize that you are simply acting unconsciously 95% of the time you can finally break new ground. When you experience worry, fear, and doubt,  what's happening in your external world is somehow bumping up against your subconscious beliefs. When you finally realize that the causes of all of your worry-thoughts, doubts, and fears were programmed in the earliest stages of your life and are not true, you can begin to rewire them to change who you are and how you show up in life. 

Your current beliefs are wired into your neuropathways, and that's why it's so hard for human beings to break out of old habits and programming. That's why change is so hard - you are literally fighting with yourself. Your subconscious mind has one job only - to keep you alive. It doesn't care if you're happy - just that you're alive. Your subconscious mind views the best way of keeping you alive is by keeping you stuck in a repetitive loop, because there is familiarity and the greatest amount of certainty there. Stuck is where you've always been and you're still alive. That's it's only goal. 

The best way that I've found to reprogram the subconscious mind is through visualization. You must use your imagination to create new. My entire life began to shift when I started visualizing the life I want to live, what I want to have, and who I want to be regularly, and this begins to rewire the mind to view this as safe. When you bring the sensations, feelings, and emotions of these new circumstances into your visualizations, it accelerates the process. 

The only reason change is hard is that you're fighting against yourself, so when you rewire your mind for new circumstances, when new opportunities appear to step into these new circumstances arise (and they will quickly), you won't hesitate to lean into the unfamiliar. But you must have already built the new circuitry which will invite the new opportunities into your life or you will simply remain on the same hamster wheel. 

All change and transformation requires becoming someone different, so being proactive is the most efficient and effective way to transform everything in your life. Getting clear about what you want to create, and impressing that into your subconscious mind makes easier work of the process of creating anything you want in your life and business.

Are You Ready?

Are you ready for more? Are you willing to create more in an easier way? You are totally able, I know this for certain. The only question is if you are willing. Only you can do the work. So I ask once more: are you ready for the life you desperately want to live?

it's easier than you can ever imagine. 

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash