The Mindset Mentor - How to Win The Game of Life

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

What if you spent your entire life winning a game you never actually wanted to play? In this episode, I’ll show you how to define what winning means for you, break free from the limiting beliefs and conditioning that have been shaping your life, and start becoming the person you were truly capable of being. Because the biggest tragedy isn’t failing at life—it’s reaching the end and realizing you were incredibly successful at building a life that was never yours. Ready to break the patterns holding you back? Join the free live workshop: https://breaktheceiling2026.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, you've done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're looking to get to your next level and you realize that it's not found in another strategy or another book, it is only found by you conquering the version of you that is holding yourself back. Then you need to be at my live event called Freedom Live this December. We're going to find out exactly where you want to be in life, why you're not there yet. and then the unconscious patterns and fears and limiting beliefs that are capping your success

without you knowing it. So if you want to live up to your full potential, but you don't know how to break through, come to my event. Go to freedomlive 26.com. There's currently a $50 off coupon on that website. Once again, it's freedom live, 26.com. Today I'm going to teach you how to win at the game of life. And I'm going to give you five things, five things you can actually do starting today. Because here's what I've realized. Most people are losing a game. that they don't even know that they're playing. Nobody told them that there was a game. Nobody told them that they were the ones

who get to write the rules. And so they spent 30, 40, 50 years chasing somebody else's scorecard and then wondering why they feel like they have nothing and they don't feel like they're winning in life. So by the end of this episode, you're going to know what your vision of winning actually is and how to get there.

So let's dive in. Let me tell you where this idea came from because I've been full steam ahead on my event that's coming up in December called Freedom Live. And we were touring the facility this week and checking out the room. We're going to have a room that can hold over a thousand people. And I was meeting with my team and we were building everything out. We're building out the event and who we want there and all of this stuff. And I kept thinking to myself, what is the main goal here? And the main goal is

to teach people in that room how to win at the game of life, how to get out of their own way, how to achieve every single thing that they've ever wanted, and how to fully live up to their true potential to teach them how to get out of their unconscious patterns, their habits, their beliefs that have been capping all of their success, their entire lives, and then break free from all of those so they can live to their true potential. So my belief that I have in life, and you don't have to have this belief, it's just mine, is at the end of your life, you're going to meet somebody. I'm going to meet somebody, right? And I'm probably going to meet God. And then right next to God, there's going to be somebody else. I'm going to meet the version of me that lived up to

full potential, like who I could have been. The version of me, if I unlearned everything that I was taught, if I had learned every pattern and every habit and every limiting belief that was never actually mine to begin with, the one who was just fully, completely aligned and true to himself and lived up to his full potential. And my goal is at the end of my life, when we meet, and I look at him, we look like twins. That's it. That is really how I define winning. Now, obviously there's some spiritual stuff and God and all of this stuff, but that's how I define winning as the actual time that I'm here in life. Like how close am I to the version of me that I was capable of being? And it's not about money. It's not about followers. It's not about a number

and a bank account. It's about unlearning all of the things that were programmed into me that are not truly me so that I can rediscover my true self and then coming from that place when in all areas of my life in my relationship with my wife, with my children, in my professional life, in my health and fitness, and in my body, in my bank account, in my fun. Because I don't think I'm going to be perfect. I don't think anybody's ever going to be perfect. But I want to be as close to perfect as I possibly can. I want to be as close to my true potential by the time I leave this place. And I want to give you something real that actually kind of ties this in that's less than a spiritual idea. There's a woman named Bronny Ware. She wrote a book that was called The Five Regrets of the Dying

and the number one regret of people who are dying is I wish I had the courage to live a life that was true to myself and not the life that other people expected of me. Not I wish I made more money or I worked harder. I wish I had been me. The number one regret of people who are about to die is I wish I had been me.

Do you understand what that means? The most common regret at the end of life when they're looking back is that they could not do anything about it but they realized they were living somebody else's life. And so this is why this hit me so hard because you and I, we come into this world like a blank slate, infinite potential, no beliefs, no fear of failure, no fear of judgment, no idea what you're supposed to be. And I'd

argue that like 99.9% of us come into this world with roughly equal chances at the moment that we're born. I'm not talking about like your circumstances. I'm not talking about the family that you're born into or your health at the time of birth or any of that. I'm talking about this raw material that we come in as, a blank slate. That part's pretty close to. the same for most of us. And then our programming starts. Your parents program you, not because they're bad people, because they're just running their own programming. Your teachers program you, your friends, your religion, your town, your first heartbreak, the internet, all of it programs you in some sort of way. And slowly over 20 or 30 years, you become somebody else. You're not your true self anymore.

