How to Rewire Your Subconscious Mind for Lasting Change (What Actually Works

When you are rewiring your subconscious, everything helps, but nothing lasts except for a handful of things. So today I want to break down some of the things that really create a distinct and lasting change, but also what doesn't really work in terms of lasting change, or what is very slow and tedious, almost like skiing uphill. It's possible, but it's— it takes an enormous amount of dedication, determination, resilience, not giving up, and so much energy to create lasting change in some of the old paradigms. Some of the old paradigms you might think are traditional coaching, therapy even. Therapy creates change, but the way the model is set up with 50 minutes a week is slow, it's tedious, and if you're after the age of 24, your nervous system is basically like a cooked turkey. You're pretty much finished as a cooked product with micro changes, slow and steady, versus going downhill. Skiing downhill, you can create a lot of change fast and it feels easier. So I'm gonna break down the pathways to create downhill skiing in, in terms of creating lasting change today. But first, I want to break down the things that don't tend to work, don't tend to create lasting change, but are very much common in our marketplace, common in our world. And the pathways are typically— you might look at coaching, going to conferences, going to retreats, going to meditation experiences. They create change, but it takes 6 months to create even micro changes of consistent daily meditation. You might look at different modalities around psychological change. Even some tools like neurofeedback are helpful, and I've seen, seen great, beautiful change in many regards, but not necessarily deep change, deep lasting change in terms of your subconscious, your identity. You also hear of tools like NLP. NLP is one of the more advanced tools out there, and I love NLP, and I love somatic therapy and somatic work, which gets into the nervous system but doesn't get as deep as what we're going to talk about today. And then you can also look at reading. I'm a big fan of reading. I've been reading a book a week almost for about 25 years, and it's been a huge impact for me where I keep growing and learning because it stacks over time, but it's actually really slow. And so today I want to break down the things that actually do work. But when we're also talking about this stuff, we're looking at really, really what, what is the problem you're trying to solve? And for a lot of the clients that I work with, they're high achievers. Often they're entrepreneurs, they're CEOs or medical doctors, and they're pretty much those Type A, highly driven personalities where they're really motivated to create impact, service, value, wealth, a great marriage. Like they're not settling for average. And so I get in, I get nitty gritty with them and I get nitty gritty on also crises. Marital crises, relational dynamics, mental health challenges, PTSD, OCD, depression, those type of dynamics that are really hard to create change in a long-term lasting way. What I've found in my own journey with my wife, with others, is we've got to get access to the back end of your operating system, not the top end, not the surface level, not put on lipstick. On change. We've got to get backend access to the core blueprints, the core patterns, the core stories, the core emotions, the core identities. And the core identities and stories and emotions can all be summed up as this is your unconscious blueprint. When you look at your unconscious blueprint, what is your trigger? What is going to just snap into action without you thinking about it? You know, our conscious mind, according to Dr. Bruce Lipton, when the early one of the, uh, innovators and discoverers of epigenetics. He found that the conscious mind processes 40 to 50 bits of information a second versus the subconscious processes 20 million bits of information a second. So therefore, your subconscious mind is roughly 500,000 times more powerful than your conscious mind. What that basically means is no lasting change is lasting if you don't get deep into the subconscious. And deep into the subconscious, I would extend it to mean your nervous system, your default mode network, your core operating blueprint. If you can't change that, you don't have lasting change. And you can override the subconscious by the, the conscious focusing on it. But the minute you take your eyes off and you're looking over there, now you're going back to the default. So we got to create lasting change in the default, in the core nervous system, human operating blueprint. Okay, so how do we get there? What actually does work? Okay, So the first thing I want to mention, psychedelics. And psychedelics has many different expressions. There are many different medicines in that category. You think of some of the most common classic ones, mushrooms or psilocybin, LSD. MDMA is lumped in even though it's not technically psychedelic, it's an empathogen. There's also compounds like 2C-B, ibogaine, ayahuasca, DMT, 5-MeO-bufotoxine. There's a whole bunch of compounds. Even ketamine technically sort of falls in that category, even though it's about 1/10 as effective and has more addictive properties, which is also one of the reasons I stay away from that. But what happens when you take some of these medicines? And let's just start with my two favorites, MDMA and psilocybin. When you take these medicines, uh, A, they're really, really safe. They're about as safe as taking an Advil if