The Mindset Mentor - How to Grow From Your Pain

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Have you wondered why the hardest moments shape you the most? In this episode, I show why your pain isn’t a punishment but a teacher and how avoiding it keeps you stuck. If you’re struggling right now, this episode will help you turn pain into power. High performers don’t wait for clarity, they create it. This Mindset University call will help you see your blind spots and your next level. Grab your spot here 👉 https://www.coachwithrob.com/mindset-university-call-rob   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 am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself, and we've been doing it for over 10 years. So if you want to grow your life and you want to grow yourself, hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to grow from the most painful things that have happened to you in your life. Because some of the worst things that have happened to you might not be

things that you chose, but they might be the reason why you're here. Because your pain isn't a punishment. Maybe it's the thing that's preparing you to become the person that you can become. But if you ignore the pain that you've had in your life, I promise you this, it will repeat over and over and over again. But if you grow from it, it can set you free. If you don't, it can keep you stuck in cycles forever. And no amount of money or success will make up for what you haven't healed in your life. And the life that you want will always feel just a little bit out of reach for you until you learn to get the lessons and grow from your pain. Because people think that they want an easy life. I'm telling you this, you don't want an easy life. An easy life doesn't make a good

life. A hard life, when faced with courage, can make an extraordinary one. Your life doesn't get easier. You just get better. And so your pain has a purpose. And let me hit you with this so you have an idea. Your pain is either going to be your prison or it's going to be your greatest teacher. And it doesn't just go away and disappear because time has passed. Unprocessed pain doesn't just leave, it leaks into many other areas of your life, into your relationships, into your self-worth, into your confidence, into your parenting, your children, into your ambition, into your anxiety. You have to understand that pain that is unhealed that is within you and not used to grow is basically like a virus. And when you look at a virus, what exactly does a

virus do? A virus comes in, it spreads all over the place, and it attacks. the host. That's exactly what your unhealed pain does. It spreads all over. It gets into your relationships, your friendships, your ambition, it gets into your relationship with your children, and it attacks the host, you. And the mistake that most people make is going, well, I've got this pain, I've got this trauma, I've got things that are just really painful. I don't want to think about. So they try to outrun their pain instead of learning to grow from it. So they they scroll instead of avoiding the silence where all of their stuff kind of bubbles to the surface. Or they work nonstop to avoid the feelings. They fill every single second of their day

so that you don't have to feel what's deep down inside that's actually hurting. I did this when I was younger. I became a workaholic. Some people get addicted to food or scrolling or alcohol or drugs. I became addicted to work because if I was constantly working, which I did about 130 hours a week, I was from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every single day, Monday through Sunday for three years, then I didn't have enough downtime to think about the painful things that happened to me in my past. No way. I was too busy to be able to do it. But here's the truth that people don't really want to say, and they have to understand that pain is not the enemy. Avoiding pain is the enemy. Let this land with you for a second. Your pain is your greatest teacher.

Your pain will give you your purpose. The cave that you're afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek. And you've got to constantly be reminding yourself of that. And like I'll give you my story, for instance. So if you've never heard it before, when I was 10 years old, my parents got divorced because my dad was an alcoholic. I didn't really understand it back then. I knew he had some problems.

I didn't really understand what was going on, but like I felt it as a human, right? I felt unsafe. I felt the instability. I felt the fear, I felt the confusion of not knowing what version of my dad I was going to get from moment to moment. Then when I was 15, my dad passed away from the same thing that had been stealing him from me for years, which was alcoholism, because he never healed from his pain of his past and his father's suicide. So I lost my dad and never really got to know him. And that pain of going through that wrecked me when I was a kid.

but it also really woke me up because I saw with my own two eyes what happens when somebody does not heal from their pain. I lived in the house with somebody who does not heal from their pain and saw how running from the pain and trying to numb from the pain eventually will end in your demise. And so I saw what unhealed trauma does to a man. And I saw how numbing the pain doesn't erase it. it just multiplies it over and over again. And it lit something up inside of me. And it really gave me a mission. First thing that I decided was I need to figure out how to heal myself.

Right. So I was like, I'm going to heal myself. When I first found personal development, the reason why I'm so obsessed with mindset and working myself in psychology and personal development because when I first found personal development when I was 19 years old back in 2006, I was like, oh my God, this is what I've been waiting for.

