Lessons About repetition and the subconscious mind You Need To Learn To Succeed
This post is about three words: Your Subconscious Mind. It is your faithful, unrelenting, unquestioning and loyal servant that never sleeps. It doesn’t falter nor make clerical mistakes. It is clinical and thorough. And it has only one job — to do exactly as you tell it. It remembers everything, some of which you might have already ‘consciously forgotten’ about. It stores every little detail, feeling or memory that you have ever internalized. But very few of us are aware of the special relationship between repetition and the subconscious mind.
Your subconscious moves in the direction you tell him to move
Unlike your conscious mind, the subconscious mind does not know the difference between what is implied, what is real and what is imagined. It is not exactly ‘creative’ and can’t tell a joke from a serious comment. It simply accepts everything fed to it as real and actionable. Fortunately, your subconscious mind solely depends on what the conscious mind — the interface between it and the real world — for instructions. And this is where the significance of repetition as far as the subconscious mind goes stems from.
To understand this better think of it this way: Your thoughts, whether drawn from sentences, words, images, dreams, visions, etc, are perceived as visitors by the subconscious mind. And just like real-life visitors, some of these stay a while, others will quickly vanish making more space for newer thoughts. Some of the deeply-rooted thoughts, however, will hang around longer. They will thus gain considerable traction and power in one’s brain and consequently affect the thinking patterns of the person forever or until they are replaced with a bigger notion. That implies, that the longer an idea or thought sticks around, the greater its chances of getting permanently lodged in the mind.
This can be a good or bad thing depending on how you choose to look at it.
For example, the more positive thoughts dominate your mind, the more positive of an outlook your life will take. Throughout your life, you will be constantly conditioning and reprogramming your subconscious mind through the beliefs, thoughts, and habits that you take up in the course of your existence. The more repetitive and frequent these notions are, the easier it becomes for them to sink into the subconscious mind and later affect the reactions, actions and day-to-day behavior of the person involved. If you, for instance, often tell yourself that it is hard or impossible to make money or get good grades in school, your subconscious mind will accept this as true and put mental barriers in your plans thereby making it less likely for you to achieve the said goal.
On the other side of the spectrum, if you frequently repeat to yourself that you will be successful regardless of your current situation, you will start acquiring an internal self-drive that gradually propels you to greatness by helping you take advantage of any opportunities that cross your path. In other words, your thoughts are the bricks that shape your life. And when these thoughts are repeated out loud (verbally), the stronger these bricks become.
This leads to one important observation. If you get into a habit of choosing, sifting and selecting the phrases, words, and thoughts that you often repeat to yourself, your life will slowly start to change. Through the power of affirmation, you will start to create new circumstances and situations subconsciously.
By affirmations, I mean repeating a positive phrase several times per day or week until it gradually sinks in the subconscious and you start to believe in it. You may not realize this as first, but as time passes, you will notice a sharp positive boost to your general mood, perception, and reaction to everyday circumstances.
Training Your Subconscious to Harness Massive Success
At this point, you might be wondering if there is a simple and effective way of training your subconscious to drive you in the right direction by relying only on the power of repetition. Turns out there is.
Start by visualizing your success. This should be an image or perception of what you consider as success in life.
For some, it might be raising a happy family while others might have other ambitions such as accumulating over a million dollars worth of property. Either way, make sure that you have a very clear picture of exactly what you are going after. Remember that splitting your focus derails your progress and purpose. So it’s advisable to aim at one goal or a collection of related objectives at a go.
The next step is to write down your goal and all the related objectives. You might not know this, but simply writing down these goals triggers the subconscious mind to start formulating (passively) a way of achieving them. Besides, it also serves as an excellent positive reminder of what you must do within a specific time frame. After crystallizing your goals on paper, go the extra mile of reading them aloud to yourself before starting your usual daily routine. Reading these goals aloud will subconsciously force you to come up with unique ways of making them come true regardless of the challenges obstructing you from them at the moment.
Another excellent, tried-and-tested method of training your subconscious to increase your chances of winning is through autosuggestion. In other words, this is a combination of little things (seemingly unimportant) that you do every day to solidify your self-belief. For instance, some successful people assume a power posture whenever they are out in public. One may associate such a standing or sitting position with their unmatched success and also assume it whenever they want to feel a little more confident. If you do this often, the message that you are also successful will start to sink into your subconscious eventually sending you off to achievement.
The Bottom Line
It is important to remember that your subconscious is more or less a slave of your conscious self. It cannot tell fiction from fact and it does not have the perception of impossibility. It only retains what you repeatedly feed it daily in a specific and organized format. The same way a bodybuilder trains his physical muscles in the gym to come up with a toned physique, your conscious part can ‘train’ the subconscious mind according to a pre-determined belief or mentality. How well you can do this determines the quality of your life.
