Cho Woo-seok, operator of BooktuberTV and head of Navi School, is an avid reader who may be second to none in South Korea. I recently learned that he had begun offering unconscious insight coaching, drawing on the countless experiences and expertise he has accumulated over the years. I had assumed that coaching focused on the unconscious might be heavily influenced by the tarot reader’s or spiritual counselor’s thought process and personal judgment. But after experiencing Coach Cho’s unconscious coaching firsthand, I realized that assumption was completely wrong.
The Five Whys began before the coaching
Once I scheduled the coaching session, I was given an assignment to complete over the two weeks beforehand. I had to choose the one thing I most wanted to achieve in life and ask myself “Why?” five times about it. At first, I regarded it as a simple warmup. But as I wrestled with the question every day, I began to feel something inside me slowly shifting.
The answer to the first “Why?” was always a familiar phrase I had used before. I kept asking “Why?” about that answer, and by the third and fourth questions, something quite different from what I had initially written began to emerge. I could hardly remember when I had last questioned so deeply what I truly wanted. Then I began to feel confused. “Do I really know clearly what I genuinely want?”
Looking back, those two weeks were already part of the coaching, even before the session began. I learned in advance that the most important thing is to discover things for yourself and spend time in conversation with yourself. I meditated on the question each day, and naturally began retracing the years I had lived, one by one. Even before the formal coaching began, I had already started encountering what was inside my unconscious.
A session room with cards and a heart-rate monitor side by side
The first thing I did when the coaching officially began was turn off my cellphone. It was important to set aside time entirely for myself, free from outside distractions. On the table were several types of tarot cards, a small ear-worn heart-rate monitor and the software needed to use it.
I put the heart-rate monitor in my ear and began with a light board game. It was meant to help me relax. We then focused on the problem I had brought in, repeatedly asking why it was a problem and narrowing the question. What was interesting was that although the genuine question we arrived at seemed to produce similar answers repeatedly, the final conclusion shifted slightly each time. It felt as though my unconscious self was gradually rising to the surface.
I turned over a card. I described the image that flashed through my mind. The graph on the screen jumped. The coach asked:
“What were you just thinking about?”
The software continued recording my heart as I experienced each step, and I watched the graph on the screen rise and fall.
Why the heart? — The heart knows the answer!
People do not notice when they have moved away from their own perspective. That is the biggest trap. The more familiar a story is, the more comfortable it feels to tell. That is why the judgment “It feels good, so it must be right” is often wrong.
The heart does not beat as regularly as a clock.
The interval between beats changes slightly from one moment to the next. Heart rate variability, or HRV, measures those changes.
The pattern of those intervals changes depending on a person’s condition. When someone is tense or unsettled, it becomes irregular and jagged; when the person is relaxed and composed, it settles into even waves. And the pattern cannot be produced at will. You can fake an expression, but you cannot fake the intervals between heartbeats.
Why trust it? The reason is simple: this is not a newly invented measurement. HRV is a metric used in hospitals. In 1996, international cardiology societies met to standardize how it is measured, and the same method is still used in cardiology and psychophysiological research. The HeartMath Institute in the United States has spent more than 30 years studying the connection between this measurement and emotion.
Its effectiveness has also been confirmed outside the institute. A research team at Boston University gathered and reassessed studies involving the method. The data covered 24 studies from several countries and 484 participants. Academia has a common standard for measuring how effective a method is, and the results fell into the category labeled “large effect.” The findings went beyond merely determining whether an effect exists.
Not tarot or counseling, but the credibility of a visible unconscious
Until then, I thought the process was not very different from other methods. Drawing a card and describing the image that comes to mind is familiar from tarot. The difference came next.
In tarot or spiritual counseling, the reader interprets what a card means and where the emotion that has surfaced comes from. How much one trusts that interpretation depends on confidence in the reader’s intuition or experience. Counseling and coaching are not much different. No matter how insightful the interpretation, I had no way to determine whether it had truly come from my unconscious or whether it had been shaped by the other person’s perspective.
In this coaching, that verification happened right in front of me. When I spoke about familiar stories I had already organized several times, the graph settled calmly. But while I was meditating, and at the moment a particular thought suddenly occurred to me, the graph rose noticeably. I was surprised to see that although the thought concerned something I liked, the response was even stronger than it was for the goal I had thought I wanted to pursue with my life. The coach merely asked what I had just been thinking; he did not interpret its meaning for me. My heart confirmed the meaning, and I was the one who recognized it.
The unconscious already knows the answer.
You cannot solve thoughts with more thinking. The key to solving a problem is how quickly you can step outside your own perspective.
