Reprogramming your subconscious mind can completely change your life. If you’re stuck in life, it’s probably because you’ve got some bad programming running the show. Changing your self image, self talk, your speech and of course your actions can bring about dramatic change in your circumstances.
The main problem for many is that the subconscious mind is running the show. Feed it the wrong information, and it’ll produces like minded results. Feed it some new information, and your results can be anything you want! If you’ve tried everything you can think of, and your results still suck; reprogramming your subconscious mind can make all the difference.
Napoleon Hill “Recall what has been said about the subconscious mind resembling a fertile garden spot, in which weeds will grow in abundance, if seeds of more desirable crops are not sewn therein. Autosuggestion is the agency of control through which an individual may voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of a creative nature, or, by neglect, permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into this rich garden of the mind.” – Think and grow rich (pdf)
Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind
You have been programming your subconscious mind all your life. Perhaps you haven’t been fully conscious of it, but your thoughts, words and deeds have all been feeding into the subconscious, letting it know how you think, feel and interact with others, yourself and life. By changing your inner dialogue, your speech and your self image, you can make dramatic changes to your life. Reprogramming your subconscious mind does take some time. After all, your life is the result of all that you have thought before now.
As a child, your conscious reasoning wasn’t fully developed and everything simply went in to your subconscious mind without any resistance. This is why the first 10 years of your life are so important. We pick up most of our ideas and deeply held beliefs from our parents or those closest to use while growing up. We hold them dearly as if they are our world. They are in fact our “inner world” of ideas, beliefs and reality. As we venture into life, these ideas can hold us back. This is our old, unconscious programming which we want to change, in order to move our lives forward.
This is years of programming remember – so changing it will take some work.
Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind – Watching
There’s a simple strategy to reprogram your subconscious mind to get whatever it is you want from life. As you go about your daily activities, notice how you talk to yourself in your mind. Notice what you say about yourself in your speech. How do you feel about yourself during your daily life? These are all signals of your programming and these words, thoughts and actions are all feeding into the subconscious mind continually. You tell yourself a story all the time which confirms your reality. To change that reality, you need to start telling yourself a different story.
Your subconscious mind listens to your every thought, and delivers results in your life which are congruent with your thinking. By first noticing your thoughts, and in particular the thoughts which offer a negative ‘take’ on things, you can get some clues into what you’re “feeding” your subconscious mind.
Don’t react at all at first. Just be the silent observer. If you react you might feel the need to explain the thoughts you’re having, even if only to yourself. This is giving you more evidence, and power to your beliefs which you want to change, so don’t do it!
Exercises For Watching Your Mental ‘Chatter’
Some simple exercises for this include:
- Learning meditation
- Sitting in quiet contemplation
- Writing a diary of your thoughts
You can also take a timer and set an alarm to go off at intervals throughout the day. When your alarm goes off take a note pad and record what you were thinking and doing. Also make a note of whether you want this or not.
Take An Inventory Of Your Limiting Beliefs
Taking an inventory of your thoughts is a good next step in reprogramming your subconscious mind. Having your “enemies” on paper can make this process much clearer. By “enemies” is mean those thoughts which sabotage your best intentions and undermine your confidence in yourself. These will usually show up as reasons which you give as to why you’re not happy, or, why you’re not moving forwards in life the way you would want.
Your inner complainer will offer many reasons as to why you are in the situation you are in. Remember, your story is still being written! It’s not over! You are the writer of your story and as you learn more about reprogramming your subconscious mind, you will learn to also get clearer on what it is you want to create.
Conflicting intent
The competing parts of our mind have different intentions. If we want sympathy, or if sympathy has worked for us as an old strategy in our lives to gain support and love; we might unconsciously sabotage our successes. The pay off is that we get support and love. The negative is that our lives fail to progress and we fail to grow.
Negative thoughts show up as excuses. They might be expressed in several ways but these are some examples:
“I’m never going to be able to..”
“I’m just not good enough”
“I always struggle with…..”
“I’m not like that”
“That isn’t for me..”
“I can’t..”
Think of your speech and notice disempowering ideas like the ones above. Choose more empowering words to say to yourself instead, even if you don’t always mean them. For example, rather than “I can’t” choose instead “I’m currently finding it difficult, but I could choose to work on it”. This is more empowering and makes you the decision maker in your own life. “I can’t” “I always struggle” etc. are disempowering and make you the victim in your own life. Remember, your subconscious mind is listening to what you say, and delivering the results in your life accordingly.
Feelings can be expressed in many ways too but often it comes down to feeling unworthy or unlovable. We are often our own harshest critics – saying things to ourselves which destroy our inner peace and calm. Often these are things we would never dream of saying to anyone else. When you catch yourself saying or thinking something negative about yourself, you have stumbled on a big key to your growth. Write it down and congratulate yourself because this is the start of reprogramming your unconscious mind.
Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind – Reprogramming
Now you should have some evidence of your own limiting beliefs in the form of some of the things you say to yourself.
“I’m not good enough”
“I’ll never get the promotion”
“Why does it always happen to me”
These are all disempowering beliefs. To change them, you first need to start noticing them. By observing them and understanding that it is those ideas which disempower you and limit you, you can start to retrain your mind for better results. As you notice yourself talking yourself down, stop and say something positive to counteract the negative thought. For example:
“I’m so sick of everything in my life” becomes “There’s many things in my life for which I can be grateful for”
“I’ll never get there” could be “I can take small actions to achieve specific goals over time”
Turn disempowering speech into empowering speech and your subconscious will reflect this in your outcomes. You can also question these thoughts as they come to the surface. Ask “Is this true?”. Soften your negative voices and you they will have less control over you and your best intentions.
You can also use mantras to focus your mind on specific outcomes too. Checkout my article on affirmations, mantras and positive intention.
Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind – Goals
A good method of both finding your limiting beliefs and changing them, is by setting goals. Ideally choose a goal which is both realistic, attainable and desirable. Focus on your goal and write it out. Repeat your goal over and over to yourself or aloud. As you do, you might find that limiting ideas and beliefs come to the surface. As they do, write them down. Ask if the statements are true, or are they just limiting beliefs? Affirm your goal again and affirm a positive intention which counter acts your limiting belief.
It is the things we repeat to ourselves over and over which become solid as our ideas of ourselves. They have the most impact on the choices we make and the outcomes in our lives. Read Psycho-cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. You can access it in pdf form here.
Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind
Aligning all parts of the mind is the fastest method of achieving a new outcome which you want to make happen. Our minds are offering contradictory thoughts all the time. It’s very difficult to focus on a specific achievement when we have so many desires and ideas. Our subconscious mind is trying to make sense out of the world and understand what we are telling it. But because we offer multiple ideas to the unconscious mind, it often delivers a ‘mishmash’ of results in our lives.
Let’s say we want to become thinner. So we go on a diet and hit the gym. Before long, we want to have a few drinks with our friends. This desire overrides the intention to become fitter and thinner and so we fall back into our old habit patterns and go out on a bender! What we get is then a mixture of our intent to get fitter, but also our intention to also live our lives as we have always done. It’s two contradictory desires meeting in the middle.
By aligning all parts of our mind, and by focusing our intent on a specific goal which we definitely want, we can attain more with less effort. Knowing what you really want is most of the battle. Do you know what you really want? Getting clear on this is most of the work. Repeating the message regularly and often to the subconscious mind and looking for feedback is the next step of the process.
Stuart Lichtman has written one of the best books I’ve found on this subject. He delivers the process to align all parts of the mind, to find your best outcome and to remove limiting intentions to get clear on what you truly desire. See How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast.
Learn more with 9 facts you should know about the subconscious mind.