When did you last check in with your auto-pilot?

Take a moment to think about what happens when you see someone you haven't met before. What runs through your head? What thoughts do you have? Are they positive? Are they negative? What do labels do you use? I know it may be challenging because it all happens so quickly and quite often unconsciously.

What tends to happen when we see someone we don't know is that we start a process unconsciously to work out if they're like us or not. This usually starts by labelling. You know the ones "she's hot, she looks nice, she seems happy,"etc etc and the opposite ones "I would never wear that",  "I can't believe her skirt is that short", "Did she even look in the mirror before she left the house",  "She's stuck up". The list goes on. How do we make these decisions, judgements or labels I hear you ask?

This process literally happens in a nano-second. Our unconscious mind operates on auto pilot. It goes about making choices and decisions without us even being consciously aware. Ever been driving somewhere, arrived at your destination and then wondered how you even got there? You were more than likely operating on auto pilot.

So what happens when we see someone we don't know? Our brain goes into autopilot again. The unconscious mind is constantly searching for evidence of what we already know. So it's constantly filtering in the things that are "like"what we have experienced before. I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but every minute we have millions of bits of information coming at us from thoughts running through our minds, feeling a breeze, noticing a sound, listening to a conversation, hearing the rumble of our stomach, the list goes on. It is physically impossible for us to notice every single piece of information coming our way, so we use filters to filter in around 135 bits of information that our unconscious deems to be "relevant"in accordance to past experiences. These 135 bits are then filtered down into 5 - 7 chunks or pieces of information that we actually recall and are subsequently categorised in our brains. So there's a lot that's not taken in once you do the math. The rest of the information gets deleted, distorted or generalised based on what our brains are focussing on.

If you've ever hard the saying "what you focus on is what you get, to the exclusion of everything else", then you'll realise what's been going on upstairs for you. Change your focus, you change your results.

The point I wanted to make in writing this post was more about the unconscious process that is humming away before we've even met someone.  The fact that this whole process happens in a heartbeat and with our unconscious mind always deleting, distorting, generalising and then categorising, what hope do we have when meeting someone to meet them with a completely open mind? You can't really pause your brain and tell it to hold tight while you make your own decision! Well, you probably can if you make the choice to be open. To teach your brain to focus on appreciation, love, likeness, acceptance, gratitude, abundance rather than what's it's been used to for however many years.

We are creatures of habit and quite often the habits we've adopted we have no idea of how they came to be. Just envisage your life if you could steer your own ship and have even greater control over your thoughts. What world of endless possibilities would open up for you right now?