Your Unconscious Mind
Your unconscious mind runs your life for you. Your creativity, all the memories you have and all of the ‘just popped into my head’ thoughts that make an appearance into your conscious mind are controlled by your unconscious mind.
Now this is where things get really important because your unconscious mind runs on auto-pilot. It holds everything you do by habit. And this happens because after your conscious mind has become used to doing something new through constant repetition, it commits the process to the unconscious mind where it is stored to work automatically as a habit.
This explains why you have to repeat your new good habits often. If you don’t, they won’t become habits and you’ll automatically revert to your old bad habits because that’s what your unconscious mind has been taught to do.
And here’s something you need to know about your unconscious mind: despite its genius design, it doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what isn’t. To prove this, do the following exercise now:
Think back to a time when you were quite scared. Picture it in your mind and remember what it felt like. Make the pictures you have in your head bigger and brighter, with more colour and saturation. Feel what you felt and replay the incident through your mind from start to finish. Do this several times, each time increasing the intensity and vividness of the images of your scary experience.
How does remembering that experience make you feel? It should make
you feel uneasy. Not as scared as you were at the time, but certainly you’ll rekindle some of the feelings you had when it was actually happening.
Now this is really important because that exercise teaches us a number of things:
Firstly, it shows that the images we picture in our mind must be accompanied by emotions for it to actually affect our physical form. By adding emotions, the experience you were running through your head felt real.
Secondly, it tells us that by making the images we have in our head bigger, brighter and more colourful it will enhance those emotions and make us feel somewhat like we did when the actual event took place.
And thirdly, because of those feelings it tells us that the mind does not differentiate between what is real and what is simply in our head. You have the same feelings thinking about it as you did when you actually there.
Let’s now look at this another way. Do this exercise now:
Think back to the same experience you used in the pervious exercise.
Now, imagine stepping out of the back of your body and seeing yourself, from behind, as that experience plays out in front of you. Push that event further away from you so it gets really small and you’re watching the whole thing play back from a distance. Slowly drain all of the colour out of the images playing back in front of you, and keep making it smaller and less intense as you continuously play that experience from start to finish. Watch from a distance as those black-and-white images get further and further away until they’ve completely disappeared from view.
How do you now feel about the experience? You should feel much calmer about it, and it shouldn’t feel anywhere near as scary as it did at the time, or when you made the experience more intense a few moments ago.
This exercise teaches us the opposite of what we learned in the first exercise:
If you take a bad experience and drain the colour from it while making it smaller, especially when you’ve stepped out of your body and you’re watching from afar, the unsettled feelings that experience caused you in the past become far less intense.
What you should now do is complete that exercise above several times, until you no longer feel scared or uneasy about the experience you went through.
Do that right now.
You need to use these techniques to your benefit. If you use the first exercise of making pictures bigger and brighter and more intense when you think back to your past successes, and use the second exercise of making pictures smaller, colourless and less intense when you think back about your past failures or uneasy moments, you’ll learn to make the highs really high and the lows just a fact of life that don’t adversely affect your physical and mental state.
And that is really important because by making the highs really high you’ll be breeding self-confidence and motivation. You’ll be conditioning yourself to repeat those past successes because it felt so good you’ll want to repeat those successes in the future.
And by making those lows something that doesn’t affect the way you think and act you’ll learn that failure is nothing but a temporary setback on the road to success.
There will be more exercises later, but remember to use these exercises daily to help grow your confidence and motivation and in-still self-belief.
