The Mindset Mentor - 3 Ways to Change Your Brain!

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

In this episode, I am going to teach you the 3 ways to change and rewire your brain!Join my FREE 2 Day Virtual Event called Mindset Mastery this weekend here: https://www.2020mindsetevent.com/ Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. And if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode. And very quickly, I've got an extremely exciting announcement. Today, it is open to the public. You could join in on my new mindset course called Rewire Your Brain. We're over the course of eight weeks. You're gonna get two live lessons every single week and we're gonna be working together to actually change and rewire your brain

because if you can change your brain, you could change your thoughts. If you could change your thoughts, you could change your action. If you could change your actions, you could change your results and that means that by changing your brain, you change results, which means you change your world.

And so if you're out there and you're interested in learning more, I've made an entire video explaining the course to you. All you have to do right now is go to coachwithrob.com. The first 100 people who join get $100 off of the course. There's already 41 people that joined from the wait list before. So there's currently 59 more spots at that $100 off. And if you join today, I'm going to be doing a drawing for one person to win a free 45 minute one-on-one call with me if you join today, which is valued over $2,000. So once again, if you want to learn more, go to coachwithrob.com, check it out, see if it's right for you. And I'm

going to work really hard with you at changing your brain to change your actions, to change your results, to change your life. Today, we're going to be talking about how to rewire your brain. We're going to be talking about something called neuroplasticity. Now, just so you have an idea, I'm completely obsessed with the brain. And over the past three years, I've been diving really, really deep into neurology, psychology, early childhood development, and also neuroplasticity. Because if I can figure out how those work and I can look at the anthropology of a human and then figure out, okay, 100,000 years ago, this part of our brain existed. Why did it exist?

Versus, okay, there's successful people, there's unsuccessful people, there's people that take action and don't take action. How can I marry the two of those and understand what makes somebody do what they're going to do so they can be successful or not be successful? And that's basically what I've been obsessed with over the past, you know, I've really been obsessed with it for the past three years, but for the past five years, I've really been diving into it. And I want you to realize this. We've all heard the phrase, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I am going to prove to you today why that is completely false because you can change your brain. You can change yourself at any moment in time. And we're going to

talk deeply about neuroplasticity, which is the science of changing your brain right now on this episode because your brain has over 100 billion neurons, 100 billion neurons, and what is used becomes stronger and what is not used becomes weaker. So this is very important to know. It's the difference between talent versus skill. You know, if you like sports, like I love sports, and all of the time you see someone that's like this incredibly talented, highly touted, incredible basketball player, and then they come into the NBA, they get drafted really high, and they end up being a big dud. And the reason why is because they had a lot of talent, which is kind of like what they were born with, or they just had some extra talent that they had. But because of the fact that they didn't build up the skills that they really needed to improve, they ended up being a dud. On the flip

side of that, there's people that are in the NBA that were not drafted, they weren't good, but just over and over and over again through skill and the difference between talent versus skills. Talent, what you're given, skill is what you build. But through over and over and over again at working on themselves and working on their movements and the connection between body and brain and hardwiring the neurons in their brain to be able to shoot and be able to move a certain way, there's people that come out of nowhere that weren't supposed to be good and they've developed the skills. They've developed the skills. And if you're not working on changing yourself and changing your brain and changing your actions and changing your thoughts every single day,

then what you're really doing is you're just leaning back on your talent. But your life can change at any time if you want to become more skilled. And with neuroplasticity, you have to realize your brain is constantly changing if you are changing. If you wake up and do the same thing every single day, every single day, every single day, your brain is not changing in any sort of way. So it's like Einstein says, to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is absolutely insanity. The reason why it's not going to change is because you didn't change. Now, if you wake up and you say, I want to get really good at this, and you put in the work and you put in the work and you put in the work,

you'll develop skill. And what happens is your brain changes through repetition. I'm actually going to tell you the three ways that your brain changes today and teach that to you. But what happens is that your brain actually reorganizes itself. That's what's crazy about the human brain is it will actually reorganize itself. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Completely false. It just takes a little bit longer if you're an old dog. So that's what you have to realize. Your brain's constantly changing if you're changing. The question is, are you changing it for the positive? I'm going to show

you why in just a minute that you might have accidentally over the course of your life, hardwired yourself to be negative. You might have accidentally over the course of your life, hardwired yourself to be lazy, hardwired yourself to procrastinate, hardwire yourself to be afraid and not take action. And that can change at any moment, but you have to be willing to step up and say, I'm ready to change my life. Cause if you're not, then nothing's going to change. So your brain will reorganize itself. You can change the way that you think. And so I want you to think about this real quick. Right now in this current moment, okay?

