Is it your health? Do you have the energy and vitality to go on all the adventures you dreamed of going on as a kid?

Is it your relationship? Have you chosen a supportive partner who encourages you to experience all you desire in this life?

Is it your wealth? Do you have plenty of money or are you just getting by?

Or is your dream life out of reach simply because of the way you talk to yourself? Do you even deserve to live your best life?

Of course you do.

And maybe what’s stopping you isn’t so easy to put your finger on? Maybe what’s stopping you is a part of your mind you don’t even think about: your subconscious mind.

The main purpose of the subconscious mind is to keep us alive. It does this by scanning the environment—taking in up to 90,000,000 bits of information every second—and determining what the majority of people are doing. Then, it drives us to do that. So we fit in with the group.

The subconscious mind is also largely informed by the first seven years of our lives and especially by our home environment when, out of necessity for survival, we accept whatever that environment is as normal. Even if that environment is bad.

The subconscious mind can make us adapt to believe alcohol abuse, drug abuse and even physical abuse is just how it is in life.

And it is this ‘normalisation’ of disempowering beliefs which can become an unseen obstacle later in life, as we strive to consciously choose better for ourselves.

What do I subconsciously believe?

So how do we find out what our subconscious believes?

One of the easiest ways is to listen to how we speak. The words we use about ourselves, and others, often reveal our beliefs.

When we say things like “This is just how I am”, or “I always do that, you know that about me?!” it’s our subconscious mind expressing its need for the familiar—something the subconscious LOVES more than anything else.

When presented with the possibility of a positive change in your life and you respond with “That’s never gonna happen!” there’s a good chance it’s your subconscious mind resisting the change, simply because it is change.

How to make the new familiar…

The subconscious mind LOVES the familiar and HATES the unfamiliar.

And since the subconscious mind responds so well to repetition this is where positive affirmations and creating empowering habits can be so helpful in making a NEW, positive behaviour familiar.

One simple way to make a new belief familiar is to re-mind ourselves, again and again. Over and over. And affirmations help us do that. As well as bringing up any resistance we may need to work through.

For instance, if you affirm “I am rich” and your subconscious mind tells you you’re dreaming, pointing you to the pile of unpaid bills on the kitchen bench, you might like to affirm it again, and again, “I AM rich, I am RICH, I AM RICH!” until your subconscious mind remembers that long forgotten 1 kg bar of silver your grandfather gave you—for a rainy day.

Repetition of the new to move on from—through and beyond—the old; that’s what it’s about.

And before you say “That just sounds like mind programming!”—it is. But instead of programming ourselves with ad nauseam repeats of TV shows we’ve seen a hundred times before already, and instead of programming ourselves with advertisements for poisons presented as shiny, aspirational status symbols, we can choose to program ourselves by affirming our dream life.

We can write in our journal or diary what our dream life feels like.

We can read our dream life every morning and every night.

We can make our dream life into a song or a painting, and bring it to life in our imagination.

We can record ourselves speaking our dream life into reality. Describing it in detail. Feeling it with every word. And we can listen and listen and listen until our dream is so familiar even our subconscious mind agrees:

There’s nothing stopping you living your dream except you.