Dhru Purohit Show - It's Time To Escape The 'Rat Race' Before It's Too Late + How to Manifest Your Dreams & Goals in 2024 with Rob Dial

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Lumebox, Lifeforce, and AirDoctor.  In our busy and stressful lives, it’s easy to feel lost while trying to discover our true purpose or potential. Our mental loops can become stuck on inadequacy and a constant state of unfulfillment. How do we stop the loop and break free? Today’s guest is here to show us how to Level Up during those challenging moments and unlock our heart’s true desires. Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Rob Dial to discuss what prevents us from taking action when we feel lost and how the story of our identity holds us back. Rob shares the research and patterns he has found that can help us discover our passions and how he uses fears as an empowerment tool to navigate the next steps. From creating habits that stick to visualizing the world you want to manifest, Rob guides us in overcoming our blocks and continuing our journey to a more fulfilling life. Rob Dial is a high-performance coach, author of Level Up, and creator & host of the Mindset Mentor podcast. With over 17 years of experience in personal development, Rob empowers individuals to overcome mental limitations and unlock their hidden potential. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, and his journey, he helps his listeners and readers make meaningful changes and master their mindset for a more fulfilling life. In this episode, Dhru and Rob dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What prevents individuals from taking action (0:00:25 / 0:00:25) The relationship between identity and belief systems (3:40 / 3:40) Identity as multiple parts of yourself (10:05 / 6:34) The stories we create and the importance of challenging them (13:30 / 12:16) Not knowing where to start and trying new things (25:00 / 21:40) Rob’s journey to pursue his passion (30:50 / 25:38) Following and assessing your energy (37:40 / 32:30) Real versus imagined fear and how it holds us back (41:20 / 36:33) Myths about purpose (54:30 / 49:26) Addiction as unresolved pain and trauma (57:58 / 53:15) How to step into your purpose (1:15:09 / 1:10:37) Visualizing the world you want (1:25:24 / 1:21:05) Creating habits that stick (1:35:12 / 1:30:15) Also mentioned in this episode: Level Up Rob’s book  To learn more about Rob, follow him on Instagram, or his website.  Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device!  That's over 50% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device.  Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  AirDoctor is offering my community $300 off. Just go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ to clean up your home’s air and feel better today.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rob, welcome to the podcast. Today, we're having a conversation on all things that prevent us from taking action and hold us back from stepping into our purpose. Yeah. You have a new book? Yeah. It's called Level Up and we're going to break down a lot of the lessons inside of there. One of the first sections of the book gets into this idea of what stops people from taking action.

Let's start at the basics. What does actually stop? There's so many people listening today that have heard a great episode, heard a great tip, are motivated to exercise, where they want to clean up their diet. They want to take steps to live a healthier life on their road to 100 and maybe beyond one day. But they find themselves regularly stopped. What stops them? I was sitting and writing this book and I wrote an entire book and I trashed the entire book.

And I was like, this isn't it. And I took a step back and I was like, I'm going to look at my podcast. There's 1,400 episodes of the mindset mentor. I was like, what do I teach? And it was like 95% of them I realize is like tips and tricks to get someone to get out of their own way to actually do something because I hear people say like I procrastinate all time. I don't take the action. I want to do it, but I'm not doing it. And so I took a step back and I was like, okay, I'm going to write a book on like how to take action. And the original title of the book

was the psychology of taking action. And then my publisher was like, that doesn't sound too sexy. So we called it level up. And so when I looked at it, I was like, all right, if we're going to talk about taking action, why don't people take action? Like, what's the first question that pops into my head? So there's a couple things. Number one is their identity that they have of the himself and who they think they are, which we can definitely dive into. That's one of my favorite topics. The second thing is the fears that they have, the fears, the limiting beliefs. And the third thing is if they're passionate about it or not. And so when you look at identity, it's one of my favorite quotes is Alan Watts and he says, you're in no obligation to be who you were five minutes

ago. And when we think like, this is who I am, that's one of the worst things that we can think of ourselves because that keeps us in the exact same patterns we've always been in. And so the person where you can say, oh, well, that's just how I am. I'm shy. You know, it's like, well, not necessarily. It's just a pattern that you've developed over time. Or there's some people who are a little bit more shy than others. Sure, but it doesn't mean that a shy person, I'm actually real shy. Can't be outgoing if they need to be here at certain times. And so the first thing is like who someone thinks that they are. And so like a good example, I always use fitness as an example because it's something you can like physically see, right? So if somebody's out there

and they're like, well, yeah, I just can't lose weight because it's in my genes. And my whole family is overweight. Sure, it's easier and harder for some people to lose weight than others, but is it absolutely impossible for someone to get in the shape that they want to? No, not necessarily. And so when someone says, like, it's in my genes, it's impossible for me to do it. There's no reason to take any action at all. And so some people think to themselves, like, I'll never be a successful business owner. Well, then of course, you're not going to take the action that they really need to in order to grow the business. If they think, I'm going to be overweight for my entire life, of course they're not going to take the action that

they need to in order to lose the weight or to gain the weight or gain the muscle or whatever is they want to do. If someone thinks like, I'm unlovable because of their relationship with their parents, of course, they're probably going to have some sort of issues with being in a relationship with somebody. And they're going to hold themselves back in showing themselves to that person or letting their guard down or being more vulnerable around that person. And all of them are going to eventually lead back to the original identity that they have themselves, which is, you know, either I'm unlovable or I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not pretty enough. And so the first thing I talked about in the book is like just the identity that somebody

has of themselves. Yeah, you have this great chart. Maybe we can put a little screenshot inside of the book. It goes, identity leads to actions. Actions lead to results. Results reinforce your identity. What's the relationship between our identity and also like our belief systems? They're part of our identity? For sure. Yeah. So I like to think of like your thoughts and your belief systems as part of the actual subconscious, mostly subconscious, but sometimes conscious identity that we have of ourselves. And what we think of ourselves is exactly the action that we're going to take unless we're consciously trying to change it. And that's what I don't think a lot of people talk about is like, if I'm trying to change myself, I have to be very conscious of what I think of

myself and what I want to think of myself and the actions that that's going to lead to. And so if I'm out there and, you know, like for instance, I've had in the past before in other relationships, I know a lot of people have, of like the feeling of like, I don't really want to open up because I've been wounded, you know, in the past with my parents, my father, you know, being an, my father's an alcoholic for context around people. Parents got divorced when I was 10. He would say he would come pick me up and I'd sit on the front yard for like two hours. He'd never come pick me up. And so I started realizing like this feeling of when someone loves you, they're not always there for you. When someone loves you, they're not always there for you. And then so then I would get into relationships when I was

younger and I wouldn't put everything into it, which would then turn into the relationship being something that would eventually go downhill, and then it would reinforce to me, see, you're unlovable. Or somebody ends up cheating on me. It's like, see, you're unlovable. When in reality, they were looking for what I wasn't able to give them from somebody else. And so that for me took me going, okay, with my wife, we've been together now for 10 years of me being consciously aware when she would come in and be in my space of like, okay, shit, I'm starting to feel like nervous that someone is wanting to love me this much. Why am I nervous? Were someone, someone? like wanting to love me, you know, and it took like me taking a step back and being conscious

myself and then being like, okay, it's, it's safe to be vulnerable. Like she's, she's safe to be around. She's safe to be vulnerable. And as I started letting my guard down, she started being able to get in more. I started to be able to be in her space more, being more loving, opening up. And eventually that broke the cycle for me of like, I'm not lovable or you can't trust love. And so for me, that's just an easy example for a lot of people feel that way because of the way that their parents were not there for them. And that was how the identity led into my actions in the past, how we had to break those actions of that identity and change the results. Because if you don't change the identity, the actions don't change, which means the results are just going to be this self-fulfilling

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And lastly, number three, life force makes tracking your progress more convenient than ever. They send a licensed lobotomist to your door every three months, and they'll adjust your plan based on how your body and your biomarkers change. If you're serious about optimizing your longevity, you have to check out Lifeforce. Right now, you can save $250 off your first diagnostic by visiting mylifeforce.com slash dhRU. That's my lifeforce.com slash dhrU to save $250 off your first diagnostic and optimize your health and longevity today. Yeah, you have a great quote in the book, which basically says that.

It says your life won't change unless you change your identity. And I think when I read that section, the thing that I realized is that a lot of people actually don't realize that they have an identity. Right. That they're actually just wearing a personality. They think this is just who I am. Right. Right. If somebody's listening today and they're like, what are you talking about?

I'm just being real. I'm just being me. What do you want to tell them about identity and it being how we have multiple sort of parts of ourselves? Yeah. I mean, there's a really good, I'm real deep into therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. And there's a part of therapy. It's not a cognitive behavioral therapy, which is it called internal family systems, which

is like inside of us, we have all of these different parts of us. And one of the things that's really the hardest is for us to identify the parts when they come up and not fight them, but just to accept them and love them as they are. And so when you look at that, one of my favorite stories, which is actually inside of the book that really like made me understand like, oh, we're not who we think we are, is there's a really great documentary that everybody should watch if they haven't seen. It's called Jim and Andy. And it is the whole path of Jim Carrey becoming Andy Kaufman to play this movie. called Man on the Moon. And it's all behind the scenes. And if you don't know, he was a method actor, which means that even when the camera's turned off, Jim Carrey continues to play Andy Kaufman. And the crazy part about Andy Kaufman is, well, he was a guy who was alive at one point in time.

And Andy Kaufman also played other people. So he played other characters like a guy named Tony Clifton. And so if the cameras turned off and Jim Carrey was playing Tony Clifton as Andy Kaufman, he would go home. And like even his, his driver, they would be pick him up in the mornings from his house and drive him to the studio said that he would drop him off and it would either be Andy Kaufman or Tony Clifton and he would pick him up and he would still be Andy Kaufner or Tony Clifton when he was in the car. And then it gets real crazy at the point where Andy Kaufman's daughter didn't really have closure with his death and they kind of did like mini therapy sessions where Jim Carrey was playing Andy Kaufman in front of his daughter and they were

kind of like healing her trauma that she had had from his death. And so it gets like really, really insane where he like loses himself in this role. And when the when the movie stopped shooting, they, he was asked to play indie Kaufman again like a month later in REM Songman on the Moon. And he's like, I can't do it. I can't go back into doing that because when the movie stopped, he was like, I don't know who Jim Carrey is. Like he goes, I don't remember what I like. I don't remember my beliefs. I don't remember any like all of these things. I'm trying to piece together who I used to be because I've been this other guy for four months at this point. And that's like when he had like his big spiritual awakening. This is how Jim Carrey's changed so much. And he said, I realized that if I can't

remember who Jim Carrey is, then he's just a character that I'm playing just like when I play the mask or just like when I play dumb and dumber. And so we unconsciously wake up, we wake up. And then we unconsciously play this pattern of who we think we are every single day. And the one of the most important things that people can do, there's a guy that I really love a, Indian guru called Krishna Merti. And he says, you have to stop knowing yourself and you have to start learning yourself. Knowing yourself is based in the past. And the past is based off of patterns and memories.

If you want to learn yourself and change yourself, you've got to know yourself in the moment, which means that like if I'm the type of person, I'm like, oh, I'm just short fuse. I just, I just react very quickly to people. Well, the next time you react, take a step back and be like, what did I just blow up on that person for? What was it that triggered me? because wherever I'm triggered, I'm not free. And I'm allowing myself to be triggered by somebody else. And so I think what's really important is for people to be like, okay, if that's the case,

why don't I just pay attention to myself all day long? I'm having a great day. Someone cuts me off and I get pissed. Why do I get pissed? I'm safe. Everything's fine. Maybe I ask myself, why did I get so mad? Well, I feel like this person is, it's like the equivalent of talking down to me, right?

They're stepping in. They think they're more important than I am. Okay. Or maybe they made me. unsafe. Okay, was there ever times in my childhood where I felt unsafe? It was when I was around my dad, when he used to drive like that. Oh my God. You started making these connections and going, is that who I want to be or do I want to be somebody else? And if you want to be somebody else, you can start actually changing those patterns within yourself. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with being any

particular way. The challenge is, is it getting you the results that you want in life? And part of that is this quote from book again, what is the story you're telling yourself? That's the identity. And we all have stories that we're telling ourselves. The only challenge is the vast majority of us don't realize, hey, that's a story. That's one version of the truth. I'm a huge fan of Byron Katie's work. And in her work, she has this whole methodology called, it's literally called The Work, where she has you question a painful thought that you have about yourself or someone else or some situation that people literally believe is true. And then she puts you in a situation. you can Google it online.

I love watching, you know, people going through this process. Jenny McCarthy, speaking of Jim Carrey, one of his ex-wife, she produced a whole documentary on the work about Byron Katie. And she narrates it. And she, Byron, you can watch it free online. And she has people run alternative stories that could potentially be true. Let's say you and I are close friends. And you end up canceling on me last minute for something.

