Achieve Your Goals without Conscious Effort

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

goal, unconscious mind, mind, priming, broaden, pivots, consciously, activity, episode, consciousness, rat race, study, idea, write, leverage, engage, achieving, focus, prime, capitalize

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Goal pursuit has been traditionally believed to be a conscious and deliberate process. But research suggests that goal driven behavior can actually happen outside of a person's awareness. And this is from the annual review of psychology and many studies that I've read. So stay with me for today's episode where I talk about the idea of goal priming as a way to keep you motivated and moving forward.

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The following was recorded in front of a live studio audience at the studio 21 podcast cafe. This is the United Podcast Network.

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Welcome to rat race reboot. I'm your host, Laura Noel. And as a certified coach and former 27 year military leader, each week, I provide bite sized mindset pivots that will help you reset your mind reawaken your spirit and regain your control.

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Hello, everyone, I am so excited about today's topic, it's the power of the unconscious mind. And we are so used to leveraging our conscious mind and our goal pursuit in particular. And we're, you know, striving and trying and laser focused. But there's so much more to our mind than what we realize, and I want to help you start to leverage it. I'm just scratching the surface with some of the stuff. There's so much more to this than what I'm going to be covering. But I thought it was really interesting nonetheless. So I talked about, there's the idea that you can prime your subconscious mind with your goal or destination. And beneath the surface, your unconscious mind is working. And it's helping you make decisions and keep you motivated toward moving in the direction of your goal. And what was interesting is in 1983, it was Labette. And colleagues, they did a study which kind of threw the idea of consciousness, it kind of shook the beliefs to their core about consciousness being necessary to inspire behavior. And in essence, what they did is they were monitoring brain patterns and activity and they had people they told people to move their index finger. And what they noticed is when people said they were ready to move their index finger, that's what they kind of signaled they're consciously ready to move their index finger. Unconsciously, there was activity in their brain about up to a minute before they actually move their finger. So that suggested that the brain started to prepare movement before consciousness became involved in the first place. But then soon, and colleagues replicated the study in 2008. And they found the same thing. But furthermore, they found not only that participants choose when that whenever they choose to engage in an activity, that there's activity in their unconscious mind before they even consciously engage in that activity. But it there's also it, there's activity in the brain, when there are one of paths, one of two possible directions a person can take, and they're making a decision. So even in the decision making process, and you're choosing between two directions, your unconscious mind is is active. And so they also found that the activity in the brain wasn't, you know, a second before they made the conscious decision to take on the activity. But it was actually more than 10 seconds of activity, unconsciously, which I find is really fascinating. So one thing that all of the researchers suggest, and I read a lot of different studies, and I encourage you to get out on the on the internet and start looking for some of these things. But there are a few commonalities that I want to kind of distill down into something that's actionable for you. Because if I were to talk about all the ways that your unconscious mind, contribute to motivation and goal achieving, we'd be here forever. And this is like a 20 minute show of bite sized mindset pivots. So let's keep it to that. So the first thing is for your unconscious mind to really engage and help you stay motivated and move in the direction of your goal. Without that conscious effort. There has to be some direction. So you have to have a goal in order for your conscious and unconscious mind to be directed. And a great example of this and I was thinking about this this morning was when I was making the transition from military to entrepreneur. And I started getting engaged in yoga philosophy and yoga teacher training. And then I started getting into helping other people and teaching In them, not only the yoga poses, but the mindset aspect of yoga and I thought, if I could bottle this up into a curriculum, this is what I want. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was making a decision, I was creating a goal. And so I left it alone. And I just kept pursuing my my vision consciously, with laser focused attention. And that kept me motivated. But on the outside, my unconscious mind was operating so that when opportunities presented themselves to me, I knew to capitalize them, I was aware I was casting my net wide. So that's one thing I was at an event where Bob Proctor was speaking. And it just dawned on me, that's the curriculum. And I raised my hand, I asked question, and then we got connected. And then I started teaching his methodologies. And one thing led to another and here I am today, many years later doing the same thing, and expanding and growing that. So what that did was I set my goal, I gave my unconscious mind some direction, and it was picking up cues, activating my goal whenever my mind would catch something that was in alignment with my goal. So that's one way that we can capitalize on this unconscious mechanism at play. The other thing is, goal priming, is a way to engage your unconscious mind. And there was another study in 2001, by barg, and all

