How to Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind for Success

Have you ever wondered how to reprogram your subconscious mind for success? The good news is that it’s easier than you think. When you do this correctly, success feels natural and you instinctively do the right things to get the results that you want.

In this article, I cover 7 great ways to reprogram your subconscious mind for success. There are many ways to do this and they all work really well when applied consistently.

Learn how to reprogram your subconscious mind for success. Experience what it’s like when your conscious and subconscious mind are working together.

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What is the subconscious mind? Well, many people describe it as like an iceberg. There is a small part that is visible which represents the conscious mind and the larger, submerged part that you don’t see, which represents the subconscious mind.

You can also think of the subconscious mind as everything that you’re not aware of right now.  The conscious mind can only focus on about six to ten bits of information at any one time. So, to show you what I mean, I want you to start thinking about your left foot. You have now become conscious of your left foot, but you weren’t until I mentioned it.

The subconscious mind also controls your breathing, heart rate, and sleep. A crucial difference between your conscious and subconscious mind is that the subconscious mind does not reason or filter information. Instead, it faithfully records all your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

This is a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing when learning to drive.  At first, everything took your complete conscious awareness. For example, changing gears, steering, and all the road rules. However, as you practiced driving more and more, it became more automatic. This is because your subconscious mind remembered and stored all these behaviors so you didn’t have to think about them consciously.  Now you can drive and hold a conversation at the same time.

It can be a bad thing if you have a very negative experience or some kind of trauma.  Your subconscious mind faithfully records this experience in the same way. It then brings this up in other future situations as a way of protecting you. You might find that you keep recalling this negative experience and then get the negative feelings from it.

How do you reprogram your subconscious mind for success? Well, here are 7 easy, highly effective and practical ways to do this.

1. Affirmations

Affirmations are short, positive, present tense statements that you can read to yourself or say out loud. You can also record them and then play them back regularly. The key thing with affirmations is repeating them consistently and often so that they become a belief.  The affirmation begins to feel true for you. This then overrides any old negative beliefs.

As you keep repeating them, your subconscious mind will pick up on the affirmations and new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors will happen automatically. Just like learning to drive a car, the new affirmations will become natural, instinctive and a part of your behavior and personality.

The thing about affirmations is that you’re probably using them already without realizing it!  Any negative thought that you have often is an affirmation!  As you’re repeating affirmations unconsciously anyway, it makes sense to start saying positive affirmations to replace those negative ones.

2. Creative Visualization

Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined. When you vividly imagine something, you are using the same circuits in your brain as you would for a real experience.

Athletes and sports people know this. They use visualization consciously and unconsciously. For them, it’s called mental rehearsal. They mentally visualize winning, playing the perfect shot or getting through the finish line in record time.

I cover creative visualization in another article that you can read here.  The key points are to ensure that you are relaxed before you start.  Then visualize on a large screen (like a large movie screen), use lots of colors and incorporate all your senses.  Notice the sounds, feelings, even smell and taste as well as what you see.

3. Self-Hypnosis or Guided Meditation

This involves getting into a very relaxed state and then either listening to a guided self-hypnosis or meditation recording or simply repeating positive statements to yourself as a mantra.

Being in a relaxed state is super important as this will influence your brain waves. In normal waking consciousness, you will be in the Beta brain wave state.  This level of brain activity is required for reasoning, making decisions or analyzing information.

When you meditate, use self-hypnosis or simply daydream, your brain waves slow down to the Alpha state. In this state, your brain is much more receptive to learning new information. This is why this state is great for meditation or self-hypnosis.

When your brain waves slow down even further, you go into the Theta brainwave state.  This is when you experience Rapid Eye Movement and is similar to when you are just drifting off to sleep or just waking up.  In this state, you are even more receptive to new positive ideas and to visualizing new positive outcomes in your life.  It’s also great for much deeper meditations.

In both Alpha and Theta state, your internal dialogue or self-talk becomes much less intense. This is important as this self-talk can often question new ideas. When the self-talk is less intense (or completely absent), new positive ideas (either from a recording or by saying them to yourself) can sink in more deeply to your subconscious mind.

The best times to do self-hypnosis and guided meditations are first thing in the morning or just before going to sleep.  At these times, your brain is already in the Alpha state. However, don’t let that stop you. At other times, just spend five minutes relaxing, so that your brain waves slow down before listening to a self-hypnosis or guided meditation recording or before repeating the new positive ideas.