We didn't have enough money for me to go to a therapist. So I was like, I'm going to try to see if I can work on myself. And the more that I worked on myself, the more that I felt like I had gone deeper in traumatic things and memories that were hard and started working from them and finding some purpose and healing from these things. I started to heal myself and I started to learn how to actually heal. And then when I was 22 years old, 21 years old, I was running an office and I had salespeople that were under me and I started working with them. I started teaching them how to heal themselves and how to work with their mind. And they started healing. And I was like,

this is amazing. So I started after learning how to heal myself, I started teaching other people how to do it. And then that pain that was like my deepest pain of my life, the worst moment of my life of my father passing away, like it gave me my life's purpose. Then I would not be sitting here today without it. And so I kind of felt like I learned how to free myself. I'm not going to say I'm 100% free from my trauma. I don't think I'll ever get 100% free from everything. But I learned how to free myself from a lot of it and create a great life. And I was like, I feel obligated to teach this to people. Like, I feel like I've had like the secret sauce that's helped my life become amazing. I want to teach us to other people. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show.

I didn't set out to make the biggest mindset podcast in the world. I just wanted to help whoever would listen. I just wanted to help people who needed help. I wanted to help people who were just going through the same shit that I went through or going through the same thing that my dad went through that he didn't heal from. And then over the past 10, 11 years, we just created the biggest mindset podcast in the world. But it wasn't the actual intention. And it gave me my life's purpose. And so I want you to think about for you in your life, the hardest moments that you've gone through, the relationship with your mom, the relationship with your parents, the breakups that you've had, the heartbreaks that you've had, the traumas, the grief that you've had. Think about

the hardest things that you've been through in your life. The abuse, the addiction, the breakup, whatever it might have been, the loss, the rock bottom. And I want you to think about how that helped you become who you are. Like, think about who you became after that moment, if you chose to grow. The self-awareness that you started to develop, the resilience that you started to develop, you know, like you started getting more resilient as a human, the empathy that you were able to learn for other people who are going through so many crazy things as well, the boundaries that you learned to finally set in your life, the purpose that got clear, whatever it might have been. I realize that the hardest moments in your life, you don't want to go back and

ever do them again. I don't want to go back to any of my hard moments ever again. But you'd never take them away. And the reason why is because you learned so many lessons from it. You became a better person from it. If you're going through hell right now, Now, you're going to pull some lessons from it. Hopefully, if you're not just trying to push away and act like it's not there. The pain of these things in your past, the pain that you're going through now didn't come to destroy you. It came to develop you into the person that you can be. But the catch is just because pain can help you grow doesn't mean that it will.

Like, you actually have to seek it out. You have to seek out the pain in the things that have happened to you in the past. and pull the lessons from you have to choose it like you have to choose to sit with it and think about it and to feel the things that you tried to not feel years ago you have to sit down and ask yourself questions like what was that thing here to teach me or if you're going through right now what are you here to teach me right now what lessons can i pull from this how can i become better i'm going to tell you this and this is why most people avoid it it's not easy it's not fun in fact it's probably the hardest thing that you can go through. You know, it doesn't feel comfortable. In fact, it's probably

the least comfortable thing that you can do. But here's the way that I think about it. Trauma is basically like a, imagine that you have a broken bone, right? And the bone is eventually going to grow back together. But imagine that when your bone grows back together, it doesn't set correctly. It kind of offsets a little bit. And it's not in the right place. That's kind of like what trauma is. It's a break in you. And then if it's not healed, it doesn't heal correctly. So it's kind of like a bone that didn't get put perfectly back together. It's a little bit off to the side.

It's going to cause you pain. It's going to cause you discomfort. It's going to cause you a lot of issues throughout your entire life. What's the only way to fix that broken bone? You've got to re-break the bone and set it correctly. That's kind of what it's like to go back and try to heal from your trauma. Is it breaking the bone? Is that going to feel good?

Hell no, it's not going to feel good. good. Is it a lot of pain? Is it a lot of discomfort? Is there a lot of rehab and working through it? Yes. But the benefit is once it's healed, you never have to re-break that bone and heal from it again. You just have to do it once. But on the other side of that uncomfortable feeling, it's a newer, more freer, happier, stronger version of you. And, you know, there is a cost to not processing your pain. So if you're going through pain right now, there's a cost. There's a cost. cost if you're just going to try to avoid it. If you have pain from your past, there is a cost from you avoiding it if you decide not to actually learn from it. And it's usually one that you'll

pay without even really noticing it. And it's not like it just goes away. Like, think about this, right? If your dog poops on the floor, that poop doesn't just disappear. You have to clean it up. It is there until you clean it up. You can walk around it and you can not look at it and you can act like it's not there, but it's there until you clean it up. That poop is your unhealed stuff. You can act like it's not there. Some of you are sidestepping all day long around poop in your house and acting like it's not there, but just because you're acting like it's not there doesn't mean it's not there. And all of your problems from your life today come from the things that you have not healed in your past. I promise you that. All of your problems today come

from your unheeled stuff in the past that you haven't grown from. If you don't trust people or you have problems trusting people in a relationship, whatever it might be, it's not because the people that you're having trouble with right now today hurt you. It's because somebody else hurts you in your past. You haven't healed from that. If you're afraid of somebody cheating on you or breaking up with you or breaking your heart, it's not because it's that person.

