Subconscious Mind Power #9

Subconscious Mind Power Secret #9: The
subconscious mind can’t tell the truth from a lie.

Remember how we said that the non-conscious can’t tell what’s
real from imagined? It also can’t tell the truth from a lie. When
you set a goal to do something you’ve never done before and you
visualize it and talk about it and think about it as if you already
achieved it, you’re lying to yourself.

And that’s an aspect of goal setting and positive thinking that gets
criticized a lot. But the critics are wrong. Neuroscientists have
now proven that the conscious mind can accept or reject an idea,
but everything that reaches the subconscious mind is accepted as
true.

Every goal you ever reached started out as a falsehood when you
didn’t have it yet but said you would. Every invention was
nothing but a figment of someone’s imagination before it was
invented.

You begin with the end in mind, you hold that picture in your
mind, and then start acting as if it were already true. You visualize
yourself as if you were already there. If you weigh 350 pounds,
you see yourself as if you were already a 180-pound lean person
and then you start acting like that kind of person.

It’s just as if you were an actor playing a role. And that brings to
mind another popular success cliché: “Fake it till you make it.” A
similar, and probably even better-stated maxim is “Act as if.” Act
as if you had already succeeded. Act as if it were impossible to
fail. This was the advice of Dorothea Brande in her classic 1936
success book, Wake Up and Live. Brande talks about, of all
things—the unconscious mind. Long ridiculed as Pollyanna by
some, the classic success books like this one contain advice that
has turned out to be scientifically accurate, based on what we now
know about how the subconscious mind works.

This is how the creative process takes place. This is how the goal
achievement process takes place. You visualize, think about and
dwell on something that hasn’t happened yet, as if it already has
happened. In this sense, if you don’t “lie” to yourself, you can’t
change yourself.

There’s only one catch, and this is important. Your goal doesn’t
have to be true yet—that’s the whole idea—but it does at least
have to be believable. If you don’t even believe it’s possible, or if
you believe you don’t have the ability to achieve your goal, then
when you set the goal, your subconscious mind says, “No way,
impossible,” and shuts off all goal-directed behaviors or triggers
self-sabotaging behaviors. In this case, you either have to work on changing your entire belief
system, or you need to adjust your affirmations and goals so
they’re believable.

One way to make goals and affirmations believable is to go ahead
and set big goals that may have challenged your level of belief at
first, but set a highly achievable long term deadline and set lots of
short term goals on the way to the big goal. If you have a huge
goal, that’s great—keep it. But remember the two keys: 1) Make
believable goals and 2) Set realistic deadlines.