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Why Your Conscious Mind Fights Your Unconscious Mind

Why Your Conscious Mind Fights Your Unconscious Mind
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Dave Wood breaks down the argument that happens inside every person chasing a bigger goal: the conscious mind sets a target, like a private jet or a Lamborghini Gallardo, and the unconscious mind, still running on old beliefs like money is the root of all evil, quietly works against it. He walks through why that fight causes self-sabotage, what changes once the two sides actually align, and a simple daily habit for asking your own unconscious what it needs in order to cooperate. Here’s the episode.

There are two sides to the battle going on inside you. One side is the unconscious mind, a goal-seeking, outcome-seeking mechanism. It acts like a servo mechanism, always moving you toward specific outcomes automatically, twenty-four hours a day, on autopilot. Here’s the problem a lot of people run into: when you’re carrying beliefs that don’t align with your conscious goals, your unconscious mind often won’t let you move toward them at all.

Maybe you were taught that money is the root of all evil growing up, which isn’t actually what the Bible says, but back then your brain didn’t have the reasoning ability to decide whether it was true or not, so you just absorbed it. Now your conscious mind says, I want to make five hundred thousand dollars this year, and your unconscious mind says, yeah right, that’s not going to happen, don’t you remember money is evil? The unconscious handles something like 99.9 percent of the information around you at all times. And its job is to move you toward pleasure and away from pain. With a belief like money is evil sitting underneath, your unconscious will find a way to sabotage every conscious effort you make.

The Negotiation Happening Between Your Two Minds

Here’s the other side of it. The unconscious will actually agree with the conscious mind at first. A lot of people decide to start a business, online or offline, because they think it would be cool: own a private jet, buy a Lamborghini Gallardo, big goals. The moment that shiny new goal gets created, a negotiation starts between the conscious and unconscious mind that most people never even notice is happening. Your unconscious might say, I’d like this big goal, the private jet would be badass, but I have to work really hard for it, so you force yourself to grind, delaying gratification for a result you’ve decided will show up somewhere off in the future.

To begin with, your unconscious mind actually disagrees with that logic of delayed gratification you’re consciously imposing on it. Because you’re internally incongruent, you create a fight inside yourself that leads to self-sabotage. Like I heard a trainer say once, to change the fruit, you’ve got to get to the root, and the root is your unconscious incongruity. Solve that. And it changes how you behave, changes the money you make from the same effort, and changes the way you perceive the entire world outside you.

As you change your unconscious belief system, your actions change. And your conscious and unconscious perceptions merge into a single, unified force of manifestation that can feel like magic, the kind of thing shows like The Secret talk about. Something powerful happens: an epiphany, where new beliefs form about the world. And the outside world seems to change automatically to match your new, more prosperous perceptions on the inside. What used to feel difficult starts fitting together easily, all the time, like you have powers. The business learning curve is longer for somebody fighting themselves than for anybody who isn’t, and your imagination genuinely changes what you experience financially and what you’re able to produce.

There Is No Spoon

I like what Neo says in The Matrix: the truth is, there is no spoon. A lot of people give up because they’ve never learned the secret of changing the world around them by first changing what’s inside their own heart. You’re different. You’re unique, and you actually have the power to create the things you desire inside. If you can imagine everything falling into place the exact right way and being easy for you, that’s actually what can happen, if you stay consistent.

The kind of people who find school easy, and always seem to land the high-paying jobs and effortlessly succeed, have mastered this secret of conscious and unconscious alignment. They have power over the invisible world around them because it’s really just an extension of what they’ve built inside their own heart. It isn’t discipline alone that creates wealth and abundance. It’s faith combined with an unconscious value system that speaks the world into existence as you want it to be, not as it currently is.

Turning the Fight Into Cooperation

There’s a real reason to change the way you think about tomorrow, and to change how you see yourself right now, by reprogramming your conscious mind around your unconscious mind. Instead of thinking, I’ve been working hard and I’m still not being paid enough, you can think, it turns out building this business is a lot easier than I imagined, it just means working in a more fun way and getting richer by working less, in a more automated, simpler way. That’s the kind of thinking that keeps your unconscious mind from turning around and saying, screw this, it isn’t worth it, and sabotaging your effort.

The unconscious mind works like a kind of quantum computer, constantly analyzing every possible future outcome and deciding instantaneously what actions you take and where you end up, giving you the outcome you’re imagining with the most emotional intensity, whether that’s what you actually want or not. Ask your unconscious mind directly: what guidelines do you need from me in order to work with me to hit this goal in the time I’ve stated? Ask it repeatedly, until you go quiet and have no answers left. And the right answer tends to show up as if from nowhere.

