Some people create a sound financial plan, but something always seems to get in the way of following that plan. Why is this? Dr. Bernard Poduska, author of ‘For Love & Money,’ writes that most money problems are actually behavior problems. To overcome this, it is important to understand how the conscious and non-conscious parts of the brain work together.
Over the last decade, new research in neuroscience has led to an important finding. The conscious part of your brain drives only about 2 to 4 percent of your activity and behavior. The remaining 96 to 98 percent of your activity and behavior is driven by the habits, goals, attitudes, and beliefs that have been programmed into the non-conscious part of your brain. These habits, goals, attitudes, and beliefs move you forward from event to event in your life with little involvement from your conscious brain.
We now know that the computational and processing capability of the non-conscious part of your brain is staggeringly powerful. John Assaraf notes in his book, ‘The Answer,’ that impulses in the non-conscious brain travel at speeds of 100,000 miles per hour. This is about 800 times faster than conscious thought impulses, which travel at about 120 to 140 mph. The non-conscious brain processes about 400,000,000,000 bits of information per second, compared to only about 2,000 per second in the conscious brain.
The conscious and non-conscious parts of your brain are different in a key way. The non-conscious brain has absolutely no ability to set goals, but is spectacularly powerful at achieving them. It simply acts relentlessly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to achieve whatever goals are presented to it. Your conscious brain, on the other hand, is exceptionally good at setting goals, but can only carry you a few hours or days toward achieving them.
This is critical to understand for one reason: much of the advice that is given about money management tends to focus on steps to be taken primarily by the conscious brain—spending, saving, budgeting, investing, and more. This is important, but it is insufficient. Most of this advice is given in a way that completely neglects the massively powerful, goal-achieving superstar of your own non-conscious brain. And, many people begin to struggle after only a few days or weeks of trying to force their conscious brain to follow through on their money management program. This is like setting the autopilot on an airplane to fly due west, but then struggling to manually force the plane to fly south.
But by properly programming your financial and money management objectives into your non-conscious brain, you can create new habits, goals, attitudes, and beliefs about money that the non-conscious brain will work resolutely to bring into your life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The important thing to note is that you already have habits, goals, attitudes, and beliefs about your own money situation programmed into your non-conscious brain. But, they may not be the ones you want. They may have been implicitly programmed without your realization or permission. Your objective is to take explicit control and to consciously program your non-conscious brain to seek after those financial goals you want, rather than after those money problems you don’t want.
The process to follow to accomplish this is simple.
1. Decide what you truly want as your own picture or definition of financial prosperity.
2. Create descriptive sentences or affirmations that clearly describe your picture or definition.
3. On a regular, daily basis, bombard your non-conscious brain with your affirmations. This can take the form of reading, hearing, or visualizing your affirmations, or by creating vision boards or other visual representations of your picture of financial prosperity.
4. Build on the foundation of programming your non-conscious brain with a sound set of common-sense money management principles.
Over about thirty days, your non-conscious brain will form new neural pathways that replace your old, unwanted programming with this new program of what you actually desire. Together, the entire process will move you steadily toward your own picture of financial prosperity.
No matter what you find in your own picture of financial prosperity, by understanding the interaction between how your conscious and non-conscious brain work together, if you can picture it, you can achieve it.