The Mindset Mentor - How To Reprogram Your Mind (for Positive Thinking)

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Ever feel like you’re stuck in a loop of negativity, no matter how hard you try to stay positive? In this episode, I dive into why positive thinking doesn’t always seem to work — and the key to making it actually stick. I share some personal stories and science-backed insights, plus practical tips to help you break free from the “dirty water” of negative thoughts and create a positive mindset that lasts. If you’re tired of toxic positivity advice and want real strategies to see the good even in tough times, this one’s for you! Grab a seat, and let’s rewire your mind together. 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

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. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, please do me a favor, give us a rating and review on whatever platform you listen to us on. Reason why is not just for the hell of it. Reason why is because basically the more positive ratings and reviews that we get, the more that those platforms show on whatever platform you listen to us on. Reason why is not just for the hell of it. Reason why is because basically the more positive ratings and reviews that we get, the more that those platforms show this podcast to people who have never listened to it before,

which allows us to grow and allows us to hopefully impact more people's lives so that we can just continue to keep changing the world. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm gonna talk to you about positive thinking. I'm gonna talk to you about negative thinking. And then we're gonna actually dive in. Does positive thinking actually help you? Or is there a chance that positive thinking

might actually hurt you? And I'll describe to you why positive thinking doesn't work for a lot of people. And if you are the type of person that wants to make it work, I'll talk about how to make it work for you. And I will say this before we dive in. A lot of people talk trash about being positive. They think it's kind of odd. They think like, oh, of people talk trash about being positive. It's kind of odd. They think like, oh, just ignore the negative. Don't pay attention to the negative. Only focus on positive.

And if anything bad happens, only focus on positive. And it's toxic positivity is what they call it. And really what it comes down to as far as positive thinking is not ignoring the negative. It's really seeing the negative for what it is and saying, hey, can I find a silver lining? And can I turn this negative thing into a positive thing? So basically actively searching for the good in your life when bad stuff happens. And I want you to understand, like, think of the bad things that have happened in your life. I bet now that you're removed from them, I bet you wouldn't want to go through them again, but I bet you probably wouldn't change them if you were given the opportunity. Like for me, if I think about

all the hardships that I went through with my dad, with him being an alcoholic, with him passing away, like for sure, I would like for my dad to be here. He passed away when I was 15. I'm 38 now. You know, it would have been cool to have him around the past 23 years. But I can see how my life was like a perfectly crafted curriculum for me to learn and grow. And I would never want to, would I want him around?

Cool, that would be awesome. Yes. Do I want to lose the lessons that I got from those hardships? No, I wouldn't want to take mine away. And so looking back, I can see the things that I've been through that were hard. You could probably see the things that you've been through that were hard. They're not fun to go through, but they have made you who you are.

And even though they might have seemed bad in the short term, when you go further along and longer and longer down the road, they actually can start to become good. So if that's the case, if the bad things that happen in my life can be lessons, can help me learn, can help me grow, can help me improve, can help me become stronger, I can actually see long term they can be something that actually turns into a positive. So if that's the case, then I can rethink of the quote unquote bad as I'm going through it and understand, hey, maybe there is always a lesson. Maybe the universe brings every challenge into our life so that we can get a lesson, so that we can grow, so that we can become

stronger, so that we can improve and evolve as a human. And listen, this is me coming from a self-proclaimed negative Nancy when I was younger. I was one of the best at finding the negative in anything. I could sniff out any bad in anything good. I can make every excuse as to why I wasn't where I wanted to be. I could find how I was the victim in any circumstance. I could find how I was the victim in any circumstance. But since learning and actually realizing how much better my life could be if I thought positive, I started actually actively finding positive in my life.

And since I have been trying to actively find the positive in the negative, my life has become so much easier and so much better, like way better. Like just living is way better when you can see the world and the universe as something that is working for you, not something that is just happening to you. And it's like, there's a quote that says something like, one of the most important decisions you'll ever make is whether you believe that you live in a hostile universe or a loving universe. And so thinking positive helps you create a better life. And it's actually not bullshit. It's scientifically proven. There's been many studies that have happened on this. Martin Seligman, who did a study, it was called Positive Psychology and Introduction back in 2000, proved that positive emotions and positive thinking

contribute to an individual's well-being and also their success. And he did a whole lot of research in the early 2000s and demonstrated that optimistic people tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful, and they tend to live longer than their pessimistic counterparts. One of my favorite quotes that has to do with this that I found recently was that your mind can make heaven out of hell or it can make hell out of heaven. Your mind can make heaven out of hell or hell out of heaven.

Life is all about your perception and your story that you create around the circumstances of your life. Because if you zoom out to 50,000 foot overview of life, right? You're born and you die. And in between, you have a set of circumstances, sensory things that happen to you. That's it. You're born, you have a bunch of things that happen to you, situations, circumstances, and then you die. The quality of your life comes from the way that you view the things that happen to you. And that's it. That's the simplest way of looking at it. And so when you look at, that's the positive side of it, but if we look at like the negative side,

are there any studies that show what happens when people are more negative? There are. Well, there's many. One of my favorites is Aaron Beck. And Aaron Beck is one of the best psychologists that's ever lived. He's one of the founding doctors of cognitive therapy.