Your unconscious controls where your resources get distributed in your life. And it puts them wherever you’re truly in alignment on the inside, so you might as well make that alignment match what you actually want to create. You need to condition your unconscious mind to associate pleasure with the actual work of creating results, and rewarding yourself at every small milestone does exactly that. A big goal off in the distant future usually won’t motivate you to reach it if there’s no reward along the way. Reward yourself regularly, every day, starting right now, and turn the work itself into the pleasure.

Full episode transcript

Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.

Hey there my friend, my name is Dave Wood, and today I want to talk about a kind of battle that happens actually inside of us all. Once this battle is balanced, it creates a magical result in your life, in every single area that you apply it. Something that few entrepreneurs or marketers ever really talk about in a lot of detail because most of them don't understand how this idea really works inside, and that's the battle that's going on right now between your conscious and also your unconscious mind and how to make your conscious and unconscious minds work together to achieve your goals and manifest them more easily and powerfully. See, there's a battle going on right now inside of you, and as you watch this episode, what you're going to find out is that... You're going to start to win the battle inside automatically as your belief system expands to new levels, and you start to know new things about your future and what you can do.

And that, my friend, is my vision with The Daily Shortcut, to empower you to transform on the inside while you transform the world on the outside at the same time, creating synergy inside and outside, and power to make more money while you have a life at the same time. Together, we will change the hearts and minds of a million families to start, while empowering them to be free in a new and a simple way. Now, there are two sides to this battle that's happening on the inside. One side is the unconscious mind, and that's a goal-seeking or outcome-seeking mechanism. It acts as what's called a servo mechanism, always moving you towards specific outcomes automatically, 24 hours a day on autopilot.

Now, here's the problem a lot of people experience. When you have crappy beliefs that don't align with your conscious outcomes, your unconscious mind often won't actually allow you to move towards certain goals and outcomes. Maybe you were taught that money is the root of all evil growing up, which is actually not even what the Bible says. Now, back then, when you were growing up, you couldn't decide whether or not that was true or whether it wasn't true. Your brain didn't have the kind of thinking and logic ability that it has now.

So, when you were growing up, you couldn't decide whether or not that was true or whether it wasn't true. Well, your unconscious mind might say, yeah, right, that's not going to happen. Don't you remember that money is evil? Now, the unconscious works to move you towards your goals automatically, handling 99.9% of the information around you at all times. So its job is to move you towards pleasure and also to move you away from pain.

With that screwy belief set, the unconscious mind will say things like, money is evil, it's bad, I've got to avoid it. So what it finds is a way of sabotaging all of your efforts that you're putting in consciously. Then there's the second side. The unconscious will first agree with what the conscious mind is telling it to do. So you have this kind of phenomenon where a lot of people will decide to start a business online or offline for one reason or the other, and they think it's going to be cool.

They could own a private jet. They can purchase a Lamborghini or a Gallardo. They've got these huge goals. And upon the creation of the shiny new goal, a negotiation starts between the conscious and the unconscious minds that a lot of times isn't productive for them, but you're not even aware of it. At all times, your unconscious is negotiating with your conscious.

If you don't acknowledge your unconscious rules and guidelines, you're going to run into problems in your life every single time, and that, my friend, is actually called the battle of the minds. Your unconscious mind might say something like, I'd like this big goal, like the private jet. It'll be badass when I get it, but I have to work really hard. Do you understand that? And so you force yourself to work hard, and what you actually want is you want to delay your gratification and create a result you know it'll work.

It's going to be off in the future. You've predefined it. You've written down. And you're saying to yourself, work hard now. Get through the pain.

I'm going to get this badass private jet. I'm going to get this new car. I'm going to get this cool stuff later. Let's go, and let's begin. So to begin with in this process, the unconscious disagrees with you, and the logic of delayed gratification that you're consciously imposing on yourself inside, it doesn't actually make sense.

So to begin with, the unconscious actually disagrees with the logic of delayed gratification that you're consciously imposing on your external world. Because you're internally incongruent, you create a fight inside yourself that can actually lead to self-sabotage. And like I heard a famous trainer say one time, to change the fruit, you've actually got to get to the root. See, the root is your unconscious incongruity. And solving your unconscious incongruity will actually change the way you're behaving, change the money that you're making from the same efforts, and actually change the entire world in the way that you perceive it outside.

