The Mindset Mentor - 4 Things That Are Keeping You From Being a High Performer

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

What if the biggest thing holding you back isn’t a lack of discipline, but the way your brain is wired to keep you safe? In this episode, I break down the four hidden mechanisms that sabotage your motivation, consistency, confidence, and performance, and show you how to work with your biology instead of fighting against it. If you're ready to stop repeating the same patterns and finally unlock your next level, this episode will show you where to start. Ready to break the patterns holding you back?    Join the free live workshop: https://breaktheceiling2026.com   The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life.     Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about a live Zoom lesson that I'm going to be doing. It's called Break the Ceiling. If you've ever felt like you were the one holding yourself back in your income, your relationships, your health, your happiness, every area of your life this is for you. I'm going to show you exactly what that ceiling is made of and what it takes to break through it for good. grab your free spot right now at break the ceiling, 2026.com. Once again, break the ceiling,

2026.com. And I'll see you live on that session. Today, I'm going to talk about the four things that are keeping you from being a high performer. Because have you ever noticed that every time your life starts getting really good, somehow you find a way to screw it up? Like, you finally start going to the gym consistently, and then you stop. Your business starts doing well, and then suddenly you lose the momentum. you meet someone who's actually good for you, and somehow you push them away. Most people call this self-sabotage, but what if self-sabotage isn't actually the problem? What if self-sabotage is just the symptom of something that is much deeper happening inside of your brain and your nervous system?

So today I'm going to show you the four hidden mechanisms that control your motivation, your consistency, your confidence, and your performance. because once you understand what's actually happening beneath the surface, you stop trying to force yourself to change, and you finally start working with your brain instead of against it. Okay, so let's dive in. After coaching tens of thousands of people over the past decade, I can tell you what we're dealing with here is not a potential problem. And if you don't understand the four things that we're going to be covering today,

here's what's going to keep happening to you. So the first thing keeping you from being a high performer is this. Your nervous system has a set point. That's number one. Your nervous system has a set point. and it will pull you back down to it every single time. I'll give you an example. If you ever had this happen, you have the best month that you've ever had in your business. And then the very next month you completely fall off or you get into the best shape of your life and then something happens

and three months later you're right back to where you started. Or the wildest one, which I see a lot of times of people, you finally get into a relationship that's actually healthy, that's actually good for you, somebody who actually loves you well, and you find yourself picking a fight over absolutely nothing. Now, most people look at that and they're like, yeah, that's just self-sabotage, I self-sabotage. Yeah, but you don't know why. Why do you self-sabotage? Have you ever asked yourself that? Because you self-sabotaged for a reason.

Your brain's number one job is to not to make you happy. Your brain's number one job is not to make you successful. It's number one job is to keep you alive. And the way it keeps you alive is by keeping you in a state that. is recognizable because your brain thinks recognizable means survivable. You've been there before. You didn't die, so this is safe. Your body does the exact same thing physically already. 98.6 degrees. That's what your body temperature is set to. If you get too hot, you sweat. If you get too cold, you shiver. Your body doesn't care if you want to be hotter or if you

want to be colder. It's going to do whatever it needs to do to get you back to 98.6 degrees. You have to understand your nervous system does the exact same thing with your life, unconsciously, except instead of a temperature, it's your stress level, it's your income level, it's your happiness level, it's how much love you're allowed to, quote unquote, loud to receive. It's how good things are allowed to get before your body, your subconscious, your nervous system goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're at a range. And then when you go above the set point, even if it's good, especially when it's good, your nervous system starts sweating.

And it's like, oh shit, we need to change this and go back to normal. And what does, you know, like quote unquote sweating look like in this situation? It's like picking a fight with your spouse or skipping the gym for a week for no reason or scrolling for two hours the night before your biggest presentation of your life. I need you to understand this. It's not that you're lazy in those situations or that you're broken or something's wrong with you. You're regulating. You're bringing the temperature back down to what your nervous system thinks is normal.

