Unconscious Influence

Welcome. Welcome to the recap of the club where this week, we talked about the four different phases of unconscious influence, or what has to happen in our subconscious for changes to be made, for action to be take, taken.

And if you are not familiar, I’m Kendra, and this is the club that was made by highly sensitive purpose driven creatives for our fellow highly sensitive purpose driven creatives, who are wanting to build businesses on their terms and turn their creativity into something that supports them, whether that be cold, hard cash in actual currency, or supports their life in a way where they get to live a full life, rather than the half life, where we try to be happy all the time. unconscious influence. Let’s dive in when it comes to change, even when we’re changing for the better, something we know we want to do.

It’s easy to think of it this. You start talking to yourself or your people or your kids or your partners or your social media fans, and then you think, if I say the right things enough times quickly, then they will buy, or they will agree, or the flocks of people will start coming into my world, and we also secretly mean that they agree, and they’ll miraculously do the thing that we want them to do, click the buy, click the link, download our thing. Say Yes to the healthy dinner.

Say Yes to the fun vacation, and that seems it would be fun, but that’s not what happens. The world doesn’t always go, oh, okay, you spoke words perfectly. Now I do the bidding.

Now I do the action. But by thinking of it this, when it doesn’t happen that way, and we get discouraged and worried, we usually decide that something happened with our words, our messaging, our marketing, or that social media stinks, or that our kids don’t get it, or our partners don’t get it, or our kids are difficult and they’re never going to figure it out. But it’s much more nuanced than that, right?

let’s get real honest here, whether it’s a small, easy change or a big, daunting change, whether we’re asking someone to part with their money or part with a routine of theirs or a part of their identity, it’s a big deal. It takes some time and it takes some subconscious phasing to all come into alignment in order for any change to happen, all these little, smaller changes have to take first place. Take place first in our brains, in our people’s brains, for us to even start thinking enough and being motivated enough to do the action.

And these changes aren’t all rational and conscious. There’s much that has to take place under the surface, the iceberg, of the depth of under the ocean, in the subconscious, in the unconscious, all these different levels for something to stick and be meaningful enough to motivate us to take the action levels of the emotions, the our instincts and that good old nervous system, let alone our emotional system and our belief system and our value system, our wiring, has been programmed against change for 1000s of years. all these levels have to get on board with the change before we even notice that, hey, I’ve been noticing that there’s a change I want to make.

And then maybe we have conscious words about it, or conscious opinions about it, and then all the parts get involved about their opinions about the past and the future. There’s many things that have to happen. when you don’t look at this.

And when you don’t consider all these unconscious levels of change, and you try to persuade yourself or influence your people to do something, to make a change, you can end up spending a lot of energy and effort and not getting very far and thinking there’s a problem. that’s what we’re solving this week. For many of you that might be, this might be a red pill, blue pill week, because you can’t go, you can’t unknow what we’re talking about.

Once we go through these phases, once them, there’s, there’s a no choice, but let’s start to use them and play with them and go back to them and utilize them for good and not evil. for some of you, this might be a reminder, but I’m going to hand it to you on a silver platter in a way that hopefully you haven’t thought about in a while, your brain can go, Aha. This is meaningful.

I gave a story this week about eating healthy. Yeah, I love eating healthy. I’m not always as healthy as I want to eat, because those little chips call to me and those little chocolates call to me.

And don’t get me started on frozen custard, especially when it’s the homemade, special variety of a local place here, I love all of the things too, but my husband has had a lot of resistance to changing some things around his eating habits. And as many of us know, usually the person closest to us is not the person that is the easiest to hear about the changes from. But he was going to the gym and using the little scale at the gym, and he kept coming home saying, I think this scale is broken.

It’s not really working properly. It says I weigh less than I probably do, and not that weight is the most important thing to him. He’s actively going to the gym.

He’s doing the taekwondo thing. He’s very fit in many ways, but sometimes, when he sees himself some pictures, he goes, Ah, is that? What’s going on when he sees himself from an outside perspective?

And I love him no matter what. I think he’s wildly sexy no matter what. But when he went to the doctor, the doctor scale, which was accurate, I think, confirmed that the gym scale was not only off, but over by about or the gym scale was under by 20 pounds.

he was 20 pounds heavier than he thought he was, and he came home ready to make the change. It’s all of the parts of him were in alignment. It was the final tipping of the iceberg, and we’ve been eating these Whole Foods.

