Part of the guide: Personal Brand
Today I want to talk about a kinda ‘battle’ that happens inside all of us.
That once balanced, creates magical results in your life.
Something few ‘entrepreneurs’ or marketers ever talk about, mostly because they don’t understand how it works.
The battle of the conscious and unconscious mind…
…and how to make them work together to achieve your goals.
Now there are two sides to ‘the battle’.
On one side the unconscious mind is a goal-seeking mechanism. It acts as a kind of servomechanism, always moving you towards specific outcomes automatically, 24 hours a day.
Here’s the problem. When you have crappy beliefs, your unconscious often won’t allow you to move towards certain goals.
Maybe you were taught that money is the root of all evil growing up. Now back then, you couldn’t decide whether or not that was true.
Your brain didn’t have that kind of thinking ability.
With that deep-rooted belief, your conscious mind might say “I wanna make $500,000 this year” while your unconscious replies “yeah right, that’s never going to happen, don’t you remember that money is evil?”
The unconscious works to move you towards your goals automatically, handling 99.9% of the information around you at all times.
Its job is to move you towards pleasure and away from pain.
When you have that screwy belief set, the unconscious says “money is evil, bad – must avoid”, so it finds ways of sabotaging your efforts.
Then there’s the second side. The unconscious will first agree with what the conscious mind tells it. So you have this kind of phenomenon where a lot of people decide to start a business for one reason or another.
They think it’ll be cool to own a private jet or purchase a Lamborghini Gallardo. Upon creation of the shiny ‘goal’ – a negotiation starts between the conscious and unconscious mind.
At all times, your unconscious is negotiating with your conscious. If you don’t acknowledge your unconscious’s rules/guidelines– you run into problems every time.
The battle of the minds…
Conscious mind: “I’d like this big goal (like the private jet), it’ll be badass when I get it, but I have to work really hard, understand?”
Unconscious mind: “Work hard now (pain), get badass private jet (pleasure) later, got it – let’s begin”
To begin with the unconscious agrees with the logic of delayed gratification. Some pain now for lots of pleasure later.
So it suspends its natural tendency to avoid all pain for the time being. Until something interesting happens.
An epiphany occurs. People realize it’s harder than they thought. The business learning curve is longer than anyone imagines.
Many give up.
Especially the kind of people who are used to things being easy. The kind of people who find school easy, landing high-paying jobs – they quit most of the time.
Those who carry on realize they need more focus; they need to be more productive or disciplined.
So they focus on working harder, longer, more often.
Lots of these people cut out everything else from their life. They convince themselves they shouldn’t focus on anything else but their business, that it’s fun.
As a couple of months or years go by, the unconscious starts to get annoyed.
It starts challenging the idea.
Unconscious mind: “Been doing this ‘working hard’ thing for a while now, it’s painful, and there’s no private jet yet?”
Conscious mind: “Turns out that building this business is a lot harder than I imagined, but it just means we gotta work harder with more structure, discipline, and effort.”
It’s usually at this time your unconscious says ‘screw this, it isn’t worth it’.
Either it decides the pain isn’t worth it, or it doubts the goal will ever come. Perhaps based on past experiences, what you were taught growing up – or whatever else.
As a result, you lose all motivation and desire to keep working. You begin ‘self-sabotage’; you find yourself missing opportunities and watching TV when you should be working.
Now consciously you have no idea all this internal dialogue has been going on; you just experience things like a lack of motivation without realizing why.
The unconscious mind works as a kind of quantum computer, always analyzing all possible future outcomes – deciding which actions you take now will result in the best possible outcome in the future.
Which is why when it decides your efforts right now aren’t going to result in the best outcome, it hits the breaks.
All of a sudden you find yourself sleeping till 3 pm, not getting out of bed, watching TV, and surfing Facebook when you should be working.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →This is just the unconscious mind trying to create pleasure in the present, without any concern for your future.
The Solution:
Ask your unconscious mind what the rules are, and start having fun – now. After a long time of struggle, your unconscious stops believing you.
Visualizing your private jet, new home, or car isn’t enough; it wants pleasure right now. Stop delaying gratification. You need to reward your unconscious mind’s cooperation after every big burst of motivation/effort. Otherwise, it turns against you every time.
Ask your unconscious mind, what guidelines you have to live by for it to work with you to achieve your goal. Repeat “Unconscious mind, what do I need to do for you to work in cooperation with me to achieve my goal within X time?”
Ask yourself several times, until you go deep down and have no answers. Eventually, things will appear as if from nowhere.
For some people, it’s taking time out every week, not over-working, or something more personal. The ‘guidelines’ will revolve around maintaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
Your unconscious has a kind of monopoly on your internal resources. It controls which resources are distributed where.
