Often called the ‘therapist’s therapist’, Alistair has worked as coach and mentor to celebrities, rock and pop stars, entrepreneurs, world champion athletes and CEOs, and has personally coached some of the world’s most successful people.
In this funny and interesting TED talk Alistair tells us that our unconscious mind operates at 100,000 miles per second and our conscious mind operates at 100 miles per second.
So despite your best efforts to change your negative behavior or habit, your unconscious mind had the decision to continue 7 seconds before your conscious mind attempts to change.
The unconscious mind with its extraordinary power and speed has research, compared, analyzed, studied patterning and arrives at its “considered decision” 7 seconds before your slower conscious mind has a chance.
In order to effectively make change you need to soothe the amygdala, so it has a neutral emotional response and then give information and suggestions in such a way that it is not critiqued – it is just accepted as the new behavior.
He calls this functional awareness which is very different from hypnosis which he says is misunderstood and misguided, and from meditation which is just the passive observer.
He hopes that other researchers will continue to study Functional awareness to bring dissociation from the negative, fear, self sabotaging thoughts by using language and imagination thereby creating states in our mind to allow change.
Original Source: TEDx Talks Noosa
