In the self-improvement classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy claims that all of your life experiences are the result of the interaction between your conscious and subconscious minds: Your subconscious mind creates your life experiences according to your habitual conscious thoughts and ingrained beliefs. Murphy argues that you can dramatically improve your life experiences by using your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and beliefs upon your subconscious mind.
We’ll first explore Murphy’s explanation of how your subconscious mind learns from your habitual thoughts to influence your feelings and behaviors. We’ll also explain how you’re designed to experience happiness because you have an inbuilt connection to a benevolent higher power (Universal Consciousness). Then, we’ll clarify why your conscious thoughts create negative experiences in your life. Finally, we’ll discuss specific methods you can use to train your subconscious mind to create positive life experiences.
According to Murphy, your mind is made up of two parts: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
Murphy explains that your conscious mind is your active mind. It contains all of the thoughts and feelings that you’re aware of at any given moment. You use it to judge your environment and to make choices and decisions based on these judgments.
(Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s judgment of the conscious mind as your active mind. According to Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!), your conscious mind continually identifies, compares, and analyzes all of the information you perceive so that it can make decisions about what is relevant to you. However, Tracy notes that your conscious mind functions like a binary computer—it has no memory and can only think one thought at a time.)
Meanwhile, Murphy explains that your subconscious mind is your passive mind. It’s always awake because it regulates all of your bodily functions, and it records and stores your every experience even when you’re not consciously paying attention. Over 90% of your brain’s activity takes place in your subconscious mind: It’s a reservoir of thoughts, feelings, and memories that lies beneath your conscious awareness.
(Shortform note: There is still much to be learned about how the subconscious mind works, but even in 1963, Murphy was right about its importance—neuroscientists have confirmed that 95% of your brain activity takes place beyond your conscious awareness, in your subconscious mind. Further, research reveals that your subconscious mind makes decisions about how you choose to feel or act before your conscious mind even perceives the need to make a decision.)
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind is impersonal because it passively accepts your habitual conscious thoughts without question. In other words, it doesn’t judge any of your conscious thoughts (in the same way that your computer doesn’t judge the documents you save onto your hard drive). All of the thoughts you think in your conscious mind filter down into your subconscious mind and leave an impression. The more often you think certain thoughts, the heavier the impression you leave on your subconscious mind.
According to Murphy, the way your conscious thoughts imprint upon and mold your subconscious mind determines your personality traits and how you respond to your life experiences. This is because your habitual thoughts train your subconscious mind to create associations and shortcuts between all of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences it has stored.
Murphy also claims that your subconscious mind forms conclusions about what your overarching beliefs are based on your habitual conscious thoughts. It then automatically relies upon these overarching beliefs to process and catalog all of the information it records.
(Shortform note: Murphy claims that your subconscious mind passively and impersonally carries out the orders it’s given based on your habitual conscious thoughts and overarching beliefs. However, he doesn’t mention that while your subconscious mind is at the mercy of your conscious mind, it also influences your conscious mind to think in specific ways and leads you to act automatically in ways that align with your overarching beliefs. According to Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), the conclusions that your subconscious mind forms about your beliefs and how it should respond to your experiences affect the way you engage with the world by triggering your emotions and leading you to react in specific ways to your environment.)
Why Your Subconscious Mind Relies on Your Conscious Thoughts to Create Shortcuts
Research supports Murphy’s claim that your conscious thoughts train your subconscious mind to create shortcuts. Your subconscious mind is an unlimited memory bank that permanently stores your every life experience: As Murphy describes, everything you experience is imprinted in this area of your brain. This memory bank processes 4 million bits (a measure of data transfer) per second and includes both significant and insignificant experiences including how you felt the first time you fell in love and the many hours you’ve wasted on Netflix.
According to psychologists, your conscious mind relies on this memory bank to access the information you need on a moment-by-moment basis. Since this memory bank is so full of information, it needs to create shortcuts so that it can quickly sift through everything it has stored and retrieve the information you need. Therefore, it relies on your conscious thoughts to categorize everything it stores in terms of how relevant it is to your habitual way of thinking.
Murphy argues that while your subconscious mind does influence your feelings and behaviors and lead you to create certain situations based on these reactions, it also plays a far more important role in your life: It creates specific life experiences that align with your habitual conscious thoughts and beliefs.
How exactly does your subconscious mind create life experiences? Murphy claims that your subconscious mind is connected to a “Higher Power,” or Universal Consciousness—the invisible power or “life force” that created and continues to manage the entire universe. According to Murphy, this force lives within all organic and inorganic matter, connects us all, and governs all of the interactions that underlie the universe.
(Shortform note: Murphy refers to this power as “God,” “Infinite Intelligence,” and a “Higher Power.” We’ll refer to this concept as “Universal Consciousness” throughout the rest of this guide for clarity and consistency.)
Your Subconscious Mind Is Your Spiritual Mind
Murphy’s ideas about how a higher power creates your life experiences are inextricably linked to the New Thought Movement that originated in the United States during the early 19th century. While many writers and philosophers, including Murphy, contributed to the movement, Prentice Mulford was pivotal in the development of New Thought Thinking. Many of the principles he discusses in a series of essays published during 1886-1892 (collected in Your Forces and How to Use Them) underpin New Thought philosophy.
While Mulford doesn’t specifically discuss the role the subconscious mind plays in creating experiences (Freud discovered the subconscious mind in 1900 after Mulford’s time), he does emphasize the connection between your “spiritual” unconscious side and a higher power. For Mulford, your unconscious mind is your spiritual mind. Similarly, while Murphy reframes Mulford’s writings to include research about the subconscious mind, he (Murphy) also argues that your spiritual connection to this power lies at the heart of your every experience.
Murphy argues that your subconscious mind is infinite and has no limitations: There is no limit to the amount of information it can record and store, and its connection to Universal Consciousness gives it access to all of the information in the universe. Through this access, it orchestrates interactions and creates experiences that line up with your habitual conscious thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. These results reflect both how you feel about yourself and what you expect to experience in your life. They encompass every area of your life including your health, relationships, finances, and career.
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind leads you to these experiences through the use of intuition. Each time you feel inspired, have a gut instinct, or the impulse or urge to do something, this is your subconscious communicating and guiding you towards specific life experiences that match your habitual conscious thoughts. Murphy’s theory explains the coincidences and serendipitous moments that occur in your life.
For example, you’re on your way somewhere but feel impelled to take a different route. This route leads you to bump into someone you were planning to get in touch with. Though you may pass it off as a happy coincidence, Murphy argues that this is your subconscious mind creating your life experiences.
The Law of Attraction: The Universe Communicates With You Through Intuition
Like Murphy, the Law of Attraction (LoA) also claims that your life experiences match your habitual thoughts. This philosophy is centered around the belief that you get what you focus on: Positive thoughts lead to positive consequences, and negative thoughts lead to negative consequences. However, unlike Murphy, the LoA doesn’t factor in the role that your subconscious mind plays in this process. Instead, it argues that your thoughts and beliefs (what the LoA calls your “frequency”) send a signal to the universe. The universe then delivers experiences that match your thoughts and beliefs.
Similarly to Murphy, the LoA claims that your frequency influences your emotions and your intuition—the universe creates your feelings of intuition to guide you to experiences that match your thoughts. This explains why you’re repeatedly drawn to the same types of situations and life experiences.
According to research, intuition does give us the ability to know something without conscious analytical thought—this knowledge comes from all of the information you have stored in your subconscious mind. While it’s clear that your subconscious mind does influence your emotions and your intuitive feelings, there isn’t any scientific research to back up the theory that these feelings are messages from the universe.
Murphy believes that Universal Consciousness is a benevolent force that your subconscious mind is connected to, and the natural by-products of this force are positive: vitality, bliss, and forward motion. Because you have an innate connection to this force, you are a physical extension of this positive force—he explains that a stream of positive energy flows within you to nurture you both physically and emotionally, and around you to create joyous life experiences. Consequently, Murphy concludes that you’re designed to think in ways that align with this energy so that you can live in a constant state of bliss.
(Shortform note: The belief in an inherently good higher power lies at the forefront of most dominant religions. Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens) explains that the idea of a benevolent God originally arose from the human need to control our environment: Humans created Gods and assigned them the power to control the things they couldn’t (epidemics, droughts). By assigning these Gods with personalities and biases, humans could believe that these Gods took an active interest in the human world and that they could pray for intervention. Further, the act of turning things over to a higher power gave humans a way of rationalizing uncontrollable events and the resilience to face challenges and upheavals.)
According to Murphy, the impressions your conscious thoughts leave on your subconscious mind influence the way it interacts with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness. If you’re not entirely happy with your life experiences, it’s because you're thinking “false” negative thoughts that contradict the positive force of Universal Consciousness. Let’s explore this idea in detail.
Murphy argues that negative thought patterns arise due to your lack of faith in your benevolent higher power. If you trusted it to work on your behalf, you’d have nothing to fear and no need to struggle because you’d know that this higher power is working to help you. But, your lack of faith leads you to the false conclusion that you have to struggle by yourself and force things into place if you want to achieve any sort of success or happiness in your life. As a result, you feel alone and unsupported, and, when things don’t go the way you want them to, you suffer from low self-confidence and poor expectations. Your subconscious mind then fulfills these expectations by creating difficult and uncomfortable experiences.