And that is a painful thought. it accumulates an over a period of time. I'm like, Rob doesn't care about me. That's my belief that I have. And that belief, literally a tiny thing like that that adds up over years are things that create wedges between two people who could be family, partner, whatever, friends, and literally conflict, you know, wars have been started over little miscommunications like that that add over a period of time.

So in my head, I have all these series of stories that make up my identity that have become, Rob doesn't care about me. And then the work, and obviously there's multiple methodologies, you talk about a lot of them, we'll get to some of them inside of this. But in Byron Katie's work, it's like, okay, what's another potential truth? Because the thing is, as much as you think that you know the truth, you can't possibly know the full truth from that person's perspective. Maybe there's something that I did at some point in time that you're holding on to. Maybe you're busy. Maybe you're going through so much. turmoil in your family that you don't have the capacity to give attention to your friends at this

moment right now because you're barely surviving. All those things are alternative realities. It's just that we tend to think that our version of the truth, our story, as you say, is the truth. But you can either be right or really what the book is about is you can get results. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Can I speak to that? You said a lot of really good stuff there. So one of the things I think is important. And I say this to people when I coach them is because what you're really trying to do is you're trying to just change your perception on something.

That's all that is. We have this viewpoint, this myopic viewpoint of like, this is the way that reality is and this is the way that I see it. But I live a completely different reality than you do because of all of the things that you've had happened in your life. And every single person you'll ever meet has a completely different reality that they're living in based off their stories. And I'm less concerned with what people do in their life.

I'm more concerned with like the stories are telling himself in their head all day long. And so the going back to what you're saying about like, is there another reality? One thing that I always say to people because I always like, it's so hard for me to see the other reality. I said, okay, imagine this. Imagine you're on the debate team and you now know your viewpoint, right? Now what I want you to do is I want you to go to the other side and I want you to debate yourself and imagine what could actually what else could be happening?

Like you're saying, like one of the triggers, I actually had this, this, not this exact conversation, I was talking with when I was on Aubrey Marxist's podcast last year. We were talking about one of the things that triggers us because we both have like father wounds is when we will text a friend that's a guy specifically, not even much with a woman. And we don't hear back from like a day or so. Because then we start going this conversation ahead of like, they don't give a shit about me. They don't care. They must be.

Oh, they're too big for me now. And it's like this whole story will start going. And then you've got to stop the story in the middle of it and go, okay. I'm feeling kind of anxious right now. Like, why am I feeling this way? Okay, feeling this way because I text him a little while ago. I haven't heard back in a couple of hours. I'm thinking to myself, he must be too busy.

Maybe he's hanging out with more famous people or more popular people than me, right? And whatever it is that it might be. And then you realize like, oh, yeah, he's also got like a hundred person company. So maybe he is busy throughout the day. And it's like you're saying, it's like literally challenging your actual thoughts. And that's what they say in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is test the validity of your thoughts. And you notice a thought that makes you feel not good, whatever that not good is, stressed, sad, anxious, tests the validity of it.

And be like, is this act, does this hold weight? Or is like, I'm just building an entire store this, this huge, you know, house of cards on quicksand. And this thing can just fall if I just immediately ask questions that are correct. And so, or on the opposite side of that. And so I do think what you're saying is actually super important people understand is like, whenever you notice yourself, be triggered in some way, is there possibly another viewpoint that I can look through that can make me see like, yeah, maybe they'll text me a little later.

You know, maybe she, a lot of people who have been like cheated on the past I've heard, they will get into a relationship with the next person and they'll text them all day long. And they're going out with their friends and they're like, where are you going? Why are you not texting me in the next hour? And they ruin the next relationship because they're squeezing too tight on this relationship because they're placing a story from an old relationship into a new relationship. So it's like, how can we just be a little bit aware of our, The thoughts or identities, the stories that we're telling ourselves in our head.

And just be like, is there maybe another viewpoint? 99% of the time there's like 40 other viewpoints of what could be other possibilities. It's an important message because when I read your book and I go through your content, I think about this is all about getting and reclaiming agency and life. Right. Most of us are responding to events in our day. We're responding to the media. If you wake up and you watch the morning news or TV or that's somebody.

else's agenda for what's important in the day might be helpful oftentimes it's usually a list of the worst things that are going on in the world so that's going to put you in a particular mood in the day if you are planning your day out by primarily responding to email that's again other people's priorities of course we all have to do email but if you're not taking space for yourself to create agency and say what do i want which is actually one of the most scariest questions for people a lot of times people feel like, you know what? If I'm being honest with myself, I don't know what I want. And that's scary, but I know that I want something different. Yeah. And if you create more space in your life, if you start to question these stories, if you address your fear, which we're going to

get to in a second, you have your whole first chapter is about fear. You can now create a little bit more space between stimulus of the world and your response. And now you can choose your identity. choose how you want to show up, which literally can transform your future, right? That to me is what I got from what the book is about. It's like, just try it on for a day. Try being somebody else for a day and just see how it works. You know, like, it's like, I'm wearing a black shirt right now. I just decided to pick this out.

But I was wearing a gray shirt earlier. And I was like, oh, you know what? I like this new black shirt, all the way this instead. But it's like, why don't you just wake up and be like, you know what? I'm going to be outgoing today. Just see how it works. See how people respond to me. Because as I change, people, you know, it's like the phrase like, if you wake up

and you meet an asshole. You just met an asshole. If you wake up and meet assholes all day long, you're the asshole. It's like everybody responds to you differently based off of how you show up. And so it's like, what if I just decide when I go to Starbucks and I get in line, I'm going to have a little bit longer conversation with the lady that's checking me out. And then while I'm waiting for my Starbucks to come, I just say to somebody and I give them a compliment. Hey, I really like your necklace that you're wearing. And just see what it feels like to be somebody other than I am. So if I'm really shy, like, you know what? I'm going to try to be a little bit more outgoing today and just try that shirt on it and just see how it feels.

There's no, there's no harm in just trying to be somebody else for a day. One of the most helpful things that my dad did because he saw that I was kind of shy growing up. We would have a lot of, I have a big Indian family, tons of cousins every year since I was probably like, you know, born, two, three, four, five weddings a year. Yeah. Right. And Indian weddings are big. Those are not small weddings.

They're big. My sister's wedding was like a thousand people. Not 1,000, 800. Very close. That's wild. And they're big fat Indian weddings, a ton of family. It's an honor to be invited. So we're flying around the world all the time to go to these weddings because it's a big honor.

And in the Indian tradition, it's a big, like other traditions as well, too, it's a big deal. My dad would see that I was shy. And I was starting to be like in middle school, you know, at that age, you're hitting puberty. And he said that, you know, when we're at these family events, you have to think of yourself as really a host and an ambassador. for the family, right? I want you to go and like welcome people. And I would say, dad, I'm shy. I don't know how to do it. He said, it's not about you. Just make them feel comfortable. Right. Ask them if they want something. Just pretend like you literally are in charge here. I'm like, but I'm not in charge. You're part of the family. You're in charge here.

Yeah. If, you know, get them water. Get them a chair. Ask them if they're okay. Ask them if they need anything. And I would try this on. I would walk around and I would just pretend like, I'm in charge, right? And you walk differently when you're in charge. You speak differently when you're in charge. And that little tiny thing I kept into my adulthood and it would be in situations, especially in business, as I've started multiple businesses throughout my, you know, career, when I would enter into a situation where I was like, I actually don't know what to do here. Okay, even if you don't know what to do, pretend like you're in charge. What would somebody in charge do. Who would they call for help? How would they approach a situation? How would they get clarity

through action? It's a tiny little phrase, but it's stuck with me for my entire adult. That's awesome. I love it. And it's, it's just like a lot of times people just want to stay in their comfort zones. And it's like, it's pushing you just a little bit further out. And as you push yourself out, you realize it's safe. And as you feel it's safe, it's like, okay, I can do this. Like, I have a friend Todd Herman who writes about you like having an alter ego, you know? And it's like, I, I don't have to be like the hardcore business person when I'm hanging out with my wife. But there's sometimes where I'm like, okay, I'm going to put this hat on. And I'm going to take that hat off and I'm going to go home and I'm going to be this way with my wife.

And so it's like we can just try these things on and just say, hey, yeah, like in this moment, I can be this way. In this situation, I be this way. When I go home and, you know, I have to turn the business and the podcast guy off, I can just be this way with my wife. And it's like, there's no reason why we can't just try these things on and just see how they work for us. In terms of trying things on, there's a great concept in the book. And I'm going to jump around a little bit.

here. Going back to a question that I shared earlier, I often hear from my community saying, you know what, I love these guests you have on. I want to live a big, meaningful life. I just don't know what I want. I don't know what I actually want. I want something more, but I'm not exactly sure what I want. And you have this idea, which is a question you ask people, which is how often do you try new things? And it's relationship to this idea of, what do I want in life? Can you talk about that? Well, I mean, if somebody doesn't know what they want in life right now, there's a pretty good chance that they haven't found it or they're not opening themselves up to, I guess there's two options, right? So it's like number one is they're not opening themselves up and

they're saying, well, I'm being realistic, right? And they're quote unquote realistic. And so that's the first thing of it. The other thing is like maybe they just haven't found it yet. And so the one thing I've been saying for years now, like one of the quotes that people always repeat back to me, I say is that if you don't know what your passion is, completely fine. But now that you're you are aware that you don't know what your passion is, it is not okay for you to not wake up every single morning and be in constant pursuit to find what that thing is. Because there's something that's inside of you that is just like maybe you haven't discovered yet. And so the thing is and we all find ourselves, I found myself like waking up about six months ago and I was like,

I feel like I've been doing the same thing for like two years, like the same exact patterns Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I was talking about it. I was like, let's just switch things up. Let's do stuff different. Like let's hang out with with people we haven't. out with for a while. Let's go to new places. Let's travel new places. Let's eat new restaurants. You know, it's like we get into these patterns of doing the same things over and over again. Where it's just like, okay, if I'm sitting here and I'm going, you know what, I don't really know what I want, well, why don't I just go try new things and see if I can find it? Maybe there's somebody who, the other part of it that's super important too is your,

that I think is very important people to hear is that your passion doesn't always have to be your paycheck. A lot of people think like, okay, well, I love riding horses. And there was that one time, like I had a student years ago who she loved riding horses. She would have children, like special needs children come and ride the horses. And it was like, she loved it. It made her feel amazing inside. But she was like, I can't make any money doing it. And I was like, who says that you have to make money doing that? Maybe you have a job that you enjoy. It gives you a lot of free time. And then you spend as much as your free time taking kids and taking people who might have special needs or children or that even older people and just taking them for rides on horses if that's

what makes you feel alive. And so for her, she knew what it was, but she wouldn't allow herself to step into it, which happens with a lot of people. It's like, kind of having it in the back of our head, but we're like, that's not realistic because I won't become a millionaire doing that. Right. And so I think that's the problem with a lot of people is they think like, I have to make a million dollars doing this thing. I have to make six figures a year in order to do it. The other thing I think is important about passion is I've heard that, there's two different types of people when it comes to passion. The first one is called a jackhammer. And the second one is a hummingbird, right? A jackhammer, like, I can identify as a jackhammer,

which means, like, I know what my passion is. And I'm okay working all day, every day for that thing because I'm so ridiculously passionate about. Like, I will die for the message of what I'm trying to work for. Like, that's just like a jackhammer, like just going to go through the wall if I have to. A hummingbird, if you ever see a hummingbird, we have a lot of them in Texas where I live, they'll go from flower to flower to flower to flower. And it's like a lot of people, people I think are hummingbirds, which is like you can go for, you know, be really passionate about this thing for three years. And it makes you feel good. It makes you feel great. And then you might go, you know what? Yeah, I feel like I've kind of, I've kind of done everything I could do here. I'm going

to go find another thing to be passionate about. So I think the first thing is you don't have to, your passion doesn't have to be your paycheck. And the second thing is your passion doesn't have to be something that you do until the day you die. It could be like, this is one thing. I'm just really curious about learning over the next couple years. And I think if you take those two viewpoints and put them in, a lot of people are like, okay, there's not as much pressure. And I think I can start to look and try to discover what I can be passionate about for the next two or three years. This episode is brought you by Air Doctor.

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fear and the two types of fear that are there. But before we do that, let's give our audience a little bit of context of just your origin story, right? From what I understand, like, you were in that place where you were successful career, right? Things were working out financially for you. You were in the consulting space. Yeah, I was in sales consulting. Sales consulting. And kind of were going through a series of life changes where you thought like I want something different. Walk us through that. Yeah. So I'll take even a further step back. So when I was 19, I started in a sales company and I mean, was incredibly shy. I never did any public speaking. And this sales company was just hardcore in personal development. And when I found personal development, I was like, oh yeah, this feels, I would never say, I think

everybody should go to therapy at some point in time in life, but it felt like I was kind of becoming a little bit of my own therapist. There was a lot of trauma that I have. from my father being an alcoholic, not showing up, all that stuff that I told earlier. I always tell people, I had the best type of alcoholic father. He didn't hurt me. He didn't yell at me. He didn't touch me inappropriately. He got drunk and he fell asleep and forgot about me.