4. Think and Speak Positive

As mentioned earlier, your subconscious mind does not reason. It doesn’t choose what goes in there. It just faithfully records what you think, say, feel and do.

And your subconscious mind does not understand the word not or don’t. So when you say “I’m not stressed”, your subconscious mind has to think about (or imagine) the feeling of stress.

Here is a little exercise for you to do right now!

Think or say the phrase “Don’t eat that cheesecake”.  What do you notice as you think or say that? – I’m guessing that you are imagining a cheesecake.  You might see it in your imagination or even imagine tasting it.  Your subconscious mind typically thinks in pictures. To think about NOT having something, it has to imagine it first.

Start by noticing the words that you speak. Are they positive? Are you using the word not or don’t often?  Become conscious of the words you say to others first. If they are negative or about what you don’t want, then start to change them.

Once you get comfortable with that, start working on your thoughts. When you notice a negative thought (or a thought about something that you don’t want), begin to challenge or interrupt that thought. Then replace it with something that is more positive.

This is more spontaneous than affirmations. It’s about noticing the thoughts and changing them on the fly to what you do want. Remember that your mind is a muscle and becomes used to a certain way of thinking. So it’s going to take some effort to change this, but it’s really worth it!  When you persevere with it, it will get easier, and more positive ideas will start to impress on your subconscious mind.

5. Influencing Your Dreams

This idea is really interesting!  It’s about influencing your dreams, so they work for you! Dreams are very unconscious and appear to be outside of our direct control.  Dreaming is how your subconscious minds stores important information, skills, and experiences into long term memory  However, you can influence this and here is how to do it.

As you are going to sleep, think about an issue that you would like solved. Then mentally hand this over to your subconscious mind as you go to sleep.  The key is not to think about a specific answer or the specific ways that the issue will be solved.  Instead, you think about the issue and the positive outcome as you go to sleep.

The answer may then appear in your dreams or you wake up with a new insight, a solution or something that you hadn’t thought of.  If you wake up during the night with a new insight, then it is important that you write it down straight away. You may not remember it in the morning.  One way to do this is to have a dream notebook by your bed so you can write these things down easily during the night.

When you go to sleep, your brain waves slow down and your subconscious mind becomes much more receptive to new ideas.  This is one of the reasons why this process can be a very effective way to reprogram your subconscious mind for success.

6. Conscious Practice

Learning to drive a car is a great example of the power of conscious practice.  Same goes for learning a sport or a musical instrument. It always amazes me how a virtuoso pianist can play an entire concerto from memory. How do they do that? What makes them remember all those notes?  How do they remember all those finger positions and do everything at exactly the right time?

Well, it’s because they have practiced, practiced and practiced so much that it has become part of their “muscle memory”. They can play that entire concerto without thinking about playing the notes. Instead, the virtuoso focusses on the music and the nuances of the style. They make it seem so easy!

To achieve that level of success and proficiency, the pianist learned the entire concerto consciously and then memorized it. It’s exactly the same when you practice regularly to get good at a sport or other skill.

However, this also applies to how you think and feel.  The more you focus on what you want and take time to feel good, then the more this impresses on your subconscious mind allowing it to become a natural and automatic part of your personality.

7. Focus on What You Want

I often work with people that have fears and phobias. A certain situation occurs (such as spiders, needles or flying) which creates an immediate and unconscious emotional response.  However, when I delve deeper, I find that they were thinking about this experience negatively for days, weeks, maybe even months before the event arises. So they have been unconsciously programming their subconscious mind to feel fear in that situation.

The solution is to focus on other things or what you want to happen instead. Focus on the likely scenario. For example, feeling relaxed and comfortable on a flight or feeling relaxed and comfortable when you next have an injection or a blood test. Alternatively, consciously focus your mind on something else, anything else! By doing this, you will start to reduce the impact that your subconscious mind has with this type of experience.

So these are my 7 very practical and effective ways to help reprogram your subconscious mind for success. The key is to practice these things consciously until they become unconscious.

Thank you for reading this article.  If you enjoyed it and found it useful, then please share it with other people, or on social media.

Hope you are having a wonderful day!

Paul