The Mindset Mentor - If You're Ambitious But Stuck, Listen To This

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Want to create a morning routine that actually works for you? Download the free workbook here: theperfectmorningroutine.com 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 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'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you're trying to perfect your morning routine, I just created a simple workbook for you to download that shows you the step-by-step process to create an amazing morning routine based in science. If you want to download it for free, you can go to the perfect morning routine.com and get it now. Today, we're going to be talking about why you feel so stuck in your life and how to basically

get everything that you want in your life and to understand that getting everything that you want in life is not about doing or achieving more. And so what I'm going to basically talk about today is hopefully waking you up a little bit to your programmings, some of your conditionings, and also to currently what you already have around you. And so one of the reasons why you feel so stuck in life is because I'm going to go out and say that everything that you want is already here in front of you. And you might be like, no, no, no, but I don't have that successful business. I don't have that million dollars yet. I don't have this thing and that thing and this thing and that thing. I think that for most of us, what we already want is already right in front of us,

we're just missing it. And most people never wake up to the amazing life that they already have that's all around them. And so let's not sugarcoat this. Most people are not living in their life. They're just surviving. They're performing for other people. They're coping. They're numbing. They're distracting themselves. They're drifting through days with just enough stimulation to keep the existential dread at bay. But if you stripped away all of the noise, all of the scrolling on Instagram and watching too much Netflix and being over distracted and everything, take away the jobs, take away the shows, the endless scrolling, most people would feel it. It's that quiet thought in the back of your head that's like, is this it? Is this really all that there is in life? And the real

tragedy of all of this is that most people are surrounded by the thing that they already want. The thing that they're starving for. They just don't really know how to open themselves up to receiving it. And so I'll give you a quick little story that'll make sense, okay? There's a plane that's that that crashes into the water. It hits the water. Everybody who is on the plane just blacks out. And they wake up and they're alive. They think, oh my God, am I dead? Am I in heaven? What's going on? They're wake up, they're alive. And they're on a raft. And no one really remembers how they got there. But they're just drifting in the ocean, and they're drifting in the ocean for days, in days, in days. And after a few days, they're parched, they're dying of thirst, they're hungry, they're, you know, dying of thirst because

they're in the ocean, you can't drink salt water. And so eventually a rescue helicopter comes by, picks them all up, and they're all rescued. And the rescuers are just like, do you have water? I'm just so thirsty. Like, yeah, here's some water. They give them water. And eventually the rescuers in the helicopters say, why didn't you just drink the water? And they're like, well, because we were in salt water. You can't drink salt water. They're like, no, you weren't in salt water. You were just in a really big lake. They were in this massive lake, and they couldn't see land, and they don't know how they got there except for the plane crash. So they just assumed, hey, we must be in the ocean. They could have reached over for days and just cupped their hands and drank the water.

But they didn't because they didn't know what they were floating in. They already had what they needed. They just didn't know it. Now, it's not a true story. It's a metaphor for how most people live their lives. This is how most people go through their entire life. They're dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean of joy and peace and happiness and love and everything they've ever wanted. But they don't know that it's there.

And so what we need is a wake-up call to really realize what is around us. And it's not really your fault that you don't realize what's around you. The ugly truth that we don't really want to talk about is that, you know, we've all pretty much been conditioned in the society that we live in unconsciously. It's not like some evil overlord is looking over us and making us do this, but we've basically been conditioned from society and from our parents and then our grandparents and just generations to believe that the good stuff, everything that we want is somewhere else outside of us that we have to go achieve.

That love that you want, that's after you get everybody's approval. The peace that you want deep inside, well, that's after all of the achievement that you need. The joy that you want to feel? Well, you got to earn that one. Happiness? You can only be happy after you're done building. Relaxation? Only after I make that first million dollars, then I can relax. In the society that we live in, we're trained to defer our aliveness. And we're taught that love and joy and fun and peace and happiness is somewhere else down the road. It's not here. and now. In, you know, from the first time somebody said, hey, you know, good boy or good girl, are you such a good boy, you're such a good girl? Our nervous system kind of started to pick up on the

rules. Okay, I need to be a good boy. I need to be a good girl. I need to be useful. I need to be liked. I need to be loved. I need to be good. I need to work hard. I need to achieve. I need to, I need to earn my worth in some sort of way. And then maybe, maybe one day you can feel safe enough to relax and then live the life you've been wanting to live. So the results is just billions of people kind of walking around in a trance, like spiritually malnourished, emotionally constipated, physically present in their body, but like psychologically, not really there. And so there's thinking about what they want and the next thing and the next thing they got to go to, the next thing that will make us happy. And I lived my life for a long time like

this where even when like I was on vacation, I was like, there's got to be something. I got to work towards the next thing. I'm not where I want to be yet. I've got to get somewhere else than here. And the hypnosis of all of this is really real. Like let's call it what it is. This isn't just about being too busy. It's kind of like a mass hypnosis. So many people are just asleep. And they're not aware that they have everything that they need around them and that by going and achieving something or being somebody else or getting others approval will not give them the thing that they want. They have inside of them and around them the thing that they want. It's always been there. And like I said, most of my life, I was in a state of trance. And sometimes I still find myself going back