That was the first change we made. Let’s take all the packaged, processed stuff out and see what our taste buds do. Let’s see what our bodies do.

Let’s see what our minds, our psychology around food, does. And I didn’t anticipate this, but for the first two weeks, I was walking around with my solar plexus hurting, with a sense of deep dread and panic. I was having heart things go on, because this feeling in my stomach was saying there is something really wrong.

And I couldn’t even hear some sometimes I could catch the thoughts, but what I realized is it was because every time that feeling had come before I didn’t even feel the feeling I had been reaching for the chips, reaching for the chocolate, reaching for the sugary beverage, sipping the little coffee that I never even knew that I was dealing with that feeling. And once I could turn myself in the direction of, oh, there is something that’s constantly happening here. And work with my unconscious, with these four phases.

And by the way, I want to say the word ethically. Work with our unconsciousness, unconsciousness, our subconsciousness. This is not for the meanies out there are the people that are trying to do something unethical.

here are the four phases for my ethical friends, whatever that means to you. Number one, first phase is congruence. We spent a whole week last week on making sure we understood what it meant to be congruent.

you can go watch that or it’s in your membership area. But in a nutshell, congruence is alignment with all the parts of you, the conscious parts of you, and what you’re saying and what you’re doing and your sense of self concept. when what your outside actions are and your inside self concept are unaligned, you’re congruent.

When you do this, you speak in a way that is honest and straightforward and grounded, because you don’t have the need to push or convince or exaggerate or twist or hide anything. You are coming from a genuine place of service and wholeness and sufficiency. We talk about coming from sufficiency a lot in the club.

It’s this energy of there’s even when there’s problems to be solved. There’s nothing wrong here. There’s no manipulation or pushing of your own ego’s agenda.

Phase two, in your subconscious, it has to understand right relationship. It has to have rapport that has been built when people, us humans, sense incongruence, even the subtlest little sense of it, we know and we are instinctively distrusting, because when you are congruent the nervous system and the instincts can relax, we don’t even have to consciously know it. When people consistently feel safe with you, that naturally builds trust, and trust is what leads the to the next phase, of us being interested and curious.

relationship is the second phase. Third phase is expansion and exploration. When someone has built the someone has the congruence, and now you’ve built trust and rapport with someone.

Now you can start to tap into. Let’s explore new ideas. Let’s expand our capacity to hold cognitive dissonance or opposites.

When someone is with you and you are in this phase, or they’re looking at your messaging or your marketing, they’re starting to pay attention to you and your suggestions. And that can take some time. You might have to show up multiple, multiple times consistently, in order for someone to even start to be able to tap into their curiosity, to come closer, to explore with you what your ideas are, and you’re over here going, why I’ve been talking about this long, I feel I’m a broken record, or I’m annoying people.

But no, they were working through their phases, and now they are ready to expand and explore with you. That’s when people start to expand their capacity for what’s possible for them, and then, and only then can you move into the fourth phase, which is motivation, motivation to act, motivation to rely on the trusting relationship. Think about the curiosity and the expansion of the possibilities, and then think, what do I want to do about it?

How do I want to implement this into my life or the life of my people? That’s when your ideas, your offers, your requests, whatever the change or new action is, that’s when another person can be motivated to do something different. We’ve talked a lot about the motivational triad.

We will later. I’m not going to go into that, but we are wired to not change. We are wired to conserve calories and conserve energy and stay on the couch.

And we got good old inertia. We also have that part of us that wants to grow and move towards change, and that’s what we’re working with here. for today, while you are considering even this new information and this learning and your creativity is already starting to see how it can fit into your life or resist it, as the case may be, I want to invite you to watch for these four phases in everything you do.

Watch for them and your people, and watch for them, where maybe you were getting frustrated because you didn’t remember them or didn’t know about them, and let the insights and epiphanies come. Then we moved into procrastination as a specific way to look at the four phases. A lot of times I hear my clients beat themselves up over being procrastinators, or why do I keep procrastinating even the things I want to be doing, even the fun things?

Here’s the thing, procrastination isn’t always being lazy or putting something off for no reason. It’s sometimes your inner child protecting you from feeling something it’s felt in the past when you took action. Usually it’s your inner child, your inner self, protecting you from feeling shame when you’re putting off the things you do want to do, when deadlines are stressing you out more than helping you schedule yourself, when guilt and urgency about what you should be doing are eating you from the inside out.

