95% of our choices are unconscious, and only 5% are conscious.
All choices we make, either conscious or unconscious, have consequences, either good or bad.
Every moment of your life, you take a particular action. Whether you are sitting on the couch watching TV, scrolling through Facebook, going for a run, or choosing to track your spending habits, it is classified as an action.
All these actions have consequences and different outcomes.
When you sit on the couch and watch TV, you are choosing to sit and stare at a screen, sitting and staring both being the actions; the decision to take this action is either conscious or unconscious.
In every situation, some choices must be made by deciding to take a specific action.
Life can be described as a repetition of a choice, a decision, and an action.
The challenge is that we can make many poor decisions. These poor decisions can become habitual and made unconsciously.
What you are often blind to is that a cognitive process happens inside your brain behind every choice, decision, and action you take. That process includes every choice in front of you filtered through a paradigm of your entire life.
It is filtered through:
- How you view yourself
- How you view the world
- How you view everything that has ever happened to you– your traumas, successes, failures, and every conversation you have ever had!
Every choice goes through that filter before a decision is made.
When you think about a process involving all of this, it is no wonder people fall into indecision. As a coach, people often ask me why people fail, and I must say indecision and inaction is the most significant factor!
When you consider that 95% of our decisions are unconscious, it is how time slips by and little action is taken.
For example, let’s say you decide to scroll on Facebook instead of tracking your spending habits.
Doing the difficult thing will increase your cash surplus and avoid inefficiencies – this will either help you pay down personal debt or help build a deposit towards your next investment or home.
It is comforting to know your decision to scroll is not likely driven by your lack of ambition or laziness. Instead, it is likely that subconsciously, you are afraid to address the actual cash position for fear of realising the answer to your cashflow challenges is not due to a lack of income but a lack of direction in your spending choices.
For example, if you know you purchase too much takeaway because you are both working full time and tired due to keeping up with your growing family and all that that entails, adding up how much of your income is going towards weekly takeaways is like holding a mirror up in front of the wart on your face. It forces you to see what you don’t want to admit. It forces you to take responsibility for your decisions and actions; immediate gratification is the most tempting fruit if you are tired and exhausted.
When we take active ownership of our decisions, that creates our choices. The millisecond your brain decides to scroll Facebook rather than tracking spending habits and taking ownership over your current position; that subconscious decision is trying to protect you from looking in the mirror and seeing something you don’t want to admit.
Which might be planning a meal menu each week and organising your weekly grocery shop and then meal prepping and having homecooked meals may be more challenging now, but it will create choices cashflow-wise; it will mean that you are more likely to eat healthier and cheaper options, which will create your benefit long term.
We must become aware of our subconscious decisions as quickly as possible because if we don’t, they will control our lives as our minds develop defence mechanisms to protect us from discomfort.
What is your subconscious mind protecting you from?
Write down one decision in your life you have been avoiding. What is it?
I want you now to try to identify what your subconscious is steering you away from. What does your subconscious see as a potential threat, so it is holding you back from deciding?
Steering you away from your limiting beliefs?
Steering you away from your fears being triggered?
Going back to the example of tracking your spending habits, I might realise my attraction to Uber Eats might be the reason why I am not where I want to be financially, forcing me to look in the mirror and realise that if I want to be in control, I need to make some tough choices.
Each action contains an inherent goal of self-preservation.
Scrolling on Facebook is a protection mechanism because it helps you avoid realising you have a spending problem, not an income problem.
Every choice and decision you make has an inherent goal. You can either track spending habits or sit on the couch scrolling.
Tracking spending habits promotes the goal of clarity – to build better spending habits.
If the subconscious is making the decision and I choose to scroll, I get to avoid clarity, I get to hide my fear of realising my position relies on me changing some behaviours that perhaps I don’t want to because they are comfortable.
I like Uber Eats. For me to give that up, I must be more organised; I need to plan a menu, I need to purchase the ingredients, and I need to cook. The overwhelm of a perceived lack of time leads me to scroll Facebook as I do not want to face my fear and the reality of where my money is going.
My not learning about my money situation is self-preservation.
I am subconsciously choosing to skip clarity for self-preservation.
This can be seen as procrastination. However, procrastination is a symptom, not the problem. The problem lies within the hidden fear of making the decision. What is the cause of you not taking action?