Faith in God Leads to Inner Peace and Fulfilment
Murphy’s claim that lack of faith leads to difficult life experiences lies at the heart of many dominant religions. For example, Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, explains that God created you to fulfill a specific purpose that he planned for you. This purpose underlies the meaning of every aspect of your life.
According to Warren, when you don’t trust that God has assigned you a specific purpose, you fail to understand the meaning of your life. This is because you allow yourself to be driven by a variety of external, emotional, and moral factors to motivate your thoughts and behaviors. Warren argues that these motivations destroy the possibility of peace in your life because you always feel anxious and unsure about why you’re on this earth. Consequently, your anxiety makes you feel like you always have to struggle through difficult life experiences.
On the other hand, when you believe that God has a purpose for you, you understand the meaning of your life and feel at peace. Warren claims that this is because, instead of relying on different motivations, you feel as if you’re being guided by a single clear motivation: to fulfill God’s purpose for you. As a result, you're able to appreciate the significance of your every life experience. This allows you to focus your thoughts and behaviors in a way that aligns with God’s purpose and leads to inner peace and fulfillment.
Murphy argues that every time you think negative thoughts, you block your subconscious mind from accessing both the useful information you have stored in your mind in your subconscious and the positive energy flowing from Universal Consciousness that creates positive experiences. As a result, your subconscious mind creates negative experiences that align with your fears and worries. According to Murphy, your negative thoughts impact your mental and physical health and your ability to create success and happiness in all areas of your life.
(Shortform note: Research on the topic of cognitive distortions supports Murphy’s argument that negative thoughts contribute to negative life experiences. Cognitive distortions are irrational thought patterns that manifest as negative emotions, increased anxiety, depression, and mental illness. These negative mental states lead people to take actions that lead to negative experiences. According to this research, cognitive distortions are more likely to occur when you habitually think negative thoughts. This is because your subconscious mind gets used to processing everything it perceives in a negative light so much so that you wire your brain to always respond negatively to your experiences.)
According to Murphy, the process to retrain your subconscious mind is very simple: You just need to use your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and images upon your subconscious mind. Murphy explains that there are two steps to making this process work for you: First, you need to decide to think positive thoughts. Then, you need to trust that your subconscious mind will create experiences that align with your positive thoughts. Let’s explore these two ideas in detail.
Murphy argues that you need to take control of what thoughts your subconscious mind identifies with by consciously deciding to get in charge of your thoughts. Recall that your conscious mind is active and your subconscious mind is passive. Even though your subconscious mind creates your life experiences, it can only follow the habitual conscious thoughts—or in other words, instructions—from your conscious mind. He suggests that you explicitly tell your subconscious mind that, from now on, you’re only going to think positive thoughts. This will give you the conviction you need to change your conscious thoughts and improve your life.
(Shortform note: The process to take control of and change your thoughts may not be as easy as Murphy makes out. This is because your thoughts and your state of mind reinforce one another to create an internal feedback loop that’s difficult to break out of: Your thoughts determine your state of mind (thinking about problems makes you feel anxious) and your state of mind determines your thoughts (you feel anxious so you think about your problems). However, research reveals that making the effort to become more aware of your thoughts allows you to disentangle yourself from this feedback loop. Instead of feeling as if you’re stuck within an uncontrollable cycle of thoughts, your awareness allows you to view and change your thoughts objectively.)
To explain why you need to trust the process of your subconscious mind creating positive thoughts for it to work, we’ll first explain Murphy’s beliefs about how your body heals from mental and physical injuries. Recall that your subconscious mind regulates all of your vital bodily functions—this includes the healing process. For example, it regulates the little paper cuts that heal overnight or the headache that fades away without intervention.
When you rely on intervention to heal yourself, such as surgery, psychology, or spiritual help (you pray for your healing), you assume that an outside source has healed you: “I am healed now because of that doctor or that religion.” However, Murphy argues that this is not the case—your subconscious mind is always in control of your healing process, and it is your faith in the healer (your method, doctor, or religion) that heals you, not the healer itself. Your conscious faith that the process will work imprints upon your subconscious mind and instructs it to heal you.
This faith isn’t restricted to the healing process but applies to all areas of your life, from your relationships to your general success. Your subconscious mind operates according to your beliefs and expectations. Therefore, Murphy concludes that you must trust that your positive thoughts will create positive experiences for you if you want the process to work.
Your Expectations Shape Your Life Experiences
In this section, Murphy argues that having faith that something will happen—that you’ll be healed from an illness, or that thinking positively will lead to positive experiences—is crucial in making this thing actually happen. This concept is similar to the well-known placebo effect: the idea that people can actually heal from an illness simply if they believe or have faith that they’ve been treated with medicine, even if the “medicine” is actually fake. Therefore, to further explore Murphy’s argument, we’ll look at recent research studies that examine the impact of positive expectations and the placebo effect.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) explains that the placebo effect demonstrates how all of your experiences are shaped by the expectations you have going into them. According to Ariely, this phenomenon operates on two mechanisms: faith and conditioning.
Faith: If you have faith in the drug or the procedure, it’s more likely to make you feel better.
Conditioning: Your body naturally releases chemicals in expectation of what’s to come. If you have faith in your treatment, you feel more confident and you expect to get better. This prompts your body to produce chemicals that do make you feel better. For example, when you have a headache and you decide to take some painkillers, your body expects to feel relief and starts releasing opiates and endorphins before you even put the tablet in your mouth.
Ariely argues that the placebo effect plays out in all areas of your life because your expectations heavily influence your perception of events. For example, if you walk into a dark alley expecting to come across danger, you experience a heightened awareness of danger. As a result, your heart rate increases and you notice every slight sound and flicker of movement. On the other hand, if you walk into this alley feeling relaxed and confident, your physiology remains the same and you’re not as alert to your surroundings.
Since your expectations alter your perceptions, they also alter the outcome of your experiences because your behavior is a result of how you respond to your perceptions. Therefore, if you have positive expectations about Murphy’s methods—you believe that practicing his methods and thinking positive thoughts will improve your life experiences—your perceptions will reflect this. You’ll find yourself paying more attention to what’s working and improving in your life, and this awareness will lead you to shift your behavior and open you up to new experiences. On the other hand, if you approach Murphy’s methods with low expectations, your perceptions will remain the same, and you won’t feel the impetus to change any of your behaviors.
Murphy suggests five methods you can use to take control of your conscious thoughts and train your subconscious mind to create positive experiences in your life:
Murphy believes that you need to focus on thinking only positive thoughts if you want your subconscious mind to create positive experiences. But how can you know whether your habitual conscious thoughts are positive or not? According to Murphy, you just need to judge how you feel. If you feel happy and you have positive expectations about your life, you’re thinking positive thoughts. On the other hand, if you don’t feel good about your life experiences, you’re thinking negative thoughts.
Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your thoughts and emotions are inextricably linked and confirms that positive thoughts make you feel happy. However, sometimes it’s not so easy to force yourself to think happy thoughts. Fortunately, there is a way to trick your brain into believing that you’re happy: smiling. Neuroscience research reveals that smiling spurs a chemical reaction in the brain that releases specific hormones including dopamine and serotonin. These hormones increase your happiness and reduce your stress levels. In short, smiling makes you feel happy. When you feel happy, you’re more inclined to think positive thoughts that continue to make you feel happy.)
To develop positive expectations, Murphy suggests that you think only about what you want to experience. Instead of worrying about how you’ll achieve something, focus on the end results and imagine the gratitude you’ll feel once you have it. This process will set a clear direction for your subconscious mind to move towards.
(Shortform note: Like Murphy, Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich), argues that you shouldn’t worry about how to achieve what you want. Instead, just expect everything to work out in your favor. Wattles suggests that imagining your desired end result and practicing gratitude in advance of receiving what you want, not only sends a clear message to the universe, but it also keeps you from becoming dissatisfied with your current life experiences. This is because, when you imagine feeling grateful for something you don’t yet have, you feel positive regardless of what’s actually happening in your life. The more positive you feel, the more likely you are to adopt behaviors that move you closer to what you want.)
According to Murphy, when you first try to change your habitual conscious thoughts, you’ll need to apply conscious effort in order to think positively. But, with repetition, your positive thoughts will eventually imprint upon your subconscious mind to form positive beliefs, and outweigh any negative and outdated beliefs. As a result, your subconscious mind will influence you to think and behave in positive ways without conscious effort.
(Shortform note: While it’s true that repetition leads to automatic behavior, opinions vary on exactly how long it takes for your subconscious mind to become accustomed to your new thoughts. Research studies reveal that it can take between 18 and 254 days, or an average of 66 days, for habits to become automatic. The timeline depends on how consistently you practice your new habits—the more often you consciously practice thinking your chosen thoughts, the quicker your subconscious mind will align with these new thoughts.)
Murphy claims that, when you visualize an image, you add weight to the impression your conscious thoughts form in your subconscious mind. This is because your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality—it only knows that you’re thinking about something often enough to create a detailed picture in your mind. The more you dwell on this image, the more likely your subconscious is to accept this image as an instruction about what it should create.
(Shortform note: While Murphy argues that visualization can help to create your life experiences, research shows that visualization may negatively impact your subconscious mind when you apply it to your goals. In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday claims that visualization can confuse your subconscious mind and create the opposite effect of what you want to achieve: When your mind believes that you’ve already achieved something, you feel that you’ve made progress despite not having taken any measurable steps toward achieving your goal. This feeling of progress feels good, but it’s based on a false sense of achievement that may cause you to lose interest in trying to progress toward your goal.)
