It was in the latter part of my primary school years that I came across the word “psychology”, got a fair understanding of its meaning as the study of behaviour and mental processes, and got hooked.
It was a revelation to me. Now I would be able to read any human being like a book, I thought. That was how psychology became one of my strongest passions.
I began to read any material on the subject I could lay my hands on, though not many were readily available. There was no internet then to help in any way. And, the few scripts that came my way were mostly too academic for me to make any sense of, but after some time, I started coming across simple facts that everyone can use in almost every aspect of life to effect changes. The most amazing discovery for me was that human beings have two minds: the conscious and the subconscious. Some call the subconscious, the unconscious mind.
The conscious mind, also called the objective mind, is what your five senses depend on to let you experience the world. It is the rational mind that analyses your experiences to enable you make choices. Also, within its domain is the preconscious. Another important work of the conscious mind is being the guard of the subconscious – the gatekeeper. That’s why your conscious mind should constantly be alert so that it doesn’t let any dangerous garbage pass through it to your subconscious and become part of your belief system.
The subconscious mind, apart from being responsible for your involuntary actions such as breathing or the pumping of the heart, it is also the seat of your emotions, creativity, long-term memory and beliefs. In short, it is the depository of all what you know, who you are and whatever knowledge you bring up to the surface whenever needed. It directs your body to act according to whatever your dominant thoughts are.
It can’t and doesn’t discriminate good from evil beliefs. Any garbage let into it without rational evaluation by the objective mind could become part of your belief system. For example, if you or someone else convinced you that you have a poor memory, the subconscious mind would accept that as an instruction and act accordingly. Soon an inability to remember a lot of things would become your new reality. This, though, doesn’t mean every poor memory is the result of wrong belief. It could be due to old age or the side effect of some medications.
The good thing about the workings of the two minds, though, is that habits can be changed by changing the content of the subconscious. Of course, progress can be a bit slow on many ingrained habits. So, prevention is better than cure.
Knowing that you can even direct the mind to rehearse a future event and have more confidence when the time to do it for real comes is another revelation to me and cemented psychology into the list of my passions. It’s called mental rehearsal. Sports people have made it a very important part of their preparation. They visualise how they would like to perform at an event from beginning to the end. Muhammad Ali calls it visualising your future history. The more efficiently your visualise, the more your subconscious mind takes it in and takes control of the real performance when the time comes and you play as if on autopilot.
I cannot claim having a good knowledge of psychology. One swallow doesn’t make a summer. I only understand that knowing the workings of the two minds is a precursor to understanding the nature of courage and cowardice, confidence and timidity, happiness and unhappiness, causes of success in reaching ones goal and otherwise, and many other facets of human nature and endeavours. I understand why a paradigm shift changes a lot of things.
Another thing I stumbled upon and had to have some training on was life coaching. You help people reach their goals in the quickest way possible. I also learnt how psychology helps business with the some of the most effective ways of getting and keeping customers.
By now, you may be wondering whether I have been able to achieve what I thought I would with psychology – the ability to read any human being like a book. Well…umm…no way near that yet, to be honest; but I don’t know what the future holds – though I know of no one who has been able to achieve that feat throughout human history. Human beings are complex characters who will never fail to surprise you, positively and negatively. All I will express for now is my delight for having a glimpse on how their internal dialogues govern their actions.
I began to read any material on the subject I could lay my hands on, though not many were readily available. There was no internet then to help in any way. And, the few scripts that came my way were mostly too academic for me to make any sense of, but after some time, I started coming across simple facts that everyone can use in almost every aspect of life to effect changes. The most amazing discovery for me was that human beings have two minds: the conscious and the subconscious. Some call the subconscious, the unconscious mind.
The conscious mind, also called the objective mind, is what your five senses depend on to let you experience the world. It is the rational mind that analyses your experiences to enable you make choices. Also, within its domain is the preconscious. Another important work of the conscious mind is being the guard of the subconscious – the gatekeeper. That’s why your conscious mind should constantly be alert so that it doesn’t let any dangerous garbage pass through it to your subconscious and become part of your belief system.
The subconscious mind, apart from being responsible for your involuntary actions such as breathing or the pumping of the heart, it is also the seat of your emotions, creativity, long-term memory and beliefs. In short, it is the depository of all what you know, who you are and whatever knowledge you bring up to the surface whenever needed. It directs your body to act according to whatever your dominant thoughts are.
It can’t and doesn’t discriminate good from evil beliefs. Any garbage let into it without rational evaluation by the objective mind could become part of your belief system. For example, if you or someone else convinced you that you have a poor memory, the subconscious mind would accept that as an instruction and act accordingly. Soon an inability to remember a lot of things would become your new reality. This, though, doesn’t mean every poor memory is the result of wrong belief. It could be due to old age or the side effect of some medications.
The good thing about the workings of the two minds, though, is that habits can be changed by changing the content of the subconscious. Of course, progress can be a bit slow on many ingrained habits. So, prevention is better than cure.
Knowing that you can even direct the mind to rehearse a future event and have more confidence when the time to do it for real comes is another revelation to me and cemented psychology into the list of my passions. It’s called mental rehearsal. Sports people have made it a very important part of their preparation. They visualise how they would like to perform at an event from beginning to the end. Muhammad Ali calls it visualising your future history. The more efficiently your visualise, the more your subconscious mind takes it in and takes control of the real performance when the time comes and you play as if on autopilot.
I cannot claim having a good knowledge of psychology. One swallow doesn’t make a summer. I only understand that knowing the workings of the two minds is a precursor to understanding the nature of courage and cowardice, confidence and timidity, happiness and unhappiness, causes of success in reaching ones goal and otherwise, and many other facets of human nature and endeavours. I understand why a paradigm shift changes a lot of things.
Another thing I stumbled upon and had to have some training on was life coaching. You help people reach their goals in the quickest way possible. I also learnt how psychology helps business with the some of the most effective ways of getting and keeping customers.
By now, you may be wondering whether I have been able to achieve what I thought I would with psychology – the ability to read any human being like a book. Well…umm…no way near that yet, to be honest; but I don’t know what the future holds – though I know of no one who has been able to achieve that feat throughout human history. Human beings are complex characters who will never fail to surprise you, positively and negatively. All I will express for now is my delight for having a glimpse on how their internal dialogues govern their actions.
