The Mindset Mentor - How To Create Happiness & Find Your Potential
Episode Date: July 26, 2024Today we're diving deep into the secrets of creating happiness and unlocking your true potential. After 17 years of personal growth, I've realized that real freedom and self-development are more about... subtracting the obstacles that hold us back rather than adding more to our lives. I'll share my analogy of life as a flowing river, where fears, guilt, and insecurities act as boulders disrupting our flow. Together, we'll learn how to identify and remove these barriers to let our true selves shine. If you're ready to transform your life, join me on this journey! And for those who want to go even deeper, check out Mindset Mentor Plus for exclusive content, detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and much more. Let's get started!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 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
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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 podcast episode. Here I put
out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can
improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if that interests you, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. Today, I am going to teach you something
that took me 17 years of working on myself to find out. And I'm going to teach you what I have found
is kind of the true, only true path to freedom. Because we all want freedom. We want to be free
from our mind. We want financial freedom. We want location freedom. We want freedom to do what we want, when we want, with whoever we want.
In this life, we are all on a path of self-realization. Whether you realize it or not,
that's really what we're all doing here. And so we're going to talk today about rediscovering
who you truly are and how to actually bring out all of your potential into this world.
How to identify your potential and then how to get out of your own way so you're not blocking your potential anymore.
Because we all came into this world who we truly are.
These infinite beings that can create and do whatever we want to in this world.
But at some point in time, we lost it along the way.
We learned how to be somebody for our mother and our father.
We learned how to be somebody for our teachers, how to be somebody for society,
how to be somebody to get the grades that we wanted
and the acceptance that we wanted in relationships.
And so we became somebody else and lost ourselves along the way.
Somehow we lost ourselves and we picked up guilt.
We picked up insecurities. We picked up fear. We've picked up, I'm not good enough. So we
picked up embarrassment. We lost ourselves in some way. And we think that these things are the
problem, but they're not. They're actually a way to the solution. And so when you think, oh, guilt,
guilt is my problem. Shame, guilt is my problem.
Shame, shame is my problem. My insecurities are my problems. My fears are my problems. My
embarrassment, all of that are my problems. Those are not the problems. Those are actually the
things that you need to work through to rediscover yourself. And so I'm going to give you an analogy
that tends to help people, right? Imagine a river, okay? It's just nice, beautiful, flowing
river. And I always talk about in life how everyone has their own river, you know, in life. You come
up to it and it is your path in life. You just got to jump in and figure out what's right for you.
It's your life path. It's who you are. It's what you do here. No one else can enter this river but
you. But what I want you to do is I want you to just imagine a perfectly calm river that's just flowing. And now imagine that you're floating
down this river and there's a bunch of big boulders that end up getting in the way. And
when you see a boulder in the middle of a river that's just nicely flowing, what happens? It
obstructs the flow. And what happens? It makes the water really
rough. It makes it turbulent. You can go whitewater rafting at that point. And so a very calm,
peaceful river becomes very rough, becomes turbulent. Well, that river is basically your
true self. And every boulder that is inside of it, that fear, that worry, that insecurity, that guilt, that shame, that
personality that you've built to be accepted by other people are just boulders that are put into
the water. And so you have this beautiful flowing river that just turns into a shit show because
there's so many boulders that we've just thrown into the water. And so what happens is we like
to look away from the rocks. We like
to look away from the boulders and say, oh, I need to just keep working on myself, right? I need to
keep working on myself and that will make it less turbulent. I need to keep reading. That will make
it less turbulent. I need to start going to the gym. That will make it less turbulent. And this
is where I lost for 15, 16, 17 years of working on myself. I was completely unaware of this.
I always thought in self-development, I'm going to develop myself so I can get better. Because
if I get better, I will create more of the life that I want. And that's good and that's fine until
a certain point. And then you realize that I was on the path of thinking that there was addition that was needed.
I needed to add to myself. I needed to become more knowledgeable. I needed to work on myself
more. I needed to add to myself addition in order to get what I wanted. But after working on myself
for a really long time and not helping a little bit, but not really helping the amount that I wanted to, what I realized is that true personal development is not addition.
True personal development is about subtraction.
It's about subtracting all of the things that you've put into that water,
that you've put into it.
It's about subtracting the things that are obstructing the flow of the water.
It's about subtracting the fears, the insecurities, the embarrassment,
the ways that you've lost yourself, the I'm not good enough, the I don't know if I can do this,
I don't deserve this, whatever it might be. And so what I've come to realize is that the actual
path to your growth is not addition, it's subtraction. And what I mean by that, it's the
working of the removal of the boulders.
