Overcoming Mental Programming

What would happen if you woke up today, or tomorrow, and you had no limiting beliefs?

HOW TO OVERCOME LOUSY MENTAL PROGRAMMING

The In’s and Out’s of Subconscious Programming, When to Change It, and How

In this episode of the Creating Your Best Self Podcast, we discuss Subconscious Mental Programming, how it impacts your life, and how it controls your perception of what you deserve and can achieve.

We discuss how to program your Subconscious Mind while reviewing the steps you need to take to overcome and change old mental programming that no longer works and why taking inventory and charge of your Subconscious is essential in creating your best self.

What is Meant by My Subconscious Mind and Subconscious Programming?

Subconscious Programming is anything, and everything that you’ve experienced that has contributed to who you are as a person, how you behave, how you feel, and how you perceive yourself and others.

The Subconscious Mind is the automated, integrated mental storage of processes, functions, and the resulting experience of all that information stored in your brain. 

Although you have no direct control over the subconscious, you subjectively experience the world through its filters of emotion, thought, assumptions, beliefs, and values related to every moment you’re awake and aware.

Your inner voice, the continuous stream of thoughts you think all day, your internal reactions, and emotional patterns are assembled in your Subconscious Mind and served up to your awareness in the present moment.

For you, that means plenty of jewels programmed into your mind that help you function well, but most of us have picked up some junk along the way that we want to eliminate from our thoughts and feelings.

You can refer to subconscious programming as ‘being set in your ways,’ or your mental and psychological conditioning. 

The way you think, feel, and behave throughout your day depends on the content and conditions established within the stored ‘matrix’ of previous experience.

In this episode, you’ll learn how your subconscious patterns prevent you from living the life you deserve, and we will discuss how to free yourself from the destructive mental code that’s holding you back.

Most importantly, you’ll discuss simple ways to rewrite harmful mental code and replace it with positive subconscious programming to make creating your best self easier and more enjoyable. You are in for a real treat in this episode.

What Outdated Beliefs are Holding You Back?

If you’re new to the concept of the Subconscious Mind, understand that it contains everything that’s caused your current results and determines your future potential. 

It also contains and organizes your desires and motivations and is the one thing that’s driven you to remain with us so far. The Subconscious Mind is the most extraordinary natural power you have to improve the quality of your future experiences.

If you have the proper internal conditioning, your subconscious will provide the agreeable thoughts, feelings, urges, and motivations for easy, enjoyable action. If not, it will work to create a mental state that incites avoidance or procrastination.

To create a meaningful future, you have to push the boundaries separating you from your next level. Moving forward means testing the limits of previously conceived assumptions and doing new things that may be outside of your psychological comfort zone.

In that moment of challenge, your Subconscious Mind uses thoughts and feelings to tell you whether you have the wrong kinds of programming (limiting beliefs, fear, etc.) by making you feel uncomfortable, fearful, hesitant, or doubtful.

Your Comfort Zone & Success Potential is Managed by Your Subconscious Mind!

Comfort Zone-testing moments trigger subconscious beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that can cause you to hesitate, avoid, procrastinate, or give up on a goal, ambition, or dream. 

Auditing and taking careful inventory of the content of your thoughts and emotions provide answers that lead to solutions.

• Are there limiting thoughts running through your head?
• What fearful feelings have kept you from moving onward and upward?

Taking stock of the thoughts, feelings, and mental states that you experience when thinking about or working on your goals can reveal internal emotional conflicts caused by old, outdated subconscious mental programming that no longer serves your best interest.

Auditing and challenging old mental conditioning means making an honest self-assessment:

• Do the thoughts, feelings, and mental states within me in reaction to this matter work for me or against me? Do they propel me forward, slow me down, or worse, stop me?
• Are the emotions I experience congruent, aligned, and helpful in moving me along the path to get the results I want?
• Am I growing, standing still, or regressing backward concerning what I want for myself?
• Am I consistently happy and in good mental health, or is there room for improvement?
• Are there areas of my life that I do not enjoy but would benefit me if I could change my attitude?

Suppose you objectively and honestly determine that you have old beliefs and feelings keeping you from moving past where you are now. In that case, it’s time to use a few simple techniques and habits to tame the potent mechanism so that your path forward becomes a joy.

Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind – The Elephant & The Rider

A famous metaphor in Psychology to represent the proper, practical relationship between your conscious awareness and subconscious mind is that of the Elephant and the Rider, introduced by Dr. Jonathan Haidt.

The concept says that you, in your awareness of yourself, are the ‘Rider,’ the rational, consciously thinking and observing self, while the Elephant carrying you through life’s moment-to-moment, daily experience is your Subconscious Mind (Emotional Focus, Power, Strength, Endurance).

In their groundbreaking book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Dan and Chip Heath summarize your ‘Rider’ role to your Elephant in this way:

“Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.”

The key, then, is for you as the Rider to use your natural power and privileges to train your Elephant so that your job grows easier, more enjoyable, and without stifling limitations. 

You have to start paying attention to the signals your Elephant uses to communicate its emotion-fueled momentum based on existing programming.

When you decide to change the way you think, feel, and react to situations that activate unhelpful mental states, the next step is to lead and influence your ‘Elephant’ by choosing one or two simple options.

Select from among readily available tactics listed below to begin reprogramming the kinds of thoughts, feelings, and productive behaviors that will make things better and more manageable.

Tips, Tools, & Methods for Changing Your Mental Programming Easy, Fun, Fascinating Way

Start a journal, So Says Science!

Know what you want in life, Get in the habit of knowing when your thoughts are incongruent with what you want out of life, Write everything down, and get intimate with your ideas. 