into a state of trance. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. Chasing the next thing, the next achievement, the next dollar, but nothing gave me what I thought that it would. Nothing gave me what I was searching for. All of these boxes I wanted to check off in life and I've checked off pretty much all of them and then realize one day like hold on i didn't get i didn't get the feeling i thought i was going to get but if there was some controlling evil overlord right if i was a conspiracy theorist it's brilliant because if you're asleep you're controllable and then you'll buy what they sell and you'll work the jobs that drain you to keep up with the joneses and get the next thing and protect belief systems that never belonged to you in the first place and so if we're like a hypnotized

audience member on stage, then we're kind of just like clucking and doing what the hypnotist says and swearing that all of it makes sense. But you're not a fool. I'm not a fool. We're not fools. We just find ourselves to be asleep sometimes. And there's a really big difference. And so it's time to wake up from the trance that we've kind of been conditioned into believing was our life. And this is why the change is so hard. And this is why you remain stuck is because you're on this treadmill that never actually goes anywhere. And a lot of people are like, yes, oh my gosh, this sounds great. I want to wake up.

I want to just tell you this. Waking up sounds really amazing and romantic until you try it. Because then you have to start questioning things. Why do I need validation from other people to feel worthy? Do I even want the life that I've built? What if everything that I believed about life and love and joy was wrong? And that's not fun. It's actually really terrifying.

Because you have to question the foundation of everything. that you've built your life on. And this is where most people bail because that shit gets scary. Because to wake up, you have to lose who you thought you were. You have to let entire layers of your identity just kind of fall away. Your ideas about success, love, family, spirituality, self-worth, success, money, all of it. And let's be honest, most people are so identified with the transit they're in, that we would rather defend our suffering than surrender our ego. Most people would rather be right than be free. What do I mean by that?

We'd rather fight for our insecurities, our identities, our fears, our limiting beliefs. We'd rather fight for those things to keep that ego attached to who we are and that identity. We can say, this is who I am. We'd rather be right and try to prove that that thing is right than actually be free from it. because defending the ego means that you get to stay the same. Getting free from our trance means that we have to put in work. And that work requires us to change. And most people would rather be miserable and comfortable than free and uncertain about the future.

But you can't wake up and get out of the trance and start to live a different life and stay comfortable at the same time. That's not how it works. And so here's the wild thing about it. Most of what you believe about yourself and the world and other people isn't even yours, and you can test it. If somebody challenges your worldview and you start to get mad or react emotionally in some sort of way, that's most likely a borrowed belief from someone else. If an idea about love or money or success or God makes you clench inside and kind of tense up, that's most likely. not your voice. That's someone else's ideas that you just picked up along the way. And we have all done this in many ways. And so it's really hard to get and to fully understand, but it's really important

to understand this. This is how deep the, you know, we'll call it kind of what it is, and not in a bad way, but this is how deep the brainwashing goes. We internalize the beliefs of our parents in school, in religion, in media, and culture. And then we want to fight for those things, like because we believe them so much because we've been told to believe them, even if those are the very things that really keep you stuck. But that's not loyalty, that's hypnosis. And so we have to have the courage to change our mind. The only reason why we feel stuck is because it's that mental treadmill that we're stuck in. So if we want to have something that gets us unstuck, we need to have the courage to change our mind in some way, to see things differently that we've seen them before.

And most people, let's just be real. Most people in this world don't want to change their mind. They're looking more than anything else for data to prove their points right, more than they're looking to prove themselves wrong. But that's not you, right? That's not why you're here. You're here because you're ready to wake up. You're ready to break free. You're ready to feel differently and create a better life. And so I don't want you to, the important thing is I don't want you to shame yourself for the things that you did while you were asleep.

Like for me, I feel like I could look back and be like, I lost years of my life when I was asleep. But it's like, no, I was asleep. So I can't shame myself for not realizing when I was working 110 hours a week for three, four years straight from sunup to sundown, just putting all of my life into a business that I ran into the ground. I can't look at that and be like, oh, my God, I need to shame myself and guilt myself for that thing. I need to just go, no, he was asleep.

He thought that that would give him the life that I want. He thought that that's what success and happiness and love and achievement look like. And so we have to stop building an identity around who we were when we didn't know any better. That version of you, that was just you and asleep and a dream. It was a survival mechanism, right? So we don't need to hate it. We don't need to be mad at ourselves. We just need to start to outgrow it.

And so what's really, what really wakes you up to be able to see the amazing things around you? Once again, you're on a raft and you're surrounded by the water that you need to drink. but we're thinking that we're not. We got to go get some other type of water. No, it's right in front of you. And so what wakes you up? It's not effort. It's not willpower.

