At some point over the course of our lives, we have all heard the phrase, ‘the power of the mind’. What many individuals don’t understand is that this power lies within our subconscious mind.
When we begin to understand that our subconscious mind is the source of an infinitesimal amount of power, we begin to realize we have the ability to set the course of our lives the way we want them to be. By understanding specific laws that govern the power of the subconscious mind, and by utilizing these laws, we have within our grasp the ability to create beneficial changes in our lives.
What we do with our inner selves – what we are in the habit of constantly thinking about – creates what happens in our outer world over a period of time. Once we become familiar with how the brain works and how we can influence our subconscious minds for betterment, we begin adjusting our thoughts in such a fashion that the person we once were progressively becomes more positive and self-assured.
How the Subconscious Works
We relate to everything that is going on in our lives through the instrument of the mind. It is separate and apart from the physical organ we know as the brain. The brain is an organ, like a heart or a lung. The mind is separate and apart from it. It is the connecting link between the conscious thinking process and Infinite Intelligence and serves as the sixth sense – the gateway to Infinite Intelligence.
It is both a broadcasting station and receiving set. It both sends out and picks up thought vibrations. Infinite Intelligence can be contacted through the repetition of a thought, purpose, or desire. Our mind is similar to a garden. Whatever seeds we plant in our garden of mind will produce similar fruit. By bringing it into the conscious mind repeatedly, and by expressing it orally with great emotion, the subconscious mind acts upon it in due time.
The subconscious mind is somewhat like a computer. It only does what it is programmed to do. We unconsciously program ourselves over the years as a result of our constant thoughts and actions. Thus, if our thoughts and actions over a period of time are negative and a hindrance to our well-being, the decisions we make and our resulting behavior will become undesirable.
Simply put, the subconscious mind is in charge. It knows how to drive the car and tie our shoes. It instructs our conscious mind what to do. What you habitually etch into your subconscious mind day after day you will in time experience in real life. “As within, so without.”
Conscious vs Subconscious
The conscious and subconscious minds always interact with each other. The greatest function of your conscious mind is that of reasoning. It interprets the world through its five physical senses. It is your contact with your environment. The subconscious mind is subject to the conscious mind.
Your conscious mind controls your conscious actions. Your subconscious mind controls all the vital processes and functions of your body. It never rests. The strength of the subconscious mind is developed from imagination, memory, and affirmation. What it conceives via the conscious mind, it strives to express.
The subconscious mind is always open to suggestion. It doesn’t make comparisons or think for itself. The conscious mind does that. The subconscious mind accepts everything coming from the conscious mind as being true. It has no conscience and does not judge. It reacts to emotional signals sent from the conscious mind. The subconscious is the seat of habit, so if we aren’t happy with certain elements of our lives, we can change our habits by changing our thoughts.
Consequently, as long as you continue feeding your subconscious mind positive thoughts, it will respond by actualizing those conscious thoughts.
Who we are and what we are is the result of the sum total of the programs in our subconscious minds. These programs, thoughts, and self-directives have been unconsciously absorbed every day of our lives. Our brains are in the process of acting out these programs at this very moment because that is what they have been programmed to do.
Our brains are following instructions, taking the routes we have prepared for them. The subconscious mind doesn’t care whether these routes are good or bad. It believes and accepts everything it has been fed by the conscious mind. Its job is to see to it we live out the programs we have been feeding it – the thoughts we have been feeding it.
Our Subconscious and Reality
The subconscious mind is reactive and as a result, responds to the nature of our thoughts. It reacts to denominating desires which have been mixed with emotional thought. Because of this, it is important we keep it busy with positive and constructive thoughts. We don’t have complete control over our subconscious mind, but we can consciously control it to a great degree so it will react to thoughts we would like to see translated into reality.
Our thoughts control our habits, and we have control over our thoughts. What is extremely important to keep in mind is that our subconscious minds will ensure we keep repeating the same unwanted habits we have grown up with unless we make it a point to start changing our thought processes. The quality of our lives is reflected in exact proportion to the thoughts we think and the actions we accept or tolerate.
Most people live their lives without being aware of the power of their own thinking, without being aware their lives can be changed by the power of their thoughts. It is unfortunate that of all the schools and universities, of all the areas where we have a choice to become proficient, we are rarely taught that we have the ability to use the immense power of our minds for the attainment of the desired goal.
