Fake it till you make it

"You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition."
W. Clement Stone

I never used to like the concept of "fake it until you make it." It came to feel to me like the most cliche advice you would get from corporate leaders who would pass on their wise kernels of company doctrine to young and aspiring leaders.

"How do I learn how to lead?"

"Fake it till you make it"

Recently, I've had a new take on this, and I think that by seeing it through a new perspective, I see now that this is a very powerful presupposition of NLP: Modelling. Model the end result consciously until the subconscious falls in to line. Let me look at it from another angle first. In an earlier post, I had this quote:

"Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words.
Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions.
Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.
Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny."
Author unknown

I've always liked this quote, and I've even found a few posts that have broken it down line by line, attributing it to the "Law of Attraction"... simply stating that by changing your thinking, you can change your destiny. I agree....BUT... changing the thinking of the conscious mind is easy. You could go ahead and do it right now. Take any thought you want and go ahead and think it - you have complete freedom to do so. But can you change your subconscious mind so easily? Is taking a few moments to think positive thoughts in a conscious state going to change the lifetime of stimulus / response changes that control up to 95% of our waking lives without any conscious efforts on our parts? If I simply think a certain way, do my actions, habits and characters simply just fall into place over time? They probably will for as long as I can stay conscious, but as soon as I need to revert to subconscious automation - not so much. What if you look at the quote backwards. It's becoming more and more common belief that this is how we change our subconscious. Act as if you believe, act as if it is your character, act as if it is your destiny, and eventually your habits, actions, and thoughts become reflexive, subconscious. If you decided you wanted to follow a new religion tomorrow, would you pray first and then believe? Or believe first and then pray?

I recently went through Doctor Phil's "Self Matters" program. Wonderful way to really unearth your history and really see what makes you tick. I liked that it didn't stop there though, as so many "counselling" type programs would. It stressed the importance of "changing the tapes". A very familiar concept in the NLP realms. You see, its not enough to just unearth our history and find out why we do what we do. Replay traumatic events and emotionally live through darker moments and memories. Its obvious we, as a species, are catching on to the fact that we need to take it a step further because countless books are being written about it and entire studies devoted to understanding the success of it. Faking it until you make it. "Act as if". You will find it in The Law of Attraction and The Secret, and if that's not scientific enough and backed well enough by academic statistics, then try "The Biology of Belief", or "Change or Die", and of course, don't forget - it is a pillar of Neuro Linguistic Programming - which takes it all even further by turning it into a replicable process, rife with methodology. The subconscious is where all of our power and programming is truly stored, but we can't be fools and think that it simply obeys the commands of our conscious thinking. It requires conditioning and belief. Repetition, affirmations, playing the part of what we imagine to be the desired state just long enough so that eventually it can take over and command our body to reflexively complete the actions and chemical production necessary to sustain the destiny that we have imagined and acted out.