In the blog ‘The downside of upside thinking: the negative impact of positive self-statements’ we saw that in the same time it takes your conscious mind to process forty-bits of information your unconscious mind can process forty million bits. Therefore, when you’re attempting to consciously change your thoughts, feelings and actions to create the life that you want and your unconscious mind is telling how you’re not good or smart enough to do that then which mind do you think will win out.

Hopeless you say. How can anyone honestly think that they can win out over their Dante Inferno like unconscious mind?

However, the Divine Comedy of the unconscious mind is this.  It’s not the hell-bound flaming pit where all your conscious dreams and desires are incinerated in the friction and heat radiating from its processing magnitude.  Your unconscious mind is more like a powerful well-intentioned, if misguided, protective friend.  A friend that would do anything to keep you out of harm’s way; anything that it thought was in your best interest.

An important fact to keep in mind however, is that without your subconscious you probably wouldn`t exist.  It is both a filter and condenser of information, feelings, and experiences.  It’s the seemingly thoughtless orchestrator of your heart beat, cell regeneration, metabolising of food and the eliminator of waste.

Your subconscious is also where you store deeply embedded emotions, beliefs, perceptions and memories.  Its whole purpose in life is to assist you in surviving the best way it knows how based on those ingrained emotions, memories, beliefs and perceptions.  Simply, the subconscious reacts to its perception of threat or danger coming from your environment.  It’s not the enemy.  It is simply reacting to, the enemy without, that it perceives.

With respect to goal attainment some might see the mega processing capability of the subconscious as saboteur.  A saboteur who is just waiting, with all the negative impressions from your past learning, to quash any conscious attempt to attain whatever the goal(s) you’re focusing on creating in your life.

However, the fact of the matter is that, unlike your conscious mind, your subconscious mind isn’t capable of abstract, intangible thought.  It’s only capable of thinking tangibly and quite literally.  Your unconscious mind only knows the world through the five senses (feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting), which is why language becomes extremely important.

For example, while you consciously may have a goal to be prosperous your unconscious mind doesn`t know what the word prosperous means.  Without giving your subconscious something to work with in terms of what prosperous from a sensory perspective it doesn`t have the wherewithal to help make the desired prosperity a reality.  You quite literally need to inform your subconscious what prosperity feels, looks, sounds, smells and even tastes like.

To create lasting change you need to find an effective bridge of communication between your unconscious and conscious mind.  This bridge needs to take you from reactively sabotaging any and all of your conscious attempts to change aspects of your current experience of life.  Reactivity based on differing levels of the fear of annihilation residing in the unexplored shadows of your subconscious.

That’s why when you’re looking to get your subconscious and conscious mind working together in making your goals a reality it’s important to remember to clarify those goals in sensory-based language.  That is what the attainment of the `prosperity` goal feels, looks, sounds, smells and even tastes like.

The subconscious works to give you the best life possible – it just needs to know what you are talking about.   If you want your goals to come to fruition it’s not only a good idea but imperative to get the mega-watt processing capacity of the subconscious working with you in creating whatever you want to create in your life.

The choice is yours.

In the next blog we will talk about how fraught your choices and decisions can be.