The Subconscious Mind

Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org. In this quick self-help segment, we are going to cover the subconscious mind.

We’re going to talk about what the subconscious mind is, how it influences your life and the results that you’re getting in your life and your success and fulfillment in life. We’re also going to talk about how you can start to work with your subconscious mind to get it on board to get you the results that you want.

I’m only going to have about 10 to 15 minutes to cover this topic, but the subconscious mind is an extremely deep topic that I’m fascinated by. It’s also crucial for the results that you are or are not getting in your life.

If you’re frustrated with things like losing weight, starting a business, performing well in your job, or anywhere else in your life where you’re not getting the results that you want, you have to realize that the most important thing is starting to understand your subconscious mind.

The fact that you’re watching this video and you’re researching this topic is a good first start. However, I’m going to cover the subconscious mind a lot more in-depth in other videos.
Let’s break into it.

What is thea subconscious mind? What you have is your conscious mind which is what we tend to think of as our mind. It’s us. It’s who we are. It’s everything that we think and feel throughout the day. It’s what we would call “consciousness” or “awareness.” That’s the conscious mind.

What most people do not understand, unless they’ve studied this topic and thought about it deeply, is that the subconscious mind is responsible for everything else that is happening in your body and your life. It’s responsible for all the behaviors.

The subconscious mind consists of the things that are below your awareness level and below your awareness threshold that are operating on you. These are the habits that you have. These are the beliefs that you have. This is the self-image that you’ve cultivated and what you think about yourself, your capabilities, your limitations, your weaknesses, and your strengths.

This is also going to include your map and model of reality. It goes deep here. This is basically your model of reality and what you think is right and wrong. The stuff that motivates you on a deep level is all subconscious. We tend to think that that’s conscious, but that all sits below the level of awareness unless you’ve done a lot of introspection and personal development work.

What tends to happen is that the subconscious is driving a lot of what you do throughout your day. I would say that 95 percent of the things that you do throughout your day are done subconsciously or even unconsciously.

When things are happening subconsciously, it means that when you’re executing your morning routine or when you’ve even having a conversation with a friend, you’re not breaking a lot of the things and behaviors that are happening there down in your mind and saying, “Okay, I need to pull out the toothbrush, put the toothpaste on it, stick it in my mouth, scrape it around for five minutes, then pull it out and rinse.”

You’re not thinking all of that. That’s just happening spontaneously. In fact, what you’re probably thinking about is something totally different while you’re brushing your teeth.

You’re probably thinking about the fact that you have a big meeting at work coming up and you have to prepare for that or maybe the electricity bill is due or you have to work on your business and there’s some problem that you have to tackle. You’re probably thinking about something like that versus the mechanics of brushing your teeth.

The question then is – who is brushing your teeth? Is it the conscious you or the subconscious you? If you ponder this and start to notice different areas in your life where stuff is happening spontaneously without a lot of your conscious effort or awareness in the moment, then that is a sign that it’s happening from your subconscious mind.

That’s what it is. We have habits and we have beliefs and we have everything that’s going on in our lives that is coming from an unconscious place.

This is an important idea because this means that if you want to get a change in your behavior or your beliefs or your life and you’re not happy with the way that things are running right now, then the real solution, if you want to solve it permanently and get amazing results, is going to happen on a subconscious level and not on a conscious level.

This is simply because your behaviors, which are contributing to the results that you’re getting and the action that you’re taking, are coming from the subconscious. If you have certain beliefs that are holding you back or certain limitations about who you think you are, your self-image, how confident you are, how good you think you look, or what you think you’re capable of or not capable of, it’s going to hold you back and you’re not even going to realize it.

You can spend years hitting your head against the wall by trying to lose weight, for example, or trying to be more successful in relationships or in dating or trying to start a business and failing at it, simply because you have the stuff below the surface and you don’t even realize that it’s there.

What can you do about this? The problem is that it is under the surface and it’s not something that you can just go in and immediately fix. The other problem is that the subconscious mind doesn’t respond well to just a one-time conscious input.

You might think, “The way to fix that is to go to therapy and maybe we’ll dig up some stuff in the past about something that happened to me in my childhood, like some traumatic event, and then that will surface and that will clear up and, all of a sudden, I will be better in my relationship or be better at the gym or be better with managing money,” or whatever.

While that can happen and that does happen sometimes, generally, the problem is that just knowing about it is not enough. Putting a little bit of awareness on it is a good start. However, the subconscious mind is an animal mind.

You can think of the fact that all animals are operating on a subconscious level. They do have an awareness. They do have consciousness. However, they don’t have that pre-frontal cortex-thinking that we tend to associate with normal consciousness.

They’re operating more on a subconscious level. It’s more instinctual and more behavioral. What they respond to and what response or stimulus that system responds to is carrots and sticks.