You need to condition your unconscious to equate pleasure with working. Reward yourself with each small milestone you hit.
A big goal in the distant future won’t motivate you to reach it (most times). The 5-year plan or when I do ‘this in the future,’ then I’ll hit my goal thinking is broken.
You need to reward yourself regularly, every day.
Do this long enough, and your unconscious mind will associate working with pleasure right now, so it can use all your internal resources to guide you toward your goal automatically, 24 hours a day.
Love ya,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts and comments below.
Comments
Adam
Great post, David! I totally agree with your point about the unconscious sabotaging our efforts. It’s amazing how much power our thoughts have over our actions. Keep up the great work!
Brenda
This is so true! I’ve struggled with self-sabotage for years, and it’s only when I started understanding the unconscious mind that I began to make real progress. Thanks for the insights!
Chris
I’m a bit skeptical about this idea of asking your unconscious mind for guidance. Do you have any scientific studies or evidence to back up this approach? Would love to see more info!
Isabella
I really appreciate this post, David! It’s encouraging to see how you break down the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds. I’ve started applying these strategies, and it’s making a difference. Keep these insights coming!
Marco
Wait a second, are you saying that my unconscious mind has been sabotaging me this whole time? That’s hard to believe! Could you provide more evidence or examples of how this actually works? I’d love to know how you discovered this process.
Nina
This post really resonates with me. I’ve been working on my business for years and can relate to the internal battle between pushing forward and giving up. What are your thoughts on maintaining a work-life balance while still staying motivated?
Oliver
Honestly, I’m not convinced by everything you’ve said. The idea of “asking” your unconscious mind seems a bit too abstract. I think real success comes from tangible actions, not mental dialogue. But hey, if it works for you, more power to you!
Amara
David! It’s been so long since we last caught up, and it’s awesome to see you still putting out great content. This post was an eye-opener! We definitely need to catch up soon. Maybe grab coffee next week? Let me know!
Ethan
This is such a relatable topic! I’ve been stuck in a similar situation where my goals and reality just don’t seem to align. Your advice to listen to the unconscious is a game changer—I’ll definitely try applying this to my routine.
Lara
Have you ever heard of the Pomodoro Technique? It’s a great way to break work into intervals, and it might complement your idea of rewarding the unconscious mind. I’ve been using it for a while, and it has really boosted my productivity. Highly recommend it!
Henry
This post was exactly what I needed! I’ve always struggled with procrastination, but after reading your take on the unconscious mind, it all makes sense now. I’m looking forward to applying these methods and seeing where they take me.
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The skeptic’s strongest case, which I don’t fully hold myself: this reframes ordinary procrastination as a ‘negotiation’ with a semi-autonomous mind, which makes it unfalsifiable — any lapse confirms the theory, any burst of motivation also confirms it.
Compressing this down to what’s actually actionable, because there’s a lot of metaphor doing work that plain instructions could do faster: one, notice when motivation drops rather than just pushing through it. Two, treat the drop as information about pacing or reward structure rather than a personal failure. Three, reward small wins immediately instead of only at the end, since waiting for a distant outcome to feel good clearly doesn’t sustain most people through months of effort. What’s missing entirely is any account of clinical depression or genuine burnout as a real physiological state rather than a mindset to be negotiated with — the post treats every dip in motivation as a negotiation you can win with the right internal dialogue, and for a meaningful number of people reading this, that just isn’t true.
Meera’s point about depression made me think of something else entirely — how many of these ‘unconscious sabotage’ posts get written by people who’ve never actually been depressed, versus people who’ve been burnt out from overwork, which is a different animal with a different fix. Might be worth someone writing the version of this post for the second group instead of assuming they’re the same thing.
What’s being described here without the name attached is close to Kahneman’s dual-process framing, System 1 and System 2, mixed with some folk-psychology dressing about ‘quantum computers’ that doesn’t hold up under any actual definition of quantum computing. The underlying observation, that automatic processes resist goals the deliberate mind sets, is genuine and well-studied. The specific mechanism claimed here is not.
Philip’s right about the ‘quantum computer’ line. Look, the whole post reads like it needed a metaphor and grabbed whatever sounded impressive that week. Doesn’t mean reward-the-small-win is bad advice. It means the packaging around it is nonsense.
Tried the daily-reward thing for about six weeks. Worked great the first two, then the reward itself started feeling like another task on the list. Marla’s ‘packaging is nonsense’ comment tracks — the advice underneath needed more structure than ‘ask your unconscious mind’ gave it.
Philip’s right the mechanism is dressed up in nonsense language, but reward-yourself-immediately is the one piece of that whole world’s internal-work advice that actually held up once I left it.