If you look back at the last 10 or 15 years of your life, would you say that you're more of a negative person or a positive person? Would you say you're positive most of the day? Or would you say there's an underlying bit of negativity? What I mean is like anxiety, stress, worry. Is there an underlying just a little bit, a little tinge of just negativity, worry, anxiety, frustration, agitation that's just bubbling under the surface a little bit? It might not be an explosion, but what do you think? Over your past five years, let's just say five years, would you say you're more positive?

Would you say you're more negative? Because you have hardwired yourself to be that way. Now, once again, you can change everything that you do and hardwire yourself to be a new person. You can hardwire yourself to be different. I would be, if I'm completely honest with you, before I really started getting into personal development, I was a very negative person. I always blamed everybody else.

I always had excuses as to why I wasn't where I wanted to be and why I wasn't successful and why I didn't make any money. I was really great at blaming other people. But when I discovered personal development, I went, oh my God, I can change myself and change my life. And so you have to realize if your brain is constantly changing all the time, you can change the way that you think. You can change the way that you feel on a daily basis. If you don't feel good, you can change that. Why? Because your feelings come from your thoughts. You can change

the way that you feel. You can change the way that you act. If you think about it, if you procrastinate or if you don't take action or if you feel fear and you get paralyzed and you don't do anything, you can change that. You could change what you think, you could change what you feel, you could change what you act. All of them can be changed at any moment in time based off the work that you put into yourself and the work that you put into your brain. The six inches that's in between your two ears. And you got to think of your brain as this. that's in between your two ears. And you got to think of your brain as this. Your brain is like a giant forest, okay? Your brain is like a giant forest and there's well-worn paths in the forest. You know, if you walk down a path over and over and over and over again, it's going to become a

well-worn path, which means that it's easier to walk through the well-worn path than it is to go and create a brand new path, right? So you realize if you do something over and over and over and over again, like being negative or being pessimistic or having anxiety or having worry or having frustration or having agitation, if you do it over and over and over and over again, you're actually hardwiring yourself. And I'm not going to talk about this deeply today, but actually becoming chemically addicted to those feelings inside of your body of anxiety and worry and frustration. It's like a well-worn path. If you've gone down it over and over and over and over and over again, then it's just really

easy for your brain to just go down that path. Now, why does your brain want to go down that path? Because the most energy consuming organ in your entire body is your brain. There is no other organ in your body that consumes more energy. And that's why Harvard did a study and found out that 48% of what a human does is actually autopilot, which means that 48% of what you do is you just going through the motions. Have you ever driven home from work and you get home and you're like, how in the hell did I just get home? And you don't ever remember. It's just like you kind of clicked off. And the reason why is because your brain wants to hard

wire things into your body and into your brain so that it doesn't have to think. Because if you think a lot, it consumes a lot of energy. But the problem is, have you hardwired the things that you don't want into your brain? Because what you need to do is you need to unwire those and start to hardwire the things that you do want, like feeling fear and taking action anyways. You know, feeling like, oh my gosh, I don't know what I should do, but stepping into the unknown and going for it. There's ways to hardwire yourself around that. So the brain consumes a ton of energy. What's crazy is we're not very self-aware of all of the things that we do on autopilot. You know, somebody can say something and boom, it immediately, we become, it's called a reflexive

thought or reflexive movement. We immediately just react and get pissed off or agitated or feel a certain way, right? It's reflexive. It's, we don't even have to think about it. It's just autopilot. So that's how your brain, you know, just going into it, how your brain kind of works a little bit. Now let's talk about the three different ways to change your brain right now. This episode is brought to you by Blinkist. Blinkist is unique and powerful. It works on your phone, your tablet, and your web browser. And Blinkist gives you the best key takeaways and need to know information from over 3000,000 nonfiction bestsellers in over 27 categories. And Blinkist condenses them down into things they call blinks, which you can listen to and read in just 15 minutes. And now Blinkist offers its members even more, including exclusive