It's because it's already happened to you in your past. The pain that you have in your past is what creates your fear in the future. If you have a short fuse today, if you explode over small things, you weren't born with it. It's not your personality. It's not the moment that's setting you off. It's the memory underneath all of it. Because anger is always just bubbling under the surface for you because that's something that's unheeled within you. If you numb in your life or you feel less joy than you feel like you show,

it's not because you're broken. It's because you probably learned in your past that you had to shut down parts of you in order to survive. You had to shut down because you had so much emotional attachment to somebody that just kept destroying you and destroying you and destroying you to protect yourself. You had to shut it down. And so you need to heal yourself in order to open back up and feel it again. If you're a people pleaser today, it's because you learned not to stand out as a child. Maybe you lived in a chaotic household and you didn't want to cause more chaos. So you became a people pleaser or the good kid. Or maybe you learned that you always had to do what dad said. And so you learn to be a people

pleaser. That's an unhealed child that's in you. And that's the thing that holds you back the most today. So avoiding the pain doesn't protect you. It prolongs the pain. It multiplies the pain. It makes it worse. And if you don't heal it now, you're going to have to deal with it later. It's just going to continue to get worse. And you're going to deal with it in many different ways. If you don't heal it, broken relationships, anxiety, sadness, depression, burnout, self-sabotage, chronic just dissatisfaction with your life. So if you're going to suffer, like make it count at least. If you're going to suffer at least let it serve you in some sort of way. If you're going to have to walk through hell, you might as well come back with some fire, right? And so you have

to understand and start seeing this pain, these things that you're either going through right now or that you've been through in your past as the most important things that have ever happened to you in your life. Not things that you want to avoid. The most important things have happened to you in your life. Because buried inside of it is your growth,

is your empathy, is your compassion, is your resilience. And for many people listening to this podcast, your purpose. Most people think purpose is only found in passion or only things that they love. And sure, that can be that. way for some people. But what I've found is that for many people, your purpose is actually found in your

pain. It's not always found in what you love. For some people, your purpose is found in what you have survived. Because when you survive something that could have broken you and you heal from that thing, you become somebody who can help others that are walking the same path that are going, you know, if you heal from something today, three years from now, if you keep healing and keep working and herself, you now have the skill set to help other people heal from that in some sort of way. That can make an amazing life. And so my call to action for you is this, right? There's a couple different steps.

Number one, you have to stop running from your pain. Like sit with your pain, sit with your story, journal on the hardest moments of your life. What did you learn from it? What did it teach you? Why is it your greatest teacher? Why are you grateful for your biggest challenges? That's one of the things every morning I wake up and when I get through my gratitude practice, one thing that I always say is thank you for all of my challenges. Thank you for the hardest moments

in my life. Because I want to be grateful for those things. I want to change my perception on them, not be mad at them, but to learn from them. So that's the first thing. Stop running. Number two, get better at asking questions. Like ask better questions. What was this thing trying to teach me? What strength did I learn in that season? What was I supposed to have learned from this? How did I grow? What lessons maybe was I supposed to get that I haven't gotten yet? The third thing, try to turn your pain into purpose. Maybe it's time for you to help others heal from what you've healed from. Maybe you've healed really well and you've done a really good job and you can start to actually help other people heal from what you went through at some point of time. Or maybe it's just

time to be more intentional with your own growth. And then the last thing I really want you to think about is just try to honor your story. Your story doesn't make you weak. It makes you a human. And when you own your story, like all of your story, you own all of your story. all of you, you become dangerous to all of the patterns that try to keep you stuck. You become aware of how they all have held you back. You're able to get past all of them and that they don't hold you back in any sort of way anymore. And so what I really want you to understand is that your pain, please don't waste it. It wasn't random.

It's not meaningless. It's there because something inside of you was supposed to be built from it. You know, strength has a cost, wisdom. It has a price. You know, purpose comes from a lot of pain. And so I want to leave you real quickly with this real quick poem that just kind of summarizes all of this, okay? Imagine that you could talk to the creative of the universe before your birth, and you could pick the person that you become. And so you say, I want to be courageous.

And the creator replies, then I will give you monsters that terrify you so that you can conquer them. You say, I want to be patient. So the creator replies, then I will make you work hard. and longer so that you can learn to wait. You say, I want to be wise. And the creator replies, then I will give you failures that crush your spirit so that you can learn the value of judgment. And then you say, man, that sounds like a rough life. Can you give me a good life? And the creator replies, just like we measure the quality of a blacksmith by the strength of his steel, I measure you by what you are at the end, not the fire and the hammer that it took to make you. A good life

isn't a life that's easy. A good life makes you into a good person. And that my son is a hard life. So that's what I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me if I ever shared on the Instagram stories, tag me in it Rob Dial Jr. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about coaching with me outside this podcast, you can 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.