Find a Way to Let Your Subconscious Intuitions Emerge

My favourite exercise for envisioning the future, which I often invite clients to do, is the one that Debbie Millman describes in her first interview with Tim Ferriss. (Millman, by the way, throughout several appearances on the show, is my favourite all-time Tim Ferriss guest.)

The exercise, which she says she learned from branding legend Milton Glaser, is to create what she calls a Five-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life. To imagine that it is five years in the future, everything you have tried has come off, everything has worked out remarkably. And to write the day, in as much detail as possible, from start to finish. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning until the moment you close your eyes at night.

Whilst there are many great ways to envision the future, one of the things I have noticed about this exercise is the power in that last instruction: write the day, in as much detail as possible, from start to finish.

This is the part of the instruction that allows what the subconscious part of the self knows to become conscious.

I always remember a client years ago who, after completing the exercise, said that one of the most interesting things was that her plans for the future changed at the moment that – in the remarkable day five years in the future – she opened her curtains. What did she want to see, she asked herself? And the answer came: trees. And in that moment she knew that her future didn’t lie in the city she then lived in. Her future, her desires for her future, crept up on her. Somewhere, deep down, she knew.

Her conscious self, mostly her thinking self, hadn’t been able to ‘work that out'. But her subconscious knew. (And, by the way, you should see her garden in her countryside house now – it’s spectacular).

Other things happen with an exercise like this: the reticular activating system will be switched on to what you want, you’ll start seeing the opportunities for the things that appear in the vision. The type of house you imagined, the type of job you’re doing.

But most interesting to me today is the way our subconscious desires sneak up on us in an exercise like this, if we let them. Whether it is where we might live, whether or not we want children, what work we do, or more.

It happened to me a few days ago, completing a different exercise. One inspired by Fred Kofman’s eulogy exercise in The Meaning Revolution, which I have written about before.

I always remember that, years ago, when I was working with Vegard Olsen and coachingpartner, Vegard would always invite and encourage us to have done the exercises that we invited other people to do in our workshops. The difference when I did this was enormous: it allowed for trust to build for the participants in the exercise, and for us in the exercise. Feeling the exercise, my deliveries and explanations came from a deeper, clearer place.

And so as I travelled to Edinburgh this week to deliver leadership workshops on behalf of 64 Million Artists for some of the University of Edinburgh’s most exciting researchers, I find myself writing the retirement speech I would love a colleague to give as I retire in many years time, and the eulogy that, should my time come with enough notice, they might give at a living funeral held for me.

And as with Millman’s plan for a remarkable life, the speechwriting allowed my subconscious to speak. And - although I have completed those exercises before, and many similar exercises, new intuitions and insights emerged. Who was speaking? Who else did they mention? What did they highlight? What does it mean for me?

The speech or eulogy writing has another trick that allows the subconscious to emerge: the invitation to imagine the colleague or loved-one speaking about you, and what they might say. Easier, perhaps, to release the true assessment someone honourable, honest and loving might make of a body of work or a life well-lived than to try to give our own, wrapped as it is in our doubts and humility.

The difference between the importance-led goal-setting of sitting down to think about what we might want to achieve in our career, and the intuition-led emergence of the eulogy, or retirement speech, or plan for a remarkable life, is notable.

Of course, we need both: the conscious and the subconscious.

But this article is a call to your subconscious.

Find a way to let it emerge, and to see what it has to tell you. 

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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