Switchwords: How to Use One Word to Get What You Want

Ellen, firmly in Jon’s sceptical camp, shared her story with me: ‘I was looking for a gardening book and I’d searched everywhere. Then your email arrived and I used REACH to find it (although I was sceptical). I set a time limit of that day and when it didn’t turn up, I felt my scepticism was justified. However, the following day I was walking past a bookcase that I had already searched through, and there it was. Did the same with a mislaid bicycle pump and found it almost straight away. Scepticism overruled (for now!)’

While a successful track record obviously helps belief (the more we succeed, the more we trust in the process), research also suggests that familiarity alone generates positive thoughts. Even if we’re only able to carry the basic belief that Switchwords are worth trying – but don’t necessarily believe that they will work – we cultivate belief as a by-product. This is known as the exposure effect. We have positive thoughts about things we’ve seen or heard (or experienced through other senses) before. This is true, of course, in advertising (which is why we’re bombarded with repeated adverts) and also in music. A refrain or chorus has the effect of enchanting the brain – the exposure effect of repetition means we come to like what we’re familiar with. So this is part of the belief factor in Switchwords: the more familiar we become with the Switchwords we choose, the more we generate an inner belief that they will work, whether we’re conscious of this or not.

Tip: Use CARE to remember the parts of this book you need.

There’s a Switchword to help you store information – including Switchwords. This word is CARE. You might imagine this as the ‘save’ function on a computer. CARE helps you bank information for retrieval later. Whenever you pause in your reading of this book, say, think or chant the Switchword CARE to help you store the information you need. When you want to remember a Switchword or any part of this book later on, use the ‘finding’ Switchword REACH, which retrieves whatever you need, when you need it.

Ready for the next step?

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Working with Switchwords (#ulink_d62bbacb-2897-5e67-b249-8adb606df462)

Opening the pathways to success (#ulink_d62bbacb-2897-5e67-b249-8adb606df462)

The subconscious houses that aspect of our higher self (or super-consciousness) that can be thought of as the guiding principle that wants what is best for us in this lifetime, attracting the wise lessons we need to learn, and inspiring us to act from a place of love rather than fear. When we use Switchwords, we are switching on the subconscious and the higher self to bring us what we genuinely need (rather than what the ego, expressed through the conscious mind, assumes we should have).

The subconscious mind holds thoughts, impressions and beliefs that the conscious mind is not aware of. These hidden attitudes have a powerful effect on our lives, both positive and negative, whether we achieve or fail, falter or procrastinate, take risks or confront problems. Your subconscious mind can be your greatest ally in achievement. It responds to the energy of the thoughts and feelings within you to attract external influences that hold the same vibration: like attracts like. This is the basis of mani-festing – the belief that we can change our reality by changing our thoughts.

So, while we tell ourselves what we’d like to achieve, we also assume that our subconscious mind hears the command, understands it, believes in our missions and enters wholly into the agreement. Our beliefs, actions and words are consistent with the goal we’d like to achieve – or so we assume. We think we’re together as one, a perfect union of the conscious and subconscious self, all geared up to make whatever we want happen.

Experience, however, shows us that this isn’t always so, and we’re often left bewildered by our failure to complete a task or make a substantial change in our lives. When our subconscious mind appears to ignore or even sabotage our conscious desire through action or inaction, it’s virtually impossible to create and sustain the new reality we want, whether it’s making more money or beginning a new business, managing time, dealing with anxiety and fear or breaking negative habits.

If we need more money, we might consciously affirm, ‘I am wealthy, I live in abundance,’ and repeat this on a daily basis, often reciting it while looking at ourselves in a mirror and imagining how we’d feel if we were rich and successful. But what if our underlying belief conflicts with this affirmation? What if, at some level, we don’t believe we deserve – or want – money?

Liam’s money

Here’s an example. Liam lost his father when he was 26 years old; they had been very close. His mother had passed away when he was just five years old, and Liam was now devastated at the loss of his sole parent. The proceeds from the sale of his father’s home were then divided between him and his brother, Patrick. Liam was not wealthy – he earned a modest wage – and willingly accepted the money from the house proceeds.

But this is what happened next. Liam immediately spent £35,000 on home improvements. He and his wife, Sarah, had been trying to sell their house for 18 months in a slow market, and Liam believed this would make it saleable. It was way more than they needed to spend, but he insisted. Why spend so much on a house they were going to leave, Sarah asked?

A friend Liam worked with needed a heart operation. She would have to wait eight months for surgery, until Liam offered her £9,000 so she could have her operation within weeks.

Another friend ran a breast cancer charity. He donated £5,000.

He spent £10,000 on a better car, but sold it within three months. He didn’t like the steering.

And then all the inheritance money was gone. When their house finally sold, its price had only increased by a fraction of the value of the improvements.

Looking back on that period of his life, Liam reflected: ‘How could I have spent that money on myself? It was Dad’s money … It somehow didn’t feel right.’

Sarah added: ‘That money was contaminated for him, so he took no pleasure in it. He maybe had the feeling it was right to suffer emotionally and financially – not to benefit. So, in effect, he gave it away.’

