The Mindset Mentor - How To Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, you probably want to hit that subscribe button. If you're the type of person who's into neurology, psychology, early childhood development, how all of those come together to make you who you are and how to use all of them to your benefit to learn and grow and become a better person, hit that subscribe button. I put out episodes four times a week that cover exactly that. Today, we're going to be diving deep into your subconscious mind, and I'm going to teach you step by step how to reprogram your subconscious mind.

Starting point is 00:00:40 And when you look at our brains, at our minds, our minds work very, very similar to a sophisticated computer. Our minds and computers operate on a set of programs. And so when someone says you have been programmed, it doesn't mean that your parents specifically sat down and said, ooh, this is what we're going to make sure that he is, she is like. But really what it comes down to is we pick up patterns, which aka are basically programs. You know, if you buy a computer with no programs on it, it's completely useless. It's not going to do very much. It needs a program to access the internet, a program to access PowerPoint, a program to play music, everything that it runs off of are different computers.

Starting point is 00:01:25 to play music, everything that it runs off of are different computers. I'm sorry, different programs. Your brain works exactly the same way. Our brains are extremely complex, far more complex than any man-made computer. And it has very similar principles in the fact that like a computer, the brain requires programming to function and run effectively in the world that we live in, you know, in society, in order to be able to be domesticated, in order to work in society, right? You know, when you go and you purchase a new computer, it doesn't, you know, perform straight out of the box. You need to install everything that you need to install in order for it to get better, in order for you to do everything that you want. You know, if you're the type of person who wants to record a podcast, to get better in order for you to do everything that you want.

Starting point is 00:02:06 You know, if you're the type of person who wants to record a podcast, well, then you might need GarageBand on your MacBook or you might need another program, Logic, whatever it might be. The human brain, especially in really early developmental stages, requires installation of quote unquote programs. And these are all just basically programs. These can be behavioral patterns. They can be thought patterns that are all acquired from our environment and all of our experiences that we have. You know, for me, my son was just born earlier this month and it's awesome. So he's, you know, at this point today, he is 19 days old. And it's cool for me to see because he's basically a computer with no programs built into him yet,

Starting point is 00:02:46 right? The only real programs he knows how to do is basically eat. He knows how to go to the bathroom. He knows how to cry and not a whole lot more than that. You know, he doesn't even really have a program that can hold his head up at this point. So he's basically a clean slate. And most of his programs, I know from what I've been doing for so long, most of his programs on the world, on society, on the way that he thinks, his behaviors, what he thinks of himself, are going to be taught to him by myself and my wife, the way that we directly interact with him over the course of his first basically seven years. The way that we directly interact with him, but also what he sees us doing

Starting point is 00:03:28 and the way that we interact with the world. He's going to learn how to treat a woman in the way that I treat his mother. He's going to learn how relationships work by the way that our relationship works. So it's not always directly what we tell the children, but it's also what they see. And the thing that you want to know is that kids will not always do what you say but they will almost always become who you are and for those of you guys that are parents that might scare the shit out of you and it might give you more of a reason why you need to work even harder on yourself is because you can tell your children to to do something but they're not always going to do it

Starting point is 00:04:03 but they can see you do something and they are constantly picking up traits and behaviors and ways to act and ways to think and ways to speak to themselves and other people by just watching you exist. And, you know, eventually with my son, the program of eating solid food will be installed. The program of walking will be installed. How to treat other people will be installed. How to treat himself will be installed, how to treat other people will be installed, how to treat himself will be installed, how to speak to himself, how to act when he is challenged, what to do when he falls down. Every single program that determines his thoughts,

Starting point is 00:04:37 his behaviors, and ultimately where he ends up in life. And so from zero to two years old is the most important time, but zero to seven is when we are the most programmable. And so most of the times our brains are in theta state when we're zero to seven years old. And theta state is actually the state that your brain is in when you get hypnotized. And so it is very, very easily programmable at that point. So your children are very easily programmable if they're under the age of seven. And so what I want you to think about as you're thinking about this is, is what are your programs? Have you ever thought about that? The hard thing about your programs is that they tend

Starting point is 00:05:22 to run unconsciously. You don't even need to think about them. You know, if you go into my computer and you click and see what programs are running, a lot of them are running in the background. And I'm like, wait, what is this program? I didn't even know this was running. And then I go to Apple and they're like, oh, no, you can't uninstall that. That's required to be running in order to have your computer work. And I was like, I didn't even know it existed.

