Subconscious Mind Power #5

Subconscious Mind Power Secret #5: Your subconscious
mind never stops working.

To keep all those autonomic functions running, your subconscious
mind works automatically 24 hours a day 365 days a year. You
can’t turn it off. It works whether you want it to or not. It works
whether you realize it exists or not.

In 1937, Napoleon Hill wrote what became a very famous book
about success and goals, called "Think and Grow Rich". In that book,
Hill wrote:
“The subconscious mind will not remain idle! If you fail to plant
desires in your subconscious mind, it will feed on the thoughts which
reach it as a result of your neglect.”
Guess what? Seventy years later, psychologists proved he was
right.

Dr. Tanya Chartrand has done research in a field she calls “subconscious goal pursuit.” What she discovered is very interesting.
She found that if you don’t consciously set and pursue the goals of
your own choosing, it doesn’t mean your subconscious goal
seeking mechanism stops working. Quite the opposite—you form
goals unconsciously by default.

If you don’t consciously choose goals, here’s what happens
specifically:
1. You keep running the same old patterns, so you keep getting
the same results in your life over and over.
2. You receive external suggestions from other people, the media,
and especially the authority figures in your life and the people
closest to you in your social circle. When you’re surrounded by other people's negativity and negative programming, pretty
soon you’re thinking negatively too. It doesn’t take long before
you’re acting on those thoughts.
3. Here’s the big one that Napoleon Hill told us 70 years ago: If
you don’t give your subconscious mind a target by consciously
setting goals, you just start moving toward whatever you think
about the most.

This could be powerfully life-enhancing or utterly terrifying,
depending on what you think about all day long, couldn’t it?
What do you think about most of the time? What do you say when
you talk to yourself? Is it positive or negative? If it’s negative—for
example if you say, “I have a slow metabolism. I’ll always be
fat”—well there you go—those are your goals: 1) Slow
metabolism, 2) Always be fat.

A few years ago, Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote a book called "The Power
of Intention". I like that title, because I think it’s a lot better to
intentionally pursue goals of your own choosing than to be
programmed by other people or by your own negative thinking
without realizing its happening. I like to call this "succeeding on
purpose".

Dr. Dyer’s book is not scientific, it’s one of those books that take a
more spiritual and metaphysical approach, but we now know that
the advice he gave, such as monitoring your internal dialogue, is
scientifically grounded. If you don’t intentionally set goals, then
whatever you think about the most is your goal by default.
That’s how your brain works—you can’t turn off the brain’s goal-seeking
mechanism. The subconscious mind works automatically;
it’s always pursuing some goal whether you’re aware of it or not.