When you're awake and alert, you can’t help but think about and judge everything around you. According to Murphy, this is what your conscious mind is designed to do. Unfortunately, this creates problems for you when you’re trying to retrain your subconscious mind. This is because you can’t just change your habitual conscious thoughts and beliefs instantaneously—your mind needs time to get used to your new way of thinking. During this time, your conscious mind questions and contradicts the beliefs you want to change. This conflict between what you want to believe and what you do believe creates confusion for your subconscious mind because it’s not receiving clear instructions from your conscious mind.
For example, you want your subconscious to believe that you’re wealthy, But your conscious mind knows that you’re not rich. Each time you imagine yourself as wealthy, it offers counterproductive thoughts such as: “That’s not true because you’re not rich.”
Why Your Conscious Mind Sabotages Your Self-Improvement Efforts
Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your conscious mind interferes with the changes you seek to make. This is because your subconscious mind influences the way your conscious mind perceives and responds to your environment. Part of this influence includes protecting you from reliving painful experiences that it has recorded: Your subconscious mind inhibits you from repeating painful experiences by encouraging your conscious mind to engage in self-sabotaging thoughts such as, “I failed last time so there’s no point in trying again.”
Moving forward, be patient with yourself when attempting to change your thought patterns. Your conscious mind will offer resistance but, with time and practice, your subconscious mind will become accustomed to your new thoughts and beliefs. As a result, it will encourage your conscious mind to work with you instead of against you.
Since your subconscious mind is more receptive to your thoughts when your conscious mind is relaxed, Murphy recommends that you make the habit of thinking about what you want before you go to sleep. In addition, if you have problems that need solving, instruct your subconscious mind to come up with solutions while you sleep. According to Murphy, your subconscious mind will provide these solutions to you in the form of urges and inspiration when you awake.
(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport backs up Murphy’s idea that sleep and relaxation help you to find solutions. Newport discusses the benefits of “productive meditation”—using your relaxation time as a constructive way to solve problems. He suggests that you’re more likely to do your best work when you alternate between periods of intense focus and relaxation. While you’re relaxing, your mind will work through the problems you’ve lined up for it and, without your conscious interference, can more quickly or creatively arrive at a solution.)
In the self-improvement classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy claims that all of your life experiences are the result of the interaction between your conscious and subconscious minds: Your subconscious mind creates your life experiences according to your habitual conscious thoughts and ingrained beliefs. Murphy argues that you can dramatically improve your life experiences by using your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and beliefs upon your subconscious mind.
Dr. Joseph Murphy (1898-1981) was a pioneering voice in the New Thought movement (which we’ll explore further in the Intellectual Context section below). He was a bestselling author, renowned speaker, and Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science, a religious faction within the wider New Thought movement. This religion’s core belief is that God is good, the source of all creation, and omnipresent. Further, this faction teaches that negative circumstances only come about when we fail to practice the presence of God—in other words, when we think and act in ways contrary to God’s inherent goodness.
Murphy authored 36 books including:
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind was Murphy’s most popular book. It was originally published in 1963 and has since been reprinted by various publishers including TarcherPerigee.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind contributed to the New Thought Movement: A spiritual movement that promotes the idea that we’re all connected to a benevolent “higher power.” According to this movement, we must align our conscious thoughts with this power by thinking positively to achieve success and happiness. Otherwise, our negative thoughts block our access to this positive force and create illness and failure in our lives.
Murphy’s ideas are not necessarily new, and his success is partly due to the work of previous authors writing within the same genre. The premise that positive life experiences come from aligning your conscious thoughts and beliefs with a benevolent higher power has become increasingly popular since the publication of The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles in 1910. Wattles, like Murphy, asserts that your thoughts are the cause of your success, and offers advice on how to think constructively to create health, wealth, and satisfying experiences. Besides The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, other successful books in this genre include:
Published in 1963, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind has since been translated into 30 languages and sold millions of copies. It continues to be one of the most popular books in the self-improvement genre and has inspired influential self-improvement authors such as Tony Robbins (Awaken The Giant Within) and Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!). Both Robbins and Tracy write about similar ideas—that you have an innate ability to achieve extraordinary success and can unleash your potential by training yourself to think positively.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind enjoys thousands of excellent reviews—the majority of reviewers have labeled this book as “inspiring” and “motivational” and have employed Murphy’s techniques to make dramatic improvements to their lives.
However, some reviewers do find it difficult to take Murphy’s argument seriously—while he presents many anecdotal examples to demonstrate how people have improved their lives by employing his techniques, he doesn’t offer any scientific explanations to back up his statements. These reviewers find the book “weak on content,” “unconvincing,” and “too focused on religious concepts.” In addition, some reviewers find it difficult to move past the repetitive style of the book.
Throughout The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Murphy argues that you need to align your conscious thoughts with a higher power and have faith that your life will dramatically improve. He supports his argument with anecdotes that demonstrate how people have applied their conscious thoughts to solve a variety of problems, create happiness, and improve their lives.
Murphy organizes the material into 20 chapters to explain how improving your conscious thoughts can positively impact each area of your life: health, wealth, relationships, and success. However, the content of each chapter is largely indistinguishable from the content in others because each chapter simply reinforces one single concept—that your thoughts impact your life experiences. Because the chapters don’t progress to include any new explanations or research to back up Murphy’s argument, many reviewers note that the material suffers from repetition.
In this guide, we’ve reorganized Murphy’s ideas into four distinct parts to reduce repetition. This reorganization also makes it easier to separate Murphy’s philosophy from the actionable ideas you can apply in your own life.
We also compare and contrast each key concept with up-to-date psychological research, and we expand on Murphy’s methods with actionable ideas from other self-improvement practitioners and psychologists.
In the self-improvement classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy claims that all of your life experiences are the result of the interaction between your conscious and subconscious minds: Your subconscious mind creates your life experiences according to your habitual conscious thoughts and ingrained beliefs. Murphy argues that you can dramatically improve your life experiences by using your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and beliefs upon your subconscious mind.
We’ll discuss The Power of Your Subconscious Mind in four parts. In this first part of the guide, we’ll start by exploring Murphy’s explanation of how your subconscious mind works—it identifies with your habitual conscious thoughts and forms conclusions about your beliefs. Next, we’ll explain Murphy’s belief that you’re designed to be happy because your subconscious mind has an inbuilt connection to a benevolent higher power (Universal Consciousness) that flows within you and around you to create your life experiences.
In the second part, we’ll explain why your conscious thoughts sometimes inhibit the flow of Universal Consciousness to create poor health and negative experiences in your life.
In the third part, we’ll discuss two steps to prime your subconscious mind to create positive results: decide to think positive thoughts and trust the process to work for you.
In the final part, we’ll explore specific methods you can use to align your conscious thoughts with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness and train your subconscious mind to create positive experiences in your life.
According to Murphy, your mind is made up of two parts: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Let’s explore each part individually.
Murphy explains that your conscious mind is your active mind. It contains all of the thoughts and feelings that you’re aware of at any given moment. You use it to judge your environment and to make choices and decisions based on these judgments.
(Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s judgment of the conscious mind as your active mind. According to Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!), your conscious mind continually identifies, compares, and analyzes all of the information you perceive so that it can make decisions about what is relevant to you. However, Tracy notes that your conscious mind functions like a binary computer—it has no memory and can only think one thought at a time.)
Murphy explains that your subconscious mind is your passive mind. It’s always awake because it regulates all of your bodily functions, and it records and stores your every experience, even when you’re not consciously paying attention. Over 90% of your brain’s activity takes place in your subconscious mind: It’s a reservoir of thoughts, feelings, and memories that lies beneath your conscious awareness.
(Shortform note: There is still much to be learned about how the subconscious mind works, but even in 1963, Murphy was right about its importance—neuroscientists have confirmed that 95% of your brain activity takes place beyond your conscious awareness, in your subconscious mind. Further, research reveals that your subconscious mind makes decisions about how you choose to feel or act before your conscious mind even perceives the need to make a decision.)
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind is impersonal because it passively accepts your habitual conscious thoughts without question. In other words, it doesn’t judge any of your conscious thoughts (in the same way that your computer doesn’t judge the documents you save onto your hard drive). All of the thoughts you think in your conscious mind filter down into your subconscious mind and leave an impression. The more often you think certain thoughts, the heavier the impression you leave on your subconscious mind.
According to Murphy, the way your conscious thoughts imprint upon and mold your subconscious mind determines your personality traits and how you respond to your life experiences. This is because your habitual thoughts train your subconscious mind to create associations and shortcuts between all of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences it has stored.
Why Your Subconscious Mind Relies on Your Conscious Thoughts to Create Shortcuts
Research supports Murphy’s claim that your conscious thoughts train your subconscious mind to create shortcuts. Your subconscious mind is an unlimited memory bank that permanently stores your every life experience: As Murphy describes, everything you experience is imprinted in this area of your brain. This memory bank processes 4 million bits (a measure of data transfer) per second and includes both significant and insignificant experiences, such as how you felt the first time you fell in love and the many hours you’ve wasted on Netflix. According to one researcher, by the time you’re 21, your subconscious mind has stored more than 100 times the contents of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
According to psychologists, your conscious mind relies on this memory bank to access the information you need on a moment-by-moment basis. For example, when you need to remember the name of someone you’ve just bumped into, you retrieve the name from where it’s been stored in your subconscious mind. Since this memory bank is so full of information, it needs to create shortcuts so that it can quickly sift through everything it has stored and retrieve the information you need. Therefore, it relies on your conscious thoughts to categorize everything it stores in terms of how relevant it is to your habitual way of thinking.