Starting point is 00:05:43 So the thing about them is because of the fact that they tend to run unconsciously in our brains, they're sometimes hard to find unless you are, and this is very important, unless you are consciously and intentionally taking a step back and looking at yourself as if you're, you know, at Geek Squad and you're saying, what programs are running? What patterns do I have? How do I react when this thing happens? Why am I triggered this way? And so real quick, what I want to do is I want to just kind of give you, I guess, a differentiation of what the difference is between a conscious and subconscious mind, right? And so the conscious mind is located in what's called the prefrontal cortex of your brain. It is just behind your forehead. It's about 5% of your brain and 5% of your thinking throughout the day. It's responsible

Starting point is 00:06:30 for stuff like creative thinking, for reasoning, for making executive decisions. It's basically the driver of your thoughts. And it uses your desires and your goals and all of that stuff to navigate through life. But it's very, very, very limited. It can only focus on one thing at a time. And so that's your conscious mind. Your subconscious mind is approximately 95% of our brain. So it's 19 times more running in the background than your conscious mind. And so it's like when I go into Apple and they show me all of the programs running in the background, that's basically what's happening. It's all of your memories, it's all of your habits, it's your acquired behaviors.

Starting point is 00:07:11 These are your quote unquote programs. Have you ever done something before and you do it and you're like, oh my God, that was just like my mom. Or oh my God, that was exactly just like my dad. That's a program that has been built in and it just automatically happens. It's basically functioning as autopilot. It takes over for like routine tasks when the conscious mind is busy. So like, you know, I can be sitting there and I can be working and I can be thinking really intensely in creating a podcast episode. And then I'm like, you know what? I'm

Starting point is 00:07:42 thirsty. And without me having to think about it, my unconscious subconscious brain can go ahead and pick up the drink that's next to me, drink it, put it down, and I can keep doing what I'm doing. And I barely even notice the fact that I picked up that water, right? So it's basically an autopilot. And the thing about it that's important is that the reason why our brain goes on autopilot is because thinking is the most energy consuming thing that your body does throughout the day. It requires about 20% of your overall energy that

Starting point is 00:08:13 you use throughout the day. And so what your brain wants to do is your brain wants to take like really intense thinking and something if you do over and over and over and over and over again, and it wants to actually store it as a habit and store it as a program. So like if you drive a car to work and you have a brand new job, you're going to have to think a lot about the turns, where you're going. But after a year, you don't have to think about driving that car to and from work. You can basically do it without consciously thinking about every single step involved. You know, if you ever have had someone when you, something happens and then you blow up on somebody and then immediately you think, oh shit, I shouldn't have done that.

Starting point is 00:08:49 I shouldn't have said that. Yeah, that was your subconscious mind autopilot immediately taking over and acting on a pattern, on a program. That's basically an autopilot moment. So that's the two differences between the conscious and the subconscious mind. And when we're not actively focusing on the present moment, our subconscious mind takes over, and it tends to run those pre-installed programs. This is going to be really surprising to a lot of you guys that are out there listening, but you could be a completely different person right now in this very moment for the rest of the day, for the rest of your life. But you would have to bring 100% of your presence to every single moment and to take different action, different thought, different behavior than you have done before if you want a different life. Otherwise,

Starting point is 00:09:42 you're just going to go back onto autopilot, aka the programs, and those will take over. You know, we think that change takes time, and it really doesn't. You know, if we're losing weight, yeah, sure, losing weight takes time. But to be a different person actually doesn't take any time. It can happen immediately, but what it requires is absolute full conscious attention, which is just, frankly, it's really hard to do. And it's very energy consuming. Right. And so what we tend to do is we tend to work off of unconscious patterns and then something happens.

Starting point is 00:10:16 We're triggered. We do something. We judge somebody and we were like, oh, my God, I didn't want to do that. Well, that was just a program that has been built into us. So and once again, we create the programs because it just saves a whole lot of energy for our brain. And so it's okay until we realize that those programs are not who you want to be and it's getting in the way of creating the life that you want. And as I said, many of these programs are installed, they're ingrained in early childhood. And you can consciously want a

Starting point is 00:10:46 different life. You can consciously want to grow a business, all of that. But you can unconsciously be self-sabotaging yourself, disempowering yourself, running a set of programs based off of limiting beliefs, unreasonable fears, thinking I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm unlovable, I don't deserve happiness, I don't deserve success, I don't deserve love. And so that's why you can consciously be like, I want to do this thing, but then you're constantly kicking yourself in the ass every single day is because you're fighting your subconscious mind versus unraveling the unconscious mind first.

