Do you know what is:
Running your life?
Keeping you stuck?
Sabotaging your success?
Affecting your health?
Derailing your happiness?
Paralyzing you from getting out of your comfort zone?
Depressing you?
Holding you back?
Making you anxious?
Reinforcing your addiction to cigarettes, food, drugs, alcohol (pick your poison)?
Making you feel miserable?
Pushing you to fail?
Disrupting your relationships?
Undermining your efforts to lose weight?
Encouraging you to procrastinate?
Keeping you confused and lost in your life?
YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS.
It’s the subterranean voices that we’re not aware of that are driving much of our lives.
According to Bruce Lipton, who wrote the Biology of Belief, your subconscious mind is running anywhere from 95-99% of your life.
So what? Well in your subconscious mind is all the stuff that you learned from the people and experiences in your environment before the age of six or seven.
So what? Well that means that a six year old (or three or four year old) is running your life at times. Especially in times of stress. Or conflict. Or when you feel vulnerable. Or afraid.
Have you ever said or done something and then thought, “Where did that come from?” “Why did I do that?” “Why am I still struggling with this problem? I thought I had it figured out.” (You’re not alone.)
From birth to about age six, we are sponges. Soaking up everything we can from our environment and the people in it: parents, relatives, teachers, tutors, camp counsellors, daycare staff, religious leaders, television, etc. Because children are dependent on the adults in their lives, what those adults say and do has a powerful effect on them.
The problem is that, as young children, we have no filters. Everything gets absorbed without discretion. So what these powerful people say or do is taken as the gospel truth. It’s just the way it is.
As Bruce Lipton describes it, the subconscious is like a tape recorder. So from birth to age six, the Record button is on all the time. Downloading into the subconscious how people treat us, what they say and do and how it makes us feel. Automatically.
Without any awareness on our part or the ability to judge what’s true or not.
Your mother asked you why you couldn’t do as well as your sister or brother at sports (or art or music or school)? Downloaded.
Your teacher told you that you’d never amount to anything? Downloaded.
The kids at school bullied you or picked you last for a sports team? Downloaded.
Your father said that money doesn’t grow on trees and wealthy people are greedy? Downloaded.
Adults said that kids should be seen and not heard? Downloaded.
After the age of six, the Play button is on and much of what was recorded in our subconscious when we were younger plays out for most of the rest of our life. Until we unpack that old baggage.
A couple of examples:
One of my clients, Ellen (not her real name), recently realized that her feelings of not being good enough or loveable stemmed from the problems she had with some girls in junior high. The problem is that Ellen didn’t just graduate from junior high. She is now 52 years old and has been carrying around those feelings for over 40 years. But they were buried deep in her subconscious so she wasn’t aware of how they were running certain aspects of her life.
No matter how many affirmations Ellen did, how positively she thought about herself or how much previous therapy she’d had, we had to unearth those subconscious feelings for her to be able to create real change in her life.
Another client, Rick (not his real name), is a really talented artist. But his talent was a well-kept secret. He rarely finished a painting or displayed his work in galleries or at shows. As we worked together Rick realized that his father had frequently scoffed at his passion for painting and told him that “all artists starve” and that it was time for him to “stop playing around and get a real job”.
Until Rick became aware of his father’s judgments and how they had become a sentence for him, he struggled with his art.
How do we know when the Play button is on and the subterranean voices are running things?
You have to watch out for the smoking guns:
Self-sabotage, procrastination, unfulfilled intentions, feelings of unworthiness, shame, guilt.
I’ll tell you how you can recognize and deal with your subconscious voices in an upcoming post.
Stop struggling in your life! Reply to this email and we’ll have a chat about how I can help you free yourself from the subconscious demons getting in your way.
With warmest regards,
