If you are anything like me then you will be constantly forgetting things from one day to the next and even from one minute to the next. I will have a great idea, get distracted and before I know it my attention and conscious mind has moved on.
Because of this, I have learned to send myself short emails or text messages as a prompt later in the day or week. This is a helpful hack but not a perfect solution.
All is not lost when we forget these great ideas, as they will be stored in our brains and be part of the subconscious brain. In the field of psychology,
the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness.
With the always-on nature of the busy professional today whether at work or at home it is hard to tap into the subconscious part of our brain and recall important pieces of information.
Our phones, tablets and social media are always calling for our attention and making us think with our conscious brains yet the massive subconscious brain is waiting to be tapped.
The iceberg metaphor is powerful at reminding us of the importance of the subconscious and hence why we should develop ways to tap into it. For me, the best way seems to be exercise, normally running but also a workout in the gym. I will find myself jogging along, either listening to music or a podcast and boom something comes to me and if I am lucky like I was recently 3 or 4 ideas come back to me. I have learned to pause my run and fire off a text message because more often than not I will have forgotten them again by the end of the run. I can't fully explain it but it happens regularly. During a recent run, new ideas about a nascent project gradually rose to the forefront of my mind. Ideas that are linked together in ways I hadn't previously considered.
Make sure you find a way into your subconscious, it could be like me with exercise or perhaps your path to your subconscious will be from listening to classical music. It won't be staring at a screen or binge-watching another Netflix series.
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