you take the right dosage. If you take too much, you can have some issues. Or you have other underlying issues like heart conditions or medications, certain medications, MAO inhibitors, SSRIs can be, uh, pretty risky and dangerous with MDMA, especially, um, other things, epilepsy medicines. Um, so always consult with a doctor and this is not health advice. Um, uh, but, uh, when you are taking these medicines, they basically give you a surge of neuroplastic effect and you got two major windows when you do these medicines. The first window is called the acute subjective experience. And with MDMA and psilocybin, depends on the dosing and the protocol, but roughly you're going to get about 5— the way I do it, you roughly get about 5 to 6 hours of wide open where your nervous system is more open than any known point in your life. And you're not too high. You're just high enough that you're basically— your default operating system opens up, your amygdala shuts off, and you can go in and shift the program and shift the triggers, basically heal some of those core childhood wounds and those patterns in your nervous system and that are not serving your highest and best. So when you do that, this is why you want to work with a skilled practitioner. Make sure that the safety is really, really high. Safety is really high. And obviously bear in mind that most of this is not legal in most of the states in the US. Some states like Colorado, Washington, DC, other places, parts of Canada, things like that, there's Everywhere has its own legality issues or things to look into. But when you are working with these medicines, what's happening is you're getting an opening, an opening where you get to resolve core childhood wounds, core patterns, core ways of showing up that do not serve your highest and best. So that's acute subjective experience. All right. And you can look at the research link, Nardo et al., August 2023, that breaks down some of this. The second window is called the critical period reopening. This is where you have a surge of flexibility like that of a small child. Again, you have two major windows of neuroplastic flexibility as a child: 0 to 7, 16 to 24. The biggest window, of course, is 0 to 7. Well, when you are in that critical period reopening, that's a social relearning where you're able to relate to others, not get as triggered. It's like you have a surge of empathy. That's why it's so effective in relationship work. Where you can react and respond to each other in a way that is non-judgmental, non-reactive, or much less reactive. Like 90% of it is going to be gone. Now you're learning how to relate, especially with— under the guidance of a skilled guide, because you can still get defensive, and I've seen it happen. And but now you can relearn patterns of not getting triggered and activated and shifting into your wounded childhood part when you're in a conflict. Right? So those are the two major windows. So the reason that's so effective is now I can make deep, lasting change really fast. And when we're doing deep, lasting change, I think of the medicines create the opening, but what you do with the opening is what matters. That's why, yes, you can get some impact and some service doing it on your own or just a very light guided experience. But I find you're missing out on 90, 80, 90% of the potential effectiveness of these windows. Okay, so I think of myself— I want to be like a neurosurgeon of the subconscious mind, where I want to go in and with precision create deep, lasting change, clean out the cancer on the inside. So while we're in that window, we're doing really the 4 layers of healing and transformation. Psychological, which is the shallowest— that's where most coaching and most therapy falls, but it's important. It's the mental side of the game. But I argue that emotions are far more important, which is the next layer of depth. We got to get into the emotional side, and the world is ruled by emotions. Just look at, look at the Gaza War right now. Look at Russia and Ukraine. Look at what we're doing with Iran. It's the human brutality system is ruled by emotion where I hurt you, eye for eye. We are hurting each other over and over, and we do it in relationships where both parties end up being both a victim and a perpetrator. 'Cause if I hurt you, now you are now gonna hurt me, which flips where now you're the perpetrator and I'm the victim. It's the common dynamic instead of forgiveness. Well, the goal is to get into a pattern of loving related connectedness and forgiveness when we're dealing with relationships in general. We want to stay in loving relational health, not in front of, with an abuser, right? The perpetual abuser that's not changing, but we want to be in that sort of intimacy. Uh, so that's the psychological and emotional. The emotional— if you look at how much buried emotion in my own life, I, I, I, I've seen my own emotional neglect and neglect of myself, my own inability to connect and feel my own emotions, how that sabotaged parts of my marriage. It's, uh, led to defensiveness, led to self-deception led to justification of things that I wouldn't normally do. And you can see it over and over where we're hurting one another, we're defending, we're attacking, we're blaming, we're shaming, we're, you know, just doing different things that are not really in reflection of our highest and best good. And it's because we are neglecting processing our own deep-rooted emotion. And so we got to really make sure our, almost our emotional home is clean as a whistle, meaning it's