Master your subconscious learning

The other day I was playing with my nephew, we were watching a Christmas tree and we saw our reflect on one of the ornaments, this one was really clear and red that we could see our reflect inside of it, so I decided to stick my tongue and say bla bla bla to the ornament, I did it a couple of times and then, she did the same to the ornament, that was when I realised something.

When we arrive in this world we are a blank canvas, we know nothing else but cry, eat and shit. This is when we are most vulnerable in our lives, also when we start to learn everything. Our parents really make an effort to teach us what they believe it’s good, some things are more accurate than others, but even the things they teach us are not what matters, it’s what we are not aware that we learned what matters the most.

I call this subconscious learning, things that we don’t pay attention on a day to day basis but we still know they are meant to be the way we think they are meant to be. It’s like you know things should follow certain order or things should be a certain way but nobody taught you that.

What your parents taught you and you weren’t aware of?

We learn to say mama not because there is something inside our brains that has all the vocabulary of our natal language, but because we hear our mother repeating the word “mama”. It happens the same with everything around you, you learn what you are exposed with more frequency, this means that we should be careful with that we are open to experience right?

Can we control the things that we can experience during our childhood?, the answer is we can’t, but as adults we could be aware of these behaviours now and try to change them, our minds associate a reaction to a feeling or a certain situation, we must first recognise those triggers to be able to change our reaction, think of it this way.

You are driving a car that you can’t stop, but once you get to a place the car will indeed stop. There are plenty of highways you can take to get to your destination, most of them lead to different places but you can take a different combination of highways to your destination, some of the highway pieces are longer and other ones are shorter.

This metaphor it’s what it’s most likely to me how the brain responds to an event, the reactions are our final destination, and the highways we choose are the way we decide to respond/behave based on a certain trigger.

Let’s build new healthy highways!

What I advise you to do is to sit down and review why you behave the way you do in certain situations, and try to associate that with something you learned during childhood and to generate a judgment if this behaviour is positive for you in the long term, and decide if you have to change it or not.

What can also help you is to ask yourself the next question, where did I saw this pattern during my childhood that lead me to react this way in this current situation?

What society secretly taught you?

How can you be careful of what you are learning when you have so many things around you reaching your sensorial senses?

You can try to be aware that this is constantly happening, we are living in the society of appearances these days, it’s most likely that most of the things we see on the street are designed in a way to catch your eye, to generate an emotion or even a behaviour in you, “thank the publicist for this”, you can train yourself to understand that it’s not the shirt that they are selling you, it’s how you will feel when you put the shirt and walk on the street, it’s not about the product but about the feeling.

And of course this is not limited only to material things, but to social trends, groups and status quo, I’m not saying that you try and avoid all of this because living out of society it’s not good either, all I’m trying to say is that we should be more aware of what we are learning from our surroundings.

What are your peers teaching you?

There is a saying out there, “you are the average 8 people with whom you spend most of your time”, I don’t think this is completely true, but it’s also not completely false, If you hang around with Timmy who is always trash talking about other people I promise you that eventually that pattern will be in your subconscious mind, and eventually you will start trash talking about other people too contrary to this if you are the dumbest person in the room, maybe by hearing the smart ones you can at least try to understand how they think.

But I don’t think it’s true that you magically become the persons around you, you become what you decide to learn from them and what you are aware you shouldn’t be learning from them, yes you can learn that Timmy by talking bad about others doesn’t have any friends and avoid that behaviour, and also you can learn a lot being the dumbest person in the room.

In the end you learning from anything even if you don’t want to

I don’t think you should approach life trying to avoid this or that in order to not be contaminated by the learning this or that could provide you, cos you will eventually find yourself in a loop of constant change.

I think you should approach life in acceptance mode, accept that you can’t control what your subconscious mind learned in the previous years, accept everybody around you but be aware or what are you learning from them, and accept that you can’t control what you are learning from society but that there are some things it’s better not to learn from it.

That being accepted you should review on a day to day basis what you learned and what you learn without not knowing, and make a decision whether it’s good or bad for you.

In the end all the things you do or don’t will have an impact on you, even if you are not capable of recognising this in the beginning, they eventually will, and your behaviour is conditioned by what you learned and what you weren’t aware you learned.