We are the only creatures on the face of the earth capable of directing our minds to whatever ends we may choose. We have the ability to either control our destiny, if we choose to do so, or continue to neglect and make use of this prerogative and live our lives much less than what they can be. Whether you want to believe this or not, the thoughts you have impressed upon your subconscious mind in the past have created the reality you are now facing.
If your subconscious mind has been saturated with thoughts of fear, worry, poverty, or weakness in some form, it will accept that you hold these thoughts as being true and will work day and night on that premise to bring about the situations which correspond to those thoughts. Simply put – if you aren’t happy with certain elements of your life, you can change your habits by changing your thoughts.
How to Use the Power of Your Subconscious Mind?
So what’s the solution to turning things around in your life? The short answer is that if you consistently feed your mind with positivity and peace, your situation will do nothing but change for the better. All it takes is a little time and effort to develop the proper mindset, and as time passes, everything will start falling into place. The key to remember is that the subconscious mind has to be influenced by the conscious mind in order to attain the results wanted.
In a nutshell, we have to put our subconscious mind to work in a positive manner by consciously telling it again and again what we want for our betterment. This procedure will become automatic once you begin to notice small, positive changes occurring in your life. Because our outer lives are reflections of our inner thoughts, we have to first change our thoughts before things begin to improve in our external lives.
By concentrating on new and improved thoughts, we regain control because now we exercise discretion with regard to the thoughts we are thinking.
It is a well-known concept that what the mind can conceive, the mind can achieve. If we create a sincere belief in the powers of the subconscious, we can create innumerable opportunities for ourselves.
By sending out negative thoughts, we activate the world negatively and attract negative results. Positive thinking, on the other hand, by sending out positive thoughts, activates the world positively and attracts positive results.
Positive thoughts = Positive results
Negative thoughts = Negative results
By always making the effort to eliminate negativity from our lives, we will gradually notice improvement. It might be a bit of a rough row to hoe when we first get started, so we have to keep at it without allowing anything to get us down. To have this technique work in its strongest and purest sense, we have to work at ridding our minds of negative thoughts and keeping them activated with positive ones. Because our outer lives are reflections of our inner thoughts, we have to first change our thoughts before we can expect to change the elements of our external lives.
To get headed in the right direction, there are dozens of procedures we can utilize. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Overcoming Fear
It has been said in professional circles that fear is the worst enemy. It makes people sick, afraid to speak out, and incapable of capitalizing on opportunity. It is the most powerful effect of negative emotions. If you allow it to make your decisions for you, it will essentially destroy your ability to achieve what you want to accomplish. You might even be unaware of its existence buried deeply in your subconscious.
To cure fear, you must become activated. You have to get yourself to face your fear. The one thing that cures fear is direct action. People who radiate confidence and are always at ease have acquired their confidence by constantly facing their fears.
I know what you’re thinking… easier said than done. The truth of the matter is that facing it square on is the best thing you can do. It’s like learning how to ride a bicycle. It’s difficult at first, but it gets easier each time afterward. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but once you have mastered the magic of it, it becomes as easy as walking down the street.
Simply put, fear is a negative thought in your mind. By replacing the negative feeling we have by accentuating the positive (I think I can, I think I can, I think I can), we can override that negative thought with a powerful and positive one. The things we fear exist only in our minds, and we bring them to pass by constantly fearing them.
Love casts out fear. Live in the joyous expectancy of the best, and invariably the best will come to you. Face your fears, and the death of fear is certain.
Failure
In actuality, there is no such thing as failure. The term was created to indicate a falling short or a deficiency of some sort. Thomas Edison went through hundreds and hundreds of different light filaments before finding the one that worked successfully.
What you might think of as being a failure is very often a simple test thrown at you from the universe to test your resolution – to see exactly what you’re made of and if you’re serious about pursuing the challenge lying ahead. Make it a point to never think of yourself as failing, because the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. Failure is a failure only if you accept it as such.
Attitude
When we have positive and constructive attitudes, joy and accomplishment automatically find their way into our lives because these attitudes determine the results we achieve. We form new patterns of positive thought when we eliminate destructive, negative thoughts from our minds. It is important to remember that your attitude toward yourself is extremely important. If you dislike yourself, it is difficult to like others.