original podcasts from top authors and creative thinkers. And over 14 million people use Blinkist to deepen their knowledge and topics from self-improvement, personal growth, management, leadership, and mindfulness, happiness, and more. And right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash mindset, you can start your seven-day free trial and get 25% off of your Blinkist membership and up to 65% off of audio books that you get to keep forever. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.com slash mindset to get 25% off your premium membership and seven day free trial. Once again, Blinkist.com slash mindset. The first way is this, is chemical. At its most basic, basic function. Your brain functions by transferring chemical signals between brain cells, which are called neurons, that trigger a series of actions or reactions.

That's it. So your brain has functions that happen inside of it. And the functions are just chemical signals going from one place to another at its simplest form. That's the way you should know it. So the thing about though is that your brain can increase the amount of concentration of chemical signaling or the amount of chemicals that go between neurons and what, you know, the actual amount of chemicals that go from one place to another and one place to another, one place to another. The easiest way to think of it is this, neurons that fire together, wire together. If you just continue to think the same thoughts over and over and over and over again, you're actually wiring that into your brain. You're like, it's clicking it into place and you're wiring it into, into your brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Once again, your brain can increase the amount or the

concentration of signaling that takes place between your neurons. So you've got to be very clear as to what you want to take happen that have happened versus just allowing it to happen. Now, chemical is basically improve. What it does is it improves your short-term memory and improves your short-term memory. Now you have to realize this. I don't know if you've ever done this before. If you've ever sat down and tried to, you know, learn an instrument or learn a sport and you take a few hours and you start learning and you see massive amounts of improvement in a really short period of time. What happens is that your brain goes new thing, new thing, new thing. We need more chemicals

to start to pay attention to this new thing because it's a challenge for us. And so you can improve and improve and improve. And after two hours, you're like, man, you're not incredible. You're not like the best guitar player ever, the best basketball player ever after those two hours. But you can see improvement because your brain has sent more chemicals to the neurons in your brain to start to get better and improve at that thing. But what happens though, you ever do this and you wake up tomorrow and you try to play that scale that you played on the guitar, a scale that you played on the piano or shoot those shots and it feels like you never even,

you're like, why is my, I felt like there was so much improvement yesterday. There's almost no improvement right now. Why is that? Because you only changed the chemical structure of your brain for a short amount of time. You didn't change your brain. You changed the chemical structure of your brain

for just those moments, which means it's good for short term. Now, if you do something over and over and over and over again, and you continue to keep learning and learning and learning and keep sending chemicals and chemicals and chemicals through thoughts, what happens is your brain starts to change in the second way, which is the actual structure of your brain. You change the structure of your brain because the neurons that fire together, wire together. You change the structure of your brain because the neurons have fired together, wired together. And during the learning process, you can actually change the connections between different neurons in your brain. So you can create brand new connections

that were never even there a few minutes ago or a few days ago by doing it over and over and over again. So this is where the actual physical structure of the brain changes. And that takes more time. It doesn't just happen in one day. It's more of a long-term play. And it's for something like developing a motor skill. It starts to get better and better and better the more that you put into it. The thing that you have to really realize about the brain is that the brain changes through repetition, doing it over and over and over and over again. So chemicals are

the first way to change, and that's short-term. The more long-term way, if you do it over and over and over again, continue to send those thoughts and those thoughts and the movements and movements and movements and chemicals and chemicals and chemicals, what happens is this starts to change the structure of your brain. And an example would be this. The cool thing about it is a couple of examples I'll give you. People who are blind and read braille have larger hand sensory areas in their brain. They weren't born with larger hand sensory areas in their brain. What happens is because of the fact they use their hands so much and the senses matter so much more than, for instance, me, somebody who doesn't read braille, the brain actually, the hand sensory area actually

