The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.
I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.
I feel it's the conscious mind that messes things up. The conscious mind is constantly telling you, this might happen or that might happen, even before it has happened. Your conscious mind tells you the next ball might be a out-swinger, but when it's coming at you you realize it's an in-swinger... so literally, you've played two balls.
The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.
I'm not a wildly gifted person; I don't play an instrument or speak another language or have great accomplishments in another field, as many writers do. But writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up.
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
I am a trained hypnotherapist, yes, but it's more like a guided meditation. Most of the people I take under struggle with stress in their lives and have unbalanced sleeping patterns, so what I do enables my patients to regain energy and peacefulness on a subconscious level which affects their conscious mind.
If we could get your subconscious mind to agree with your conscious mind about being happy, that's when your positive thoughts work.
Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.