Infinite Ideas - Achieve Your Goals. Fulfill Your Dreams with Help from Classic Self-help Thinkers

Achieve your goals

Fulfill your dreams with help from classic self-help thinkers

Infinite Ideas with Andrew Holmes, Karen McCreadie, Tim Phillips and Steve Shipside

The conscious and subconscious mind

In The Secret of the Ages Collier says, The one most important province of your conscious mind is to center your thoughts on the things you want, and to shut the door on every suggestion of fear or worry or disease. If you once gain the ability to do that, nothing else is impossible to you.

Since Collier wrote his book there have been many theories about the conscious and subconscious mind and how each bit is made up. In 1967 neurologist Paul MacLean came up with an evolutionary model of the brain, known as the triune brain. The oldest part of the brain is the reptilian brain, followed by the limbic system and finally, the neocortex (or rational) brain. Sigmund Freud muddied the waters in the 1920s when he suggested the subconscious was nothing more than an impulsive force in a constant tug of war with the more logical and detached conscious mind. Some view the two as part of the same system, while others such as Peter Dayan, a theoretical neuroscientist at University College London, together with fellow scientists Nathaniel Daw and Yael Niv, see the mind comprising of four systems.

There is also debate as to where the subconscious ends and the conscious mind begins. Studies carried out in the 1990s by Stanislas Dehaene, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at INSERM, demonstrate we are aware of things that our conscious mind does not register. For the purposes of this book, however, its probably not that important which is correct we dont need to understand how electricity works before we can use it, do we?

The most helpful description Ive ever found about whats really going on in your mind comes from Bruce H. Liptons fantastic book The Biology of Belief, in which he states, The conscious mind is the creative one, the one that conjures up positive thoughts. In contrast, the subconscious mind is a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences. The subconscious mind is strictly habitual; it will play the same behavioural responses to lifes signals over and over again, much to our chagrin.

Most probably you will have experienced this yourself when something trivial has sent you into a tailspin and youve later on been confused by your own over-reaction. Indeed, something just pushed your buttons and you reacted to a long-forgotten association that delivered a knee-jerk reaction.

According to Lipton, When it comes to sheer neurological processing abilities, the subconscious is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind. So, if your conscious desires conflict with the programmes running in your subconscious mind, they will come to nothing.

Left to its own devices, the subconscious will run amok over your hopes and dreams. But if you understand the challenges you face and train your conscious mind to harness the power of the subconscious then anything is possible. Collier states, Our subconscious minds are vast magnets, with the power to draw from universal Mind unlimited knowledge, unlimited power and unlimited riches.

HERES AN IDEA FOR YOU

If you want to change, you must learn how to tap into the subconscious mind so that you can, where necessary, overwrite negative or unhelpful programming. This can be assisted by techniques such as Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy. Alternatively, just master your thoughts.

DEFINING IDEA

It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish, we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind.

ORISON SWETT MARDEN, writer

Commit or dont bother trying

According to Napoleon Hills book the first step toward riches is desire. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.

This sentiment echoes down the ages, appearing, for example, in Sun-tzus The Art of War which was written two and half thousand years ago. Sun-tzu was a Chinese military genius who said, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him.

The two richest men in the world and long-time friends, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, know all about closing the exits and laying everything on the line in order to succeed.

Warren Buffet is the most successful investor of all time. Known as the Sage of Omaha, Buffet is the majority shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Most stock market professionals are safe in the knowledge that if they are wrong they wont lose out personally. But not Buffet. As majority shareholder, all his eggs are in the same basket as his investors; he has cut off all sources of retreat and so if he makes an investment mistake he suffers too. A quiet man of simple tastes, Buffet is now more interested in giving away his impressive fortune. In June 2006 he pledged $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In December 1974 Paul Allen was on his way to meet his high-school friend Bill Gates at his dorm room at Harvard. On his way he picked up a copy of Popular Electronics. The cover showed the Altair 8080 under the headline, Worlds First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models. Convinced that the home computer market was about to explode and that software would be needed, Gates rang MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the makers of the Altair. He informed the company that they had developed a BASIC programming language that could be used on the Altair. MITS wanted to see it.

But neither Allen nor Gates had written a single line of code; they didnt have an Altair or the chip that ran the computer. But they did have a burning desire and were prepared to cut all sources of retreat to make it happen. Eight weeks later Allen flew to MITS to demonstrate the program, having never tested it on an Altair. The demonstration went perfectly and MITS arranged a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC. Within the year Gates had dropped out of Harvard, he and Allen had created Microsoft and the rest is history.

HERES AN IDEA FOR YOU

Write down three actions you have recently taken in connection to your current goal. On closer inspection are any of your actions preparing yourself for defeat? Are you guilty making excuses? Diluting your goals to cushion the blow of failure virtually ensures defeat. You must commit to your definite major purpose, commit to your current plan and close the exits.

DEFINING IDEA

Nothing of worth or weight can be achieved with half a mind, with a faint heart, and with a lame endeavour.

ISAAC BARROW, scholar

Youll never know until youve tried

Its easy to make excuses about why you cant do something, but far harder to just give it a go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that the only person who really knows what you could do is you. And, more importantly, that the only way you could know was to give something a go. In other words, only after you have tried something and immersed yourself in it, could you truly say whether or not you could do it. This makes enormous sense and once you have tried something and succeeded, or at the very least learned from the process, you should be more confident in your own abilities.