How Our Subconscious Mind Takes Us By Surprise
SHOW NOTES
Here's a metaphor from my kitchen that won't leave me alone. I love buying beans and rice from the bulk section, but every so often I grab the bag and discover a tiny hole I never noticed, and suddenly there's rice all over the counter and the floor, and I'm either sweeping it up and hoping for the best or cutting my recipe down to a kitty-sized portion.
Our lives can feel exactly like that. We think we've got it together, we have a plan, we're about to execute, and then everything starts spilling out through a hole we didn't even know was there. In this episode I explain how those hidden holes are usually unresolved fears and deeper desires working in the background, quietly in conflict with the goals we think we want. Like the promotion you keep getting passed over for, not because you lack strategy, but because a deeper, unexamined fear of visibility and pressure is steering the ship.
The good news is that when you learn to spot and plug those holes, you stop creating your own messes, and you move through life less like you're chasing spilled beans and more like that warrior who already sees the punch coming.
Warmly,
Linda
💖 For comprehensive support from a licensed therapist, reach out to me through:
Meet Your Host!
Linda Sanderville, LCSW, RYT-200 is the founder of Satya Counseling & Yoga LLC. She specializes in concierge therapy for female founders and public figures, helping high-profile women navigate public scandal, executive burnout, and the values that will define the second half of life. Based in Albuquerque and serving clients virtually in DC, Maryland, Virginia, and beyond, Linda combines clinical expertise with somatic wisdom to help leaders reclaim their truth.
Read below for full transcript.
[00:00] The Bag of Beans That Started This Episode
Hi, I'm Linda, an emotion coach and hypnotherapist who also loves a good sunrise yoga class, listening to the belly laughs of my baby boys, and hunting down the best vegan donuts. This podcast is for ambitious and high-performing women who want to feel fulfilled in all areas of their life. I'm here to give you practical tips and mindset shifts that will help you put your self-love skills into action. Welcome.
So I just ate a whole bunch of oranges that are about to go off. When you're a mom, you'll know this. You'll understand this. The amount of fruit and berries and things that we have to buy on a constant basis for our kids. It just feels like I'm running a farmer's market in my own house. And so there's these oranges. I love oranges. And they're looking kind of old. So let me just get these oranges. Let me just, this is my breakfast now. Oranges and, what is this, English breakfast tea.
But anyway, thinking about groceries, because I have a mom also. As a parent, really, I'm always thinking about groceries. I was thinking about this. This kind of happens to me a little too often. I like to buy food from the bulk sections at grocery stores. I don't know if you guys have, you know, Sprouts or Whole Foods or something near you that has the bulk section. And I usually like to pick up my beans from there, sometimes my rice if I'm getting low. You should get that at Costco. We eat a lot of rice. We've got Africans and Mexicans in this household, so we eat a lot of rice.
But I was thinking about how often, when I go to grab a bag of beans or rice, sometimes what happens is that, I can either find out when I get home later, or recently this happened to me at the cash register, I grab the bag, and the beans or the grains of rice start falling out everywhere. And I have no idea what's happening, right? And so if I'm trying to cook a recipe, I'm going to just grab the bag and make the rice or the beans really quick. And suddenly there's stuff all over the counter and all over the floor.
And it takes me a minute to plug that hole back up or figure out where the hole actually is so that I can salvage my meal. So this is really frustrating. And at this point, you guys are either like, team, you know, sweep the food off the floor and rinse it off, use it anyway, or you're like, well, I'm just going to cut this recipe in half now. Either way, you're in the middle of a very messy extra step that you weren't planning on. And it's pretty irritating, especially if you're constantly cooking meals and you just want to do this quickly and you're kind of over it.
[02:55] The Hole in the Bag Is Like the Holes in Our Minds
So I was thinking about this example. I have the hole in the bag, right? The hole in the little plastic bag. And I was thinking about how this is so similar to the way that our lives can feel, right? How it can feel when we're in the middle of a situation. We think we got it all together. We have a plan. We're about to execute. We're doing the thing.
And then all of a sudden it's like things falling everywhere, things falling apart. And this mess that's been created is an example, just one of many examples, of how our subconscious can really cause a lot of grief and frustration for us. Because there can be holes that we don't know about in the way that we think, or how we function, or the things that we believe. And then these holes that we don't know about, they end up messing up our plans. They slow down our progress on our goals. They make us spew things out of our mouths that we wish we could just take back, right? And on and on and on.