It's not reading one more self-help book or, as much as I love that you listen to this podcast, it's not you listening to 10 hours in binging a podcast. There's one really true ingredient that wakes you up. Your willingness to receive new truth, even if that terrifies you. And what does that mean? That means questioning some of the things that you've, put as the foundation of your entire life. So many people are clinging to their old identities.

And the amount of truth that you can tolerate without running away is the exact measure of your capacity to wake up. It's not how smart you are. It's not how much effort you put into it. It's not how spiritually sound you are, how long you meditate for. It's how available you are to see what's actually real. Even if it contradicts everything that you've clung to, to for safety in your entire life. Because everything that you want is already here. And this is where

it's really wild. You're not missing the life you want because it doesn't exist yet. You're missing it because you've been trained not to notice it. Like so many people I've talked to are like, well, once I make up this amount of money, I'll be happy. I'm like, really? Like I've been to third world countries and seen people who have nothing that are 10 times happier than people. that I know that are worth hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars. So clearly it's not money that makes you happy if they could be happy. Clearly that money is not the thing that makes somebody happy. And so we've been trained not to notice and not to be able to go, oh, it's right in front of me. You know, the love that you're craving, it's not coming from somebody else. It has to come from

yourself. There's people around you that already love you. The joy that you want, it's already available to you right now. The safety, that belonging, that deep sense of meaning that you've been chasing, it's already around you. It's already yours. We're just thinking that it has to come from somewhere else. Right? The problem is that we've been programmed to look everywhere else, but here, inside of ourselves. I always say whatever you're looking for in the external world is actually what you're looking for from yourself. And if you say, oh, I want money. No, you don't on money, you want the thing that you think money will give you. Safety? Well, safety, that's something that you find inside of yourself. Whatever it is you think it's going to give you.

Happiness? Happiness is a state of mind. That's something that's inside of you. And so we were all taught to chase this thing in the future and to grasp for achievement and for something else and to hunt for something else, to believe that there's something outside of us. And that's why our dreams and our goals, a lot of times, are like chasing the horizon, closer you get to them, the further you get away. They're always just out of grass. You know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like looking for your glasses when they're already on your face. That's really what it's like. Life is happening right now. The miracle is happening right now in front of you. But if your mind is locked on what is next, or it's fixated on what is

missing or what you don't have or what you need in order to get the happiness, then you're going to walk past the amazing buffet of life. the feast that is laid out right in front of you. So your life isn't empty. Your awareness is. You're surrounded by all of the things that you've been praying for. You just didn't know how to see it. And so you're not really afraid of change in going into the unknown. Like people always say like, I'm afraid of the unknown. There's no such thing as being afraid of the unknown. There's only being afraid of losing the known. When you're like, oh, but I don't know what the future looks like. No, no, no, that doesn't matter. You're afraid of losing what you already know.

And so even if what you know is this identity of playing the victim or being the fixer or being the anxious overthinker or being the high achiever who's always tired or being the people pleaser, letting go of that feels like death because in a way it is, it's a death of the you that you thought you were. It's a death of that mask. And that's exactly what's going to set you free. And so what I want you to do is think about this for a second. I know this is a little bit different than some of the stuff that I talk about. It's not about going and achieving more and being more and all that stuff. It's about realizing what's already in front of you. I want you to take like a pen and paper day and I want you to write down the beliefs that you hold most dearly,

that you feel are true deep down inside of you. Write it down. What's the thing that you feel is the most true. And then ask yourself the question, where did I first hear this? What I still believe this and if I had never been taught it? You might. You might not. I don't know. But you might be shocked that you might have been living in someone else's mental operating system, that they gave it to you and you didn't realize it. You might notice that a lot of what I talk about is different than other personal development stuff. You know, I've read hundreds of books and listen to hundreds and hundreds of hours of podcasts and conferences and done all of those things. And most self-development is about adding more, adding more, adding more, learning more, learning more,

achieving more, get this next piece of knowledge so you can get even further along in life. Believe me, I played that game for 20 years. I did. I tried it. It didn't get me anything that I wanted. And what I've realized is that everything I want is already here and it always has been. So it's like, damn, I was kind of like a sleep for 20 years. Like one of the new tattoos that I got is right here on my wrist and says, be here now. Because it's like I'm, I find myself chasing things all of the time. And then I look down on my arm and I'm like, that's right.

It's already here. It's in me. It's, it's already here. I just need to see that's around me. And so you don't need to be better. You don't need to do anything differently except for wake up. And so my invitation for you is to wake up to the joy that you've been postponing, to wake up to the love that you're trying to go and find in someone else, to wake up to the richness and the aliveness that doesn't need permission to be felt. It's already there in front of you. Because you're already floating in fresh water, my friend, it's right there in front of you. The thirst that you feel is not absent. It's right in front of you. You have the cup. You have the water. You have the water. take a drink. It's you just haven't allowed yourself to drink. And so take the cup, take the risk.

Don't look back. It's all right in front of you. And so how do you get yourself unstuck? It's realizing you are never stuck in the first place. So that's what I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you want to download my free workbook on how to create the perfect morning routine based by science, You can go to the perfect morning routine.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.