Right. So that's neglect, though. So there's an emotional side of that side, right? But a lot of stuff comes to that. So once I found personal development, I was like, oh, I can start to kind of help myself and work through this. So I started with that company. I was 19 when I was 20, I was promoted to a assistant with them and started

doing trainings. So by the time I left that place, I was 24 and I had trained over 2,000 sales reps, this huge team of sales reps. And the thing that I love the most was teaching people what helped me improve myself. And when I left, I went and did sales consulting. And I was 27 years old. And I was making like, 250 grand a year. I was working from home. And I was like, I just feel completely unfulfilled. Like I was not depressed, but I could feel myself like getting really close to like being depressed with where my life was going. And, um, and so I was, I was sitting at Jason's deli with my wife. I remember specifically. And it was, uh, beginning of 2015. And I was like, I'm going to start a podcast. And she's like, okay. Because podcasts weren't like huge back in 2015,

right? Like it was hard to tell people how to listen to a podcast in 2015. There was no apps on your phones to listen to them, all of that stuff. And, um, she's like, why? And I was like, I just feel obligated to teach people what's helped me. And I was like, she's like, I don't know if you can make money doing that. I was like, I probably can't. But like, I don't, there's something inside of me that needs to come out. And so I started the podcast. And as I got more into the podcast, I started hating what I was doing on the other side

even more. And so I made the decision. And it was a really hard decision that I was going to leave where I was at 27 years old, making a quarter million dollars a year, barely. working to follow this like podcasting thing and to try to grow a coaching business and whatever might come from it. Like I had no idea I was going to make any money or how it's going to do it. And the thing that was the most important though is that it felt right. And my wife always says like she's like whatever you think is right. If it feels right, I'll trust it because you have like

one of the best intuition of any person I've ever met. And if it feels right for me, I'll follow it and I'll put 100% into it. And that's kind of what happened with me was I was at the point where I was like, I was looking at my boss and I was going, I don't want her job in five years. So why am I here? I was like, I need to pivot in some sort of way. Yeah, it could be good for her, but it wasn't bad for you. Yeah, and she's still at the company. She's still killing it, you know, nine years down the road.

And she's great. And I love her. And I catch up with everyone once in a while. But for me, it just didn't feel like the thing I wanted to do. And so I was like, I just got a, I just got a quick cold turkey. And there was a lot of fear that came with it. Like people were always like, man, how did you do? it so gracefully. I'm like, I didn't. I woke up every morning thinking I was going to go back

and work for someone else. And I was like, I don't, I, and I'll tell you even deeper story that's around it. I was in so much fear that about four months after showing the podcast, about a month after leaving the job that I was at, I was like, I'm going to go work for someone else. And as I had this thought, my sister, I was at her house and she goes, hey, have you ever seen this box of dad stuff? I was like, no, it's like 10 years, 12 years after he passed away. It was like his glasses, his watch, and it was a couple of the things that were in there. And there was a lot of letters. My dad was in jail when I was a kid, and he wrote letters to us.

That's how he kept in touch with us. And the letter that I wrote, he wrote my sister on her 19th birthday, so I'd have been 13 years old. And he wrote it to her. And the last line said, I hope you live your life with courage, love, and laughter. And I read it. And I was like, it was like, the universe kind of like shifted. And I was like, he wrote this for me. And I was like, he wrote it for her, but he wrote it for me because this is the

exactly what I need to hear. Because I was in so much fear in the first line said, courage. And I was like, courage is the opposite of fear. And I was like, I'm like getting goosebumps even thinking about this. I was like, courage is the opposite of fear. Okay, it's 2015. My dad wrote this for me in 2001. So this is 14 years later. I was like, did the universe just like shift? Like it was this weird moment. And I was like, I got to commit. I was like, how do I commit to this thing? And I was like, I'm going to get a tattoo. I was like, I've never and I had no tattoos at that point. So I literally on my arm right here, you can't see it, but it says, live your life with courage, love and laughter. It's my dad's handwriting blown up and put on my arm. And I was like, I'm either going to succeed at this thing or I'm going to die trying. There is no other option for me.

And when I like made that full on commitment, everything started falling into place after that. Yeah. And it wasn't that it wasn't tough. It was tough. So hard. It wasn't that there wasn't fear. There was a ton of fear. And yet you still move through that. And that's what your podcast and your coaching is all about. Mindset Mentor, obviously it's a podcast. We'll link to it below. People can follow it, you know, if they're not already following it right now. And a lot of those key lessons and themes that you talk about there, you put inside of the book, level up, a link in the show notes as well. You know, a couple of things that I want to go into as you're, you know, sharing that story. And thanks for, thanks for sharing that story with our audience. You mentioned that like

you were following your energy. And this is another great quote that I heard from actually your interview with Lewis Howells that you guys did together that I wrote down. He's the only other interview where I've ever talked about the thing on my arm. That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I love that interview. I know Lewis.

He's great. You're obviously great. You have this quote you shared, God, the universe, God slash the universe, whatever people's religious beliefs are, speaks through you through energy, speaks to you through energy, right? And I think that that's one thing that's super important in this process here is that going back to that hummingbird concept is that we all may not know what we're ultimately, like, I don't know what I'm ultimately meant to do and I'm not obsessed with that idea. I'm just doing what I'm meant to do right now, what I enjoy and often I'll follow that aspect of what adds energy to my life,

what fuels me that even if it's tough, even if it's challenging, even if I'm unsure, even if there's a ton of fear, I'm going to follow the fact that I feel lit up by this idea or concept that I want to pursue. Can you chat a little bit more about that? Yeah. And this is, this is, you know, when I look at everything, I sit in a lot of silence a lot by myself. And I try to learn a lot. Like, I'll go on my back porch. And it's all trees that are outside. And I'm like, I'm part of nature. What can I learn from nature? And I always, I always like to sit there. And I'm like, what can I learn? And when you look at like nature, when you look at quantum physics, when you look at all of it, everything in this world is energy, right? So like, I'm energy. This hand is just

energy. It's just moving atoms. This desk that's in or this, yeah, this desk that's in front of us. This is energy as well. It's just slower moving than my hands. And so I'm like, what's the thing that holds everything together. And it's like energy is the thing that holds everything together. And what I've found is that if something doesn't give me energy, it's not the thing that's for me. But there's some things. Like, for instance, I will get done with this podcast episode and I will have way more energy than when we started. Like, just it comes out of me. Like, it just gets me excited. It's not because of like having coffee or anything like that. It's like, I get more energy from doing this thing. I think a lot of people underestimate how much energy is stolen from them from

doing things that they don't want to do, right? It takes, it takes way more energy to drive to a job that you hate than to do something that you're truly passionate about. And so when you find something that truly lights you up and you feel it and you're like, this thing is, I feel like I have more energy, I get excited when I think about this thing. That's usually the thing that's meant for you. The problem is it's not blatantly in our face all the time. It's kind of, we have to take a step back and be like, how do I feel? Oh man, like, I feel really drained right now. okay, this probably isn't meant for me. And, you know, I've had a lot of people send me message to be like, Rob, I quit my job

because if you're, I'm like, I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing. I hope you don't have like a mortgage you got to pay. So if someone's out there and they're like, yeah, my job doesn't give me energy. Okay, well, you know, you might have a mortgage and children, all this stuff, but like, could you come up with a transition plan? Like, over the next two years, I'm going to decide what this thing is. I'm going to figure it out and start saving up money to transition out of this job. I don't think people should just quit immediately, especially if they have responsibilities.

but I think just getting to end your life and just regretting what you're doing is probably the saddest thing that could happen to somebody. And so I think what's most important is like I believe, and it's my personal belief, that God speaks in the silence. When I sit in the silence and there's no religion that's behind this. It's just the way that I feel is like, if I can be silent and I can listen and I can be like, how do I feel right now when I think about going and doing this new thing in my business. I'm like, yeah, I'm feeling kind of anxious right now. Okay, that might not be a thing for me. But if I think like, well, what if I did this event coming up in six months and we have a thousand people there? I'm like, oh my God, that's super exciting. There's probably some message

that's in there. And so I think it's just about being silent a little bit more, not being, you know, I deleted Instagram and all that stuff from my phone so I can just have more space just to like listen. And that's what I think a lot of people should do is like, just be alone with yourself a little bit more. And like you said earlier, like, what do I want? And the question, you said, you said, could be what do I want. It could be extremely vague. Or you can say, what do I want in my relationship of my wife? What do I want in my relationship with my children? What do I want in my career? What do I want in my bank account? What do I want in my traveling? What do I want? And we just ask yourself those questions and you can get a pen and paper and just start writing down all things you want.

And if something gets you excited in there, that's probably something that's meant for you. Sometimes people write things down. They get excited. And then the next thing that comes up for them is this statement either to themselves or other people that I want that, but I'm afraid to pursue it. So the whole first chapter of the book is all about breaking down fear. You get into the top fears that people have. But first, there's sort of this important concept that you share with the audience about the difference between real versus imagined fear. And we've all heard some variation of this, but it's so important to understand

our relationship with these two types of fears and how they're holding all of us back, right? Even there's times where I realize like, oh my gosh, is that? an actual thing? Is that an actual fear? Or is that something that I just made a part of my identity because of some sort of, you know, past experience? So can you set up a topic of fear? Yeah, I mean, as humans, we're animals and we're always trying to protect ourselves, right? So that's really what it comes down to. In this moment, like in my comfort zone, I know I'm safe. Outside of my comfort zone, I don't know that I'm safe because it's something I've never done before. And so when you look at fears like this is, I love this topic because they're like so many people just don't do

something because there's some sort of fear. And, you know, the fears that I always hear the most when I ask people in front of me, it's like fear of rejection, fear of other people's opinions, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of not being loved, fear of disappointing other people, not being able to pay the bills, all that stuff, right? And when you look at it, and the way this came about for me, I had a friend Chad that went and lived with a native Brazilian tribe in Brazil. And so when I say native Brazilian, like he had to fly to Brazil, he had to go on a boat for two days. And he had to go on a boat for two days through the Amazon to get to this tribe. And he lived with them for 40 days. And he lived in a TP. They have almost no outside contact. And to the point where he literally had to have a machete in his

hand everywhere he went. And he was like, because, you know, he had to sleep with him also in his TP next to him because stuff would walk in in the middle of the night. And he would go hunt anacondas with him. Like, I'm talking like literally in the middle of nowhere, right? And he's the one to kind of click this into my head. And I started researching and going deeper into it. is he would have to walk with machete everywhere. And he said, because if you saw a Jaguar, that thing's been following you for a long time. And it's okay being seen

because it already knows that it's coming after you. And I was like, what was that like? He was like, it was like the most fear I've ever felt to my entire life, but the most alive I've felt to my entire life. And he looked me like dead in my eyes. And he goes, you want to the craziest part about it? Not one of those people is depressed. And he goes, you don't know why?

They don't have time to think about anything other than survival. And so I was like, interesting. Tell me about that. We basically talked about like, he goes, when I came back to America, I realized everything that I was afraid of had nothing to do with my survival, nothing to do with me living. It was all of these things that I made of in my head. And so then we started talking about, okay, so there's there's primal fears, which is a primal fear the way I define it. And this isn't saying like just FYI out there, like saying depression isn't real. I'm not saying that any sort of way. But what I'm saying is, you know, there are some times where people can take a step back and be like, am I just, you know, going down

the wrong route in life? Can I change things up? All of that stuff. But really, when we started breaking down, it's like primal fears are pain or death is attached to it. Right. So like, if I'm on the edge of a cliff, yeah, that's a primal fear because I could fall off the edge of that cliff. But if I'm sitting there and I'm like, well, I want to post this thing on Instagram, but what is my mom going to think about me? You know, that's not a primal fear. That's what I call an intellectual fear. And so a primal fear is pain or death is attached to it in some sort of way. Intellectual fear is something else, which means that there's no pain, there's no death attached to it. So when you look at all of the things that I basically just said, the fear of failure, the fear of success,

the fear of, you know, judgment, fear of any of those things, those are all intellectual fears. And so if they're intellectual fears, do they exist in our physical reality? No. Where do they exist in the mind? And if they exist in the mind, and if they exist in the mind, mind, well, then I can start to try to work through them. And so when you look at an intellectual fear, most people are out there and they're like, well, you know, of course, I don't want to put this thing on Instagram and then, you know, get fired for my boss because then I won't be able to feed my family and stuff. Yeah, that could happen. That's like the worst thing that could happen. But when you look at intellectual fears, the first thing that came into my head was, okay, if I'm going to have fears,

how do I over, most people we can identify them. But when you identify them, the very next question is, okay, well, how do we overcome this fear? And I remember specifically when I was writing this book, what I would do every day is I would write and then I would go on a drive and I would listen. I listened to a lot of, you know, spiritual gurus and stuff like Christian Murta, like I was saying, I was listening.