As you change your unconscious belief system, your actions begin to change, and your unconscious conscious perceptions of the world will merge into a single, unified, and powerful force of success manifestation that seems like magic. Like shows like The Secret Talk. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. And then something powerful and interesting can happen, and this can actually change everything for you.

And that's an epiphany that happens inside, where new beliefs begin to form about the world. And the world seems to change on the outside automatically to match your new and prosperous perceptions that you have inside, inside your internal state and belief system. Well, you used to believe and act as if it's difficult. You now begin to automatically change, and it starts fitting together easily in the exact right way all the time. It's like you have powers.

See the business learning curve is longer if somebody's fighting themselves than anybody could imagine if you're imagining that way. But your imagination can actually change how things happen and what you experience financially, the results that you produce, the results that you're producing externally in a world that seems to be built on rules. But I like what Neo in The Matrix so convincingly says. He says, the truth is, there is no spoon. Remember that part of the movie?

See many give up because they haven't mastered the secret of changing the world around you by first changing what's inside your heart. See you're different, you're unique, you're powerful in your own way, and you actually have the power to succeed and actually create the desires that you have inside your heart. If you can imagine everything falling into place in the exact right way and being easy for you, that's actually exactly what could happen for you if you stay consistent and you keep paying attention carefully to each new episode. That's the daily shortcut and applying and actually going through the bonuses and the assignments that we give you each day. See the kinds of people who find school easy, they always land high-paying jobs and they always seem to effortlessly succeed, these people have actually mastered this secret of conscious and unconscious manifestation and they have power over the invisible world in their external environment that's actually just an extension of the beautiful painting that you're building inside your own heart.

That's what I'm talking about. You are an unconscious mind. Those who carry on realize they all of a sudden, one day, have everything falling into place in the blink of an eye as the quantum mechanical power inside their brain begins to reconstruct the world in their external experience to give them exactly what they've always wanted at just the right time, all the time, or so it seems. It therefore is not discipline, but faith and systems of unconscious values that actually are going to create wealth and abundance as you speak into existence, the world, as you want it to be. In other words, you want to speak the world not as it is, you want to speak into the world as you want the world to be.

Lots of people, they cut out everything else from their life as they're working. They never ever realize the simplicity in the abundance that they can create inside. They convince themselves over and over again they shouldn't focus on anything else but how hard it is, how frustrating it is, and how much work they have left to do. Why not have fun at the same time? Why not have fun at the same time as you create money out of thin air like you're a genie, rubbing yourself and granting yourself wishes?

If you can do that, you can actually change not only your perception of the world, you can change the world with your words. As a couple of months or years go by in this process, the unconscious mind will change as you begin to fill it with new life and also new words and new perceptions of future. It starts today by challenging the idea that you can't create the life. That you want immediately and get the results that you want to get right now. And I'm here to tell you that you can do that, you can do it right now.

You'll then start reversing the flow, fighting, and change the nature of your internal and external experience. How would you like it if your unconscious mind was fighting your conscious poverty thinking and making you rich even when you didn't want to be? That's what transforming your mind daily will do. That's what transforming your mind daily will do. There's a small side to why you want to?

That's the drain for the rest of your life. There's a small side to why you want to change the way you think about tomorrow. There's a small side to why you want to make your own changes to how you view yourself right now, and that is why you should just change the way you think so that you're earns a degree in nature and how you'll jeszcze fit into your position. You can change the changes in the way you think inside by reprogramming your conscious around your unconscious mind. Now your conscious mind can begin to act like, nicely, you know, I have been working hard talking with other people, it's been paid too much and that doesn't will determine the outcome.

In that sense, you don't have to worry about your mind dangerous or it just works. that objection automatically, making what you're doing work better and more effortlessly, making you rich instead. What if you instead said something like this, you said, turns out that building this business is a lot easier than I imagined, but it just means we got to work in a more fun way and get richer by working less at the same time in a more automated, simple and happy way. See that's the kind of thinking that you want and it's usually at this time when you start making this change that your unconscious mind can say to you, you know, screw this, it isn't worth it. It starts sabotaging all your efforts, but you can change that right now and you can start creating the success that you desire automatically.

What if you totally eliminated the battle altogether and there was no battle in your mind and you just started getting richer, you started getting happier and more free and more powerful and having better relationships in your life. Perhaps based on the past experiences that you've had, you think that it can't happen for you. Because you were taught something differently, maybe by people in the past, people who didn't have what you want to have in their life and people maybe even who loved you no matter who they are, no matter how much they loved you, if they don't have what you wanted to have, they can't help you. But you can have your cake and eat it at the same time. Cake is more delicious that way is what I like to say.

