SUBLIMINALS.

This is a little all over the place because there is so much to get into and obviously I can’t cover absolutely everything there is to say about subliminals in a 3000 word article but hopefully this gives you some perspective, clears up a few misconceptions and gives you a little more insight into what subliminals actually are and how simple they really are.

Subliminals work and at their core and they’re incredibly simple. I think people sometimes hear the concept explained and assume there must be something magical or supernatural happening because it sounds almost too straightforward but really subliminals are just statements/affirmations being repeated over and over. They’re words, perspectives being reinforced. 

It’s subconscious reprogramming. It isn’t inherently spiritual, religious or some sort of aesthetic. Your brain is constantly processing information, learning and adapting throughout your life and subliminals are simply a way of intentionally participating in that process by choosing which thoughts and ideas you repeatedly reinforce instead of leaving that repetition entirely to your existing habits and environment.

You’re taking control of the narrative instead of endlessly dwelling on circumstances you don’t want. In a way that’s the beginning of every hero’s journey (deciding that where you are right now does not have to be where your story ends) It’s the complete opposite of dooming. 

I think people underestimate how much strength that takes. It takes willpower to envision something better for yourself when your current circumstances are telling you otherwise. It takes strength to deliberately reinforce a different self concept, to believe you’re worthy of better, to expect more from your life and to refuse to reduce your ambitions just because what you want doesn’t match what you currently see. I’ve never understood why affirmations and hope/positivity are sometimes treated as weak or corny when there is nothing particularly weak about looking at a situation you dislike and having the audacity to say “No. I want better for myself, I deserve better and I’m going to pursue it.” It’s literally the opposite of being a loser or a quitter. That desire inside of you to break out of the cage and experience more is something I think is absolutely exceptional.

A lot of people are conditioned to accept whatever circumstances they find themselves in as “realistic.” and when you’ve been taught to shrink your expectations, someone else refusing to shrink theirs can look ridiculous. To people who have been conditioned to expect less from life, being confident is like being delusional, if you’re ambitious, it looks unrealistic, if you’re hopeful, you’re naïve. So people laugh at those who try, ridicule people for aiming “too high” or immediately explain why something (like subliminals) probably won’t work. Don’t take that personally because their relationship with possibility does not have to become yours.

At the same time I understand why being around certain parts of manifestation or subliminal communities can sometimes make you question whether you even want to associate yourself with any of it. That happens with virtually every community on the internet. You’re inevitably going to encounter people who share the same interest but understand it completely differently from you. You’ll see people asking whether they can get results because they listened without headphones, whether some completely unrelated thing will “block” their manifestation, whether they accidentally ruined everything because they had one negative thought or whether they performed some imaginary rule incorrectly. 

It starts sounding like some kind of sacred ritual/spiritual practice, which subliminals ARE NOT and seeing people treat them that way can make the entire concept feel incredibly alienating or strange. I think it helps to look underneath that behavior rather than immediately assuming those people are intentionally being extreme. Some people are encountering the idea of deliberately changing their habitual thinking for the first time. They’ve spent their entire lives absorbing beliefs from their environment without ever stopping to consider that they can question those beliefs and develop a different relationship with themselves and their possibilities so even while pursuing something better they bring the same conditioning with them. They doubt themselves, underestimate their own ability to change, search for permission, create rules and turn subliminals into these sacred or magical objects that have to be used perfectly.

I think that’s often less about people deliberately being “corny” and much more about self esteem and fear/conditioning. When someone has never been taught to trust themselves, simplicity literally feels suspicious/too good to be true. They struggle to comprehend that the subliminal itself doesn’t need to be some magical object and that they don’t need an elaborate ritual surrounding it. The mind is already learning, adapting, forming associations and reinforcing patterns every day. The point is to become more intentional about what you repeatedly feed it with subliminals. You don’t need to make yourself smaller because somebody else is uncomfortable with ambition and you also don’t need to adopt every limitation, rule or fear you encounter within a community you happen to be part of. Trust yourself, experiment on yourself. 

Sometimes people ask me whether subliminals are witchcraft and that question literally never made sense to me until I started paying attention to some of the behavior within the community. I realized that a lot of people don’t fully understand what subliminals actually are or what they’re intended to do so they unconsciously fill the gaps in their understanding with random rules, spiritual explanations or supernatural concepts that were never necessary in the first place. For example people will talk about having a “blockage” as though there’s some mysterious spiritual force preventing their results when in this context a blockage can simply describe a limiting thought pattern, belief or habit of thinking that you’re trying to change. You’re not cursed, there isn’t some invisible force working against you and you don’t need to perform a ritual to remove/flush anything. You’re literally just identifying patterns in your thinking that no longer benefit you and replacing them with ones that do. You’re changing your mind about some things. That’s it. To be fair, if you don’t understand subconscious programming how else would you try to explain someone completely transforming their circumstances, achieving extreme success or getting life changing opportunities, etc? From the outside it can look like magic because you’re seeing the outcome without understanding all of the psychological processes that preceded it. Those processes focus on your observable reality. That is where your inner world has enormous influence. You’re just becoming intentional about your own mind and the reality you personally experience through it. Like I said, you work with what you were GIVEN. Your mind, your reality, your rules. Your mind is your own and what you choose to repeatedly think and reinforce is ultimately yours to decide, that’s all there is to it. 

