Opening Your Mind for a Change

The saying ‘open up your mind’ and similar phrases are frequent metaphors in the personal development world as a means to communicate encouragement to expand one’s mental map.

Similarly, ‘closed minded’ and ‘small minded’ are used as adages to denote the characteristics of a certain type of thinking that is restricted in form and thus part of a mental map which is limited in scope.

But, what is mind and how do you open it? That’s a good question, as rarely, if ever does the request to open the mind, come with instructions on how to do so? The intention of this article is to give some guidance to the reader on mind opening. If this sounds interesting, read on with a curious mind!

Let’s begin, with defining what the mind is. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the mind as ‘the part of a person that makes it possible for him or her to think, feel emotions, and understand things’. This may sound simple, but the processes of thinking, feeling, understanding and responding,  involve complex interaction of neurons, of which human beings have 86 billion in the brain alone. The mind however is not just the brain, we have hundreds of millions of neurons in our body, for example it is estimated that the gut has up to 500 million neurons alone connected to the brain through the vagus nerve.

The mind is a complex interaction of neurons occurring through the whole body connected through neurotransmitters for human beings to be able to do the amazing things we can do as singing, mathematics,  dancing, writing poetry, problem solving, making decisions, speaking, writing and so much more and also experience involuntary mind processes, such as phobias, anxiety, grief, happiness, love and so on.

So when we experience an intense emotion, such as love or grief, we are unaware of the complex neurological activity occurring the brain, we are however fully aware of the emotional experience in our bodies, particularly our gut, our heart, respiration and perspiration as well as our overall physiology influenced both neurologically and biologically, otherwise known as ‘state’.

French philosopher, Rene Decartes, based much of his discourse methodology on a mantra ‘I think therefore I am’, originally documented in 1637. This premise falsely promoted ‘thinking’ over ‘being’.

Ask anyone with a phobia, can they think their way out of the fight or flight syndrome associated with the phobia? Same goes for PTSD or shock, thinking has minimal influence on the physical aspect of mind amidst these intense experiences.

Thinking is a cognitive process, there are different forms of thinking, for example deductive logic and creative thinking will utilise different parts of the brain accompanied by somatic reactions in the body to the thoughts experienced. Our thoughts, as you well know, can be very deliberating or exhilarating and are all a part of our mind which of course directly impacts our state.

In Neuro Linguistic Programming and Hypnosis we work with practical applications and we break ‘mind’ into two components; i) the conscious mind and ii) the unconscious mind. With the conscious mind, we are referring to functions of the mind we are aware of at any given time and the aspects of mind we consciously mediate control, such as decisions, reflections and planning. With the unconscious mind, it’s all the functions in the human that are occurring each moment, without our direct awareness of these functions, as well as holding all our tacit knowledge gained through a lifetime of experience. The iceberg metaphor can be applied,  that our explicit knowledge is the tip of the iceberg and under the surface is a vast bank of tacit knowledge,  which is the core of the unconscious mind.

Opening the mind is the process of gaining access to your tacit knowledge by harnessing the unconscious components of certain states to bring your tacit knowledge to everyday consciousness. Tacit knowledge is unconscious and includes your life learning experiences, motor skills, insight and intuition as well as the unconscious circuitry of how you experience problems and work through them   it’s like a vault of circuitry and patterning that forms who you are as a person and your potentiality . Tacit knowledge is far more expansive than your explicit knowledge, which forms your everyday thinking.

So in the business of coaching, clients seek out a coach for some form of life improvement, often the motivating factor is dissatisfaction with the current situation that the client is seeking coaching for.  The client knows they are dissatisfied, they express that dissatisfaction to themselves through their internal representations, images, sounds and self-talk packaged with the kinesthetics that form the present state. What they don’t know is the tacit journey of the mind that is attributed to the issues they are experiencing, nor will they ever. So many people and a lot of coaches waste huge amounts of time and energy attempting to discover the ‘why’ behind their issue. The components of the problem are buried so deep in the unconscious vault of tacit knowledge derived from tacit experience, it is futile even trying to work out a ‘why’. Whys are way too linear in the complex processing of the human mind.

No problem is entirely new, you have had a lifetime of training for experiencing what we call problems and some people are really good at it. Most people have had practice in dealing poorly with rejection, losing confidence, unnecessary fear and high levels of flight or fight and addictive behaviours. As well as health issues where the immune system hasn’t coped well with pathogens leading to health challenges. It’s as if there is a vault in your mind, which acts like a storehouse of tacit knowledge for creating problems, and every seemingly new problem will be a synthesis of components from problem history in the vault. How clever is that? Human beings are highly effective at organising historic tacit experiences to unconsciously create X situation in the present.

And the coach says to the client ‘what would you like instead?’, and proposes the client sets a well-formed outcome to plan a journey to the solution.

And the client, from the perspective of dissatisfaction with the current state, sets the outcome with the inverse of the problem, and attempts to crack the iceberg of tacit knowledge that forms the problem, with their conscious understanding of the situation derived from their explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is just their surface level descriptions of the situation they have tacitly and involuntarily created and out of conscious influence. This is akin to attempting to crack an iceberg with an ice-pick, it’s totally futile.

On the flip side, you have had a lifetime of experiences in learning, healing and overcoming intensely challenging circumstances. For example, you unconsciously learnt at least one language, able bodied people learned to walk, you have healed from illnesses, you learned how to read and write, you learned how to ride a bicycle,  play sports and mental games such as chess, you learned how to work technology, how to overcome intensely emotional challenges such as grief, relationship breakdown, and you learned skills for creativity, arts, dance, poetry and communication. The list of your tacit knowledge is almost endless. It’s highly likely the vault of positive assets (resources) in your tacit knowledge is significantly larger than the problem creating vault. So instead of mediating a problem with your limited conscious mind of explicit knowledge, how about engaging with the unconscious processes inherent across a lifetime of acquiring resources, which are within your tacit knowledge vault.

New Code NLP, (Grinder and Bostic, 1987 to present), revolutionised the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming as a coaching methodology, with a paradigm shift away from applying conscious reprogramming of behaviours in problem contexts, relying mainly on explicit knowledge and using sensory based mental linear mental rehearsal formats. Instead New Code NLP utlises state mediated patterning where naturalistic optimised states are built within an individual to open the vaults to the components of the unconscious ‘human assets’ stored within the entire spectrum of tacit experiences. Additionally, New Code NLP uses a biofeedback method, to directly engage with previously unconscious processes out of reach from conscious logic, to implement healing frames, harness offline resources to bring about natural and long term change in an individual.

New Code NLP has tried and tested patterns,  utilised by top coaches around the world for people to truly open their minds and access states and their human assets, which are not readily available in everyday consciousness. Your everyday thinking is limited to what you understand and restricted by your ‘possibility map’, i,e what you currently believe to be possible and not possible for you. Open your mind with New Code NLP, then the possibilities are endless.

To become a qualified coach and learn New Code NLP, from John Grinder, Carmen Bostic St Clair and Michael Carroll, click this link, your tacit and explicit knowledge will be glad you did.