It’s good at understanding when you give it incentives and you incentivize it again and again. It’s also good at understanding sticks and being hit over the head again and again.

That’s why, if you’ve ever had big changes in your life or big transformations, it’s usually happened because you’ve either gotten yourself on board with some sort of inspiring vision and you’ve drilled that vision into yourself through some sort of process of visualization and that caused a shift in your subconscious or – and this is probably more likely the case if you don’t do a lot of personal development work – you tend to go with the negative model.

What happens is that your subconscious is reshaped by hitting your head against a brick wall time and time again until, finally, something cliques clicks and something gives in. What’s happening in both of those models is that your subconscious is being retrained.

The important thing to understand here is that that takes time. You cannot simply retrain your subconscious mind with one stimulus. You can’t just give yourself one carrot or one stick. You have to do it again and again.

That’s why consistency and persistence are key hallmark traits of successful people. They achieve their success by going out there and growing themselves and working on their subconscious whether they realize what they’re doing or they don’t.

They’re working on their subconscious and they’re altering it by doing this visualization process and creating amazing visions and goals for themselves. They’re repeating them to themselves ad nauseam until they just are immersed in it and believe it. They reshape their beliefs and self-image and are able to go out and do amazing things.

It could also be the other way around where they hit their heads against the wall and they fail again and again and just keep struggling. They keep at it because they’re naturally persistent people and have faith. Then some stuff clicks for them and they move on to the next level and evolve. Through that process of persistence, they’re able to re-mold their subconscious mind to get to the point where it’s doing what they want for them.

That’s the process and that’s why change is difficult and can take a long time. That’s why a simple one-time motivational speech or reading a book one time or going to the gym one time or thinking positively for one day is not going to create a deep and meaningful level of change in yourself.

That’s going to take place on a conscious level and it’s going to feel nice. You might even be inspired and feel great about yourself for the moment. However, it’s not going to be a lasting thing.

Everything about you that’s permanent and lasting is embedded deep in your self-subconscious. If you want permanent and lasting results and you want to eliminate some deep-seated negative habits, you have to do the opposite. You have to have some deep-seated positive thoughts and habits that you’re constantly think about.

It’s a question of positive versus negative patterns. These patterns are etched into your mind. Your beliefs are even deeper because you have the thoughts that you’re having and then you have the beliefs that are creating the model of reality.

This is a deep concept. You can do a lot of amazing and advanced person development work when you start to work with this idea and start to use techniques that create these grooves.

You start to align your life with this whole idea that what you’re doing to get success is not going out there and getting some external result or taking some action or hitting the gym hard.

What you’re doing is working on yourself and the subconscious mind of yours. You’re analyzing it and introspecting on it. You’re journaling about it and doing the visualizations and affirmations. You’re doing various techniques.

Maybe you’re going to therapy and you’re trying to get stuff to come out and up from your subconscious. Then you’re also trying to instill stuff into your subconscious with the conscious mind.

Your conscious mind is limited because you only have so much willpower throughout the day. There’s only so much that you can do using your conscious mind. It’s only going to get you so far in life.

What you have to do is be smarter than that. You have to start thinking, “I have this limited willpower. How can I not waste it and use it to imprint those grooves on my subconscious mind so that the subconscious mind does all the heavy lifting?”

What’s nice is that once you train your subconscious mind in any activity, whether it’s a sport, musical instrument, running a business, being good with people and relationships, or mastering your own psychology by eliminating worry and instilling positive thought habits, when you do that, after a while, you build up those habits and it’s a relief.

You can actually have some change in your life and you don’t need to constantly stay vigilant with it. You can go to the gym and you don’t need to always be on guard about falling off track. You can be a little bit more at peace with it because you’ve built the habit and imprinted that idea into my subconscious. Now you can use that willpower that you have and put it to other purposes.

This is a powerful and advanced-level concept. I’m going to wrap it up here. I think I gave you a pretty good sense of what the subconscious mind is.

One of the action items for you, from this video, is awareness. I want you to gain more awareness. I want you to spend a little bit more time, throughout your day, noticing the things that are happening that you’re doing. It’s the subconscious part of you that’s doing them.

Think about that and think about the fact that your subconscious mind could be more aligned with your conscious goals and desires than it currently is. That is the first step.

I have so many other techniques and ideas about how to reprogram your subconscious mind. This is personally something that I’ve been doing heavily for the last year. I’ve been getting amazing results and I want to share more of those with you. If you want, check those out on Actualized.org.

I’m going to wrap it up here and sign off. Go ahead and leave me your comments. Please share this and “like” this. That’s why I put this stuff up for free. Share it with a friend, if you would.

Please go check out Actualized.org. You can sign up for my free newsletter where you’re going to get weekly updates with videos and articles and exclusive content just like this that I don’t always publish on YouTube.