Our mind is made up of 3 parts – and by understanding what their roles are, how they interact together, and how they drive our feelings, emotions and behaviours – we can become far more insightful towards ourselves, and more tolerant of our partner, children, parents, friends and work colleagues.

There are 3 parts to our mind:

1.         The Conscious Mind

2.         The Subconscious Mind

3.         The Unconscious Mind

1. The Conscious Mind

Our Conscious Mind, which is approximately 20% of our total mind, is the part of the mind that enables us to operate in the now… interacting, thinking, analyzing, planning, communicating and doing.

It is the part of our mind that most represents who we really want to be – that part of us that tries to have good intention, to behave in ways that are congruent with the beliefs and values that we try to put into practice.

2. The Subconscious Mind

Our subconscious mind is where all feelings and emotions are generated. You can liken it to a vast database containing every past experience – with the strongest and most influential ones being from our childhood – that time of our life when we are learning about the world around us and how we fit into it – from our parents, siblings, teachers, etc. It acts like filter, processing everything that we experience consciously.

Every experience stored in our subconscious has a belief connected to it. That belief was our interpretation of the situation at the time we experienced it. Even if we now know consciously, looking back, that the belief is wrong, it is very difficult to change.

For example, a loving parent who just wanted you to do better can leave you with a belief that you were never good enough. As an adult this can develop into low self esteem, perhaps making you overly sensitive to differences of opinion.

 3. The Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind is responsible for all actions and behaviours. Actions range from keeping the body running as in heart and lungs, protecting the body such as in fight or flight, or defending the body in all sorts of ways that might include behaviours (responses) such as anger, aggression, addiction, withdrawal, or manipulation.

These behaviours are triggered by the feelings and emotions that are generated by the subconscious mind. Because they are non thinking behaviours, they may not in our best interests. In fact, at times, they can be extremely unhelpful … or even dysfunctional. Yet because they are the result of our non-conscious minds working independently to our conscious mind – we have trouble controlling them.

Science has proven that our non-conscious minds operate at speeds thousands of times faster than our conscious mind does. Therefore, feelings, emotions and subsequent behaviours are happening before we have even consciously processed an event. And then our non-conscious mind ‘tricks’ our conscious mind into thinking (justifying) that it made the decision or took the action.

It is important to note that when we are stressed, have had too little sleep, or have been drinking or taking drugs, we tend to bypass our conscious minds and operate from the non-conscious – in auto pilot mode. Behaviours therefore often do not represent the real ‘conscious’ person as free will is has been handed over to the non-conscious mind.