Ask And You Shall Receive: Good Questions are Better Than Affirmations for Achieving Big Dreams - Part I

I have been working on Following My Dream of being a Human Potential Consultant, Trainer & Speaker for 15 years using many self help programs: "Do What You Love the Money Will Follow", "Law of Attraction or Secret" "Think & Grow Rich" to name a few.  And have had minor success (not as much success as the authors said I would have). I believe it is because these programs are based on affirmations from the conscious mind vs. reprogramming the 4x as powerful subconscious mind with questions, pictures and emotions. 

You can think 4 x as fast as you can talk: 1200 words a minute vs 300 words a minute (no wonder we get bored with speakers and trainers so easily). Essentially your subconscious mind has 4 people talking to you and your conscious mind 1 person. Your subconscious mind has stored up millions-billions of information starting in childhood coming from your parents and family (most of these messages have not been very empowering). From this information it creates programs to make life easier to react and respond. So until you address these subconscious programs, no matter what you tell yourself you want to change (conscious mind) the subconscious is just too powerful to overcome all the information and programs it has created. The power of the subconscious mind is that it creates pictures or images to convey the program - easier than words. And the most powerful images come when it is based on an emotion. All behavior is emotionally driven usually based on fear, guilt, anger and love.

So if you are wanting to Follow Your Dreams in a new job/career/purpose you are going to have to reprogram millions of pieces of information and images that you have stored up about yourself and how you see yourself in your career if it is different than what you are wanting to accomplish in the future. All of this started from the information your parents/family gave you about the world of work, career and purpose and continued with cultural messages, heroes or heroines (or lack of), church messages,  school messages and so forth. Most people do not achieve Career or Purpose-Mission Path "Follow Your Dreams" success based on two very powerful subconscious messages:

1. Lack of Money & Resources
2. Lack of Confidence in your abilities

So when we start dreaming and thinking what we would really love to do with our lives, we immediately have sabotaging images and thoughts about the ability to do that. For instance, I want to get my Ph.D. and every time I think about that and state it, all I can think about is all the debts I have and how I can't afford to pay for the program.  Or when I think about my Creative Training & Speaking Business and attempting to get  business again, I think about how I failed at it last time or how I don't know how to make calls, or how to convince people in companies they need something as fluffy as creativity and the list goes on.

Affirmations or some form of it (Law of Attraction and the Secret use these heavily & primarily) are supposed to overcome these negative subconscious thoughts and images. I just don't think that works. Remember the conscious mind where the affirmations are coming from is like 1 person  (pretty weak person)  going against the subconscious mind (all the information, messages, images and programs from your past) that is like 4 very strong people. Affirmations are just not strong enough to overcome the 4 people. So what do we do?

There are two subconscious components that activate an emotional state which in turn determines your behaviors:

1. You must talk to yourself which usually begins with a question and
2. By asking yourself a question your subconscious mind will always give you an answer which in turn produces a correlating picture. It is from this subconscious picture that your emotional state is determined and in turn decides your behavior. 

The most affective means of changing your self-talk (subconscious) is to intervene and change your negative self questioning into positive empowering questions.

So as soon as I make my statement of my Dream or Goal: "I am a successful Human Potential Consultant, Trainer, Speaker" and all the negative self doubts, questioning, and thoughts start coming up, I turn those thoughts into a question. All you have to do is learn what questions to ask yourself to achieve the results you want. Ask and ye shall receive.  Part II I will explain how to ask the right questions and to start visualizing the answers.