The Mindset Mentor - 5 Mental Shifts That Improve Your Life

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Join my free workshop on March 25th called Identity Upgrade where I’ll show you how changing your identity—not just your habits—is the key to finally changing your life. Register at https://www.2026upgrade.com Feeling stuck? It's time to take back control. If you're ready to master your mind and create real, lasting change, click the link below and start transforming your life today. 👉 http://coachwithrob.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 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 I am running a free workshop on March 25th called Identity Upgrade. And you should be there live with me. Because after 20 years of studying self-development and teaching it to people, I've seen thousands of people try to change your life through habits and routines and actions. And all of those are great. But nothing will really stick long term if you don't change your identity. because your behaviors will always fall back to who you believe that you are. So in this workshop, I'm going to show you step by step how to upgrade your identity so that you can finally change the course of your life.

So to sign up absolutely free, go to 2026upgrade.com. Once again, 26upgrade.com and I will see you live on the workshop. Today, I'm going to be talking about five different mental shifts that will improve your life exponentially. because if you've been in personal development for a long time, you've probably tried a lot of things. You probably tried morning routines and visualization and affirmations and discipline. But what if I told you most people don't stay stuck because they lack motivation? They stay stuck because they're interpreting reality through the wrong mental models. See, the difference between someone who spirals and someone who becomes unstoppable isn't their intelligence.

it's not their work ethic, it's this invisible framework in their brain that determines what everything means. And once those frameworks change, everything changes with them. So today, I'm going to give you the five biggest mental shifts that you can use to change the course of your life. So let's go through it. Number one, you need to change your mindset from life happens to me to life is always training me. See, most people believe that life is happening to them. But the highest performers in the world eventually realized something different, which is life is constantly training you. Not metaphorically, literally.

It's trying to train you to get better all of the time. See, there's a concept in psychology. It's called stress inoculation theory. And the idea that's pretty simple. Exposure to manageable stress actually strengthens psychological resilience. which means that manageable stress builds mental strength. So in other words, the difficulties that you're experiencing or that you've gone through in your life are not random. They're set for you to grow from. They're conditioning stimuli.

See, your nervous system is constantly learning. Your brain is constantly adapting. Your cognitive flexibility is always expanding. And you have to realize that your life is never going to get easier. Life will never get easier for you. You have to use life to make you grow so that you can get better. Because most people are just complaining when life gives them what they don't want. But high performers use what happens to them as a way to strengthen themselves and get better every single day. And the reason why this matters is because if you believe that life is attacking you, then your stress will always feel like life is threatening to be stressed. It's not a good thing to feel stressed.

Adversity in your life is going to feel like you're a victim. Like it's unfair. I just must be unlucky because I have all this adversity. And then difficulty that you have will just feel unescapable. But when you realize that life is training you, then everything shifts. Your stress becomes practice. It becomes exposure. It becomes adaptation.

Your adversity feels like something that's there for you to grow from. The difficulty that you're going through, you can actually start to pull some meaning from. And when you look at elite military units, they train this way very intentionally. Special forces, when they train people, they use progressive exposure to stress and not just like immediately stressing people out, but progressive exposure because your brain starts to learn with all of this a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more stress. It learns I can function even under most extreme pressure. And your life is constantly doing the same thing.

But most people are misinterpreting it and making themselves a victim instead of actually trying to grow from it. And so when you look at this, how can you use everything hard or challenging in your life as a way to strengthen yourself and actually get better? That will give you meaning to some of the hardest moments in your life. And so ask yourself one question when things become really difficult. How can I use this to grow? If you look at it and you're like, hey, if this was happening for me and not to me, like what am I supposed to learn from it? Not, oh, well, why is this happening to me? No, it's like, hey, what am I supposed to learn? Like, is this training emotional regulation? Is this training my decision making under uncertainty? Is this trying to help me practice

patience? Is this trying to help me with my leadership? And your brain starts interpreting adversity as skill development instead of suffering. And that dramatically changes your behavior in the course of your life. And that perspective can change everything in your life. Now when something comes through that would have normally crippled you, you can look at it and not be afraid of it and get better because of it. So that's the first really big mental shift. The second one is you need to shift from I need confidence to I need evidence. And what that means is like most people chase confidence. But confidence is actually a downstream effect of evidence. And the brain is brutally logical about this. There's a concept in cognitive psychology called self-efficacy that was introduced by Albert Bandera.