That's your conditioned self. And it's a costume that you were basically handed so early that you never even knew you were wearing it because it's just like who you've always been. And like I watched my son every single day. He came into this world with zero beliefs about himself. Zero. None. Not one. Everything he will believe about himself in the world and about who he is, he's going to get from somewhere. And I'm going to have the biggest chunk of it that's going to come from me. And that scares me in like the best way possible because it made me look at myself and go, okay, wait, where and like what, like, what am I still running, like programs that I never chose? And this game of life is not you versus anybody else. It's you, it's not you versus your brother. It's not you versus the government

or your co-worker. It's not you versus the world. It's you versus your old condition self, your true self versus your condition self. That's the only game that's being played. are you going to free yourself from your old patterns and your conditions and realize your true self and realize your true potential? And so here's what you really need to realize. You are playing a game and you can write the rules of this game. I like to look at life as like a game because it takes so much pressure off of yourself and it can make it a whole lot more fun. When you see a challenge come up in your life and you see your life as a game, you can actually see like, oh, this was brought to me for me to conquer and struggle and grow stronger from.

And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. But the difference between this game, the game that you're playing of your life and every other game is like if you play pickleball, somebody else wrote those rules. If you play basketball, somebody else wrote those rules. You show up and you're handed a rulebook and they say, hey, this is how you make a point, this is how you win the game, and then you go play. But in your life, nobody hands you the actual.

rules. But I would bet everybody listens podcast. You've been living your entire life under somebody else's rules. You have been playing their game under their rules when this is your life and you get to make the rules. You get to define what success is in the game, how to win, like what actually winning looks like and then how to play the game itself. But most people don't even actually know that. So let me ask you a question. Like, have you ever actually defined the rules of your game? Have you sat down and written out what a win for you is? Because most people never have.

They just borrow somebody else's. They play their dad's game. They play their friends group game. They play society's game. And then they never really question it. But what I need you to understand is you can win at somebody else's game and still feel like you lost. And I see it over and over again. extremely successful people that feel like failures.

And it's like Tony Robbins says, success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. There's a researchers named Ken Sheldon who studies goals, specifically goals that come from you versus goals that come from outside of you. And what he found is super interesting. When people chase goals that are actually, truly deep down, aligned with themselves

that come from themselves, they have more sustained effort, they work harder, and they feel better when they get there. When they chase goals that are absorbed from other people or what they think they're supposed to do, they don't work as hard. And when they do achieve them, they don't really truly feel fulfilled by ever achieving that goal. And so the translation of that is you can hit a target and feel nothing because it was never your target. It was somebody else's. So you need to get really real with yourself and decide what do you want in this world? What are the rules of the game and how do you know that you won? Because here's the thing, you cannot win a game that doesn't have a definition of winning.

You can just play it forever and feel like you didn't really get anywhere. Right. So what do you want to do in a situation is start to audit what is actually yours and what somebody else is. The problem with the conditioned self is it doesn't announce itself. Like it doesn't even feel like programming. It feels like personality. It feels like, hey, this is who I am. And so here's the audit. Take any belief that you have about yourself and ask one question, where did I learn this? And try to see if you can find it. You know, if you say, like, I'm not good with money. Okay, where did you learn that? I'm not a creative person. Where did you learn that? Who told you that? I'm too much. Where did you learned that. Who made you feel that? If you could trace it back to a person or a moment or a memory or a

room that you were in, it's not yours. It's an install. I did this a few years ago, something I had been carrying my entire life. I always believed that I had to like, like rest had to be earned. Like if I wasn't producing, I wasn't worth anything. Right. And I thought like for years, I just had really great work ethic. And I was proud of it. People like congratulated me for this work ethic. But when I traced it back, it wasn't my work ethic at all. It was a kid who figured out that the way to get his approval from anybody was to achieve. And nobody really, like, sat down and taught me that. I made it up from what I saw happening around me and how I got recognition. And that's a survival strategy from like 30 years ago that I never updated. And so do that. Take three beliefs this week today,

write them down and then trace them back to where they came from. And then here's what I want you to do. I want you to do what's called a life review now. Okay? You know, people always talk about, hey, when you die, you have a life review. You meet God. You have a life review, all of that. And what's crazy about that is I don't think that you need to get to the end of your life to have a life review.