For example, your subconscious mind may classify your best friend’s name as something important to remember, since you consciously speak with and interact with this person regularly. However, it’s unlikely to give the name of a stranger the same level of importance and precedence in its memory bank.
To clarify how your conscious thoughts mold your subconscious mind, we’ll first explore the process that enables you to use shortcuts to perform certain tasks automatically. Then, we’ll explore how, according to Murphy, this same process influences your feelings, behaviors, and personality.
Murphy explains that you’re able to perform tasks without having to apply conscious thought, such as riding a bike or getting dressed, because the impressions your habitual conscious thoughts make condition your subconscious mind to act automatically. When you’re learning how to do something new, you have to focus on what you’re doing and apply conscious effort in order to do it right. The more you practice this skill, the easier it becomes for you to perform the task without conscious effort. This is because your subconscious mind learns how to perform the task and takes control so that you can perform it automatically.
Why Repetition Leads to Automatic Behavior
Since The Power of Your Subconscious Mind’s publication in 1963, neuroscientists have developed the ability to observe how learning occurs at the molecular level—they can see what goes on inside our brains when we’re engaged in learning something new. While this research doesn’t specifically comment on the part that your subconscious mind plays in this process, it does include details about the impact of your short-term and long-term memory on learning, which are both stored in your subconscious mind.
The more you learn, the more you change the physical structure of your brain by strengthening specific neural pathways. Here’s a very brief overview of neural pathways:
The brain consists of a dense network of pathways consisting of neurons.
Synapses allow sensory information to be transmitted through this network of neurons.
This sensory information is stored in your short-term memory while your brain processes it by comparing it to the memories you’ve stored in your long-term memory (everything in your subconscious mind). This process determines whether the new sensory information is kept or discarded.
Neuroscientists believe that your memory and recall rely upon the relationship that your neurons have with each other. The stronger the relationship (the more frequently these neurons interact with each other), the stronger your ability to remember and recall what you need to do. This is because strong neural pathways heighten the transmission speed of information and allow you to effortlessly recall the information you need. This is why you can perform your routine tasks without conscious effort.
Every time you learn something new, you need to form new neural connections within the brain—this requires conscious effort and attention. When you attempt to do something new, your brain has to work much harder because you haven’t yet developed the specific neural pathways—the neurons required to achieve the task haven’t developed a relationship so their communication is inefficient. However, the more you practice, the more you strengthen your neural pathways and encourage the required neurons to interact and develop strong pathways. Stronger neural pathways allow your subconscious mind to take over the task without your conscious mind’s involvement.
In the same way that practicing a new skill conditions you to carry it out automatically, your habitual conscious thoughts condition your subconscious mind to identify and classify everything it perceives in a specific way. For example, if you habitually think that dogs are a threat, your subconscious mind classifies every dog it perceives as a threat. Murphy claims that this is because your subconscious mind forms conclusions about what your overarching beliefs are based on your habitual conscious thoughts. It then automatically relies upon these overarching beliefs to process and catalog all of the information it records.
The following examples illustrate how your subconscious mind creates conclusions from your overarching beliefs:
Example #1: You habitually think that “men are distrustful” and imprint this upon your subconscious mind. Your thoughts turn into a belief—your subconscious mind concludes that every man you think of or see is distrustful: “Men are distrustful, this is a man, therefore he is distrustful.”
Example #2: You habitually think about how uncomfortable you feel around strangers and imprint this into your subconscious mind. These thoughts turn into a belief so your subconscious mind concludes that every new person threatens your sense of safety and comfort: “Strangers make me uncomfortable, this is a new person, therefore I should feel uncomfortable.”
Your Habitual Thoughts Determine Your Feelings and Behavior
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind is at the mercy of your conscious mind—it simply carries out the orders it’s given based on your habitual conscious thoughts and overarching beliefs. However, he doesn’t expand further upon the interplay between your two minds: Your subconscious mind is at the mercy of your conscious mind but it also influences your conscious mind to think in specific ways and leads you to act automatically in ways that align with your overarching beliefs.
According to Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), the conclusions that your subconscious mind forms about your beliefs and how it should respond to your experiences affect the way you engage with the world. These conclusions trigger your emotions, color your perceptions and the way that you judge your environment, and lead you to react in specific ways to your environment.
Maltz argues that this interplay between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind then reinforces a behavioral cycle: Your subconscious mind’s interpretation of your environment justifies your habitual thoughts, feelings, and how you continue to behave—how you continue to think and behave further reinforces the way your subconscious mind perceives your environment, and so on.
For example, if you habitually worry about how much work you have to do and blame other people for wasting your time, your subconscious mind leads you to react to delays in ways that align with the conclusion it has formed about you: You don’t have time for delays, other people are to blame, you should feel angry. As a result, it makes you feel impatient and leads you to judge others harshly and lash out at those around you. It’s difficult to break free from this way of reacting to delays because your conscious and subconscious minds have become habituated to interacting in this way.
Murphy argues that while your subconscious mind does influence your feelings and behaviors and lead you to create certain situations based on these reactions, it also plays a far more important role in your life: It creates specific life experiences that align with your habitual conscious thoughts and beliefs.
How exactly does your subconscious mind create life experiences? Murphy claims that your subconscious mind is connected to a “Higher Power,” or Universal Consciousness—the invisible power or “life force” that created and continues to manage the entire universe. According to Murphy, this force lives within all organic and inorganic matter, connects us all, and governs all of the interactions that underlie the universe.
The following is an example of this life force and interaction at play: Ecosystems rely on multiple interactions to thrive—for example, bees are born knowing that their job is to pollinate flowers, while seeds contain all of the intelligence they need to blossom into flowers. The resulting interaction benefits the survival and reproduction of both bees and flowers, as well as all of the organisms within the ecosystem.
(Shortform note: Murphy refers to this power as “God,” “Infinite Intelligence,” and a “Higher Power.” We’ll refer to this concept as “Universal Consciousness” throughout the rest of this guide for clarity and consistency.)
Your Subconscious Mind Is Your Spiritual Mind
Murphy’s ideas about how a higher power creates your life experiences are inextricably linked to the New Thought Movement that originated in the United States during the early 19th century. While many writers and philosophers, including Murphy, contributed to the movement, Prentice Mulford was pivotal in the development of New Thought Thinking. Many of the principles he discusses in a series of essays published during 1886-1892 (collected in Your Forces and How to Use Them) underpin New Thought philosophy.
While Mulford doesn’t specifically discuss the role the subconscious mind plays in creating experiences (Freud discovered the subconscious mind in 1900 after Mulford’s time), he does emphasize the connection between your “spiritual” unconscious side and a higher power. For Mulford, your unconscious mind is your spiritual mind. Similarly, while Murphy reframes Mulford’s writings to include research about the subconscious mind, he (Murphy) also argues that your spiritual connection to this power lies at the heart of your every experience.
Despite its belief in a higher power, the New Thought Movement is not considered a religion. Rather, it is the expression of a blend of philosophical and scientific ideals accumulated from a variety of cultures and belief systems. There are various offshoots of this philosophy including Religious Science, Unity, and the Law of Attraction. In general, all adherents of New Thought share the following core beliefs:
God or Infinite Intelligence is the source of all matter within the universe, and it is omnipresent.
This God or Infinite Intelligence also lives within each of us.
Our life experiences are simply the manifestation of our mental and spiritual states. In other words, the interplay between our thoughts and God or Infinite Intelligence creates everything we experience.
Murphy argues that your subconscious mind is infinite and has no limitations: There is no limit to the amount of information it can record and store, and its connection to Universal Consciousness gives it access to all of the information in the universe. Through this access, it orchestrates interactions and creates experiences that line up with your habitual conscious thoughts, expectations, and beliefs. These results reflect both how you feel about yourself and what you expect to experience in your life. They encompass every area of your life including your health, relationships, finances, and career.
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind leads you to these experiences through the use of intuition. Each time you feel inspired, have a gut instinct, or the impulse or urge to do something, this is your subconscious communicating and guiding you towards specific life experiences that match your habitual conscious thoughts. Murphy’s theory explains the coincidences and serendipitous moments that occur in your life.
For example, you’re on your way somewhere but feel impelled to take a different route. This route leads you to bump into someone you were planning to get in touch with. Though you may pass it off as a happy coincidence, Murphy argues that this is your subconscious mind creating your life experiences.
The Law of Attraction: The Universe Communicates With You Through Intuition
Murphy claims that your subconscious mind creates life experiences that align with your habitual conscious thoughts. But he doesn’t explain how it produces results. Therefore, we’ll consider how Law of Attraction theory argues this interplay occurs, as it aligns well with the principles of the New Thought Movement.
