The Voices You Hear Might Be Saying The Wrong Thing

As I've talked about before, we (our conscious minds) are bombarded by thousands of messages every second. And believe it or not, most of us never hear them.

Where do those messages come from and why can't we hear them? Well, because most of the time, they are doing very little more than simply re-enforcing the behavior that we so naturally live in our lives.

It's just like if I were to beat a drum at a rate of 2 beats per second really loudly, and you were able to sync up with my beat in another room, with a different drum, I wouldn't ever know you were even there.

We wake up when the messages tell us to.

We eat when the messages tell us to.

We do, all day long, what the messages tell us to do.

That is how the subconscious and conscious mind work. We think we are doing what we choose to do each and every minute of the day. But, 99% of the time, what we are doing is more driven out of habit and or life patterns, than of conscious choice.

Normally, when our lives are going the way they always have, this isn't a big deal. Because the messages are in-sync with our conscious thoughts and actions. But. . . when we decide to change something in our lives, or things in our lives are suddenly changed for us, things become a lot tougher.

Going back to the drum beat example, imagine if I were to change my tempo and you didn't. Yep, you guessed it, your presence would suddenly be known to me.

This change causes the messages from our subconscious and our conscious actions to begin to conflict with each other. And there are two results that can occur:

1. You ignore your subconscious pull to your past methods, knowing they don't apply any more. (I accept that our beats are out of sync and I begin to teach you . . . over time to follow my pattern).
2. You revert back to your old habits, ending the changes that you start to experience. (the consistency of your beat at a rate of 2 beats per second, overcomes my desire to be different and I start following your lead, to stop the noise).

Our Subconscious Mind Doesn't Care What We are Doing

The subconscious doesn't care what you are doing, that's not a concern of it. The present doesn't matter to it - nor does current reality. It wants you to do what you were doing - what it's trying to get you to do . . . is get you to do what you did yesterday.

Your subconscious likes repetition. It likes habits. And it hates change.

So every time your life begins to deviate slightly from its past patterns of behavior, you feel a conflict. And that conflict is tough to overcome.

Overcoming the Change . . . Or Not

The first couple days / weeks you are trying to change, your sheer will to make it happen often is enough to keep your subconscious mind from winning the battle. But as your focus dissipates (as it nearly always will over time), the pull of your habits becomes stronger and stronger.

Good news is that eventually, you can build new habit patterns - new ways of thinking and behaving in a given situation. But the bad news, is that the "old patterns" of thought never completely go away - although their influence does decrease over time.

The hardest part of creating change in your life is that the messages become "louder" (more obvious), the more out of sync with your old behavior you get. You can call it self-sabotage, or self-destruction, but the simple truth is that what your subconscious mind is trying to do is simply do what it's supposed to do - keep you safe and alive using the same patterns of thought that have gotten you this far.

It doesn't know if your new patterns are working or not - it just keeps trying to maintain the status quo.

It doesn't want to create failure in your life - it just wants to keep you moving forward the same way you got to where you are.

Breaking Through To The Other Side

You've seen it before in failed diets, attempts to turn over a new leaf, or stopping any behavior that you know is habitual, but is causing you serious harm in your life. Every time you start to make big headway, you hit a barrier that you can not break through - you hit a invisible wall.

The wall isn't really there, it just feels like it is, because the influence of your subconscious is so powerful.

In order to break through the personal barriers, you must keep you eyes on the horizon and your conscious mind on your goals. Don't let the voices (messages) dissuade you. Don't let them turn you around - they grow loudest just before they start to fade.

Stay focused and keep moving forward.

Why are you doing that?

Every thing we do, each and every day is for a reason. Unfortunately, most of us have no clue what those reasons are, except the classic reason, "because that's what I've always done".

We've all heard of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys - a story of two families that feuded for generations. But at the end, most of the individuals feuding had no idea why they were even fighting - except that it was what they always did. It took a conscious choice to put behind the habitual anger and loathesomeness of each other to change the course of history for those two feuding families.

So, rather than doing what you've always done, STOP! Think for yourself consciously, and ask the question, are my actions actually getting me closer to my dreams . . . or further? Am I acting consciously through my actions or am I just blindly following my subconscious influence?

What things are you doing today that you've always done, without even realizing why you are doing it anymore?

If you are a smoker, do you want to keep smoking? Then why do you?

If you are overweight or have high cholesterol, why do you keep eating the way you have always eaten?

Goals drive what you do - whether they be to maintain the status quo, or to help you grow to become what and whom you've always dreamed of being. Everything you do, you do for a reason. If you want to grow and BE someone different than you are right now, then stop letting your subconscious decide your fate. And start questioning what you are doing, every minute of the day.

Think about why you are doing what you are doing and
then choose your path - rather than responding out of habit.

Stephen Covey, author of the breakthrough self-help book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks a lot about putting first things first - making sure you are doing what is important first, and then worrying about what's urgent, only after the important things are done. I like to take that one step further. I ask clients to look at what they are doing and why they are doing specific things, and not others.

To highlight the difference between important and urgent in how you are acting consciously or unconsciously, let me use an example - taking an afternoon nap. Is it important, urgent, both or neither? Well, honestly, it depends on why you are taking it.

1. It could be both urgent and important, if you are are very sick and need the rest in order to avoid a hospital visit. This is usually a conscious decision.
2. It could also be important and not urgent, if you feel yourself getting ill but don't want to get to the point where you are run down. This is the most conscious decision of all the decisions in this example - if you weren't thinking of tomorrow, you would definitely blow off the nap for more urgent matters.
3. It could be urgent and not important, if you are really tired and doing it to avoid doing other more important, less urgent tasks. Now, yYou are getting into subconscious influence over your actions. You are subconsciously being prompted to act on the nap now, because of fatigue. But is it fatigue or habit? That's what you have to ask yourself, and search for the real answer.
4. Finally, it could simply be that you want to avoid other more important things, without even being tired - using the nap simply as an escape, because you have always taken naps - or enjoy taking naps. You are consciously acting and choosing a nap - but less out of importance or even urgency, and more out of a subconscious desire to keep you from doing what's important .

It's not the nap that is the problem, it's why you are taking the nap that matters.

Truth, all too often, we end up doing the same things again and again, not because we decided to, but because we didn't decide not to.

So as you go about your day, stop and think, why am I doing what I'm doing? Why am I eating what I'm eating? Why am I working on what I'm working on and being whom I am currently being?

These questions aren't challenging what you are doing, but WHY you are doing it. They get you to go beyond the life you numbly live and challenge you to stop and act out of choice instead of habit.