Starting point is 00:11:25 And there's so many different types of unconscious programmings that keep us stuck. You can, like I said, consciously want a better life, more money, success, happiness, love, all of those things. But if you have a subconscious programming that's in the way and you're not actively trying to work through that thing, it'll stop you completely. And this is why so many people I talk to are like, I feel like I'm just self-sabotaging. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I hear that all the time. The subconscious will hold you back every time unless you start working through it, unless you become more aware, unless you actually work

Starting point is 00:11:57 through it. You can consciously want to be happy, 5% of you consciously, but then 95% of you might have a program that was installed into you accidentally by a parent and 95% of you thinks that you don't deserve happiness. You're a bad person. Well, it's gonna be really hard to be happy if 95% of you in the background is running a program of you don't deserve to be happy. And I've seen so many different flavors of fears and limiting beliefs and programmings that just hold people back. And so you've got to really recognize the subconscious programs. So many of our most fundamental programs are established before we're even conscious of them. we think of ourselves, of what we think of the world, of the way that we act, of our behaviors, of our thoughts are, and this is important, they're established before we can even be conscious of them. Recognizing and altering these things can be really challenging because we're not even aware of them. It's kind of like the story of the old fish and he's swimming by the two younger fish

Starting point is 00:13:00 and he's swimming by and the old fish looks at the two younger fish and he says, water's really nice today, isn't it? And the two younger fish look at each other and they're like, what's water? It's because they're in it. They've been surrounded by it their entire life that they don't even recognize it. And so that's how a lot of it is with us in our programmings. If you're going to change, you have to really work at becoming more aware of your programs that are holding you back and then challenging them. And so let's talk about real quick how to actually go through and change these things. The first step is self-observation.

Starting point is 00:13:36 You have to start watching yourself as if you are watching somebody else. I always say the phrase, you can't read the jar when you're inside the label. I'm sorry, that doesn't make any sense. You can't read the label when you're inside of the jar. You've got to take yourself out of the jar to read the label, which means you've got to take yourself out of your own head and look at yourself and say, why did I act that way? Why do I feel this way? Why did I blow up on this person? Why did I get so emotional? Why did I judge that person? And you actually start to watch yourself. Pay attention to the reoccurring patterns in your life, especially ones that are holding you back the most. If something's popping up over and over and over again, start to pay more attention to it. Those are the patterns that often reveal when you've

Starting point is 00:14:20 noticed a pattern that's popping up over and over again, underlying some subconscious programs. When you're triggered by something, that is a program that's built into you. That is an automatic reaction. In cognitive behavioral therapy, they have something called automatic thoughts. I don't know if you've ever done this. I do this all the time where I'll have a thought and then my immediate next thought is where in the hell did that come from? And it's not even like I consciously thought it, but my second thought was like, what was that? And I've told this story many times, but like, I have been working at so much. I remember years ago, like six, seven years ago, I was like, I don't like that I judge people. I don't, I love people. I don't want to judge people, but I have this like program that's just like judges and judges and judges. And I don't know

Starting point is 00:15:02 if I learned from my mom or my dad or society or what it was, where it came from doesn't really matter. The fact that I don't want it anymore and I want to work through it is what matters. And so with the automatic thoughts that come up, you've got to start to become very aware of them, right? And you become aware of them through self-observation, through writing things down, through paying attention to them. So the first thing you've got to actually watch yourself. The second thing you need to do is you need to start to identify your patterns, identify your limiting beliefs, identify your fears, the things that might subconsciously be holding you back.