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where they primed one group out of two with words when they had, they were working on some kind of puzzle. And so the the words that they used were strive and succeed. So they were priming Group A would the words strive and succeed, they didn't go prime, the other group, and both groups performed the task. And the group that was primed, performed exceedingly better than the group that was not primed. So what gets me thinking about that, and what that gets me thinking about in particular, is the idea of affirmations. I always tell clients to write their goal down every day to get engaged with their goal, the feeling of their goal, visualizing the goal, writing it down, reminding themselves every day, at multiple points during the day of their goal, I have them distill their goal, their beautiful vision for their life into a goal statement in the affirmative. I'm so happy and grateful now that and then one or two sentences that encapsulate your goal. And if you go back to episodes one and two, I teach you how to do that rat race reboot. So having that goal, you're priming your mind, you're priming your subconscious mind, not only your goal, the physical what you're going to do or accomplish, but how you feel in the context of achieving that goal. So you're priming your mind with that goal. So that when opportunities present themselves, your mind is you can't possibly take in all of the information that is being, you know, sent your way through your five senses all at once you're taking in millions of pieces of information. But what this goal priming does is it focuses your attention, so that when something out there catches your attention, and it's an alignment with your goal, you're really kind of reconstituting that goal, so to speak, okay, so that's one way of doing it. affirmations, also another way, affirmations in and of themselves. If you're not emotionally involved in the affirmation, that doesn't work, you're just saying a bunch of words. But you want to get emotionally involved in the affirmation and create that belief that it's true. And that will help you prime your goal. So that when you're not consciously working on it, when you're out in the park, feeding the ducks, you know, ideas can come to you. And you're always kind of in essence in the background working on that goal and you're making progress. And then lastly, you know, you really have to have a balance between focused attention, directing that goal behavior and the flexibility of being able to change courses and pivot a little bit when your circumstances change. And when life changes you and and what you can do to broaden your focus is take time for yourself quiet time, and I've been harping on this on every single episode. mental activity does not constitute thinking and when you're consciously striving and focusing and laser focusing, there's a time and place for that. But if you're always doing that, I'm telling you now you are not capitalizing on the the magnificence of your mind and what it's capable of doing. And I want you to really capitalize on all of you every aspect of you. So it's important that you have that focus. But it's equally as important. Even more important that you carve that time out. So that you can think and you have that space. So there's you broaden your focus, and you can see what else is out there that might be able to help you advance your goal much quicker, farther, faster, and all of the good things. So I hope this has been helpful for you. And it's the idea of leveraging the unconscious mind to get you to move a lot quicker. And it takes a lot less effort in doing that. So we kind of covered a lot of things. And I encourage you to read more up on this. So you're in this episode learning to leverage your unconscious mind, you're already really good at using your conscious mind to focus and direct goal achieving behavior. But you can also leverage an aspect of your mind the unconscious mind by one,

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giving it a goal to work with, and then letting it go. And then just being open to being directed and to the ideas that come to you. Goal priming is another way of doing that. So you could start doing that today as well. Write your goal down if you don't have it written down. Repeat it every day auto suggestion, there's power in that, write it every day. Bring yourself emotionally and in your mind's eye, in the space where you are living from your goal every day, imagine it every day, get emotionally involved. And then lastly, have a balance of focused attention toward moving toward your goal. And that more flexible, broadened attention where you're receiving cues that are triggering, and activating your goal from that unconscious mind perspective. So once again, I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to hear how this works out for you. Go to rat race reboot.com Leave us a five star review. Leave your comments, let us know how it goes. I read those comments. And and then we're going to continue on down this path of how do you take a goal that you were so excited about in the beginning? And how do you maintain that motivation, unconscious and capitalizing on that unconscious part of mind is another way of capitalizing and maintaining motivation toward the end result. So we're going to end today's episode like we do every day or every week. And we're going to put this into practice we're going to help you broaden your focus and tap into the unconscious mind that wisdom that is already inside of you when if you can just let go. And this is really going to help you take inspired action. So wherever you are, take a deep breath in through

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your nose and exhale. Take another deep inhale and then slow down the exhale take one last deep inhale through the nose exhaling slowly and completely and this is a time for you to just give yourself three minutes to be with.

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So I want you to imagine you've already achieved your goal How would your life change? If you achieved your goal? What would be different?

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Maybe bring to your mind's eye some things you might be doing. Would you feel more joy, ease or flow? Would you take more time out for yourself and to enjoy connections with other people

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just allow your mind to wander this is your life the life you created enjoy it. Embrace it and start to sharpen that image a little bit. Be get a little more granular

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In this snapshot in time, start to take in that image through your five senses. Notice the temperature of the air on your skin, the texture of your clothing maybe the vividness of the scenery around you. How are you interacting with people? Or how are you enjoying your solitude? And how does it feel? Being new?

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And ask yourself, What can I do today? To have more of that, it's yours. It's yours now. Just let it in. And as ideas float to your consciousness, write them down and take action today. Thank you once again for joining us for another episode of rat race reboot. Go wherever you listen to your podcasts on Listen, leave a review, write a review, reread them, if there's something that you want to learn more about, in terms of the mind, neuroplasticity, motivation, goal, achieving law of attraction, whatever that may be. Leave us a note in the review, and we will take it seriously and we'll add it to another episode because we want this to be for you. I want you living the best, most awesome authentic life ever. And I am grateful for you. So remember, join us again next week and everything is created twice. First in your imagination, and then in physical form. We'll see you next week.

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The views and opinions expressed by the hosts guests or callers of this program do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the studio 21 podcast cafe, the United Podcast Network, its partners or affiliates.