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In my last article Our Unconscious Mind the Ultimate Power House, I shared a basic overview of the many functions our amazing unconscious mind performs every second of everyday. In this second part to that article, I’d like to share the twenty prime directives of the unconscious mind, so that by the end of the article you’ll know exactly what your unconscious mind is capable of, and how if as the saying goes “you set your mind” to achieving something there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to achieve it.
Your unconscious mind is a vast supercomputer with almost unlimited storage capacity, every experience you’ve ever had is stored at acellular level across the entire body, your first day at school, learning to walk, and even the things you can’t remember are stored away in the vast library managed by the unconscious mind.
All our emotions are stored at a deeply unconscious level, our conscious awareness of our emotions is just that, a conscious awareness that’s been interpreted by the highly logical and critical conscious mind as the feelings we experience.
The unconscious mind organizes all memory according to time, we know this as a time line, your unconscious mind does this so you can differentiate between past and future memories. When you remember a past experience you only recall a perception of it based on your beliefs and values at the time, you filter it again based on your current values and beliefs as they are today, which is why time is a good healer.
Our unconscious mind is most concerned with your well being, and so may decide to keep negative emotions suppressed. This is because it may decide that the cost of bringing them into your consciousness may be too high, which explains why some trauma patients can have total amnesia to events that were very frightening.
The unconscious mind may repress significant negative emotions and will use a lot of energy keeping these memories repressed and will only present them for a resolution when it feels that you are in a good place to deal with it.
The unconscious mind may keep negative emotions repressed, and may never present them for a resolution if it decides that this is the best for your well being. This is done because you’ve pushed these negative emotions back so many times that the unconscious mind decides that it will never re-present them again.
In part one of Our Unconscious the Ultimate Power house we discussed the many amazing functions our unconscious mind undertakes ever second of everyday.
The unconscious mind is responsible for everything outside of our consciousness, functions that we usually take for granted. What is fascinating is that you can communicate with yourself at a cellular level, we now understand that our thoughts and emotions physically change us, and that if we hold negative emotions for too long these can cause dis-ease within our bodies.
I call the unconscious mind the maintenance manager of the body. At a deeply unconscious level it has a perfect blue print for individual cell creation and perfect health, the unconscious mind is constantly running maintenance of your system.
Your conscious mind is a moral being and takes serious the morality you’re nurtured with. Your Morality directs your motivation and behavior. Throughout our lives we are influenced in many different ways and this shapes our values and beliefs which are of the utmost importance to the unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind operates very differently to the conscious mind; the unconscious mind doesn’t like to deal with logic or reason unlike the conscious mind. When you’re having self-talk, you have to be very careful what you tell your unconscious mind as it’s only concerned with delivering the results you ask for, all the conscious mind is responsible for is to deliver the intention to your unconscious mind. I like to think of it this way, the conscious mind is the goal setter, and the unconscious mind is the goal getter.
As we have just seen in prime directive number ten, we have to be careful what we say to ourselves, even on those days when things aren’t going our way, as the unconscious mind will take our self-talk as an instruction. The unconscious mind believes every experience we have or visualize as real, and holds these perceptions of what we believe to true and real.
The unconscious mind generates stores and distributes energy and will direct that energy that best looks after our well being. There is a huge amount of energy in all of us; most of that energy isn’t actually doing any work, but it stays with us as potential energy for you to tap into. What is really useful to understand is that you can change your energy levels with a single thought.
When we think of habits most people tend to think of bad habits, and yet habits are an important part of getting what you want in life, generating positive energetic habits is one of the best things you can do for yourself and the good news is that habits are an unconscious behavior and very effective. Anything you can set on autopilot that helps you achieve your goals has got to be a good thing.
The unconscious mind needs repetition until a new habit is installed. When you think about this it makes perfect sense, the more you do something the more likely it is to become a habit. There is a saying neurons that fire together wire together and neuroplasticity, as it is known, states that the more you think or do something the more “hardwired” the behavior or thought pattern becomes. This creates new neural pathways in the neurology and allowing old ones to become redundant.
The unconscious mind is conditioned to seek out more; when we speak to ourselves we have to be very careful about what we ask the unconscious mind to look out for. If you keep saying to yourself “why am I so bad at relationships” for example, the unconscious mind is primed to seek out evidence to support this belief and it will go on seeking evidence to support this belief until you decide to change it. So the unconscious mind will look for as many ways to back up the instructions you give it, which can be both a good thing and bad depending on what instructions you’re giving the unconscious mind.
In an earlier article on the mind body connection I described how the mind and body work together. The unconscious mind works best when everything is in alignment. Integrity is important within our system, both in terms of our physical integrity and integrity of our thoughts. When we have this balance between mind and body incredible results can be produced.
The unconscious mind is symbolic as it attaches shapes and symbols to states. When using NLP with clients, I often ask them to picture a past experience. For some this will be a picture perfect snap shot of the experience, however for some it may be a shape, or swirling colors, or it may not be a picture at all it may just be an awareness that something is there. These are metaphors that we are drawing from our neural pathways, the neural networks in our minds. Remember there is no actual picture stored away, you make it up, these are just ways that our unconscious mind encodes the data relating to an experience or situation and attaches meaning to it.
The unconscious mind takes everything personally, you may have heard of the concept perception is projection, a concept developed by Carl Jung who describes the concept as follows: what you perceive in other people is what you are project onto them, in or in simple terms “it takes one to know one”. To be able to recognize that people are not their behavior and that everyone has unlimited potential to achieve anything they want, then you can start to reflect that back on yourself. If we truly believe that everyone has unlimited potential, what must you first believe about yourself?
This is a common law in physics and your unconscious mind is no different, if there is a simple way to deliver the result you want, then your unconscious mind will find it and use it. So being very specific with the unconscious mind is vitally important, particularly around your goals, if you’re not clear on what you want then you’ll end up with some very mixed results. An example of this is setting a goal to have more money, not a bad goal you might think, except don’t be surprised if one day you spot a coin on the pavement out of your peripheral vision and pick it up like most people would. And here’s the danger of not being specific with the unconscious mind, because by picking up the coin you would have achieved your goal of having more money, job done for the unconscious mind, it’s done as instructed and will stop working on the goal.
Being aware of the way the unconscious mind works and knowing that the unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives is very useful. Asking for what you want rather than what you don’t want is the key to achieving your goal, remember the last prime directive? Here are a couple of examples to help you understand this directive, “don’t forget your keys” replace with “remember your keys”. Here’s another example “I don’t want to miss my sales target this month” replace with I want to hit my sales target this month. “Don’t think of a pink elephant”, if you’re like most people a pink elephant just sprung into your mind. So if you’re giving instructions to people then remember this directive and you’ll get more done.
So that’s all twenty of the unconscious minds prime directives, you may want to spend some time going back over these directives as I invite you to become more familiar with them. Once you start to make sense of them collectively, and relate to the ideas from your own perspective, you'll achieve a new level of self-awareness in literally everything you do. Make the power house that is the unconscious mind work efficiently for you, bringing into your life for everything you desire.
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