I am sure we have all experienced, at some time or other in our lives, the feeling that we are our own worst enemy - that we are sabotaging our lives and stopping ourselves from being happy, content and fulfilled. We know what we want and we know what we need to do or change to get there but no matter how hard we try we just can't seem to do it!

Well, according to the great hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, that is because we are not working in harmony with our unconscious minds. He said that all the clients who came to see him, whatever the problem, were there because they were not in rapport with their unconscious mind. 

We all have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not consciously thinking of right now. As soon as you think of something, it becomes conscious. Your unconscious mind remembers everything you have done and seen in your life - it runs your body, it pumps your heart and it breathes for you.

The unconscious mind is like having an autopilot function in the brain. It allows us to do many things at the same time without having to concentrate on them all consciously. When you were a young child you had to use your conscious mind and concentrate in order to learn how to tie your shoelaces or put a knot in your tie. You had to learn every single part of the task individually until when you had mastered it your unconscious mind took over and allowed you to do it automatically without thinking about it.These automatic functions or programs are useful as they free us up to concentrate on other things, but sometimes they can begin to work against us and it is then that we need to update, change, or completely abandon them.

Many of these automatic functions are simply habits which we have picked up by accident and never managed to get rid of. They may have come from things that were said to us in our childhood such as "You are not good enough", or "You'll never amount to anything", or they may be habits and behaviours we saw our parents or older siblings do that we just copied believing them to be the right thing to do.

These behaviours can be carried forward into our adult lives where we continue to believe them to be true and let them influence how we feel today. The inevitable result of this is that we still believe today that we aren't good enough just as much as we believed it when we were a child. 

Your unconscious mind is the source of all learning, all behaviour and all change. By learning to be in rapport with your unconscious mind you can use it to improve your behaviour and change what needs to be changed to take you to where you want to be.

Learning

Learning is not the domain of your conscious mind - it is your unconscious mind that does the learning. Yes, information you learn must first go through your conscious mind, but it is your unconscious mind that remembers it. Everything, once learned, is stored in your unconscious mind.

If asked to recall your home telephone number I am sure you will remember it right away. Now before you recalled the number where was it? You may think it was in your conscious mind but it was actually stored in your unconscious mind and then passed to your conscious mind so that you could recall it.

Behaviour

All behaviour is generated at the unconscious level. The last time you drove to or from work, how conscious were you of the journey? Do you remember the whole trip? Or do you remember none of it? If, like most people doing routine journeys you remember very little of it, that is because your conscious mind was probably off thinking about other things, like what to have for dinner that night or planning your weekend. Meanwhile it was your unconscious mind that was driving the car! The car journey has become an automatic function, just like learning to tie your shoelaces or putting a knot in your tie. If you want a real scare, the next time you drive somewhere, just look over at the driver next to you. They too are probably unconscious!

Change

Think of a habit you wanted to change in the past. Was it easy? Probably not. Most people find it hard to change a bad habit like smoking, biting their fingernails or eating too much chocolate!

If change was easy then you could walk up to a friend who is being annoying and say "Excuse me, but you are being annoying. Would you change please?" If change was conscious, they would simply change there and then. In the real world however, change isn't always that easy. Many people go on doing the same old bad habits year after year and complain about it constantly.

If change is not easy for you, it is simply because you are not in rapport with your unconscious mind.

So how can you start improving your relationship with your unconscious mind and move towards your ultimate goal?

Use Positive Language

Your unconscious mind cannot directly process a negative. For example, if I say to you "Don't think of a green elephant," what are you thinking about, at least for a split second? That's right, a green elephant!

Most of us go through life thinking about what we don't want. "I don't want to be angry", "I hope I don't make a mess of this job",or maybe " I don't want to worry all the time"! Because your unconscious mind cannot process a negative, it will focus on the content of your thought and therefore look to achieve precisely what you don't want so that you are angry, you do make a mess of the job and you do worry all the time!

That is why it is crucial to start thinking about exactly what you do want. Whether it be achieving a result at work, or being happier in your life, think about exactly what you want and your unconscious mind will start working with you to achieve that goal.

Visualisation       

Visualising what you want in a positive way is just as effective as doing it in a negative way, so rather then making scary movies in your head about all the horrible and nasty things that could happen to you, you need to be making feel good movies that show your unconscious mind exactly what you want to happen. Repetition is a key to making a conscious behaviour into an unconscious one, or a learned behaviour into a habit, so the more you think and see things in a positive way the quicker this becomes a natural way of thinking for you.  

Listen to your Unconscious Mind         

Now that you are improving the way you talk to your unconscious mind it is equally important that you listen to what it has to say to you! We all have gut feelings or instincts that tell us things, but most of us try to ignore them or rationalise them consciously. How often have you been faced with a difficult situation or decision and agonised over it for days only to conclude that if only you had gone with your first instinct it would have been the right one?

Instincts, gut feelings, call them what you will are messages from our unconscious minds, helping us with solutions or warning us of possible dangers.

More controversially, but now gaining much wider acceptance, is the belief that many illnesses and diseases are created by our unconscious minds as a last ditch attempt to get our attention because we had chosen to ignore all its previous messages and warnings to change something! The mind body connection is now accepted by even the most conservative of doctors and consultants, so listen carefully to what your unconscious mind is telling you! 

Take Action

Once you have opened up the communication channels and learned to trust your unconscious mind then change will become a whole lot easier. So start right now, tell your unconscious mind exactly what you want in a positive, confident way. If your wish is still stated in a negative "I don't want x" then think of the exact opposite and state it as " I want to be more y".

Be as ambitious as you want, don't hold back, say exactly what you want no matter how big or unrealistic it seems at the moment! Then listen to the feelings and inklings that come back from your unconscious mind. Try to really tune into your inner feelings and learn what your unconscious mind is telling you. Make great movies in your head! See what you want to be and what you want to achieve and your unconscious mind will get the message. Together you can achieve so much more!!    

Peter Blake

 

 

 

 

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