“Guard your heart with all diligence for out of it, proceed the issues that govern life” – Proverbs 4:23
“In the end, we will remember, not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” – Marthin Luther King Jr.
It might shock you to know, but research has revealed that in any area of professional development, focusing on the skill itself accounts for less than 30% of what will make you grow or develop. In fact, a school of thought I have come to find interesting and fascinating says that the combination of learned skill, knowledge and other intellectual factors account for just 15% of the actual skill’s development, the other 85% are accounted for by things you and I an unconscious of. Let’s call them unconscious factors.
To take a more practical approach, let’s look at a skill like presentation skills, or writing skills. If you wanted to develop these skills today, you would focus on reading about these skills, that would be called gaining knowledge, you would talk about learning by doing, practicing, forming habits, that would be called learned skill. You would also look at some other intellectual factors like learning by teaching others, going for a course, passing an exam e.t.c. Right? All that will account for only 15% of what you need to do to develop that skill. If that is all you have ever done today, you can only imagine the potentials you have to further develop yourself. 85% of what is responsible for your development are things within your subconscious mind. The factors mostly responsible for your success, are internal. You’ll need to align them properly to succeed.
These unconscious factors include but are not limited to the following – your attitude, self-beliefs, feelings of worthiness, spiritual and emotional influences. All human beings have a latent inner power that only few are ever able to access and tap into. This inner power makes all the difference between success and failure. All the trainings of the world will never take you past a point in your cruise to success. You will only get past this barrier when you are able to tap into the vast resource of internal and unconscious factors.
Fact 1. Your limiting factors in life are the things you unconsciously accept to be your possibilities. Your deep-seated self estimates give the marching orders, and your habits, activities and attitudes carry them out without questioning. You have an internal script, a programming that runs underneath the operation of your life. You are normally unconscious of this script or programming, but it clearly describes your achievement possibilities and your life runs on it. If you take time out to be introspective, you will pick up some of the events and factors that created this internal programming – your parents, your upbringing, privileges you enjoyed or were denied, love or lack of it e.t.c. These become the basis for your perception of yourself. When something becomes your perception, it doesn’t matter if it is right or wrong, it is the pivot of your reality. If I perceive that I was being chased by a lion, and in reality I wasn’t, I would still run like I was being chased. Deep seated perception controls our realities.
Fact 2. You have the power to achieve any goal you consciously accept to be within your possibilities. There is a lot of literature out there on the fundamental principle of goal setting. What goal setting does for you, is that it helps you expand your unconscious limits. It changes some aspects of your internal programming. Remember, the viability of your internal programming is not a function of truth or false, right or wrong; it’s a function of your perception.
Where the battle for success is won is in the mind. The weapons of our warfare are not canal, they are not physical weapons, they are internal, and they are weapons that help us to capture and channel our thoughts, to program our subconscious mind and to give ourselves a chance to be the best that we can be. A little rudder controls a big ship, a little fire burns down a big forest, a little tongue sets nations against each other, small hinges swing big doors, little keys open metal doors…in the same way, the little seemingly insignificant unconscious mind controls all that you see in the world and is responsible for the limits preset in the lives of the living. What do you unconsciously disallow?
