Ashok Gupta breaks down how your subconscious mind, which stores memories and habits, generates gut reactions that your conscious mind can override but often doesn't. Your subconscious prioritizes avoiding failure and seeking certainty, approval, and quick wins. Imagination usually beats willpower, which is why you eat the chocolate cake even when you don't want to.
You have a conscious and subconscious part of your mind. The conscious part of your mind is rationalizing and analyzing what I'm saying right now. It is where you think it's normally associated with the cortex or outer part of the brain. The subconscious mind is much larger and it is the more instinct distinctive part of your brain. Your subconscious deals with the emotional reactions and feelings, long term beliefs and perspectives, memory storage, habitual thinking and habitual behaviors. Imagine your mind is like a computer. The conscious mind is what you see on the screen at any one time. Your subconscious mind is the hard drive looking after all the automatic functions and running the software. However, as we all know, the software can be prone to bugs. So it is with our minds. We can be prone to faulty thinking, bugs in the system which can cause bad time management. Your subconscious values the following things very highly. These are the subconscious priorities. It wants to minimize failure and maximize certainty. Your subconscious wants to minimize rejection and maximise approval from others. It wants to minimize bad or difficult emotional states. It wants to minimize difficult physical states and maximise pleasurable ones. It's very short termist. It's about the gain you can get right now. It discounts future returns. Your subconscious mind is where your emotions about something are originally created. So when there is a stimulus, your first gut reaction is an emotional reaction. Your conscious mind is where your thoughts about that same stimulus occur. Your conscious mind is influenced by the emotions which come up from the subconscious. This is where you experience certain emotionally charged thoughts and feelings. Your behaviours are ultimately determined by a combination of how you feel and what you're thinking in your mind. It's a battle between how your subconscious feels and tries to influence your behaviour versus what you consciously think and rationally how you'd like to behave. In this next diagram, I will focus on the interplay between the conscious and subconscious parts of your mind. Your subconscious mind will try and influence your thoughts and behaviours to using emotions. I feel I should do X. These emotions will be based on the subconscious priorities that we mentioned. And these automatic reactions come first. According to the latest studies of the brain, there are gut reactions. Your conscious mind will be influenced by these emotions, but it can override these subconscious urges. And the conscious mind may say I, although I feel like doing X, I think I should do Y. By taking charge, the feelings can be influenced over time. On the right hand side of the diagram, this is literally where you are retraining. Your brain. Leadership is having conscious control over your behaviours despite what your subconscious emotions would like you to do. Let me give you the example of a piece of chocolate cake. Imagine you've already had a slice of chocolate cake and you're full, but you can see another piece on the plate. Consciously, rationally, you're thinking, no, I shouldn't have any more cake. But your subconscious wants you to have it. Why? Because the subconscious wants a pleasurable physical experience from eating the cake. It wants short term gain right now, but consciously you think you should refrain. Do you see how it's a battle between the two parts of your mind to ultimately decide your behavior? In this battle, your imagination is stronger than your willpower. So when you're imagining that chocolate cake, that's a very powerful image, a powerful feeling. You can override your subconscious emotions using willpower. However, your imagination will always be stronger. One way you can override this is to simply imagine how sick you will feel if you have another slice of chocolate cake. This will be more powerful than simply telling yourself that you shouldn't have it. If you work subconsciously or reactively based on your emotions, your mind will move you towards bad time management behaviors. We're going to use this model throughout the rest of the course.
