The Mindset Mentor - How to Stop Living Below Your Potential

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Are you living your life as the main character, or are you waiting for someone else to change it for you? In this episode, I’ll show you how the invisible limits and beliefs you inherited can keep you trapped inside a smaller version of your potential. I’ll walk you through how to break out of that box, take back your authority, and start creating the life you actually want. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level.    Get $50 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive   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, you've done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you want to create the perfect morning routine, go to the perfect morning routine.com right now and get my free workbook and video on exactly the step-by-step process according to science of how to create a perfect morning routine. Once again, that is the perfect morning routine.com. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to stop acting like you are an audience member of your

own life and to actually take control of your own life so that you can change where you're going. Because I want you to imagine getting to the end of your life, looking back at everything you accomplished, everything you did in realizing that you only lived to about 60% of what you were capable of. Because you spent decades obeying limits that were never even actually real in reality, they were only real in your mind. Limits that you didn't choose, but they were inherited in your life. Limits that decided how much money you believed you could make. What kind of relationships you felt like you deserve. How big you were allowed to dream and how big you were allowed to act. And because they were taught to you as normal, you never even questioned them.

That's what scares me the most more than anything else. I never want to look back on my life and realize that I half lived my life. And I think so many people do this. I think there's tens of millions of people who spend their entire lives inside of invisible prisons that they don't even know that they're living in. And if you don't recognize the prison that you're in and actually work past it,

you'll never actually really escape it. So today I want to show you where that prison came from, why it exists in all of us, and how to see it pop up multiple times a day, and then the step-by-step process for you to follow so that you, can get outside of it. And then you can live a life that's up to your potential. Okay, so let's dive in. Now, if I asked you straight up, hey, are you waiting to be rescued in your life? I guarantee most

people listen to this podcast would say no. Of course not. No one's going to really say yes to that. But let me tell you why it might be true. See, most people are living their lives as if they're just an audience member and not the main character. So many people are waiting for the right time. They're waiting until they feel ready. They're waiting for the economy to change. They're waiting until their kids get a little bit older. They're waiting for a sign. They're waiting for the motivation to hit them to change. They're waiting for the perfect opportunity to just land into their lap. Or they're waiting for somebody at their job to finally notice how hard they've been working and give them that promotion that they feel they deserve. The key is they are waiting.

they're waiting for a version of their life to show up that they have never actually taken any action to create let that land for a second that's how most people are living in their lives they're just thinking that someone's going to gift them the life that they want and they haven't changed themselves or anything around them have you ever felt that way like i know i have definitely felt that way when i was younger because to be honest that is what trying to be saved and waiting to be saved looks like it doesn't look like sitting there on the couch with your handout It looks like doing just enough to get by, maybe even a little bit more, but still inside of your comfort zone. Like hoping that life will eventually hand you whatever it is that you want.

And it won't. It's not going to. Because the universe isn't running like a customer service department. There's no manager that's going to come out and say, hey, Sally, you know what? You've been really patient. We're going to go ahead and give you. We're going to upgrade the entire life that you have for you. Don't worry, but you don't have to change anything.

We'll go ahead and do it for you. Right? That's how most people live their lives. Like, they're just waiting for it to happen. But your life will only change when you change. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's the entire mechanism.

And I know you know that because you're listening to this podcast, but are you actually taking action in your life? Because I get emails from people like, Rob, I listen to every single episode, but I'm not taking any action. What should I do? And so the real question isn't why hasn't my life changed? The real question is, is why do so many of us, smart people, hardworking people, good people with so much talent,

why do we unconsciously live like somebody else is in charge of it and they're just going to come and gift us a life that we want? And I thought really, really deeply about this subject. Because this is what I hear from a lot of people. And I want you to think about the first 18 years of your life. Right. Like I always think like, how did we get trained to be this way? And you have to understand from the moment that you were born until the moment you graduated high school, somebody else was probably telling you what to do. And for the most part, like I understand everyone listening, your childhood and teenage years were all completely different. But for the most part, somebody told you when to wake up. Somebody told you what to wear. Somebody told you what to learn