Cho Woo-seok, who developed unconscious insight coaching, explains this state as follows.
“When I look at people who cannot solve a problem, they have one thing in common. They keep circling within the limits of their own thinking. No matter how hard they work within that space, the answer they produce is one that was already there.
An old story illustrates this structure precisely.
One night, an elderly woman was diligently searching under a streetlamp in a park. A passerby asked, “Did you lose a diamond ring here?” The woman replied:
“No, I lost it over there in the grass. But it is too dark there, so I am looking here.”
That is usually how we try to solve problems. The answer is in the dark, but we always search the light. The light is made up of familiar thoughts, explanations we have tried many times and methods we always use. It is bright and comfortable. The only problem is that the ring is not there.
Two sentences attributed to Albert Einstein pinpoint the issue.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
That narrows the key to solving a problem to one question:
How quickly can I step outside the boundaries of my thinking and look at this problem from a different perspective?
Why is that so difficult?
This is where most people get stuck. We have heard countless times that we should change our perspective. The problem is that the person telling us to change our perspective is also speaking from consciousness. Trying to escape the conscious framework through consciousness alone just leaves us going in circles.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, compared the human mind to an iceberg. The part above the water is consciousness; the much larger part submerged beneath it is the unconscious. He wrote:
“When making a decision, I carefully weigh the advantages and disadvantages that may result. But when it comes to truly important matters, the unconscious residing somewhere in my mind makes the decision.”
Some researchers have put the proportions into numbers. Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor and pioneer in unconscious marketing, estimates that the unconscious accounts for 95 percent of human cognitive activity and consciousness for 5 percent. Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, offers a more specific explanation.
“Every second, a person receives 11 million bytes of information, while the capacity consciousness can process is about 40 bytes. Our consciousness is no more than a single snowball atop an iceberg.”
A sentence from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, describes the outcome.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist and the author of 『The Road Less Traveled』, left the story that became the title of this article.
“The unconscious knows our true selves. (…) Our unconscious knowledge of everything possesses greater wisdom than our conscious mind.”
In short, this is what it comes down to: The place where we struggle with a problem accounts for 5 percent of the whole. We are digging in the same spot while leaving the other 95 percent untouched.
So to change our perspective, we must open the door from the unconscious, not the conscious mind.
Changes experienced through unconscious coaching
A business owner in his 40s who received unconscious coaching said, “My heart cannot lie.”
A television producer who said he had tried everything from dream interpretation to hypnosis said he heard the voice inside himself for the first time while looking at the graph. A business owner in his 60s who had struggled with insomnia for months reportedly slept soundly the night of his session for the first time in a long while.
“I really tried everything there was to try.”
People who have carried one question for a long time have often wandered from place to place looking for answers.
Counseling increased their understanding. But life did not change even after they understood.
In consulting, the analysis was perfect. But although the analysis was right, it did not move the heart.
Tarot, saju and spiritual readings offered clarity. But before long, new questions arose.
Books and lectures made perfect sense. But understanding something and changing are different matters.
Meditation and spiritual practice brought peace of mind. But when people opened their eyes, reality remained the same.
All of these are good methods, and each has areas where it is especially effective. Logic is useful for analyzing a problem precisely; meditation creates a state in which wisdom can be sensed in stillness; images and symbols draw out unconscious messages beyond the reach of language; and gamification helps turn knowledge into action.
Still, each of these methods also has limitations when it comes to solving problems.
For Coach Cho, who said he had tried everything from counseling to meditation, the biggest problem was that changing one’s perspective took too long.
Modern society is a race against time. Changing one’s perspective on life must also happen faster now to keep pace with the world.
That is why Coach Cho’s unconscious coaching was created. It was built on all the philosophy and spirituality he had accumulated, with the goal of helping people change their perspective through a single coaching session rather than over several months.
Unconscious insight coaching, created by someone who followed logic to its limits
The early part of Coach Cho’s résumé, as the developer of unconscious insight coaching, is rooted in logic. After majoring in business administration, he earned an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School. He later worked as an executive at a consulting firm, where he led consulting projects for major corporations and trained their employees. He is also the author of the best-selling 『Six Days of Classes to Achieve Your Dreams』 and the steady sellers 『How to Use Luck』 and 『Intermittent Immersion』, among other books. He now runs BooktuberTV, which has 430,000 subscribers.
His turn toward the unconscious was not a matter of personal taste. He had followed logic as far as it could take him.
“Logical thinking, logic trees, MECE and SWOT, which are commonly used in corporate consulting, are all useful. But they only go that far. I experienced countless times that logic alone could not solve the problem.”