Like Murphy, the Law of Attraction (LoA) also claims that your life experiences match your habitual thoughts. This philosophy is centered around the belief that you get what you focus on: Positive thoughts lead to positive consequences, and negative thoughts lead to negative consequences. However, unlike Murphy, the LoA doesn’t factor in the role that your subconscious mind plays in this process. Instead, it argues that your thoughts and beliefs (what the LoA calls your “frequency”) send a signal to the universe. The universe then delivers experiences that match your thoughts and beliefs.
To visualize how this works, picture a vast, infinite ocean of magnetic thoughts and experiences shared and influenced by the entire universe. Each of your conscious thoughts is a magnetic drop in this ocean—the thought feels impelled to move towards an experience that matches it, and this experience feels impelled to move towards the thought that created it. In this way, your conscious thoughts influence the shape and the frequency of the currents and the waves (your life experiences).
Similarly to Murphy, the LoA claims that these magnetic pulls influence your emotions and your intuition—the universe creates your feelings of intuition to guide you to experiences that match your thoughts. This explains why you’re repeatedly drawn to the same types of situations and life experiences.
For example, you habitually complain about your love life because you always feel attracted to the type of partner that lets you down. According to the LoA, you initially feel inspired to trust this type of partner because your habitual thoughts instruct the universe to guide you to the wrong type of partner. As a result, the universe sends you emotions and intuitive feelings that encourage you to start relationships that are destined to fail.
According to research, intuition does give us the ability to know something without conscious analytical thought—this knowledge comes from all of the information you have stored in your subconscious mind. While it’s clear that your subconscious mind does influence your emotions and your intuitive feelings, there isn’t any scientific research to back up the theory that these feelings are messages from the universe.
Murphy believes that Universal Consciousness is a benevolent force that your subconscious mind is connected to, and the natural by-products of this force are positive: vitality, bliss, and forward motion. Because you have an innate connection to this force, you are a physical extension of this positive force—he explains that a stream of positive energy flows within you to nurture you both physically and emotionally and around you to create joyous life experiences. Consequently, Murphy concludes that you’re designed to think in ways that align with this energy so that you can live in a constant state of bliss.
To visualize this, imagine that you’re rowing down a stream made up of this positive force of energy. Everything and everyone you pass on your way along this stream represents your physical and emotional well-being and all of your life experiences. The stream comfortably flows towards good health, happy relationships, and satisfying experiences.
Humans Turn to Higher Powers to Control the Uncontrollable
Murphy’s claim that Universal Consciousness is inherently good, and his belief that its “good” energy can help you to feel good too, is rooted in his religious background. Murphy was Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science, a religious faction within the wider New Thought movement. This religion’s core belief is that God is good, the source of all creation, and is omnipresent. This faction instructs followers to practice feeling the “presence of God” in order to connect to the inherent goodness within us and the universe.
The belief in an inherently good higher power lies at the forefront of most dominant religions. Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens) explains that the idea of a benevolent God originally arose from the human need to control our environment. When faced with uncontrollable events, such as a drought or epidemic, humans created Gods and assigned them the power to control the things they couldn’t.
By assigning these Gods with personalities and biases, humans could believe that these Gods took an active interest in the human world. Further, they believed that by praying and providing offerings, they could negotiate with these Gods to intervene in the world and shape their experiences. The act of turning things over to a higher power gave humans a way of rationalizing uncontrollable events and the resilience to face challenges and upheavals.
The Church of Divine Science takes this concept of God a step further: It teaches that humans, through their connection to a higher power, are God. According to this religion, we don’t need to pray to a higher power to intervene on our behalf. Instead, we can take control of our environment by connecting to the higher power that lives within us.
According to Murphy, all of your life experiences are a result of your habitual conscious thoughts—these thoughts instruct your subconscious mind to orchestrate your experiences. Understanding how certain thoughts lead to certain outcomes can help you direct them toward what you want to experience.
Describe an experience you’ve had in the past week that felt positive to you (such as meeting up with a good friend).
How do you think your conscious thoughts instructed your subconscious mind to create this experience? For example, did you look forward to meeting up and have positive expectations about seeing your friend?
Now, describe an experience that felt negative to you such as getting into an argument with someone.
How do you think your conscious thoughts instructed your subconscious mind to create this experience? For example, have you had disagreements with this person in the past that you often replay in your mind?
In the first part of this guide, we explored how your subconscious mind learns from your habitual conscious thoughts to influence your behavior. We also explored Murphy’s belief that you’re designed to be happy because your subconscious mind has a connection to Universal Consciousness—the benevolent force that created and continues to manage the universe.
According to Murphy, life is very simple: You’re supposed to be healthy and happy because you’re connected to a powerful and positive force of energy. But, life isn’t that simple for most of us: We don’t always get what we want and, sometimes, happiness and bliss can seem like far-off dreams.
Therefore, in this second part of the guide, we’ll explore the reason why life isn’t always as easy and perfect as Murphy claims it should be. We’ll explain how the interaction between your subconscious mind with both your conscious mind and Universal Consciousness can either work with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness or against it to create your life experiences.
According to Murphy, the impressions your conscious thoughts leave on your subconscious mind influence the way it interacts with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness. If you’re not entirely happy with your life experiences, it’s because you're thinking “false” negative thoughts that contradict the positive force of Universal Consciousness. Let’s explore this idea in detail.
Recall: Murphy believes that, because you’re connected to Universal Consciousness, you’re designed to think thoughts and live in a way that aligns with this positive force. Consequently, your natural state is one of health, vitality, bliss, and forward motion because these are natural byproducts of this positive force.
Murphy argues that negative thought patterns arise due to your lack of faith in this benevolent higher power. If you trusted it to work on your behalf, you’d have nothing to fear and no need to struggle because you’d know that this higher power is working to help you. But, your lack of faith leads you to the false conclusion that you have to struggle by yourself and force things into place if you want to achieve any sort of success or happiness in your life. As a result, you feel alone and unsupported, and, when things don’t go the way you want them to, you suffer from low self-confidence and poor expectations. Your subconscious mind then fulfills these expectations by creating difficult and uncomfortable experiences.
Recall the stream made up of this positive force of energy: Each time you think a thought in opposition to this force, you throw a boulder into the stream. This boulder blocks the flow of the stream, slows down your progress, and leads you through long and uncomfortable diversions. The more boulders you throw into the stream, the harder it gets to make your way across the stream. In other words, the more you think negatively, the more blocks you place between yourself and what you want (good health, relationships, wealth, and so on).
For example, imagine you’re trying to make a major decision that will impact the course of your life. Your lack of faith in a higher power leads you to rely solely on your conscious mind to analyze the pros and cons of this decision. Because you don’t trust this higher power to work on your behalf, you magnify the weight of this decision and all of the disastrous consequences that could happen if you make the wrong choice—these consequences feel catastrophic because you believe that you’ll have to deal with them on your own. As a result, you feel blocked and anxious about choosing a direction. Your state of mind then delays any progress you make toward creating the life you want.
Faith in God Leads to Inner Peace and Fulfilment
Murphy’s claim that lack of faith leads to difficult life experiences lies at the heart of many dominant religions. For example, Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, explains that God created you to fulfill a specific purpose that he planned for you. This purpose underlies the meaning of every aspect of your life.
According to Warren, when you don’t trust that God has assigned you a specific purpose, you fail to understand the meaning of your life. This is because you allow yourself to be driven by a variety of external (materialism), emotional (fear), and moral (false beliefs) factors to motivate your thoughts and behaviors. Warren argues that these motivations destroy the possibility of peace in your life because you always feel anxious and unsure about why you’re on this earth. Consequently, your anxiety makes you feel like you always have to struggle through difficult life experiences.
On the other hand, when you believe that God has a purpose for you, you understand the meaning of your life and feel at peace. Warren claims that this is because, instead of relying on different motivations, you feel as if you’re being guided by a single clear motivation: to fulfill God’s purpose for you. As a result, you understand the meaning of your life because you're able to appreciate the significance of your every life experience. This allows you to focus your thoughts and behaviors in a way that aligns with God’s purpose and leads to inner peace and fulfillment.
Murphy argues that every time you think negative thoughts, you block your subconscious mind from accessing both the useful information you have stored in your mind (this information is part of everything your subconscious mind has absorbed throughout your life) and the positive energy flowing from Universal Consciousness that creates positive experiences. As a result, your subconscious mind creates negative experiences that align with your fears and worries.
(Shortform note: While Murphy argues that your negative thoughts create negative experiences by blocking the positive flow of a higher power, Wallace D. Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich) claims that these thoughts create negative experiences by communicating directly with this power. According to Wattles, this power’s job is to manifest thoughts into tangible forms—every time you think a thought, it responds by manifesting into something that reflects the nature of your thought. Therefore, when it senses negative thoughts, it manifests something negative.)
According to Murphy, these negative experiences can manifest in several ways:
When you allow your negative thoughts to dominate your positive thoughts, you develop unhealthy mental patterns that lead to low self-esteem and psychological problems such as anxiety, addictions, and phobias. Murphy argues that these mental patterns prevent you from seeing the best in yourself and others, and they encourage you to develop negative expectations about everyone and everything around you. As a result, your subconscious mind creates failure instead of success and happiness.
