Before we dive into today’s episode, I want to quickly recap where we left off in the last one, because if you remember, this is a series about the law of attraction, creating and manifesting the life that you want and desire.
I talked about the law of attraction in the last episode, which is this idea that our thoughts, emotions and beliefs carry within them a vibration. And that vibration is constantly matched by the universe. In other words, like attracts like.
For years my main intention wasn’t about just achieving a specific goal, which is what we tend to focus on, but it’s about thinking about how do you want to feel in your life? For me, I wanted to feel freedom: freedom in my work, freedom in my schedule, freedom in my personal life, freedom in my personal desires. I started to learn how to align my thoughts and emotions with the feeling first. Then the actions and opportunities started to attract to me.
We talked a lot about how our thoughts create a frequency, and when you match that frequency of what it is that you want to attract or desire in your life, you begin to attract it. I explained that it kind of looks and acts like a radio, right? Whatever station you’re dialed into in life: are you dialed into the abundance station, or are you dialed into the scarcity and lack station? Are you dialed into the confidence station or the self-doubt station? That’s what you’re going to constantly be getting back in your life.
I want to take this idea of the law of Attraction a little bit further in today’s episode.
The last three episodes, we’ve also been talking about the power of beliefs. Carol Dweck says the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. What she’s talking about—whether this is in relation to the students that are in our classrooms and the beliefs that they hold about what they’re capable of, the beliefs that you as an adult hold about what you can or cannot achieve, what you can and cannot attract in your life— all of that is based on these beliefs, which are just repeated thoughts.
So I want to talk to you today about the conscious mind and, and the subconscious mind, and we’re going to dissect that today.
First, what I want to say is I want to go back to that: a belief is a repeated thought in your mind. So whatever you think, whatever you feel, whatever you believe—that is the same condition of your mind, right?
All of these beliefs, like I said, were installed in you from your earliest days and formed kind of by the time you were six years old by your parents, your caretakers, the prominent people in your life. What we know is that we all have the power to influence and affect our life.
We have these beliefs, but these beliefs are sometimes very buried in what we call the subconscious mind. I want you to kind of picture an iceberg. With an iceberg, the very tip is out of the water, but the huge, massive part is under the water. That’s what I want you to think of when we’re talking about the conscious mind versus the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is like that little tip out of the water, the iceberg’s tip. Your conscious mind is your thinking mind, your planning mind. It’s the ability to reason, to have logical thinking, to do critical thinking, to say, “I need to go do the laundry, I need to put the soup on the table, I need to call my mom.” It’s one task at a time. It’s doing things voluntarily. The conscious mind understands past and present, and can project to the future.
But we all have a second part of our mind, called the subconscious mind. It’s like the dark recesses in the back of our mind. That is what is responsible for driving most of how we operate in our lives. The subconscious mind is your belief systems. What do you believe?
What did you learn from your parents about money? What did you learn from your parents about taking risk? Did they teach you to start your own business and take a risk, or play it safe and do the same job every day, even though it’s not something you love?
What did your parents teach you about how you navigate relationships and life? The subconscious mind is all your past programming, and it’s also your emotions, your imagination, your intuition—you know how you just have this sense about things, even though you can’t see it? That comes from your subconscious mind.
Your traumas are housed in your subconscious mind—many of these you’re not even aware of. Basil Van Der Kolk wrote “The Body Keeps the Score.” What he’s basically saying is that we all have traumas. We have adverse childhood experiences—things that happened to us, like divorce, alcoholism in our home, chaos, parents fighting, substance abuse. We have traumas, big and small, that still affect us.
Those traumas are housed in the subconscious mind, in those hidden recesses. Your body remembers them even if your mind doesn’t, and these traumas can still show up in your life.
A lot of the work in schools is teaching students how to emotionally regulate themselves, but we have teachers who don’t know how to do this for themselves. I sometimes don’t know how to regulate my own emotions, because my traumas keep coming to the surface when I engage in controversy or feel wounded.