My fear is a perceived view that it will make more work for me.
Human nature is to avoid discomfort; this can often lead to us making the easier choices that provide us with immediate gratification than making the tougher decision, which gives us delayed gratification.
The answer lies in what solution is there to overcome my fear of lack of time.
This takes us back to the concept that if we make hard choices now, life will be easier later. Or easier now, will make life harder later.
Jim Rohan states, “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret?”
Not taking ownership and managing your cash flow now will make your life harder as it progresses.
Instant gratification – easy now – hard later.
Delayed gratification – hard now – easier later.
Your life is just a series of choices you make in the present moment.
I can either track or scroll.
Think about how this decision will have different outcomes and change my trajectory. The human brain will always gravitate towards easy for self-preservation.
If you feel like your life is stagnant and that you are not moving forward. Are you constantly making the easy choices in life?
Are you happy with this position? If so, keep going.
If not, what are you going to do about this? To become more, you must make an active, conscious, intentional decision to create more direction and gain results that resonate with you.
Being intentional means that we must proactively recognise we are inherently lazy, and we will always choose the easier route.
Proactive decisions that align with our long-term goals, even if they are challenging, will make our lives better down the track.
Are you prepared to make hard choices and decisions now, even if the benefit is not for 2, 3, 5, 10 years or more?
To do this, you must overcome your human brain’s drive for self-preservation. You must build your confidence and muscle in the desired area to overcome this. At first, it is like riding up a hill on a push bike with the brake stuck on; it is hard! However, we know that the more we get up each morning and repeat the exercise, the easier it becomes.
An example for me in my own life was my fear of public speaking. I was in year seven at a new school. I was the weird new country kid who had arrived in the city, I had braces and glasses at a time when these accessories did not rank as cool. I was told by the housemaster I was to be 3rd speaker at a debate the following day.
First, I ran to my older sister and asked, “What is a debate?”
Then, I wrote what I thought was an okay attempt at being a 3rd speaker. The following day, I did a horrendous job. My skirt was physically shaking, and I could barely stand as my nerves overtook, and I blundered my way through in front of the entire school. We lost.
That evening, the housemaster tore strips off me in front of the house group of over 200 peers about how terrible it was and how unprepared I was. From that moment, I avoided public speaking. Whenever I had to speak, I felt my skirt shaking and my blood pulsing like it did in year seven.
I recognised this was holding me back in my career and what I wanted to achieve. To overcome this fear and act of self-preservation. I had to force myself to do this. I started with one-on-one conversations and built into small groups. Eventually, due to work commitments, I was training large teams, but still, that feeling of wanting to run and hide and “scroll Facebook” instead of talking in front of people was there.
Building muscle and confidence in a particular space is about showing up for yourself, being prepared and doing it regardless of what is happening in your head and body. Eventually, I was speaking in front of groups but always prepared. I did not particularly like it; it always put me on edge, but I knew I was doing something hard now to make it easier long term.
How did I know that I had achieved a level of comfort in this space? I was in a position recently where we had a large group of people arriving to go on a bus tour around a market to learn about the Melbourne market. I was not there to speak; I was there to learn, so I had no prompts or prepared presentations. However, through an error, the bus did not arrive.
The event organisers’ sentiment decided we should cancel and send people home. We had people who had flown from Cairns to Melbourne for this event. In my mind, cancelling was not an option.
I found myself taking charge, I asked one colleague to find us a conference room. I told the main presenter I would take the first two hours, and then he could deliver a classroom version of the bus tour.
I found myself boosting the confidence of the main presenter, saying we can do this; we must do this; people have paid and organised their lives to be here; we cannot cancel! From there, I went on to deliver two hours of jam-packed education. People had to ask me to slow down as they frantically took notes and tried to keep up with the message I was delivering.
Flying home after this event, I realised I had finally overcome my fear of speaking in front of people. I had done this by practising, building my muscle, building my confidence, and recognising that what I had to say was helping people.
Finally, I want to share a quote I grew up hearing regularly from my Dad, who is still one of my most incredible mentors.
“If you don’t make a decision, someone else will make it for you, and chances are it will be at your expense and not in your best interest”!
Life is a series of choices. Don’t allow someone else to make the choices for you!