Right? Like, why would we wait? Like, let's do it now while we can still change the ending. Because at the end of life, we can't change anything about it. So once a week you sit down and you just run the tape from the past week and you just ask yourself three questions. Number one, where was I my true self last week? Where did you feel the most alive? Where were you feel aligned?

Where did you feel like you were just the most like yourself this week? Next one, where was I my conditioned self this week? So where did I kind of like, where was my people please are coming out? Where did I do something I didn't want to do? Where did I do something that's just out of conditioning? Okay. And then the last question is, what's one thing I'd redo? so that you can figure out in the next time that this actually happens, this is what my

choice is going to be. That's it. It takes 10 minutes. And this is not like beat yourself up session where you shame yourself and guilt yourself because you fell back in old patterns. That's not what this is. You know, when people describe a life review and near death experiences, because I've watched a lot of videos on it, almost all of them say the same thing. When they sit down and they have, you know, they die, they talk to God, whatever it is, and they come back to life. They had a life review. There was no judgment. It was only love. And so just review your week the way somebody who deeply loves you would review it with you with honesty, with love, with zero cruelty, and just be curious. Because your life is just a bunch of weeks that you run

until you run out of weeks. It's just one week after another week after another week, and then eventually you run out of them. And if you review every week for the next 30 years, you won't get to the end of your life and be surprised by what you see. Okay. And then the next thing, your focus is becoming the twin of your highest potential self. Like stop playing other people's games. Stop comparing your finances to a guy whose definition of winning is completely different than yours. You're comparing your body to someone who's a fitness influencer whose entire job is their body. You know, you're losing a game that you never signed up for.

So you need to change the scoreboard. So every night, just ask yourself one question before you go to sleep. did I get closer to him or further away today or her, right? Did I get closer to her today or did I get further away from her today? And what we're talking about is that true self, is that twin that you're trying to build yourself into that if you do happen to go through this fictitious thing that I just talked about, which is you get to see who you could have been at the end of your life, are you going to be twins or is there going to be a huge gap?

Right? That's only the real true scoreboard that matters because I believe that when you are truly, fully 100% your true self, everybody in your life benefits from it. Everybody else's life is better. And that's how you can truly win at every single pillar in your life, all of the things that are most important. Right. And the beautiful thing about this is whenever you mess up, you can always win tomorrow. Right. There's no losing streak that takes you out of this game. You mess up today. Cool. Fix it tomorrow. Just get better tomorrow. And then the last thing that I really want you to do is I want you to play like you chose this life. I want to give you a frame that kind of changes everything in the way I

think of things, right? This is just my belief. You don't have to hold on to it. You can if you'd like. I like to think that before I came into this life, my soul saw all of it. So like before you came into the life that you have, your soul saw all of it. Every challenge, every success, every person who would love you, every person who would break your heart, the whole thing from start to finish. And your soul looked at your life and said, yes, that's the one. That's the one that I want. That's the one that I need to learn and I'm supposed to learn next. Like, I need this one to get to my next level of soul college or whatever it's called, right? And like, sit with that for a second.

If you're the person, the soul, inside of the body that you're in and you chose this life, how would you view your next challenge if you actually believe that? Because that would mean the hard part isn't the thing that came to ruin your life. The hard part of what you're going through is the curriculum of your life. It's the exact same thing that you came here to learn. Your life is a perfectly crafted curriculum for your soul to learn whatever it's supposed to learn here. That heartbreak wasn't a detour. That bankruptcy or, you know, failure in business wasn't a detour. That childhood wasn't a detour. It was the level that you picked. And so the practical piece of all of this is next time something

punches you in the face in life, and it probably will, maybe even this week, right? Instead of asking like, why is this happening to me? No, say, what did I come here to learn from this? That's it. One question, simple question, extremely powerful. And I want to be very clear on it. It's not about pretending that things aren't hard when they're hard. They are. And some of them are brutal. It's about refusing to be a victim of a life that you signed up for. And so I think the greatest tragedy in our lives would be to get to end of our life and realize that we did not live up to our true potential. And so I want you to understand through this episode, number one, you are playing a game and you can win it. Number two, you have to define what winning looks like.

And number three, you have to come up with the rules of that game and live every single day to try to be the type of person who comes back to their true self. Let's go of their conditioned self and actually starts to win at each of the categories in life that truly matter from a place of full alignment. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, once again, like I said, this is exactly what I'm going to be diving into in a much, much, much, much deeper way over the course of three days at Freedom Live in Austin, Texas. It is going to be live in person, Austin, Texas, December 3, 4th, and 5th. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to Freedom Live, 226.com. Once again, Freedom Live, 226.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.