This Time, It Actually Changed Me
by John Moyer
Co-founder of Daily Consciousness, Professional Hypnotists and YouTube Creator.
The Loop Is Familiar, Not Failure
We’ve all been there: an endless Groundhog Day loop. Maybe we read a book, attend a seminar, watch a video or podcast, or, given today’s attention span, just rapid-fire tap that heart on an Instagram meme and keep scrolling. Either way, the end result fires up our inspiration and motivation more than a Tony Robbins Pez Dispenser filled with Adderall.
We think, “Yes! We are going to start doing THIS! THIS is going to change everything!”
And maybe it does, and we make a change. For about a day. Or a week. Then we are back to doing the same old things we’ve always been doing, that have been keeping us stuck and held back.
A deep dive into our failures doesn’t have to unravel one enigma after another, wrapped in a riddle like we’re pulling clowns out of a wrecked clown car. The answer is simple.
Consciously, we say, “This makes sense! If we do this, things will change for the better!” And it does and it will.
But subconsciously, we say, “Of course this makes sense! But only for everyone else, not for us! We’re not good enough. We’re not smart enough. We’re not strong enough. We can’t succeed.”
That’s the programming of our subconscious mind. That’s where making real change deserves to start to happen.
The Hardest Easiest Thing and Why It Works
I tell everyone, “Changing your mind is the hardest easiest thing you’ll do. It’s hard because people can’t believe it’s so easy.”
When I first began my journey into hypnosis and meditation, one of the areas I felt I deserved to upgrade was being more assertive: speaking my voice authentically and not being afraid to.
I started listening to a daily self-hypnosis audio and committed to it consistently. After a few days, nothing. A week, nothing. A couple more weeks, still not much. But I kept going, because something in me knew the shift wouldn’t be loud. It would be subtle. Internal. Energetic.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that most change doesn’t land through logic — it lands through access.
The subconscious mind is where real transformation happens, but it doesn’t operate like the conscious mind. It doesn’t care how much something makes sense. It cares how familiar, how safe, and how repeatedly it's been imprinted.
Between the conscious and subconscious mind is something called the critical faculty. Think of it like a bouncer outside the club with the red velvet rope deciding who gets in and who doesn't. Its job is to reject anything new that contradicts what’s already running in the background. Even if what’s running is painful or limiting.
So when you affirm something like, “I’m confident,” but your subconscious has been playing “I’m not safe when I speak up” for the last twenty years, the critical faculty blocks it. It’s not because the new thought is wrong, it’s just unfamiliar.
Now here’s where it gets fascinating: the subconscious is incredibly powerful - and incredibly lazy. It doesn’t want to think. It wants to run loops. And it will continue to run whatever feels most familiar, whether or not it’s aligned with your highest self.
That’s why hypnosis and meditation are so effective. They don’t argue with the critical faculty - they bypass it. Like distracting the bouncer with the red velvet rope and sneaking into the club. They guide your brain into slower, more receptive alpha and theta wave states where the subconscious becomes suggestible and open. In that state, the gatekeeper turns off. And your subconscious, instead of fighting change, starts to accept it.
With repetition, the suggestion becomes a new program. And the new program becomes the new normal.
That's what happened with me. A few weeks after I began practicing my form of self-hypnosis every day, I found myself in a situation that was reflective of my previous experiences, where I would normally just suck it up and shut up. Only in that moment, a switch went on. I was thinking differently. I was feeling differently. I was feeling empowered to express myself.
And I did speak up, and I was calm. Not that the situation was contentious. It wasn’t some road rage moment, screaming into a driver’s side window with eighty-seven video angles from everyone else stuck in traffic whipping out their phones. It was just a conversation about which approach to take. I witnessed my ability to express my voice and I’ve been able to do so ever since.
That’s when I realized I had changed. My old programming had been erased and a new program was written. This hypnosis thing was working after all.
A Surprising Side Effect
An unusually interesting side effect from that was I discovered heavy metal music. I have an eclectic taste in music, but of heavy metal, I was never a fan. But I started to listen to it and found a lot of stuff that spoke to me with a liberating energy. I’m not talking about Satan-worshipping, kitten-sacrificing kind of heavy metal music, either. But themes of standing up, resilience, and empowerment.
I was poring through Apple Music, hearing songs that once made me cringe and dismiss after only a few seconds, but were now resonating with me. It opened me up to a whole new genre that I finally understood as to why it resonated with its fans.
This profound and powerful moment didn’t come after spending a week and thousands of dollars at a seminar. It was the result of spending a few minutes a day, in a meditative state, allowing my mind to receive new information that was aligned with my preferred state of being.
Doing that part wasn’t hard. I just had to overcome the initial hurdle of believing spending those few minutes a day could actually make a difference.
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