I think it was Sad Guru I was listening to and I was like typed in overcoming fear. And the thing that I put inside the book, which is the thing that like is one of the most highlighted that I can see when I go back in Santa Kindle and I can see what people are, you know, highlighting in the book is on page 7, of the book, it says, how to overcome your fears. You can't overcome something that doesn't exist.

And so we're constantly trying to fight our fears, but our fears aren't even actually rear up their intellectual fears. And so what we're doing every single morning, say my fear of failure is what I'm dealing with, right, is I'm waking up in the morning, I'm creating the boogeyman. And then instead of building my business or whatever it is that I'm trying to do, I'm fighting the boogeyman versus actually building the business. And so the intellectual fear, when we really start to dive into it and ask the questions like you and I are speaking of like testing the validity of these thoughts, you realize that they really don't hold weight majority of the time. And so with all of the fears that we have, and there's a quote in there that's from a guy named

Carl Albrecht and it says, fear is based off of our perceived things that could possibly come in, perceived pain into the future. And so what we're doing when we're in fear is we are sitting in this moment where nothing is wrong. I'm projecting myself into the future, thinking about what could happen, feeling those feelings of it happening right now, and then not taking action because I don't want to feel those feelings. Even though right now, nothing is wrong and all I need to do is take action. And so, yeah, I kind of went down a rabbit hole on it. But that's why I literally wrote an entire chapter on fears because I find so many people are like, I'm afraid of this and this is the reason why I'm not doing it. And I've almost never hear somebody say any primal fear that's actually

holding them back. Yeah, a big part of what I got a reminder of in the chapter. It reminds me of here in L.A., we have Reverend Michael Beckwith, who's founder of the Goppa spiritual center. A lot of great conversations. We've had him on this podcast a few times, and he has a fantastic quote. He's like, just take your fear along with you. Yeah. Right. You see your fear. You're like, okay, I acknowledge it, right? I understand that I have an identity that is made up a bunch of of different parts. Okay, great. I understand when I was younger, my parents, not my parents, but somebody might feel this way. Like, anytime I did something that wasn't perfect, they said, oh, don't embarrass us or don't fail or don't do this or whatever. And that led to

you feeling like you don't want to try new things. You're afraid of failure. You're afraid of this. You're afraid of that. It's like, all right, we have very, you know, strong reasons that we might feel that is part of our identity and we might be worried about doing something. Okay, great. That's one part of you. It's not the full story, which why the next chance, chapter is all about identity, which we talked about earlier. And it's okay to take that with you. Yeah. Right. You said also in the book, it was like, don't try to get rid of your fear. Right. Partly because it's not something that's actually real. But another part of it is that sometimes people actually think, oh, Rob, he left his business and he started his podcast. And now he

has one of the top podcasts in the world. He got over his fear. And that's how he started his podcast. Right. I'm sure the fear was with you. the whole way through, and yet you still pushed through. I felt fear this morning when I was getting ready where I was like, I hope I don't screw up on this podcast. Like literally, I felt that. And as I was driving, I had a listen to Ram Dass as I usually do. And I'm like, okay, it's just about service.

That's all that it is. Whatever's supposed to come out of me is what's going to come out of me. So that you're 100% correct, which is when I know, you probably know extremely successful people. I know pretty successful people. And they are not, like they haven't overcome fears. They've just understood that fears are always there and they're going to do it. regardless of the fear, which is what you're basically saying, which is they're going to be there.

But it's either you listen to them or you're just like, hey, man, yeah, let's go on a ride, just get in the pasture seat with me. And so for people, be like, I've done, I've done 400 podcasts episodes and there's still a part of me as like, I don't want to screw this up. Like, that's just the way that it is as a human. And that's okay, but I'm not going to not show up or text and be like, hey, man, feeling sick today. You know, I'm just going to show up and try my best. And it's like, goes back to what we were talking about literally right before we started, which is, are you on self? Are you on purpose? Right? And if I'm on myself, I'm thinking, I hope I don't screw this up. So I don't look like an idiot. If I'm on purpose, it's, I just want to

show up and serve and try to be as into with myself as possible and whatever's supposed to come out is hopefully going to come out and impact people. Yeah, we were chatting about this before we hit record. So it's worth repeating. This is a friend of yours, Matt, who's a mentor in your life. And he shared a quote with you, which has been one of your most powerful sort of sayings and personal mantras. You've got to get off of yourself and get on your purpose. which sets us up for the purpose conversation so perfectly here. But before we jump in, one of my favorite podcasts growing up was this podcast called This American Life.

I don't know if you ever came across. I've heard of it. I've never heard of it. It was big in the sort of public radio scene. It's like all these different intricate stories about just sort of literally the human existence, right? The host is this guy named Ira Glass. He's based out of Chicago.

Build this incredible team. They made it into, you know, it was a document. entry on Showtime, but it's like a classic top podcast, you know, a podcast before there was even the name podcast that were there. And one of the things on the topic of fear on this career advice episode that Ira Glass did as like a bonus episode, because people would always ask him, like, what are your top advice for your career? If people want to be a creative, they want to be a storyteller, they want to create a body of work that you've created, which you're proud about, right? What is your number one and two tips? Number one tip, which actually,

has nothing to do with fear. It was a life hack, which I love was work, live close to where you work, you know, and he had a whole bunch of reasons on that that you can get to there and, you know, be able to work anywhere. But the one that I thought that really showcased, which was related to fear, was try new things and put yourself on a regular deadline, even if it's a micro deadline. Obviously, he's coming from the world of news publishing stories and deadlines are important. You can always make the story better. You can always make more references or more quotes or, you know, have more contacts that are a part of it, but you have to be willing to publish. And going by this idea that so many people are not willing to try something new and then put

themselves on a micro deadline. And that micro deadline in a way, it's like if you have something that's due tomorrow, right, something low stakes on something that you actually care about and want to make progress on, it's like, yeah, your fear is yapping, yapping, yapping, but it's either you get it done or you don't get it done. And that's one of the things that I've seen in my own life has just helped me. If I care about something and I want to make progress on it, just have a little bit of like a micro deadline. And you have enough deadlines in your life that you have forgotten about fear getting in the way, even if it's in the background, you know, speaking it's sort of crazy voice that it's speaking. Yeah, I love that. I used to, this is the most drastic example I can

give you, but I'm going to give it to you. I used to do the same thing with people where I'd say, I don't do a whole lot of speaking anymore, but I used to a lot of speaking back in the day. And I would go in front of people and I'd say, hey, what's the what's the percentage chance if you making a million dollars this year. And they would be like zero percent, one percent, you know, like maybe one person would say five percent, but everyone's like zero, zero, zero. And I was like, what's the percentage chance of you making a million dollars this year? And if you don't, everyone that you love dies. And everyone's like, a thousand percent, a thousand percent, a hundred percent. There's no way I'm not doing it. And I was like, why? And they're like,

because I'm going to get it done because I care about all the people, which kind of like goes to what you're saying, which is purpose, right? Which is you love these people so much. you have a real big purpose to actually go after this thing, which is you have a deadline to it. You know what you need to do. So the deadline didn't change. The goal didn't change. What changed is the actual reason why you're doing it. And there's a lot of things going back to the deadline of like people work really well with deadlines.

If you remember like a lot of people's parents when they used to be like, it's trained into us from children. Hey, you better go do this. Three, two. And you're like, I don't know what happens at one, but I don't want to find out. Right. And so like we're used to just like moving towards it. Then you work for someone else and your boss like, hey, I need this by five o'clock. You're like, I don't want to get fired.

So I got to get this done. You can impose deadlines onto yourself anytime that you want to. And there's a lot of research that actually finds that what you're saying is true, where people work better when they have some sort of deadline, whether it's given to them by someone else or whether it's self-imposed. Let's talk about purpose. You know, what is it and what do you find as both a coach and doing your podcast and, you know, writing on this topic?

What are the biggest mistakes or misconceptions that people have when it comes to their relationship of purpose? Yeah, I think the first thing is going back to what we were saying earlier, which is like that it has to be something that they do till the day they die, which it doesn't have to be. And it has to be something that makes them, you know, extremely successful. And I think that more than anything else, we all have to pay the bills. It's just the way that it goes. We're not really going to, unless we want to remove ourselves from the society, but we all live

in society where we have to pay bills. So there has to be some form of work that happens. And whether that's how their passion is how they make money or not is completely up to them. But for a lot of people, what I think is you're also going to have a lot of time outside of work. And so if you can't figure out a way, say I find my passion, right? If I can't figure out a way for me to make money on that passion, can I figure out a way for me to have a job that pays the bills that I at least enjoy so I don't hate my life when I wake up in the morning and have to go somewhere and do something. something, but at least gives me as much free time as possible to be able to do that thing that I love. And so I think that for me, I was very blessed. The worst day in my life was also the best

day in my life. And that was the day that my dad passed away when I was 15 because he was the very first person that I ever knew that passed away. And it was very apparent to me, oh, this is ending one day. And I remember sitting in the room with his casket the day before his funeral and we were on a little tiny couch and he was right there and we were in the viewing and it was it was me. It was my grandma, his mother to my right. It was my mom next to her and it was my sister next to her. And I remember thinking to myself, this guy was such a dreamer. Like he was an incredible person. I was like he was such a dreamer and he never brought any of it to reality. And I remember sitting there thinking, I'm not going to be that. Like the thing that I am going

to do is I'm going to take whatever I end up being passionate about, whatever my dreams are, and I'm going to work my ass off to make sure I bring that into my reality. Because I know I'm going to be in this exact same position one day. And when I get to this position, I don't want to have any regrets. I wish I would have done something different in my life. And I think that for most people, like even going back to fear, I have all of the same fears that everybody else does. But the fear that's the strongest for me that drives me to work in my passion,

is I don't want to get to the end of my life and regret. That's way stronger than any of like, I hope I don't get judged today. I hope that I don't put up this post and somebody says, oh, this guy sucks. It isn't always talking about. Right. And so I think that for me, it's like, I've discovered, I luckily have discovered my passion, the thing that I really believe in more than anything else. And with that comes the fear of, oh, now I've got to go take this action. And I can feel all the other fears, but the one that's more omnipresent in my life is like, I don't want to get to end in my life and wish that I would have done something different. And so I think that the biggest misconceptions that people have around their purpose is

what we spoke about earlier, which is, you know, that it has to make them a million dollars or that, you know, it has to be something that they do until the day they die. You know, you talk about your dad very openly and have brought them up. You write about them in the book. You've mentioned them on podcast. I had a question for you on the topic of your dad. You know, we've had on, if you're familiar with all with the work of Dr. Gabor Matte.

You know, he has this great quote. I love Gabor Mate. Yeah. It talks a lot about addiction. Yeah. And obviously, you know, your dad was self-medicating, as you mentioned. He was an alcoholic. For sure.

And Gabour asked, he says, you know, when somebody's addicted to something, alcohol, drugs, whatever it might be, he says, you know, don't ask why the addiction. Ask why the pain. Right. You know, because so much of our life is shaped by our early childhood, what do you think the pain was that your dad was running from? Yeah. So I know what it was.

And I luckily knew what it was as a child. I didn't know the severity of it until a couple, I knew, I knew my dad's dad killed himself when I was a kid. I didn't know the severity of it until a couple years ago, about five years ago when my grandmother actually, you know, my dad's dad, or my mom's mother, my dad's mother, goodness, actually shared it with me was, so my dad's dad was a, and this is why I love Gabon Montes, because I always consciously knew what Gabon Mati shares, which is addiction all comes, all addiction comes from trauma that hasn't been worked through.

