The 95% Rule

Did you know that that 95% of what you do and say each day is determined and controlled by your unconscious mind?  Don’t confuse this with the popular “We only use 10% of our brain.” statistic.  They’re completely different, one is physical mass ratio and the other is what that 10% mass does. 

Here is a great example of what I’m talking about.  This weekend I took a trip from Seattle up to Vancouver BC to attend a small workshop.  It was a very good trip and well worth the my time and investment.  But the event isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about; it is the drive itself.

As I always do, I ran Google maps to get the specific driving directions and estimated trip time to set my schedule accordingly.  As you may or may not know, the driving instructions give you specific turns and the distance between them so you can better judge where you are, to where you are going. 

At one particlar junction I was to make a turn on to Highway 91, travel for 1.7 miles and it would lead me to Highway 91A.  Easy right?  As I’m driving (and listening to a podcast on my ipod) I realize that I seem to have traveled further than 1.7 miles and must have missed my turn off to Highway 91A.  I decide to turn around and go back and see where I missed my turn, so I take the next available exit, just before the Queensborough Bridge. 

That particular exit was probably the worst exit I could have taken to try and turn around.  It was a series of twists and turns that intersected and wrapped around and could be confusing to someone unfamilar with the area and trying to get turned around.

All of a sudden I made a sharp left turn across three lanes to catch a particular off-ramp.  In this crazy manuever, I made a decision to turn, checked my mirrors, turned my head to visually confirm a safe route, made the turn and read the new signs, all unconsciously.  My conscious mind had been instantly taken over by the unconscious mind and was not making any decisions at this point.  Why it did this was unclear at the time.

Well come to find out, I was right back on the original Highway 91 that I had turned off of.  My conscious mind was throwing a fit, telling itself how stupid that little maneuver was, that I was going to be late for my meeting and that I couldn’t turn off again because I was committed to crossing the Queensborough Bridge and had no idea where it would take me.

So onward I travel waiting to come to the next exit so I could try and turn around again and get back on track.  The next exit; Highway 91A!

Besides consciously feeling a bit foolish about this little fiasco, I was completely fascinated and grateful about the way my unconscious mind took over, KNOWING that getting back on my original course would take me where I needed to go.  You see what happened is that my unconscious mind remembered the map of Vancouver I looked at 3 hours earlier.  It determined that my conscious move to turn off Highway 91 was in error and corrected my action before I made things worse. 

These kind of situations happen to all of us everyday, but are you aware of what is happening?  Communication and actions through the unconscious mind occurs every second of the day (95% of the time) and when you increase the communication between the conscious and unconscious mind, a synergy begins to develop between the two and the internal arguments start to diminish.  This is a profound feeling that keeps you on track, stress free and opens your eyes to so many more opportunities that your internal filters would normally disregard.

I will be sharing more and more of these kinds of stories from myself and from those around me.  I would love to hear about your experiences.  Are you at war or at peace with your internal dialogue?