For example, your habitual negative thoughts make you feel insecure about your relationship with your partner. The more you focus on the negative things that could happen (he’ll leave, he’ll cheat, he’ll get bored), the less able you are to notice what’s working well in your relationship. Instead, you constantly feel threatened and your insecurities make you act in ways that push your partner away (jealous, overbearing, critical). According to Murphy, your fear of abandonment turns into a negative expectation. Your subconscious mind believes this negative expectation and ensures its manifestation by creating circumstances that both align with and fuel your insecurities.
Cognitive Distortions Perpetuate Irrational Behavior
Research on the topic of cognitive distortions supports Murphy’s argument that negative thoughts contribute to low self-esteem and psychological problems. Cognitive distortions are irrational thought patterns that manifest as negative emotions, increased anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They’re more likely to occur when you habitually think negative thoughts. This is because your subconscious mind gets used to processing everything it perceives in a negative light so much so that you wire your brain to always respond negatively to your experiences.
According to this research, negative thinking causes negative mental states and emotions. These negative emotions lead people to act irrationally. But, due to a lack of self-awareness, many people find it difficult to recognize when they’re engaged in negative or irrational thinking. As a result of their failure to recognize their negative thoughts, they mistakenly assume that external causes are to blame both for their emotional states and their resulting actions. The following examples illustrate the association between an external cause and a resulting action:
Work is stressful. This drives you to drink too much.
Your kids are loud. This drives you to lash out at them.
Spiders are creepy. This drives you to panic when you see one.
However, once you recognize the impact that your thoughts have on your emotions, you’re able to view the causes of your actions in a different light:
Your thoughts about work make you feel stressed. These stressful thoughts drive you to drink too much.
Your thoughts about how irritating your kids are, make you feel angry. Your anger drives you to lash out at them.
Your focus on how revolting spiders are makes you feel afraid. Your fear fuels your phobia and drives you to panic when you see one.
Once you understand how your thoughts impact your emotions and behaviors, you can learn to manage them in a more positive way. To achieve this, you first need to become aware of how you choose to think about your experiences and how these thoughts make you feel. Next, you need to make the effort to change your thoughts so that you can improve the way that you feel. Once you improve your feelings, you’ll naturally engage in more positive behaviors.
For example, you catch yourself feeling stressed out about work. You realize that these stressful thoughts are not helping you to act positively or rationally so you decide to take a break and go for a walk. As a result, you feel refreshed and calm. This gives you the mental space to prioritize your workload and to get things done more positively. As you reduce your stressful thoughts, you also reduce your urge to escape into drink.
Murphy argues that when you struggle to come up with new ideas and solutions, it’s because you’ve blocked your subconscious mind from accessing both the information you have stored in your mind as well as relevant inspiration from Universal Consciousness. For example, when you’re anxious about an exam, your negative focus blocks your subconscious mind from recalling the information you need to ace the exam. As a result, you feel uninspired and this inhibits your ability to respond to the challenge in front of you.
(Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s claim that negative thoughts impact your ability to recall information. According to these researchers, negative thinking leads to cognitive decline and problems with memory, and it increases your risk of developing dementia. This is because negative thoughts leave a high number of harmful protein (tau and amyloid) deposits in your brain. Prior research reveals that the accumulation of tau and amyloid deposits in the brain are the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as a number of other cognitive disorders.)
According to Murphy, your subconscious mind uses its connection to Universal Consciousness as a “positive power source” to regulate your bodily functions and keep you in optimum health. When your conscious thoughts align with this force, the positive energy moves freely around your body to heal and rejuvenate you. On the other hand, when your conscious thoughts are out of alignment with this force, you disrupt the flow of energy and prevent your subconscious mind from maintaining your body. As a result, your body suffers from health issues, and it degrades and ages faster than it’s meant to.
(Shortform note: Murphy argues that all physical ailments are a result of thinking out of alignment with Universal Consciousness. While research confirms that negative thought patterns are bad for your health (for example, stress impacts your digestion and sleeping patterns), various scholars and scientists have raised concerns over the view that your mental state is the sole determinant of your health. These critics assert that illnesses and diseases have a wide range of physical causes that must be addressed by modern medical therapies in conjunction with any holistic methods you choose to incorporate.)
According to Murphy, if you’re not entirely happy with your life experiences, it’s because you’re thinking negative thoughts. Developing awareness around your negative thoughts will help you to intentionally create more positive thoughts and experiences.
Describe a situation where you often find yourself thinking negatively. For example, every time you bump into your neighbor, you feel annoyed and irritated because she offloads all of her problems and you find it difficult to cut the conversation short.
What specific thoughts and feelings come up when you think about this situation? For example, you resent your neighbor for wasting your time and energy, and you feel annoyed with yourself for putting up with her behavior.
What do you think these thoughts are instructing your subconscious mind to do? For example, your thoughts about your neighbor make you dread bumping into her. This magnifies your feelings of discomfort when you do see her.
What instructions would you prefer your subconscious mind to follow? For example, you would prefer to focus on the positive qualities of your neighbor and to feel comfortable enough to politely evade long conversations with her.
In the previous part, we explained how your negative thoughts inhibit the positive flow of Universal Consciousness, prompting your subconscious mind to create poor health and negative experiences. Fortunately, Murphy believes that you can reverse this process and train your subconscious mind to create the life you want.
According to Murphy, the process to retrain your subconscious mind is very simple: You just need to use your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and images upon your subconscious mind. Murphy explains that there are two steps to making this process work for you: First, you need to decide to think positive thoughts. Then, you need to trust that your subconscious mind will create experiences that align with your positive thoughts. In this part of the guide, we’ll explore these two steps in detail.
Murphy argues that you need to take control of what thoughts your subconscious mind identifies with by consciously deciding to get in charge of your thoughts. Recall that your conscious mind is active and your subconscious mind is passive. Even though your subconscious mind creates your life experiences, it can only follow the habitual conscious thoughts—or in other words, instructions—from your conscious mind. He suggests that you explicitly tell your subconscious mind that, from now on, you’re only going to think positive thoughts. This will give you the conviction you need to change your conscious thoughts and improve your life.
(Shortform note: The process to take control of and change your thoughts may not be as easy as Murphy makes out. This is because your thoughts and your state of mind reinforce one another to create an internal feedback loop that’s difficult to break out of: Your thoughts determine your state of mind (thinking about problems makes you feel anxious) and your state of mind determines your thoughts (you feel anxious so you think about your problems). However, research reveals that making the effort to become more aware of your thoughts allows you to disentangle yourself from this feedback loop. Instead of feeling as if you’re stuck within an uncontrollable cycle of thoughts, your awareness allows you to view and change your thoughts objectively.)
To take control of your conscious thoughts, be careful about what thoughts and beliefs you absorb from others. According to Murphy, other people can’t influence you unless you accept their thoughts into your mind. You’re the only one in control of your conscious thoughts and you can choose what you want to believe. When you choose to entertain the thoughts of others, they become your thoughts. If you think these thoughts often enough, they imprint upon your subconscious mind and become your beliefs. Your subconscious mind then creates experiences that match these beliefs.
Murphy claims that throughout your life you’ve unconsciously absorbed unproductive and limiting beliefs from others, such as, “Old age creates suffering,” or, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” According to Murphy, these cliches don’t lead to positive experiences. Therefore, consider the conversations you have with others as verbal expressions of your thoughts and beliefs that will ultimately either allow or block your subconscious mind’s access to Universal Consciousness. Above all, Murphy suggests that you avoid discussing problems and issues that perpetuate negative thoughts and beliefs.
How to Let Go of the Thoughts and Beliefs You’ve Absorbed Throughout Your Life
While Murphy stresses the importance of being vigilant about the thoughts you absorb from others through conversation, he doesn’t explain how the thoughts you’ve already absorbed from others impact you.
According to Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), throughout your childhood, you unconsciously adopted the opinions and beliefs of others. This is because, when you were young, you were less able to question what was going on around you and to form your own rational conclusions. As a result, you simply absorbed everything you heard, saw, and experienced. The more you dwelt on these thoughts, the heavier the imprint you left upon your subconscious mind. These thoughts then turned into your beliefs.
Maltz argues that, while you may choose to think different thoughts now, the thoughts and beliefs you accepted as a child continue to live in your subconscious mind and inform your feelings and behaviors. Like Murphy, Maltz believes that it’s possible to replace these outdated beliefs with what you choose to believe.
Like Murphy, Maltz recommends that you mind the tone of your conversations to ensure you’re not using words that reinforce your negative beliefs. In addition, he suggests that you regularly imagine yourself acting like your ideal version of yourself. In other words, choose the beliefs you want to adopt and imagine yourself as someone who already lives by these beliefs.
For example, if your ideal self only thinks positive thoughts, imagine how you’d feel and behave throughout various situations in your life. How would you feel about your work, your relationships, and your social life? How would you behave in these situations?
Maltz claims that, with constant practice, your subconscious mind will gradually become accustomed to accepting the thoughts and beliefs you wish to adopt. As a result, it will let go of the old, unproductive beliefs that you’ve absorbed throughout your life.
To explain why you need to trust the process of your subconscious mind creating positive thoughts for it to work, we’ll first explain Murphy’s beliefs about how your body heals from mental and physical injuries. Recall that your subconscious mind regulates all of your vital bodily functions—this includes the healing process. For example, it regulates the little paper cuts that heal overnight or the headache that fades away without intervention.
