Your subconscious is tricky

You can’t access your subconscious as if you’re calling a friend or Googling how to bake cookies. This is the place of daydreams and aha moments. This is the work of jumping out of danger before your conscious mind recognized the bus coming.

Think of your subconscious as the back-office of your brain, dealing with all the deep tasks, while your conscious mind cooks dinner, navigates through traffic, chooses which Netflix show to watch, and holds a conversation. Ever notice all the green cars after you buy a green car, or you take out the trash and a great idea pops in your head from nowhere? This is your subconscious hard at work in the background.

We can’t do without conscious thought. That 10% of your thought power is a very important 10%. But if we’re looking for heavy solutions to creative problems, those issues are assigned to the back-office. Unlike your conscious mind, your subconscious handles many activities/thoughts/processes simultaneously. Your subconscious can process 500,000 times more information that your conscious mind!

So, why don’t we call-up our subconscious when we need it?

It’s not that easy — Mother Nature’s little trick. You can’t just set your subconscious to work on a problem. It’s real meta, I know, but by that very act of making a conscious decision to use your subconscious mind, you’re only using the conscious part of your brain — but you CAN help the process along and point your brain in the right direction.

As creatives, we need this subconscious powerhouse to help us thrive in our chosen vocations. Conscious solutions aren’t enough. We need these deep ideas to take us to the next level. If Einstein required this (he’s famous for his though experiments and hours of pondering), we do too.