A 10 point guide to your unconscious mind
We think of work as the domain of rationality, but our unconscious, irrational minds are dominant there just as in our private lives. Our unconscious assumptions, intuitions and emotions determine our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, both as individuals and, through the culture, as a group.
These are the underlying themes of all my articles, and I thought it worthwhile briefly to revisit the concept at the core of them – the unconscious mind.
Introducing the elephant: your unconscious mind
- You have two different intelligences. You inhabit your conscious mind - it’s what you think of as ‘me’. But your unconscious mind – the seat of your instincts, gut feelings, passions and fears - is much more powerful. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider to describe the relationship. We believe that our conscious mind, the rider, is in charge. But the elephant is much stronger, and is really in control.
- The psychologist Louis Cozolino uses a different comparison. He says that your unconscious mind is your operating system, like Windows or IOS. When you use your phone, the code scrolling behind the scenes is invisible to you, though it’s determining the functionality – what you can do and see. In the same way, your unconscious mind is always ‘on’, interpreting your experience and controlling how you think and act, instantly, without your awareness. You take it for granted; you can’t imagine what the world would be like without it. And it’s the result of your personal history, particular to you.
- Its job is to predict what’s coming next. The unconscious mind came first in our evolution, before we developed the capacity to reason. It works in a very different way from your conscious mind – holistically, by distilling your experience into simple models of the world, looking for similar patterns in your current experience and cueing you to respond appropriately, in a way that worked before, when it finds a match. It communicates with you by visceral feelings: if something unexpected happens it jolts you so you engage your conscious mind.
- It’s your emotions that make you act: they tell you what to approach and avoid. When you see a bus bearing down on you as you cross the road, your unconscious mind recognises a pattern that means danger and triggers a cascade of physical changes. You focus on the bus, your heart beats faster and you run for the pavement, half a second before you’ve consciously registered what’s happening.
Your unconscious mind can do magical things your conscious mind just can’t do
- Intuition helps you make the right decision though you don’t have the facts or the capacity to analyse them. Your unconscious mind applies all your knowledge and experience simultaneously, recognises similarities in the current problem to ones you’ve solved before and guides you by a positive gut feeling to a solution. This is how the pilot Sully Sullenberger was able to land that plane on the Hudson river minutes after it lost all power on its take-off from La Guardia. It’s how all professionals make decisions, whether under time pressure or not: they draw on their expertise, the distillation of all their knowledge and experience – and it seems quite magical to the novice (Articles 3, 4 and 5).
- Your unconscious mind is always sorting and reorganising your models of the world, particularly when your conscious mind is at rest, when you’re daydreaming or sleeping. New insights and creative ideas are generated when it identifies new correspondences and links and recombines the elements available to it into new, more illuminating models of the world (Articles 6 and 10). It can even tune in to the thoughts and feelings of other people, find common ground and inspire them to collaborate. Our powers of empathy are intuitive: we pick up small cues that enable us to simulate the emotional state of others.
But it can also seriously misdirect you
- But it also infiltrates and biases your thinking. Some examples: we are over-optimistic – we suffer from wishful thinking – both about ourselves and our prospects and influence and in our projects, where we fail to anticipate difficulties. Do you know of any large infrastructure project that has come in to time and cost? We discount facts that contradict our settled opinion. We jump to conclusions on the basis of incomplete evidence: stereotyping is an example. These biases are very difficult to counter because many of them are evolutionary in origin or simply the product of the way our powerful unconscious minds work. The authority on these is the late Daniel Kahneman who sets them out in his book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.
- And many of us are subject to emotional distortions. We may have unexamined values and assumptions acquired from people influential in our earlier years that may be preventing us from being happy or realising our potential. Imperfect parenting may have seriously distorted the way we see ourselves and hence relate to other people and the world in general. If, for example, our parents’ love for us was contingent on our achieving, we may believe we are ‘worthy’ only if we succeed or everything we do is perfect. If they were critical, we may find even constructive feedback at work threatening to our self esteem and become defensive or depressed (Articles 10, 11, and 12.) President Trump’s father convinced him that he was worthy only if he was a ‘winner’, not a loser.
What can we do to maximise the magic and minimise the misdirection?
- Enter the Engineer. Your unconscious mind is a Visionary, and may be subject to wild imaginings about the future; but your conscious mind is an Engineer. Engineers take things apart and reassemble them so that they work, and that’s what your conscious mind does – it comes to its conclusions by analysing the evidence, and applying words and numbers and logic. Fortunately, the Visionary and the Engineer have complementary skills (see Articles 3, 4, 5 and 6). Your Engineer can help you get the best from your Visionary, but also curb it when it’s on the wrong track.
- Using your Engineer you can rigorously evaluate your intuitive hypotheses about solutions or new ideas, find the gaps and flaws and reject them if they don’t work. You can also set about training your intuition by systematic reflection of when it was right or wrong and why (see articles 5, 6 and 10). Prof Eugene Sadler-Smith explains more in his book, ‘Trust Your Gut’. You can apply a similar discipline to your emotional reactions by questioning them when they seem out of proportion to the events that triggered them (Article 11) or seeking the help of a coach or therapist to help you identify and emerge from the distortions you’ve brought with you from your earlier life.
Your tenth point reminds me irresistibly of Philip Larkin:
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”
I will not quote the rest–too depressing. But has a point: we could all probably do with therapy to help us understand how what we think of as our “self” was formed, and where our elephant might be taking us as a result.