Does the prospect of public speaking terrify you even though you are an expert in your field?
Do you find yourself crying in front of your boss at the least appropriate moment?
When you have an irrational or out-of-proportion response to certain challenges or circumstances, it is likely that your unconscious mind is running the show.
Research estimates that the conscious mind represents only 4% of your consciousness.
The remaining 96% is whirring away outside your conscious awareness. While much of this whirring relates to bodily functions such as breathing, digesting, temperature regulation etc., it also includes the beliefs which inform your “operating system”, the unconscious set of rules that help you to navigate life more easily.
Your personal operating system makes life easier by predicting how you will respond in certain circumstances and prompting you through your body (emotional responses and physical impulses) and mind (mental thoughts) to show up in a certain way. You’ve been building this operating system since birth and it is programmed by every thought, emotion and experience you’ve ever had. It’s how you make sense of the world around you, by building a memory bank of meaning.
It is unique for every person and means that your past experiences dictate your response to current circumstances, unless you catch yourself and make a conscious decision about how you want to show up.
Jung expressed it eloquently when he said: “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Until you get curious about why you show up the way you do, you will continue to play out this unconscious conditioning that is your operating system and never question it.
When you become curious, and able to observe yourself, you can start to disentangle your present from your past.
What does this mean in practice?
The personal development journey focuses on catching this first, reflex reaction, based on your past experience. When you catch yourself, you create space to make a conscious decision about how you show up.
Personal development is about taking responsibility for your own operating system and questioning whether your reflex response is appropriate in the circumstances.
Like all algorithms, your personal operating system has some bugs and design defects.
Getting curious about out of the ordinary, extreme and uncharacteristic reactions to certain circumstances can shine lights on these bugs and design defects, and result in true emotional resilience.
True emotional resilience goes beyond learning coping mechanisms to manage your emotional response to situations. True emotional resilience results from getting curious about the root cause of your reaction and transforming it by better understanding what the underlying trigger is.
When this happens the trigger loses its hold over you, you upgrade your operating system by correcting the bug and you no longer have the same reaction in those circumstances.