grows in their brain. That's what's crazy. Now your brain doesn't grow in size. What happens is a part of the brain will grow, which means a part of the brain will shrink. So you're actually hardwiring and something in there and kind of rewiring or, you know, making the actual neurons smaller. Another part of your brain. Another example is this. I'm right-handed. So your dominant hand motor region is larger and the part of your brain, if you're right-handed, it's that part of your brain. If you're left-handed, it's that part of your brain. So depending on if you're right-handed or left-handed, your dominant hand motor region is larger depending on what hand you use to write. Pretty crazy, right? Another example is London taxi cab

drivers are not able to use maps. They actually have to memorize every single street before they can start driving taxi cabs. And they have to memorize the entire thing of map of London. And they have done studies on the brains of them and they weren't born this way, but because of fact, they have to sit there and memorize it. They have larger spatial regions in their brain that are used for mapping. So literally by sitting there and learning and learning and learning and over and over and over, the chemicals go and the chemicals go and the chemicals go and the chemicals grow. And what happens is the brain, the structure of the brain actually changes. Once again, your brain does not get larger. Your brain does not

get smaller. It's just the region that you concentrate the most on will grow or shrink. And that will strengthen the actual connections between different parts of your brain. Is this not mind-blowing to you? Like to me, this is mind-blowing. I can actually literally change my brain. This isn't some woo-woo BS. This is actual real science called neuroplasticity. So you have to realize that is that you can change your brain at any moment in time. So if you're sitting there and I'm going to tell you the third one in just a minute, the third way to change your brain. But if you're sitting there and you're like, I don't like my, you know, how my life is right now. I want to change it. You can, and you can change it through changing your brain,

which changes everything on the external. Maybe you love your life, but you're like, you know what? I feel like I have so much more potential inside of me. Guess what? Through working at it and working at it and working at it, that's how you bring it out. That's the beautiful thing. So the first way to change your brain is chemical. The second way to change your brain is structure. And the third way to change your brain, if you've changed it chemically and you've done it so much, you've changed it structurally. The third way is you actually change the function of your brain. You will actually change the way that your brain functions because as you use a brain region more than another brain region, it becomes easier to be more excitable. And so what happens is,

without going too deep into it, is there's stuff called myelin that's built on the outside of a brain. And the easiest way to think of it is if you go up to a cord that's inside of a wall, right? You know, cords plugged into a wall. On the outside of it, you're actually, there's something, there's this rubber. That's what it is. And on the inside of it is usually a copper wire. The copper wire is actually where the signal, the electrical signals are sent through. Why do you have the rubber on the outside? Because it actually allows the chemical signal, actually allows the copper signal, the electrical signal to transfer with less energy and move faster. The same way that if you think of the actual brain itself as you have the neuron, and then on the outside of the neuron, you have something called

myelin that builds. The more that you do something over and over and over again, the more myelin that builds so that your brain can actually send an electrical signal from one place to another even easier. And so the same way that you look at the cord that's plugged in, there's a copper wire on the outside of the copper wire is myelin. If you look at the brain, the more that you do something, the more myelin that will build up. And myelin is the equivalent of the rubber cord on the outside of it. So there's a neuron on the inside wrapped with something called myelin. And that's the exact same as a cord. So the more you do something over and over and over again, the easier it becomes to do because myelin will build up, which makes it more

energy efficient to send a chemical signal from one place to another. So actually changes the structure of your brain. Mind-blowing, isn't it? You could change the structure of your brain. But here's the thing. When learning, you have to realize this. There's no drug that you can take for neuroplasticity. There's none. The only way that you could change it is that there's nothing more effective than practice. Doing it over, doing it over, doing it over. You have to put in the work. Your life will not change. Your brain will not change unless you step up to the plate and actually change yourself. There's no drug you could take for neuroplasticity. There's no secret sauce. There's no shortcuts. It's the work. You have to put in the work because you have to change the

chemical structure. You have to change the chemical. I can't use the word structure because I'm about to use the structure. You have to change the chemical structure of your brain. Then you'll have to change the actual structure of your brain. Then you'll have to change the actual structure of your brain. Then you'll have to change the actual function of your brain. And that's why if you see someone, you're like, God, they're positive all the time. It's because they've been positive and they've actually hardwired positivity into their brain. Or you're like, man, that person just takes action and they never second guess themselves. It's because they've hardwired that taking action and not second guessing themselves. And it's available to anybody.