You can change everything in your life if you change your attitude. People who practice self-control know the changes in their circumstances have been in direct proportion to their altered mental state. You can create for yourself any pattern of life you choose by the simple process of changing your mental attitude. The difference between the successful individual and the unsuccessful individual boils down to a state of attitude. Unsuccessful people invariably have Excusitis and are always looking for reasons why it isn’t going to work, and by extension why things aren’t going their way.
Our futures are not determined by external circumstances over which we have no control. They are controlled by our mental outlook over which we do have control. In other words, by looking for something good out of a bad experience, we create a seed that will germinate into something beneficial. In every ‘bad’ experience exists a seed for something good.
When you live with a positive attitude, your subconscious finds ways to make your life more positive. The most convincing evidence to support the importance of mental attitude is that it is the one and the only thing we have complete control over.
How to Create a Positive Mental Attitude?
- associate with positive people
- condition your mind in a positive manner
- recognize you can, in fact, make your own choices and live your own life in a positive manner
- create a burning desire to attain certain goals
- constantly feed your mind with positive instructions until it reacts by manifesting positive things for you
A positive mental attitude is simply the accumulation of positive beliefs, wishes, and actions that have been transmuted into faith. To maintain a positive mental attitude, all that is required is to keep our minds busy with thoughts of what we desire in life and exclude thoughts of the things we don’t desire.
As difficult as it might be to understand, our minds have the ability to create in our lives what we think about most. By maintaining a positive mental attitude, we work at solving the problems we can control and at the same time disallowing problems we can’t control to influence our attitudes from positive to negative.
Develop an attitude of looking for a seed of positivity in any adversity. The seed might be small, and you might think it isn’t worth paying any attention to. The big old tree at the park started out as a seed smaller than your thumbnail. Look how big it is now. Thoughts, like seeds, grow.
Here are some important areas where further study will help you get closer to a more peaceful and abundant life:
Faith
In the Bible, Matthew 9:29 says, ‘According to your faith, it is done to you.’
Faith is the promise of the realization of things hoped for and unseen. It has been suggested a mind attuned to currents of faith is attuned beyond its own physical dimension. Your subconscious mind responds to your faith, to the acceptance of your conscious mind. By turning over to your subconscious mind any request with faith and confidence, it will take over and give you the answer you need.
By having faith, we can elicit the omnipotent power of Infinite Intelligence. We have to believe, we have to be in the proper mindset, and above all else, we have to have faith. As we blend our faith with positive thought, we create the perfect ingredient for true subconscious belief. Faith becomes an integral part of our personality and character. In time, it forms itself around every thought we think. Faith says ‘yes’ to life.
Visualization and Imaging
The way we deal with life mentally influences and colors our feelings about what’s going on in our lives. These thought-forms ultimately attract everything that happens to us. By using positive affirmations, and by visualizing, we can replace the programming that has led us the wrong way with more positive constructive concepts, thereby changing what we create for ourselves.
If we visualize our fears as being drained from our minds, they will in due course be actualized. If we visualize ourselves as achieving, rather than failing, and if we are willing to be persistent, there is no question we will advance toward our goal.
It is important to remember that when we visualize, we are imagining ourselves in a situation that hasn’t yet happened but we are working at, one small step at a time, because of the results we desire. You will begin to see the results after the image is presented again and again. Like anything else, your success is dependent on the amount of concentration you put into it.
We have to see a thing in our minds before we can do it. At that point, our inner creativity takes over. By mentally picturing the desired end result, we are automatically forced to use positive thinking to achieve that end. Our subconscious can’t distinguish between the image of an event and the actual event. This is where imaging can be used successfully to get our mind to believe what we want it to believe. By holding a picture in your mind of circumstances as you would like them to be, and by believing in the mental picture and working at it, you can actualize it.
Self-Talk
We talk to ourselves, whether we are aware of it or not. Psychologists have coined the term self-talk to mean the ways we direct ourselves to relate to the world. Most of the time we aren’t aware we’re talking to ourselves because it has become automatic.
By listening carefully to our self-talk, we can begin to get an understanding of what’s going on inside. By becoming aware of the voices and the actual words we use in different situations, it will help us realign our thoughts in such a manner that we can communicate to ourselves more positively.
Through simple self-talk suggestion, we have the ability to reprogram the subconscious mind, which over time builds up the belief structure for our behavior. We know that by challenging negative self-talk, we can control negative emotions. Self-talk will affect, create, or control every habit we have because self-talk itself is one of the greatest habits we have, even though we might not be aware of it.