and when to learn it. Somebody told you when you were allowed to eat and when you were allowed to speak. You literally had to raise your hand and ask for person. permission to go to the bathroom in school. That's one of the most basic things that a human being does, and we had to get permission to do it. Think about how that trains your psyche of what's possible for you. For 12 years, you had someone in charge of if you were able to go to the potty or not, right? So for at least 18 years, for most people, that is external authority. 18 years of the answers and the authority coming from outside of you. 18 years of your entire job being,

follow the instructions, don't get in trouble, wait to be told what to do. And then you turn 18 in society goes, all right, cool, go be an adult now. Go figure out your career. Go figure out your money, your relationships, your health, your purpose. Go figure out your life. Good luck. And then they smack you on the butt and say, go figure out your fucking life. but nothing inside of you has actually changed. Do you get that? Nothing was switched on. You had a

birthday. That's it. Like, if you ever thought about that, I've thought really, really deeply about this as to why people are still not doing what they want to in their life. And the really, really interesting part about all of this is that in our Western society, this was normal. But for most of human history, there was like a moment. There was an actual moment where you were no longer a child in almost every single culture had one. The Messiah had it. Indigenous cultures had vision quests. Aboriginal cultures had a walk about. Native cultures had a right of passage. The moment where you were no longer a child and you are now an adult, a big moment where something happened and you were different. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. And what do we do in the Western world? Well, you get your

driver's license when you turn 16. You got a graduation cap. You were able to get drunk at 21 if you wanted to. Like, I guess that's our right of passage. But we don't really have like a moment in our culture where somebody hands you the authority over in your own life and says, it's yours now. It's on you. And so I think a huge number of people never actually take the wheel of their life, which is why I say that they're living like an audience member in their life. But there's a lot of people that are like 47 years old, walking around this world who are unconsciously still living under their parents' rules. Like they've got a mortgage. They've got three kids. They've got a job. They might have a company where they run a team of 20 people and there's still some part of them that feels like

that kid who's about to get in trouble. Now that she listens, start to notice it around you. Notice it within yourself, first off, and then notice it around other people. Most people have become an adult physically, but not fully become an adult mentally. And so here's what happens with all of that. Those first 18 years, they don't teach you just information. They build you an invisible box that you're probably right now still in. The walls of that box are made out of everything you absorbed before you were old enough to have any say in it. What your parents believe about money, what your family thought was realistic for people like you, what your town thought was possible for you, what you got praise for, so you did more of it,

what you got shamed for so you stopped doing it, what you saw your dad doing things got hard, what you watched your mom settle for, all of those things. And it creates an invisible box. And you didn't choose any of it. You just downloaded it unconsciously. Your brain was a sponge and it soaked up whatever environment it was sitting in. And so now 20, 30, 40 years later, you're walking around with a set of rules of what's possible for you. And you think those rules are facts. we call them beliefs. That's just what you believe. They're not facts at all.

They're just the size of the room that you grew up in. To give you an example, like, you've probably heard the thing about fleas, right? If you take a flea and you put it inside of a jar and you leave the lid off, the flea's gone. It's going to jump right out of it. They can jump like something like a hundred times their body length. It's out of there instantly. But if you put a lid on top of that jar with the flea in it, the flea jumps, it smacks its head into the lid, it jumps and smacks its head, jumps and smacks his head into the lid.

and after a while, it's learned that the lid is there, and it stops jumping high enough to hit the lid. And it starts jumping just below the lid, like just below, just right underneath it. And then here's the part that gets me. You take the lid off, and the flea never jumps higher than the lid again. It stays the exact same height forever. It never, it has the opportunity to be free. It never jumps down and gets free. There's nothing above it, but it doesn't jump any higher.

