A conventional way of understanding conciousness would be by dividing it into the multiple functions it serves. Firstly, your subconcious mind is made up by the sensorial-perception mind and the discriminating one (responsible for emotions, memories etc). I think there's another one which precedes the subconcious one which has a purely mechanic, cognitive function but I'm still not sure.
Then, there's your conciousness. Conciousness is simply how your mind exchanges information at the highest level. An unconcious intention has limited faculties which go into creating it, analyzing it etc. Once it's projected onto conciousness, ALL parts of the mind have access to it and have something to add. Only the subconcious intentions that are important enough are projected onto conciousness, afterwards which they have access to more "cognitive faculties". The best part that comes with understanding this is that you can do everything effortlessly. You aren't performing these cognitive functions "conciously". Theyre taking place automatically, by themselves. All you're really doing is setting up some concious intentions and letting the mind do its thing.