While I am waiting for Luis, my youngest, outside a drugstore, I look at the back of the lip balm I had just bought. The headline read: “What touches you, becomes a part of you.” I really like that sentence. Of course, in this case it’s about the lip balm itself becoming part of you as it’s absorbed into your lips. But I want to take it further. Because touching people’s hearts is what drives me most in my work as a speaker and coach. Why? Well – it’s right there on the lip balm packaging: “What touches you, becomes a part of you.”
Years ago, I learned that our brain essentially consists of two important parts: your conscious and your subconscious mind. The conscious mind is creative. It helps you solve current challenges – things you’re thinking about in the moment. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, handles all the things you’ve done before, especially those you’ve repeated often: Opening a bottle, using your phone, pressing a door handle… All those repeated actions get stored as habits – or even as autopilot patterns – in your subconscious mind.
Since we humans are creatures of habit, researchers have found that we operate about 95–97% of our day from the subconscious. If you want to dive deeper into this, I recommend – once again – my first book “I AM GRÄTER”.
“But Norman, what does all this have to do with being touched?” Let’s take it one level deeper. Let’s look at the language of these two parts of the mind. The conscious mind speaks in thoughts. You perceive something through your five senses – and that leads to a thought.
Let’s say you see a beautiful bouquet of roses. You think: “Maybe I should get some flowers for my sweetheart.” You consciously process that idea. If you then decide, Yes, that’s a great idea, the rest often happens almost automatically. You go to the flower shop (because you know where it is and have been there before), quickly pick something out consciously – and then pay subconsciously, because you’ve tapped your phone to the terminal with Apple Pay hundreds of times before. Autopilot in action. But what really got you moving? Was it the thought itself? No. It was the feeling the thought created. “Oh, how nice would it be to surprise them with flowers!” If that thought gave you a positive feeling, your body followed without hesitation. You didn’t consciously tell your muscles to walk to the store – your subconscious took over.
If, however, the thought had triggered a negative feeling, like “They don’t even like flowers…”, you would have gone somewhere else. So, here’s the key insight: Feeling is the language of the subconscious mind. “What touches you, becomes a part of you.” Now ask yourself: Can you touch others through your presence – or your work? Instead of keeping people stuck in their heads with numbers, data, and facts, move them with stories, examples, emotion, and meaning. The more vividly you speak, the more you touch the heart – and the faster your message becomes a part of that person.
And once it’s in their subconscious, it can take root. That’s why I place so much emphasis on reaching people emotionally. A client recently wrote to me:
“You moved hearts – thank you! Dear Norman, you achieved something at our event that can’t be planned: you reached people on a deep emotional level. Your keynote was moving, empowering, and energizing – it brought exactly the spark that made the day so special.
I’ve received lots of positive feedback since – and I just had to share that with you.”
If it’s important to you, too, to touch people’s hearts – through your words, your product, or your service – but you’re not sure how, then I’d love to support you in a coaching session. Send me an email – and let’s find your way to inspire and move the people you care most about.