So I'm going to say this one more time because I really want people to understand it.
After 17 years, I realized that the path to true self-development, true personal growth,
self-development, personal development, spiritual development, all of that is not addition. It is
subtraction. It is removing all of the things from your life that are not actually you, but you kind of lost yourself
along the way through them. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. They are the
things that are in the way of that river just flowing very nicely. So the first step in personal
development is to acknowledge and confront these barriers, to acknowledge and
confront these boulders that we have placed in our own rivers. Not to identify with them and say,
oh yeah, well I am this way. No, no, no, you don't identify. Like if you go, if you're going
whitewater rafting and there's a boulder that's next to you, you don't point to the boulder and
go, oh my God, it's me. That doesn't make any sense. That's stupid, right? So it's not to
identify with them, but to see them as they are. If you're going whitewater rafting, how do you calm that
river if you want to? Remove all the boulders. And so you have to understand that the removal
and the subtraction of those boulders in which you think of yourself and the things that are
holding you back and seeing them and the removal of them as the path to your true greatest self.
If you look away from the river and you're like, well, no, those boulders don't exist.
It doesn't move the rocks. It doesn't move them. And so it's not about the avoidance of them.
It's about the removal of the blockages. And the thing that I've come to find is what most people
try to look away from their pain. They try to look away from the trauma. They try to look away from the things that have happened to them in their past, and they try
to act like they didn't happen. And in turn, what happens is that people never really overcome
their traumas. They never overcome the things that happened to them. And it can be painful.
I promise you this. It can be painful to go back and relive some things from your childhood,
from your heartbreaks,
from your being cheated on, your divorces, whatever it might be. But you've probably heard
me say, and I've said it over and over again on this podcast, the cave that you're afraid to enter
holds the treasure that you seek. That cave that you're afraid to go into is where your freedom
lies. So the cave that you're afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek. That is where your freedom is.
Acting like it's not there is not going to make you free.
And I promise you this, it's not always easy.
In fact, it's never easy.
Almost never easy.
We'll put it that way.
But it will make your life so much better.
The way I like to see going back in safely, whether this is journaling through something,
meditating through something, seeing a therapist or a coach to work with you through these things,
the way that I see it is kind of like something happened to you in your past and it's like
breaking a bone. And if you break a bone and then that bone doesn't get set properly and it grows
a little bit off center, the only way to fix that bone
later on in life is to break it again and reset it properly.
And sometimes that's what it feels like when you go back and you relive some of these things
to reset them properly.
Because a lot of times what happened to you when you were younger was you processing life
as a child.
You were processing life as an eight-year-old.
you processing life as a child. You were processing life as an eight-year-old. Now, as a 38-year-old,
you can go back and reprocess it as an adult in a safe way with a whole lot more intelligence and emotional intelligence to see things from a different perspective. And so the cave that
you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek. So here's what we do. The first thing is to admit the boulders. Write them down. Write down all of your fears. What are you afraid of in this life? Write down all of your guilt, the things that you're feeling guilty for, the things that you say to yourself in your head, all of your shit talking, the things that you say to yourself, write it all down, put it on a piece of paper so you can see it
physically in front of your eyes. Write down all of the things that are in the way of you and your
greatest self, your true self. And what I want you to do is I want you to see them and I want you to
try to disidentify from them. And what I mean by that is you don't get caught up in them.
You see them.
It's like watching a movie, right?
Like if you've ever, if you go to like a really good movie,
the really good movie, really good actors,
like you get caught up in the movie, don't you? You can put yourself in the character's shoes
and you can feel what they're feeling.
You can get there and you notice that your heartbeat
is just like beating because you're
so nervous for them. You're so excited for them or you're so hoping that they don't get caught,
whatever it might be. And you're in the movie, even though you're just sitting on your couch
watching it. And so it can feel the exact same way. We can get caught up in our thoughts,
in our heads. We can get caught up in our emotions. We can get caught up in all of that stuff.
But you really have to understand those things that you wrote down on a piece of paper are not you. Those are the things that are
in the way of you and your true self. And you have to learn to let go of these things. You have to
learn to work through them. You need to look at them and you need to say, okay, my guilt that I
have for this thing that I did five years ago, I'm going to forgive myself. I did the best that I
could at that moment because if I could have done better, I would have done better. Now,
hindsight's 20-20. Of course, you can see how you could have done something different, but you did
what you thought was best at that point. I did what I thought was best at that point.
I understand it and I forgive myself. And you let go of it. You start to journal through it.
