Programming the brain for results!

These seven concepts are adapted from an age-old mind-guidance system and help illustrate the conflicts which can arise between your conscious and subconscious mind.

They are all interlinked so you must understand them!

Every thought causes a physical reaction.

For instance, if being nervous or stressed causes you to reach for the biscuit tin, you must address the cause of the thoughts which make you need comfort food rather than simply trying to stop eating biscuits. You may need to take action to increase your self-confidence or relax yourself at the end of the day.

Your imagination is more powerful in determining your actions than any knowledge you have gained.

Any ideas which have emotional attachments are almost impossible to change through logic alone. For instance, if you constantly read magazines which fill your brain with images of ‘size zero’ models who seem to possess everything they could ever want, you begin to imagine yourself in that situation.

Unless you program your subconscious mind to realise that this is not the way to live, it doesn’t matter what you read elsewhere about how bad it is for you because your subconscious mind still attaches the perfect lifestyle to being a ‘size zero’ and will cause you to act accordingly.

Conflicting ideas can’t last for long – one will eventually come out on top.

For instance, you know that eating cakes is not good for your fat loss plan and yet every time it comes to decision time on the office cake round, you decide that one cake won’t hurt. Unless you get it crystal clear in your head that you cannot eat cake under any circumstances it will always be very difficult to resist.

If you allow emotions to rule for long enough, they will eventually cause real changes to occur.

For instance, your friend borrows your favourite shoes and ruins them in a night club. You pretend its okay but secretly you stay angry at them for a few months. Eventually this will become a physical reality in the form of an outburst related to some other event or another form of retaliation.

This is similar to the old saying “never let the sun go down on an argument”. It will only serve to make it worse because it becomes part of your subconscious being. The same applies to food. If you are unable to alter your emotional, subconscious state, you will soon get to a stage where the action of eating is the only way to solve the problem. You know the solution won’t last long but nevertheless you have brought the emotional build up into reality.

What you expect to happen tends to become reality.

We’ve all heard that we should practice ‘positive thinking’. This is because if we can convince ourselves something is going to happen and we genuinely believe it, the physical reality of the idea tends to take shape right in front of our eyes. Obviously, this can be a bad thing because if you keep telling yourself you’re going to fail, it’s more than likely to come true! For instance, if you keep telling yourself you are fat and you’re going to stay fat, guess what…..you will!

Once an idea is developed and accepted by the subconscious mind, it will remain there to guide your actions until a new idea replaces it and becomes the new guide for your actions.

This is why habits can be so hard to break. It doesn’t help to try and give up smoking by just trying not to open the packet. You must create a new ideal in your subconscious mind by visualising what your smoke-free life would be like. Going back to our biscuit example, if you can’t find an alternative to eating biscuits to reduce stress levels, your subconscious mind is going to remain programmed to demand biscuits to cope with the problem.

Each thought which you act on makes it much easier to act on future thoughts of a similar nature.

For instance, you may have to really force yourself to say no to dessert when out with friends, but once you have done it once and you realise your social world will not crumble as a result, it will become easier and easier to do it in future. Again, this is because you spend less time thinking about doing it and just let your subconscious mind take over – “Would you like dessert?” “No thank you.” End of story.


Now you should realise that it is crucial to program your subconscious mind to be on exactly the same wavelength as your conscious mind if you are going to prevent yourself going around in circles and never really making progress.

The key is to keep talking to yourself and those around you about how you are achieving your goals.

"I am losing a stone because...."

"I'm on target to run under 40 minutes in the London 10k race"

"I'm hitting single digit body fat by the start of May"

This constant talk will program your brain to see that as reality and consequently you'll find yourself taking whatever actions are required to get you there even when you aren't actively thinking about it!

It's not magic but it works really well so make sure you do this on a daily basis!