Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

One Brain-Two Minds

We may only have one brain, but it contains two different minds. The first mind, the one we are most aware of and familiar with, is the conscious mind. This is the logical, rational mind that we all consider when we think of the mind, because this is the mind we control. Intent is a key word for this mind because the results of the decisions we make with our conscious minds are intentional. The second mind, however, operates well below the surface or our awareness, making much more intuitive, quicker, decisions, without the justification or rationalizations seen in conscious thought. This is the mind that operates without our conscious intent. This is the mind we are more concerned with when we talk about self-awareness and this is the mind we are most interested in when it comes to improving your individual performance.

Even though this second mind (i.e., your subconscious mind) operates below the surface, that doesn’t mean its effects are irrelevant or inconsequential. Quite the opposite, the effects on your life from your subconscious mind are remarkable. The jumbled paragraph below is a great example of how our subconscious mind can deliver results that are visible on the surface, even though not intentional.

Read the following paragraph as quickly as you can and see how easily it makes sense.

THE PAONMHNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it deosn”t mttaer in what order the ltteers in a word are, the only
iprmoatnt thing is that the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can
be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit porbelm. This is bcuseae the human
mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe.

Could you read the words above? It was pretty easy wasn’t it? Actually, the faster you read the easier it probably was. That’s because the faster you read, the more you relied on your subconscious mind. You weren’t consciously working to rearrange the letters of each word, but your subconscious mind registered these words coming in anyway, and processed them appropriately. If you tried to use your conscious mind to do this, it would take you much longer (go ahead and see what I mean with just the first line). Our subconscious minds can detect and pick up information up to 800 times faster than our conscious minds.

It is this subconscious mind that holds the greatest potential for increasing your individual success because this is the mind that influences, and sometimes even controls, the majority of the decisions you make every day. Just as it took surprisingly little effort to understand this jumbled paragraph, so too does using your natural talents require surprisingly less effort. That’s the whole key to reaching the 5th level of performance and becoming a genius at something. When you learn to trust your subconscious mind, and manage to create a role where most if not all that you do relies on how your subconsciously tend to think (i.e., your natural talents), the results you get out will be efficient and accurate, even though they require less effort.

While we can override that control and use our conscious mind to make decisions, something we tend to do with larger decisions, the vast majority of smaller decisions are subconsciously driven. In other words, we can think about thinking, when the situation is urgent enough or we are forced to, but whenever we forget to think about thinking control reverts back to our subconscious mind. Becoming a Genius means creating a life where you align what you are trying to do with the way your subconscious mind likes to think. The less you have to think about thinking, the more effective you will be.