I think the rational (mostly linguistic) parts of our brain can influence decisions made by other parts, if we’re smart about it. The main trap seems to be that when the conscious and subconscious parts of our brain disagree, we may decide that we didn’t will hard enough. So we try to “will harder”, which to the linguistic part of our brain means sticking the word “very” in front of everything and generating a bunch of negative self views, which has the opposite of the desired effect on our subconscious.
IAWY; it’s either the opposite effect, or just no effect. You could also think of this as being a case of “the leader not listening to subordinates”, in that the “try harder” mode is ignoring whatever the actual problem is—i.e., the subconscious goal or prediction that’s interfering. In my experience it’s much more important to teach people to be able to listen to themselves (i.e., become aware of what they already believe/expect/desire) than to talk to themselves (i.e., push new information in).
Every time I try listening to myself, my subconscious invents me some new and “deep” explanation that I then actually believe for a day or two. It’s an endless quest.
A more fruitful strategy for me was taking some minutes or hours every day to grow something new in my mind, ignoring the old stuff completely. A couple times the new stuff in me eventually grew strong enough to overthrow the old stuff for control of my life without much struggle.
Every time I try listening to myself, my subconscious invents me some new and “deep” explanation that I then actually believe for a day or two. It’s an endless quest.
That’s not listening, and it’s not your subconscious. Your other-than-conscious mind doesn’t do explanations—heck, it doesn’t even grok abstractions, except for an intuitive (and biased) sense of probabilities for a given context (external+internal state).
The type of listening I’m referring to is paying attention to autonomous responses (e.g. a flash of people laughing at you if you fail), not making up theories or explanations. It’s harder to learn, but more worthwhile.
IAWY; it’s either the opposite effect, or just no effect. You could also think of this as being a case of “the leader not listening to subordinates”, in that the “try harder” mode is ignoring whatever the actual problem is—i.e., the subconscious goal or prediction that’s interfering. In my experience it’s much more important to teach people to be able to listen to themselves (i.e., become aware of what they already believe/expect/desire) than to talk to themselves (i.e., push new information in).
Every time I try listening to myself, my subconscious invents me some new and “deep” explanation that I then actually believe for a day or two. It’s an endless quest.
A more fruitful strategy for me was taking some minutes or hours every day to grow something new in my mind, ignoring the old stuff completely. A couple times the new stuff in me eventually grew strong enough to overthrow the old stuff for control of my life without much struggle.
That’s not listening, and it’s not your subconscious. Your other-than-conscious mind doesn’t do explanations—heck, it doesn’t even grok abstractions, except for an intuitive (and biased) sense of probabilities for a given context (external+internal state).
The type of listening I’m referring to is paying attention to autonomous responses (e.g. a flash of people laughing at you if you fail), not making up theories or explanations. It’s harder to learn, but more worthwhile.