We were told throughout childhood to believe in ourselves and the power of positive thinking, but it is hard to live up to those standards in our actual adult lives. All too often, we look at our mistakes and regrets and become convinced that everything we do is bound to fail.
That fear of failure and apathy leaks into our subconscious, which represents the overwhelming majority. Some scientists suggest that as much as 95% of all brain wave activities are unconscious. And while much of these activities goes towards mundane yet crucial functions such as keeping your heart beating, a substantial portion of your thoughts are influenced by our subconscious.
For example, suppose that your boss is willing to offer you a promotion or a company is willing to offer you a new job. If your subconscious is accustomed to failure, it may tell you to reject the promotion. It may say that there is clearly something off with the job or position, because why would they want to hire someone like you as opposed to other, better people? This sort of subconscious can affect your future performance and maybe cause you to reject the job.
To stop things like that, you need to reprogram your subconscious and by extension yourself to be more positive and willing to believe in yourself. This may sound tricky, but here are a few steps which can make reprogramming to be far easier.
- Create a Positive Environment
You want a single, easy way to make yourself feel happy and positive? Get off social media. It has been well reported that social media hurts our mental environment in multiple ways. We feel pressured to compete with not just our immediate friends and coworkers, but our 10,000 additional Facebook “friends.”
The key to understand with this tip is that your daily environment regularly influences your subconscious mind. If your environment is constantly filled with negative thoughts, your subconscious is going to be filled with negative thoughts. And social media as well as the news are filled with negativity.
Turn both off, and seek to fill your time with positive thoughts and people. Meet successful people, go out into your community, and look for the good in your world instead of comparing yourselves to fake lives on Facebook. A positive environment creates positive thinking and a positive mindset.
- Use Affirmations
Affirmations are positive statements which help bring up positive mental images and memories. This website lists commonly-used affirmations which you can try to use such as “I deserve to be happy right now” or “Success loves me.”
These statements may sound silly, but the key with affirmation is that the feelings which the statements create matter more than the words themselves. I use a line from a poem as an affirmation which is frankly nonsensical to anyone else who would hear it, but it means something to me. It helps calm myself down during stressful moments when I’m doing SEO Toronto and gives me fortitude and positivity when things are difficult. Find an affirmation which works with you, and do not just repeat it once or twice. Repeat it routinely whenever you have the time and think about any memories associated from that statement.
- Meditate
I realize there is a decent chance you may think of meditation as New Age hippie stuff, but science has shown meditation to be highly beneficial for your mental and physical health. Remember that your mind does not exist in a vacuum, and a strong body supports a strong mind.
Meditation is an important reprogramming tool for two primary reasons. First, meditation puts you in a state of mind where you can access your subconscious more than when you are functioning, similarly to how your subconscious goes wild when you are dreaming. This lets you put your thoughts and goals into your subconscious and gives you more will to carry them out. Second, meditation improves your focus by virtue of sitting in one spot for a substantial period time training your mind.
- Behave as if you have succeeded
A great life secret is that you can trick so many people by acting like you belong in a spot where you don’t belong. And if you can trick other people, you can trick your subconscious.
Affirmations can help here, and you can cause your subconscious to believe a statement is true if you repeat it enough. But you have to phrase any such statement carefully. Don’t say “I want” or “I will accomplish this goal,” because that just emphasizes what you have not done. Say “I have accomplished this goal.” Another method is to simply do research. It is one thing to want to be wealthy or successful, but you should learn the habits which they regularly do and follow them. Being wealthy is not just about having money, but about having a certain mindset. Look at successful people in your life and copy their habits, and you will cause your subconscious to think “I am successful.” That is when you know you have successfully reprogrammed your mind.