“I am successful.” This is an example of an affirmation that could be included in a subliminal and repeated with the intention of making that thought increasingly familiar/automatic (which would naturally lead to real life experiences and evidence that reinforce and validate that statement). In a subliminal the affirmation is typically placed beneath a masking sound so that you aren’t consciously focusing on and analyzing every affirmation. 

Consciously hearing or saying the affirmation isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it can immediately trigger a reaction. If you’ve spent years thinking of yourself as unsuccessful, hearing “I am successful” might automatically produce a response like “No I’m not” followed by reasons you believe the statement isn’t true. Instead of reinforcing the new thought you end up rehearsing the old one all over again. It’s like affirming something new creates an itch in your mind that your brain immediately wants to scratch. The unfamiliar thought can feel uncomfortable at first so you might feel this overwhelming urge to “correct” yourself, contradict the affirmation or retreat back into the old familiar narrative your mind is used to repeating. That reaction makes sense psychologically because our minds tend to interpret new information through existing beliefs and expectations and information that contradicts an established self concept can feel unfamiliar or literally incorrect. 

I think of the masking sound as quieting that conscious gatekeeper (the part of you that wants to analyze, question, contradict or “correct” every unfamiliar statement) so the affirmations can be repeatedly reinforced without that constant conscious interference. The goal is to reinforce “I am successful” until it becomes an increasingly familiar and natural thought rather than something your mind automatically challenges with all the reasons you believe you aren’t.

It doesn’t require some elaborate ritual/special technique or complicated set of steps. At its core it’s about repetition and consistency. So many of the assumptions, thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself today are the product of years of repeated experiences, messages, interpretation and environmental conditioning. You already have an established self concept. You believe you’re good at certain things and bad at others. You have ideas about your status, your identity, what kind of person you are, what you can accomplish, what you can have, what you deserve and what you expect from life. Those ideas are reinforced every single day as you move through your life. They don’t necessarily feel like “affirmations” because you’re not consciously sitting there repeating them as a technique, they just feel like facts about who you are. Thinking “I’m this kind of person,” “I can do this,” “I could never do that,” or “this is just how my life is” feels completely natural because you’ve returned to those conclusions so many times that they’ve become familiar.

That’s ultimately what you’re trying to change through repetition/with subliminals. You deliberately introduce a different story about yourself and reinforce it until the new thought stops feeling foreign and starts feeling normal. You change what you repeatedly tell yourself about who you are, what you can do, what you can become, what you can receive and what you expect to experience. Your self concept shifts accordingly and that shift can change how you experience reality and create outcomes in your life. It all comes back to what you repeatedly return to and what feels normal to you. Subliminals are a perfect way of facilitating that repetition. They repeatedly expose you to affirmations intended to reinforce a new self concept. That's “reprogramming”. You’re taking “this isn’t me” and through consistent repetition gradually turning it into “of course this is me.” It really comes down to the reps, what you consistently reinforce is what becomes familiar and what becomes familiar increasingly becomes your normal.

You could definitely argue that there’s something powerful about your inner self talk, because there is but it still isn’t something outside of you. It’s you repeatedly telling yourself a certain story and choosing to hold that perspective regardless of what your current circumstances are showing you. If you want more money for example, you stop constantly reinforcing the story that you don’t have enough and start affirming from the perspective of having it. We’ve established that your inner world has a huge influence on how you experience your outer world. What you repeatedly focus on changes what your brain prioritizes, notices, remembers, expects and responds to. Attention is selective by nature meaning your brain is constantly filtering enormous amounts of information and giving priority to what it considers relevant. This is also where repetition matters. (Neuro plasticity) Your brain changes with repeated experience, thought, attention and behavior. When you repeatedly reinforce a particular way of thinking, you strengthen the mental patterns associated with it until they become easier and more automatic to return to. So when you consistently affirm, listen to a subliminal and focus on a particular outcome, you’re training your mind to expect that outcome as normal which can then change the way you literally experience your reality. 

You affirm until your reality gives you evidence that supports what you’ve been reinforcing. Your inner world is the lens through which you experience life so the thoughts, expectations and assumptions you repeatedly return to naturally shape your reality. You persist in the new story until seeing results like it’s the natural conclusion.

Affirming which is essentially what subliminals are doing, makes perfect logical sense. Even though we don’t use logic here as the thing that decides what is or isn’t possible for us, it’s interesting that the two still line up. If we stick with the money example, a rich person wouldn’t constantly think about how broke they are, how little money they have, how much they lack or how desperately they need to make more. Why would they? They’re rich. Their inner world naturally reflects that. Whether they consciously affirm it or not their thoughts are going to be much more aligned with “I have money,” “I’m wealthy” “I can afford this” or the assumption that money is available to them. At the very least, they wouldn’t repeatedly affirm the exact opposite of their reality. It literally wouldn’t make sense for them to keep identifying with being broke while already living as a wealthy person.