The fear that you have,
the being a people pleaser. Okay, I can see how I'm a people pleaser, but I can see how that's
not actually truly me. I can see that that is a behavioral adaptation that was required of me
to keep the peace in my family when I was a child. It was a behavioral adaptation that gave me some
form of benefit, but I'm ready to let go of it because it's not my true self. And you can see those things on a piece of paper and you can journal
through them in how they are not truly you. The act of you letting go requires you to observe
all of these and not to try to suppress them or any of that. Don't try to suppress them,
any of that stuff. Don't try to fix them. Just say, hey, here's the way
that it is. If you get emotional from it, allow yourself to get emotional. Relax into it. Release
it. Surrender to your emotions and allow them to flow through you. A lot of times people will go
and they'll start journaling something that was tough that happened at one point in time and they
start crying and they're like, I don't know why I'm crying. You don't have to know why you're
crying. It's probably your body's been holding on to that so tightly for so long that this crying is just an emotional release
that's been stuck in your body. And so don't fight it when it comes up. Just allow the emotions just
to kind of flow through you and just be what they are. Because if you resist it, it persists. What
you resist persists. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to identify all of these barriers,
all of these boulders that are inside of the water that are causing so much turbulence in your life,
but are not your true self. And by the removal of these rocks, of these boulders, our emotional
barriers, we allow the water, which is our innate energy, to kind of just flow freely.
And you allow your true self to start to come out, start to come through. And one thing that
you'll notice is when you start to remove these things and let them go, it's not fighting them,
it's not resisting them. It's just like, hey, I see that you had some benefit for me at some
point in time in my life. I appreciate you for being in my life the way that you were,
but now it's time for me to release you. The process doesn't involve changing the
river's course, making it go around a different bend to get around all of the boulders. It's
about removing the boulders and letting the river just flow in its true direction. And I get it.
It's not, it sounds easy. I'm going to be honest with you. It's not very easy.
It requires significant personal work, but I promise you that it's worth it. It brings you
closer to this state of inner peace. And so, you know, for me, one of the things that I realized
is that I had this feeling just based off of how my childhood was that I was kind of like,
almost like addicted to stress. And I remember listening to a podcast
and there was a podcast host was asking a therapist
and he was like, hey, can people get addicted to stress?
And therapist was like, yeah, absolutely.
Especially children who have, you know,
turbulent households or parents that have drug
or alcohol issues.
They become addicted to their stress
because it is so omnipresent when they're younger
that as they get older,
they continue to find ways to stress
themselves out just because it feels normal to them. I was like, holy shit, I think that's me.
And so then I started looking at myself and I started saying, hey, the stress that I feel,
it's not me. Are there things that I do throughout my day that stress me out more?
Oh my gosh, I'm drinking a fucking shitload of coffee. Well, that kind of stresses me out.
Okay, I'm usually putting way too much on my plate.
Well, that stresses me out.
I'm doing things I don't necessarily want to do.
That stresses me out.
And so I looked at it and I was like, that's not truly who I am.
Like if I look back to videos of me when I was playing as a kid, I was never a stressed
out little kid that was there.
So that was a behavioral adaptation based off of my past in some sort of way.
And so I started identifying and it wasn't like a quick fix. One time I just thought of it and it was gone. It was
like, I started noticing where I was doing things that were stressing me out that weren't a hundred
percent necessary, but it felt natural for me. And then I was like, is this something I actually
truly want to do? It's not. Okay. Will it stress me out? It will. What if I just say no to it this
time and just try it out?
And so the long term of doing this is it will lead you to definitely be way more calm,
to feel more balanced, more fulfilled. And then really to have a more enriched life is because
your river becomes more calm. Your energy becomes more calm because there's no giant boulders
sitting in there making it
turbulent and messing up the calm water that's who you truly are. And so I hope this analogy
kind of helps you understand that each of us are this way. All of us have this beautiful flowing
river and you come up to it and some of you guys have a couple boulders and some of you guys out
there have a whole couple miles of whitewater rafting and giant boulders that you just need to
start picking through. And it might be another year, another two years, five years. It might be
a lifelong journey of you just removing these boulders, but I promise you one by one by one,
as you remove them, your life becomes way more calm and your inner peace becomes much more
prevalent than the inner stress, the inner turmoil, the judgment, the lack of self-love, all of that.
So try it out. Identify your barriers, identify your boulders, and start removing them to find
your true self. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode,
the best way that you can say thanks is to share this in some sort of way. So share this on your
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a dollar a day and will massively change your life if you implement it. So if you're interested,
mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your
mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.