It hasn't been healed in some sort of way. And I always thought that that's what it was until I heard him say it. And I was like, okay, God, this is great. Somebody's actually saying it that there's really as a professional in this space. So when my dad, my dad's father, I'll just tell the whole story. My dad's father worked for a company called Monsanto, which most people know. was like one of the worst companies that's out there. And he developed stomach cancer from being in their, in their facilities and working inside

of their factories in Columbia, Tennessee. Wow. And he developed stomach cancer. So he went from a deacon into the church to self-medicating because he was in so much pain. And he was in so much pain he had these grandfather. My grandfather, yes. And so he started drinking alcohol because he just wanted to stop feeling it as much. And then it got to the point where it was so much, you know, my dad was 12 years old in the middle

of the night. He just heard a gunshot go off. and my father ran into the room at 12 years old. And my grandfather had shot himself in the mouth of the shotgun. And that's what my 12-year-old dad saw. And so a lot of people like to look at their parents and be like, well, they, you know, if they would have just been different than that, right? And I look at it and I'm like, I knew that my dad had some demons that just weren't

overcome. And so for me, it was like, that's why I'm so passionate. What do I do? And I'm so blessed that, that I would. was given this life and had that father that I had was because I know what happens when someone doesn't heal himself. And so then I can look at it and be like, yeah, I don't want anyone to have to go down that route that my father went down. And so his pain was that, yeah, he, he, you know, walked into the room, woke up the next morning after everything happened. His father's dead,

and he was a 12-year-old boy that is now the man of the house with his mom, who didn't know how to handle it, and his two younger sisters. And so, of course he had pain. from it. But when you grew up in rural Tennessee and you don't really know what to do, he never went to therapy, any of those things, he never really overcame it. And the way that he was able to numb, what he found was through alcohol. And, you know, many people go to alcohol, some people go to drugs. And those are the ones that were like, in society, we tend to like shun those people. Oh, yeah, well, they're drug addicts. Oh, they're alcoholics. Look at, you know, on the drive over here, there's a lot of people that are homeless in the street. And I'm like,

man, I just like feel for those people because there's something that's probably, we not healed within them, right? All adults are just children and, you know, children in adult bodies is basically what it is. And a lot of us have unhealed trauma. And so a lot of people have drugs and alcohol. We can look and be like, oh, yeah, drugs and alcohol. But for me, the way it showed up for me was being a workaholic. So the way that I numbed was like, I'm not going to do drugs. I'm not going to do alcohol. And then when I found the opportunity to work, I would work 110 hours a week for years, right? And so my way of numbing and not feeling the things that my trauma that I hadn't overcome was just being a workaholic. Some people, it's constantly being on Instagram or some people become addicted to working

out. And so I think that for all of us, a lot of, I mean, most people that I've ever found have some sort of unhealed trauma and we end up becoming addicted to something or keeping ourselves so busy so we don't feel. And that's why I say, like, I like to sit in silence because I want to feel the feelings and go, what are these feelings? What do I need to work through? And so, yeah, to answer the question, that's, that was my dad's story and he just never overcame that. I had a mentor, um, He was from the Jain community, J-A-I-N. It's a religious and philosophical tradition from India, very similar to Buddhism. It's the side that my mom comes from the Jain tradition.

And he was one of the first Jain monks to leave India and sort of set up like a Jain association here in North America. And his name was Chitubanuji, Ghridhhhhhubanji, really incredible individual. And he had this great sort of saying and kind of he would interject it into some of his lectures on personal development that he would do, he said, you know, if you would watch, take somebody that you disagree with, right? Take somebody that you don't understand. You know, a lot of times people get an argument with somebody or they're fighting with somebody at work or they look at somebody from across the political aisle and they say, I just don't understand this person. That's a common phrase that people use. Even if you maybe hate this person,

right, if you saw from the beginning of their life how they were brought, up in this world. And it was a 90-minute movie. And you could watch their entire life. And it was in 90 minutes, but you'd get everything in detail, everything they went through, every time they got bullied, the situation that happened to them. What happened to their parents? How they got transferred to. How they were talked to. How they were not talked to. At the end of the movie, you may not change your mind about them, but the one thing that you won't be able to say is that you won't be able to say that I don't understand them. I love that. And in that same way, not only do we need that understanding for the people around us, especially for the people that are here's teachers to kind of

push us and challenge us a little bit. We also need that same understanding for ourselves, that so much of our identity has been shaped by these outside factors. We were just a young child trying to figure out and make sense of the world. And that's why we are this way. That's why we are that way. But it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. And there's so much compassion that I have for your dad and people that have gone through similar situations like him because in a way it's kind of like the feeling that I have is like your dad didn't even have a chance right there was no podcasts that were there there was no tools or situations you know and in the community that you're describing that your dad grew up in there was not resources for somebody to

have a different path other than the path of self-medicating for the pain that was there the fact that he didn't abuse you, the fact that he didn't berate you, that he didn't do all these other things, which he easily could have done and would have had the quote unquote justification for doing because of what he went through is a miracle. And it feels like one of the greatest gifts he gave is like enough to keep kind of his demons to himself, not that you weren't impacted and your family wasn't impacted. And then you, not having gone through that same pain that he went through, were able to find the life influences that took you on a different path. And you literally change your, you know, your family tree.

Right. It's so much compassion for anybody in your dad situation or anybody who's listening to this conversation today and it's like, you don't understand what I went through. You know what? I don't understand what you went through, but I have compassion that you are a byproduct of what you have gone through. But if you're listening, it can be something different. You can shape your future, which is what today's conversation is about. Yeah. You bring up a really good point. I remember so my dad died on November 1st and my sister's 21st birthday was November 24th of that of that, year. So it was 23 days later. And I was 15 years old and I had my permit. So I was like all excited, right? And I remember I was at a stoplight. I remember we went to Olive Garden from my sister's

21st birthday and I was driving the car. And my mom, we never really spoke about emotions and stuff like that as a kid. And so that's been a whole self-discovery that I've had to go on. And she said to me, she goes, what do you think about your father's death as I was at the stoplight? And I said, I think that if dad were to understand how much good is going to come from this, he would be okay with dying. And like, since that moment, I've been like, I don't know what it is, but I'm going to figure it out. So for me, it was like, the first thing I tried to do was I tried to go speak at AA meetings as a 15-year-old, even though I had no public speaking spirits and scared the hell to me, but they don't let people who are not alcoholics into AA meetings. So I couldn't speak to them and let them know, like, from a child's perspective, this is what it looks like from someone who just lost their father.

another thing that's if I could share that that I think would help people who are listening that that might have troubles with their parents. You know, I like to test every thought and put everything into different places. And so, you know, I don't, I'm not going to sit here and say like, I know what happens after we die. Right. So some people think like heaven exists. Some people think that, you know, reincarnation exists. But I had a conversation with my mom probably about four years ago. She picked me up from the airport when I flew home to Florida. And she said, you know, we get in a deep conversation, she's like, I still regret marrying your father because I feel like I put, put you and your sister through a lot of trauma. And I said, okay. And I shared with her like,

hey, well, you know, play this game with me real quick. Let's say reincarnation does exist, right? And our soul just bounces from one body to another over years and years, maybe a thousand times. And I said, how would it change your perspective? And I don't want everyone to think about this if they have some sort of trauma issues with their parents. How would it change your perspective? if, you know, 200 years ago there's like Debbie right here and there's Rob right here and both of our souls are kind of sitting there and, you know, you flip through like a karaoke book, you know, and you're looking through it and you're like, okay, Debbie, okay, she, she's going to be married to a guy named Steve.

She's going to be born to Michigan. All these things are going to happen. Oh, this is interesting. Steve's going to become an alcoholic and they're going to get divorced and Steve's going to pass away when he's 48 years old. And she's like, oh, this is an interesting one. and then she hands the book over to my soul. My soul looks in and says, Rob, okay, he's going to be the son of Debbie and Steve.

Steve's going to become an alcoholic and all this stuff. They're both going to get tons of different trauma that they need to work through. And like, my soul looks at your soul and goes, you want to do it? And we're like, yeah, this seems like the next thing that I need. And then so I'm like, how would that change your perspective of a couple of everything. Number one, maybe we chose this life because it was for us to come and go through those things. because there's some sort of lesson that our soul needs. And she's like, yeah, it changed it a lot.

And I go, how would it change your perspective of dad? Because that means that he did the same thing, which means that he sat there and said, Steve Dial, he's going to walk into the room after his father kills himself with a shotgun at 12 years old. He's never going to overcome it. He's going to be an alcoholic, but he's going to change his son's life.

His son is going to decide to do all of these amazing things through the world. And his soul goes, yeah I'll take one for the team. And for me, when I changed my perspective and thought of it that way, I went, oh, shit, my entire life, I thought that I was more enlightened than my dad. I thought that I knew more than he was. Why couldn't he overcome all of his trauma? Now I have to deal with it.

And then it flipped my mindset to, oh, God, what if he did this for me and for the greater good of all the good that's going to come from this? And I never saw him as anything less. And I was like, maybe he's more enlightened being. because he came and actually gave one for the team in order for us to all improve. What I love about that is that really you're expanding on this idea, which is what if you came up with your own story, right? We could tell ourselves any story.

That is one story that you can tell yourself, but that story brings a sense of peace inside it. We can't possibly know what's true, but you're trying it on. And with you trying it on, there's a different relationship that not only you have with your dad, his own life, his understanding of what are the circumstances that led up to it, but also an understanding of why did reality happen the way that it did to me? I chose this. You chose this.

I'm not a victim anymore. Which means when you're not a victim, you're stepping into the law of responsibility. That now I have agency. What do I want to make out of this situation? What do I want to create? And also, my dad had it so rough. Like, look at this situation that I'm in. Let me make something out of it because my dad wasn't in a surrounding and situation to be able to do that.

Like, you're 12 years old. You experience that. Your life is going to be incredibly tough. Most of us in that situation would have ended up in the same boat. We all think we're so strong. You end up in a situation like that. You would end up in the same boat. It's those experiences that often shape individual.

So I love that because it's a real world example of the toughest thing that somebody could imagine, you know, a parent, you know, passing early, passing at a young age, you're now the man of the house. One of the toughest things that somebody could imagine. And now how do you make meaning out of that to shape the future of your life? Yeah, for sure. And I think that that's the most important thing because all too often people are kind of like, well, I just want my life to change. I want things to be different. And I think that it comes with the decision of like, like you said, and I think it's somewhere in the book is like your life, in order for your life to change, you have to change. have to be the one. There's no one that's going to come and save you. And so you've got to go,

you know what? Yeah, like, I need to change. I need to change my view of myself and need to change my fears. And the only one that's going to take action in my life is going to have to be me. So if I'm going to change my family tree, if I'm going to change the traumas that have happened, I'm going to have to be the one to work through it. I saw a reel that that hit home with me a couple weeks ago before I deleted Instagram. There is some good that comes for that's for sure. There's definitely different perspectives, but I was like, I'm just going to step away for little bit. I've done it a few times. And it said trauma runs through families until someone has the strength to feel it. And it's like someone and those people are the teachers and that said

something like people are the teachers and the trauma, the, the shamans where there's pain and it just continues to keep going through family from one person to another. It just changes the way that it looks until one person goes, yeah, no more. Like I'm going to be the one that's going to feel it. And I think that that's important for everyone out there to think is like, we will pass things on to our children if we are not aware of them. So it's like, hey, I want to give my children the best shot they could possibly have. And I'm going to go, you know what, I'm going to step up to a point. I'm going to work through my things because I don't want them to have to deal with these traumas. Because I know what it feels like to be three years old, five years old, 12 years old and have to be working through these things.

I don't want my children to ever have to feel that. Yeah. We hopefully want to live in a world where increasingly we're making progress towards that. You know, a lot of people look at the world and especially if you follow the news, you just think, that everything bad is happening all the time and the world is going to shit. And there are plenty of problems in the world. Always will be. There's plenty of problems. There always will be. And life as a whole for the mass majority of people, there's way less people dying of extreme hunger. There's way less people of dying of extreme poor sanitation and access to, you know,

lack of clean water. There's still too many people that are out there, of course. But I want to give, you know, some kudos to human. and the human spirit because there's hardworking people that are out there that are working on making the world a better place from their own advantage point. And part of that is obviously even conversations like this, the work that you do, the podcast you put out there, because if you can remind people and help them step into their purpose, that person, you know, goes from nothing wrong with working corporate, nothing wrong with working nine to five, nothing wrong with, you know, putting food on the table.

Like that's one of the best things that you could do for your family is providing for them and taking care of them. but they take a leap and go do something different, and now that has its own unique ripple effect in the world, right? That's how everything ends up changing. On that note, we were talking about addiction, and obviously it's easy to see the life of somebody who's addicted to drugs or alcohol and think,

oh, I don't deal with addiction. One of the addictions that a lot of people deal with, and they talk a little bit about this in the book, The Five Regrets of the Dying by Brony Ware. She's, yeah, it's a fantastic book. One of the top regrets in that book is, and for those are not familiar, we've chatted about it before, but these are the regrets of people that are in nursing homes that are about, they get transferred over to palliative care.

They only have often in many cases days to a couple months to live and they're opening up their hearts to this nurse, this Australian nurse, sharing their deepest regrets. And she wrote these themes down. And the number one regret was, I wish I had the courage to live. live the life that I was meant to live instead of the life that other people wanted me to live. And when I think about that regret, I think about one of the number one addictions that's out there that nobody talks about, which is people being addicted to being told what to do. Yeah, for sure.