He also confirmed through conversations with countless people that this was not only his problem. Their professions, ages and personal stories differed, but the place where they got stuck was strikingly similar. As long as they tried to solve problems within the framework of what they could think of, they could stay in that pattern indefinitely without getting out.
“So one conclusion emerged. The key is how quickly we can help people step outside their own perspective. And that cannot be done by persuading them through logic. I concluded that there had to be a process that would allow them to move beyond the pattern through the unconscious.”
To test that conclusion, he studied tarot and saju, the I Ching and hypnosis, psychoanalysis and depth psychology, counseling and coaching, meditation and spiritual practice, Harvard’s theories of change and MIT’s U Theory, Columbia’s strategic intuition and the self-transformation game of the Findhorn community in Britain. He has read more than 10,000 books alone.
The conclusion he drew from all of this was unexpectedly simple: Consciousness and the unconscious operate according to entirely different logic. Consciousness weighs, compares and calculates, while the unconscious speaks through images, emotions and bodily sensations. That is why the unconscious does not answer no matter how long one holds on through the language of consciousness.
Unconscious insight coaching was built on that conclusion. It extracts the strengths of each technique and restructures them in the sequence most likely to produce a rapid shift in perspective. Rather than simply joining the techniques together, it is redesigned around what works best at each point.
In particular, it makes the unconscious conscious very quickly. What people gain at the end is not information but a choice: an optimal decision supported not only by logic or intuition, but by data from all three — logic, intuition and the heart.
You do not have to say what you do not want to say
There is one concern people raise most often about this coaching: If it deals with the unconscious, could things they want to hide be dragged out?
No. You only need to share what you want to share. You do not have to say everything that comes to mind when you look at the cards. The session proceeds as usual even if you do not say aloud what occurred to you. Only you need to know what you chose not to say. The coach does not press.
Paradoxically, this sense of safety is necessary for the unconscious to emerge. Nothing opens up in a setting that does not feel safe.
What became clearer after the coaching — and the action plan
I cannot say that the problem itself disappeared as I left the office after the coaching. But it was enough to realize that I needed to act quickly on something I had wanted to do but had postponed for months, and that I no longer needed to keep working at something I had already been trying to accomplish.
The most important thing at the end, however, was the action plan that had to follow the coaching.
The process was to set a deadline, write down exactly what I would do and by when, and then carry it out. People do not change easily. Once you realize something, you need to act on it immediately, because resolve tends to fade with time.
Who could benefit from unconscious coaching?
It may be worth trying for someone wandering before a future obscured like thick fog, someone who must make decisions alone, or someone who has been holding on to one old question for months. But this coaching is not a setting for quickly obtaining a predetermined answer.
One participant who also undergoes psychoanalytic counseling said, “It was useful to be able to observe my consciousness and unconscious so effectively in such a short time.”
Participants generally take away one of two things.
One is an option they had never considered. A path that had never been a candidate appears in a problem they had been circling for years.
The other is the true meaning of something they thought they already knew. It is a story they had heard countless times and told themselves repeatedly, but for the first time that day, they see where those words fit into their own life.
A participant’s comment immediately after the session precisely illustrates the second case: “The things I had dismissed and avoided by insisting I did not know, it turned out I actually knew.”
Not everyone who applies is accepted
This coaching has one unusual procedure. After receiving an application, the organizers conduct a phone interview and then decide whether to proceed. They do not accept everyone who applies.
“It is to avoid wasting each other’s time, money and energy.”
The criterion is not the weight of a person’s story but their attitude.
“Some people come with the answer they want already decided and become disappointed if it does not emerge. They are looking for a quick solution or a big breakthrough. But that is not how the unconscious works.”
“What the unconscious offers can sometimes sound very ordinary. But it is something you absolutely need to hear.”
That makes the recommended participant clear: someone prepared to respect whatever answer emerges, listen closely and willingly put it into action. That is what determines the outcome.
The people Coach Cho hopes to meet through the program are specific.
People in positions, such as executives or leaders, who must make decisions alone. People who have been carrying one old problem for months. People who return to the same place the more they think.
“I hope they have the experience of stepping outside the framework of their own thinking at least once. Once they know what that feels like, they can do it on their own from then on.”
As I left the session, I thought again of the elderly woman beneath the streetlamp. We have generally lived by searching only in the light. We repeated the same explanations and called that self-understanding. But our bodies did not respond to those stories.
A thought I have not tried yet, rather than an answer I already know.
The unconscious already knows the answer.
Participant information
Unconscious insight coaching is offered in individual sessions and small groups of two to four people. Details on the format and application process are available at the link below.