Are You Getting What You Want?

What do you want? Is it money, fame, love, freedom? Well if you really want those things and you’re not getting them there is a good reason and it’s got to do with how you communicate with yourself.

If you’ve ever read any modern book on self improvement, you’ve likely heard that you should think of your mind as having 2 parts, a conscious and a subconscious. We are going to use the word unconscious in place of subconscious since most of the time you’re not consciously aware of what the heck that part of your mind is doing.

I’d like to make an analogy that relates to how your conscious and unconscious operate and interact with each other to help you understand how you communicate with yourself.

I’d like you to think of a large ship, and as you do, think of the captain as the conscious part of your mind and the crew as the unconscious part of your mind. Now as you think about how that ship is run and tell me who runs the ship, the captain or the crew?

As you think about this you’ll now realize that the captain gives the orders but it’s the crew that runs the ship. Considering this think about what happens when the crew loses respect for the captain??

You get mutiny. The crew literally stops listening to the captain and does what it wants to.

As you apply this to your life and think about if you getting the results you want?  Is the part of your brain that runs your body, produces your emotions and drives your actions paying any attention to you? In other words, is your crew paying any attention to you as the captain of your ship?

When you plot a course for your treasure, does your crew say aye, aye sir and guide you there? Or does it fight you with negativity, stress and anxiety?

If your crew is not eager to go after what you want, then your captain is out of rapport with your crew and your crew has lost respect for you. When this happens you’re going to have a really, really hard time achieving any of your goals because your crew ignores you and does its own thing. And when your crew does its own thing, its primary goal is to feel good in the present with the least amount of effort. This means staying in your comfort zone and doing things such as over eating, smoking, drugs, playing computer games, sabotaging yourself or some other mind numbing, time wasting activity. Obviously when this happens, you are going to feel very unfulfilled with your life.

But it’s actually much worse than that because letting your crew run wild puts you in a continual downward spiral of hoping and wishing things were different until the day you either wake up and find a purpose for your life or you die.

Now let’s talk about why would the crew lose respect for its Captain?

Well it’s really pretty simple and it’s the same reasons you’d lose respect for anyone whether it be a child losing respect for a parent, an employee losing respect for an employer or a student losing respect for a teacher.

They’re things such as the lack a vision or no clear goal for your crew to work toward.

For example, were you ever put in a position where you knew you had to create a result, but you didn’t know what the result was? And you knew from experience that no matter how hard you worked, you were going to get beat up for not producing what you didn’t know about?

In other words, your boss, parent or spouse wants something and expects you to provide that for him. Except he really doesn’t know what it is that he wants and when you don’t provide it, he blames it on you! How does that feel?

I bet that really if you think about it, you really do know how that feels because there’s a good chance you’re doing it to yourself every day. And by that, I mean you’re consciously wanting and maybe even expecting something better of yourself but you don’t really know what that is. You never took the time to define it. And then when you don’t get whatever it is, you punish your crew for doing the absolute best it could given the lack of information that you provided.

What happens when you try and try to please someone and continually get punished for it? Eventually you’re going to get pissed off and ignore them. And that’s what your crew does to you.

How about Indecisiveness or the “lack of will” to make decisive decisions, how do you think the crew looks a captain that can’t make the simplest decision?

What about inconsistencies like giving your crew conflicting goals or tasks that are often impossible to achieve concurrently, tasks like making a large profit in trading without losing no matter what happens. And then following up with punishment no matter how things turn out because you should have done better. How do you think that makes you feel about yourself?

How about disrespect for yourself and the crew? Would you want to follow a leader who doesn’t treat you respectfully? How about a leader who is disrespectful to himself and calls himself stupid? I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to follow someone who’s stupid.

So how do you get back in rapport with your crew? The best way is by having a definite purpose, clear goals, being decisive, being consistent and then communicating your purpose and goals in a clear, respectful manner to your crew and rewarding them with ANY progress toward what you want.

In other words you always want to talk to yourself “as if” you know exactly what you want and were speaking to a highly respected, very close friend who can give it to you, because that’s what you’re doing.

This is why having a clear purpose and goals are essential for you to be happy in any part of your life.

For more information on how to get your crew working for you, visit www.lockeinyoursucces.com

John Locke