Starting point is 00:15:36 Find areas of your life where you feel like you're stuck and you struggle. Those are often indicators of where your limiting beliefs and your fears are kind of at play. And identify them. And then what I want you to do is I want you to debate yourself. And I want you to play the other side of the debate. So if you think, if we go back to the other one, which is I want to be happy, and that's your 5%, your 95% is I don't deserve happiness. And that's what you've been debating, basically. You've basically been on that side for your entire life that I don't deserve happiness. I'm a bad person. I want you to go to the other side, and I want you to debate yourself. And I want you to say, you know, I do deserve happiness, and I'm not a bad person, and here's all the reasons why. And I want you to prove yourself

Starting point is 00:16:20 wrong. Another thing they say in cognitive behavioral therapy is question the validity of your thoughts. So when you find these things, these programs, question them. And the more that you question them, the more that they start to crumble. The majority of the time, your thoughts are not correct. You think they are because you've been thinking them for so long that you've started believing that they're actual truth and actual fact. Majority of the time, though, they're not correct. And so you need to go to the other side of the debate table and you need to debate your fears, your limiting beliefs, all of that. And it's best to do this on pen and paper.

Starting point is 00:16:52 So that's the second thing, okay? The third thing is to reframe your negative thoughts. It's called cognitive restructuring. And so once you challenge the thought, I want you to actually come up with a completely different thought that you want your thoughts to be. So, you know, if your thought was, I want to be happy, and then immediately what pops up is the pattern and the programming of, I don't deserve happiness, I'm a bad person. I want you to find a thought that is completely opposite of that and work through it.

Starting point is 00:17:19 And so through cognitive restructuring, it's basically identifying the thought, the fear, the limiting belief that's holding you back and changing it, getting the exact opposite of what it is and using that exact opposite as a new affirmation that you work through and repeat to yourself. You replace your negative thoughts, beliefs, and patterns with positive, empowering affirmations. Which brings us to number four, which is create affirmations. Affirmations seem corny and they can definitely be corny, but you are always repeating some sort of story in your head. And if that story is not empowering and not moving you towards the life that you want, you need to come up with new ones. And the more that you do it over and over and over again, the better that it becomes

Starting point is 00:17:58 and the better you become. You know, I've been saying to people a lot recently that the past year, You know, I've been saying to people a lot recently that the past year, my main goal has really been working at my own happiness and not worrying, not fearing things, but just trusting and just being as happy as I can every single day. And one of the songs I've been listening to is Three Little Birds by Bob Marley. And what I found is that I sing it throughout, it gets stuck in my head. Like a lot of you guys, if I just say, you know, don't worry about a thing, every little thing is going to be all right. A lot of you guys are now going to have that stuck in your head. And I noticed myself saying it over and over again, especially when something starts

Starting point is 00:18:34 to worry me, I just start singing that song to myself over every little thing is going to be all right. And I noticed my fears, not a big deal, starts to get less and less. And so find your affirmations that you can repeat over and over and over again to yourself that are the opposite of what you have been believing. And then the last piece of it is to really just start getting clear on what your intentions are. Define very clear, specific goals, intentions of what you want your life to be, and then try to start aligning your subconscious mind

Starting point is 00:19:05 and your conscious desires towards that thing. And so if you want to be happy, as we're talking about right here, you know, wake up every single morning. And when you sit down and you meditate for five or 10 minutes, what I want you to do is I want you to think about what it would feel like to be happy, to be joyful, to feel amazing all day long. And you actually start to align your conscious and your subconscious feelings and thoughts towards that desired outcome. So that, everybody, is how to reprogram yourself. If you love this podcast, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at RobDialJr.

Starting point is 00:19:40 Also, if you love this podcast, you're going to love something that we just launched called Mindset Mentor Plus. It is something that I designed and I've been coming up with it for years and trying to figure out how can I help people who listen to the podcast actively integrate every one of these episodes into their lives. And this is what Mindset Mentor Plus is. Every single episode that comes out of this podcast, Mindset Mentor, Mindset Mentor Plus subscribers are going to get a whole lot more. You're going to get multiple page detailed worksheets, effectively a mini masterclass for every single episode that's more in depth than just the podcast that comes with journaling questions that comes with challenges and assignments so that you're not just listening

Starting point is 00:20:17 to the podcast, but you're actually integrating every single one of them into your life and making real changes so that you can improve your life a lot faster. Also, what we do in Mindset Mentor Plus is we do monthly Q&A sessions and more. So to learn more about it, just go to mindsetmentor.com. And it is way, way less than a dollar a day, which is what's awesome. And so if you want to learn more about it, go to mindsetmentor.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.

The Mindset Mentor - How To Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind

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