It is a neurological fact that the electricity of the mind tends to follow the path of least resistance. It finds the most direct route to follow. It is for this reason that the stronger programs in our subconscious win out in the computer-like circuits of our mind. When we use the right kind of self-talk, we create a new path of least resistance, and because we have set the direction ourselves, it is by our own choice the best path to follow.
Self-talk should be spoken with conviction and emotion. Emotionalized thoughts are recognized by the subconscious more readily than words merely spoken. Don’t be afraid to put some emotion into it. Nobody’s going to hear you. This is between you and your subconscious.
People who get things done program themselves with positive messages, and consequently feed their self-confidence. When you use positive self-talk, you emphasize what can be done.
Affirmations and Autosuggestion
An affirmation is a statement you make about yourself that is consciously chosen.
Example – “I am a great speaker!”
It is repeated so the subconscious will absorb it and in the end produce the desired result. This is done by thinking it or preferably saying it out loud. By repeating an affirmation emotionally, the idea becomes etched into our subconscious and in time is accepted and reacted upon as a truth.
Autosuggestion may be defined as the implanting of an idea in oneself by oneself. Here is an example:
‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’
We can be infirm or old, weak or selfish, and autosuggestion will improve us because it is our thoughts that create our circumstances. In order to accept autosuggestion as a means of self-improvement, we have to change our attitude.
We put our intellect into gear when we continually affirm accomplishment, and we affirm accomplishment with suggestion. Once you realize you can literally change the cause of your life by making a simple but powerful affirmation, you’ll begin to understand how important it is to keep feeding your mind wholesome, powerful thoughts.
Affirmations and autosuggestion work because our subconscious mind is impressed by definite instructions continually repeated by the conscious mind. Affirmations have been used for centuries as prayers and mantras. When doing affirmations, it is extremely important you consciously create a feeling that your desire has already become a reality. Believe it has already become a reality and it will become a reality that much sooner.
This has been mentioned several times and is extremely important to remember – your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between a true statement and one that has been merely stated as being true. For this reason, we must always use positive affirmations to obtain positive results.
Always keep your affirmations in the present tense.
‘I am a great speaker.’ NOT ‘I want to be a great speaker.’
As a result of repeating affirmations in the present tense over a period of time, the subconscious will accept it as a truth, and your ability to speak in public or do anything else for that matter will be greatly enhanced.
Persistence and Determination
Bulldog persistence is an essential success quality. You’ve heard this one before:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step.
Through thick and thin, you have to be patient with yourself and keep at it. Every step you take gets you one step closer to your goal. The people who eventually triumph are the people who will not quit. There will be a certain lag time, or incubating period, while you are developing a new consciousness because by and large you are still living in your old reality. You have to be patient with yourself in order to give the seed thoughts you are planting time to blossom.
By keeping at it, by being patient with yourself, you’ll be more than grateful for having persisted when you start seeing things happen in a positive and constructive manner. What is also important to remember is that when you are reprogramming your mind, your circumstances will be changing. By being persistent with your new-and-improved thoughts, you are effectively creating a new reality for yourself.
Here’s a little analogy for you. A drop of red dye won’t make an appreciable difference to the color of a tubful of water. It will be less than pink. If you continue to add a drop of red dye every time, you entertain a positive thought, the water will gradually turn pink, and ultimately a bright red.
This is essentially the same as what you’re doing day by day with your mind. You’re slowly but surely saturating it with thoughts you want to be in there. With patience and persistence, your mind will be glutted with your ‘improvement thoughts’, and your actions will change accordingly.
Your old habit patterns are going to try to get you to quit, but as long as you’re persistent, your chances of accomplishing your goal increase greatly.
Final Thoughts
When you begin to understand that strength can only be developed with effort and practice, by exerting yourself and adding effort to effort and patience to patience, you will never stop developing. The main thing is to charge yourself inside and get your thoughts going in the right direction. That done, you will spend the rest of your life living out the positive changes you have made.
Written by Brent Longstone, the author of “REROUTING YOUR THOUGHTS: Using the Immense Power of your Subconscious mind to Create Happiness and strengthen Self-Confidence”.
Dear Brent,
I have so enjoyed Learning Mind and reading articles daily. I felt compelled to write to you and tell you this is one of the best articles I have read on the subject of the sub-conscience mind. Well done. Bravo!