Using the Subconscious

USING THE SUBCONSCIOUS, OR, YOU DON’T REALLY NEED TO FIGURE IT ALL OUT

One of the most fascinating aspects of people with high levels of personal mastery is their ability to accomplish extraordinarily complex tasks with grace and ease. We have all marveled at the breathtakingly beautiful artistry of the championship ice skater or the prima ballerina. We know that their skills have been developed through years of diligent training, yet the ability to execute their artistry with such ease and seeming effortlessness is still wondrous.

Implicit in the practice of personal mastery is another dimension of the mind, the subconscious, through which all of us deal with complexity. What distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery is they have developed a higher level of rapport between their normal awareness and this other dimension we have come to call the subconscious.[16] What most of us take for granted and exploit haphazardly, they approach as a discipline.

Is the subconscious relevant in management and organizations? Inamori of Kyocera says:

When I am concentrating … I enter the subconscious mind. It is said that human beings possess both a conscious and subconscious mind, and that our subconscious mind has a capacity that is larger by a factor of ten …”

O’Brien of Hanover likewise sees tapping mental capabilities formerly ignored as central to building the new organization:

The greatest unexplored territory in the world is the space between our ears. Seriously, I am certain that learning organizations will find ways to nurture and focus the capabilities within us all that today we call “extraordinary.”

But what is extraordinary is actually closely related to aspects of our lives that are so ordinary that we hardly notice them. Our lives are full of myriad complex tasks which we handle quite competently with almost no conscious thought. Try an experiment: touch the top of your head. Now, how did you do that? For most of us, the answer resembles, “Well, I just thought about my hand on my head—or, I formed a mental image of my hand on top of my head—and voila, it just was there.” But at a neurophysiological level, raising your hand to the top of your head is an extraordinarily complex task, involving hundreds of thousands of neural firings as signals move from the brain to your arm and back again. This entire complex activity is coordinated without our conscious awareness. Likewise, if you had to think about every detail of walking, you’d be in big trouble. Walking, talking, eating, putting on your shoes, and riding a bicycle are all accomplished with almost no conscious attention—yet all are, in fact, enormously complex tasks.

These tasks are accomplished reliably because there is an aspect of our mind that is exceedingly capable of dealing with complexity. In some sense it does not matter what we call this other aspect. The term “subconscious” is suggestive because it implies operating below or behind our conscious awareness. Others call it “unconscious” or “automatic mind.” Whatever it is called, without this dimension of mind it would be quite impossible to explain how human beings ever succeed in mastering any complex task. For one thing we can say confidently is that these tasks are not accomplished through our normal awareness and thinking alone.

Equally important, the subconscious is critical to how we learn. At one point in your life you were unable to carry out “mundane” tasks such as walking, talking and eating. Each had to be learned. The infant does not get the spoon in her mouth the first time out—it goes over the left shoulder, then the right shoulder, then the cheek. Only gradually does she learn to reliably reach her mouth. Initially, any new task requires a great deal of conscious attention and effort. As we “learn” the skills required of the task, the whole activity gradually shifts from conscious attention to subconscious control.

As another example, when you first learned to drive a car, it took considerable conscious attention, especially if you were learning to drive on a standard transmission. In fact, you might have found it difficult to carry on a conversation with the person next to you. If that person had asked you to “slow down, downshift, and turn right” at the next corner, you might have given up then and there. Yet, within a few months or less, you executed the same task with little or no conscious attention. It had all become “automatic.” With practice, the mechanics of shifting and steering demanded less conscious effort, leaving more attention for traffic and changing road conditions.

When we first learn to play the piano or any musical instrument, we start by playing scales. Gradually, we move up to simple and then more complex compositions, leaving scales behind as a task that can be handled with little conscious attention. Even concert pianists, when sitting down to an unfamiliar piece will play that piece at half speed in order to allow concentration on the mechanics of hand and pedal positions, rhythm and tempo. But when the concert comes, the same pianist places no conscious attention on the mechanics of playing the piece. This leaves his conscious attention to focus exclusively on the aesthetics of the performance.

We have all mastered a vast repertoire of skills through training the subconscious. Once learned, they become so taken for granted, so subconscious, we don’t even notice when we are executing them. But, for most of us, we have never given careful thought to how we mastered these skills and how we might continue to develop deeper and deeper rapport between our normal awareness and subconscious. Yet, these are matters of the greatest importance to the discipline of personal mastery.[17]

This is why, for instance, many people committed to continually developing personal mastery practice some form of meditation. Whether it is through contemplative prayer or other methods of simply quieting the conscious mind, regular meditative practice can be extremely helpful in working more productively with the subconscious mind. The subconscious appears to have no particular volition. It neither generates its own objectives nor determines its own focus. It is highly subject to direction and conditioning—what we pay attention to takes on special significance to the subconscious. In our normal highly active state of mind, the subconscious is deluged with contradictory thoughts and feelings. In a quieter state of mind, when we then focus on something of particular importance, some aspect of our vision, the subconscious is undistracted.

