If You Thought YOU Were In Control, Think Again!

Getting To Know Your Overlooked And Under-estimated
Subconscious Mind

We live with the illusion that we are running our lives through the wishes, desires and aspirations created by our conscious thoughts.   However, neuroscience has established that our conscious mind is in charge, at best, only 5% of the time and that the programming installed in our unconscious mind influences 95% or more of our day-to-day experiences.

The subconscious mind is in charge.

Introduction

The vast majority of people wake up every day with an unconscious assumption that they have no control over their lives.  They roll out of bed and face whatever life throws at them that day, remaining oblivious of the powerhouse that is their subconscious. 

The key here is choice.  You can choose to consciously connect with your subconscious mind and with practice, reap the rewards – or not.  This article will help you to make an informed choice by helping you understanding and appreciate your subconscious mind, and to notice and translate the nudges that you are receiving.

Once you engage with the phenomenon that is your subconscious, you’ll begin to see possibility in an entirely new way.

I wanted to share a series of articles with you, which are designed to help you move from the outdated, external way of doing, to understanding the relevance of developing who you are being and who you need to become day on day, to make your difference.

Being gives you the lift and weightlessness that doing is entirely without.

So, I hope that you will find the articles not only informative, but transformative as well, should you begin to put what you learn into practice.  Obviously, the second bit won’t happen if you don’t!

This article is the final one of 3 sharing with you 8 robust habits that will help you create a good working relationship with your unconscious mind.

When you pay attention to these habits regularly you will be able to tap into the depths of your subconscious and harness its wisdom to support you in realising and delivering your vision into the world with grace.

First, a bit more background.

“The fundamental behaviours, beliefs and attitudes we observe in our parents become conditioned as synaptic pathways in our subconscious minds. Once programmed into the subconscious mind they control our biology for the rest of our lives – or until we become aware of them as a hindrance and choose to do something about them – ie reprogramming.
Dr Bruce Lipton – The Biology of Beliefs

If You Thought YOU Were In Control, Think Again

The subconscious mind chooses the reality we continue to live in based on the concept we have of ourselves.  This is moulded by our conditioning and beliefs.

Information is only passed onto the conscious mind if the subconscious determines that there is a need for it to do so. Otherwise, it filters out information through distorting, deleting or generalising.   It will hold onto all the stored information until you trigger its release.  

The subconscious makes many decisions before informing the conscious mind.

The limbic system, the oldest part of the brain and also known as the reptilian brain, (made up of the thalamus, amygdala, the hippocampus, the basal ganglia and the nucleus acumbens) creates and controls our emotions and drives 95% of our behaviour.

In experiments done in an fMRI scanner on subjects during the process of decision making on basic A or B choice decisions, the researchers looking through the fMRI scanner can tell whether the subject will choose A or B up to 10 seconds before the subject themselves becomes aware of the decision they are about to make!

Neuroscientist Professor John Dylan Haynes based at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, in Berlin performed a key experiment that showed that the subconscious mind is making many decisions before the conscious mind is informed.  Professor Haynes was able to predict a subject’s decision with more than 90% accuracy before the person was aware of having made a decision themselves.

The Unconscious Mind Does Not Process Negatives

This is a really useful and important fact to know.  The unconscious mind does not process negatives.  When someone says, “Don’t think of yellow wellies.” What happens?  You will just have thought of yellow wellies.  This is why it’s so important to think in terms of the things you do want and not what you don’t want.  Thinking of what you don’t want, only brings more of the same.  For instance, change the thought. “I don’t want this to go wrong, to “What do I need to do to make sure this is a success?

Just learning to switch this thought habit when you are giving instructions to people, and what you say to yourself, will begin to bring significant change in how easily you get things done.

Embodying Thoughts And Beliefs – Practising Thought Replacement

Practise becoming aware of what you are thinking from moment to moment.  Every thought in your mind or spoken out loud, conscious or unconscious, is an instruction to your subconscious to take action.  It is 100% suggestible.

From now on you can train yourself to watch the tone of your self-talk, how you are saying what you say to yourself and then notice how helpful it is to you on a moment by moment basis.

A simple example would be that you may find that you are telling yourself over and over again that you are useless at something.  Every time you say this, you will be giving your subconscious the instruction to reinforce this in your physiology (your body and cells). 

That’s fine if you know that you are doing this.  The issue that may arise is that this thought is unconscious.  And here’s the rub.  The problem is that because it is unconscious you won’t notice that you are telling yourself this over and over again!  The thought has become so habitual that you no longer notice it, (if you ever did) and so embodied in your physiology that you are not aware of how it is making you feel.  So, the behaviour remains and becomes more deeply embedded. 

This is where training yourself to notice your thoughts, stopping as soon as you are aware of that train of thought and realising that this is the moment you can choose a better thought, becomes such a revelation because you finally put yourself in control.  Only then you can decide what to change and what to keep.

(This goes on to be a big topic and is beyond the scope of this article*).

Making Decisions

When we get the sense of making a decision, we are making a decision, but just from a pre-selected list of choices presented to our conscious mind by the subconscious.  

In the next article, I will be sharing 8 habits that create a good working relationship with your subconscious mind.

Until next time

I hope that you have found value in this article. I’ve enjoyed sharing it with you.  If you have any questions or would like help, please get in touch.

* We all have limiting beliefs, and mostly we just don’t know how to recognise them easily.  There are ways in which unconscious limiting beliefs can be brought into conscious awareness and busted, replacing them with new, enriching beliefs.

Sources: 
Psycademy – NLP Spiritual Practitioner and Master Practitioner Training

The Biology of Beliefs – Dr Bruce Lipton
Moving Through Parallel Worlds – Kevin L Michel

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