WHEN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND IS UNHELPFUL

Conscious minds come in all sorts of conditions. Some are well informed, sharp, incisive, clear and so serve the owner very well. Others are not so well informed, in fact, may be mis-informed, deceived, confused, dull and do not serve the owner well at all. What’s the condition of your conscious mind?

When you consider the mind of a young infant, it’s obvious that we all start out with a very weak and completely uninformed conscious mind. Then we go through the cognitive developmental stages. Usually, at first our mind is very naive and open to anything and that’s where it can become really distorted— after all, the mind of a child is not capable of critical thinking. So depending on the things it hears, the things it is told— it can develop all sorts of misinformation and disinformation.

As a child goes through the learning process, he goes through the ego-centric thinking stage, the magic thinking stage, the concrete thinking stage, and so on. It’s in this period of life (0 to 12) that we experience, learn, and sometimes solidify various Cognitive Distortions— over- generalizing, personalizing, dichotomizing (either-or), emotionalizing, etc. As a result, the person who does that will inherent a very unhelpful conscious mind.

Here, it’s not the case that the conscious mind is the problem, it is not. The problem is the programming that a conscious mind has received and how a person, now a teenager is using his or her conscious mind. What is common is that we have learned a lot of judgments, insults, and criticisms and now that’s the way we talk to ourselves. What is common is that we have learned to use our conscious mind passively so that instead of directing and focusing our mind, we tend to react to whatever grabs our attention. Consequently, we live in the world of attentions (and not in the world of intentions).

No wonder then that many people complain about their conscious minds. I would to. As an instrument— the only instrument you have— for navigating life and determining what things are, how they work, and what you should or could do, a poorly developed conscious mind operates as a poorly equipped tool. No wonder there are many who then conclude, “The problem is the conscious mind,” and try to solve the problem by trusting their feelings, intuitions, the voices of others, etc.

A well-developed and equipped conscious mind enables you to look at yourself, others, and life clearly and adequate and determine what you want. You set goals. You identify what you want, why you want it, and how to achieve it. You use your imagination to construct ‘life at its best for

me’ and then you set out to make it happen. You create a strategy of feasible actions that you can take to move you from your present state to your desired state. You access your internal and external resources as you mobilize your energies to make it happen. That’s how a well- developed conscious mind serves you in an effective and ecological way.

Not so with an unfocused, highly distracted, self-judging, self-contempting, and confused conscious mind. That kind of a mind is itself the problem. Those who suffer such may forcibly come to an understanding of what they want and how to get there, then their untamed conscious mind unhelpfully intrudes. They doubt themselves. They fear failure, mistakes, embarrassment, and all sorts of things. They get defensive and say hurtful things to others. They are their own worst enemies. But the situation is even worse! What the person has thought consciously becomes programmed into them at unconscious levels. Now all of this occurs automatically. It occurs outside of their control. Talk about locked into a corner!

So, what’s the solution? Obviously, to re-educate both the conscious and the unconscious mind. To do that, set the realization that you are not the problem— the thinking, framing, and programming is the problem. If I thought that way, I would feel and act that way. As you free yourself from that personalizing, now you can more clearly work on getting a cognitive make- over.

What the cognitive distortions especially do is activate the lower levels of your brain and mobilize your emotions so that you are engaged in distorted emotional thinking. What’s needed is the emotional safety so that you can think about things with more objectivity and clarity. That’s where the frame, you are not the problem, the frame is the problem, can liberate you for a cognitive make-over. Try it out.

Thinking is just a tool. It’s your tool for creating mental models by which you can then navigate life. And the quality of your thinking is the quality of your life.

For more, get Executive Thinking (2018) and look for the next training in Brain Camp. That’s where Neuro-Semantics offers you a cognitive make-over.