Liam’s grief over his father got expressed through money – he got rid of it as quickly as he could, making sure not to purchase anything he would have to live with long-term. A subconscious money programme was running the show, not his conscious mind, which knew, logically, that the money should be spent first to help himself and his family (with donations secondary). This was how he consciously chose to spend his inheritance. But his true beliefs about what the legacy money meant showed up in his actions. He made decisions about spending from a place outside of his immediate conscious awareness.

So how did Liam’s actions get ahead of his conscious decision not to spend money in the way he spent it? One explanation is that …

The subconscious has impeccable timing

One aspect of the drive of subconscious behaviour is its timing; there’s a race between the subconscious urge and the conscious reaction. Say you want to kick your eBay habit – browsing and buying has become all too consuming; you know you’re spending too much time and money, but yet again you drift onto the site after an email leads you to Facebook, which somehow reminds you that you could just take a peek at eBay. No harm done yet. Your conscious mind senses that you’re about to break your own rule, but you’re in the thrill of the danger zone, directed by that old subconscious urge. You click and buy (after all, it’s already happening, so it’s too late). The reason why the hand gets to the mouse before the conscious mind can effectively intervene might be explained by neuroscientist Heather A. Berlin: ‘Recent imaging, psychophysical and neuropsychological findings suggest that unconscious processes take place hundreds of milliseconds before conscious awareness.’ Could this be the neurological reason why our subconscious wins out, why it’s always one step ahead? This is brilliant news if we have self-togetherness and self-awareness; the knowing, clever subconscious takes action before we get too analytical, and gets the job done. But if you’re subject to negative habits, which are deeply ingrained in the subconscious, the subconscious wins again, and sabotages our goal.

Liam’s subconscious behaviour pattern is also illuminated by research conducted by various cognitive neuroscientists. Studies suggest that the conscious mind is only in control around 5 per cent of the time, whereas the programmes of the subconscious mind influence 95 per cent or more of our experiences. This is a stunning statistic; in effect, we’re run by our subconscious programmes most of the time. Which is fine if enough of our programming is positive, but if not – and rarely do we have dominantly positive programming – the results can be failure and frustration. Just as Freud believed that we are driven by our subconscious patterning, the biologist Bruce Lipton in his book The Biology of Belief comments:

… We are completely unaware that our subconscious minds are making our everyday decisions. Our lives are essentially a printout of our subconscious programmes, behaviours that were fundamentally acquired from others (our parents, family and community) before we were six years old. As psychologists recognise, a majority of these developmental programmes are limiting and disempowering.

Because Switchwords talk directly to the subconscious and we work with them with an understanding of the power the subconscious has to direct our actions (and win out over our conscious mind), we can turn our subconscious into a friend rather than an enemy we must defeat. The language of Switchwords communicates with the part of us that has most influence over our actions, decisions and attitudes.

What the subconscious learns at night school

According to recent research at Northwestern University, Chicago, sleep could be the key to reprogramming unconscious attitudes. ‘Although the tendency for people to endorse racist or sexist attitudes explicitly has decreased in recent years, social biases may nevertheless influence people’s behaviour in an implicit or unconscious manner, regardless of their intentions or efforts to avoid bias,’ say Gordon B. Feld and Jan Born in their report ‘Unlearning implicit social biases during sleep’. In one study, the team looked at unconscious bias towards gender and race. They presented two biases: one, that science is more likely to be associated with a man than a woman; and two, that a black face is more likely to be associated with bad words than a white face.

A group of 40 white men and women were exposed to pictures of women and science-related words, such as ‘maths’, ‘geometry’ or ‘physics’. Researcher Jessica Creery explains, ‘We got them to strongly associate women with science words. So every time they saw a woman that was shown with a science word, they had to press a button, and every time they correctly and quickly pressed that button, they would hear a very unique sound.’ (If they didn’t press the button, they wouldn’t hear a sound.) Then the subjects repeated the counter-bias, this time between a black face and positive words, hearing a different, distinct sound when quickly pushing the button. When the subjects were in a deep sleep, one of the sounds (for women/science or black face/good) was played to them quietly so as not to disturb them. When they woke up, the subjects were played both sounds and tested again, and the results showed they had less bias associated with the one sound they were played during sleep. This lead the researchers to deduce, in Jessica Creery’s words, that ‘associations that you learn while you’re awake are strengthened while you’re asleep’.

Although the researchers state that it’s difficult to see how long the effects of the counter-bias sleep training may last – due to the reinforcement of stereotypes through the media, for example – this study does show that it is possible to reprogramme implicit social bias buried in the subconscious mind, and that sleep – an unconscious state – is the key to this learning. The report authors explain how this happens:

During sleep, information recently stored in the brain can be integrated with other information and transformed into stable representations through a process known as systems-level consolidation. The mechanisms of this transformation are thought to involve repeated reactivation of information, particularly during sleep, leading to subsequent improvement in post-sleep memory performance.

Just as sound was used as a trigger to embed a memory and strengthen an association at an unconscious level during sleep in the experiment, Switchwords, I believe, as sound vibrations that talk to the unconscious, have a similar impact, strengthening new, positive associations and reducing a bias towards unwanted beliefs. Feld and Born also suggest that ‘novel sleep manipulations could be adapted to aid people in changing various unwanted or maladaptive habits, such as smoking, unhealthy eating, catastrophising or selfishness’.

