Neuro Linguistic Programming

Chapter 3: Discovering Who’s Directing Your Life

Distinguishing between conscious and unconscious

In NLP terms, your conscious mind is that part of your mind that has aware-

ness of things around and within you at any given moment in time, which,

according to research conducted by George Miller in 1956, is a meagre seven

(plus or minus two) bits of information. (For more information on Miller’s

findings, head to Chapter 5). The conscious mind can be compared with the

tip of an iceberg and the unconscious mind with the nine-tenths of the ice-

berg that’s submerged underwater.

Your conscious and unconscious minds excel at different things (as Table

3-1 shows). A useful extension to the conscious/unconscious mind metaphor

might be to think of your conscious mind as relating more to your left brain

and the unconscious mind relating to your right brain. Knowing what each

is best suited for can help you to recognise whether you’re better at using

your logical left brain or your creative right brain. You may then decide to

focus on aspects of your mental development, for instance, learning to draw

if you’re more left-brained, or learning applied mathematics if you’re more

right-brained. Certainly, discovering how to meditate develops the traits of

both parts and gets them communicating better.

Table 3-1 Comparing the Conscious and Unconscious Minds

The Conscious Mind Excels at The Unconscious Mind is Better at

Working linearly Working holistically

Processing sequentially Intuition

Logic Creativity

Verbal language Running your body

Mathematics Taking care of your emotions

Analysis Storing memories

Understanding your quirky unconscious mind

As with your friends and their little foibles, your unconscious mind has some

interesting quirks with which you need to become acquainted so that you