When you rely on intervention to heal yourself, such as surgery, psychology, or spiritual help (you pray for your healing), you assume that an outside source has healed you: “I am healed now because of that doctor or that religion.” However, Murphy argues that this is not the case—your subconscious mind is always in control of your healing process, and it is your faith in the healer (your method, doctor, or religion) that heals you, not the healer itself. Your conscious faith that the process will work imprints upon your subconscious mind and instructs it to heal you.
This faith isn’t restricted to the healing process but applies to all areas of your life, from your relationships to your general success. Your subconscious mind operates according to your beliefs and expectations. Therefore, Murphy concludes that you must trust that your positive thoughts will create positive experiences for you if you want the process to work.
Your Expectations Shape Your Life Experiences
In this section, Murphy argues that having faith that something will happen—that you’ll be healed from an illness, or that thinking positively will lead to positive experiences—is crucial in making this thing actually happen. This concept is similar to the well-known placebo effect: the idea that people can actually heal from an illness simply if they believe or have faith that they’ve been treated with medicine, even if the “medicine” is actually fake. Therefore, to further explore Murphy’s argument, we’ll look at recent research studies that examine the impact of positive expectations and the placebo effect.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) explains that the placebo effect demonstrates how all of your experiences are shaped by the expectations you have going into them. According to Ariely, this phenomenon operates on two mechanisms: faith and conditioning.
Faith: If you have faith in the drug or the procedure, it’s more likely to make you feel better.
Conditioning: Your body naturally releases chemicals in expectation of what’s to come. If you have faith in your treatment, you feel more confident and you expect to get better. This prompts your body to produce chemicals that do make you feel better. For example, when you have a headache and you decide to take some painkillers, your body expects to feel relief and starts releasing opiates and endorphins before you even put the tablet in your mouth.
Ariely argues that the placebo effect plays out in all areas of your life because your expectations heavily influence your perception of events. For example, if you walk into a dark alley expecting to come across danger, you experience a heightened awareness of danger. As a result, your heart rate increases and you notice every slight sound and flicker of movement. On the other hand, if you walk into this alley feeling relaxed and confident, your physiology remains the same and you’re not as alert to your surroundings.
Since your expectations alter your perceptions, they also alter the outcome of your experiences because your behavior is a result of how you respond to your perceptions. Therefore, if you have positive expectations about Murphy’s methods—you believe that practicing his methods and thinking positive thoughts will improve your life experiences—your perceptions will reflect this. You’ll find yourself paying more attention to what’s working and improving in your life, and this awareness will lead you to shift your behavior and open you up to new experiences. On the other hand, if you approach Murphy’s methods with low expectations, your perceptions will remain the same, and you won’t feel the impetus to change any of your behaviors.
According to Murphy, you need to imprint positive thoughts upon your subconscious mind to improve your life experiences. Let’s define what kind of thoughts feel positive to you.
Think of something positive that you want to experience. Create a detailed picture of this experience. What does it look like and why does the idea of it make you feel happy?
What in your life already makes you feel happy? For example, cuddles from your kids or enjoying a good book.
What thoughts do you think about the things that already make you feel happy? For example, do you feel grateful and lucky when you think about them? Do you generally expect to experience these things?
How can you apply these thoughts to the happy experience you want to create? For example, you could feel gratitude in advance which will boost your positive expectation of it happening.
Now that we’ve discussed the two general steps for retraining your subconscious mind, we’ll explore specific methods you can use to align your conscious thoughts with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness. According to Murphy, this will retrain your subconscious mind to create the positive experiences that you want, such as perfect health, satisfying relationships, wealth, and success.
Murphy suggests five methods you can use to take control of your conscious thoughts and train your subconscious mind to create positive experiences in your life:
Murphy believes that you need to focus on thinking only positive thoughts if you want your subconscious mind to create positive experiences. But how can you know whether your habitual conscious thoughts are positive or not? According to Murphy, you just need to judge how you feel. If you feel happy and you have positive expectations about your life, you’re thinking positive thoughts. On the other hand, if you don’t feel good about your life experiences, you’re thinking negative thoughts.
(Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your thoughts and emotions are inextricably linked and confirms that positive thoughts make you feel happy. However, sometimes, it’s not so easy to force yourself to think happy thoughts. Fortunately, there is a way to trick your brain into believing that you’re happy: smiling. Neuroscience research reveals that smiling spurs a chemical reaction in the brain that releases specific hormones including dopamine and serotonin. These hormones increase your happiness and reduce your stress levels. In short, smiling makes you feel happy. When you feel happy, you’re more inclined to think positive thoughts that continue to make you feel happy.)
To develop positive expectations, Murphy suggests that you think only about what you want to experience. Instead of worrying about how you’ll achieve something, focus on the end results and imagine the gratitude you’ll feel once you have it. This process will set a clear direction for your subconscious mind to move towards.
(Shortform note: Like Murphy, Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich), argues that you shouldn’t worry about how to achieve what you want. Instead, just expect everything to work out in your favor. Wattles suggests that imagining your desired end result and practicing gratitude in advance of receiving what you want not only sends a clear message to the universe, but it also keeps you from becoming dissatisfied with your current life experiences. This is because, when you imagine feeling grateful for something you don’t yet have, you feel positive regardless of what’s actually happening in your life. The more positive you feel, the more likely you are to adopt behaviors that move you closer to what you want.)
Murphy suggests that you use this method to improve your thinking about any area of your life:
Imagine the freedom you’ll feel and all of the opportunities you’ll embrace once you’re free from your addiction. According to Murphy, the more you focus on the benefits of releasing your addiction, the less likely you’ll be to give in to your urges.
(Shortform note: According to James Clear (Atomic Habits), as well as focusing on the outcome of what you want (how good you’ll feel to be free from your addiction), you also need to define the beliefs that will support your disassociation from this bad habit. This is because your habits are inextricably linked to what you believe about yourself. Your beliefs about who you are encourage your habits and your habits encourage what you believe about yourself: for example, “I smoke, therefore, I believe that I need cigarettes to be happy.” So, in addition to imagining how you’ll feel, consider replacing your current beliefs with healthier ones that support the changes you seek to make: for example, “I am healthy and enjoy taking care of my body.”)
Focus on your partner’s best qualities and take the time to offer praise. If you’re looking for a partner, Murphy suggests that you think about what type of person you want to be with, how you’ll spend your time together, and how this person will make you feel.
(Shortform note: According to psychologists, your internal dialogue determines your ability to focus on the positive aspects of your relationships and reflects in the way you interact with others. When your internal dialogue is positive, you’re more likely to practice self-compassion, have an awareness of your best qualities, and accept yourself as you are. Because you see the best in yourself, you’re able to recognize the unique strengths and values in others. On the other hand, when your internal dialogue is negative, you’re more likely to engage in self-critical dialogue that focuses more on what you dislike about yourself and where you’re going wrong. Because you’re unable to recognize your own value, you’re less able to see the value in others.)
Trust that every problem comes with a solution and imagine how you’ll feel once you’ve figured it out. According to Murphy, Universal Consciousness has access to all of the answers—your positive expectation gives you access to these answers.
(Shortform note: While there’s no empirical evidence to suggest that Universal Consciousness can provide solutions to your problems, research shows that positive expectations do increase your ability to solve problems. According to The Happiness Advantage, when you choose to cultivate the habit of thinking positive thoughts, you train your brain to create solutions. This helps you to find opportunities in adversity and more easily overcome challenges and setbacks.)
Consider how you’d like other people to think about you. Now think about them in this way regardless of how they behave. For example, if you’d like people to treat you with more respect, then you need to think respectful thoughts about others. Murphy argues that people will intuitively pick up on your positive thoughts and, as a result, their behaviors toward you will improve.
(Shortform note: While Murphy argues that your thoughts about others should mirror how you want them to think about you, Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) argues that you need to think about yourself the way you want others to think about you. Hay claims that every experience in your life reflects your opinion of yourself: If you don’t love yourself, you send out emotional signals that make other people not want to love you. According to Hay, practicing self-love affirmations will change the way you view yourself and the emotional signals that you send out. Other people will then reflect these emotional signals back to you. So, if you want others to respect you, affirm to yourself, “I love and respect myself” multiple times a day.)
Decide on how you’ll enjoy spending the wealth you want. Murphy claims that imagining how comfortable you’ll feel with more money will prime your subconscious to create wealth.
(Shortform note: Murphy’s suggestion here seems to encourage you to focus on what you want and then passively wait for your subconscious mind to create what you want. While this may be the case, focusing on the benefits you expect to feel from creating more wealth will also motivate you to take actions that support this goal. Many self-improvement practitioners agree that you need to feel emotionally invested in your goals in order to achieve them—in other words, the more benefits you anticipate from creating wealth, the more inspired and motivated you’ll feel to take actions that increase your wealth.)
Recall: Murphy argues that your subconscious mind learns from repetition. When you first try to change your habitual conscious thoughts, you’ll need to apply conscious effort to think positively. But, with repetition, your positive thoughts will eventually imprint upon your subconscious mind to form positive beliefs and outweigh any negative and outdated beliefs. As a result, your subconscious mind will influence you to think and behave in positive ways without conscious effort.
For example, if you have social anxiety, improve your self-confidence by repeatedly thinking kinder thoughts about yourself. Over time, you’ll replace your anxious thoughts with more compassionate thoughts. This will increase your self-confidence and allow you to enjoy socializing with others.