And when you look at it, self-efficacy is your brain's estimate. of how capable am I at actually succeeding at this thing? And so they actually discovered something really important around this. Confidence doesn't come from affirmations or meditations or motivation or visualization or any of that stuff. It comes from evidence, tiny proof points that your brain collects along the way. Like you can't meditate your way into confidence. I'm sorry, you can't read a book on confidence and just end up having it.

You need real life experience to become confident. And the reason why most people get stuck is because most people wait until they feel confident. But the brain doesn't generate confidence before it has some form of evidence. It generates confidence after it receives evidence. And so you get more confident when you think, you know what, I've been here before. I've worked through harder things. I know I can handle this. So the real shift in your life is to stop chasing confidence.

or to be waiting for it to show up and to actually start collecting evidence in your life. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. The thing that high performers do is they unconsciously run what psychologists call micromastery loops. They set up situations where they can generate small wins,

like measurable progress. They can check things off of their list, these repeated competent signals to themselves. in each one of them, these tiny little bits of confidence come through as like data for the brain. You know, and your brain starts updating its internal model of who you actually are. And you get these little small wins and these small wins are just like little blocks of confidence added to the stack. Like the way I always describe and the visual I always have in my head for confidence is like a stack of jingo blocks, right? Every time you do something and you have a small win or you show up for yourself or you follow through or you wake up when you said you were going to,

It's like adding one little jingo block to the blocks. So instead of asking yourself, how do I become more confident? Ask yourself, what evidence would convince my brain that I'm capable? And then engineer a way to get that evidence for your brain to see that you are capable. Okay, so that's number two. Mental shift number three is that most people think like, I need motivation first. Your shift needs to be, I need to change my behavior first. Like most people think that motivation causes action.

And it doesn't. You know, when you look at neuroscience, neuroscience actually proves the exact opposite. Action often creates motivation. And so this is explained by something that's called behavioral activation in psychology. It's a technique that's using clinical psychology to treat depression in many people. Researchers found that when people wait to feel motivated before acting, they remain stuck. And so if you're waiting for motivation to show up, you're asking yourself to basically remain stuck. but when people act first, their move improves afterwards.

Why is that? Because the action triggers dopamine and serotonin inside of your brain. And so your brain updates your emotional state based off of your behavior, not your intention. So I think, and you say that again, just so you can really get it. Your brain updates your emotional state based off of your behavior, not your intention. So if it's like, hey, I really want to go and do this thing, but I'm sitting on the couch, well, your intention doesn't matter.

What matters is your behavior. You got to think about that. And so you got to ask yourself, what is my behavior that I'm taking? What it means basically is this is motivation. Sure, it can come swooping in every once in a while, but it's very fickle. Motivation is often more than anything else, a byproduct of momentum, of action on your side. The brain sees the momentum and concludes, hey, we must be engaged in something meaningful. and then motivation appears.

This is pretty exciting. Let's continue doing this thing. And so high performers kind of understand this intuitively. They don't ask, do I feel like doing this thing? What they really do is like, what do I need to do now? That's what they ask himself, what action is going to create momentum on my side. And then they look for tiny wins to take action or gain some forward momentum. And once momentum starts, motivation usually follows.

motivation comes after action most of the time. Okay, so that's number three. Number four, the fourth mental shift you need to make is that most people think failure is bad. You need to shift your mindset to failure is information. This one sounds obvious, but most people really misunderstand how deep this concept actually is.