Moreover, there are particular ways that people with high levels of personal mastery direct their focus. They focus on the desired result itself not the “process” or the means they assume necessary to achieve that result.

Focusing on the desired intrinsic result is a skill. For most of us it is not easy at first, and takes time and patience to develop. For most of us, as soon as we think of some important personal goal, almost immediately we think of all the reasons why it will be hard to achieve—the challenges we will face and the obstacles we will have to overcome. While this is very helpful for thinking through alternative strategies for achieving our goals, it is also a sign of lack of discipline when thoughts about the process of achieving our vision continually crowd out our focus on the outcomes we seek. We must work at learning how to separate what we truly want, from what we think we need to do in order to achieve it.

A useful starting exercise for learning how to focus more clearly on desired results is to take any particular goal or aspect of your vision. First imagine that that goal is fully realized. Then ask yourself the question, “If I actually had this, what would it get me?” What people often discover is that the answer to that question reveals deeper desires lying behind the goal. In fact, the goal is actually an interim step they assume is necessary to reach a more important result. For example, a person has a goal of reaching a certain level in the organizational hierarchy. When she asks herself, “What would it get me to be a senior VP?” she discovers that the answer is “respect of my peers” or “being where the action is.” Though she may still aspire to the position, she now sees that there is also a deeper result she desires—a result she can start to hold as part of her vision now, independent of where she is in the organizational hierarchy. (Moreover, if she doesn’t clarify “the result” she truly seeks, she may reach her stated goal and find that the more senior position is somehow still dissatisfying.)

The reason this skill is so important is precisely because of the responsiveness of the subconscious to a clear focus. When we are unclear between interim goals and more intrinsic goals, the subconscious has no way of prioritizing and focusing.

Making clear choices is also important. Only after choice are the capabilities of the subconscious brought fully into play. In fact, making choices and focusing on the results that are important to us may be one of the highest leverage uses of our normal awareness.

Senge also connects commitment to the truth with subconscious rapport. He draws an analogy with lie detectors, which record physiological changes such as blood pressure, pulse, and respiration. Those changes can reflect stress; they do not by themselves establish whether someone is lying. His broader argument is that self-deception obscures current reality and creates distracting mental “chatter”. In the principle of creative tension, both the desired outcome and present circumstances need to be clear.

The art of working effectively with the subconscious incorporates many techniques. An effective way to focus the subconscious is through imagery and visualization. For example, world-class swimmers have found that by imagining their hands to be twice their actual size and their feet to be webbed, they actually swim faster. “Mental rehearsal” of complex feats has become routine psychological training for diverse professional performers.

But the real effectiveness of all of this still hinges on knowing what it is that is most important to you. In the absence of knowing what truly matters to you, the specific practices and methods of working with the subconscious run the risk of becoming mechanical techniques—simply a new way of manipulating yourself into being more productive. This is not an idle concern. Almost all spiritual traditions warn against adopting the techniques of increased mental powers without diligently continuing to refine one’s sense of genuine aspiration.

Ultimately, what matters most in developing the subconscious rapport characteristic of masters is the genuine caring for a desired outcome, the deep feeling of it being the “right” goal toward which to aspire. The subconscious seems especially receptive to goals in line with our deeper aspirations and values. According to some spiritual disciplines, this is because these deeper aspirations input directly to, or are part of, the subconscious mind.

A wonderful example of what can be accomplished in the pursuit of something truly important to a person is the story of Gilbert Kaplan, a highly successful publisher and editor of a leading investment periodical. Kaplan first heard Mahler’s Second Symphony in a rehearsal in 1965. He “found himself unable to sleep. I went back for the performance and walked out of the hall a different person. It was the beginning of a long love affair.” Despite his having had no formal musical training, he committed time and energy and a considerable sum of his personal finances (he had to hire an orchestra) to the pursuit of learning how to conduct the piece. In Senge’s account, Kaplan’s performances of the symphony won international critical praise. The New York Times praised his 1988 recording of the symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra as one of the five finest classical recordings of the year and the president of the New York Mahler Society called it “the outstanding recorded performance.” Senge interprets this achievement as more than an act of conscious willpower: Kaplan’s practice developed the skills he could bring to his new “love affair.”

In many ways, the key to developing high levels of mastery in subconscious rapport comes back to the discipline of developing personal vision. This is why the concept of vision has always figured so strongly in the creative arts. Picasso once said:

It would be very interesting to record photographically, not the stages of a painting, but its metamorphoses. One would see perhaps by what course a mind finds its way toward the crystallization of its dream. But what is really very serious is to see that the picture does not change basically, that the initial vision remains almost intact in spite of appearance.[18]