And it'll spend the rest of its life jumping to the height of the lid that it has, isn't even there anymore. And if it has babies in that jar, they will learn to jump to that height too. And the babies will not ever hit the lid or jump out of where the lid once was because they learn from watching and it's in their DNA. And because most of us hit a lid somewhere between the age of zero and 18 years old, probably many times with our parents from what was possible, we've never actually jumped or tried to jump past that since that day. The lid came off a long time ago, but nobody ever told us. And so here's what I actually believe. And I want you to really like sit with this one. I think most people who are doing like well in life, like really, really well in

life are only living up to about 60 to 70% of their actual potential. Like let me say that again, not people who are just like not doing well. People who are doing really, really well in life, I think they're only living to about 60 to 70% of their potential. And they will spend their entire lives there and not getting anywhere past it and they'll never really know it. And that's the tragedy is because it doesn't feel like 60%. When you're the person who's living that life, it feels like 100%. But that's because you're inside of the invisible box. The walls of the box feel like edges of reality, but they're not. And so you could look at your life and you could go, you know what? I'm doing pretty well. Like I'm doing better than my parents did. I'm doing better than most people that I graduated with.

I'm doing better than what's realistic for somebody in my situation. And you're right. You are. But that's the exact problem. Because you have a picture in your head of your potential based off of where you came from. You need to understand something about that picture. That picture is not your potential. That picture is the potential based off of your conditioning that you have of yourself. And I really want you to understand this. Your brain has built a picture out of evidence. And where do that evidence come from? It came from what you've seen, who raised you where you, where you live, what you watched other people around you do, what you've already done in your life so far,

that's the whole data set. Like I remember being 29 years old and being like, I'm doing way better than everyone that I grew up with, everyone that I know what I'm supposed to be at this point in time in my life, but I was like, I know I'm still not even close to what I could be though. And so your brain will not,

and I mean, it will not show you a version of yourself that it has zero evidence for most of the time. it's not really designed to do that, right? And so the ceiling that you think is possible, like is your ceiling is really just the highest point of what you believe is possible. Now, it's actually possible. And if that's true, and I really do believe that it is,

then here's the sentence I want you to write down somewhere. Pull over the side of the road, whatever you need to do, put in your notes tab inside of your phone. Because I think it's one of the most important sentences that I've ever said on the podcast. If you don't get out of the box that you're unconsciously in, the absolute best that you can ever do is become the greatest version of your limited self.

The best version of you inside of the box. You can optimize the box. You can get up earlier. You can have a better morning routine. You can read more books. You can cold plunge. You can have another productivity system. You can get more discipline.

And you will get better. You will. But you'll get better inside of the box. you'll go from 60% to maybe 70%. Maybe if you really optimize your life, 80%. You'll become extremely impressive. A very well-organized flea is basically, right? Jumping to the top of the jar.

But then outside of that jar, there's another 20, 30, 40% of your potential outside of that jar, depending on where you currently are right now. That's the potential you actually have. Not the potential that you think that you have, the actual potential that you have. the potential that exists outside of what you've always been. Outside of what you were raised,

outside of where you live, outside of what your family believes is realistic, outside of the identity that you got handed before you could read anything. And you can't really see it. That's the whole trick of this world. You can't see it because it's never been there. We're not trying to figure out, hey, like what's up there? Where is it everything? Like where? How far can I go? You're not trying to figure it out from the box. The work is to break the box. break the jar, break the lid, whatever it is that you want to call it, so that a new view becomes available to you. When you get past your old identity, your old fears, your old limiting beliefs,

you'll realize how much those things actually clouded your vision of what was possible and made you unable to see what was truly possible for you and for your potential as well. And so how do we get out of this? Give me a step-by-step process, Rob. Okay, I'll give you one. First thing is this. Number one, you need to find out who you're still waiting on. get a pen and paper, not your phone, an actual pen and paper, and answer this question, what am I waiting for before I let myself go all into my life? Write down everything, right?

Until I have more money, until the kids are older, until I feel confident, until I know that it'll work, until my spouse is on board. Whatever it is, just get it out of your head and get it onto a piece of paper, right? And then, next to each one of those, answer the second question, who exactly is going to give me that? Who exactly is going to give me that? And I want you to ask you try and name them. A real person.

