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?

Subconscious Mind Exercise

Here’s another little demonstration of the fact that even though you forget it, your subconscious mind is always working behind the scenes to influence or even control what you do in the real world. While seated, take your dominant leg and raise it off the seat but keep your foot hanging down free and loose. Now start to rotate your foot in a clockwise circle. Nothing too grand, just say a 12-inch circle. Now, at the same time, take your dominant hand and place it in the air in front of you like you were writing on an invisible black board. While continuing to rotate your foot in the same clockwise direction, use your finger to draw a 12-inch letter “S” on the invisible board in front of you.

What happened with your foot when you drew the S? For the vast majority of you, your foot started following your hand and began to move counter clockwise. Why? You didn’t consciously tell your leg to start going in the opposite direction did you? It happened
because your subconscious mind has developed such a strong habit for thinking that the direction of an S is counter clockwise, and your conscious mind was overridden and both limbs listened to your subconscious mind.

You may have trouble actually hearing your subconscious mind, but it is there. Your body heard it even if your conscious mind did not. The problem with the subconscious mind, however, is that we don’t trust it, we’re suspicious of it. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of the decisions we make are directly related to the time and effort we put into them. As doctors treat all their patients they put lots of conscious effort into each decision – don’t they? When good managers make decisions, they take time to carefully weigh the entire set of variables before they act – don’t they? And what are we taught about making decisions?

Haste makes waste, look before you leap, Stop and Think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We are taught that the more information you gather, and the more carefully you deliberate, the more accurate the decision will be. This view assumes that when we are at our decision-making best, we are the pride and joy of Plato, Descartes and Kant (all of
whom argue that rational reasoning and logic rule the best decisions). Formal logic will, by itself, get us to the best available solution for any problem – or so we are taught. The subconscious mind, however, has much more to do with controlling our decisions than we give it credit for.

One of the reasons experts think the subconscious even exists is because consciousness has a very limited capacity. To survive in the world people must be able to process a great deal of information, more than we can consciously juggle at one time. It all comes down to efficiency. When you consider that, thanks to our five senses, we are being bombarded by that tremendous amount of 11,000,000 bits of data every second of our lives, we simply can’t process that much information at one time. According to Dr. Timothy Wilson, “Scientists have tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect differences in flashes of lights and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information every second. Think about it; we can take in 11,000,000 pieces of information a second, but can only process 40 of them consciously. What happened to the other 10,999,960? It would be terribly wasteful to design a system with such incredible sensory acuity but very little capacity to use the incoming information. Fortunately, we do make use of a great deal of this information outside of conscious awareness”

Our subconscious mind tends to get more involved in the smaller decisions than the larger ones. Deciding to close down an entire division is not only a decision that will most likely be made using conscious thought, but also one that will probably be better served as a result. My focus in this book, however, is on the thousands, or tens of thousands, of small decisions you make every day. These have a much more significant impact on your personal performance than do the few and infrequent big decisions you make.