And here's what makes it so hidden. Self-sabotage never really feels like is self-sabotage in the moment. It feels reasonable for some reason. It's always like a really good excuse. Oh, I'm just tired this week or I deserve it. I deserve a little bit of a break or you know what? Right now is just not the right time. Like it seems reasonable.

It seems logical a lot of times. In those situations, it's not really like you making a decision. That's like your subconscious sweating, right? It's bringing you back to what it thinks is 98.6 degrees. And so what do you actually do about it? Well, you have to raise your set point. And the only way to raise your set point is exposure. Your nervous system has to get used to the exposure of doing better than you've ever done before.

You have to stay at the new level long enough that your nervous system stops calling it dangerous. and it starts thinking of it as normal, which means your goals right now might actually be too big. It might be the problem that you don't need a really big goal. You might need goals that are just a little bit better than what you're doing right now. Your goal, being a little bit better, might actually have your nervous system to get used to it quicker, right? So you lose five pounds.

Not 50 pounds, you lose five pounds. And you're like, oh, I'm starting to get used to it. kind of gets boring. You're more consistent with it. Maybe you have those five pounds off for 30 days. Maybe you have a little bit more money in your bank account or maybe you have like a little bit more vulnerability in your relationships. It's not like massive changes. It's a tiny bit of a change that you're allowing your nervous system to get used to through exposure so that it starts to deem it as safe and not dangerous. Because if it becomes boring to you, it means your body has finally accepted it. And once your body accept it,

it becomes your new normal. It's about being a tiny bit better each day. It's not about changing your entire life overnight. Incrementally better feel safer to the nervous system than uprooting your entire life. Slow and steady wins the race. So that's number one. Number two is you never really finish your stress cycle. You have never truly learned how to recover. And I don't mean rest. I mean recover. These are two different things, right? Your stress response is designed to be a cycle. There's a threat. Your body activates. You take action. The threat resolves. You come back down to baseline. It's like if a zebra sees a lion, it runs, it escapes. It goes back to eating grass 20 minutes later like nothing happened. Cycle complete. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. The cortisol is out of the body of the zebra because it rained it out. It's back to normal. No threat is now here. Now look at your life though. The crazy thing about life nowadays is that there's always. a threat. I don't mean like a physical threat. It's like a little bit of a tiny threat in our mind, like an email that comes in, numbers on a spreadsheet, a conversation that you've been dreading for

six weeks, a text that you haven't answered. And there's no running from these things. There's no escaping. There's no moment where the lion walks away because we're constantly being bombarded by these little things. And so the cycle never actually closes. This is a really, really big problem in modern society that I don't think people know about. I recognize this in my life probably about four years ago being a business owner. Like I have 40 employees. We've done over 20 million dollars in the past five years. There's always something that my brain can go to to stir me up. So I've gotten myself stuck in that for years and years in the past. And all of this stuff happens. And then you go to bed with it and you wake up and it stacks on top of tomorrow's. And you do that every single day for 10 years. And there's no like,

there's no like release valve for high performers. There's a researcher called Bruce McEwen who spent his entire career on this. He came up with a term that's called allostatic load, which basically means the wear and tear on your body from being chronically activated. I have found myself years ago being chronically activated. And here's what I want you understand about it. The damage doesn't come from stress. Stress is fine. Stress is actually how you grow. The damage comes from the stress that never gets completed. Nobody nowadays delodes their life. Everybody's just running, redline as fast as they can. They never actually allow themselves to delode until their body forces them to delode. And your body will always force one eventually. It doesn't ask for permission. It doesn't schedule it at a convenient

week. It'll just show up as burnout or a heart attack or an injury or getting sick every time you finally take a vacation. It'll show up as a panic attack in the car. As you're your marriage slowly falls apart. And so how do you close the cycle on stress and delode so that you can recover from all of this? These are things that I've prioritized in my life the past few years when I realized that I was running most of my life with like this mid-level stress that never went away. The first thing, move your body. It's the oldest, it's the most reliable one because it's literally what the chemistry was built for. You've got to move your body to let your body process the cortisol that you have from the stress so that you can get it out.