It’s easy to freeze and get stuck in overthinking and over feeling and over eating and over worrying and over all these things, and then it’s natural to give up, to feel the relief of not spinning in the times, though, when you’re not being lazy, which, by the way, being lazy is a lovely thing that I advocate for, but in the times when you’re finding that it’s procrastination is protecting you from something deeper that you can’t quite see, that’s what we solved for this week. I want you to think now of something maybe that you’re putting off, something that you really do, genuinely see that you would to do, but you’re not quite getting to it, or you feel that sense of, oh, do I have to do this? Or even maybe think of a time when you took action and you made a mistake.

Then I want you to ask yourself, are you coming to that part of you, or thinking of that mistake, or when you made that mistake? Did you come to that with patience, where you met from the outside world with patience and understanding and for of course, this is human, or was there a school situation or a job situation or your own inner self situation going, what’s wrong with me? Come on, let’s get this going.

Go for the a plus only did you feel ashamed when you made past mistakes? Embarrassed? That sense of humiliation, which I know, I’m sure you all know what humiliation feels.

We can almost taste it, even by thinking of it. Think of all those moments in your life where you goofed, you genuinely were in the wrong. And do you see those moments now as whether each one individually or collectively, do you see them as exactly precious and perfect for your growth, or did they somehow become subtle proof that you can’t do that thing or you’re not good at that thing, or that you failed and there’s something wrong with you?

If past mistakes meant shame, then it makes sense why, at least now a part of you is avoiding having you not feel that shame. When you soften though, and you allow some space around even shame, even embarrassment, even humiliation as a sensation, then you get to a point where you. See procrastination and that protection moment as precious, and when you become willing to go ahead and feel those sensations on your body, when you can feel any feeling at all, that’s when you’re free.

Of course, you don’t want to feel judged. No one does, and you’re definitely going to make mistakes in the future when you’re doing something new. That’s how growth and learning and human beingness works.

Getting trained in schools to get straight A’s, or being trained in our culture to fit in and do be the be the same, doesn’t help us when we are ready to ask for discomfort toddler phase, level of making mistakes on purpose. But when procrastination is protecting you from shame, what’s really happening is shame or embarrassment, or whatever your flavor is. That’s training your brain right now to expect rejection before it even happens.

We got to get in there. We got to look at hey, if I anticipate that, I’m going to fail, and then I’m going to feel all these bad feelings. Of course, I’m going to stop it makes sense that I’m protecting myself from that.

You’re keeping yourself in survival mode, because that means you get to stay safe by staying the same. It happens to all of us, human beings on repeat. We stop trying, we stop learning, and sometimes we even stop hoping, because these sensations, when they’re not allowed to be felt and held, they literally start dulling our brains.

They dull the part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex that does want to problem solve and be self expressed, and instead, it helps you engage the back of your brain, the lizard brain, the reptile brain, the survival brain, amygdala, which tends to make everything then feel and look a threat, you will stay stopped. pairing that with unconscious influence, you can see why these four phases, these four levels are important to not understand, but to allow and start to employ and be with them in a deliberate way. congruence relationship and rapport, expansion and exploration and motivation comes last, to act.

the final thing I want to wrap up with is this idea that I have to remind myself of all the time, that having vitamins in your cupboard is not the same thing as taking the action of taking the vitamins. A lot of times I realize, Oh my gosh, I haven’t been taking my vitamins. I feel healthier because they’re in my cabinet, same way having the knowledge of these unconscious phases of influence isn’t the same thing as going to them and using them to help you start acting with them.

I’m gonna say them again, we get good at them. Congruence, aligning all the parts of yourself with your self concept inside and your actions on the outside, that’s what helps us and others feel more relaxed, more trusting. Our instincts can really sense this, and we call it safety, and we can sense incongruence, a shark can sense the blood in the water, even if you say, Hi, how are you?

And someone says, I’m fine, thank you, but you see some little quiver on their face. You sense it, if they’re not really fine. Phase Two, relationship and rapport, that positive feeling of connection, oxytocin, when two people have built trust and are starting to be open to be influenced by each other, helps us move into Phase Three, to explore, get curious, expand into new information, and try on, even in our imagination, new ideas.

This is when your world can get bigger. Your capacity to understand what’s possible expands when you explore. And then the phase four of motivation, once you’ve tried on this new idea in your imagination and expanded your awareness of what’s possible.

