hi,
Here’s the prose version of my recent experience of revisiting Rich West’s “Decide and Win” tool. I talked about it n Doctor D’s Stream-O-Consciousness a couple days ago. Which you can listen to here:
So, Phoenix stumbled on this guy’s video a year ago (or more? time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…into the future). The video in and of itself is all kinds of awesome in this late era of YouTubing. But the tool, and I speak from considerable training in hypnotherapy, is genius. It’s based on sound principles, it’s exceedingly easy to use, and it works.
Decide and Win
One way of looking at the subconscious mind is that it acts like a fairly primitive computer that persistently runs a set of programs. These programs are often based in early-life trauma and/or significant experiences related strongly to fear, shame, drives or desires.
Once these programs get imprinted powerfully enough into the subconscious, it will keep reacting to new experiences (internal or external) with the same set of programs. Say you suffered a painful rejection by a boy or girl in junior high school. This rejection was experienced as shameful or humiliating. Probably also as a harbinger of the end of your world.
The subconscious internalizes your powerful emotional reaction as a life or death situation. In order to keep you safe, it develops a program that says, “It’s not safe to be emotionally vulnerable.” Or a program that says, “You’ll never be (pretty, popular, rich enough to) get the love you want.”
From then on, unless we are able to correct that program, the subconscious will continue operating beneath the surface of consciousness whenever similar parameters to the original traumatic event are triggered.
Sometimes we rewrite these primitive programs by going after another love interest further down the line. Our emotions and hormones are strong enough to override the subconscious program trying to keep us safe. And we do get the boy or the girl.
But often the subconscious programming just keeps going, year after year, subtly undermining our happiness and potential for living the life we truly desire.
Correcting this programming can be difficult precisely because it operates beneath the surface of consciousness. We don’t know why we can’t seem to stay on track for what we desire in life. We don’t know why we keep seeming to sabotage our own progress. Because we don’t realize that the subconscious programming will usually trump our waking-mind desires — until we go in and override or weed out the old, fear-based programs that reside in the subconscious.
This is why modalities such as hypnotherapy, trance work, somatic releasing, and rhythm-based movement arts can be so powerful in the process of self-realization; because they bypass our rational prejudices and work at a deeper level of consciousness to build new patterns and connections.
Rich West’s “Decide and Win” tool is genius because it works at a foundational level to help build self-esteem, make us more aware of the decisions we’re always making (albeit often with limited awareness), and correct the subconscious programming almost all of us get in this society that says we’re fundamentally irresponsible, untrustworthy, and incapable of sustained, meaningful action on on our own behalf.
The thing I love most about it is his emphasis on taking the win. Due to a lot of bad parenting — followed by a lot of bad societal influences and media programming — most of us have typically found it much easier to judge, nitpick, downplay, and criticize ourselves than to praise ourselves for what we’re doing right.
How can we ever live our best lives if we can’t even be kind to our own souls?
No Space
After the conversations with my son that I described on the podcast, I didn’t say out loud, “I’m going to write a two-minute song and just finish it.” But the thought definitely occurred to me and I know I experienced a strong inner impulse to do just that.
So when I wrote a new song in one sitting (for the first time in I don’t know how long), I instantly knew I was taking the win. See how easy that is? And it feels great.
Plus, I’m taking another win, for a decision I didn’t even remember until after I posted the Stream-O-Consciousness pod. I’ve been playing around with some diminished and augmented chords in my acoustic guitar exile out here in off-gridland. At some point this winter, I did say out loud in my mind, “I want to write some songs that include these chord substitutions instead of just staight major and minor chords.”
The verse progression in “No Space” is Cadd9 / C /Fmaj7#11 / Fmaj7 / Dsus2.
I’d been playing around with some of those chords for a couple months but never managed to put them together in a way that resolved satisfactorily. They did in this new song, though — they just kind of popped. So, yeah, taking that as a win!