The Desirable Mind Technique

Instrumental Imagination

God wants to give you the desires of your heart. You become what you think about most of the time. That is why you are to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5). Doing this places hedges against allowing your imagination to begin germinating seeds of insecurity and doubt. When you passively allow unhelpful thoughts to dominate your thinking, you might notice how they take root and your imagination begins forming the unhelpful lens through which you see the world around you. You will do well to begin intentionally directing your thoughts and making deliberate choices for the perspectives you entertain. I want you to be able to design who you are becoming with intention.

You are created in the image of God, in his image you were created (Genesis 2:7). His spirit propels you to create a life with all the wonderful gifts He has given you. I imagine He intends for you to be a life designer. Because of the human nature, sin has infected your being and it screams at you, telling you who you are. You hear this messaging and begin to believe the continual iterations. When you look at this world, you notice the corrosive effects of sin and begin believing that you are limited to only that which you see in your life. Quit possibly, guilt and shame are telling you that you are undeserving of a better life, so you might be seeking comfort in the patterns of what you observe in yourself and the world around you. Believing in the permanency of those patterns is what carves deep grooves within your subconscious mind. You are able to strengthen your God-given imagination and believe that God is who He says He is. “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us…” (Ephesians 3:20).

God Calls You to Be a Designer

Many Christians will say, “Well, I want what God wants for my life.” Understanding God’s will for your life is an excellent desire that needs to be the priority. God has given you the freedom of choice as a gift and He is inviting you to exercise that freedom in how you design your life. You are a child of the King, Master Creator and Designer of all that is good! The mind of God designed the grand architecture of existence and His Word created a world that is vibrant with life, animation, color, and nuance. I imagine He relishes seeing the joy, enthusiasm, and peace on the faces of His children who are human while being deliberate in designing a life reflective of the Creator’s power at work in them. Keeping an attentive ear to the Shepard’s voice, you are free to create the life you desire. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you…” (Matthew 7:7).

Picture Billy in his room building a massive Lego compound, crafting it just the way he wants! He builds the Lego structure and then realizes he needs a fortress surrounding the compound, so he tips over his desk and encapsulates his creation. All of those instruments he used to create his design were provided by his parents. Billy’s dad calls out, “Billy, we gotta get to your dentist appointment, so you need to get ready. Oh, and please help your sister…she is having trouble with something in her room.” Billy isn’t quite finished, but he sits on his bed and puts his shoes on. He goes to help his sister, gets in the car, and goes to the dentist. When he gets home, his wonderful design is waiting on him to reengage. The meaning is not hidden in this illustration. We have all of these wonderful instruments that God provides for us, and  we  are free to  use them to design, color, and animate our lives. However, we must keep an attentive ear and listen to the Master Designer for when He calls us to be His instrument. When He calls us, we are to listen and obey because there is sufficient evidence that He has our and everyone else’s best interest in mind.

The Ten Commandments are quite freeing. God has given you His law as parameters to keep you safe. Everything within those parameters is available to you, so you can design the life that you desire. With God rightly at the helm, faith, imagination, intention, and desire all converge to give rise to the life you imagine for yourself. So, what about when things are going wrong? It is important to understand how to use desire effectively. It is fairly simple.

How To Deal with Fear

You probably have gone through fearful experiences at one point or another in your life. Most negative experiences in life are derivatives of fear, insecurity, and doubt. What you may not realize is that these anxiety-based attributes prolong unsavory situations. The body’s reaction to internal or external stimuli is where it will focus its attention. Fear permeates the mind with insecurity and doubt, telling you who you are and what to imagine will be. It clouds the thinking and focuses your attention to narrowly scan for solutions. When this occurs, you probably pray but still fear. Your imagination begins telling you to get ready because now is the time where God is going to teach you a lesson.

You must pray and wonder! Be curious and wonder how God will work within your circumstances to design solutions. Realizing a sense of pure wonder allows for your Creator God to create a pathway into peaceful pastures. Wonder despite circumstances will broaden your radar. Your intentional display of wonder coupled with desiring God to shape your vision allows for the Holy Spirit to tap your shoulder and point; then, you look and can see.

The Desirable Mind Technique

Below, I am providing you with a technique that God revealed to me at the beginning of my practice. I encourage all of my clients to use in order to design the life they want to live in. It may seem quite elementary, but this is how you can begin to intentionally exhibit self-control over your emotions and thinking patterns. I have coached a variety of populations, from high school students to postgraduate professionals. They all are very encouraged by what this technique does to their thinking and focus as they move toward the life they desire. I believe this will work magnificently in your life, no matter if you are a child or traversing your golden years. Practitioners are not supposed to make any guarantees, but I am very confident this will help you become the person you want to be.

Here is the information about The Desirable Mind Technique and how to implement it:

Think of five things that you desire, five simple but comprehensive desires that you want to do, be, or have. They should be simple yet actionable. Use an ink pen with blue or black ink, never a pencil, and write your name in its possessive form on a piece of paper. Then write Desires followed by the date. For example, Ken’s Desires – 01/01/2025. I recommend purchasing a sketchbook that you can dedicate to this activity. Underneath your name, write down each of your desires, a new line for each. When you write down your desires, you are not writing down what you don’t want. For example, “I don’t want to be anxious” is not how you become calm. You write down “I desire becoming calm.” You are focusing on the abundance of what you desire, not the lack of it. This is important, so I’ll say this again; you are to focus on the abundance of what you desire, not the lack of it.