And he has a cognitive therapy of depression. And he discovered that negative thinking patterns are central to the development of and deepening of depression. And he has many studies that showed that patterns like all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, catastrophizing, all of those contribute to depressive symptoms. There was also a study that was done in 2000 by the Mayo Clinic that found that pessimism was associated with a higher risk of mortality. And the study found that pessimists have 19% higher risk of dying over a 30-year period compared to optimists. And so the research showed that there's a link between a pessimistic outlook in life and worse overall health outcomes in someone's life as well. If we just extract from

those lessons we just went through, the three that I spoke about, it seems like negative thinking creates a worse life and positive thinking creates a better life. So then why did I start off saying, hey, positive thinking doesn't work for everybody? Well, let me explain to you. Let me tell you why. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. I had a video. It's funny. I had a video go viral about six years ago and where I showed clean water, dirty water,

putting dirt into water. And I'll explain it all to you. It's funny because I don't know if somebody happened to find that video, but it's been redone multiple times. It's starting to go viral again by other people, which is kind of cool to see. I've seen it on TikTok and Instagram, but basically what I showed is that lots of people talk more negative to themselves than positive. And so in this video, I had a big bowl of water and it was clear. It was a huge,

huge bowl of water and it was just clean water that was in it. And I said, think of every single scoop. I'm sorry, every single negative thought as a was in it. And I said, think of every single scoop, I'm sorry, every single negative thought as a scoop of dirt. And so with every thought, you just put a scoop of dirt in the water, you put a scoop of dirt in water, you put a scoop of dirt in the water. And every positive thought as a scoop of clean water. And so most people, you have this, you know, we're coming to this world, completely clean, beautiful, clean bowl of water. And then we talk negative to ourselves. And we say stuff like, oh, I'm dumb. I'm ugly. I'm fat.

I'm, uh, I'm not what society wants. I'm unlovable. I'm not enough. I'm, uh, I have so many failed relationships, whatever it is. There's so many different things that so many people, you're stupid. You'll never be loved. There's so many things that narratives that people have in their own head. And it's like every single time they speak it five, 10, 20 times a day is like taking that clean water and putting a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it and a scoop of dirt into it. They're like, you know what? Maybe I will start to actually think positive. Maybe I'll try this positive thinking thing and see how it works for me. And so they're like, I'm going to do an affirmation.

I believe in myself, right? And that's like taking the dirty bowl of water and putting one scoop of clean water into it. And then being like, this doesn't work. It's still dirty. Well, of course it doesn't because you have to understand that when you put so much negativity and negativity and negativity and negativity into your mind and then you put a tiny bit of positivity and your life doesn't change, you're like, that doesn't work.

You have to understand you have to do more of it. You have to do more of it. You have to do more of it. And you have to be your biggest fan. You have to be your biggest supporter. You have to learn to change your internal narrative and to start to speak positively to yourself. You have to demand happiness for your life

because we live in a world that can be so negative that we need to work on ourselves and create a positive atmosphere because the world tells us what society wants, what's not acceptable. Your parents tell you what they want. People think that they're not enough. You have failed relationships. You're comparing yourself to Instagram models. There's advertisements that are designed to make you feel like you're not

enough until you buy their product. And it turns us negative. It's impossible to go through life without getting scars. And so we have to wake up at some point and be like, I need to actually create a positive environment within myself. I need to start trying to be my biggest fan. I need to change my internal narrative. I need to be one of my biggest supporters. So when you first hear about positive thinking, you might have a really dirty bowl of water that's in front of you. And you're like, I'm going to try positive thinking for a couple of days. And you try it for a week and you put a couple of water, look for a little bit of water. You put a little bit of water, but it's still dirty because you have way more negativity in there than positive. And you're like, ah, it doesn't work. You know, the water is still going to be more dirty because it's had so

much dirt that's put into it. If you're having more negative thoughts than positive thoughts, the water's always going to be dirty. Positive thinking can't be something that you just try. You have to turn it into a way of life. It has to be something that you do all of the time. You have to be super intentional about it. It is natural for a human to be negative. If you don't believe me, go back to past episodes where I've talked about this, that our negativity bias is a part of the human circuitry. We're negative nowadays, but what that comes from is us naturally trying to protect ourselves and our species trying to protect themselves for millennia at this point. And so it is natural to be more negative as a protection mechanism. And so what we need to do is understand that a mind left to

its own devices will almost always sway towards the negative side. And so we have to actually be intentional about being positive. We have to notice the negative thoughts when they come up because they will come up. And every negative thought that comes up counts as one scoop of dirty water and put the dirt in the water. And if we want to be more positive, we need to replace that one scoop of negative with three scoops of positive. You have to beat the negativity out of your head sometimes. And in the video, the video that I made that went really viral, it was basically what I did.

