you’re doomed to self-sabotage because you don’t believe you deserve happiness and success. And if you do start achieving happiness and success, you’ll subconsciously feel guilty about it. (This is a huge cause of imposter syndrome.) The root cause of all your behavior from this point forward will be based on your low self-esteem. Put in emotional

Here’s what that looks like: You want something with your conscious mind, but you have a core belief in your subconscious mind that is sabotaging you from achieving that goal. An example is the millions, perhaps billions of people who are more afraid of success than they are of failure. They’re self-sabotaging themselves and have no idea they are

not realizing that the call is coming from inside the house.

I am not joking about living in the Matrix. Because you really are living in a Matrix; it’s just not configured like the one in the movies. The real Matrix is a collection of machines used for surveillance and data-gathering. (This includes every online search you perform, what you buy, every website you visit, your social media posts, the things

The common denominator in all these scenarios is a futile attempt to find self-worth from external factors. And your self-worth can never come from things outside of yourself – that has to come from the inside.

Just as your laptop hard drive can get infected with a virus from an email, your subconscious mind can be infected with a mind virus from the environment around you. That’s exactly what’s happened in the examples above. The result of being infected with mind viruses like those is self-sabotage.

Any time you are acting instinctively, impulsively, and unconsciously, you have reduced your ability for rational and critical thought. While you haven’t technically lowered your IQ, you have for all practical purposes locked a portion of it into a vault you’re unable to access. And if you can’t access that intelligence, it’s no more helpful than

When you possess self-awareness, you’re not easily manipulated because you’re always in a dual role of participant and observer. (Running the command center.) When you hear something that creates cognitive dissonance with a core belief you have, you pause, question the premise, do some critical thinking, and reach a conclusion. You may change your

Dawkins took the Greek root of “mimeme” and shortened it to meme, to be more suggestive of gene. A meme is a mind virus – an idea that is also a replicator. Think of a meme as something that causes people to think a certain way, believe a particular thing, or take a specific action – much like genes do. A catchy jingle or slogan is a meme. You hear