And to me, is if we're addicted to being told what to do, and I definitely was in that position, like I want somebody else to tell me how to live my life, you're not stepping into your purpose. If somebody's listening today and they feel like, hey, I feel like I'm addicted to being told. I want to step more into my purpose. What are some action steps that they can take to start heading in the right direction? Yeah. I mean, so I'm very lucky in the sense that I know a lot of people, like a lot, a lot of people whose parents have told them what to do and where they should go in life and what they should

do for a profession. My mom, I'm so lucky that she just was never that way for me. so I was able to just follow it. My mom was definitely not perfect as a parent. She was amazing. But the one thing my mom always did is she never told me I couldn't do something, and she always told me she was proud of me. And that's like one of the things that I will take and for sure pass on to my children

is support them in whatever their thing is so that, you know, like I remember when I was thinking about dropping out of college. And I was working for that company that I was talking about, the sales company. And I went and met her at Cracker Barrel. And I was like, mom, they're giving me an opportunity to like open up my own office. and I think I want to do it. And she's like, what's the, I was like, I don't know. I want to, I want to finish college and stuff.

She's like, what's the point of going to college in the first place? And I was like, to make money. And she's like, aren't you already doing that? And I was like, yeah. And she's like, so why don't she just drop out? And I was like, all right, cool, which is like the exact opposite of most people's parents of what they tell them to do, right? They're like, you got to finish.

You got to do this. So I think the thing that's, that's most important. And I love that you brought that up because I was actually thinking of about 20 minutes ago we were speaking of that. that exact same thing, which is the people's number one fear, which is, I wish I lived a life that's true to myself and not the life that other people expected of me. We want to be accepted as humans. And it's built into our system. We want to fit in with the tribe because 100,000, 200,000 years ago, if we didn't fit in with the tribe, we were dying. It's just the way that it is.

So it's built into our system to want to feel accepted. But going back to Jim Carrey, again, there's a great quote that Jim Carrey says, which is your need for acceptance will make you invisible in this world. And I don't think anybody that's listening to this wants to be invisible. I think everyone knows that they have something unique inside of them. But I think it's kind of through our society trained out of us. And I think what people really need to do. And it drives people crazy because everyone's like, give me the next action step, Rob.

Like, do I need to give me the book to read? Give me the thing to do? You know, I wrote a book, but I don't even care if anybody reads a book. If you just sit in silence more, it's 100 times better than my book. Like, I think that everyone has inside of them. I fully believe that everyone has inside of them, if they're quiet enough, every single answer that they need to find. Whenever I do events, which I do them very, very rarely, the majority of the time is me ask, like teaching a little bit, but asking deep questions for someone to journal

and then speak about another person. Because I believe that I don't have anybody's answers for themselves, but I do believe that everyone has infinite intelligence that lives inside of them, but they're just not coming in contact with that thing. And so I think, First off, if somebody's in the position where it's like, yeah, maybe I went to this job and became a engineer because my dad was an engineer and told me I need to become an engineer. But I hate being an engineer and I want to do something different. Well, it's like, okay, you've, you develop that awareness, which is good, you know. And so now you have the awareness of I don't want to be here. So the next question is, where do I want to be?

And with that is self-discovery, right? So like, what do I want? What makes me come alive? You know, in the book, I talk about Ike guy, which is, you know, just questions ask yourself. which is like, what is a world need? What am I passionate about? What can I be paid for? But another question that I ask people, which is like another question that I just don't hear too often is like, what am I really interested in learning? And I think that kind of goes back to like the energy thing where it's like, what am I interested in? You know, it's like I have a friend

who's really interested in pickleball recently. And it's like he might make zero dollars off pickleball. He also might come up with an idea in pickleball that could completely revolutionize a sport and he could be worth $10 million at the end of two years from now from that thing. But it's like asking yourself, like, what am I, what am I, what do I want to learn more about? What am I passionate about? So it's like, I don't know what it is that I want can turn into, okay, now me, let me go on the path to figure out what it is that I want. Okay, now that I know what I want, okay, how do I have like the actual, like, strength

to go ahead and do this thing? I think that everyone needs to just understand that you need to get better at trusting yourself more in your intuition that exists inside of you. Because I think what we tend to do is we tend to look to other people to reflect back who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act. And one of the reasons why I think that this is, and I've thought about this for years and years like, why are we so, why are so many people like just not able to do the thing that they want?

And I think it goes back to like our childhood, right, which is in case you know, there's statistic that found that children are reprimanded eight times more than they're praised, which means that the average child subconsciously thinks, I don't know what I'm doing, eight times more they think, okay, I know what I'm doing, right? Because most people who are parents don't really have psychology degrees, they don't know exactly what's happening. So they think to themselves and subconsciously, I don't know what I'm doing. So what do we do? We look to our parents to know what we should be doing. And so subconsciously in our lives, we were like, mom, am I doing this right? Am I doing this right? Dad, am I doing this right? And then we turn

18 years old. We go to college. Mom, am I do it? doing this right? Am I doing this right? Then we get a job. And even though we don't rely on them anymore, we still are subconsciously like, am I doing this right? Like, Dad, am I doing this right? And there's no like rights of passage, really, that we have in our lives anymore. Like, you know, like Native Americans used to be like, you're going to put you in the desert. We're going to give you two pounds of mushrooms. You got to eat all of them in the next week. Like that's like the right of passions or whatever it was that they did, right? Whereas like, that was when they became a man or a woman and said, like, I'm in control now. We don't really have that. And so I think

that for a lot of people, it's just like realizing that you need to take control of your own life and say, what is it that I want? And if people don't understand it, I have to be okay with people not understanding me. And it might hurt for a little while. You know, if your parents are very extreme, they might, you know, stop talking to you for a little bit. But the one thing that I found is when someone finds their passion, they follow it with all of their heart, some people might not get it. it might take a couple years, but eventually almost everybody comes back around and goes, yeah, you were right. I'm sorry that I didn't support you the way that I should have. That's the way that parents should have been. Yeah. And on the road of taking action to get there, you know,

you have this great question in the book. It says, what are you so interested in learning or doing that you would do it for free? Like dabbling a little bit. Yeah. It's not like you got to go on this vision quest, nothing wrong with that. Yeah. To the Himalayan Mountains and find your purpose in some deep dark cave. Yeah. It's the things that you're genuinely interested in. Growing up, I was interested in, like, community in bringing people together. And I really was clear from a young age. I was like, oh, I actually not only get along with my family, but I like, I really enjoy working with them. We had worked on a bunch of, you know, nonprofit projects and other stuff.

And in particular, my two sisters, one older, one younger, I was like, I want to work with them. I have a vision for that. Okay, I don't know how it's going to happen. I don't even know what the heck we're going to do. Yeah. I just know that I'm, okay, I'm interested in health. I'm interested in personal development. I want to work with my family.

I want to basically do cool shit with people that I care about. And everybody would tell me, oh, no, your purpose has to be way more defined. It has to be eloquent. It has to be this beautiful thing. And still to this day, I don't have a purpose like that. No knock on anybody who does. It's just I'd love to do cool things with my family in areas of my life and topics that I'm interested in.

Yeah. And we're just going to keep on doing that. until one day I decide to go in a different direction. Yeah. Right. Well, what's cool about is like, you actually bring up a really good point that I've actually not really ever thought about, which is, I think what might hold a lot of people back is they think it has to be like extremely clearly defined and they have to see the entire path.

Right. I don't think that's the case. Like you're saying like, like, I like hanging out of my family. I like bringing people together. I like personal development. Could these live together? Like in this moment, they do live together. Does it have to be his thing forever?

Maybe, maybe not. And it's like, I've never sat down and been like, my purpose and life. is this, right? Like, I've never actually done that. I don't know if I'm supposed to. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. But I have this feeling of like, okay, I know what my dad went through. I know what I went through. I've gotten myself free from a lot of those things. Can I just teach other people what I've learned? That's just kind of my purpose. That's it. There's no like, the reason Rob Dial is alive. And I've never like wrote that stuff out like a mission statement sort of way. So it's like, yeah, I think you're on a right path. It's just like, what are a couple things that you

enjoy. Can these live together? They can. And it's like, you don't have to do it forever, but it's like, you're having a good time doing it. Things are going pretty well. And might as ride this wave and see how far it takes us, you know? Yeah. And maybe one day you'll come up with a tagline that makes it all make sense to the outside world. I know you mentioned before we started recording that I think, either later on today or tomorrow, you have the Jay Shetty podcast, right? I think his thing is like, my purpose is to make wisdom go viral. Yeah. Amazing. I'm so happy that that's like super clear. He's obviously incredibly gifted at that.

And one should know that maybe yours may not sound that way. And I'm sure long before he came up with that tagline, he was already doing that by just tinkering. Tinkering, putting a video together. I think he started off by making videos with like the Huffing Post and that sort of thing. And it's just the dabbling. And then somebody from the outside says, you know what? You're good at this.

You should do more of it. Right. Or hey, we're going to pay you for. this thing or hey, do you want to come and do that for us? Or, hey, can you teach that to us? And one step leads to the next step leads to the next step. And we're constantly just experimenting and trying and figuring it out. You know, that's why we're here. And sometimes it starts off with stepping this idea of, again, in silence, having the courage to imagine your life differently than it is right now. We all know our life right now. If you close your eyes right now and I tell you to

visualize your day up until this point, hopefully you're not driving. Don't do it if you're driving. You can close your eyes and you can walk me through your day just as real as you experienced it. You can share with us. Okay, I woke up and I turned off my alarm and then I went and did this and I went and did that. But how often do we take the moment to actually say, well, we have this idea of what we want our life to look like in the future, but what does it look like to tap into the power of visualization to imagine that and make it more real? What do you want to tell our audience about visualization? I mean, I think everybody should do it all the time if they could.

Well, first off, it comes back to, like, what I want. You can't visualize anything if you don't know what you want. So it's like try to become a little bit more clear on what it is that you want. You know, I was lucky enough that I was introduced to visualization like 2007. You know, I was like, what, 21 years old when I learned about visualization. I'm about to be 38 now. And one thing that, like, I'm, I could be very, I can be on two ends of spectrum. I can be very woo-woo, but I could also be extremely analytical.

So I'm always dancing between both of them to try to figure it out, right? And so I could sit there and be like, like when I first started visualizing, it was woo-woo. Like there wasn't a whole lot of science and proof behind it. Now there's like a whole lot more science and proof behind the whole thing. But the way I like to think about it is if nothing else, you're just basically brainwashing yourself into believing it's possible. Because all too often, we're playing the same stories in future in our head of, oh, I'm going to do this and I'm going to fail. I'm going to do this and fail. I'm going to do this and fail. Whatever there's someone's story is, which is, why don't I at least try to play the other side, which is like we keep saying, like, look at it from another perspective,

why don't I at least try to play it out another way and say, let me visualize in my head and see what this could look like. And a lot of times, it's like, we're actually just brainwashing yourself into believing it's possible. The thing that was like really the biggest for me in and like really being hardcore in visualization was in 2017, like I got hardcore on my goals, like really hardcore. And in January of 2000, January 1st, 2017, I wrote down my number one goal is for my girlfriend and I at the time, wife now, to move to Italy for six months. That's what I wanted to do.

Like I wanted to go and move to Italy. My business really wasn't making that much money at the time. Like it wasn't enough. I just bought a new house before I left the job earlier. So I was like, I had a mortgage. things I had to pay for, but I was like, I want to move there. Once again, what happened? All the fears came up. Like, I'm not immune. I'm as, listen. Listen, listen to the podcast, I'm as screwed up as every other person. I'm just fumbling my way through life and trying to get

tools and put in my tool about how to help myself, right? Visualization is one of those things that help me. And so I was in so much fear. I was like, I need to brainwash myself and believe this is possible. I was like, you know what I'm a deal? I'm going to visualize it every single morning. And so I went into, this is exactly step by step what I did. I want to, this is exactly step by what I did. I went into Facebook and I was like, I wonder if there's people that like live in Rome that can kind of tell me about it. I found this, this Facebook group called expats in Rome. And I went in there and I said, hey, you know, I'm however old I was. My, my girlfriend's this old, this age as well. We don't really party. We love food. We do like, you know, hanging out. We like nice views.

Don't like being around a whole lot of people if it's super busy. Where's the best place in Rome? And all of these answers come through. And one thing that came back a lot was Tristavory, which is a neighborhood that's in Rome. So I googled it. I looked at it. I was like, oh, this looks nice. I started watching YouTube videos on it. And I started watching YouTube videos

so I could see what it looks like and see the area around it. And then what I did was I was like, I wonder if I could use Google Maps. And so I literally found a coffee shop that was in Google Maps. And I did street view. So I could see it and I could look around in 360 and see what the streets look like

and walk up and down the streets and Street View. So every morning what I would do is I would, I would, after my girlfriend at the time, would go to work. So I would sit there and I would go into Trest Avery and I would go to the same coffee shop and I would walk up and down the street so I could see what they looked like. And then I would sit there and I would close my eyes and I would visualize me walking out of our apartment in Trest Avery, which is neighborhood in Rome and walking to this coffee shop. And I started doing it and doing it and I was like, okay, I'm bringing my mind into it. Can I possibly bring in other senses?

