Authored by Adrian Leach

We all want the best for our children don’t we? We want them to succeed in life, to be healthy and happy, confident and to have good friends. We want them to do well at school and pass their exams. Go on to College and University and get a degree, to do better than we did, to be career minded and have a highly paid job with good prospects.

Go out into the world and travel, meet someone special and fall in love and get married and have children (grandchildren), and live a long and happy life… Now that’s a shopping list – isn’t it? But it’s what we all basically want for our children, to be better than us, to achieve greater things, to have more than we could afford…

And in order to get them there we mould them with our dreams and desires, we push and motivate and cajole and maybe even bribe them to doing more, doing it right now, before you do anything else, because I say so that’s why…

If you could rewind the clock of time, would you do anything differently? Would you change your approach, your attitude or the way that you respond to your children or life’s problems?

Remember, that you are living out your life based on the programming that you inherited and developed from your parents when you were growing up, in your surroundings, with your relatives and, it was so different then wasn’t it? So why have you programmed your children to be less than you would have them aspire to, fall below your expectations and then blame them for their failures? STOP, right there, before you unleash your programming onto me and let me explain …

Firstly, what do we mean by programming? Every thought, feeling, emotion and belief that we have, how confident we are, how safe we feel, how we process information, interact with people or groups of people, literally everything that we think do and say are all programmed responses and belief systems based on and created by the vast input of data we have received and perceived through our senses, which are then continually compounded on a daily basis, it’s an ongoing and never ending process.

Is that heavy or what? Let me give you some background information and take you right back to when all of this starts and go forward from there.

Conscious/Subconscious Programming
The conscious mind is the thinking you; it is the creative mind that expresses free will. It's the equivalent of a 40-bit processor in that it can handle the input from about 40 nerves per second. In contrast, the subconscious mind is a super computer loaded with a database of pre-programmed behaviours. It is a powerful 40-million-bit processor, interpreting and responding to over 40 million nerve impulses every second. Some programs are derived from genetics: these are our instincts. However, the vast majority of the subconscious programs are acquired and created through our early childhood learning experiences.

How are Programmes created?
As babies and juveniles our brain operates predominantly in delta and theta EEG frequencies through the first six years of our lives. This low level of brain activity is referred to as the hypno-gogic state, a hypnotic trance. While in this hypnotic trance, a child does not have to be actively coached into specific behaviours. A child obtains their behavioural programming simply by observing parents, siblings, peers and teachers. In addition, a child's subconscious mind also downloads beliefs relating to self and the world around it.

When a parent or teacher tells a young child he is sickly, stupid, bad or undeserving, this too is downloaded as a fact into the youngster's subconscious mind without question. These early-acquired experiences constitute to the building blocks of our belief systems onto which every other similar experience is attached. The subconscious mind continually creates programmes around our daily activities and life experiences. Learning to walk or talk or drive a car or ride a bike, these are all typical programmes. Remember how difficult it was when you were learning to drive? When was the last time that you consciously thought how to walk?

You don’t have to tell your body which muscles to move or how to balance or to step over something, you just do it. That complex programme was all being learnt by the subconscious mind during the process of crawling, standing and walking and falling over and over again. It’s now an automatic programme that’s running at an unconscious level, something that you take for granted.

The subconscious mind actively creates these programmes so that we can ‘consciously’ get on with our life and not be bothered with these mundane processes. The subconscious is just like a computer in this respect. You don’t have to think about all of the software that’s loaded onto the hard drive, you just click on a button and the programme is activated.

Transderivational Search
Transderivational Search is a technical term that simply means, in order for you to consciously make sense or understand what you are doing at any time, your subconscious automatically accesses your memories, experiences, feelings and emotions surrounding what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. It literally searches for similar memories in order to compare and make sense of what you are experiencing right now. It can file this new piece of information away in the correct place – something to 'refer' to in the future. This constant searching for information happens incredibly fast and may even explain why sometimes we react so fast to an experience or what someone has said, that we regret our actions afterwards?

It may also explain why children are said to be 'just like sponges,' they literally absorb everything without question because they have nothing in their memory to ‘refer' to. They accept everything as being true.

The subconscious mind is not a seat of reasoning; it is strictly a stimulus-response "play-back" device. The subconscious collects, files and stores information from all of your senses, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It creates programmes from this information and then creates a belief system based on that information. When an environmental signal is perceived, the subconscious mind reflexively searches in your memories and then activates a previously stored behavioural response (programme) - no thinking required!

The insidious part of the autopilot mechanism is that subconscious behaviours are programmed to engage without the control of or the observation by, the conscious self. Neuroscientists have revealed that 95%-99% of our behaviour is under the control of the subconscious mind. Consequently, we rarely observe these behaviours or much less know that they are even engaged.

It’s the programming of our childhood that comes back to plague us as adults. Many people feel so stuck, ineffective and victimised, in spite of the fact that their conscious intentions are focused upon success. We try and try to change and get over things but find ourselves falling back into our old ways – why? Because of our childhood programming!

We have been led to believe that by using willpower, we can override these negative programs of our subconscious mind. Unfortunately, to do that, one must keep a constant vigil on one's own behaviour.

There is no observing entity in the subconscious mind reviewing the behavioural tapes. The subconscious is strictly a record-playback machine. Consequently, there is no discernment as to whether a subconscious behavioural program is good or bad, it is just a tape. The moment you laps in consciousness, the subconscious mind will automatically engage and play its previously recorded, experience-based programs.

So, bearing in mind now just how susceptible we are as infants to the creation of programmes and belief systems that could restrict our potential, and, in that 6 year period there are approximately 22,000 hours of potential programming time, would you do or say anything differently?

One question I get asked over and over again is this ‘can anything be done to change our programming’? And the answer to that is a resounding yes.

The technique I use to address programming issues is called Be Set Free Fast (BSFF) and the feedback I receive supports the long lasting efficacy of BSFF. It is fast, effective and very efficient at dealing with these unresourceful, limiting belief systems.