This is one of the most important things you can do. That's the first thing. The second thing, breathe. Specifically longer exhales than inhales. Slow breathing because that's what tells your body that the lion is gone. The first thing that activates when you're in quote unquote danger is your breath, short breath. So many people are just walking around short breathing all day long, realizing that it's keeping them in fight or flight. And the number three, close your open loops. Get the unfinished stuff, finished or at least out of your head and onto a piece of paper with a decision next to it, even if that decision is not this month. So that therefore you can close it and your brain doesn't see it as this low level stress and threat that's

continuing to stay open as an open loop. Okay, so that's number two. Number three, I want you to realize this. You're not avoiding hard things. You're avoiding the unclear things in your life. This one might be my favorite because almost nobody talks about it. You're not avoiding difficult things or because they're hard or any of that. You're avoiding things that are ambiguous. Think about your to-do list right now. The stuff that's been sitting there for three weeks, be honest. Is it actually the hardest stuff in the list? It's usually not. It's used this stuff where you don't really know what the next step is. It's stuff like figure out marketing or fix things with my brother, have that tough conversation or look into that opportunity or get my finances in order, something like that

where it's kind of like ambiguous. It's like grabbing water. You can't literally grab it. Meanwhile, like you'll actually happily do something that's a little bit harder like wake up at 5 a.m. or go to the gym three times a week or something that's easy to just check off your list. Like do the laundry. Why are you more likely to do them? Because there's zero ambiguity in them. They are clear. You know exactly what to do. You know exactly when you're done. done and you know exactly what the finish line looks like. Crazy study I think about all the time. There was a study out of University of College of London a few years ago and they had people play a game where they would turn over rocks. And under some of the rocks was a snake. And if there was

a snake, they would get an electric shock. And they measured people's stress levels like real physical stress, the cortisol, the sweat, the pupil dilation. And here's what's crazy that they found. The people who had a 50% chance of getting shocked were more stressed than the people who had a 100% chance of getting shocked. Hmm, why is that? Well, you have to think about this for a second. Just knowing the fact that you're about to get hurt was less stressful to the human body than not knowing. So uncertainty isn't just uncomfortable. Your brain, it sees that as the threat. the shock wasn't a threat, the uncertainty was the threat, which means that your brain would genuinely rather have a guaranteed bad outcome

than have an unknown outcome. And that right there, everybody, that right there is why people stay in jobs that they hate. That's why people stay in relationships that they outgrew five years ago. That's why known pain beats unknown anything. Sit with that information for a moment. Like that's fucking life-changing if you really think about it. This is the reason why people stay in misery and don't change their lives is because they're more afraid of uncertainty than anything else.

Now, how do you put that together for high performance? Here's how you do it. The highest leverage work in any field is almost always ambiguous work. Nobody hands you a checklist for the thing that would change your life. There's no instruction manual for building a business. There's no instruction manual for healing your childhood trauma, for having a conversation that saves your marriage, for figuring out what you're actually supposed to be doing with this one life that you have. Right. And so when you look at it, that's the reason why you're not checking

off the biggest things on your to-do list is because they're too ambiguous. So how do you fix it? You don't need to try to become fearless. You need to shrink the ambiguity on your to-do list. Take something like grow revenue this month. That's a terrible thing to have on your to-do list. and switch it to open a document and write down 10 people that I will reach out to this week. Right? That's it. No ambiguity because your brain doesn't need certainty about the outcome. Your brain needs certainty about the next step. Do you get that about the next step? And so here's what I want you to do with this info. Find the thing that's been sitting on you to do this for the longest and ask yourself, is this hard or is it just unclear? And if it's unclear, your job is to make the next step so small, so obvious that there's

nothing left to be afraid of. Okay? So that's number three. And number four is you've never actually defined what enough is. Let me explain what I mean by that, right? This is the one that keeps most talented people that I know miserable, most high achievers, miserable, is you've never actually defined what enough looks like in your life. So your brain never gets to log a simple win.

