***This giveaway is now closed. Thank you so much to everyone who entered and congrats to the winner!***
A Shared Wisdom Guest Post by Bestselling Author, Eldon Taylor
(Be sure to enter the giveway at the end for a chance to win Eldon’s new book + cd, Self-Hypnosis and Subliminal Technology: A How-to Guide for Personal-Empowerment Tools You Can Use Anywhere!)
Everyone I’ve ever met or interacted with, everyone I’ve ever listened to or whose work I’ve ever read—in fact, every single human being from my experience—has, at one time or another, desired to change something about themselves. For some, the longed-for change may involve getting a better job, losing weight, improving memory, accelerating learning abilities, or increasing charisma. Indeed, there are very few individuals who find nothing they wish to improve.
What Is Change?
What is change? The idea seems simple enough. To some, it’s a thing, often thought of as something like a commodity. For example, we desire more prosperity. The evidence of our success is money. So change in this instance is money, right? No, money is only the outer symbol that represents the shift.
Competing Strategies
Let’s say, for purposes of illustration, that our hypothetical individual who wishes to be more prosperous was also raised with the belief that money is the source of all evil. A subconscious strategy may therefore work to sabotage any effort he makes to achieve real monetary success. In other words, in this instance the ego perceives safety as avoiding evil— that is, money.
Our hypothetical person may believe, on the other hand, that only money matters. However, there could still be subconscious strategies that get in the way. For example, assume that this person seeks to build a large company but is afraid of public speaking. How will he build a large and successful organization without communicating? When will the fear (public speaking) strategy kick in and knock out the goal (large company) strategy? How will the two ideas compete?
Conflicting strategies exist in nearly everyone. They often underpin what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the conflict that arises from holding two incongruent beliefs. Indeed, opposing strategies also lie beneath much of what’s called “sublimation,” or the acting out of unacceptable fantasies in a socially acceptable way.
The Subconscious Mind
The other challenge to creating real change in our lives lies in the subconscious mind. This part of us is basically indiscriminate in how it accepts information. The problem then is twofold: first, there are already years of uncritical acceptance in my mind; and second, I act in reliance upon this information.
All the statements that have ever been accepted are present in our subconscious minds, and for most of us that’s negative programming. Some psychotherapists have used numbers that indicate that for every input of positive messaging there are 100 bits of negative!
How many times have we all said to ourselves things such as, I can’t do it, or It never works for me? How many times has each of us heard statements such as, “You’re not old enough,” “You’re stupid,” “Money is the source of all evil,” “Life is difficult and then you die,” “Thank God it’s Friday,” “That will never work,” and “You’ll never amount to anything”?
Our Defense Mechanisms Often Defeat Our Purposes
The fact that we act in reliance upon the information accepted indiscriminately by our subconscious minds is a pervasive problem. This means that if negative messages have caused us pain or fear, then we adapt our behavior and beliefs around avoiding those circumstances and outcomes.
With this adaptation come choices. Most choices of this nature are deeply rooted in the subconscious. Our subliminal beliefs—those in the subconscious that arise from our desire to be accepted and to avoid pain, humiliation, and rejection—determine our actions. All behavior comes from choice, even if the decision is made at a subconscious level. What happens is that we build defense mechanisms in order to protect ourselves from former bad experiences and possible future rejection.
These defense mechanisms often defeat our own best interests. For many of us, our worst enemy is often ourselves. Ignorant of these dynamics, it’s easy to see why more than 90 percent of the people who attend or participate in motivational gatherings or products are unsuccessful. The fact is that every time we tell ourselves something such as, I am good! the subconscious gives a thought to the conscious such as, Really! Good at what?
Even when the behavior we desire is something as simple as success in our workplace, these subliminal beliefs come into play. For example, when I ask a group of people how many of them would like to come up front and speak to the audience for five minutes on some topic I’ll assign them, rarely does anyone volunteer. A common fear is that somehow they’ll suffer deep embarrassment, humiliation, and more. But this same group of people will respond almost unanimously to the simple, straightforward question: Do you want to be successful in business? Their answer is always yes!
To succeed in business, one must learn to speak. If there’s a deep abiding fear of public speaking and a desire to be successful, there are contradictory motives present in the psyche. Thus, when a person reaches a certain level of success, for some inexplicable reason everything crumbles. What may be viewed as outside circumstances is, in truth, inner conflict. In the instance of the fear of public speaking, the closer to success the individual gets, the more powerful the exertion by subconscious processes to eliminate the impending threat. Conflicting factors or mechanics of our own psyche often defeat our stated desires without our conscious awareness.
Hypnosis and Subliminal Communication
The power of hypnosis and subliminal communication exists largely in their direct communication with the subconscious. The conscious mind is generally in abeyance during hypnosis, although our defense mechanisms can still play a significant role in the outcome. The advantage of sub-threshold (subliminal) communication is that it bypasses conscious awareness. Unlike hypnosis, where attention and conscious assistance are often necessary, subliminal messages aren’t attended to by the conscious mind in any necessary manner. Because of this, we can decide for ourselves how to “script” our subconscious mind with this technology.
You Can Rescript Your Inner Talk
Using hypnosis, then, it’s possible to access the hidden recesses of the mind to discover the source of a conflict and its solutions. Hypnosis also allows us to “seed” the subconscious mind with thought patterns and ideas that can serve us as opposed to sabotage us. But for me, the most exciting use of hypnosis is for deepening meditation exercises and using this to access information from my higher self.
As for subliminal communication, it works by allowing the positive messages or affirmations to eventually overtake the negative information contained in the subconscious. This new data rescripts our inner-talk, thereby priming positive self-beliefs, which begin the cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies. When this happens, the subliminal beliefs that formerly were self-limiting begin to change. As they change, so do we!
