"Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful." – Ann Landers
Your Subconscious Is The Boss Of You
Yes. That little guy, or perhaps big guy, has total power over your conscious self.
If you want him to work with and not against you, you need to develop the single most important skill in life: self-awareness.
In 5 simple words, self-awareness can be described as the capacity to make the subconscious mind conscious. In order to do this, one needs to step out of the all too familiar autopilot mode. Only then, do you give yourself the chance to investigate the thoughts you entertain, the emotions you feel, the behaviors you choose to adopt, that translate into the concrete actions that you do in the real world.
Without self-awareness, you can't evolve and grow as a human being.
Self-awareness is the process of acknowledging our own selves and the mental and behavioral patterns that have been ruling the shit out of us, for maybe too long.
Why Change Without Self-Awareness Is Impossible
The main reason as to why change is hard, and maintaining it even more so, is that to install a change in our lives, we need to uninstall a deeply ingrained pattern that has been forged into our subconscious. And to do just that requires a massive dose of patience and persistence. The thing is that anything that you have been doing for a long enough period of time, whether consciously or not, will be a tough habit to break. More than goodwill will be necessary for you to attain that change and sustain it.
It is not for nothing that if you google the word "subconscious" on your browser, a bunch of pictures with icebergs appear.
This illustrates exactly how our mind operates: the subconscious holds all the data you have accumulated during the course of your life, and acts on it when he feels like it. You are at his mercy, unless you take the matter in your own hands and decide to reprogram the heck out of him!
Hence why self-awareness is crucial to develop as it will give you the capacity to dig under the surface of things to discover the Why behind what you think, feel and do. But to change your external reality (a.k.a the way you do things) you need to change your internal reality first. And whoever says internal reality says changing your thoughts, as your thoughts not only govern your mind, but they create the emotions that will thereby sow the seeds of your future actions.