Who is it? For almost every single one of them, you're going to find out the answer is nobody. There is nobody. There is no name to write down. That can seem depressing, but it's not depressing. It's freeing because it means the only person that you've been waiting on this entire time was you,

but you unconsciously been waiting for someone. else to come and help you out. Right? And that's not going to happen. It's your turn to act like the main character in your life. Right. So that's number one. Number two, I want you to actually go through and audit the rules that you never agreed to. I want you to find your rules and your beliefs that you're living your life by. This is a huge one. Write down 10 beliefs that you carry about what is realistic for you in your life, and your money, in your career, in your relationships, in your body, and how much success a person like you gets to have. And then right next to each one of these, you're going to ask two questions. Number one, where did I get this? And number two, who taught it to me? Where did I get this? I got at this point

time of my life. And who taught it to me? This is my mom. Right? Because I promise you, some of those, most of them are not going to be yours. You're going to hear your dad a little bit. You're going to hear your mom a little bit. You're going to hear your aunt or your grandpa. You're going to hear somebody that said to you when you were, you know, nine years old that you have been organizing your entire life around and you haven't even realized it. And you don't break a belief unless you question it. You don't have to fight the belief. It's not a battle. You just have to see it and you have to see that you never chose it and you have to see, you know what? Actually, I don't want to believe this anymore. Because the second that you realize that you inherited it instead of chose it, it loses most of its

power over you. And it goes from being a fact in your mind, a fact in the world, to seeing it as something that some other person gave you and handed you when you were younger, and it's just their opinion. Okay, so that's number two. Number three is for you to take the authority back. Stop unconsciously outsourcing your life to someone that isn't living it.

The next time you have a decision to make and you catch yourself about to call somebody or thinking differently or acting like your mom or act like your dad, whatever it might be. Don't. Sit down, ask yourself, what do you actually think? And then you decide.

think about a life outside of what you've been thinking. Start with asking yourself, what is the life that you actually want in detail it? And then ask yourself, yeah, and then what? But what else? But what else? And force yourself to try to see further on the horizon that you've been allowing yourself to see. Like you could ask yourself, if I have 3,650 perfect days, 10 days of perfect days in a row with absolutely no restrictions, where could my life be? And you'll realize that you have been restricting your own dreams, your own potential, what you are capable of. So that's number three. And then number four, collect evidence for outside of your box. You cannot think your way out of your box. And I want to be clear about that. You will not read your way out of it. You will not journal your way out of it.

All of those things are good. But I want you understand, you have to act your way out of it. Because the box is made out of what was taught to you. And the only thing that dissolves that is evidence. Evidence that outside of what we thought was possible is possible. So, Every day, do one thing that exists outside of the box. One thing that the old version of you would have needed permission for. Like send the message, make the phone call, make the ass, 10x the number that you want to make this year. Apply for the thing that you're not even close to being qualified for. And it's going to feel wrong.

And I want to prepare you for that. It's going to feel like you're doing something you're not allowed to do. And that's your whole system. It's going to light up and it's going to tell you to sit back down. That feeling is not a warning. It's just the lid. and that's how you know that she found it. So here's the part that I want to leave you with, okay?

Everything that you've been taught in your childhood, everything that your parents taught you, all of those rules, all of those beliefs, all of those things of what's realistic for you, it was probably built to protect you. It was never built to make you great. Those are two completely different jobs, protection and greatness.

And safe was the right goal when you were seven, but it's not the right goal for you now. So that lid came off a long time ago, and you're just jumping to the same height even though it's not there anymore. and you are not put on this earth to spend 80 years becoming the greatest version of your limited self. Nobody's coming.

And that's the best news you've ever gotten because it means that this life is yours to change. Now you just have to go out and change it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram Stories, tag me in at Rob Dowell Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. And once again, if you want to download my free workbook and video on how to create the perfect morning routine

based in science, go to the perfect morning routine.com right now and download it for free. And with that, I am going to leave you the same way to 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.