Your subconscious mind

And tiny steps towards freedom

PS. I like you is a newsletter for creative humans with self-doubt. Subscribe and read along to get answers to all the questions you didn’t know you had about self-doubt and making a creative life 🌿

Quick note:

Head’s up, I am increasing my prices (ever so slightly) soon, so if you’ve been thinking about working with me, now is a great time to enquire. You can check out my coaching page for more info — or if you’re ready to hop on a call, book one in here.

---

A road trip in the very north of mainland Scotland.

28-year-old me was lost.

(18-year-old me was lost also. But in a different way...)

28-year-old me had a stable job. A stable life. Stable house, stable relationship.

The problem was… it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. 

(And I had a whole load of thoughts around ‘wanting more!’ But, eventually, I had to listen. Because it was doing my mental health serious damage to ignore it. So yeah… had to listen 😶)

So, I started listening. Even though I had no idea how to do that.

Because I knew I was missing something. I just didn’t know what that was.

How do you find something you know is missing, but don’t know what it is?

A fuckton of self-exploration.

You can go to therapy. (Which I did.)

You can journal at lot. (Which I did.)

You can try find yourself in another/exotic location. (Which I didn’t.)

In short, you try to find the clues your brain is leaving you — through your subconscious mind.

i.e. The part of the mind we’re not always aware of — but is influencing our thoughts and feelings every day, our entire lives.

The subconscious mind knows what you want. 

Deep down, it’s holding the secrets to all the things you truly desire — which are usually fundamental human needs (like belonging, and meaning, and purpose!) but with a flavour specific to you.

There are lots of ways to converse with the subconscious mind. For example, journaling, visualisation, therapy, movement, hypnosis, coaching, etc.

Some of these practices are guided. Some are very much ‘left to your own devices’, with instructions. They’re all different. They can all be helpful. One is not better than the other, and I would encourage exploration with all of them.

One thing I will say though, is that when we’re not used to practising ‘speaking’ with our subconscious (which is part of the point—it’s not meant to be in your awareness all the time), it can often feel like stumbling around in the dark. 

But the rewards for stumbling about in the dark can be great.

As Karen Armstrong puts it in The Spiral Staircase:

“I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness.”

This is what I want to emphasise: Whatever subconscious patterns you are dealing with — if you are even a tiny bit aware of them, you are different to how you were when you had no idea they were there.

You are making progress. You are changing.

Even though it feels like stumbling about in the dark. You are slowly climbing out of darkness.

You will repeat the same mistakes. You will go over the same old ground and it will sometimes feel like nothing you do is worthwhile.

I promise you this is simply your brain not seeing it. You do not yet have the perspective to see the progress you have made. 

Not when you’re in it.

So, now, the job is to be in it.

The job now is to be in the place you are in, and keep going. This is the hard work of feeling lost.

Where you must do tiny steps. 

The tiny steps that lead you out of darkness are often tinier than you think they should be.

They look like inching towards safety. The crawling towards ‘I felt mildly creative today.’ The slow and painful progression towards ‘picking up this paintbrush, makes me feel slightly more alive.’

They should not be big steps. (Because, who takes big steps in the dark when they don’t know where they’re going?? Reckless people, that’s who. 😉 )

Take the tiny steps — by creating something (small). By going along to a class. By following your curiosity.

Take the tiny steps that make you feel a tiny bit more alive and human.

Something I would say to my younger self:

Take one step at a time.

To remind yourself you’re a human being. And you’ve got the desire to make, create, and connect, inside you.

This the first step. Of an unfathomable number of steps.

And that’s okay. You are where you need to be. 

Keep going 🧡

Love,
Kathryn

PS. If you would like comprehensive guidance on how to explore your subconscious (so it can reveal to you all sorts of things, like what motivates you, what scares you, and what moves you…) then may I suggest that coaching is an excellent option for this.

Coaching over the long term will not only teach you how to connect faster with your subconscious (so you can better understand your patterns of behaviour, motivations, and why you are or aren’t doing something), it will teach you how to work with it. (Not against it!)

Coaching is how I completely changed my relationship with my self-doubt — and my thoughts and feelings around it. It taught me how to listen to, and trust, what my subconscious was telling me, and how I could work with it over the long term to get the things I really wanted, and truly valued.

If you want something similar, find out more about coaching with me. Book a call, and create the first steps. So you can feel more free, more creative, and far more resourceful in yourself. Book a call and let’s speak :)