(Shortform note: While it’s true that repetition leads to automatic behavior, opinions vary on exactly how long it takes for your subconscious mind to become accustomed to your new thoughts. Research studies reveal that it can take between 18 and 254 days, or an average of 66 days, for habits to become automatic. The timeline depends on how consistently you practice your new habits—the more often you consciously practice thinking your chosen thoughts, the quicker your subconscious mind will align with these new thoughts.)
According to Murphy, when you visualize an image, you add weight to the impression your conscious thoughts form in your subconscious mind. This is because your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality—it only knows that you’re thinking about something often enough to create a detailed picture in your mind. The more you dwell on this image, the more likely your subconscious is to accept this image as an instruction about what it should create.
When Visualization Makes You Lose Interest in Your Goals
While Murphy argues that visualization is an effective way to get Universal Consciousness to create your life experiences, research shows that visualization may negatively impact your subconscious mind when you apply it to your goals. In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday claims that visualization can confuse your subconscious mind and create the opposite effect of what you want to achieve: When your mind believes that you’ve already achieved something, you feel that you’ve made progress despite not having taken any measurable steps toward achieving your goal.
This feeling of progress feels good, but it’s based on a false sense of achievement that may cause you to lose sight of the actions you need to take to move forward. In fact, researchers examining the effects of visualization on goal achievement found that participants often lost the energy required to fulfill their goal because once they convinced themselves they’d already achieved the goal, they lost interest in trying to progress toward it.
Murphy believes that your subconscious mind is more effective when you’re relaxed or asleep because you're unable to use your conscious mind to think unproductive thoughts that contradict what you want.
When you're awake and alert, you can’t help but think about and judge everything around you. According to Murphy, this is what your conscious mind is designed to do. Unfortunately, this creates problems for you when you’re trying to retrain your subconscious mind. This is because you can’t just change your habitual conscious thoughts and beliefs instantaneously—your mind needs time to get used to your new way of thinking. During this time, your conscious mind questions and contradicts the beliefs you want to change. This conflict between what you want to believe and what you do believe creates confusion for your subconscious mind because it’s not receiving clear instructions from your conscious mind.
For example, you want your subconscious to believe and expect that you’re confident about something. But, your conscious mind is so used to thinking of you as unconfident, that it questions your new belief and offers counterproductive thoughts and memories to rationalize why you should feel unconfident: “How can you feel confident when you failed so miserably the last time?”
Why Your Conscious Mind Sabotages Your Self-Improvement Efforts
Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your conscious mind interferes with the changes you seek to make. This is due to two reasons:
Your subconscious mind includes negative experiences that you internalized, such as embarrassing events from your childhood, or memories of when you felt emotionally or physically threatened.
Your subconscious mind influences the way your conscious mind perceives and responds to your environment. Part of this influence includes protecting you from reliving painful experiences that it has recorded. It achieves this by inhibiting you from engaging in situations that may bring you pain.
The way you originally internalized these negative experiences determines how far your subconscious mind will sway your conscious thoughts in order to avoid repeat experiences.
Let’s examine how this plays out in the following example: When you were young, you were told to recite a poem in front of your class. You stumbled and made a few mistakes. Other children laughed at you. You could’ve internalized this in a few ways, including:
“I got more right than I got wrong. It’s okay, I’ll do better next time.”
“I was so terrible and they all know it. That’s why they’re laughing at me. I hate being in the limelight and never want to do it again.”
The first response instructed your subconscious mind that this situation presents a minor challenge that you can overcome—it isn’t anything to fear. In contrast, the second response instructed your subconscious mind to stay away from similar situations that may cause you discomfort. As a result, it now encourages your conscious mind to engage in self-sabotaging thoughts such as, “How can I feel confident about this considering what happened last time?”
Moving forward, be patient with yourself when attempting to change your thought patterns. Your conscious mind will offer resistance but, with time and practice, your subconscious mind will become accustomed to your new thoughts and beliefs. As a result, it will encourage your conscious mind to work with you instead of against you.
Murphy argues that when you practice relaxation, you lull your conscious mind to sleep and have direct access to your subconscious mind. To illustrate how this works, Murphy touches upon how hypnotists induce their subjects into a relaxed state before they make suggestions—by preventing their subjects’ conscious minds from interfering, they ensure that their subjects will follow through with their suggestions.
For example, a hypnotist can make someone believe that a carrot is a chili pepper. When the person eats the carrot, she’ll react in the same way that she would if she had actually taken a bite out of a chili pepper—she’ll turn red in the face and desperately seek water to relieve the burning sensation in her mouth. She believes that the carrot is a chili pepper because her conscious mind isn’t interfering and arguing against the hypnotist’s suggestion.
Hypnotism Encourages Your Conscious Mind to Detach From Your Experience
In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz also draws on the practice of hypnotism to argue that relaxation encourages your subconscious mind to accept new ideas. According to Maltz, your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality—it can only react (by creating changes in your nervous system) to what you imagine to be true.
When your conscious mind is alert, your thoughts help your subconscious mind distinguish fact from fiction. For instance, in the example above, your conscious mind would step in and tell you that you’re eating a carrot. As a result, your subconscious mind would not cause your nervous system to heat up. But, by inducing your conscious mind into a state of complete relaxation, hypnotists take advantage of your subconscious mind’s inability to distinguish between imagination and reality.
However, hypnotists don’t have complete control over you when you’re in this relaxed state. According to studies, the relaxation method hypnotists employ doesn’t cause your conscious mind to fall asleep. Instead, it encourages you to feel detached from your experiences. As a result of this detachment, your conscious mind disassociates from any problems or concerns and serves merely as a witness to the events that take place. In other words, your conscious mind is aware of what’s going on but doesn’t feel involved in the experience. Consequently, it doesn’t feel the need to interfere with thoughts that disrupt the experience.
Since your subconscious mind is more receptive to your thoughts when your conscious mind is relaxed, Murphy recommends that you make the habit of thinking about what you want before you go to sleep. In addition, if you have problems that need solving, instruct your subconscious mind to come up with solutions while you sleep. According to Murphy, your subconscious mind will provide these solutions to you in the form of urges and inspiration when you awake.
(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport backs up Murphy’s idea that sleep and relaxation help you to find solutions. Newport discusses the benefits of “productive meditation”—using your relaxation time as a constructive way to solve problems. He suggests that you’re more likely to do your best work when you alternate between periods of intense focus and relaxation. While you’re relaxing, your mind will work through the problems you’ve lined up for it and, without your conscious interference, can more quickly or creatively arrive at a solution.)
Murphy claims that prayer is also an effective way to bypass your conscious mind to communicate your new thoughts directly to your subconscious mind. This is because he views prayer as a form of relaxation—he believes that your focus on what you’re praying for induces you into a relaxed state and silences your conscious mind.
Murphy suggests a simple prayer: Say specific words to generate the feeling of what you want. For example, you might talk about wealth, love, success, or health. These words allow you to avoid conflict in your conscious mind because you’re not giving it anything to question or contradict—instead of affirming that you are wealthy or healthy, you’re simply saying words that allow you to focus on what you want.
(Shortform note: A recent study into the effect of mantras confirms that repeating a single word stops your mind from wandering. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain blood flow patterns of people who silently repeated a single word. The imaging showed a reduction of activity across the brain, primarily in the area of the brain that gives rise to internal thoughts—this is the area that generates your self-critical thoughts. So, while there isn’t any evidence to support the argument that repeating the word “wealth” will make you wealthy, there is proof that it will calm down your internal dialogue which will benefit you.)
The Psychological Benefits of Prayer
Research studies confirm that prayer is an effective way to relax. These studies reveal that prayer and meditation share similar benefits: They both calm your nervous system and make you less reactive to negative emotions. Further, some scientists argue that people who pray benefit more than those who meditate. According to them, praying fosters a sense of connection (with a higher power, the environment, and other people), allows people to feel emotionally supported, and encourages them to let go of their worries for a time.
If the idea of praying to a higher power makes you feel uncomfortable, this process may spur your conscious mind to interfere more than usual—this will inevitably make you feel more tense than relaxed. To combat this, some researchers recommend that, instead of picturing a higher power, imagine yourself having a heart-to-heart conversation with someone you trust. This will allow you to benefit from the positive effects of prayer without giving your conscious mind something to resist.
According to Murphy, when you focus only on what you want to experience, you give your subconscious mind clear instructions to follow. In this exercise, we’ll determine what you want and how you can focus on it.
What one thing that you want would immediately improve your life experience and make you happy? For example, your life might improve drastically if you find a satisfying job that pays well.
What are your current thoughts about this thing? Do you expect it to happen or do you have doubts?
What specific thoughts do you think will help your subconscious mind to create this experience? For example, it might be thoughts that encourage confidence in your abilities and the value you have to offer.
What single word could you repeat to remind yourself to have positive expectations about this experience? For example, you could repeat the words “success” or “satisfaction” when you think about the job that you want.
Murphy argues that thinking positive thoughts will improve your life. Let’s explore how you can make it a habit to think positively.
Make a list of at least five happy and positive thoughts you can run through your mind throughout the day (for example, “Life is good”).
Describe a strategy you can use to remind yourself to focus on these positive thoughts. For example, perhaps you can set a reminder on your phone to check in with your thoughts.
Which one of Murphy’s methods will you try today to ensure your thoughts remain positive? For instance, you might try conscious repetition or visualization.