The whole point is repetition and changing the way you think until that new perspective becomes the one you naturally operate from and experience. It will be reflected and begin unfolding in your reality because you’re no longer mentally entertaining the opposite outcome. When you consistently affirm only what you want, you stop reinforcing competing stories and perspectives instead of constantly creating room in your mind for a completely different scenario. You persist in the reality you want until that becomes the one you naturally experience.

This applies to everything you want to change or experience like your appearance, love life, money, success, self concept, desired scenarios, opportunities, literally whatever it may be. There’s something almost ridiculous about placing unnecessary limits on what you allow yourself to pursue when you have complete control over what you consciously choose to affirm and reinforce. Persistence can obviously be more challenging, especially when you’re accustomed to thinking the opposite but choosing to operate from a new story is still within your control. You are capable of deciding “This is what I’m going to reinforce from now on” regardless of the subject. That’s why I sometimes have a hard time understanding when people ask me whether this or that is “possible for them.” I’m not an authority over your life. I don’t get to decide what you’re allowed to pursue and neither does some random person on the internet. 

My answer will always be “you can do whatever you want” because I truly believe that. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again I really, genuinely believe in you like even if you feel like nobody else does, even if people laugh at your ambitions, think your imagination is too big or make you feel ridiculous for wanting whatever it is you want, I need you to know that I would never be one of those people. I will never ridicule you for dreaming big, belittle what you want or make you question yourself for believing that more is possible for you. I’ve shared results from people manifesting cars, proposals, huge sums of money, life changing opportunities, complete glow ups  and I’ve also shared people manifesting a slice of pizza, a book, a face wash, a new phone, etc. It literally ranges from the smallest everyday desires to things that completely change someone’s life and I respect and celebrate all of it exactly the same. If you want something and receiving it would make you happy, bring you joy, make your day or genuinely change your life then I am ALL for you getting it. Nothing has to be “big enough” impressive enough OR “realistic, small and easy” to be worth experiencing. You don’t need to shrink your goals to make them feel more achievable and you don’t need to make them bigger to make them feel more meaningful. If it matters to you that’s enough. I’m not saying this because I’m trying to sound overly cheesy or supportive. This is a real belief that I hold. When you tell me you want something my instinct is never to tell you that you’re aiming too high. I want you to go for it. I want you to see what happens when you stop asking other people for permission to believe in your own possibilities and actually give yourself a chance. EXPERIMENT ON YOURSELF! Gain knowledge and wisdom from your own experiences. 

You didn’t find all of this because you wanted to remain exactly where you are. We didn’t cross paths for you to spend your time convincing yourself that nothing can change. My purpose is to bring you out of that little world where your desires only exist in your imagination and encourage you to carry them into your real life experience. Life itself is magic! It’s wonderful! I’m here to awaken what’s already inside of you like the hope, ambition, imagination and belief that there can be so much more for you and push you to actually live it instead of only wishing/dreaming about it. You’re here because you want results, you want more for yourself and somewhere inside of you there is already a part that believes more is possible otherwise you wouldn’t be looking for it in the first place. So as you go through life with your huge ambitions, wild ideas, specific desires and whatever else you decide you want to pursue, remember that there is at least one person who isn’t looking at you like you’re crazy for wanting more. I want you to keep that part of yourself that can imagine something greater than what you currently see because you CAN get it. Banish the doubt. Give yourself permission to go for it.

What you consciously choose to affirm is literally up to you. If you continuously tell yourself, “I can’t manifest this” “this is too much for me” “I never get results” “this won’t work for me” then those are the thoughts and expectations you’re choosing to keep alive. I can’t control that for you. This is especially important when you’re using subliminals. You already know what the subliminal contains. You’ve read the benefits. You pressed play because those are the results you WANT. So why spend the rest of your day consciously arguing against the exact statements you’re repeatedly exposing yourself to? You’re trying to establish one story through repetition while simultaneously rehearsing the old story every chance you get. If you want results why repeatedly tell yourself that you can’t get results? At the very least stop actively fighting the direction you’ve already decided you want to move in.

The endless arguments about the “correct” way to listen to subliminals are another perfect example. Someone might decide, “I can only listen to one topic at a time or subliminals won’t work for me.” Okay…well, that’s the rule they’ve chosen to operate under. Why should that automatically become yours? It makes no sense for someone else to impose their personal assumptions onto you and it makes even less sense for you to immediately adopt them as limitations when you didn’t have them five minutes ago. You don’t need to collect everybody else’s rules. You don’t need to turn someone else’s limitations into your own. If the entire purpose is repetition then repeat what you actually want to reinforce. 

To sum everything up, the core concept really is that simple. Affirmations + repetition + consistency + letting go of the old story and consistently reinforcing the new one = results.