The Blank Page Was Staring Back
I sat down to write a chapter that I’d been putting off for three weeks. The cursor blinked. My hands hovered. Nothing came. The harder I pushed, the more the words retreated, like water squeezed through a fist. I was a writer who couldn’t write, and the irony wasn’t lost on me.
That night I picked up Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind for what must have been the tenth time, and something in his section on creative expression hit me differently. He wasn’t just talking about manifesting money or health, he was describing exactly how the subconscious mind feeds the creative process. And he was saying that the reason I couldn’t write wasn’t a lack of talent or discipline. It was that I’d been working against my own deeper mind instead of with it.
Murphy’s View of the Creative Subconscious
Joseph Murphy drew a clear distinction between the conscious and subconscious minds, and his framework has specific implications for anyone who creates with words, whether on the page or at the podium.
The conscious mind, as Murphy described it, is analytical. It selects, judges, compares. It’s the editor. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is the storehouse of everything you’ve ever experienced, read, heard, and felt. It’s also the part of the mind that makes connections the conscious mind can’t see, the part that produces that flash of insight in the shower or the perfect sentence that arrives at 2 a.m.
“Your subconscious mind is a darkroom within which you develop the images that are to be lived out in your daily life. If you develop negative images, you will produce negative conditions. If you develop positive images, you will produce positive results.” – Joseph Murphy (1963), Chapter 3
For writers and speakers, this means something very practical: the quality of what you create is shaped by the images and convictions you hold in your subconscious. If you sit down to write while telling yourself “I have nothing to say” or “this is going to be terrible,” you’re programming the very faculty you need to draw from.
Why Willpower Alone Doesn’t Work for Creatives
I spent years believing that writing was about discipline. Show up, put words down, grind through the resistance. And yes, showing up matters. But Murphy helped me understand why willpower alone so often produces flat, lifeless prose.
He called it the “law of reversed effort.” When the conscious will and the subconscious imagination are in conflict, the subconscious always wins. If you sit at your desk forcing yourself to write while your deeper mind is convinced you have nothing valuable to say, the subconscious will win that tug-of-war every time. The result is writer’s block, anxiety, and pages that feel like they were assembled by committee.
The same principle applies to public speaking. You can rehearse your talk fifty times, but if your subconscious holds the image of yourself stumbling, blanking out, or being judged, that’s the image that will express itself when you step on stage. Your hands will shake. Your voice will tighten. The words you rehearsed will scatter.
What Murphy Recommended Instead
Murphy’s solution was deceptively simple: before you create, program the subconscious with the outcome you want.
For a writer, this means spending a few minutes before you sit down to work, ideally in a relaxed, meditative state, vividly imagining the finished piece. Not the process of writing it, but the result. See yourself reading the completed chapter and feeling satisfied. Imagine a reader telling you how much a specific passage moved them. Feel the sense of flow and ease you experience when writing is going well.
For a speaker, the visualization shifts to the room. See the audience leaning in. Feel your own voice, steady, warm, carrying. Hear the laughter at your well-timed aside. Feel the applause not as ego gratification, but as the natural response to genuine connection.
“The feeling of health produces health; the feeling of wealth produces wealth. How do you feel? Feeling is the secret of successful prayer. Feeling is the touchstone of every effective subconscious impression.” – Joseph Murphy (1963), Chapter 5
The key word is “feeling.” Murphy wasn’t talking about making a mental movie with no emotional content. He was talking about feeling the reality of the creative success you want, feeling it so deeply that the subconscious accepts it as fact and begins to cooperate.
How I Changed My Writing Practice
After I started applying Murphy’s principles, my writing routine shifted. I still sit down at roughly the same time each morning. But before I open the document, I close my eyes for three to five minutes. I let my body relax. Then I imagine the writing session going beautifully, words arriving easily, ideas connecting, the work unfolding with a sense of inevitability.
I don’t force specific sentences or outlines. I just feel the creative state, that particular warmth in the chest, that quiet excitement, that sense of being a channel rather than a manufacturer.
Then I open my eyes and start writing. And more often than not, the words come. Not every time. I’m not claiming perfection. But the ratio of good sessions to agonizing ones has shifted dramatically. My subconscious seems to cooperate now instead of resisting.
The biggest change is in the quality of what arrives. When I was forcing output through willpower, the writing was technically competent but emotionally flat. Now, writing from a subconscious that’s been primed with a positive creative image, the work has more life in it. More surprise. More of the quality that makes a reader pause and re-read a sentence.
A Practice for Writers and Speakers
Here’s a specific exercise drawn from Murphy’s principles that I’ve adapted for creative work.
Choose a time when you can sit quietly for ten minutes, preferably before your creative session. Close your eyes and take several slow breaths until your body feels noticeably relaxed. Now build a brief scene in your mind:
If you’re a writer, imagine yourself at your desk, hands moving across the keyboard with ease. See the word count climbing. Feel the satisfaction of a paragraph that captures exactly what you meant. Now skip forward, see yourself reading the finished piece and feeling genuine pride. Hold this image and let the feeling deepen.
If you’re a speaker, imagine yourself walking to the front of the room. Feel your feet solid on the floor. Hear your voice, clear, confident, natural. See faces in the audience nodding, engaged, moved. Feel the ease of someone who knows their material so well that the delivery feels like conversation.
Stay in this scene for several minutes. When you feel the reality of it settle into your body, when it stops feeling like imagination and starts feeling like memory, gently open your eyes and begin your work.
Do this consistently for two weeks and pay attention to what changes. I suspect you’ll notice not just improved output, but a different relationship with the creative process itself, less adversarial, more collaborative.
The Subconscious as Creative Partner
What Murphy’s work taught me is that creativity isn’t something I produce. It’s something I receive. The subconscious mind is constantly processing, connecting, synthesizing, it’s doing creative work all the time, even while I sleep. My job isn’t to generate ideas through brute force. My job is to create the conditions under which the subconscious feels safe and invited to share what it’s been working on.
Visualization, in Murphy’s framework, is that invitation. It tells the deeper mind: we’re doing this, it’s going to go well, and I trust you.
For the Writer or Speaker Reading This at Midnight
If you’re stuck, if the words won’t come or the stage terrifies you, I want you to know that the problem almost certainly isn’t talent. It’s the image your subconscious holds of you and your creative ability. Change that image, and the creative faculty responds. Murphy was emphatic about this, and my own experience has confirmed it. Your subconscious is the most powerful creative engine you have. Stop fighting it. Start feeding it what it needs.
