If you’re dissatisfied with your current job, and you know there must be something for you, how do you go about finding it? Let your subconscious be your guide.
What’s your subconscious? It’s the innate part of every person that includes memories of all one’s past experiences, associations, connections — the sum total of what we call the intuition. It’s when an idea suddenly flashes into your head and you know instinctively it’s true. It makes absolute perfect sense — 2 + 2 = 4 — so you decide to follow it.
The subconscious is the opposite of the rational mind, which uses deduction to solve problems. If you’re a scientist, that’s your forte: breaking down a problem into its many parts, analyzing each one, and then solving the problem by putting the parts back together. The subconscious functions in a totally different way. It finds likenesses in a problem and then matches them up.
Say, you always liked to play with legos and building blocks when you were a kid. You loved getting down on the floor with your brother and creating houses and castles, schools and parking garages. But your parents come from a long line of lawyers and wanted their kids to follow in the family tradition.
They were very disappointed when you proudly announced that you wanted to be an architect. But they bit their tongues and supported your ambitions. Now they’re proud of you, the first woman principal at one of the top global firms whose buildings stretch from China to Brazil. Little do they know how bored you are and how much you want stretch your wings.
So it’s time to rely on your subconscious for a change. It may help you to know that discontent will drive you and inspire you. But an essential tool is patience. As long as you keep searching, you need to know that you’ll ultimately find something that’s satisfying. Maybe your love of hiking in the Rockies will inspire you to join a firm that builds log cabins, so you can be in nature while you work, or your love of music will lead you to study acoustics and you’ll end up founding your own firm that specializes in renovating concert halls at colleges and universities all over the country.
My writing career started with a mentor in college and led, after a string of meaningful coincidences, to my becoming a bestselling author of health and lifestyle books. A meaningful coincidence is when a synchronicity of events reflects more than chance. And it plays out the same way that the subconscious solves problems — matching up likenesses. For instance, I didn’t set out to be a writer, but a series of events pushed me in that direction. My mentor in graduate school suggested that I write papers and publish them in prestigious journals. That gave me credentials as a writer. In the meantime I worked as a teacher of special education kids and researched the acidalkaline balance to help cure one of my student’s health issues.
When I didn’t find books on that topic, I wrote them. Now I have written
The Subconscious: Your Port in the Storm, which is the topic of this article.