How to Build Your Subconscious
Build your subconscious; build your life.
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The subconscious is the part of your mind that is outside of your awareness. It controls what you think (and how you think it), what you do (and how you do it), and what you say (and how you say it).
It is your personality. It is your character. It is your God.
Good thing there’s an extent to which you control it. You do not have complete control over it—if you did, you would do exactly what you wanted to do, in the way you wanted to do it, all the time. But in a certain context, you do control it.
Think of your subconscious like you would a Formula One car, and you are the team leader. That car determines how well your team does throughout the year, but you can build it to your own specifications. And if you come in last place like those Eastern European teams always do, then you can learn what you did wrong and rebuild for next year.
You don’t want to end up with an Eastern-European psychology. It’s morbid and pale, and you’ll greet your guy friends by kissing them on the lips. So here’s how to build your subconscious mind the Western way.
1. Figure out what you want
There’s no such thing as a “best” subconscious. A subconscious is as useful as it is built for what you want it to do. There is a best “doctor” subconscious, a best “fiction writer” subconscious, a best “salesman” subconscious—but they will all be different. When you build a car, you can either give it high top speed or quick acceleration, but not both. It depends on what you want it to do.
The only incorrect way to build a subconscious is to have it do too much at once or nothing in particular. You cannot build a subconscious to be funny, and also build that same subconscious to get along with your mother-in-law. And if you build your subconscious to “like, be famous and stuff,” you will end up as an Uber driver.
2. Focus
Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to control what enters your subconscious accordingly. This is done by your conscious mind, which is you, the team leader. The conscious mind can only hold limited amounts of information at once. But if you can focus well enough to play Nintendo, then you can focus well enough to build your subconscious.
Your subconscious is a genius with no will power. It is capable of more than you could imagine, but it only works well if it is given specific orders.
If you were to give a direction to your engineers, you would get a better job done out of them if you gave them specific instructions. If you just told your team to, “Oh you know, find some tires and put them on the body there, then make the car go fast,” you would get a worse result than if you were meticulous and knowledgeable.
With specific instructions, for a specific purpose, you will get a better performance out of your team, ie your subconscious.
3. Fill your subconscious with good information
Part of what it means to focus is to learn all the time. Constantly, for a specific purpose. This can either be through experience or through books. If you want to be a journalist, learn everything you can about writing, politics, psychology, and the world (books), and also apply this information in any capacity (experience). Good information is out there, though probably not at journalism school. What is at journalism school, however, is other journalists. People are wealth. This is the extent to which college is useful, but it’s an awesome extent.
4. Think in essentials
It’s not enough to fill your subconscious—you need to build it, after all. This entails integration, ie the arrangement of information. Your subconscious is built well when similar bits of information are grouped together. What determines whether two pieces of information are similar? Their essentials, ie their fundamental cause. This is pattern recognition, which is general intelligence or IQ. When you think in essentials, your subconscious will be much more useful. You’ll be able to retrieve the more-relevant information faster, create abstractions, and properly integrate new information.
Let’s say you attend a lecture about Alexander Dumas. If you don’t think in essentials, then you will link Alexander Dumas with your buddy named Alex, because all you take away from the lecture is the name—something unessential to what Alexander Dumas is.
Or, you could think of Alexander Dumas as a French author, in which case you will link him up to your folder for John Paul Sartre. This is more fundamental to what Alexander Dumas is, so it’s more relevant, but there is little in common between Dumas and Sartre aside from the fact they are both French.
To better categorize, or integrate, Alexander Dumas would be to classify him as a 19th Century writer of the Romantic movement. Then, you will put him in the same folder as Victor Hugo, an author who he shares many similarities with. They have similar themes in their novels, they were both influenced by similar people, and they’re entombed in the same room in the Pantheon. Yes, they happen to share a similar nationality, but this is only secondary.
When we think of Alexander Dumas by his essentials, we group him in our mind better, and so we allow for a better retention of him and what he is. As a result, we are able to understand both him and the world better.
5. Become aware of uncomfortable emotions
Your uncomfortable emotions are the parts of your Formula One car from last year that broke down at Monte Carlo. So you need look into your uncomfortable emotions, most notably anxiety, anger, and their corollary, shame. Unpack them, see what’s in them, and learn from them. This is the only way you can free your mind of them, and so free your mind of obstacles. It’s impossible to build a new fuel injector around an outdated fuel injector. Sure, that old fuel injector may have served you well for a while, but there are new goals this year, and so new specifications.
6. Talk about emotions
The alleged reason why men don’t want to talk about emotions is because we’re afraid it will make us weak. The politically-correct response to this is it’s okay for men to be weak, and any admonishment to be strong is merely a social construction. The truth, however, is it’s completely reasonably for men to fear weakness. As it’s reasonable to fear obesity and poverty—both are states that place us and the people we love in a precarious situation. Though the avoidance of emotions makes us even weaker.
This situation appears to be a Catch-22—we need to talk about emotions to become aware of them and so emotionally strong, yet we become weak when we talk about emotions. The way out is to talk about emotions in a specific way. Thankfully, we have a structure for emotions (see my book and then course), so let’s apply this structure of emotions to their discussion. Since I elaborate on this elsewhere, let’s suffice it to say it’s vital to keep two principles in mind: connection and responsibility. We take responsibility for our emotion, and use it to connect with others. We don’t blame others for either our situation or emotion, and we do it with the intention that other people will be able to relate with us. This builds awareness of emotions, which means you’ll get your willpower back.
7. Take action
The best way to access and change information in your subconscious is through action. Information is more than your perceptions, knowledge, thoughts, and feelings. Information is action; action is information. Thus, “learn by doing.”
Conclusion
Life is most difficult when we feel like we’re out of control. We all feel like this sometimes because, for the most part, we are out of control—but only in the short-term. In the long-term, if you know how to build your subconscious, you will be amazed by how much you are in control.
