THE POWER OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND - the secret to student success

Copyright 2006 Lisabeth Protherough
One of the best ways I know of to give a massive boost to your ability to learn and to enhance your grades beyond all recognition is to leverage the immense power of your unconscious mind.
‘The thinking process is unconscious. We become aware of the results consciously. All change takes place at the unconscious level. We become aware of the change consciously when we are ready.’ Joseph O’Connor
What on earth does this mean???
Well, read on ……
Roughly two million bits of information per second come into the human nervous system. We are literally bombarded with information. To maintain sanity, our conscious mind filters out most of the stimuli and Miller (1956) discovered we can consciously handle only seven plus or minus two bits of information at a time.
The unconscious mind deals with everything else over and above the seven (plus or minus two) bits of information that you are not consciously paying attention to at a particular time. As soon as we switch our attention to something, then it becomes conscious. Some parts of your physiology will always be unconscious. This should not surprise us really. Our unconscious mind takes care of us all the time! We do not run our heart, lungs, kidneys, immune system etc… consciously do we?
I want to show you how to bypass the conscious mind in order to access the immense powers of your unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is around 90% of your total mind power as opposed to the 10% of the mind that you usually use in your normal daily waking state. The unconscious mind is a source of great treasure - of skill, of memory and experience.
The power of positive thinking can be significantly enhanced and reinforced by the use of affirmations. An affirmation is a short statement in the present tense repeated frequently to impress itself onto and be accepted by the unconscious mind. The ideal affirmation must be short and totally unambiguous. This is important, as the unconscious mind cannot easily assimilate long or complex statements. The unconscious mind is much more easily influenced by short, appropriately worded statements.
The majority of people however, are in the habit of negative thinking - of dwelling on problem areas in their life by repeating exactly what they do not wish to happen. This often ends up compounding the original problems and making them even worse. For example, a student might keep on saying to themselves:
"I will never be successful in my examinations".
Or: "I always get sidetracked when I am studying".
Or: "I simply can’t concentrate".
The student who constantly repeats these negative affirmations, either consciously or unconsciously, will be much less likely to succeed in their examinations, and may never be able to concentrate or get their studying done.
Underlying almost every negative emotion is a thought or belief, and most often these are unhealthy thoughts or beliefs. By unhealthy I mean they are not effective in getting you what you want in your life. They don’t serve you.
The belief (often unconscious) is like a trigger. It sets you up to fail in certain situations.
Remember this! If you do not THINK and fill your head with positive thoughts and beliefs, then negative ones will always come in to fill the gaps.
Please NEVER, ever, ever, ever underestimate your own abilities. It is never a question of can you do something. The real question is will you?
In the examples above, the student was repeating the negative affirmations in their head. They should instead replace them with the equivalent positive affirmations. Such as:
"I know I will be successful in my examinations ".
Or: "I am focussed when I sit down to study".
Or: "my concentration is improving".
This might well seem difficult to do, particularly in what may seem to be difficult circumstances or where the reality appears to be totally the opposite. However, believe me, like most things, it is just a question of practice.
Where attention goes, energy flows! You become what you think about most of the time.
The more often an affirmation is repeated, consciously or otherwise, the more quickly and effectively it will become real. But take care because this works just as effectively for both positive and negative affirmations. A great time to repeat positive affirmations is just before drifting off to sleep at night or just after waking in the morning before you get up. At these times your conscious mind communicates best with your unconscious mind. If you can repeat the affirmations throughout the day and even write them down and place copies around your home, so much the better.
An even more powerful possibility exists as an alternative to affirmations that are stated aloud or within the mind. This is the power of "Subliminal messages".
The power of subliminal messages has been proven over many years to be a highly effective way of programming the unconscious mind by using either audio or visual methods. In fact,subliminal messages are so powerful in the way they work on the unconscious mind, that in 1974 the US government banned all forms of subliminal message advertising on radio and television.
Subliminal messages reach the unconscious mind by working at a level that cannot be detected by the conscious mind. The conscious mind therefore never has an opportunity to reject them and the unconscious mind can receive and act upon them.
There are two main ways of using subliminal messages in a most powerful way - visual and audio.
Visual subliminal messages are affirmations that are flashed before the eyes so quickly that the conscious mind cannot perceive them. The affirmations therefore go directly to the unconscious mind, which perceives and acts upon them immediately.
Audio subliminal messages work in a similar way by being played at a frequency that is just above the normal threshold of human hearing. Again, as with visual subliminal messages, although the conscious mind cannot perceive these affirmations, the all-powerful unconscious mind can perceive them, and will therefore immediately act upon them.
Both audio and visual subliminal messages are extremely powerful in accessing the enormous potential of the unconscious mind.
Once you understand the power of the unconscious mind and start to harness it, you can skyrocket your grades and the learning process becomes a natural rather than a forced activity.