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Excerpted from NY Times best-selling author, Eldon Taylor’s latest release, Self-Hypnosis and Subliminal Technology: A How-to Guide for Personal-Empowerment Tools You Can Use Anywhere!
One lucky winner will receive a copy of Eldon’s new book + cd, Self-Hypnosis and Subliminal Technology: A How-to Guide for Personal-Empowerment Tools You Can Use Anywhere! (Click on the link to learn all about it, and then come back here to enter!)
Entering is super easy!
- Follow Eldon Taylor and Soul Speak on Facebook.
- Leave a comment below sharing one positive change you would like to make in your life. (If you are reading this via email, please click here to comment.)
One lucky winner will be chosen randomly on 10/28.
Good luck!
Join the book launch party and receive over 100 bonus gifts plus the chance to enter drawings to win super-gifts from supporters of Eldon, such as Linda Evans (Emmy nominated and award winning actress), Dee Wallace (award winning actress), Steven Halpern (award winning composer and recording artist) and many more! This is a limited time event. Please click here for more details!
I am attempting to realize how i behave in all interactions and stop myself if i start feeding off any negative energy.
Happy to follow you on facebook. See you over there with my comment.
I am making the positive change this year of believing in myself and my abilities to the etent of finding a new, prosperous, close to home, fabulous, fulfilling job that utilizes my Reiki Master/Teacher healing and other modalities.
There are many, but I really want to be able to leave the abuse of my past…in my past, and live a happy life. Not letting what another did and or said lower me anymore than it already has. Too once again see the beauty in ‘me’.
I am always seeking new ways to bring about change. Change is good:-) My current area of improvement is self love and getting rid of negative self talk.This could be a wonderful tool to do both things,hope I win! Thank you for sharing:-)
One very positive change I need make is a career change for both myself & my husband. Being an over the road truck driving team for the past seven months has been great. Being together 24/7 is the best but we have come to realize just how much we miss being home and dislike the limited opportunities we have to spend time with our 9 children & 13 grandchildren (soon to be 16). I would like to go back to an office job (better yet a work from home position so that we can take in more rescue dogs – we currently have 2 that go on the road with us) & my husband would like to drive locally so that he is home every night. Once this all falls into place, & I know it will, we want to apply to become foster parents and volunteer more in our community.
I wonder if I could release the habit of letting others push my buttons, I would like to be ambivalent.
Love & Light
Valerie
I would like to be strong and confident again and not to fall for or give in to the manipulative tactics of others.
One positive change would be to overcome subconscious behavior patterns that isolate me and separate from living fully and interactively with the world, most notably my emotional eating. I’ve come to recognize that my emotional eating is not only a soothing anxiety reliever it is also a subconsious effort to “protect me”. The resulting extra weight, which I abhore, becomes an excuse to keep me from doing new things, going places and interacting with people. My most fervent desire is to feel fully alive and fully participate in life but these behaviors continue to be a stumbling block. I’ve worked on my mind-set to overcome this but regardless of my conscious awareness and good work toward breaking habits there is still a subconscious aspect that is frustratingly difficult to change.
I took a stab at Twitter, Facebook and blogging in 2012. It is more fun than I thought it would be, but I am still no where near my potential. I am ready to break out
I’d like to be proactive in doing acts of kindness.
One positive change I would like to make is to start living in a more healthy way, eating better, exercising more, taking better care of myself.
I want to change the negative perception that being bright and wanting to share my light was wrong and boastful.
I want to find what I love to do & make my heart sing. I know after that, everything will fall into place.
Yes the subconscious if very powerful indeed! One thing I find is that substantial change cannot be done in language/statements alone…we must dive into the emotions/moods and also our physiological to have faster and longer lasting change.
I would like to change my mindfulness. Espcecially in regards to my spending and eating habits.
Following on facebook =)
I’ve made so many important changes in the last few years, but am still struggling with money. I would love to be able to reset my ‘money-threshold’, be comfortable around more money and feel what I have to offer is worth a decent return.
i would love to be able to win this. i have been doing alot of study on learning to open up more, stopping negativity in my life. i am 55 and disabled. not long i became disabled i lost my husband of 19 years. i felt i was in a deep hole. i decided that i needed to get out of that hole and live within and without. before anyone will love or respect you, you need to love and respect you.
I would love to be able to get past the hurt/words/actions that other have caused me in the past- just forgive them and move on to become what I am meant to be
My biggest change I want to make is to quit smoking. Other than that I live a healthy, productive and satisfying life. My inability to do so has a profound effect upon my inner confidence as each time I fail, I berate myself. I find myself concluding that I am weak, ineffective, stupid, yadda yadda blah blah. And I know this is not so, I am proud of my accomplishments, no matter how small and know that I am a creative and interesting person. This one failure is very depressing.
I would like to be fully self directed in my employment. Should I just go ahead and email you my address now or wait until the 28th?
Thanks for the article Jodi.
Dan @ ZenPresence.com
I would like to overcome the barriers I have placed in front of me that I don’t even know exist.
At this point, it would be awesome to change my issues with procrastination on a few topics and things I know can really improve my life 🙂 I am making progress daily, but this ‘little’ thing slows it down so much I sometimes want to scream!
I’d like to change my limiting beliefs about money. I’m always embarrassed to quote my prices, and instead of charging what my services are really worth I’ve lowered my prices twice, and I’m still offering discounts even though I already am the cheapest in the area.
I would like to improve my follow through, I have a tendency not to start things I finish. I have started classes, projects, etc and for the most part never finish them.
Thank you so much to everyone who entered. I loved reading about what you would like to change in your lives. I truly believe that it’s possible to do exactly that, especially now that you have set the intention!
Congratulations to Cyn – she will be receiving this book/cd!
Hugs to each of you!