Fortunately, or Unfortunately, You Get What You Focus On

Summary: Understand why you have what you have in life from a mental programming point of view.

This article, the third of four, demonstrates that your mind always has a target picture in its focus for where it’s taking you, whether you know it consciously or not. (As a side note, this explains why “trying” is an exercise in futility.)

The Hidden Cause of Success

We can also call it “the secret cause of success.”

What you are reading now is so rare for people to think about that you can almost call it a secret. And it is certainly “hidden” because it happens at a level that we are not typically aware of consciously.

Even if some do know about the principles around getting what you focus on, they rarely know how to employ this knowledge to their advantage. That changes for you now.

Choose Wisely

There is one caveat worth taking note of before we get started, have you ever heard of the common saying, “Be careful what you wish for?” This cliche demonstrates the power of the mind in creating your realities. How often a person sets their mind on a particular desire, only to regret later what they acquired.

Today’s lesson isn’t necessarily meant to teach you wisdom in wishing only for what is wise.

Today’s lesson is meant to provide you with the infrastructure of how we get the outcomes in life that we do.

Additionally, I aim to share with you a simple step-by-step process of how you can consciously play a part in purposefully attaining your desired outcomes in the next post. It’s up to you to choose those goals well.

Today’s lesson is meant  to provide you with the infrastructure of how we get the outcomes in life that we do. Additionally, I aim to share with you a simple step-by-step process of how you can consciously play a part in purposefully attaining your desired outcomes. It’s up to you to choose those goals well.

The Mind Mechanics of Achievement

In essence, the brain uses pre-made inner-mental templates as guidance and internal maps. Rarely do we move along aimlessly, though it may feel like it at times. Whether we know it or not, we move within some form of hidden boundaries and directives. As a ship captain utilizes a compass to advance toward a pre-chosen destination, our psyche pushes us to the outcome we have mentally pre-programmed even if that programming was not intentional or self-induced.

Through the ages, many have compared the mind to a cybernetic device. What is that?

A heat seeking missile is a good example of such a device. Once it is shot off toward its target, the rocket adjusts and keeps moving relentlessly toward the object radiating the most heat. It patiently but consistently follows the target up and down, left and right until finally, kaboom, the missile finds success.

Similarly, your mind has pictures in mind of what to move toward continually. Usually, you are not aware of these quickly almost spontaneously formed targets made with the mind’s eye, but they are surely happening and not with any effort from us at a conscious level.

Your mind gets fixed on a distinct unconscious image. It then does all it can to lead you to the outcome that is the focus of that fixation.

It’s much like tieing a string to a pole that is ten, twenty, 100 feet away. It doesn’t matter how far it is. Anything you thread onto the beginning of that line, such as a washer or a ring, moves toward that pole as you slide it forward. The other end of the string is fixed onto the inevitable ending. It can’t go in any another direction. It remains on its path. Similarly, the mind sooner or later reaches its objective because it unconsciously focuses on that end-result.

That is why we hear the phrases, “I got to stay on track.” Or, “I’m in a rut.” Or, “She is fixated on such and such.” Or, “He has a one-track mind.”

Good or Bad, It Happens the Same Way

Both success and failure come from the phenomenon of this subconscious mindset. We simply get what we are focused on at an unconscious level, for better or worse.

For example, your mind can be programmed to fixate on the mental image of your overweight parent or even of a visual of an overweight you. It then causes you to move in that direction. You begin to do the things that cause problems with your weight.

How did all of this happen?

Some call it a “post-hypnotic suggestion,” because, inadvertently, a person communicates to your emotional part of your mind a message that ends up being programmed as a command. The person that caused this was someone with a certain measure of authority. An authority figure has scripted into your mind a directive in this case.

This passive embedded command usually begins when you are at an emotionally vulnerable time of your life due to a form of stress that comes from being traumatized by being forced through a stage of human development too quickly.

Of course, authority figures rarely consciously set out to write undesirable mental scripts that program their subordinates to focus on a self-defeating mental image. However, it happens by accident quite often.

Sadly, our poor outcomes are due to being permeable to post-hypnotic suggestions that our so-called superiors mistakenly cursed us with when they unwittingly commanded our sub-conscious minds.

A Bad Programming Example

Imagine that as you were moving into your adolescence, you suffered ridicule for having a funny last name by a bully at school. Your siblings teased you about your weight, (either being too thin or too heavy.) You’re feeling awkward, and you are experiencing all kinds of unwelcome changes with your body.

Simultaneously, you happen to complain to your mother that you feel too skinny and your mom says to you quite innocently, “I was too skinny when I was your age too but when I turned 30 everything changed. You watch. When you turn 30, the same thing is going to happen to you. Especially the way you eat. Yep. Some day you’re going to end up just like me, fat.”

Your mind is open and impressionable in this type of scenario, so it quickly creates a picture of a future you with a weight problem just like your mother. With the determination of a cybernetic missile aimed at that bullseye, your mind fixates on that as your ultimate unconscious goal. You don’t want it, but that doesn’t matter. The unconscious programming of the mind wins every time.

Sure enough, by the time the age 30 comes around, a weight issue exists that onlookers never thought possible since you were always too thin in your youth.

Now you know how it happened. Fixed, like a string tied to a pole, your mind had nowhere else to go. It had to do its job and get you to that destination no matter how much you consciously wanted to go toward an opposite direction, that of being slender.

Good Programming, Good Results

Conversely, when you have had the good fortune of having your mind programmed to fixate on a slim and healthy looking image unconsciously, it may be almost effortless to remain thin and fit. And the work it does take for you to be in good shape seems to happen automatically. Even if that’s not fully the case, you may end up with at least the desire to stick with your conscious goals to stay in shape; it may even be a challenge you may relish. In this case, staying slender may feel almost like a non-issue for you.

You seem to eat what you feel like eating, and yet you keep that impressive figure. Your metabolism works with you along with many other physiological and psychological systems.

All Categories Work the Same

This principle works with everything, your relationships, your income, even your personality and mood tendencies.

Your mind always has an unconscious template in the background that it is sticking to and using as a compass.

This mind’s eye’s focus can be called your “intent” because everything you have and don’t have comes from this hidden fixation.

Is there a way to consciously intervene and change our unconscious intent?

Yes, you can alter the focus of your mind’s eye.

What could help you to change your unconscious focus from negative pictures to something more helpful?

 

Watch for the next post, “Change Your Focus and Trust (Again).”