Your Mind – The Conscious and Subconscious and How They Work | Part 1 – The Conscious Mind – How to Succeed at Goal-Setting

When your goal is to step up your personal development game and create the best habits and thought patterns for your future self, there is something you cannot ignore.  That is the conscious and subconscious parts of your mind, which play a big role in how you think, feel, and act in this world.

Think of the mind as the engine of your experience – If you want to make changes/repairs to an engine, you have to know it quite well.

In this article series, we’ll give you insight into the conscious and subconscious mind, starting with the conscious mind.

What Is The Conscious Mind?

By definition, the conscious mind is the part of your mind that thinks logically, applies critical thinking, analyzes, and compares.

The conscious mind, quite simply, takes in sensory information, through the 5 senses:

1.    Smell

2.    Touch

3.    Vision

4.    Taste

5.    Hearing

At its very essence, the conscious mind can be responsible for your thoughts, actions, and self-awareness.  So think of the conscious mind as the tool you use to interact with the external world.

Filtration: How Your Conscious Mind Filters Information

One of the main functions of your conscious mind is to filter information and select the things that you need (or strongly believe in).  The consciousness is like storage, which saves everything significant that happened in our lives at one point or another.

Where Does the Information in the Conscious Mind Go?

During  95% of our awake time, we exist and act upon already established patterns of thoughts and actions.  In fact, the conscious mind only has a tiny bit of control in your awake life (roughly 5%).  The patterns of thoughts, actions, behaviors, and emotions are executed by the subconscious mind.  To put it simply, the conscious mind once took in the information that made sense, seemed probable, and believable.

Once that information was taken in, it was pushed to the subconscious mind, where it quite literally, became a program.

Conclusion

The conscious mind takes in information from the external world, through our five senses.  Once taken in, the information is filtered and broken down into a logical picture of the world.  Then, the things we believe to be true about the world and ourselves, get pushed to the subconscious mind, where a program is established.

That program then leads to certain thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, which are essentially a pattern.  In the second part of this article series, we’re going to tell you more about those patterns and the subconscious mind. We will give you actionable advice on how to rewire your subconscious, to ultimately develop better habits and boost your personal development journey.