Your traumas live in your subconscious mind. Your involuntary actions, like driving, happen automatically thanks to your subconscious.
The conscious mind, the thinking tip of the iceberg, only drives about 5% of how you show up in life. The largest portion, your subconscious, drives most of your life: what you believe you are worthy of, what you believe you can achieve, feel, accomplish, go after.
I’ll give you a quick example. A lot of our beliefs that we hold are in our subconscious mind, not always in our awareness. For example: how many of you have heard, if you sit near a fan, you’ll get a stiff neck? Maybe your grandparents or parents told you this. If that’s the belief you hold, your subconscious mind will go to work and make sure you get a stiff neck. It’s not the fan causing the discomfort, it’s your belief about it.
If you’re afraid that you’ll catch a cold because someone sneezes or has a cough, your fear becomes the movement of your own mind that creates what you expect to happen, what you fear, and what you believe.
A great example is my husband, Scott. If I even tell him I have a sore throat, nauseous stomach, headache, or fever, hands down, in a few hours, Scott Strobel has the same symptoms. Sometimes I even test it just to see if he gets the symptoms. I know that sounds awful, but I’m always trying to prove the power of beliefs.
Your thoughts affect your beliefs and your receptivity. Your beliefs matter, just like learning to ride a bike—it becomes a natural repeated thought again and again.
What we want to do is work on that subconscious mind. We want to extract old beliefs that no longer serve us. We want to download a new set of beliefs. This has been the work of my life: extracting old beliefs of lack, scarcity, victimhood, and replacing them with new beliefs like “I’m capable of this.”
For example, in front of my computer where I’m recording, I have a sticky note that says, “You deserve this.” Every time my business takes a leap financially, I get a little uncomfortable—“What’s happening? How did this happen? It’s never going to happen again. This is all going to go away.” I’m not the type of person who generates this kind of money. I’m not smart enough to run such a big business.
But when I level up, I have this sticky note: “You deserve every bit of this, Kim Strobel. Look at what you’ve done, look at what you’ve created.” I went from making $8 an hour as a teacher assistant, working as a secretary, to a teacher, to a curriculum director, to launching my own business—now running a successful, service-oriented, heart-centered business that makes money. I have to consciously tell myself, “Kim, you deserve this.” I have to download that message over and over.
In today’s episode, I’m focusing on helping you understand the subconscious and conscious mind. We’ll go further in upcoming episodes.
Previously, we talked about the Law of Attraction and how your thoughts and feelings influence your life. In this episode, we’re concentrating on the subconscious versus the conscious mind.
Think of your subconscious mind as a dark room in your mind—a secret place that runs tapes you’re not even aware of. That’s where your beliefs take shape. The subconscious mind stays neutral. So when you drop negative thoughts into your subconscious, we’re often surprised when those thoughts find expression in our day-to-day experiences.
Whatever we’re housing in our subconscious is constantly showing up in our lives. Our job is to feed the conscious mind true, positive things, and your subconscious will reproduce those mental conscious pictures.
You have infinite riches within your reach, but you have to learn how to become a magnet for the things you want. You do that by working with the beliefs in your subconscious mind.
Think of a magnetized piece of iron—it can lift twelve times its own weight. If you demagnetize it, it won’t even lift a feather. There are two types of people: magnetized people, full of confidence, faith, abundance, life, who know they’re born for success—they win and win and win at life. I know people who have this Midas touch; everything they try turns to gold. They’re just magnetized with belief in themselves.
Then there are people who are demagnetized, full of fears and doubts. When opportunities come, they say, “What if I fail? What if it doesn’t work out?” and fear keeps them stuck.
When you know the secret of the law of attraction, universal intelligence, and your ability to co-create, you become magnetized.
The secret miracle-working power in your subconscious mind is already in you. You don’t have to acquire it, you just have to apply it.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear isn’t that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
Friends, you have the ability to make magic happen in your life. What we’re going to be learning, in this and future episodes, is how to reprogram your subconscious mind so you can raise the
