The Mindset Mentor - A Simple System To Break Bad Habits

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Are your daily habits keeping you stuck in the same life year after year? In this episode, I’ll show you why motivation and willpower usually fail when it comes to breaking bad habits—and why your brain often fights back when you try to change too much too fast. I’m going to walk you through a simple system that combines small, sustainable actions with a clear sense of purpose so you can finally make real changes that stick and start creating a different future for yourself and your family. 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 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, you done so hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week so you can learn who you are so you can grow yourself so that you can make your life better. So if that's what you want, hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm going to be talking about a simple system to break your bad habits because if you don't fix your habits, your future doesn't change. And if your future doesn't change, neither does your family's life change. So the way that you scroll, the way that you procrastinate, the way that you overeat, the way that you avoid hard conversations, all of that, all of those bad

habits compound. And if you don't get rid of those bad habits, then five years from now, it's going to cost you opportunities, it's going to cost you money, it's going to cost you happiness, it's going to cost you joy, it's going to cost you your fulfillment in your life. So today I'm going to give you a simple system that actually makes changes stick. And today's episode is going to be way different take on habits. I'm going to talk about them in a way that I've never talked about them before. And I'm going to teach you something in a way that I've never heard anybody else teach before. And so I want to make this as simple as possible because complexity is the enemy of execution.

And I would prefer that you execute what I'm going to teach you versus teaching you something completely groundbreaking. So let's dive into it. Let's talk about real quick why most people fail when they try to break their bad habits. You know, most people try to break bad habits with motivation and with willpower and with hard work and with shame. And it's usually that they try these big dramatic resets. Like, I'm quitting sugar forever. I'm waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning starting tomorrow. I'm never procrastinating again or I'm going to work out for an hour every single day this year. And it's just, frankly, it's too much all at once. It's just for your system, it's too much. And then what always happens when you do that?

Your nervous system panics and then your brain and your body because they hate sudden threats to what is normal end up crashing the car. Why? Because your brain and body, they love safety. They love familiarity. And your brain loves predictable patterns because predictable equals safe. If it's predictable, there's not a threat. Even if those patterns are bad patterns, your brain doesn't categorize them as good or bad patterns. It just categorizes them as familiar pattern and familiar is good. And so when you try to go from like zero to a hundred or like, I'm going to go from from lazy to the most disciplined person, I'm going to be, you know, David Goggins.

or you go from like super distracted to trying to be a monk, or you go from extremely overweight to like, I'm going to have this massive diet and calorie restriction. Your brain and body fight back. And it fights back unconsciously. So you don't even realize it, but you're just self-sabotaging, self-sabotaging, self-sabotaging. And lo and behold, you find yourself in the exact same place

as you currently are three months down the road, with absolutely no changes, asking yourself like, what in the hell is wrong with me? Why can't I change? Well, that's where this whole system that I'm going to bring in comes in. Okay. So the first thing I want to talk about, both of them are Japanese philosophies and tactics here. The first one is one that's called Kaizen. In Kaizen basically means constant, never-ending improvement. When I first heard about Kaysen when I was younger, I became obsessed with it. Like, it has been my life, motto for over 20 years now since the first time I heard it. And I love it because it's not it's not a dramatic transformation. It's not an overnight reinvention. It's small almost like laughably small

tiny little upgrades because I believe that slow and steady wins the race. And so it's these little teeny tiny almost unrecognizable upgrades that compound over time. And neurologically, when you look at your brain, the idea of Kaizen is genius. Because tiny changes don't trigger your body and brain's internal threat response. It doesn't say, oh my gosh, this is too much. We've got to just crash the car. And you get these little teeny tiny changes. And these tiny changes are like tiny wins. And those little tiny wins give you a little bit of dopamine. And so you want more of it and you want more of it and you become consistent in this tiny bit of consistency starts to build a new identity of who you are. So, you know, if somebody wants

to stop scrolling on their phone when they're bored, instead of, oh, I'm deleting all social media or I'm just going to get a dumb phone or whatever it is, Kaysen says, move your phone into another room when you go to bed or move your phone into another room when you decide to work. You know, when you pick up your phone, delay your scrolling by five minutes. You pick up your phone. All right, let me just hold on before I can go to Instagram, whatever it is. I'm just going to delay myself five minutes. Let me put the timer on on my phone. Right, it's just a little bit of a delay. Maybe you replace one scroll session with two minutes of breathing. Maybe you track your screen time and you watch your phone time every day and you try to get it to be 10 minutes less today than

it was yesterday and 10 minutes less tomorrow than it is today. And it's just these little teeny tiny incremental movements in the right direction. It sounds unimpressive. But your brain says, okay, that's safe. And this is the most important part that I want you to get from this. Safe for your brain and your nervous system is sustainable. When you try to add everything all at once, that's not sustainable. But safe and you're not sounding the alarms in your brain and your brain's not saying,