It was, I was like, you can see this water's still dirty. So this is what you have to do. When I turned on a hose and I put the hose inside of the water and if the hose is in the water long enough, you can start to see it spins out all of the dirt. And after a couple of minutes, there's no more dirt in the water and it's clean again. That's what it has to be. That's how we have to be in our own heads. We have to kind of like, we have to kind of bash positivity into our own heads.

It has to be like omnipresent. We have to be intentional about it. And if you do this, you'll start to notice that your feelings are going to shift. You're not going to feel as bad anymore. You know, and if you do notice yourself shifting into negativity, if you feel yourself feeling bad, the best question to ask yourself is, what was I just thinking?

And in cognitive behavioral therapy, they say there's these things called automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts, we don't even really notice. They're automatic. They just kind of come from the subconscious and immediately hit us. What we do notice is how we feel after that thought. And so what happens is something will happen to us

in our life and then we'll feel something. In between that was an automatic thought that came into our head. So we have to ask ourself, okay, I'm noticing my self shift. I don't feel good. I feel sad. I feel negative.

You have to ask yourself, what was I just thinking? And I gave this example a couple of years ago. I remember this really happening in my life. I was on a podcast. I was interviewed for a podcast. And I was just speaking with the person who was interviewing me. And I've done a lot of podcast interviews over the years. And I was basically just talking about how when I was younger, I couldn't afford therapy. And so I just read books and I got into self-development to try to help fix myself.

Well, this person turned my words into me saying, you don't need to go to therapy, which is not what I said. You don't need to go to therapy. You just need to read books and try to fix yourself. But they basically put that in the comments of the YouTube. And I had seen it. I was looking through it because I saw the video went up on YouTube and I watched it for a few minutes and started reading the comments, which is never a good idea. Don't ever read comments about yourself if you want to keep up your own personal positivity

space. But what did I do? I read the comments and all of them were positive. And I saw this one guy who said this. And I was like, all right, I'm of them were positive. And I saw this one guy who said this and I was like, all right, I'm going to shut my laptop. I'm going to go make some eggs. So I went in, I was making eggs. And about 10 minutes later, I noticed myself feeling really anxious. And I was like, why do I feel anxious? I was like, that's weird. Like I've had a great day. I did my workout. I'm making some eggs. I'm just creating breakfast. And I was like, what was I just thinking? And I went back because I noticed my body shift. I didn't notice my thought shift. I noticed my body shift. I was like, what was I just thinking? And I went back because I noticed my body shift. I didn't notice my thought shift. I noticed my body shift. I was like, what was I just thinking? And I was like, oh, I was

thinking this. I was thinking this. Oh my God, I bet it was the whole thing that happened with that guy. And I was like, what was I just thinking? I was thinking to myself, you know what? I try my hardest to do so much good in the world. And still some people want to take that and try to change it into something different, into their own narrative. And I realized that I was creating my own internal narrative, which made me feel bad. It wasn't the guy who made me feel bad. It was me that made me feel bad based off of my perception of that guy. Right. And so I was like, what are my, what was I just thinking? And I had to then turn into kind of like my own psychologist at that point, which that guy would probably hate that comment. And what you have to do is you have to ask yourself when you notice your body shift,

what was I just thinking? And you start to write it out or you start to talk to yourself out loud. You start to think about it. And then what you do is you test the validity of your thoughts. Are those true? Like whatever it is that you're thinking, your beliefs, your thought patterns, are they true? And when I say true, I mean written into the fabric of the universe. Or are they just a thought or a belief that you've held for a long time? A belief is not truth, just so you know. This is very, very important to know. Your beliefs don't mean, my beliefs don't mean, absolute truth.

Your belief is just a thought that you continue to think. So if you notice that something made you feel bad, was negative thinking there? And if negative thinking is there, can you pull those weeds? And then can you do something that's called cognitive reframing? Where if you're going to think negative about something, can you force yourself to cognitively reframe what you were just thinking and to think the exact opposite and to try to see a different perspective. Because when you can see a different perspective, you start to realize that your quote unquote belief might not be as strong as you thought it

was. And so I always say it's like most of our lives, it's like we have this thought pattern, this belief, and it's like us being on one side of the debate table. And when you cognitively reframe, it's you going, I'm going to actively go to the other side of the debate table, and I'm going to try to debate my own thoughts and my own beliefs and my own thinking patterns. And what you notice is that you can actually take your negative thinking patterns and turn them into something positive. You can realize that there is always another perspective than just the perspective that you're seeing in your own. And so when you start to think about it,

if all of these studies have done is show that positive thinking help you, then maybe it doesn't really hurt you. It is something that you can do. It just needs to be something that becomes omnipresent and something that you do actively, often throughout the day. So that's what I got for you for today's episode.

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And with that, I'm gonna leave you 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.