And so I was like, I'm visitors myself, go to a coffee shop. I drink coffee every morning. what if I just kept my eyes closed and drank my coffee? And so what it turned into was I visualized myself going there and I would take my chair, actually, there's no joke, because the coffee shop had seating outside. I would take a chair and go outside in the sun. And so what was happening is I would go outside in the sun, close my eyes, and I would visualize myself getting there. I would feel the chair on my body. I would feel a sun on my skin. I would have the coffee in my hand. I would taste the coffee. I would smell the coffee and I was visualized myself being there. And I did it every single morning. And I went from, I don't know if this is possible to Lauren, we need to get our shit together

and go because I was so excited. Like, I have to live in Rome as soon as possible because in my dreams it looks amazing. And the goal is to be there by July 1st, 2017. And we moved there June 1, 2017. So we went there a month early because I was just so excited. But what happened was it went from fear, fear, fear, I don't know if it's possible. And I started finding all the reasons why it's not to. I'm so excited.

I started working harder. My business started growing. I realized that I can make it happen. and we actually made it happen a month earlier than I wanted to because I was like, I got to go. Like, I'm so excited. It's happening. I know it's happening. I'm 100% sure.

And it ended up happening that way. So I kind of just brainwashed myself into believing that it was possible in the first place. Yeah, I love that. The brainwashing. You know, we've had Dr. Tarsoort on the podcast. I don't know if you're familiar at all with your work. She's a neuroscientist, Oxford graduate, taught at MIT, and has written a whole book called The Source. And it's the neuroscience of manifestation, not from the spiritual.

Wu-woo side, which she has that side and she's willing to talk about it, but she's like, this is not the side that's supported by science. And then there's a side that's supported by science, which is priming your brain because neurons that fire together, wire together. So her big thing is I want you to create an action board, which is her name for a vision board. Because when you put that photo of Rome or you print that Google Street Maps view of that coffee shop you want to spend, spend time in. Or you put that book that you want to write one day, or you have that podcast that are going to start,

or you're imagining yourself playing with kids because you want to start a family one day in the future, right, or find the right partner, whatever it is. The more that you see and expose your senses to this idea, the more you're priming your brain, and now you're on the lookout for all the different ways to conspire your own nervous system in your mind

to make that more of a reality. So one of her big things is like taking a look at it every night before you go to bed to inspire the action that happens the next day. And we can all do that with all different sorts of goals that we have. And we can do it in the smallest of ways. You know, just even imagining yourself. It was a small study. I'll link to it in the show notes.

But it was a small study around standardized test and getting high school students to even go spend time in the room that they were going to be taking a test in, like the SATs or whatever, and just imagining themselves taking the test and doing good on the test. And just the improvements that came would just imagine yourself in the room, what it feels like, you know, how calm are you in this moment and that you're making progress and taking this test? You're priming your brain and priming your mind for success. it's such an easy tool, it's such a free tool. But again, if we don't remind herself that it's one of the tools in the toolbox, we'll forget to take advantage of it. Yeah, I love that. I'm going

to have to read that book. That sounds amazing. So the source, I'm going to get that one when I go home. So the, I think it's amazing. And I learned it actually. It's funny because as you're speaking, I remember my very first coach that I hired, I hired a coach one-on-one coach when I was 19. And he actually is the first person that brought it visualization into me. And I remember he was saying he was trying to win a sales competition. And so it's a two-week sales competition. And he had his manager was like, you really want to win this? You want to break the record? Which was, you know, I think it was like $70,000 for two weeks. And he was like 19 years old, 20 years old at the time. He's like, you're going to come into my office every single night. And what we're going to do is we're going to

have you stand on stage. And what we used to do when we were there is we'd stand on stage. And they'd say, okay, who sold $10,000 or below? And if you sold, you'd come up to the stage, you'd say how much he sold, you'd walk off the stage. And he had him stand in front and he took all of the chairs that were inside of the office. And he would put him next to him as if there were the other people that were there. And he would say, okay, if you sold between 5,000 and 10,000, go ahead and step forward. And so he would have all of these chairs move. And he visualized with my mentor, his mentor and him, every night walking on stage, being in stage,

everybody else, the chairs, but everybody else leaving before him and then him being the very last person. and his goal was to sell $70,000. I think the goal was, I think the original record was $60,000. His goal was sell $70,000. And he ended up being number one, and he sold like $69,750,000. Like he was that close to hitting it because it was just so real that just he had done it every single night that he just went into reality and created the thing that he was visualizing every single evening. That's super powerful.

I love that. I want to jump ahead a little bit here. and I want to talk about how do we create habits that stick? What are some of the key principles? Because now let's say somebody's on the train. They're understanding, they've heard some of these concepts before, but it's becoming more real for them. They're getting energized.

They're visualizing. They're understanding the power of sort of taking action. How do we make things part of our habit and our lifestyle so that they're built into our day? Yeah. So good question. Because I love the fact of like, how do we take something that we've never done before and how do we hardwired into our system

so that it becomes near automatic? And so this is like, it's funny because the book like switch is like halfway through and then it starts becoming like a whole lot of science. And I was like, I literally hired a neuroscientist to go through my entire book and be like, tell me if this is real, tell me if there needs to be something to switch. And I want you to cite everything that needs be cited. So I think there's 78 sightings that are inside of my book. And when you look at habits, It's an action. You said neurons of fire together, wire together. So it might be something I've never done before.

It means that there's going to be a really weak signal in some sort of way. Right. And what happens is if I'm trying to create habits, it's something I need to do over and over and over again. And as we start to do it, our brain starts to change. And so if I know, okay, I'm not really good at this. Like if I decide I want to play piano, I'm not going to be great at piano. But if I show up every single day, do it over and over and over again, there is proof, much like a ton of proof. and some of it's in the book, that if you show up and you play a piano every single day, your brain will actually start to change.

And so it's like if we just remember, if you want to take all of the science, all of that out of it, if you just show up and do something every single day and you push yourself just a little bit further, you will get better at it. Your brain will change. And so there's a couple of different things that are really important when you start to to look at it. There was a study that was done on the brains of London taxi cab drivers.

So London taxi cab drivers have to go through an actual exam. They have to memorize all the streets of London. And they did a study on their brains and found out that near all of their brains had the same like spatial recognition area in their brains. And then two years later, they went through and I think it was like 30% of them had passed the exam, which means they memorized thousands of streets in London. Yeah, they literally have to know every street. Every single street. Yeah. It's like they call it knowledge.

It's something like that. Yeah. And yeah, I think it's what it's called as knowledge. And like most people don't get it because it's a lot of streets they have to memorize. And what they found is that the two years later, the people who had passed the test, even though at the beginning of the test, their brains were almost exactly similar in their spatial recognition area. Theirs had grown in their spatial recognition area, which means their brain molded to what

they wanted to mold it to. When you look at people who are play piano, even though most people, you know, they sit down to play piano and one hand is more dominant than the other one, what they find is that the part of their brain where it's the non-dominate hand, that part of their brain will actually start to grow and it will change and be usually equal to the other side. The other thing that's crazy about it too is so when you look at doing something over and over and over and over again, and you actually start to change your brain, your brain changes a few different ways. The first way that it will change is just chemically, which means that the chemicals are going to change, which I can sit down

and learn Mary had a little lamb and I can get a pretty good idea of it and then come back in a month and then I probably won't be able to play it really well because it changed chemically in that moment. The next thing that will happen is if you play something over and over and over and over and over going to make yourself a little bit better, it'll change chemically. And then your brain actually starts to change structurally, which means the structure of your brain will start to change, which goes back to like what we said. If you look at the people that take the knowledge, the London TASCab drivers, the spatial recognition parts of their brain actually will start to grow and to become stronger. So then the structure of the brain starts to change. Then what's crazy is

the next level, the last level, is the function of someone's brain will change. And so what they found with it is it becomes so autopilot that your brain doesn't have to think about it near as much. And so they found people who are pianists are sitting down playing piano. And they said, there's a like classically trained amazing jazz pianists. And they said, okay, we're going to give you this. Go ahead and solo. And they would have them solo. And then they have someone who's been playing for a couple years solo over the same piece of music. What they actually found is that the people who had been classically trained and they've been playing for like 20 years of their life, that less blood flow would have to through their brain because basically their brain could just go and flow in on autopilot. And so

the brain changes chemically, structurally, and then functionally, which means that once you get to the functional part, like, you can just kind of go in flow of it. Like, I don't know about you, but like, there's times when I get done with a podcast and I'm like, I don't really remember what I said. Like, I kind of like black out and it like flows out of me. That's like the function changing of it. But it took 1,400 podcast episodes to get to that point. So I think what's important, for people to realize is that, and the thing that I love about being, like love about being a human, is I love the idea of the 10,000 hour rule, which is if I want to get better at something, I can get better at it. And I can become a master at this thing. Now, obviously, I can't become

like an NBA basketball player. You know, I'm not tall enough and 38 years old. About to be 38. I'm not getting in the NBA, but I can become really good at playing basketball if I wanted to, right? And when my wife and I had our first date, she's like, do you have any tattoos? And I was like, no. And she's like, do you want one? I was like, I think I'm going to get one. I want an X with a line above it, which is the Roman numeral for 10,000. Because I think it's amazing that humans can set our mind to doing something. And as long as we put dedicated work into that thing, I can change my brain to become

master at that thing. And that's literally the only other tattoo that I have on my wrist, which is right here, which is the Roman numeral for 10,000. And so there's like tips and tricks on how to actually get into habits. But I think that's the most important thing is people understand, like, we can actually change our brains to make anything that we don't have right now as a habit, become a habit in our brains. And so it changes, first off, chemically, structurally, and then functionally. Throughout this podcast, you've made multiple references to different mentors you've had

in your life. One of the things that I often hear in conversation from speaking with people, and I've had some mentors that have been very instrumental in my life as well too, I'll hear some version of, well, that was easy for you. You had a mentor who believed in you. You had your Socrates, your Obi-1, you had somebody kind of, you know, give you that quote or encourage you or that. For the person that's listening to today saying, I don't have anybody in my life. How important is it to have a mentor and or is it not important to have a quote-unquote

mentor? I mean, I think it's extremely important to have a mentor. And a mentor could be, it doesn't have to. to be a person that you meet with every single week. It could be, like when I told you my first mentor that I had my first one-on-one coach, I paid him when I was 19, about turned 20 years old, $500 a month, which was more than I paid in rent. And I did not have the money in my bank account,

but I did have a credit card. And I just hated the situation of the direction that my life was going in, that I was like, this guy seems to have it together. I will pay him to download his knowledge into my brain. That's the way that I saw it. Now, does everybody have the means to do that? Absolutely not. But the cool thing is, is like,

I feel like I've had hundreds of mentors over my life. Some of them are physically, and I've had conversation with them. But some of them I've never met him may never meet. I would say like a huge mentor. My life is Ram Dass. Never met him. He died a couple years ago. But I listen to him. I listen every one of his podcast episodes. I've been trying to download the information from his brain into mine because he's a great example of someone who's very intellectual, very spiritual, which is kind of the way that I feel that I am. Right. Krishna Murtu is another guy that. that I will never meet. He died in like 85 or something like that.

I was born in 86. But I read that guy like crazy because like there's something about him that clicks. But then there's also tons of mentors that I've had in my life that are like physically existing. And some of them are, you know, free mentors where it's like a friend of mine who's more successful than I am or a friend of mine who's really a great father and I want to learn from him on how to be better in that way or has a great relationship with his wife and I want to learn that way.

And we just meet up every couple months or, you know, twice a year going to coffee. and I learn from them, we text and stuff. And then there are mentors that I literally pay my money to to say, you have knowledge in your brain. I want it in my brain. I'll pay you to help me shorten the learning curve for whatever that is. So I have business mentors where I'm like,

yeah, I'll pay you X amount of dollars in order to teach me exactly how to take my business from where it is to where I want to go. And so I think that mentors, a lot of people, you know, somebody could be listening to this and they can live in, you know, middle of Iowa on a farm. And they might be like,

I don't have anyone around me. I can't even see another house from my place. The internet is the most incredible thing in the world where you can learn anything from anyone at any moment in time. And, you know, I'm sure there's people out there that listens podcasts. And they're like, yeah, you are a mentor. You are literally, he's a mentor for me and I listen to them as much as I possibly can. Right.

Like, that's, you're a mentor for people. I feel like I'm a mentor for people. We might never meet them. But it's like the knowledge that exists. Like almost everything that's ever been known exists online. And so, you know, it's kind of like the phrase where it's like there's the difference between someone who can't read and someone who can but decides not to. I mean, both of them lead to the same thing, which is ignorance, which is you're not learning something. So it's kind of like the same thing.

It was like, the people who are out there like, I'm not going to learn anymore. Cool. That's the right. You decide to go. But in, you know, 2024, you can get anything at your fingertips. You can learn from any person that's ever lived. The smartest people who have ever lived have written books. You can take the knowledge from their brain and put into your brain.

