Your Subconscious – the 9 Year Old Inside
Do you think you are a mature grown up adult? The inner truth isn’t always what it looks like.
Your subconscious mind should be as old as the rest of you but it isn’t. It’s best thought of as a bright 9 year old child. That is the level of emotional maturity our imagination gets to before ‘Grown Up’ becomes our preferred mask.
Logic and sensibility appear to take over from full blown imagination and emotion at or around the age of 9 in most societies. Which makes perfect sense when we take on board the 10,000 hour practicing rule of becoming ‘expert’ in something as put forward by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. Because with the huge amount of time spent sleeping and eating and mostly doing nothing really, in early childhood about 10,000 hours is all the practice you get at being a thinking person.
I’ve been teaching this now for well over a decade but it was brought home to me reading a marketing blog today a friend pointed me to. The author was talking about being a parent to his son, 5 year old Austin, and what he would be like at 20…
“You don’t get an evolved, new mature being. You get Austin with fifteen blankets over his head.”
Johnny B. Truant
Keep this in mind next time you are suggesting anything to anyone hypnotised or very emotional and talk as if you talking to a bright kid with scuffed knees and loads of kids-smarts but no logic to speak of and a ‘get it first, think about it later’ attitude. That shouldn’t mean that you treat your mind as being stupid, your subconscious is far from being stupid and although it may feel as if it is just reacting, it does make choices even if it doesn’t do that in a reasonable and adult considered way.
Of course that means when using persuasion or influence the trick is forgetting all the grown up clever stuff and remembering what it was like when you made friends faster than an ice cream disappearing and the whole world was dead simple. And keep it simple.
Thinking of people this way is a great way of getting rid of the jitters and building confidence when talking to someone your adult self says is ‘superior’. And it’s a fabulous way of not having to think up complex intellectual arguments or even harder metaphors or stories. Just keep the language simple and you’ll get through those blankets a hell of a lot easier!
Smiles
Jonathan Chase