That's the beautiful thing about it though. So here's the thing though. Some of you have accidentally hardwired yourself for what you don't want. For negativity, for worry, for self-destruction, for holding yourself back, for not taking action, for procrastination, because you've done it so many times over and over and over again, and you didn't even know it, but you were actually hardwiring the habits, the traits, the qualities, the thinking, the feelings that you don't want. Now that can change is what's the beautiful thing. You're not going to be stuck

there forever, but you have to make a change. That's the thing that you have to realize about it. You have to literally unlearn the things that you've learned to change your brain. And you have to relearn other parts of your things that you want to relearn. So if you've, let's just take it for example, if you've been really negative your entire life or just had underlying anxiety or underlying stress, it's going to be there forever unless you make a change. But the more that you actually start to change towards the other side of positivity, of being grateful of whatever it is, you start to actually make the signals weaker for negativity or stress or worry or anxiety and make the signal stronger with more myelin on the outside for positivity, for love, for action, for happiness, for joy, for peace, for whatever it is that you actually truly

want. Now, here's the other crazy thing. There's a part of your brain called the hippocampus and the hippocampus is very important for turning an actual doing something into a memory. And the hippocampus is extremely, extremely active when you sleep, which is why they say that 50% of neuroplasticity happens at the event of doing it. And 50% actually happens when you sleep. So when you're actually doing the thing itself, whatever it is that you're doing over and over and over again, you're doing what they call triggering. You're triggering the change in your brain, but it's not actually changing your brain. You're triggering the change in your brain. Only through deep sleep or deep rest does your brain actually change.

And the reason why is because your hippocampus will replay it over and over and over and over again in your sleep to allow you to be able to change it. So I don't have enough time to really dive into that. I talk way, way, way, way, way deeper in that in my course be able to change it. So I don't have enough time to really dive into that. I talk way, way, way, way, way deeper in that in my course of how to change your brain through sleep and actions to take before you go to bed to make sure that you hardwire it deeper into your brain. But just know this, as much as it's important to do the things, it's also really, really important to have deep rest so that your brain can recover and grow in those moments. Just like when you work out, the most important part is working out and your diet and all of that, but you've got to get the

sleep because your body has to recover because that's when it actually grows. So understand this, this is why it's so important. Your brain makes your thoughts. Your thoughts create your actions, your actions change your results, and your results create your world, create your actions, your actions, change your results and your results, create your world, create your happiness, your joy, your peace, your success, your bank account, your relationships, all of that stuff. So the way to change your brain, I'm sorry, the way to change your world is to change your brain. So what are the two things that matter to us? Number one, the thing that's crazy about this is it shows you that who you are now doesn't have to be who you will always be. You can change yourself, but you have to change. The only way to change yourself

is for you to change, right? You can change at any moment. And the second thing is you can literally create yourself into anything that you want to be. That's mind blowing. You could create yourself into anything that you want to be. So realize, do it over and over and over again. So you can change the chemical structure of your brain. You can change the actual structure of your brain and you can change the function of your brain. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode,

please share with someone that you know and love. And if you're interested in taking an eight week course of me teaching you two times a week live every single week, all you have to do for in this course of eight weeks. So I'm going to be going over and over and over and over and over again and hardwiring all of these things into your brain of the course of eight weeks. Join my rewire your brain course. If you want to learn more about it, I made a 10 minute video that explains every single aspect of it. All you have to do is go to coachwithrob.com right now.

Once again, the first 100 people who join get a hundred bucks off the course. And if you join today, as you're hearing this, you go into a drawing for a free one-on-one coaching call with me. I will choose one winner that will win that one-on-one coaching call with me. It'll be a 45 minute call. It's worth over $2,000. And I'm excited to take the journey with you. It's going to be fun. And hey, if you're ready to change yourself, I'm ready to push you to change yourself and teach you exactly how to do it as well. But with that, I'm going to leave you the same way

I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you. I hope you have an amazing day and I'll see you on the next episode.