Here’s a tip to get your subconscious mind on your side. When you’re thinking about or verbalising your goals, express what you want in positive terms. Often when we’re asked what we want, we can slip into expressing what we don’t want – “I don’t want to feel stressed”, “I don’t want to be in this crappy job”, “I don’t want to eat like a pig”.
This trap can lead you into a negative cycle of staying focused on the problem state. Using metaphors describing yourself as a “pig” for example can unhelpfully reinforce your sense of identity as someone stuck with the issue you want to drop. And using negative words, like “stressed” or “anxious” actually triggers the neurology of these states, again, tending to keep you stuck in the problem state rather than focused on the solution.
Your subconscious mind is your emotional mind and it responds to the words you feed it. It also tends to filter out caveats such as “don’t” or “not” in instructions. If I ask you NOT to imagine a blue snowman, you will automatically start to imagine a blue snowman. Credit card readers used to give the instruction “Do not remove your card” while it was processing payments. They don’t tend to give that instruction now because so many people removed their cards, filtering out the “do not” and just responding to the active words.
This is why it’s much better to tell your mind what you DO want and not want you don’t want. And if there’s some kind of crisis situation, it’s much more helpful to say “stay calm” than “don’t panic”!
So when you’re focusing on your goals, the more empowering approach is to use language describing what you actually want. “I want to feel calm”, “I want to eat healthily”, “I want a job in X industry”. Using this kind of positive language moves your mind and your focus towards the outcome you want. And once you express your goal in this positive way, you can move to the next step of asking yourself (or others) how you’re going to achieve that. Using positive, outcome-focused words helps loosen your attachment to the problem you want to move away from and gives you a target to aim for.
I give all my hypnotherapy clients a personalised audio recording to listen to after their hypnotherapy session. This is packed full of positive suggestions and visualisations of the outcome my client wants. The idea is to reprogramme the mind towards the goal the person wants to achieve and to fill their mind with the neurology of the positive emotions they want to experience. You can do this for yourself as well – spend some time each day visualising the outcomes you want and using powerful, positive language to express and envisage your goals.
To your success!
Sarah Cookson
Clinical Hypnotherapist