T. Harv Eker explains that humans carry a conditioned, fear-based mind whose job is protection and survival—not happiness or success. He argues this protective ‘bodyguard’ bias toward noticing problems creates habitual dissatisfaction, and recommends consciously cultivating the true self by practicing attention to what’s good and right in the present.
We have to recognize that we have a true self and a false self. Our conditioned mind. A conditioned mind is who we learned to be. And that conditioned mind is a fear based self. Right? We have our protective mechanism. That's our mind. Generally, it's a fear based mechanism. It's always looking what's wrong or what could go wrong in any and all situations. Why? It's its job. That's its job. It's not a bad thing. You need something like that. But the problem is you have a conditioned mind that is fear based. Its job is protection. It's like the bodyguard, right? What's the bodyguard gonna look like? The bodyguard's gonna walk into a room. Is it gonna look for? Oh, isn't that gonna be fun? Oh, look how cute that is. Oh, that's very nice. Is that the bodyguard's job? No, the bodyguard could goes in and looks in every corner if they're doing their job properly. Right? Every corner of that room. Who's here? What do they have underneath their coat? What could go wrong? What might go wrong? Hey, this is in the right place. I don't think that was there yesterday. We should check this out. What about the floor? You could slip on that. What about that? What about that? What about that? That's the bodyguard's job, right? It's doing what it's supposed to do. Here's the problem. The problem is we believe it all the time. The problem is we tend to run our life based on it. Okay? Your bodyguard, your mind's job is not happiness. It's not to make you happy. I'm sorry, I wish it was, but it's not. It's to protect you, keep you alive. Survival, that's it. And it's not. Their job is not to make you successful. It's not. It doesn't care about success. Success and alive are very, very different, aren't they? Okay? And so your bodyguard's job, your protective mind's job, is not to make you successful and not to keep you happy. It's to keep you alive. It's survival. And that's it. And happy and successful are the opposite of just survival, right? You want to thrive, but its job is to keep you just alive. And they're very different. So here's the thing. We have a bias, what's the word? A bias towards negativity, A bias towards the bodyguard looking for what's wrong or what could go wrong. And so that becomes our normal for the average person, our normal way of thinking. So our normal way of thinking is to look for what's wrong, for what the problems are for what could go wrong. Our normal way of thinking is. Listen closely. Discontent. Discontent not enough. We have to consciously move our focus from what's wrong when it comes up to, hey, hey, you know what? I'm not. I don't want to live like that. So you had your say. So you say, what I say to my, my bodyguard is, well, thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Thank you for alerting me to that. And this is what I choose to focus on. I choose to focus on what's good. I choose to focus on what's right when only in this moment. So we have to practice having a part of us that is offset to that negative fear based mind. So our true self has to come in and practice looking for what's good, looking for what's right, looking for the positive in all situations. My Zen teacher Sherry says, one process does not lead to the other. One process does not lead to the other. What that means is that dissatisfaction does not lead to satisfaction one day. It doesn't. We believe that if we're dissatisfied now, it's going to motivate us and it's going to lead to more satisfaction and more happiness later on. That's the mind complete bull. It's not true. Dissatisfaction never leads the dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction leads to more dissatisfaction. More dissatisfaction. Why? Because we are creatures of habit and we get good at though our patterns of thinking. Dissatisfaction becomes your habit and you become good at dissatisfaction. Sa.
