The subconscious mind is incredible. Our minds operate by making our many thoughts and behaviors develop automatically. This happens behind the scenes, without our direct knowledge.

In The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam, the author explores the hidden aspects of our brain. The book is a fascinating look at our biases. It explores the ways evolution has created processes in our mind that vary from our intentions.

The author states “Scientists have long known that there are many brain activities that lie outside the den of conscious awareness; your brain regulates your heart, keeps you breathing, and makes you turn over in your sleep at night. None of these things feels strange or disturbing. We are perfectly happy to delegate such mundane chores to - to what? To some hidden part of our brain that does all that boring stuff.”

He then goes on to say “You have no awareness, for example, of how your brain is taking visual images from this page, translating symbols into recognizable letters, combining the letters into words and sentences, and producing meaning. All you - meaning your conscious brain - must do is decide to read, and the rest flows seamlessly.”

To me this fascinating. It details areas of our lives that we ignore. These tasks get accomplished automatically. But a few key questions come into my mind. How can we access this? How can we develop it? How can we train so that we can better accomplish goals and objectives?

At first glance we may say that we don’t have any control over this. We don’t have access to our subconscious and it happens automatically so there is nothing that we can do about it.

But a deeper dive says that we didn’t come out of the womb with the ability to translate symbols into recognizable letters and read from a book. Studying martial arts, yoga, singing or a host of other activities places a focus on being able to control our breathing and heart rate. We may not control every beat, but we can certainly calm our mind through various breathing and relaxation techniques. This can affect our heartbeat and adjust our breathing. So, some of the automatic aspects can be controlled.

We tend to develop these abilities which are largely determined by our habits. Our habits are the outward, behavioral expression of our subconscious mind. And we do have access to habits in a way in which gives us control.

But most people only need enough control to get to a mediocre ability. Most Americans have a driver’s license and have the ability to drive. Every day we drive to work. We drive to the store. We drive to a new destination for vacation.

Yet most never understand that driving requires various skills and abilities. Once we learn the basics, we stop improving. Instead, we continue to use our skills and abilities, as they are today.

We all experience poor driving from others. We see the overly defensive driver. We witness the speedy, late-for-work driver. There is the driver who swerves between lanes without a blinker. We see the driver that assumes stop signs simply mean slow down.

If they can drive their vehicle without many accidents, what motivation do they (or us) have to get better? We don’t have any motivation once we reach a certain minimum level.

Unfortunately, we do this with almost every aspect of our lives. We get complacent and let our habits control our improvement (or lack thereof). Habits are great at solidifying behaviors but horrible at systematic improvement. Unless we consciously focus on them, they don't keep improving. But if we identify areas of improvement, and then work on developing the habits to succeed, we can nudge our subconscious mind in the direction that we want to go.

Just as we learned to read. We learned to ride a bike. We learned to write a letter. Our subconscious mind works along with our conscious mind and our habits to do a task. But how many of us have improved our ability to ride a bike since childhood? How many improve an ability to read as an adult?

By developing a systems thinking mindset, we start to ask different questions. We want to know what we can do to improve, rather than stay the same.

The interesting thing is that this actually helps us to be excellent. Successful individuals and teams hold this at their core. It shows through consistent, above-average performance. By constantly trying to grow and improve, successful teams and individuals stay ahead of the pack.

It is true that our subconscious mind controls many aspects of our lives. It does this while going unnoticed. But we can start to gain control by focusing on systematically improving the habits in our lives. Doing this we will develop the behaviors and actions that we hope will become automatic. This changes the focus to be on getting better rather than simply maintaining the status quo.