Each of us has thousands of mental conversations that bubble up throughout the day. Be mindful of the thoughts that you give power to, for those are the ones that you become

Consume Better, Aligned Knowledge

By reading, watching, and listening to new material, perspectives, and expertise on topics related to your goals, you pour new ideas, beliefs, and values into your mental matrix.

This new subconscious content will inspire you to take eager action you previously wouldn’t and allow you to enjoy both the action and its results in a new way.

Associate with Aligned People

In that same way that consuming better information trains your Elephant to accept new possibilities and better paths, changing who you spend your time with will further break any mental shackles holding you back.

You can save yourself lots of wasted time, energy, and mistakes by borrowing from the experience, wisdom, courage, energy, and inspiration of others moving in a similar direction.

Changing the company you keep will invigorate your progress rather than having your energy stolen, and momentum stopped by people who unconsciously work to keep you on their mental, spiritual, or socioeconomic level.

Your new, higher influences and the better social company will work as a psychological elevator that helps you achieve new levels of success with increasing, natural ease.

The practical values, beliefs, and habits, of those who have already walked a path similar to what you want to be, do, and have can be yours if you make their acquaintance and role model the best approaches.

Design & Install New Habits with Reliable Ease!

There has never been an easier time choosing to build any new habit that moves you with increasing speed and accuracy toward your goals. There are scores of famous works available surrounding the now scientifically-sound process of creating new habits quickly by making them obvious, attractive, easy, and rewarding.

Information on proven methods for establishing new, reliable thought and behavior patterns are now available, even at no cost, with a simple online search for terms like ‘Atomic Habits,’ ‘Easiest Way to Form New Habits,’ and ‘Breaking Bad Habits.’

Suppose you assemble a list of a few habits that would automatically propel you toward the successful pursuit and achievement of your goals. In that case, you will have what amounts to a ‘golden ticket’ giving you an advantage over 99% of other people competing over the same idea. 

By ‘stacking’ a set of habits into a daily ritual, you can design a series of automatic, force-multiplying actions to guarantee a successful everyday experience.

Update Your Inner Voice & Internal Visuals to Work For You Instead of Against You

Although your Subconscious Mind broadcasts and communicates its current ‘conditioning’ through emotional signals that you can feel in your body (positive or negative, pleasant or uncomfortable), they tend to be attached to:

• Mental imagery (pictures, moving imagery), 
• Auditory Sound (mimicking voices – your own, mentors, friends) 
• Memories or Assumptions (regarding feelings about the future)

Your habitual inner voice and mental pictures strongly affect how motivated or hesitant you are to take action, engage in comfort-zone challenging tasks, or dare to learn and do what is unfamiliar to achieve your ambitions. 

Indeed, that internal stream of thoughts and feelings is what your brain uses to protect you by motivating you to stay on the level you are in the interests of familiarity, conformity, or safety. If you have ambitions, that kind of safety can be the thin, fragile rope that keeps your Elephant stuck in place.

For centuries, people have used the following Subconscious Reprogramming Techniques to retrain their mental programming for better personal results. These methods are yours to use anytime you wish:

Visualization Engineering – or ‘Visioneering,’ in which you use daily sessions of creative, intentional visualization (with attached emotions to the content) to replace old visual imagery and unhelpful feelings resulting from old ways of thinking. 

Visualization works best as a form of mental rehearsal, allowing you to safely practice any new idea, action, habit, or skill on the stage of your imagination where you can feel safe.

Over the past century, many peak performance works have emphasized mental rehearsal’s critical, priceless value in improving mental health, intellectual capability, and physical skill.

The field of Psychology has decades of peer-reviewed research supporting the use of visualization as an effective method for reprogramming your mind, fostering motivating emotions, creating supportive urges, and improving your physical skills at the same time.

Positive Affirmations or ‘Autosuggestion’ – The phrase ‘Affirmation’ comes from the Latin word, ‘AFFIRMARE,’ which means to fortify or make stronger. 

To update your thoughts and feelings about anything whatsoever (including your self-image), use affirmations as your mental reprogramming tool consisting of positive statements (in the first person) about who you want to do, be, and have.

It may sound too good to be true, but science has shown that consistent, repetitive, positive statements to yourself can help change the way you feel and behave to fit a new vision you have for your life. Studies such as The Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2015 research shows that positive affirmation directly affects our future-oriented mental focus.

Through the power of repetition of an idea, you carve new thoughts into your Subconscious Mind that reflect themselves eventually as your own inner voice, thoughts, and feelings, generating compelling urges that make doing the actions supporting your goals easier and more enjoyable. One of the most famous affirmations in history was by French Psychologist Émile Coué, who said:

“Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Self-Hypnosis – Hypnotic Subconscious Programming is a simple, easy form of super-relaxed affirmation. 

With easily accessible editing software available for free or at low cost, you can now assemble customized self-hypnotic recordings that work to your effortless advantage when sculpting your Subconscious Mind.

The main difference between Affirmations (Autosuggestion, Self-talk) and Self-Hypnosis is the profound level of relaxation involved in Self-Hypnosis.

Deep relaxation is required to calm your mind enough to shut off your inner critic so that the suggestions planted within the hypnotic audio are sketched directly into your memory without interference, doubt, or distraction.

Like Affirmations, the success of Self-Hypnosis shows itself by changes in your inner voice and thought-based imaginary habits. 

With enough repetition of the new idea, your subconscious begins feeding those commands back to you as though they came initially from you. Success, in this way, proves itself when you feel and speak those things you originally installed, and it feels genuine.

Some Books & Other Resources Useful in Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind

Books, Videos, Articles & Blog Posts Recommended for Learning How to Change Your Mental Programming:

The Strangest Secret (free on YouTube), by Earl Nightingale

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Dan & Chip Heath

The Elephant & The Rider (topic), by Johnathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Atomic Habits, by James Clear