And so it's like they might be someone who lived 200 years ago. They might be someone who's still alive and you never meet. It might be somebody who is just a friend of yours. They might be someone who you actually physically pay your money to. But there's many, many mentors that people can have that will help them get better. That's great advice. I think the other thing that goes along with that is that people underestimate the power of also just like a buddy. Yeah.

Right. not that that person may not be, you know, they may not be a formal mentor, but they could be a friend who's interested in also furthering along their life. Somebody who's interested in making progress has goals and dreams, whether it's in the same category that you're trying to make progress on or it's in a, you know, parallel category and the power of like keeping each other accountable. You know, I have a men's group. I've talked about it a bunch on this podcast here. We all happen to be entrepreneurs. It's based here in L.A. We meet every, Thursday morning at 8 a.m. And we go on a walk somewhere, you know, either by the boardwalk

here in San Monica or one of these many hikes that we have all over L.A. And the power of just meeting with a regular group. And I do, some of the guys in the group are mentors to me. You know, one area that I haven't gotten as much into in the investing side of things is real estate. There's a few guys in there that had built up pretty sizable real estate portfolios. And I'm learning from them. I'm learning from them about real estate, how it works, what questions to ask the difference between a good deal and a bad deal, et cetera, and I'm enjoying that process. And other guys in the group are accountability buddies who will check in and say, hey, you said you wanted to make progress on this thing. And I'm just checking in. How is it going?

Right. And we often ask this question when we meet up and we stole this from a group that I was part of called Summit series. We'll often ask this question, which is tell me one thing you're celebrating this week and tell me one thing you're navigating. So it's an opportunity to open up. So if you didn't make progress on this particular goal or thing that you're paying attention to in life or something in your business or even in your relationship, it's like, okay, what did you make progress on, even if it was something small? Yeah.

Okay, what is something tough that you're working through? And even though you didn't quote unquote solve it, you're still working through it and you're still committed to working through it. What is something you're navigating? So sometimes in my life's things show up as a formal mentor. Sometimes they show up in the form of what I would call, I borrow this first. from Seth Godin. He wrote this article called mentors and heroes.

You know, sometimes there are going to be somebody who's passed away, like a Krishna-morti or somebody that you're not friends with or what you want to learn from because they left a body of work. And he calls those heroes, right? We have heroes that we can learn from. Sometimes it's a buddy, you know, that's there. And it's just about taking action. So we have all of these things.

And we're not always going to be in this situation that, you know, a lot of the people that we look up to, especially if they've accomplished a lot. We have to understand, like, they have thousands of people reaching out to them on a regular basis saying, will you mentor me? Oh, yeah. And they can't tell. They can't, they, first of all, they may not have a lot of time. Yeah. And secondly, they can't tell who's serious and not serious, but everybody knows at least one person. Everybody knows at least one person who's a little bit further along, or everybody can at least find one person who's further along. Maybe they're not famous. Maybe they didn't write a book. Maybe they haven't sort of podcast on the topic who you can learn from and can mentor you in one

category because they're just a few steps ahead of where you want to be right now. For sure. You know, it's really, I think, very underestimated. You know, obviously we've all heard the phrase like, you're the five people that you spend the most time with, which I do 100% agree with. but one thing that that I think we don't really think about is the energy that we get from being around people, which is like, there's definitely the mentors and someone's further along than me and they can teach me exactly what they did. There's definitely I can pay you and you can teach me what you did. There's definitely the accountability and all of those are super important. But there's also just the piece of it of like just being in the energy of somebody who is

working on themselves or who is trying to grow. I didn't realize that I found myself in this situation. And my VP of operations kind of brought this to my attention. And this was like two months ago. And she's like, hey, have you celebrated that you wrote a book? And I was like, I mean, what do you mean? She's like, do you realize like how big of a deal that is? And I was like, yeah, I guess it's like big deal.

She's like, no, no, no. Like, will you just shut up for a second and like just think about the fact that you did this thing? Like so few people do it. And what happened was what she brought to my attention was not, I hope this isn't sound wrong, but like so many of my friends wrote a book have written books and I'm like, yeah, it's just another thing that I did. Right. And I didn't like take a step back.

And what I realized from it is that because I'm kind of in the energy of a lot of people who have written books or had successful businesses that just to kind of do the same thing just kind of felt natural versus like, oh, yeah, damn, I didn't even realize that this happened. Like it did take years to have this happen. And I think what's really important is like, even if like, the person that you're teaching or that you're around, if they're further along in life, and you're just watching them do certain things, you start to pick things up just by naturally being in their energy. Like one of a guy that I probably see once a year, his goal was to be

worth $100 million and hit it by 40 years old. And he's like, well, what the hell am I supposed to do now? And so now his goal in life is he wants to donate $100 million. Anytime that I go get coffee with that guy, he always has his planner with him. And on the back of his planner is all of his goals and he checks his goals every single morning. And that's one thing that like just being in the energy of him, I've been like, this guy's, I mean, he's incredibly successful. His number one goal in life is to be the best father he can possibly be. So he went, okay, I built a super successful business. I need to figure out how to delegate this business because I've got two children and I don't want to be just a guy that makes money all the time. And so he's, and then he went, I'm going to start

getting around other really great parents so that I can learn from them of how they became great parents and his number one focus became that. But it was really interesting that I just started noticing every time I saw this guy, he had his journal and his planner with him, his journal and planner with him. And I was like, one day I was like, what is it that you always have that? He's like, oh, I keep my goals with me everywhere that I go. I was like, that's interesting. And it was just like the energy of he didn't say it to me specific. Hey, he wasn't like, Rob, you need to take this and you need to have all of your goals every moment. But I was like, what is that thing that you always have? And he told me and he's like, I was like, can you show me your goals? And it was like this whole way of breaking it down.

It was like to a science. And I was like, this is cool to see. And some. Sometimes it's like that's cool about mentors is like sometimes you just see things that they do or the way they interact with the world where you're like, I like that. I want to be like them. And sometimes it's not. The important thing is we could talk about business and we could talk about success and all that stuff. But sometimes it's just who they are as a person, like their character traits, how they treat other people. And I can look at them and go, you know what? Like he's super kind of people. You know what? There's a judgmental side of Rob. How can I try to make my judgmental side just a little bit quieter and my kinder side a little bit

bit higher. You know, I think that's the energy of being around the, around other people is super important and not really spoken about as well. Yeah, 100%. Rob, this has been great. We've covered so many aspects of the book and just like the stories that you bring to the table, you sharing from all the lessons that you've learned from the mentors. Obviously, there's a ton that we didn't get a chance to cover. You have a whole section set of the book where you're helping people understand the baby steps of taking action, you know, direction, how to avoid distraction, the importance of taking things one step at time and the power of focus. Obviously, you can pick up the copy of the book and you can learn more about those things.

But I really enjoyed it. And I appreciate how you show up in the world. And through like tenacity, regularly publishing and being on a deadline, I think you said you published four times a week on your podcast. It's been amazing to watch you over the years like grow and expand the reach. Like you people who follow a podcast space, you are one of the most followed podcast. And it's a perfect example of, you know, if we want to create something in our life, using these tools that you write about and talk about in your show, it's available for us. Now, the only question for you is not you, but the audience that's there is,

is it actually something that you want to go for it, right? And are you willing to even, even if you're not sure, are you willing to take a step in that right journey? because another quote that I love that you've shared is that you find that clarity through action. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can start heading in that direction. Some of the best things in my life that have come to me have come because I was pursuing

something else. I climbed up the ladder. I got up halfway and I realized, oh my gosh, I'm on somebody else's ladder. I want to get off and I want to go instead on this side of the building and climb a different ladder. So even the things that don't work out, they've brought in so much clarity and progress to me on my goals, and I wish that for everyone here, for whatever it is that they want to pursue. Any final words that you want to leave our audience with and how to keep in touch with you?

I mean, yeah, if anybody wants to listen to podcast, they can always listen that. It's the mindset mentor. Like you said, it comes out four times a week. And I just wanted it to be a short, simple, no BS podcast. My goal was, hey, how can I take something that might take someone an hour to learn and to teach? Like, how can I do it in 15 minutes and not really have any fluff? So that's just the way that I speak. I'm very short to the point, explain things as clearly as I can.

And that's kind of how I've done with the podcast. And ultimately, man, like, I just, you know, I just, I just want to get to the point where it's just like, and I think I'm kind of there, which is just like, I want to show up and just serve every single day. And I'm so glad that I can look back now, almost 20 years of working on myself and personal. I'm going to be like, damn, it works. Like, I wasn't sure that it was going to work, but it did work. And I think that for most people that are just listening, like, if you do want to change, like just try to change for a little bit and try it out like we're saying. Like try a different perspective.

Try to be a different person. Try on a different shirt and say, I'm going to be this person for a day. And just see how it is because ultimately like, you know, maybe there's heaven, maybe there's hell. Maybe there's reincarnation. I don't know, but I do know one thing. Like I do have this one life right now is Rob Dilellum and try to be the best that I possibly can in it. And a lot of times we look out to the world and say, I want the world to change this way. and I want the world to change this way.

But very rarely do we look at ourselves and say, like, how is the external world of reflection of myself? And how can I change myself? Because when I change, naturally, whoever I interact with is going to change, even if it's in a small way. And so I think if people could just say, you know, let's go back to the Gandhi quote, I didn't understand it for years, but be the change you want to see in the world, like, if we all just took a step back and said, like, how can I become just a little bit better?

How can I become a better person? I can become a better business person, podcast, whatever is the people do. And we all did. I think the world would just be a better place. And that's ultimately what I'm trying to do is just try to help in my small way. Yeah. Powerful message. Great reminder.

One thing only because you mentioned reincarnation. Yeah. Again, I got to share this one thing with you. People often ask me what was like one of my favorite interviews that I've done this podcast. Well, at the University of Virginia, they have this entire department that's there where literally they have one part of the department that studies. near-death experiences? I've been on a near-death experience kick recently, so I want to hear this.

So there's an author and researcher that was there. I think he's taken a little leave of absence there to kind of focus on his health. So near-death experiences and what it means for life and potentially beyond, what we don't understand, medical doctor, his name is Bruce Grayson. He wrote a powerful book about near-death experiences and all the research that's out there and how he, as a young medical doctor, had this patient. of his who had this near-death experience that he could not explain at all. I interviewed him. And there was another guy. His name is Jim Tucker, also at the University of Virginia. And that

department there, literally like mind-blowing that they even have a department at the University of Virginia that does this, they study what are called validated past life experiences. Really? Yes. And, you know, not to detract from what we were talking about here, but just because he had brought it up a couple of times, he wrote an entire book about the body of work that this department is done. And he is one of the continuing, he's a medical doctor and a researcher, is one of the continuing chairs of this sort of department at University of Virginia and how they've sent people all around the world to basically investigate individuals who say like, hey, listen, like, and it's not like, oh, my daughter thinks that she's Princess Diana, right? It's not that.

It's, hey, my son, who's four years old keeps on talking about this very specific series of events and like he has no exposure to Broadway and musicals and it's like these very clear facts and they go in and send a team to research and it's mind-blowing. I don't know. I obviously come from a culture that reincarnation is kind of like part of the very point of the world. I don't know what's real. I don't know what's not. But after you listen to these interviews, you're like, look, I don't know what's real. I don't know what's not. But there's something out there that we don't understand. So I'll send those. to you afterwards. Just because you brought it up a couple times. I love it. Yeah, I love it. Because I was,

I was raised, you know, Catholic and hardcore Christian. I'm like, okay, what else is out there? Like, let me just see everything that's out there. And so actually, one of the things that actually really changed a lot from me was we've spoken about him is Jay Shetty was like, you should read 2017, right, when we were leaving to go to Italy. What I spoke about earlier, he's like, you should read the Bhagavad Gita. Yeah. And I started reading that. And I was like, okay, interesting. I always learned that God was like this king that was above us. This is saying like God is under and within all things. And I was like, that's kind of how I've always felt. Like I've always viewed God. And so I kind of like started looking at all these different viewpoints. So I was like, let me just

test and see what else is out there. It's like, it's like I don't want to go to the same restaurant forever. Like I'm going to try some other things and see just what I like. And so I've kind of pieced it together. But yeah, I'm probably more on that page of reincarnation. There's also other experience I've had in life where maybe like, yeah, I think there might be something there. I don't know what, but there's something out there. Maybe we don't understand. And while we're trying to figure it out, let's step into the best life that we can live because we were given this shot. We were given this knowledge. We were given this opportunity. And a lot of people on earth right now have not been given that opportunity. Maybe they don't

live in America. Maybe they don't have an iPhone. They can't listen to podcasts. They don't have access to this information. So in a way, we owe to ourselves and we owe it to the fact that we've been given the shot to actually go and take it. I hope. everybody listening can step into a lot of the principles that you talk about to go shoot for their wildest dreams in life. Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one

thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called

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