Every morning, I wake up and see something on my ceiling. As the sleep clings to my eyes, my eyelids flip open and closed. The image above me dances through my sleepy mind and is contorted as it turns into strange dreams.
Sunrise on Phu Chi Fa by Atomdocs
The something I see on my ceiling is this. My most pressing goal. The one thing that will make the most difference in my life at the moment. I have it taped to my ceiling and it is written in present tense. It is in present tense because, even though I don’t know exactly how it will happen, I know if I stay focused on my goal, I will reach it.
Have you ever thought about your subconscious mind? What does it think about while your regular mind is thinking? What does it think about when you are sleeping or driving or eating or talking to someone else?
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night with a song playing in your head as loud as if you were singing it? You wonder how long this song has been playing in your head because, for the life of you, you can’t even remember where you heard it?
I have. It is my subconscious mind alive and active even while I am sleeping! It never rests. It is constantly taking stuff in. Songs, impressions, pictures, thoughts. It’s the brain beneath your brain.
So, why do I hang my goal above my bead? I hang it there because I wake up every morning and without even thinking, I see my goal. Without even thinking or even while thinking about something else, I read it because it is right there.
Every day I am making a deposit. A deposit into my subconscious. It is a goal met. It is of no consequence that I’m not 100% sure how I will achieve it thinking about it rationally.
For months before Michael quit his job, we had this posted on our bathroom mirror:
OBX Sunset 2012
We had decided Michael needed to quit his job and become self-employed. We, however, had no idea what it would look like or how to make it become a reality.
I will let the rest of our story speak for itself here.
I now know the power of my mind. I don’t hesitate to guide it in the direction it needs to go.
Question: Did you ever have a goal where you weren’t sure how it was going to come about?
Most of my goals have begun that way, Claudia! I just created a vision board and I am reading Think and Grow Rich and I just got to the chapter where he sets out 6 steps to creating your goal. The last and most important is pretty much what you shared here – you write out a statement of your goal in present tense and with specifics and read it first thing every morning and last thing before bed every night and really visualize, feel, taste, experience it as if it had already happened. Your subconscious mind is a powerful driver and we have to program it with what we want to see not what we already have (Romans 4:17)!!
Awesome Ann,
I am almost at the end of that book right now! Wow is all I can say.
How about you? Are you enjoying it? I have the audio version…
I am really enjoying it! I am going slowly and taking notes because it’s on my Kindle – very, very cool though.
I pretty much feel that way right now about two projects – how are they going to come about. So, I’m just beginning and seeing what happens. What’s the worst that could happen?
Exactly Chris! Way to push forward… excited to see what comes of your projects 🙂
Exactly. That’s a great question. If you answer it honestly, it’s usually not too bad.
Isn’t it funny that we know these things about our minds, yet use so little of the power? I’m speaking from experience here. I know when I wanted to lose down to sub-200 pounds, I put a positive paragraph on my office wall that I spoke aloud each morning and right beside it was the 4 main actions I was going to checkoff for that day. Since I hadn’t been below 200 pounds in about 20 years, I didn’t know if it would happen or not, but my mind decided it would happen. So it did. Now I want to carry this over to my career and financial world and focus on that. It’s powerful, yet I can get lazy and push it aside when I don’t see results quick enough.
Oh, I’ll add here that I’ve had goal notebooks from as long as ten years ago. I’ll say this – that even the act of writing down goals (I wrote down 86 goals one year – a little much) has power. I looked back and saw that 10 years later, many had come to pass, even though I really don’t remember focusing on them at all. Think of the power of actually focusing on a goal!
So cool Michael! Wow… was it just your different mindset that allowed you to make different choices to loose the weight??
The really amazing thing about your journals is that you did write stuff down and looking back gives tremendous perspective for your now!
…and you are right… when you actually focus on a goal, it is tremendously powerful!
Losing weight was triggered by a conversation I had with a friend’s son out of state – he had lost a ton of weight and said it was due to listening to a certain podcast. I thought that if he could do it , I could too. I found an awesome podcast (Cut the Fat Podcast) that made sense to me – and that led to reading and about the same time I found Ann Musico and her book. Once you get that positive feedback (losing the weight), it makes you feel better and you don’t want to go back to feeling crummy again.
That is awesome Michael!! Finding something that you can relate to is huge! How much did you loose?
The funny thing is sometimes you don’t even know you are feeling crummy till you feel better 😉