We all experience things in our lives that affect us on an unconscious level. Our pasts are often filled with experiences that if we allowed ourselves to focus on, would fill us with tension, fear, frustration. Perhaps childhood trauma, a difficult break-up, or financial strife has damaged your confidence. It’s important that we acknowledge and understand how the dominant guidance system we access will impact our ability to reach our goals.
Your Unconscious Guidance System
Can Get in Your Way
We use an internal guidance system to maneuver through life. The unconscious guidance system is one that operates based on fear, habits, and the primitive need for survival. It is a limited guidance system because it only functions on what it knows to be true, based on past experiences.
Using this unconscious system inhibits our ability to live in the now. It’s based on emotional action, and it is most comfortable operating with familiarity and what we believe to be certain.
The unconscious guidance system is strong and severely reactive. Awareness of your feelings and thoughts is important so that you can choose to take action that moves you closer to your goals.
The unconscious guidance system is not a bad thing, though on the surface it might appear to be a roadblock to living a fuller life. It’s designed to make sure that we have an appropriate response to threats that might produce frustration, fear, or pain. This guidance system is on auto pilot, it just reacts, no thought or action required. It’s particularly helpful in keeping us safe. For instance this guidance system will keep you from putting your hand in the fire and getting burned; it keeps you from dashing in front of a locomotive. It eliminates threat.
We must be conscious of the unconscious guidance system because it will also create habits that can limit our action and create unhealthy fear. It can easily become the dominant guidance system if you don’t apply conscious thought.
Use Awareness to Improve Your Confidence
Conversely, we have the ability to tap into our conscious guidance system before we take action. This guidance system does not rely on past experiences or negative emotions like fear, anxiety or frustration. It operates in the now, and uses inspiration, conscious choice, and awareness to move forward. It seeks out opportunities for fulfillment. Using this guidance system will move you closer to your goals. Using the conscious guidance system allows you the freedom of not being tied to your past, and allows you to focus on your journey, not the outcome. One of our goals should be to make sure that the conscious guidance system is the dominant guiding system in our lives.
Tags: conscious choice · creating new habits · emotions · fear · habits · letting go · past2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
I’d like to know how I can help my husband. He did something when he was young which he (and most people would) considers horrible. He did it unintentionally, but has never been able to forgive himself and once and again falls in a deep state of desperation which makes he even think about commiting suicide. I’m the only person who he has been able to talk about it , and I know for sure I’m the only reason for him to be still alive. He knows that death dos not exist and that we are here to learn, but he feels so tired… I try to help him live the present moment. Actually, he has so much to be happy about… and he knows it… but when he falls there’s nothing I can say… The only thing I can do is giving him all my love, which sometimes becomes difficult because when he feels so he drinks and asks me to leave him alone, but I’d like to be able to do something more. He has asked me for help because he’s become aware of his problem and I’ve told him to go to a psycologist. He knows that he must look inside himself for forgiveness, but he needs some help to find a way to forgive. I know this is not the kind of comment one leaves, but I’ve felt the need… Thank you.
He needs to accept God’s Forgivness and then he will be able to forgive himself. He needs to know that no matter what he did, he did not commit the unforgivable sin and that God loves him so much that he sent Jesus to die on the cross so that all his sins (past, present and future) would be forgiven.