The Power Behind Thought is the Subconscious Mind

(This article was written by Richard Schultz of WisdomWays. Richard is a Genuine Contact™ trainer, a life coach, and a Certified PER-K^® Instructor. Richard is also a Certified PSYCH-K® Basic Instructor for personal belief change. Richard Schultz resides in Calgary, Canada. PSYCH-K® is a registered trademark of The Myrrdin Corporation)

For growth, competitiveness, and viability, organizations over the past few decades have been continuously working to squeeze higher and higher levels of productivity out of their people while lowering their cost structures. Technology, information, quality, training, and organizational structure have all provided gains, large and marginal. In the next wave, organizations that effectively tap into the power of the subconscious minds of their people will lead the next era of growth through innovation, productivity gain, employee retention, cost reduction and revenue generation. This next wave, tapping the real power and wisdom of people, promises to generate gains far beyond what is possible in our current mindset.

How can such a claim be made? The subconscious mind is a vast storehouse of all our past experiences and for all the beliefs, attitudes, and values we form out of those experiences. Our subconscious mind processes about 4 billion bits of information per second compared to our conscious mind at about 2,000 bits of information. With this vastly different power, when the two minds conflict, the subconscious mind almost always “wins” and no amount of “will power” or “trying harder” can prevail. When we align our subconscious mind with our conscious goals, we create a powerful dynamic of performance and achievement.

The beliefs that we hold subconsciously about ourselves or the people around us affect every area of our personal and professional life. If we consider for example someone that has a fear of public speaking, ‘cold calling’ or a phobia, then we can understand the power of the subconscious mind to influence us. There is very little we can do consciously when confronted by fears of this magnitude. We get shortness of breath, we perspire, procrastinate, get stomach cramps, or other kinds of emotional and physical symptoms (controlled by the subconscious mind) which signal us not to do the behavior that we consciously want to do or are told to do. In organizations, effectively assisting employees to change subconscious beliefs will drastically affect the bottom line through more effective communications, reduced conflict and enhanced conflict resolution, improved decision making, increased effectiveness of training programs, enhanced leadership capabilities, reduced time off due to stress and sickness, greater safety, enhanced capability of sales people, increased motivation and greater productivity. This list can go on and on and each of these areas can see dramatic improvement.

What beliefs might we want to have to be highly successful in our professional life? From Steven Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” we might want beliefs that would support us in each of the habits. Habit #1 “Be Proactive” would inspire us to have a belief “I make decisions and carry them through”. Habit #3 “Put First Things First” would inspire the belief “I organize and execute my life around priorities” The point is, that if the subconscious mind does not have this “programming” or has contrary programming, then training is only partially effective in creating these desirable habits. An unorganized person generally continues to be unorganized after training. Every organization has tried out the motivational speakers and many different kinds of training programs to increase the skills and effectiveness of their people. Common to most of these programs is that for most of the people, the training or speaker only produces limited or temporary change and before long, people are back to business as usual. The quote “Old habits die hard” is very relevant here. Our habits are stored in our subconscious mind, and to change those habits, we need a new approach to making change at the subconscious level.

Because the subconscious mind is so fundamentally different in the way it works, the “conscious” training approaches we have used are seldom effective in themselves. That does not mean that we should throw out these training programs, but instead, we can apply new “subconscious training” approaches to quickly bring these conscious trainings into a habit within the subconscious mind. In addition, we can change any limiting beliefs that people may hold regarding the training to new, empowering beliefs that support the learning and implementation of the changes that the organization requires. Consider the impact if each organization could just get a 10% improvement in the effectiveness of the trainings they have already done!

Fortunately, there are already technologies available that organizations can use to engage the full power of the individual subconscious in support of organizational conscious goals.

One such program is PER-K^®. PER-K^® is an organizational training program that teaches individuals how to change beliefs simply and easily at the subconscious level. The techniques are non-evasive, empowering, and fun. The two day PER-K^® workshop is aimed at empowering individuals with the tool, so afterwards they can use the tool to enhance their professional lives, their personal lives and the lives of their friends and family. In the first day of this experiential workshop, attendees learn the basic tools to change their beliefs, and by the second day, the attendees choose to apply these tools to change individual beliefs in a chosen “business category”.

Business categories can be sales performance, communication, leadership, teams, wellness, safety or any area of a business that requires attention. In this way, PER-K^® can be added on to other training programs to quickly bring the essence of what has been learned into habitual reality. The opportunities for an organization and the individuals within it are endless . . . limited only by our imagination!

PER-K^® is highly congruent and complementary with the principles and aims of the Genuine Contact™ Program. Together, they can be powerful allies in change.

• Where PER-K^® works to identify beliefs and patterns in the individual subconscious, the Genuine Contact™ program works with the “organizational subconscious” or the “collective mind”, to bring values, attitudes and beliefs to the surface(or into consciousness) that they can be changed and modified as appropriate.
  
  
• The “operating system” metaphor so commonly used in the Genuine Contact™ program, could be directly applied to mean the subconscious, individually, or organizationally. Where the Genuine Contact™ program meeting processes work with communicating and making changes in the organizational programming, PER-K^® can be used to support these programming changes at the individual level.
  
  
• The processes are congruent in their philosophy of working holistically with the “whole system” in a life nurturing way. Each recognizes that we are not separate from our environment. As we make individual belief changes, it affects the organization and vice versa.
  
  
• Genuine Contact™ meetings bring the “Whole Person” into the room, including the left and right brain (whole brain) capacity of those individuals. PER-K^® uses “whole brain” states to accomplish belief change. In addition, a “Whole Brain Posture” in PER-K^® could be used within a Conflict Resolution meeting to greatly reduce the conflicting energies.
  
  
• The facilitator of change in Genuine Contact™ and in PER-K^® comes from a place of honoring that the wisdom is in the group or individual. In that wisdom, the organization or individual takes responsibility for the choices and change. In both processes, the facilitator “holds the space” for healing and change to occur.
  
  
• Each program recognizes that change and capacity to change must come from within.
  
  

In conclusion, there is very little we need that is outside of ourselves or our organizations. Individuals and organizations have tremendous creativity, wisdom and capacity to do and be anything they aspire to. The key is to access and engage the unlimited potential that is already present. The gate that often blocks our way to this storehouse of personal power and potential is the limiting conscious and subconscious beliefs we hold.

To open this gate and unleash this subconscious power only requires that we install new empowering belief programs and then take the conscious actions that we already know how to do. Genuine Contact™ and PER-K^® are keys to these organizational and individual gates. Organizations and leaders that use these keys will lead the way in the decades to come.

Henry Ford said:
“If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right!

NOTE: The PER-K^® workshop is almost identical the PSYCH-K® Basic workshop except that the focus of the PER-K^® workshop is on individual beliefs associated with performance in an organization, and the focus of PSYCH-K® is focused on personal development in all areas of life.