The brain is designed to learn through prediction error. Prediction error is a concept that studied exclusively in neuroscience. And basically it describes the gap between what you expected to happen and what actually happened, right? And so that gap is where your learning actually occurs. When the brain detects prediction error, like messing up in some sort of way, I thought this is going to happen, but this happened and said, dopamine neurons fire

to update your neural pathways. Your brain releases acetylcholine, which allows you to focus more. actually become more focused after you mess up something so that you can get better the next time that you try and so that you are more likely to succeed the next time. All of this means that failure isn't just like something that happens. Failure is literally how your brain improves models of reality and helps you go, oh, I just failed. I thought this was going to happen. This thing happened and said, let me release dopamine. Let me release acetylcholine. I am now more focused. Now let's see how we can get better the next time we do it. Most people try to avoid failure. But avoiding failure

keeps you stuck. If you avoid failure, you avoid prediction error. And if you avoid prediction error, you avoid learning. Your brain stays operating with old outdated models. So don't see failure as the opposite of success. See it as a necessary part of success. You need to fail in order to become successful. Every mistake becomes information for you to learn and get better from. And that information now helps you figure out what does work so that you can get closer to succeeding. Okay, so that's number four. And then mental shift number five is that most people think their identity is who they are. Like they think like identity is fixed.

See, most people treat identity like it's something that's just said in stone. But modern neuroscience shows that identity is actually a predictive model that your brain holds about you. Your brain is constantly updating this model. But think about this for a second. it's a predictive model that your brain holds about you. So your brain is constantly trying to predict what's going to happen based off of what you give it. And it updates primarily through your behavioral evidence. So every action that you repeat sends a signal to your brain of this is who I am.

And over time, the brain integrates those signals if it happens over and over and over and over again, like you start waking up early when you weren't waking up really before, or you start finishing what you started, or you start following through. Over time, the brain integrates those into signals of this is who I am. So your identity is not who you actually are. It is who you think you are

based off of what you have seen yourself do in the past. It is a prediction of what will happen in the future based off of the past. But if you're trying to create a different life, you already know that you need to be a completely different person than you have been in the past. And so what you've done before and who you've been in the past should mean to you absolutely nothing because you're thinking about who you need to become, right? And so when you look at your habits and how they

change your identity, my favorite quote on this is from James Clearer. He populizes the phrase that says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you wish to become. And that idea actually aligns with predictive processing theory in neuroscience. Like your brain constantly predicts your future based off of past behavior. And so the fastest way to change your identity is an affirmation. It's not meditation. It's not sitting silently and journaling about it. It's repeated behavioral evidence. What action you're actually taking. You need to force yourself to change your behavior. And if you do that long enough and your brain starts to see different actions, your identity will have to shift over time.

So let me give you an example, right? You don't become a confident public speaker by sitting there and going, I'm a great public speaker, I'm a great public speaker, I'm a great public speaker. No, what happens is you speak publicly repeatedly and that eventually your brain starts to update, hey, I guess apparently we're someone who speaks publicly

and the identity shifts. I can tell you for myself, this is 100% true. the very first time that I ever did public speaking, like really like did in front of a decent size group, which when I say decent size, I mean like 15, 20 people was at a team meeting back in 2006 when I was 20 years old. And I was scared, shitless. I did not want to do it. I was terrified. The talk was horrible. When I got done with it, I never wanted to do it again, right? But the company that I worked at forced me on stage over and over and over and over again, And by the time I left that company five years later, I was speaking on stage publicly,

whether it be an interview with five people that was an hour and a half long that I had to run in a group interview or multiple team meetings a week or getting on stage or whatever it might have been. I probably had about 15,000 hours of public speaking experience after five years. Like it was just so much public speaking. Now public speaking is one of my favorite things that I do. It's like who I am. But I hated it before. So you see how my identity completely updated, what made me excited and where I get

excitement from completely updated by my behaviors and everything changing as well. And so most people, they try to change their life by changing external circumstances. But really the deepest transformation happens when you upgrade the way that you interpret reality. And if you update these five different ways that I taught you, you know, you can have the same experience that you've had in your life and it can mean something completely different than what it did before because you're interpreting it differently based off the mental models that you're using. And when you change the model, you'll change the response within yourself. And when you change the response within yourself, you can then change your behavior. And eventually, if you do that long enough,

you will be able to change your life. So that's all I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, you will love my free workshop on March 25th called Identity Upgrade. After 20 years of studying and teaching self-development, I've seen thousands of people try to change your life. But nothing will stick in changing your life if you don't change your identity. So in this workshop, I'm going to show you step by step how to upgrade your identity and change the entire course of your life. So go to 2026upgrade.com to register for free. Once again, 2026 upgrade.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.