Whether you’re a CEO or a six year old, your unconscious mind rules your world.
Note – I said unconscious. That means you don’t know it’s running your world. Which is why being an adult really doesn’t matter. Our mindware is not about our age, our adulthood (or lack of) or our degree of control over our life. Period.
So forget the idea that as an adult you can snap your fingers to control your behavior, thoughts and life. It doesn’t work that way. Not even. That’s legacy thinking and beliefs that need to go bye bye.
Who Is in Control?
The reality is that the unconscious mindware we’ve created through our lives is in control of our perceptions of reality and how we respond to that reality.
Which is why I keep explaining to people that being an adult doesn’t mean we can snap our fingers and change a pattern or thought or behavior. It’s also the little known flaw in beliefs from The Secret and Law of Attraction. We can’t change or control something we are not even conscious about.
Here’s how we really work.
- Our unconscious and conscious mindware is created from the moment we’re born. We learn from every experience and person that intersects our lives.
- These mindware programs select our reality – what we choose to perceive and how we choose to perceive our world.
- These same programs also guide our thinking, beliefs and behaviors.
- 95% of what we do and think is managed by our unconscious mindware. We respond to a situation, make a decision, run a mental evaluation using this mindware. We are not aware of the programs that direct us. We do not consciously know that what happened when we were six is now guiding our choices about our business.
That’s why we call it unconscious. We don’t know it’s happening.
Unconscious Mindware in Action
Here’s an example from my own unconscious mindware.
All my life I’ve prided myself on the fact that I could do things faster than anyone else. I do the work of three people in a day, can create a business plan in a day, most of my books I write in a month. The same goes for m personal life. I learned to ski at the ripe old age of 40 and be the end of the first year I was doing black diamonds. Driven? That’s me.
Over the past few months I’ve been consciously looking at my “need for speed.” While it’s great to be quick, with that belief comes a lot of pressure to perform, pressure that has created some problems with my adrenal system. I need to slow down and balance my life. Yet, I’m still driven. When I did slow down, the big loud voice of guilt began to ring in my ears, louder and louder. Then it became a chorus of less than positive self evaluations.
Say what?
I dug deep into my unconscious mind, using some of the tools I use with executive clients. That’s when I found the programmed belief that was tightly linked to my instinctual survival mindware. **
“You have to be perfect or your grandma will hurt you. You have to do it better than anyone else or she’ll make you pay. The only way to survive, to be safe in life, is to do everything faster and better.”
WOW. I had no idea that I was being driven by a negative experience. No wonder I was always so panicked to be fast – and drove myself and everyone else crazy in the process. I upgraded that mindware program et voila, the drive to be faster than everyone no longer impacts my life. The reality beyond that program is that everything gets done and I have no need to push!
Whew – talk about an opportunity to breathe!
The Bottom Line
Forget the idea that just because you’re an adult you have conscious control over every single one of your thoughts, decisions. and behaviors That belief is ancient history that’s just plain inaccurate.
Does that mean we’re powerless? A victim of our unconscious? No way!
We can upgrade our unconscious mindware programs. We can all learn to shift the unconscious programming that is limiting our lives. Just not in the way we’ve been led to believe all these decades.
Thanks to the power of neuroscience in action, we can literally rewrite our mindware. That’s why I am so excited about the power of our minds.
We’ll talk more about that next Monday.
** Background note. Six years ago I recovered memories of being tortured as a child whenever I wasn’t perfect. Hence the strong survival connection. That said, kids link to survival for many of their mindware programs. To a child, negative experiences are big and scary and trigger survival level mindware. Whether it’s your grandma beating you in the cellar because your horse ate a tomato or mean little kids are not picking you for tag – the mindware created from the experience will link to survival.
