If you really want to bring change in your life, whether enhancing your self-confidence, improving relationships, communicating more effectively, improving heath, fitness or anything else, you need to know yourself. If you want to know yourself, you must understand your mind. Studying NLP can give you great insights to bring about real personal development. Here’s what you need to know about the conscious and the unconscious mind.
In NLP we use the metaphor of the conscious mind to represent those things we are aware of in any one moment (studies reveal the conscious mind can only process about 7± 2 chunks of information at once) and the unconscious mind to represent everything else. All our experiences and memories are held in our unconscious mind and these may come to consciousness at different times.
Whatever you think you are always (and in all ways) more than that
Metaphorically, Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis) has suggested you could liken the relationship between conscious and unconscious minds to an elephant and its rider. The rider represents the ‘controlled’ processes of the mind, the planning and reasoning that takes place one step at a time in conscious awareness, while the elephant represents the hundreds of automatic operations we carry out every second outside of conscious awareness.
The elephant has been around a lot longer than the rider. It includes emotions, gut feelings and responds to stimulus control. The rider, by contrast, has very little influence on behaviour. Although he can look into the future, imagine scenarios and make plans, he is essentially an adviser and a passenger.
Usually, though, we don’t realise this: we think either that we are in charge of the elephant, or (perhaps more often) don’t realise there is an elephant, and then are baffled or give ourselves a hard time when we don’t stick to our resolutions and don’t carry out the actions that we know we “should” be doing. Problems occur when rider and elephant are not operating in harmony.
All change takes place first at the unconscious level
Typically, as we learn and develop new behaviours we have an awareness of them consciously and it is our unconscious mind that remembers everything. Everything, once learned, resides in the unconscious mind. Change with NLP is generally a case of creating new habits, patterns or resources at an unconscious level for a person to choose to use in the future. This can be done with a conscious process, such as anchoring or applying the meta model, or at an unconscious level such as using six step reframing or metaphor for instance.
Your conscious mind excels at:-
· Processing sequentially
· Logic
· Verbal language
· Analysis
Your unconscious mind is better at:-
· Working holistically
· Intuition
· Creativity
· Running your body
· Taking care of emotions
· Storing memories
Now that we know these differences we can harness our brains correctly. How exactly we do that I’ll explain when I’ve got a moment later.
‘Til then,
Ben
Tags: unconscious mind