To empower Switchwords by listening to them during sleep, see here (#litres_trial_promo).

Recognising self-conflict and dealing with ‘block’ attitudes

Blocks are logical. They have a purpose. They are not necessarily bad, limiting or disempowering. Often, they are there to protect us from a feeling associated with a memory we don’t want to revisit. When blocks become not just blocks to the past but blocks to the future, however, it’s time to identify why they exist and release the patterns of thinking they create. Generally, our blocks are hidden from our conscious awareness in our subconscious databank. As the subconscious drives so much of our everyday behaviour, we can often find that when we want to make positive changes to our lives we come up against conflict within. This struggle is a sign that we want to change.

Are you in conflict?

As the subconscious mind is powerful, it needs powerful motivation to change and clear old beliefs. We need to deliver this motivation in a different language, using words that don’t always make sense to the conscious mind. As Colette’s experience below shows (which may resonate with many of you wanting to break unhealthy habits), without the subconscious mind’s agreement with your plans your efforts will be half-hearted, and being stuck in a cycle of self-conflict leads to frustration and even despair. It also means your efforts will be short-lived – after all, it’s really uncomfortable to be in conflict with yourself for any length of time, so you give up on the diet, the new venture or that new job, which brings temporary relief from these feelings, but doesn’t ultimately move you towards your goal.

Colette’s story: Weighing up the past

Colette was 10 kilos overweight and admitted that she sabotaged her diet after around two weeks – just when she was beginning to feel and look better. She said, ‘Sometimes I would really hate myself for doing it – gorging on chocolate and giving up on myself – but I would do it anyway.’ Colette had been slim when a teenager and in her early twenties. She’d had a great figure (‘I had a tiny waist and big boobs’) and, as a consequence, lots of male interest. She dated lots of boys, and by the time she was 18 she admits she had ‘a bit of a reputation. I didn’t do half of the things I was accused of sexually, but somehow my body alone seemed to say it all.’ When she met her long-term partner John, she piled on the weight. After her first attempt to lose weight on a sensible long-term eating plan, she organised an evening with friends at a bar. ‘John was away that night and I was looking forward to going out – I’d lost loads of weight, I’d bought some new clothes, and I walked into the bar looking better than I had in years. All of a sudden, eyes were upon me. And I loved it – for the first time in ages, I was getting male attention.’ But over the next three months Colette ate lots more and regained her fat.

‘I came to understand that fat protected me from a part of myself I didn’t trust,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to be with John, but being slim again took me right back to being a teenager – when I wasn’t good at saying no to advances.’ Colette’s weight gain was logical. It served a purpose in her life, keeping away feelings of shame and guilt, but it was slowly eating away at her confidence to take control of her weight and her life.

She chanted the Switchwords FORGIVE and RESTORE. Colette is working on liking herself more and trusting that she will feel safe at whatever weight she chooses to be.

Recognising self-conflict

You know when you’re in a conscious/subconscious conflict when there’s negative self-talk. There’s frustration, irritation and self-criticism, and projection of all this onto other people who make you feel bad because of their success. And then you’re more annoyed with yourself for being negative about people you know you should applaud – and so the cycle continues. The simplest way to look at this is to honestly assess if your actions reflect your goals. Do you take action, commit to a goal and do what you say you’ll do most of the time?

One key indicator of self-conflict is procrastination. When we procrastinate (becoming indecisive or reluctant to take action) it’s likely that we are avoiding not just the task, but also the feelings we’ll have to encounter if we do the task. If we begin that book, mow the lawn, turn down that job, will it lead to failure, regret or even a simple lack of enjoyment we don’t want to deal with? Procrastination keeps us safe from feelings we don’t want to feel, but procrastination also keeps us stuck. The more we procrastinate, the more the experience of procrastination itself (never mind the old experiences that might be causing it) becomes established as a neural pathway in the brain. This happens because our lived experiences cause our brain cells – neurons – to connect with each other and grow, or, as Hebb’s Law has it: ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together.’ Procrastination becomes a habit, and the more you do it – like any habit – the more familiar it becomes. As that neural pathway grows from a country lane to a motorway, busy with avoidance thoughts, procrastination becomes the reflex response when faced with a decision. It inhibits our sense of confidence and imbues us with a lack of self-trust – we can’t rely on ourselves when we need to.

Try this: Get out of self-conflict and align with your goal

Here are two Switch-pairs to help clear the block of self-conflict: RELEASE-RESISTANCE and TOGETHER-CHANGE. First, say RELEASE-RESISTANCE. How do you feel? What’s going on in your body? Did you sigh and feel a sense of release?

Now declare TOGETHER-CHANGE. TOGETHER, the master Switchword, brings your conscious and subconscious minds together as one. CHANGE clears away whatever you don’t want or need (including anxiety, pain and negative thoughts – see here (#litres_trial_promo)). Try also the finger-muscle test to see which Switch-pair resonates most strongly for you (see here (#litres_trial_promo)).