hey, we need to stop this. Safe is sustainable. And this is really, really key here. It's not sexy, right? But this thing feels safe to the brain in the nervous system, and that's what's the most sustainable. Rome wasn't built in a day. It was built brick by brick. And that's how I want you to start to think about changing these little teeny tiny bad habits. And so this philosophy of Kisen works because with your nervous system, it works with it. It works with it, not against it. It's these little sneaky, like, kind of like you're sneaking in a new habit or you're breaking a bad habit, which is making it a little bit less than what it was before

so that your nervous system doesn't even recognize as the changes happening. And for some reason, like I don't know why. I think of it like Jurassic Park like the first one. Like, you know, if you don't move, the T-Rex can't see you. It's almost like you're kind of doing that to your nervous system where it's like, I'm just going to slowly sneak out this bad habit just by making a little bit smaller than what it was yesterday. It's kind of the same thing for habit change. Small is safe and safe is sustainable. And I know it's not sexy,

like you're not going to post on Instagram and brag to everybody of these little teeny tiny changes. But if you do this little by little by little, six months from now, that old bad habit is gone. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. So I would rather,

if it takes six months of just little teeny tiny incremental work to break one bad habit, I would rather break two big bad habits per year because it takes six months for each one of them, then to try to break five habits at one time, shock the system, derail my nervous system, and then six months from now, nothing's changed, which is how it usually happens for people when they're trying to break bad habits. So, Kaysen is really important, alone isn't enough. You know, here's where most people, when they work on productivity and advice and all that stuff, it's this is where they kind of miss the mark. Like, you can improve 1% per day, and that's important. That's a beautiful thing. But if you don't know where you're improving or

why you're improving, you'll quit when it gets uncomfortable because you will get uncomfortable. So you need direction. And that's where the second Japanese system comes in, which is Ikigai. Iki-guy is my second favorite Japanese technique, and it roughly translates to a reason for being, right? Your reason for being. Basically, your ikigai is your reason for being alive. It's the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be rewarded or paid for. But I want to simplify that for this episode, because once again, the more simple, the better. And I want to simplify it for you. Ikegai for today is the reason for getting better and the reason why it matters. So the reason why you're breaking that habit, how it will affect your life, how it will affect your children's lives, how it will affect your spouse's life.

So if someone is trying to quit drinking, Kisen, which is the first one I talked about, says, hey, let's just reduce one drink per week. But then you put Ike guy on top of that, and Iiki guy asks, who do I want to become? Like, what kind of father do I want to be? What type of mother do I want to be? What type of partner do I want to be? What type of son or daughter or brother or sister or business owner or CEO do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to live? What life are you creating?

And you're basically taking this small habit breaking and you're attaching it to the purpose of why you're here and you're attaching to the purpose of why you want to break that habit and you find purpose from it. So the purpose is to uncover your deepest meaning here in life and to have your action line up with that. And so who are you trying to become and why? When people don't have like a true ikigai or a true purpose, they will almost always like 99.9% of the time default to comfort. You need a purpose. You need a direction of where you're trying to go and what you're trying to build and who you're trying to make yourself into. You have to have something that you're shooting for in this life at all times. Every person listens podcast, you need something that you're

working towards because that gives you purpose. And so instead of just being like, oh, I want to stop drinking and just one drink per week, you start to think about your entire life purpose, what's important to you, you're here, your North Star, who you want to be as a father, who you want to be as a husband, who you want to be as a business owner, and you can see how the act of drinking less and less actually lines up and is in full alignment with who you're trying to be in this world. Because most people are like, I'm trying to break a habit. They have no reason why they're trying to break that habit. And so I ask this question to people all the time, and I rarely, rarely get a solid, concise answer

that's on point. It's a hard question, but it's the simplest question. The question is, what do you want? If you're here and you're doing things every day and you don't know what you want in all areas of your life, your entire life, your relationships, your money, your career, your friendships, who you are as a parent, then what the hell are you doing here? Like, what do you want is the most important question? What do you want in your entire life? What do you want your relationships. What do you want in your your friendships? What do you want in your bank account? What the hell are you doing here if you don't have any idea what you're trying to do with all of these? Imagine if you got invited on a friend's boat. Then you get onto the boat and you're,

you know, whatever, on the coast of Florida. And you're like, all right, cool, what are we going to do? And your friend just points out to the middle of the ocean says, I don't, we're just going to go 100 miles offshore and just kind of float around and see what happens. You'd be like, no fucking way am I going to let you take me out on that boat? Like there's no way if we're just going to go 100 miles into the ocean just see how it goes. That's how most people live their lives in this world, just floating around aimlessly hoping that life is going to give me what I want. You need direction. You need purpose. You need something that you're working towards. When most people connect to purpose, the discomfort feels bearable.