Because here's how it goes. You hit the goal and you feel it for about 30 minutes and then it's gone. And then the bar moves and you're already looking towards the next thing. There's a researcher at Harvard named Teresa Amabil who did this massive study where she analyzed thousands and thousands of daily diary entries from people at work trying to figure out like what actually drives motivation on a giving day. The number one thing, it wasn't money. It wasn't recognition. It wasn't a promotion. It was making small progress in meaningful work.

Small wins. That's it. That was the single biggest driver in motivation. But here's the catch. And this is the part that gets a lot of people. You cannot make progress if the finish line continues to move every single time you get close to it. Then by definition, you've never actually made any real progress, right? You're just running towards the horizon. The closer you get, the further it gets away from you forever. In your brain, it needs this completion. It needs to build evidence. As Tony Robbins always says, progress, equals happiness. Humans want to feel like they're progressing. We really truly do want to feel like we're progressing. And if you never let anything be done, then you never really collect any evidence for your success. So you can do an extraordinary thing for a decade and still feel like you're behind.

And many, many people feel so like, shit, I felt this way, right? You need to cross small finish lines. That little bit of acknowledgement is what gives your brain the dopamine hit that says, hey, we just did something worth doing. Let's do it again. And once your brain, expects that hit, it starts giving it to you before you even start. And that's when the work stops being something that you have to drag yourself to do. Because dopamine actually is the chemical of motivation and you actually start feeling pulled to do it. And so if you bring it all together, let's zoom out for a second because I want you to know something about all these. The set point, the dopamine, the stress cycle, the ambiguity, the completion. Not one of them is about

you working harder. It's not. Every single one of them is about your biology running an old program in the background, a program that was written 200,000 years ago to keep human beings alive, not to help a human build an amazing life. And so you've been trying to out-discipline your biology, and that's why it hasn't worked. That's why the motivation keeps running out. You're not fighting laziness, you're fighting a freaking survival system that's built into us with willpower. That's like trying to scream at a brainstorm and hope that it stops. You're gonna lose. So high performance is not about becoming a machine. Most people think they need to like swim faster,

right? If we're using that as an example, you don't need to swim faster. You've got weight tied to your ankle. And if you just cut the weight off, you don't have to swim any harder at all. You'll just suddenly start moving at a speed that you couldn't reach before because you don't have that ankle weight tied to you anymore. That's high performance. It's getting rid of all of things that are interfering with your high performance. And so here's what I want you to do. I don't want you to try to fix all four of these things. If you try to fix all of them, you're going to fix zero. That's how it always goes. I want you to pick one. And I want you to pick one that made you a little bit uncomfortable as I was talking about. The one where you're like, oh, shit, yeah, that one actually feels like it hits. It's not a coincidence.

That's the one that your brain has been protecting. And that's exactly the one that's been costing you the most. And so work on that one thing for the next 30 days. You don't have to be perfect. Just be consistent. And I promise you 30 days from now, you're not going to be a different person, but you're going to be a person with one less weight tied to their ankle. And you do that a few times over the next few years, and then you will be somebody a few years from today that you don't recognize. So that's what I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with anyone that you know that would like to listen to it. And if you have ever felt like you're the one holding yourself back with your income and your relationships and your health,

I have a live lesson you're going to want to be a part of. I'm going to show you exactly how to break through every ceiling that you have and breakthrough for good so that your life changes. You can grab your free spot at break the ceiling, 2026.com. Once again, break the ceiling, 2026.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way. Leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.