The subconscious mind's ability to reason from the general to the particular--called deductivelogic--is tailor-made for this process.

Beyond perceiving changes in others, it has also been demonstrated that the subconscious mind can control, at least within certain parameters, all of these dimensions within ourselves.

What we have in the subconscious mind, then, is a vast source of information about other people and an immensely powerful tool for influencing other people. Not only can we read other people's emotions, we can also influence their emotions through the control of our own emitted cues.

One of our problems in using this ability, though, is the conscious mind, the very thing we need to interpret all of this. The more the conscious mind is involved, the more it gets in the way. For example, thousands of people have been subjected to all kinds of research projects in which their task was to tell when someone was lying. All of this research has drawn a blank. In the main, people cannot consciously tell whether or not someone is lying. At least they can never prove that they can in a typical, controlled experiment.

However, my own research with ideomotor questioning has produced positive hits in a range much better than chance. More research is needed, but I have no doubt that we--or at least some of us--can subconsciously read other people well enough to know when they are lying. And the subconscious mind can read a number of other things, too. Like when people are pleased and what pleased them; what gets them excited or motivated in a particular direction; what it is they like and dislike in others; and so on.

Since the conscious mind gets in the way of interpreting the subconscious mind's information, and since the subconscious mind is quite reticent about giving up its secrets, indirect communication processes must be used. Dreams, autochthonous processes (such as flashes of insight), and various forms of ideomotor questioning are the processes of choice.

To get these processes going requires Discovery Suggestions. Or to put it another way, we want to suggestion discovery. (That's not a typo; I've verbed a noun here.)

Generally, working with Discovery Suggestions involves giving ourselves suggestions. These suggestions must be formulated to tap the potential of the subconscious. We are interested in getting information from the vaults of the subconscious about howand whatwe should be doing to achieve a particular goal. In the case of my teaching example, the goal was to find out what it was about me that was having a negative affect on students, and what I could do to have a more positive affect.

I concentrated my suggestions on the dreaming process because that is what I was most intrigued with at the time. I formulated and applied suggestions that I would have dreams in which I would receive solutions to my teaching problems.

I should have kept better records, but I didn't. Here is the way I remember the suggestions:

"Every night when I am asleep I will subconsciously work on my problems related to teaching. I will have dreams in which solutions to the problem appear. When I awaken I will remember the dreams and understand the messages in them. These messages and solutions will be about what I can do to make myself more popular with students, motivate them to do good academic work, and improve my rapport with them and understanding of them."

It was 21 days, or rather nights, before I began to get results from this set of suggestions. On the 21st night I awakened about 3:00 am from a dream about bicycles. It was a brief and unremarkable dream in which I was riding down a narrow mountain path, occasionally dodging branches growing out over the path. That was it. But the dream's meaning was clear to me: I was too defensive.

Message dreams are often like this. They seem totally unrelated and unremarkable. In fact, it may be that the messaging process is going on under the dream, and that the particular dream we remember upon awakening just happened to be going on at the same time the message arrived from the subconscious. This possibility is one of the reasons why it does not pay to get too involved in trying to figure out dream imagery, or to generalize the meaning of one dream to another that just happens to have the same images.

Anyway, the message was that I was creating problems with my students and with other people, too, by being too defensive. This was a revelation that I had not expected and that took time for me to accept. Over the following few days I watched myself closely and, sure enough, I was frequently being defensive. Evidently I had been that way most of my life.

So I started working on adjustments in my behavior that would deal with the defensiveness. For one thing I resolved never to make excuses for anything. I had been introduced to this concept in the Army, where the only acceptable response to a superior who has found something wrong with you is, "No excuse, Sir!" I had learned that lesson about inadequately polished combat boots or a dirty weapon, but I had not thought to generalize it to all of my behavior. But I was aware of it now, and the standard response from then on was going to be "No excuse!"

That helped a lot. It did not make things or me perfect, but it helped. I am still working on my defensiveness. Even after all of these years, I still lose control and get defensive once in a while, then hate myself for it. But I am a lot better. And believe me the No Excuse rule is a good one. I think everyone should adopt it because excuses only please the person who makes them.

A little later I woke up one morning with the awareness that I needed to stop being disconfirming to students when they asked questions or made comments. No dream, just the awareness. So I resolved to treat every question and comment with respect. I did not have to agree with the student's position, but I would move from a policy of "straightening them out" to one of gently bringing them around to my way of thinking. And if they did not come around, that was okay too. I became more confirming. That helped some more.

Then one day I had another insight while I was reading. This insight involved the subject of aggression. It was undoubtedly prompted by my Discovery Suggestions because the subject was by no means new to me. My bachelor's degree was in psychology and I had taken several courses in which aggression was a major topic. Some of my leisure reading over the years had been about different levels and types of aggression. The subtle nuances between Freudian and neo-Freudian positions on aggression were a topic on which I could have held forth for at least an hour. I could have done at least three hours on the differences between the behaviorists' and the phenomenologists' concepts of aggression. Ethologists were fond of the topic of aggression in those days and I had read all of the works of thinkers like Lorenz and Tiger and Wilson. In short, I had the psychology of aggression pretty well nailed down.

On this particular day I grabbed Wolman's Dictionary of Behavioral Scienceto look up something and the book just happened to fall open to page 15. There at the top of the right-hand column was "aggression 1. Attack or hostile action that may take any form from physical assault at one extreme to gentle verbal criticism at the other extreme...."

Verbal criticism? VERBAL CRITICISM? Of course! How stupid I had been. I must have sat there for five minutes looking at the phrase on the paper. Tears came to my eyes. Not only was I disconfirming, but I was often disconfirming in a hostile, aggressive manner. I had been a boxer and football player and I had never learned to stop hitting people. Except now I did it verbally instead of physically. I was slapping my students around just like Mrs. Peek used to slap me in the first grade. Only I was doing it verbally.

My Discovery Suggestions had opened me up, made it possible for me to have that insight. It is also probable that I subconsciously thought it okay to have that insight because I had been able to emotionally handle the previous two--the ones about being defensive and disconfirming.

So within a couple of months I had come to the realization that I was a disconfirming bully who liked to verbally beat up on people. No wonder the students didn't like me.

(If you are noting the similarities between Discovery Suggestions and psychotherapy, you are not wrong.)

I don't suppose any of us ever completely rid ourselves of negative patterns laid down early either by genes or environment, but that does not mean we cannot improve. Although I am still working on improving all three of these negative qualities (and some others too), I have come a long way.

I improved but never became a great teacher of college students. I am at my strongest with groups of adults. For some reason the methods I have been using have had their strongest results in non-academic settings.

I have given keynote speeches at conventions which were exceptionally well received. I have had people contact me after seminars and beg to know how I did what I did. They did not even know how to put it into words other than to say things like "you reached me in a way no one else ever has," or "how do you communicate like that?"

It is all because of my Discovery Suggestions. And I will share one final discovery with you that helps me in speeches and seminars. I frequently give myself suggestions during a presentation. As I am looking at people in the audience I think things to myself like, "I like you;" "I feel good about being here;" "You are a good person whom I value highly;" "You can trust me to never hurt you;" "I understand you and I really want to give you something of value here today;" and "We are all members of the same group."

Now you know my secret. If you ever find yourself in a group where I'm making a presentation, you will probably watch me closely, trying to spot my "method," or "technique." You probably won't detect it because it is transparent, but you'll know what I am thinking.