#409 Snippets of wisdom: How to change your subconscious thoughts.

00:03 - Agi Keramidas
You are listening to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet comes from my conversation with Frank Rich, a former bodybuilder, now a men's health and recovery coach. It is about how to change your subconscious thoughts, those thoughts that control everything we do. I hope it's as insightful for you as it was for me. 

00:40 - Frank Rich (Guest)
You have your conscious mind, you have your subconscious mind, then you have your unconscious mind, right, and I think a lot of people they think just in terms of the conscious right, like what am I actually able to control, have conscious awareness of, and make those decisions? But the subconscious mind is so much more powerful, right Like this is the part of us that is working, that we're not in full control of. And then the unconscious. We don't get too deep into that. So let's just speak here to the conscious and then subconscious mind. The subconscious mind so it processes 11 million data points per second. The conscious mind processes 40 data points, not 40 million, 40. So what this means to people listening is that when you look out in the world, what you see, how you live and what you experience this world to be is happening at an 11 million to 40 ratio, subconsciously versus consciously. That means you're not in control of how you're perceiving the world and many times you're not in control of your initial reaction to things. This is all happening at a subconscious level. So when you're changing somebody's mind, you need to think about changing their subconscious programming, because changing your conscious thoughts is easy, right? I want to think about picking a bottle up. Think, pick, bottle up, pick, bottle up. That's a conscious thought that leads to a conscious action, the very easy to do, right, because I'm in the moment. I'm consciously aware of what I'm doing. We want to change somebody's life, though. We want to produce a transformation within them and through them, we need to change the way that their subconscious mind works. Well, how do you change your subconscious mind? It's through your conscious actions. So, listening to the words you speak about yourself, we all have this internal dialogue. If you drop something on the floor, what's your first response? Are you an idiot? Are you stupid because you dropped something? Or did you just have an accident where you slipped something? Very little things, right, but it reveals a lot to you about how you think about yourself, and your identity is nothing more than how you perceive yourself to be showing up in the world. So how do you change that, though? Right, that was the question. You need to be conscious and you need to be aware and super intentional about reprogramming those subconscious thoughts. 

02:47
One thing I think that is powerful for most people is if you don't have a daily journaling exercise, at the end of the day, start doing it. This is what's known as metacognition, when you spend time every day thinking about what you've been thinking about. So we have anywhere from 11 to 50,000 thoughts that run through our head. Right, you look at different research and data reports, they'll say 11,000 will be on one research, 50,000 on another one, but it's a big range. All that matters is there's a lot of thoughts that are coming into our head that we don't even pay attention to. But if you get into the habit and practice of five, 10 minutes at the end of the day drawing on your thoughts, what was I thinking about today? Like, when I was at the gym and I saw the blonde chick, why did my thoughts go there? Right, I work with the guys that are struggling with porn addiction, so a lot of what I talk to is is those guys? Right, but when somebody, when, when, when I was out with with my wife after work and we were having dinner, the way that I responded to what she said to me, why did I react that way? You know, like, was this triggered because I was tired and I was stressed? Was this triggered because she pulled something out of me that I know is there and I need to change. So I think a lot of people can make a lot of headway in transforming their life is if they just spent time thinking about what you've been thinking about, because what that's going to do is now, when those thoughts begin to randomly appear, you're going to be aware of them. You think, oh, I was journaling about that two nights ago. Let me spend some time here in this moment and think about this. Let me process this in real time. Let me change the way I would initially respond. So you want to change how you're acting. You want to change how you're responding. You got to get underneath these things and begin to get clear on how you're thinking throughout the day. But I think you can change your subconscious mind by your conscious thoughts that you intentionally drive into it. So the journaling would be one. 

04:29
Living in a state of gratitude is incredibly powerful as well. This is something that we coach. A lot of our men is having a morning gratitude practice, because what it does is it shifts your perspective, right? You know, a lot of people wake up the day. They're stressed. Emails are already coming in. They're like I got a to-do list of a thousand things to do. Oh my God, it's so overwhelming, like this life is crazy. I'm never going to get out of this hole. Well, if you just pause for a moment and you're like I'm just happy to be alive, god, thank you so much for another day how would that change your state? Now, moving into your day, we're all stressed, right. There's a lot of things. I got six podcasts in the next three and a half days. I don't know how I'm going to get all this done. There's a long calendar sitting in front of me. I could be stressed, I could be overwhelmed or I could be grateful that people actually want to talk to Frank and people want to hear what I have to say. 

05:14
So, by starting your day from a place of gratitude, you've now shown up in the world as like I'm just happy to be here and I'm grateful for this life. And what's cool is there's this part of our brain called the reticular activating system. It sits here in the prefrontal cortex, and what it does? It filters out what's not important to us and it shows us what is really important in our lives, right? You know? We've all experienced this. When we buy a new car, we're going out, we're test driving different things. You know, you're shopping at Ford Chevy. You're shopping at Ford Chevy, you're driving the red Mustang here or there, you sign that paperwork, you pull the car off the lot. Literally, you're seeing that same car everywhere you go and it's like no, those cars were always there. You just turned your brain on to seem that those are important. 

05:56
So if you start your day with things to be grateful for, as you're navigating your stressful life, things to be grateful for will begin to appear more regularly to you. So I think two things that people can do to change their mindset is having a gratitude practice first thing in the day to frame that perspective of how we're going to show up into the world, and ending the day in a metacognition practice where you think about what you've been thinking about and it's not going to radically change like overnight. The first practice of gratitude is not going to like feel like you're showing up as a different person, but consistency compounds right. So if you do this for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, you're now showing up in the world and everybody's going to be like Aggie. He's the nicest person to be around, his energy when he walks into the room, he's so infectious Like I want more of him. So that would be two things there. I think that could really help a lot of people. 

06:42 - Agi Keramidas 
Thank you for listening. You will find the full conversation with Frank Rich in episode 254. The link is in the episode description. Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.