36 Part I: Introducing NLP
can get on with it better. The ideal situation is to have your conscious and
unconscious minds working as one, pulling in the same direction.
By getting your unconscious mind on-board – working with you rather than
against you – you can achieve much more in life, such as setting and achieving
compelling goals with much less effort.
Your unconscious mind can’t process negatives
If we say to you, ‘don’t think about watching a film,’ you may get a sense
of yourself in front of your TV or in a cinema with a film playing on the big
screen, before you shift your thoughts to something else in order to comply
with the instruction.
This exercise shows that before you can stop yourself thinking about something,
you have to deal with the thought that automatically pops into your head.
Your unconscious can’t process negatives: it interprets everything you think
as a positive thought. So if you think, ‘I don’t want to be poor,’ your uncon-
scious mind focuses on the ‘poor’ and, because it doesn’t do negatives, the
focus becomes ‘poor’ and everything you associate with poor. Being poor
then becomes the goal in your unconscious mind and like a young child, des-
perate to please, it helps you behave in a way that keeps you poor; which is
obviously not what you wanted!
That’s why stating your goals in the positive is so important. In this instance,
instead of thinking ‘I don’t want to be poor,’ you need to think ‘I want to be
wealthy,’ because this creates the representations in your mind of what being
wealthy means to you and helps you keep your focus on what you want. For
more information on the importance of stating goals in a positive way, head to
Chapter 4.
Your unconscious mind needs direction
Yogis liken the unconscious mind to a mischievous monkey, always leaping
from tree to tree. The way to keep the monkey occupied and out of mischief is
to stick a pole in the ground and direct the monkey to climb up and down the
pole. If your conscious mind doesn’t provide a direction for your unconscious
mind, the latter looks to find direction wherever it can. A young, directionless
child, for example, may find that joining a street gang provides a structure
to their life and they then find that they get their direction from the leader of
the gang and the gang laws. Your unconscious mind does the same thing, and
needs direction and focus or it may create destructive behaviours in you.
In order to direct the unconscious mind, you need to open up communica-
tion channels between your conscious and your unconscious minds. This
rapport is developed by finding a quiet time for meditation or relaxation and
examining the memories presented to you by your unconscious mind.