When writing down your desires, you can harness them by actively engaging with your desires in the present tense, emphasizing action and being in a state of realization. When articulating desires, it is helpful for you to frame them as ongoing actions toward their continuous and active display in your life. For instance, instead of passively stating a desire or a static state of being, such as “I desire happiness,” it would be more potent to express it as “I desire experiencing happiness.” The i-n-g form is utilized in progressive verb tenses alongside auxiliary verbs, which create the active voice. By using i-n-g words, you place yourself in the middle of the action, thereby activating a natural and quite reflexive momentum toward what you desire. By using i-n-g, you put yourself in the dynamic state of becoming. You do not desire to be human…you are a human being.

Every day, repeat the same process, write the SAME five things down. Beginning this activity, there will be modifications and changes in what you desire. As the neural circuitry begins to shift, new ways of thinking will help you realize what you truly desire. The goal is to settle into the grooves of your desire within a couple weeks. After you create an actionable and simple yet descriptive and focused list of desires, write these down every single day. After a couple weeks of doing this, the desires should be written by memory. Each day that you do this with intention, you are changing the hardware running in the background. The subconscious mind is always running in the background, always motivating your thoughts and behavior.

Adherence To Guidelines

I was in session with a client and we were going over this information. I told her that she needed to use an ink pen for this exercise and her eyes became big as saucers! “Ken! I never write with ink…what if I mess up?” The permanency of pen ink sends a clear message to the subconscious mind that you are making intentional, deliberate, and permanent plans for who you want to become. I had another client who simply wrote “I Desire…” at the top of her paper and wrote the rest in bullet points of incomplete sentences.

This exercise is to be written without shortcuts or modifications. To give you an idea of how this exercise is constructed, here are a few desires that I find helpful. Please come up with a list of desires that are meaningful to you, but please use the formula below when creating that list of your Desires:

• I desire growing closer in my relationship with God.
• I desire becoming wise.
• I desire being healthy and experiencing wellness.
• I desire being safe and secure.
• I desire happily engaging others.

Creating your own Desires is important. This is psychological surgery. You are focusing your mind on the desires that God created in your heart. This will remove the detrimental scripts that play on repeat in your subconscious mind. You have gone through life picking up different ideations. Moreover, the ideation patterns that tend to stick are the ones that you perceive will keep you safe, both emotionally and physically. Instead of creating the space you want in your life, you might take whatever is immediately accessible to make you “feel” safe or comfortable in the moment. Your subconscious gets imprinted with this high alert state of mind, especially if you have gone through traumatic experiences. Thoughts, especially anxious ones, tend to be very ominous and ambiguous. These thoughts are most always quite reflexive and unhelpful, unless they are used for the purpose with which they are intended. To run or fight!

Every single thing you do and say is stored in your subconscious, so every single action or communication not only sends messages to other people, but also to yourself.

When you write down what you desire, you are sending many messages to yourself that may seem insignificant, but the continual repetition of defining what you desire and who you are becoming has a powerful effect on your subconscious. Some examples for the types of messages you are sending:

• I am able to have desire.
• I am setting time aside to write my desires, so it is important.
• I’m designing a permanent representation of that desire.
• I know where I a going.
• These desires must be important because I’m organizing my thoughts around them. 

Benefits to Anticipate

The affect you will experience when you commit to writing down your Desires every day is multifaceted. It is incredible what you will accomplish when you control your emotions and choose how to see things in your life. At the very least, you will experience peace. Your thinking will become much clearer and focused. You will become more poised and composed. You will begin choosing how you think and what perspectives to entertain. You will become more deliberate and creative with how you communicate and how you facilitate getting your needs met. You will begin understanding how to shape the person that you are becoming. You will develop a sense of curiosity as your thinking begins to change. You will find that you can easily choose not engage in disparaging self-criticism as you will begin understanding the relationship between law and grace. You will stop struggling and will truly begin choosing to live the life you desire.

Final Thoughts

Right about now, you are probably thinking, Ken! you are getting a little out there with all this talk about the subconscious mind. I understand that we must be careful when dealing with matters of the mind. The thing is, ignoring these mind mechanisms allows for Satan to insidiously influence our thoughts to cleverly influence the subconscious mind. By writing down your desires to live a life steeped within God’s way, you are placing hedges at the deepest level of your psyche.

We get what you think about most of the time. Writing down your desires creates your intentions and they are real, not just wishes. As healthy thinking patterns begin to emerge, observe how the desirable outcomes are beginning to match your intentions of obtaining the life that you desire.

With writing down your desires, you are changing your reactive impulses to intentional responses when challenges arise. This will help you to exhibit poise and character under pressure. You will seek to conform to your stated desires rather than to some primal need for emotional survival. If you don’t define what you want, what you want will be defined for you. Simple as that!