This was the first district 80 pre-convention workshop conducted by Dr. Arulnathan, DTM at Queenstown CC Auditorium on 12 Jan 2008. This workshop was about how powerful our subconscious mind is.

Seeing is believing.. Dr. Arul first started with a demonstration. Could you believe, a man who has a flexible body could behave like a straight rod and able to withstand a 54-kg man standing on top of him? Look at the picture; this was the demo that Dr. Arul showed to us.

By the way, what is subconscious mind? In psychological point of view, it’s a mind that is operating or existing outside of consciousness. For example, have you ever encountered a situation whereby you were searching for something urgently but you couldn’t find it? Eventually, you found that thing when you didn’t intend or consciously look for it. Another example is, you were thinking for a solution for a whole day long and yet you couldn’t think of one. Surprisingly, on the next day when you woke up, the solution automatically appeared in your mind. These two examples are something deals with subconscious mind. We can actually make use of the subconscious mind to achieve whatever we wish to achieve. In other words, our mind can be reprogrammed in such a way that we believe we have a not limit in achieving a goals.

Dr. Arul shared quite a number of techniques in how to make use of the subconscious mind. Here, I would like to share with you the ones that I feel it’s easy to apply.

Auto-suggestion
1) Written affirmation
- Write down your goals in a piece of paper. It must be written in succinct and terse manner.
2) Verbal affirmation
- Read your goals out loud everyday.
3) Picture affirmation
- Imagine yourself achieving the goals while reading out your goals.
4) Taped affirmation
- Audio-record your goals and listen to them daily.

Mental imagery or visualization
- Visualize about the happiness, satisfaction and gratification that you can gain after achieving your goals.
- Imagine it as real as possible.
- Think of yourself as a super hero, you can do whatever things and achieve whatever goals.

Some people may ask. By just using the auto-suggestion and visualization techniques, we can achieve our goals? It sounds so easy… There must be reasons why these techniques were introduced. In my point of view, we don’t know what our limit is in performing a particular task. However, we have to always push ourselves to go beyond our own limit. Then, how to get the drive to push ourselves everyday? Human is by nature, lazy and forgetful. By using the auto-suggestion techniques, we will be always reminded about our goals, our purposes in life. With the aid of mental imagery or visualization techniques, the result in our mind serves as a drive to drive us forward. For example, in your mental imagery, you visualize yourself as a rich man, traveling around the world with your family members. Your family members are so happy and enjoyable. Subsequently, you will have an urge to work harder and think of ways to make more money so that you can have a happy life with your family. In other words, all the techniques introduced, the purpose is the same, to remind yourself and to find the urge of yourself to achieving your goals.