Monday, August 07, 2006

Success or failure and the unconscious mind

Human mind is the most complex part of the human body. Its work is to process all the information received from all types of human sensory systems and control the human body, emotions, and feelings. It keeps working twenty four hours a day and never stops. Even if one is sleeping the human mind keeps doing background processing. It is capable to make a human do something extraordinary or to make him incapable of doing even daily routine tasks properly.

Mind is divided, by psychologists, into different categories depending upon different functionalities being performed by human mind. In this article i'll just give you an overview of two of them, the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. I'll tell you how our unconscious mind is being programmed, how it affects our capabilities to achieve a goal or to fail in achieving our goals.

The conscious mind is that part of our mind which knows who actually we are, where we are right now, what we are doing, why we are doing all this, whom we are talking to, what decision to take in some particular situation. It is the one which performs thought processing and generating new ideas by using our perception. The unconscious mind, on the other hand, works in background. It works just like a helper to the conscious mind. It uses the data stored in our brain to make rules and apply those rules on our daily decisions. These rules, made by unconscious mind, can right or wrong. Now, whenever our conscious mind tries to find a solution for a problem or to take a decision, it contacts our unconscious mind to find whether there is some rule already defined for this kind of situation. If unconscious mind provides some predefined rule, your conscious mind applies that rule to the current situation. If such situation happens again and again it becomes a habit. If the rule made by the unconscious mind is good then you'll adopt a good habit otherwise it'll become a bad habit. In current situation, it is sometimes said that success is a habit, this is because if your unconscious mind if programmed properly it will create a success habit otherwise situation will be reverse.

Now, let us see, how these negative thoughts, which don’t let you succeed in life, are imprinted on your unconscious mind. Human mind start processing images, voices, and every kind of data right from the infancy. A child perceives all kind of things and then mind saves them in the brain memory. As a child you get instructions from your parents, teachers, seniors, society, and everything you hear or see even a TV show or drama. Whenever, your parents or elders dictates you that you shouldn’t do one thing or the other without giving any valid reason to not to do that, even if some reason is given the decision is imposed and as a child you can't change that decision, you are bound to stop the action. Sometimes, parents or other people just let you do the things of some particular type or in some particular fashion and not in any other way, so you adopt a particular pattern of doing things. As, those instructions are being written throughout the long enough childhood, the unconscious mind makes some false rules like
"I'm a bad child..."
"I can't do anything..."
"I can't do things right..."
"I'm not as good as some other child is..."
"I always break things..."
"I make other people feel bad..."
"I can't achieve what i have planned for..."
"I can only do things with the help of someone else..."
Such negative thoughts are also written by yourself, for example, if you fail once or twice in certain thing you make it a general rule that you can't succeed in anything. The more deeply these thoughts are imprinted on your mind the more chances of failure are there.

As i have already discussed, our conscious mind is the one who take the active or current decisions. These decisions are based on our current perceptions or the predefined rules established by your unconscious mind. The deeper those rules are imprinted the more your decisions will be effected by those. As you want to do something new on the journey of success these rules become an obstacle. They give you a shout - "hey - don't you do that, you'll fail... or you are just going to waste your time or money or you are not very good at that...blah blah blah....". So, actually, those false rules are the cause of failure.

The good news is that these thoughts and rules can be changed. Your unconscious mind can be reprogrammed. First of all, you need to think rationally and logically. Don't take decisions abruptly; if you do you'll be under the control of your unconscious mind. Don't just give up immediate. When you are about to take a decision, just take a short brake, put the pros and cons in front of you. Find out the list of the good and bad things relating to this decision. I know you'll keep hearing the voice from your unconscious mind that'll rather make you afraid, but just continue for a while. Evaluate every single fact and figure. At the end if you find the high score on the positive side then just act upon that decision. You conscious mind will never deceive you. You need to follow this approach again and again until your rational decisions are imprinted more deeply as compared to your irrational decisions. Once you have reprogrammed your mind this way, you'll feel comfortable while achieving you goals. You'll stop hearing those voices of unconscious mind and you'll be bound to succeed.

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