That’s finally when you can consider doing something, taking action. It might be as simple as clicking a button, speaking to someone, making an offer, buying something, going somewhere, finishing something, all of our marketing efforts, all of our sales, especially when we’re bringing businesses online, seem to be geared toward the motivating our people to act. But if we start marketing and selling to these other parts of them intentionally and taking our time to help the people move through them with us, that is when it gets good and you are in the seat of power.

let’s see. I gave you a couple more examples this week of especially in business implementation. If you’re running into I’ve been posting or offering and giving all the info.

If they’re still not buying, then you might start to look at , well, what’s the relationship that I’ve built? What’s the relationship from their perspective? What might they still be needing to build trust with me?

Do they think I’m selling them something, or do they not understand something? Is there some way I can ask them what they need? Or is it that their motivation is low and they don’t have enough yet to act on something?

How can I inform them at through exploration and expansion of their what’s possible that they start getting excited and motivated to act now? Or if you’re thinking, people are saying they love me and they’re inspired by me, but they’re not coming closer. Maybe that’s another place do we have to go look at the relationship?

Is there something about you that’s incongruent about how you’re making the offers, and how can you focus on helping them expand and explore for themselves? You can see how starting to ask and answer these questions gives you a little movement beyond it’s not working. This stinks.

And the last one, my favorite was, I know I can help people. why do I have such a hard time putting myself out there? This one comes up for me.

Still, a lot people have even said to me, tell me about what’s going on. How do I come more into your world? And I somehow still can hear the thought of , don’t tell them that would be salesy.

That’s when I need to turn to congruence with me. Where am I out of congruence? Where are you not feeling aligned about making those offers?

Is there something that in you that feels a fraud? Is there something that feels your price isn’t right? Is it something in you that doesn’t feel the container that you are offering is is ready yet?

Not that it’s not ready, but what parts you and to be able to let those parts of you speak words, especially with a mentor or a coach, you can hold them and go, Oh, that makes sense. Why you’re stopping yourself. We haven’t solved that congruent problem yet?

What parts of you aren’t on board yet? What parts are still frustrated? What parts are being compassionate and which parts are being curious and judgy?

What’s the bigger why behind your hesitation to really listen for those answers helps you get into congruence, and that’s when you start seeing problems. Once you start knowing about these phases and going to each phase and go, let me do some tweaking and some iteration here, and you start to see problems as opportunities. They’re going to show you.

Problems show up right before you’re going to expand, right before you’re going to do the thing. Problems will show up. And when you see sounds I got an opportunity here come up in the face of problems, you relax.

You are free. one of the upstream ways we did this to get you into your body, into the congruence of your whole self in the present moment. We talked about tapping.

I’m not going to go into it too much in the recap, but I will say that the beginning of tapping begins with rubbing a sore spot on your body, under your clavicle. You’ll feel it over here by your not too close to your armpit, but right here. And you rub it.

And you literally say, even though I have this problem, whatever your problem is, whatever you see is your problem. I completely love and love and respect myself. Even though I have this problem, I completely trust that I will figure this out.

Even though I have this problem, I completely know that I will be okay, and I have my own back. Whatever you say you’re holding both the problem and the opportunity and the love, then you get to work. Some people say it’s both sides at the same time.

I have my microphone, I’m going to do one side. I say, get in your body where the meridians of of your energy centers come closest to the center of your body, above your eyebrow, to the side of your eye, on the bony part, underneath your eye, above your lip, under your nose, under your lower lip, underneath that clavicle area, not far over as the sore spot you’re tapping. You’re getting in your body, under your armpit, lymph node area under your breast bone, top of your rib cage.

And then there’s some parts on your fingers. I don’t even remember all those and your karate chop point, as the tappers call it, these moments, these times with yourself, we are getting back into your body. Everybody’s got all kinds of different things.

We did box breathing this week. You could listen to a song, you can sing a song, you play a musical instrument, you can clap and cross the midline of your body. There are many ways to help your nervous system regulate you can come into congruence while you ask yourself these questions.

you can build relationship within your own self as you build relationship with your outer people, that you can explore why it is. You’re hesitating, where you’re out of congruence, that then you can finally move in to the motivated stage where you’re gonna start taking the action. This is happening all the time, whether it or not, let’s stop fighting against it.

Let’s start using it for good and not against ourselves. And with that, let’s coach you.