Every minute of every day, various stimuli bombard your consciousness demanding to be heard and seen and noticed - sights, sounds, smells. Your conscious mind can only take so much. It must filter out most, so it can properly deal with the important stuff. But, how does it decide what is important - to be let through - and what is unimportant - and is to be filtered out?

    This is the job of the Subconscious. The subconscious mind decides what it thinks you want to see, hear, feel, etc. and what it thinks you do not want to see, feel and hear. It screens out, or 'switches off' the reaction of your conscious mind to those stimuli that are not wanted. If you have ever tried reading with the radio on and not hear the radio, you have experienced these filters in action. A certain word on the radio suddenly interrupts your reading. Why that word, and not one of the others? The interruption is usually caused by something in which you are interested, or which you consider important. This also explains why working in a noisy environment can be so tiring - your brain has to work overtime filtering out all that unwanted stimuli - and why a mother can hear her baby start to cry before anyone else can hear it.

    If you can somehow inform your Subconscious that something that wasn't important has suddenly become important, the switch mechanism will be altered. What was filtered out will now be let through, and the conscious mind will start to notice it. Sound peculiar?

    Have you ever decided to buy a new car, and then suddenly started noticing this same type of car everywhere you look? Why? Didn't those cars exist before? Of course they did! You just didn't notice them. They weren't important to you and your subconscious screened out that information. As soon as that type of car became important to you, you started noticing them everywhere.

    This shift in mental awareness can be used to build success. Make a goal, decide it is a priority: give it emotional power by imprinting it on your Subconscious. This is one reason that goals should be written down - that aids the imprinting process. And why you should read your goals out loud and check them on a regular basis. And surround yourself with pictures of your goals. All this burns these goals into your Subconscious.

    Now your Subconscious will let you notice anything that will help you achieve those goals, because the filtering mechanism has been opened up to let related information through.

    It's not true that opportunity only knocks once. Opportunities are all around but they are getting screened out as being irrelevant to your current goals, the more so if you do not have any goals at all.