Recently, I spent time in understanding consciously the workings of the subconscious mind. While I’m still new at it (assuming my brainpower is hopeless), there are a few interesting discoveries. While these discoveries may not win Nobel prizes nor make me walk on water, it helps a great deal in explaining the linkage between the conscious and the subconscious mind, or I prefer to call it the interactions between the management and the operation departments.
Overall, the mind is divided into the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious comprises the things we want to do consciously while subconscious takes care of the involuntary activities such as heart beating, breathing, digesting and other trained skills such as cycling or driving.
The conscious brother is the ‘I’ that we know ourselves very well. The ‘I’ that thinks, plans and wishes. This is the brother that does all the thinking. It’s the one that is talking to our spouses and friends every day. It’s the one that is employed by companies, the one that everyone knows as us. However, the brain is born as a pair of twins.
We have a twin brother besides the one that we know. This twin brother is quiet, hardworking, disciplined, and gullible and always looks up to his brother for aspiration and instructions. While this good twin brother is not a great leader, he has a lot of strengths and qualities that the conscious brother cannot do. This subconscious brother doesn’t need rest, knows all the technical stuff in the body way better than the scientific knowledge combined in the world, is constantly in charge of cell production, and can even connect with the unseen force of the universe for ‘celestial’ or ‘divine’ help or solutions.
He does have one weakness inherent to his strength – he trusts the conscious brother too much to the point that he takes his conscious brother’s messages and instructions literally –word by word; letter by letter.
So, we have a perfect pair of twin brothers. The conscious one is smart, extrovert, active, full of passion, have infinite needs but has low stamina, doesn’t know much about the workings of the body and doesn’t know how to communicate with divine forces. The subconscious brother works tirelessly, knows a lot of technical knowledge has his divine networking and takes instructions very well. However, he is very gullible and trusts his twin brother too much without questioning.
Since the conscious brother is doing all the thinking, hence the relationship between the twins if turns sour must be due to the conscious brother since the subconscious brother is only at the receiving end. What sorts of problems arises form these relationships? It is very much like a lousy boss that gives conflict instructions, breathing down the next of his staff, lacks technical knowledge but still wants to meddle, and worse still, de-motivates his team.
Now that we know we have this biological twin brother that co-exists with us, it’s time we treat him well so that he can work well for us and by that, work well for both of us. Howe can we be a good brother and treat our non-evil twin brother well? Just follow the golden rules below:
1. Tell him what you want but don’t tell him how. Let him handle the operation part because he knows the best and you don’t
2. Having confidence in you simply means have confidence in your subconscious brother. Just tell him what you want and shut up. Don’t advice him and worse still, instil doubts in him.
For example: Just say ‘I want to remember all these words’ instead of ‘I must try to remember’; ‘at least remember 60% of these words’; ‘I must not forget’ – you are just confusing your own subconscious brother
Simply put, you do your best and let your twin brother do the rest. Whether you like it or not, the guy has been living up there since you were born. Why not make friends?
