Your Conscious Mind vs Subconscious Mind: how to achieve your goal with ease
(Why what you think is the problem, isn’t really the problem)
You may have heard this stat before, but not really thought about it. At least not consciously.
Approximately 95% of your thoughts are subconscious.
Which means that you’re only consciously aware of about 5% of your thoughts.
Why it Matters
While this statistic may not be something that you’ve thought much about before, it’s critical information to understand when it comes to figuring out how to reach your goals.
When you choose a goal that really matters to you – and you create a strategy and a plan to help you to achieve it, you do that with your conscious mind.
Your conscious mind is the goal-setter.
But we already know that your conscious mind makes up less than 5% of your thoughts – and therefore your behaviours.
It’s your subconscious mind, the part of your mind that you are not overtly aware of that is responsible for almost all of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Your subconscious mind is the goal-getter (or as is often the case, the goal-upsetter).
It’s pretty clear that if you want to achieve your goal, your best bet is to get your subconscious mind on board with achieving the goal.
How We’ve Learnt to Achieve Goals
Unfortunately, this isn’t the way that most of us have been taught.
As high achievers we’ve been shown how to create clever strategies and design well thought out plans.
We’ve learned to create to-do lists and hustle harder.
We’ve watched YouTube videos and read books and listened to podcasts about how to be more productive.
We’ve listened to many motivational speakers.
We’ve all worked hard on our mindset – reframing our thoughts, reciting affirmations, changing our language.
We’re all familiar with exerting willpower and effort and energy to try hard to get what we want, to do what we said we were going to do. But sooner or later, we end up feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and unsatisfied.
Your Subconscious is the Missing Piece
No one ever told us that mindset is only one piece of the puzzle (and a very small piece at that).
No one ever taught you that until you get your subconscious mind to line up with the intentions that your conscious mind has set, you’ll continue to find it challenging to reach your goals.
The subconscious part of your mind has been programmed by all of your past experiences – the things that you have directly experienced as well as the things that you’ve heard and seen around you.
As humans, we love to create meaning to help us understand ourselves and the world around us. We love to understand why and we love to understand what is right.
The meaning that your subconscious mind creates from your experiences become your beliefs.
The Internal Conflict
The primary role of your subconscious mind is to keep you safe. The problem is that your subconscious mind determines what is safe based on your past experiences and conditioning. To your subconscious mind, what is safe is what is familiar.
Because these familiar patterns may have been established very early on in your life, what feels familiar is often in conflict with what you know (on a conscious level) that you really want to achieve.
That conflict shows up as resistance which may look like procrastinating on the tasks that you need to do, or it may feel hard to get them done i.e. you find yourself having to rely on a lot of willpower or put in a lot of energy and effort. And when you do this, you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, burned out, caught up in overthinking and feeling unsatisfied and unfulfilled.
Your subconscious may not be on board with the goals that you are consciously setting – because the actions that you need to take to get there feel unsafe or unfamiliar or because the person you need to be to achieve your goals feels unsafe or unfamiliar to your subconscious.
How to Engage Your Subconscious Mind
While most of us know of and have practiced plenty of ways to engage our conscious mind, you might not be as familiar with ways to work with your subconscious mind. As a coach and breathwork facilitator, I’m trained in lots of techniques that work with the subconscious mind (though many traditional coaches and therapists often focus on working primarily with your conscious mind).
There are also lots of things that you can do on your own to start to access the power of your subconscious.Some of the best known ways of working with your subconscious mind are meditation, visualisation and practicing gratitude. Other techniques include hypnotherapy, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT/tapping), somatic therapy and breathwork.
The Key to Achieving Your Goals With Ease
Ultimately, the key is to align both the conscious and subconscious parts of your mind so that there is no longer an internal conflict. You’ll know that this is the case when it feels so much easier to take action. You’ll notice that your behaviour changes (without requiring so much effort or willpower) and you’re (finally!) able to develop new habits.
This means that simply engaging your subconscious mind (though it is helpful even on its own) is not enough to create lasting transformation. Integration – of both the conscious and subconscious parts of your mind – is essential.
I make sure that I always include integration every time that I work with a client, regardless of the type of session that it is or the specific goal that the client is focused on.
As an example, in a circular connected breathwork session, I’ll guide you to consciously set your intention at the start of the breathwork journey. Then, the rhythm and flow of the breathwork support you to connect with your subconscious. Towards the end of the breathwork journey, I prompt you to move into the integration phase – and then the integration will continue even after the breathwork is finished.
There are lots of things you can do to support the integration process. One is to summarise your experience – you could do this by writing it down or leaving yourself a voice memo or you could tell someone about it. Something else you can do is to set yourself a small action step that you can take immediately (or within the next 24 hours) that is based on the insights you received from the work you did with your subconscious.