Lost glasses can drive you mad! You know you had them a moment ago. But now they’ve disappeared off the face of the Earth.

Ok, so you’ve checked all the usual places for your lost glasses… the kitchen, the car, your pockets, the bedside table, the kitchen for a second time… Nothing!

Then, you spot your lost glasses sitting next to the book you were planning to read at bedtime, and you chastise yourself for not having discovered them during your earlier hunting expeditions.

This dance with your lost glasses happens over and over again. You’d think by now, you’d have figured out a way to stop punishing yourself.

But don’t beat yourself up. There may be a perfectly straightforward reason why your lost glasses were so tricky to find.

Carl Jung talks about your conscious and unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is full of the stuff about bills that need paying, appointments, important places and times, family matters and the 101 things that need dealing with on an ongoing basis.

Your conscious mind is busy, and it is always looking for ways to lighten its load. When it identifies habits and behaviours that are routine, it pushes them over into your unconscious mind.

Your unconscious mind is full of past memories, good and bad habits and behaviours that don’t need your conscious mind to dwell on.

So when you walk into a dark room, you don’t need your conscious mind to work out how to deal with this problem, you simply reach out to the light switch as you’ve done so many times before.

Carl Jung points out, that you can’t change anything that lives in your unconscious mind until you move it back into your conscious mind.

Back to the problem of your lost glasses, and the fact that your glasses are frequently getting lost.

The reason you put your glasses down, and don’t remember where you left them, is because it’s a simple process you’ve done many times before. Your conscious mind is not engaged in the simple task of putting your glasses on a table, so the task is completed using your unconscious mind.

The solution is to use a technique called “Point and Say”. As you put your glasses down onto a convenient shelf, or a table, you point at the glasses and say out loud “My glasses are on the bedside table.”

Okay, you may feel a little silly doing that, but what you’ve just done, is to engage your conscious mind, using your physical body by lifting your arm pointing, and by using your eyes and voice. This simple process has turned a thoughtless action into a thoughtful action, and your chances of remembering where you left your glasses have been raised considerably.

If you’ve ever been to Japan, you’ll be aware of the highly efficient Bullet Train, which travels at speeds up to 200 mph!

All the staff use the point and say technique, which has saved lives. In particular, the staff on the platform whose job it is to check everyone is on board and the doors are closed safely. They point along the edge of the platform and at the doors in their line of vision, saying out loud that the doors are closed and no one is trapped.

A while back, a child got onto the train, while the mother was left outside as the doors closed. She put her arm through the closing doors and became trapped. Fortunately, because the platform staff were mentally engaged with the safety process they completed many times a day, the safety check in this instance was in their conscious mind, and the train was prevented from moving off.

Point and say is a proven method, that drags unconscious thought back into the conscious mind. With a bit of practice, you might never lose your glasses, car keys or cell phone ever again…

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