pure, it's in love, forgiveness, presence, connection, not anger, resentment, bitterness, etc. All right, so that's the second layer. The third layer is somatic, or the body. The body keeps the score. The body remembers muscle memory. Here's a crazy stat: the average red blood cell lives an average of 114 days. The average cellular muscle, skeletal muscle, lives an average of 15 years. So 15 years versus 114 days, massive difference. So muscle memory is a real thing. And then when you look at the epigenetic side, where muscle memory is passed on over and over and over. For example, there's a study about mice where they would eat this certain flower petal. This is listed in the book, uh, It Didn't Start With You. I don't remember the exact study offhand, but they would take these mice and Every time they would eat a flower petal, this— that's normally like a good food for them, they would get a shock. Well, what happens the next 2, 3 generations, 4 generations of mice? They will not touch the flower petal even though they've never been shocked. Muscle memory passed on. It's like a— we don't fully understand how all the coding is passed on, why we have certain memories and collective, like, collective trauma or memories that we can feel into and see that go far beyond the biochemical breakdown. And I'm not going to get into all that, but we know there's multiple dimensions of reality and there's, there's layers that go beyond just a pure 3D biochemical layer. All right, so that's the somatic. We got to shift the core blueprint of the muscle memory and help those parts recognize— and parts, I'm thinking part psychology is like you're one team with many players, like Let's say a basketball team. You got the Chicago Bulls, 5 players on the court at a time, but they're one team. They all have a different role to play. They all have different positions. They all have different skills. And you have subs coming in and out. So there's all these other pieces that are working. But we're complex individuals. I can have a little wounded boy part. I have a teenager part. I have a part that shows up in my clients' lives. That's like Magic Mike. I have a part that is a loving, playful dad. I have a part that is a lover and a devoted servant of my wife and others. And, and also I have an egoic part that's looking for validation and all these other things. We want to be aware of those parts and make sure that our lives are not hijacked by the wrong part at the wrong time. And so that is in our body. We can also have those muscle memory pieces of like those default reactions, which is really a part of us taking over. So we want to shift the body's default reaction, and meaning helping that part. Let's say you're really acting like a wounded little boy, which I've done in my marriage. If I'm acting like a wounded little boy, then I am— my little, let's say, 4-year-old is showing up. And if I need— what I want him to do is feel loved and held and safe and realize he doesn't have to take over. And his wife or whoever loves him, and he— and I love him, and he, he can relax and breathe out his tension. He doesn't have to hold on to that. All right, so that's the, the somatic or the body piece, where at the end of the day, we want to bring— go from a dysregulated, highly activated state into a downregulated, calm, present state. And also, she mentioned parts work. I think parts work encompasses really the body, the mind, and the emotions. All right, and you could also go into the spiritual, so it almost supersedes all of it. The spiritual is the fourth layer. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, survived the Holocaust. He wrote about this, he called it logotherapy. He was a psychiatrist and innovated this, this technique of reapplying meaning and repatterning meaning for some of the most deeply traumatic, overwhelming, challenging things you might have ever been through. And when you repattern the meaning then it's— then our energy around it has shifted. And that's at the end of the day, that's where we got to get to. We got to re-pattern all 4 layers: the psychological or mental, the emotional secondly, the third layer, the somatic, and then the fourth layer, spiritual. And if we can do that, then we've re-patterned our core blueprints or our core operating system. And you could also define it as our identity. Tony Robbins said All lasting change is in the identity, and I can't agree more. We've— but the identity encompasses everything. So hope this is helpful. Hope you can see how some things work and how some things almost work but don't work all the way until the identity is changed. And once identity is changed, then your beliefs, your patterns, and your default operating system has shifted, and you're now acting according to your identity. Because human beings have a cognitive bias to remain consistent, to act consistent with who we see ourselves as in many regards. Yes, we can all have self-deception, we all have layers of self-deception, but if we can get congruent with who we really are and get congruent with our identity and stay attuned to that identity, guess what? Everything flows downhill. And again, the combination of all these tools— when we're combining tools, we're looking for How do we create the perfect recipe for deep, lasting change? And I feel like over and over with the hundreds of people I've served with some of the most complex challenges you can imagine, we can get there using these tools in a way that nothing else has. So much love. Let me know if you have questions or comments.