Unconscious Mind: unleashing your potential …

Are you intrigued? Curious?  …. starting to understanding how your mind works means you are able to better utilise it’s potential to help you get the results that you desire, want to hear more?

As an introduction, I want to invite you to consider that we all have 2 parts to our mind, our conscious mind and our unconscious mind.

Our conscious mind is often the part of the brain that we use to consciously ‘think’ – I often refer to it as the old, outdated laptop (you know the one, the one that often crashes and runs out of battery faster than you can ever finish what you wanted to achieve!). People often refer to the conscious mind as the logical, linear mind – when for example, you want to sit down and consciously decide on a goal or task, you are using your conscious mind. The unconscious mind is like the super computer in comparison – we apparently only really use 3% of it’s potential – it is the part of your mind that automatically tells your heart to beat, that makes your lungs work so you can breath and oxygenate your blood – you don’t tell it to do it, do you? It’s also very playful, creative and takes care of all those wonderful dreams you have.

So, what’s the purpose of your Unconscious Mind? Your unconscious mind also stores memories, runs your automatic behaviour and responses (such as your fight/flight response), right the way through to storing your Values and morals (your values within your Unconscious Mind will not allow you to do anything which is against your Values – despite what a certain ITV show that’s currently running on a Saturday night would have you believe!). It also protects you; for example it represses memories (i.e. your ‘baggage’) until you are ready to process it; have you ever experienced a memory just popped into your awareness at a point in time and you found yourself saying ‘where did that come from?’ …. well, that’s your unconscious mind offering up a memory that it may have repressed until a time it felt your were able and could effectively process it and take whatever learnings you needed from it.

Your Unconscious Mind also has the job of making sense of the 2 million bits per second of information that is entering your system via your senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, and what your feeling – such as the chair your sat on). Despite how amazing your mind is, it can’t and doesn’t need to process that volume of information to make sense of the world – it would overload you if it didn’t. So, for example (if it’s safe to do so) close your eyes for a moment – what level of information can you recall about your surrounding right now …. then open your eyes and really take a few moments to look – I bet you didn’t notice quite a lot of things when you stop and force yourself to really look, and I mean really look at the detail around you – it’s cool, who would want to feel overloaded with information that is surplus to requirements?

So, your Unconscious Mind deletes stuff and it also distorts and generalise stuff  ….. and that’s the content for a different blog or you can book to come onto our Practitioner course.

So, how do I make the most of what I’ve got?

When you can understand the critical roles that conscious and unconscious mind plays you can start to utilise them. But the real power comes when you can use them both together – taking the best parts of both – for example using your conscious mind to write a fantastic goal (using our goal setting techniques) and then aligning your unconscious mind (values etc) behind it and that means that both your conscious and unconscious mind are moving in the same direction.

If you’d like to find out more about how to unleash the potential of your mind, check out our coaching and training courses.

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