For instance, ninety-five percent of your behavior reflects patterns and habits mostly acquired when you were very young. Because our educators and caregivers didn't know any better, most of us grew up with ineffective study habits. Countless hours have been wasted in classrooms and in home study, and have often yielded frustration, self-limiting beliefs, and low self-esteem. However, there's no need to take it anymore! No matter what your age, you can learn successfully and with delight.



Freud popularized the concept of the subconscious (or what is sometimes also called the unconscious or the non-conscious). Although your conscious mind plays an important role, learning has much more to do with non-conscious processing than with conscious thought. Remember that, as you learn how to nourish and develop it, your mind's chief responsibility is your protection; in fact, your survival.

Let me use an analogy to explain the power of the subconscious mind. If your feet are flat on the floor, the area under your feet corresponds to the processing ability of your conscious mind. The floor area in the room not covered by your feet represents the power of your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind operates at around 126 bits per second, and your subconscious mind is 10,000 times faster. Clearly, the power is really in the subconscious.

As a therapist, I have found that most issues that adults present to me originate in their first seven years of life. This imprint phase of social development is at a time when the conscious mind is not yet fully developed, before growth of a vital filter to assess incoming information's validity, the so-called Critical Faculty. Well aware of this, advertisers use the term Critical Faculty Bypass when weighing the effectiveness of advertisements. If the advertising message gets through to the emotional subconscious mind, then the likelihood of purchase increases. What does this have to do with learning? Quite a lot. Read on.

If life-long patterns are set in the first seven years of life, then it's important for parents, older siblings, coaches, teachers, and any other influencers to be extremely careful with their language, both verbal and non-verbal. If a parent says, "You're just like your father. You'll never amount to anything" or "It's a good thing you're cute, because you're not very smart". The messages go directly, in the absence of a strong Critical Faculty, to the subconscious where accepted as valid, they begin to form patterns and beliefs. Subsequent fractured self-esteem and self-doubt results.

Elephant trainers use an interesting control technique. When an elephant is still very young, the trainer attaches one end of a strong chain to one of the elephant's legs, and the other end to a stake. This allows the animal the freedom of a very defined circle, and, harnessed day after day, the elephant learns that this circle is its only territory. As the years go by, the chain is progressively exchanged for thinner and thinner ropes. The trainer knows that the elephant could walk away at any time, but the elephant doesn't catch on, and so remains within the defined circle. Important questions for you from this are: What's your circle? What are your self-limiting beliefs?