See the battle can actually just fade away in the past. You don't need to fight. You can just learn to walk. In a more simple, a more powerful, a more abundant way, every day in your life starting today by downloading your bonuses below this video. As a result of taking action and keeping things aligned, you increase your motivation and your desire to work because you're congruent from the inside out.

You'll begin sabotaging your self-sabotage, turning off the TV and turning on the daily shortcut and getting richer automatically in your business. See the battle can actually just fade away in the past, maybe by people in the past, who've been doing things you've never even considered doing. Now, consciously, you may have no idea that this new internal success dialogue has been going on that's starting to happen inside. Maybe you'll just experience new things, like an increase in motivation as you watch every day without even realizing it, just because you're continuing to download your daily audio, your daily bonuses, and all the gifts that I'm giving you. The unconscious mind works as a kind of quantum computer.

always analyzing all the possible future outcomes at the same time and deciding instantaneously which actions you take and where you're going to be with who right now to result in the outcome that you're imagining inside in your future, giving you the results that you're imagining with the most emotional intensity automatically on autopilot, whether that's what you want or not. Which is why when it decides now that your efforts are going to make you rich, your efforts will do just that automatically. And all of a sudden, you'll find yourself walking in abundance, creating sales effortlessly, getting commissions daily, maybe even on autopilot. And this is just the unconscious mind giving you what you want for a change just because you're paying attention as each new episode continues to come out, seeming to magically unfold, while it speaks to you the exact right words into your mind, your heart, and your business. See, the solution for your new future is now, while you ask your unconscious mind what the rules are, finding your purpose inside, how you can connect with it, and start having fun in your business in this moment.

Don't put it off in the future. Just start taking action and believing it's going to work for you because it can and it is. After a long time of struggle in the past, that comes back. can dissolve, your unconscious will now work with you to create a more abundant future you can step into automatically and walk in prosperous, abundance, rich blessings everywhere in your life. Visualizing your private jet, new home, your car with passion as you focus on your written vision statement can create a pleasure inside and a manifestation energy that will change the nature of your future and what you have the power to create.

You can stop delaying gratification and turn the two to five year plan into a lifestyle now plan instead by paying attention, by taking action and deciding to believe in a better and more powerful way that you can take action in. You need to reward your unconscious mind's cooperation after every big burst of motivation, after every big burst of effort as you begin getting richer and more powerful and having success by applying these shortcuts. And the world will change. The world, the universe will seem to work together in your favor, blessing you 24-7 instead of what it used to do. Ask your unconscious mind now, what guidelines do you have to live by in order for it to work with you to achieve your goal?

Repeat unconscious mind, what do I need to do in order for you to work in cooperation with me to achieve my goal within the period of time that I have stated? Ask yourself. Ask yourself several times until you go down deep and have no answers left and eventually things will appear as if from nowhere there seems to be just the right answer for you. That my friend is the motivational source you now want to align with in your business today. For some people, it's taking time out every week for their spouse or for the children, not overworking, maybe resting on a schedule, maybe exercising or maybe something even more personal like taking a walk.

Well, you listen to beautiful and enchanting music that speaks to your soul. Or maybe something else that's more personal to you. Your unconscious has a kind of monopoly on your internal and external resources in your experiences. It actually controls which resources are distributed where in your life and it puts them in whatever area you are truly in personal alignment with on the inside. And why not make that area you're in alignment with exactly what you want to create in your life?

Because you can choose. You need to condition your unconscious mind to be in alignment with the pleasure of actually working and creating the results that you want. Because rewarding yourself with every small milestone you hit will do just that. And immediately begin transforming the nature of your future. A big goal in the distant future won't motivate you to reach it most of the time if you don't have some kind of reward.

You should reward yourself with the content that you're giving yourself right now in this moment, like the five year plan or when I do this in the future that I'm going to hit my goal. That thinking is not actually congruent with the way your heart and your mind will automatically guide you to do the right thing most of the time that create riches in your life today but also extend out for a long period of time. You need to reward yourself regularly, every day. Start right now. Turn your work into pleasure.

And work with an energy that adds your work into pleasure. You're going to get your reward. You're going to get your reward.

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About the author: David Wood
Co-founder of Empower Network. Went from living in a van to teaching 100,000+ people how to publish their way to an audience. Writes daily about marketing, leadership, and the inner game of building things.
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