So look, I know for me, I want a whole lot more than floor food. I don't want to be sweeping food off the floor and just hoping it's okay. I don't want you having to cut your meal in half to the size of a kitty meal if that's not what you want. When you know how to plug up those holes that can create a lot of self-sabotage, then you can really reduce the amount of unexpected, surprising messes that are happening in your life, at least due to you. And you become so much more powerful.
Just like that, you're like that female warrior in the movies, you know, the ones where, gosh, they're so good, right? Like their opponent is coming at them, and even before their opponent can throw a punch, the warrior, she already knows where the punch is coming from. She started blocking it, and she's getting through their defenses. I love those scenes because it's just like, great. It's like in The Matrix, you know, at the end. I don't think I'm spoiling it for you. Either you've seen The Matrix at this point, or you're probably not going to watch it. Right when Neo is just doing his thing, and everything's in slow motion because he already knows when it's coming.
[05:15] The Deeper Desire You Don't Know You Have
So that's the magic of being able to come into a higher level of awareness on our own unconscious desires and fears. Sometimes we think we know what our desires are. And actually what's going on is that we have other desires that we're not so conscious of, that are even deeper, stronger, more intense. And those deeper desires are having the final say in what's going on. So when those things are operating in the background of our minds, they're going to create conflict with those more surface-level desires and goals that we think are the only things that we want.
An example of this would be if we're like, oh, I want that promotion at work. That'd be really great for my family and make things a lot easier for me. And yet we keep getting passed over. And part of a deeper desire that you may have, as an example off the top of my head, is that you're actually really fearful of having to present, having to travel, be away from your family, having to be really visible, people looking at you or expecting things from you, having that higher level of responsibility.
And so your desire is to actually protect yourself from that amount of pressure, right? You don't know that, but that fear is there and it's unresolved. And so it's in conflict with that other desire to be promoted and to have a higher status and to feel like you're more in control of your position and what you deliver at work.
So you may be frustrated right now, because you know that you have all the right strategies. You know that you've done all the research, you've gotten all the advice, right? You've read the books, you've listened to the TED Talk, you've done all the usual things. And you did it well. And you're smart, right?
So you're like, okay, I have this goal in mind, I have all the strategies in place. And yet you're feeling frustrated because things aren't going as planned. You're trying to develop a different kind of relationship with your partner or your siblings, and things just aren't going as planned. So what do you do?
[07:34] Coming Into Your Power by Plugging the Holes
But this deeper understanding of your subconscious mind, and the way that it works, and your unexpressed desires and fears, the learning curve on time periods like this, where you feel like you're kind of stuck and not sure what's going on, the learning curve on those time periods becomes greatly accelerated. So you waste less time, you adjust more quickly, and you feel lighter throughout the whole process, because you know that good things are coming. It's just a matter of time, and you're learning on your way there. It's a totally different mindset.
So I offer that example to you of the bag of bulk beans spilling all over the floor, just to give you an image of how you can come at that differently, and come more into your own power by being able to have that deeper level of understanding. So if you haven't thought about that before, I encourage you to think about how that may be showing itself in your life right now, where you're feeling that sense of disconnect between what you want and what's going on.
These are not always going to be things that, you know, it's not always going to be that everything is under your control, right? So we're just talking here about the things that are determined by your own actions and interactions with the world around you. The good thing is that that's actually quite a lot more than sometimes we realize. There's a lot more impact that our own functioning, thinking, and beliefs has on our experiences in the world than we always realize.
I hope that's helpful for you. Give it some thought, and I will see you in the next video. Also, make sure to eat your oranges or bananas or whatever before they go bad.
You hung with me to the end, my shero. If you benefited from this episode, please say thanks by leaving a wonderful review. It helps me know what's helping you the most and allows more like-minded women to find and learn from this podcast. We don't want to keep all the good stuff for ourselves. See you next time.
Interested in Working with an Internal Family Systems Therapist who supports Women in Public-Facing Roles in Great Falls, VA, Potomac, MD or Albuquerque, NM?
Is the inability to rest or slow down leading to burnout in your professional and personal life? Reclaim your joy and vitality while managing your professional commitments through holistic and evidence based counseling. Our specialized support at Satya Counseling & Yoga is designed to fit seamlessly into your busy life, empowering you to conquer trauma-based responses and thrive. Prioritize your mental well-being – embark on a transformative journey towards a happier and more fulfilling life by following these three steps to get started:
Schedule a complimentary 15-minute call to see if we’ll be the right fit.
Begin meeting with me, therapist and trauma-informed yoga teacher, Linda Sanderville, to rediscover your healthy, authentic self.
Start moving forward in your personal and professional life in a positive and healthy way!