You can find meaning in the discomfort. And meaningful discomfort is tolerable. So if you're trying to lose weight, you could say, oh, I want to break the habit of eating crappy foods. But if that's all that you have, like you can say, I'm going to eat a little bit less crappy food. And that's where, you know, the Kaizen comes in. But the Ike guy is like the North Star.

I need to eat less shitty food because I'm trying to love. lose 75 pounds so that my heart can be healthy so that I can see my grandchildren get married and I can live longer and healthier and be able to impact the people around me. Right. Now when you go to pick up a chip and you start thinking about your Ikega and you start thinking about your purpose, you're much more likely to put that chip down. If you don't think about it, that chip just tastes too damn good. Right. And so how these two work together, this is the powerful part, you know, because most people either like dream really big, but like act inconsistently or they take small actions, but they have no like real emotional driver direction. But when you

combined Ikegai, which is like your vision in life, in Kaizen, which is these tiny actions, this small incremental constant never ending improvement, you create this massive change in your life and you start to create identity based change. So like an example would be like instead of saying, I want to try to stop procrastinating. That's what so many people, I want to try to stop procrastinating. It's such a bad habit of mine. The way that you would shift that is by creating an ikigai that's important to you and say, like, my ikigai is to build a meaningful life for my wife and for my children.

And that includes traveling with them and showing them the world. And I want to take them to Spain next year. Then I can connect how not procrastinating and how taking. action connects with Spain. If I don't, then I can sit around and be like, oh, I don't really feel like taking action today. So I can connect taking action with Spain in my mind, and I can see how Spain connects to a meaningful life for my wife and for my children. So now I'm much more likely to take that action. And so you're going from thinking about procrastinating to thinking about if I take action, it aligns with my purpose and think of how it's going to change my

wife, my wife's life and my children's life. And then I'll be able to create a completely different set of circumstances for myself, for my wife, for my family, for my children. Right. And then Kaizen comes in after that, which is what's the most meaningful action that I can take right now? And then I just start with five focused minutes on that action. Just one small task that's in the direction of taking that action to stop the procrastination. One uncomfortable social, media video so that I can grow my following for my business. Now, the action that I'm taking isn't about discipline. It's about alignment. It's about my purpose. It's about how the action is going to change my life and my family's life. It's about how much I'm going to enjoy being in Spain with my

family and going from Barcelona to Valencia to this. And it's just like to San Sebastian. It's like, oh my gosh, it's going to be so much more amazing. And I'm like, okay, I could probably take this action because it'll be fun to go to Spain. So it's about so much more than just doing it for the sake of doing it or just doing it for the sake of making money or forcing yourself to do something you don't want to do. Believe me, it's so much easier to take action from a place of purpose instead of force. And on the neuroscience angle, it's really important to understand. So when you look at the brain, breaking habits is difficult because habits are stored in your basal ganglia, they're automatic, and they conserve energy. And so when you try to override with force,

you activate your amygdala, which is your threat response and where all of your fear is, you activate cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it creates a stress loop neurologically. But Kaizen kind of sneaks in the back door. It avoids triggering that threat with a little teeny tiny movements forward. And then your ikigai, your purpose, activates dopamine, which is motivation, which is goal pursuit. It activates your prefrontal cortex for future planning. And so now you're getting your brain and the networks in your brain to start working in your favor by using both of these. So now you have, instead of like fear and willpower and force, you have purpose, you have safety, and you have action. And that's what's really powerful for it.

And so when you look at it, let's create a really, really simple way to go through it. Okay. step number one we're going to have a three-step system number one you need to identify the habit that you need to break what's the habit that's draining my life be very specific number two find your purpose behind changing it ask like what would change in my life if i got rid of this who would i become why does it matter to me deeply how does it affect my family you know you'll work harder if you bring up your family than you work for just yourself just so you know and then step number three is to apply kison make it the smallest possible move, not impressive, not dramatic, just a small direction, like, small a little step in the right direction, something sustainable. The journey of a thousand miles

begins with a single step. What's the next step? So if somebody wants to exercise, don't start with 60 minutes of exercise, just start with thinking about how you're doing it for yourself, you're doing it for your family so that you can live longer so that you can, you know, dance with your grandchildren. And then that tiny step forward, put your gym clothes on. Like, no joke, this is what I do. I did it this morning. I didn't want to work out today. I was like, I'm just going to put my gym clothes on, and then I'll eventually probably find myself in my gym. Guess what? Did it work? Yeah, is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it effective? Yes. Because consistency beats intensity. I will always bet on the person who's the most consistent over the most intense or the most talented, the most

driven person. Consistency is just like, hey, I always show up. And so you could break bad habits by attacking them, enforcing them. Or you could just outgrow them. And Kizen grows you slowly. And Ikega just kind of pulled you forward emotionally. And eventually, the old habit doesn't fit who you are anymore. And now that's identity change. And that identity that you now have is a different person and the old habit doesn't line up with it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. And if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast,

you can go ahead and go to coach with rob.com. Once again, coach with rob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.