You Don’t Become a New Person Until You Get a New Paradigm

Forget will power: reprogram your subconscious mind.

Many people face fear-based emotions and act as if they have an obligation to heed their warnings. For instance, when trying to write your first book, an onslaught of sleepiness may prompt you to put it away. Or a combination of anxiety and distrust might cause you to change the subject instead of telling a new friend an intimate detail about yourself.

In circumstances like these, people act as if their thoughts and dispositions are windows into unshakable truths. In actuality, their perspectives are just manifestations of paradigms.

Your paradigm determines who you understand yourself to be and how you believe the world to work. According to a powerful lecture by Bob Proctor, we feel emotions like self-doubt, fear, and resistance when we’re pushing against a long-held paradigm.

Proctor describes these states as part of the terror barrier, a defense put forward to keep an already existing paradigm in place. Your paradigm wants to keep you where you are because its existence depends upon you being there.

Fortunately, you are the witness of the paradigm, not the paradigm itself. Therefore, you have the opportunity to exchange limiting paradigms for those that lift you higher.

When you understand that all your beliefs are simply artifacts of your paradigm, you come to terms with your massive power in interpreting your experience and in directing your life path.

Of course, many, if not most of your disempowering paradigms were put there by other people. Still, you have the opportunity to choose the paradigms that move you toward states of ease, purpose, and lightheartedness, leaving behind those that leave you defeated, hopeless, sad, and so forth.

The best way to evolve your paradigm? Reprogram your subconscious mind.

Paradigms infiltrate the subconscious before they become part of conscious awareness. The subconscious doesn’t think. It doesn’t deliberate. It can’t distinguish between fact and imagination. Many of the contents of your subconscious were formed before you developed critical faculties. In your early years you were extremely suggestible, accepting everything as if it were fact.

Now that you’re here, you get to recognize what beliefs and thoughts are worth cultivating, and which are not. You can tell the difference by paying attention to how specific perspectives make you feel. If someone shares with you an opinion, and you then feel anxious, depressed, angry, or some other undesired emotion, you can take that feeling as a signal that the perspective just isn’t for you. Think of this as a central principle in creating an inner environment that facilitates a mind free of fear, contradiction, and otherwise disempowering programming.

“Personal empowerment means reconditioning yourself from the programs of society and putting your own values and programs in place.” — Terence McKenna

Below are three main strategies for reprogramming the subconscious.

Be careful about what you ingest while relaxing.

There’s a reason that hypnotists put people into a state akin to sleep. You are most susceptible to suggestion when you’re relaxed. When you spend your free time or minutes before falling asleep listening to news, murder mysteries, or conspiracy documentaries, you are very often planting seeds of doubt, anxiety, and lack of trust into your subconscious.

When you consume material that reaffirms states of fear and doubt, you’re reinforcing these beliefs and giving them the opportunity to filter into other domains of your life. Perhaps you become prone to jealousy in relationships or believe that your neighbors are corrupt bankers or politicians before even getting to know them.

So what can you do instead?

Saturate your mind with empowering material.

Napoleon Hill wrote extensively about the power of autosuggestion, that is, the repeated consumption of information that puts one into a desired state. If there’s anything you’ve read or listened to that eases your fears and makes you excited about life, do not hesitate to absorb it every single day. Don’t assume you’re wasting your time. This is one of the most intentional acts you can engage in. This is how you cultivate a perspective that is ergonomic to the kind of life you want to have.

“One of the fastest ways to make your way into a wonderful vibration is to find any subject that consistently feels good and focus on that.” — Esther and Jeremy Hicks

To reprogram your subconscious, you have to treat the practice of absorbing empowering material as if it were a discipline, similar to the way you approach going to the gym or eating vegetables. In addition to repetitively consuming empowering information, affirmations present you with another method of autosuggestion.

Write down a few phrases that speak to you. These will be phrases that affirm perspectives that you find nurturing, comforting, or useful, statements about the kind of person you want to be. It doesn’t matter if they don’t currently represent you precisely. By reading them every day, ideally as soon as you wake up and before going to bed, you will automatically participate in the materialization of these suggestions, given that you stay consistent and immerse yourself into their emotional impact while reading.

Make and keep promises to yourself.

If you set intentions but don’t follow through, you’re producing an inner atmosphere of self-doubt. Fortunately, this is easy to change.

You can set in motion a greater sense of self-trust by picturing yourself engaging in desired behavior and then taking action on it. You can start small. Begin with simple tasks, such as washing a table or pouring a glass of tea. The power lies in envisioning exactitudes: determine the order in which you’ll act and how long you’ll engage in each task or activity.

When you repeatedly imagine yourself acting and then physically do the same, you’ll feel much more confident in your ability to imagine and create from that imagined act. Eventually you can move onto actions you find more challenging. They will seem easier — you will have already built the muscle of the self-trust, and you’ll find it more natural to act from a place of ease.

“We navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rear view mirror to tell them where they’re going.” — Marshall McLuhan

By reprogramming your subconscious, you embrace the road ahead. Even if you grew up thinking that the opinions expressed by others were in some sense facts of nature, even if you believed that failing to accept their suggestions meant you were delusional, misinformed, or rebellious, you are free to leave these assumptions behind.

You can instead adopt perspectives based on their usefulness. You can cultivate an inner atmosphere conducive to all sorts of new experiences and opportunities, unhooking from the shackles of your old paradigms.