Look around the room you are in right now.
The chair you are sitting on.
The phone or laptop you are reading this on.
The business you run, the home you live in, the relationship you are in.
Every one of them existed as something you could not see before it existed as something you could. Someone had a thought, made a decision, and held a picture in their mind. Only after that did anything physical appear.
That is what this article is about: the part of your life you cannot see, and why it runs the part you can.
What your senses miss
We tend to treat what we can see, hear and touch as the whole of reality, when it is only a fraction of it.
The light your eyes can pick up is a very small part of the full range of light that exists. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet are all around you right now, and you see none of them. Your ears pick up a narrow band of sound. A dog in the same room hears things you never will.
None of that is mystical.
It is simply how human senses are built, and they evolved to show us what we needed to survive, not everything that is there.
So when someone says "I only believe what I can see", what they are really saying is "I only believe the small part of reality my senses are designed to pick up."
The invisible runs the visible
Here is where it gets practical.
The results in your business are physical. You can see them: the bank balance, the number of clients, the calendar, the follow-ups that did or did not get sent.
What produced them is not physical. Nobody can point to it. It is what you believe about yourself, what you expect to happen, what you are afraid of, the identity you are operating from and where your attention goes all day.
You cannot hold a belief in your hand. And yet a belief decides whether you name your price or discount it, whether you post the video or leave it in your drafts, whether you follow up or tell yourself they are probably not interested.
That is what I mean when I say your external reality is a direct reflection of your internal state. The physical part of your life is the end of the story. The beginning happened somewhere you cannot see.
Why working harder on the physical rarely works
When results stall, the natural response is to work on the part we can see. More posts. More calls. A new funnel, a new offer, a new morning routine.
Sometimes that helps. But if the cause sits in the part you cannot see, working harder on the part you can is like repainting a car with an engine problem. It looks different for a while, and it still breaks down in the same place.
This is why the same patterns follow people from one business to the next, one relationship to the next, one diet to the next. The surface changes, but the thing producing it does not.
So what is consciousness?
Underneath your thoughts, your beliefs and your feelings, there is something that is aware of them.
You can watch a thought arrive. You can notice anxiety rise in your chest before a sales call. You can catch yourself halfway through a story you have told a hundred times. The part of you doing the noticing is separate from what it is noticing.
That awareness is what I mean by consciousness. It is the part of you that sits beyond the physical and beyond the mind's chatter. It has no shape, no weight and no location, and it is the one thing that has been there for every moment of your life.
I wrote about the first step of this in The version of you who already has it: the ability to step back and observe. This goes one step further. When you notice a thought, ask who is noticing it.
You are not your patterns
This matters more than it sounds.
If you believe you are your thoughts, then a thought like "I'm not good enough for this" feels like a fact about who you are. You argue with it, give in to it or try to drown it out, and it keeps coming back.
If you know you are the awareness behind the thought, it becomes something you are looking at rather than something you are. A pattern you picked up, usually long before you were old enough to choose it. And anything you picked up can be put down.
That is the space where real change happens. You stop fighting the old pattern with willpower and start seeing it clearly enough that it loses its grip.
A great book I have read on this is The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. I would recommend it to anyone who struggles to detach from their thoughts.
Where hypnosis fits
The part of you that runs most of your patterns is the subconscious. It works below your awareness, which is exactly why you can understand a problem perfectly and still repeat it.
Hypnosis is a way of working with that part directly. In a session you are fully aware and in control, and your attention is turned inward, much like the moment you arrive somewhere having been completely absorbed in your thoughts on the drive. From there we can find what is running underneath, at the root, and change it, rather than adding another strategy on top.
If you want to know what that actually looks like, I have written about it in What actually happens in a hypnosis session.
Three ways to start working with what you can't see
- Catch the thought before the result. The next time something goes the way you didn't want, a missed sale, an argument, a day you avoided the important thing, trace it back. What did you believe just before it happened? What were you expecting? Write it down. You are learning to see the invisible part of the story.
- Notice the noticer. Once a day, sit for two minutes and simply watch your thoughts come and go. Don't try to change them. Just notice that you can see them. Then ask yourself: who is watching? You don't need an answer. The question itself moves you out of the pattern and into awareness.
- Start from the inside. Before your next important call, post or decision, take one minute to choose the state you want to act from. Calm, certain, clear. Then act from there. You will notice the same action lands differently when the part you can't see has changed first.
If something heavy comes up while you do this, stop, and speak to someone you trust or a qualified professional.
What this means for you
What you can see in your life is real. But it is the last step, not the first.
Everything you have built, and everything you have not built yet, starts in the part of you that no one can see. Change that, and the physical follows.
If you want to see how I help entrepreneurs change what is running underneath, start with my free video at derekeldercoaching.com/rewire, or book a call and we can talk about where you are right now.