Creating Rapport With Your Subconscious
There’s something else, besides your consciousness, living behind your eyes.
In fact, it takes up most of the room back there.
And it’s pretty talented.
Your conscious mind, scientist tell us, can process about 40 bits of information a second. This other intelligence, this hitchhiker behind your eyes, can process around 11 million bits a second.
How’s your memory? I must admit (and if you ask Sara), mine is very often unreliable.
The other guy in there with you — science believes he/she remembers everything your senses have ever passed over. Every stray word you’ve heard in someone else’s conversation, every detail of every image you’ve seen, every book, every smell, every sensation — no matter how insignificant it seemed to you at the time.
You might have already known or guessed by now, the other entity behind your eyes is your subconscious. And while the description above may make your subconscious sound alien or strange — it is basically your best friend. It has been working since birth to keep you alive. It has kept your lungs breathing and heart beating, it has taken the thought out of walking and moving so that you can do so quickly to avoid danger. It even drives for you when you’ve let your mind wander to work or arguments or Hamilton or whatever. It happily and readily takes orders from you, though you probably don’t realize you’re giving them.
Now, the movie Limitless, starring, in Zach Galifinakis’ words, “handsome idiot” Bradley Cooper is fiction. There is no pill, no process, no switch inside us that can suddenly give us access to all this stored information and processing power.
But, what we can do — I’d even say WHAT WE SHOULD DO, is seek to build rapport between these two sides of ourselves. When we have a rapport with our unconscious mind it expresses itself a couple of different ways.
First of all, we develop an uncanny degree of intuition. The language our subconscious speaks is one of images and feelings. So, if it has information for us it will often present it to us as a sudden urge or a relevant memory of past experience. A lot of us go through life not trusting our own instincts for whatever reason. Maybe we’re overly analytical. Maybe someone in our life has made us feel like we shouldn’t. But the process of building rapport with your unconscious means becoming really aware of feelings of intuition and acting on them. When your subconscious sees these messages are getting through, it will gratefully send you more. Andrew Carnegie even said, in his rules for success, that successful people make a lot of decisions and make them quickly. Sounds like a vote for intuition to me.
A second way we build rapport with our subconscious is by engaging in creativity. As I said, the language of your subconscious is non-verbal. So, when we engage in creative activities that require us to interact with the images and feelings in our heads, we are working with our subconscious. Even if the creative act you prefer is writing, a largely verbal activity, it’s origins are in non-verbal thoughts — pictures, sounds, and emotions.
A final way to build rapport between these sometimes disparate parts is though daydreaming. Jung (mentioned above) had a very structured therapeutic use for daydreaming. He called it “Active imagination,” and it was a process by which he used his imagination to make contact with his subconscious mind. It’s a little too involved to describe adequately here, but for now, you can just spend five or ten minutes (or more if you want), every day in your imagination — but here’s the important thing — these imaginings need to be positive. You shouldn’t imagine what can go wrong in the future or what has gone wrong in the past — instead, you should imagine, in as much visual detail and emotion as you can, the perfect future. The perfect day. Something you want to happen. Or relive a time in your past when you felt loved, confident, or abundant.
All three of these are perfect ways to start building a bridge between your conscious mind and your unconscious mind. A fourth way is hypnosis. Not only can you be hypnotized to improve your intuition and creativity, but the very act of hypnosis is also rapport building. Think of hypnosis as a networking event in your mind — you shake hands with the other part of yourself, maybe for the first time, and add it and it’s vast resources to your Rolodex.
