Can you lift a car single-handed? Neither can I, yet we hear news stories about people who perform seemingly impossible feats of strength or endurance in emergency situations. The slender female who lifts the car that has her partner or child trapped beneath it. The average male who walks miles to find help for himself and others despite serious injury.

Most of the time we only use a small fraction of our physical abilities. That’s true of our mental abilities too.

The mind functions on two levels conscious and unconscious. The conscious level of mind is the one that you are using now to read these words. Although you have probably heard of the unconscious level of mind its purpose and functions may be unclear to you. This is the case for many people.

The unconscious mind and its way of operating remind me of my favourite fairy tale “Aladdin and his wonderful lamp”. Your unconscious mind is like that wonderful lamp because it can bring you all that you seek in life when you know how to communicate with it. Why is this? Because you’re unconscious mind unlike your conscious mind knows no limitation.

Your conscious mind contains your self -image. This is the mental picture that you have of yourself containing not just your physical description but also details of your personality traits, skills and abilities. Most of us have a very limited and limiting self-image. This is because our notions of who we are were formulated by the time we reached six or seven years old and not updated.

So at the age of 37,47 or even 57 we still at one level view ourselves as having only the abilities that we had at the age of six.

Of course we are aware consciously of the lifetime of work experience/engineering degree etc that we have now. However this does not help us when our inadequate self-image (most people have an inadequate self-image) kicks in.

This always happens at the worst possible times such as when we are invited to speak at a meeting and want to impress the boss. Or when we meet an attractive member of the opposite sex or meet our future parents in –law.

So how can we overcome this? By seeking the help of the unconscious mind.

As far as our unconscious minds are concerned we can have, do and be anything. At this level no pre-conceived notions exist as to what is or is not possible. Ask and your unconscious mind will find a way to bring your desire into your life.

This brings me back to the story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. The lamp brought great riches to those who knew how to use it. To those without this knowledge it just appeared to be a rusty old lamp not worth a second look.

I’ve given you the first key to your unconscious mind by explaining what it is and how it functions.