The Mindset Mentor - Is Stoicism the Secret to a Good Life?

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Do you find yourself overthinking, worrying about things you can't control, or letting life's challenges dictate how you feel? In this episode, I’m breaking down four powerful lessons from Stoicism that will help you master your mind, manage your emotions, and stop creating unnecessary suffering. I’ll show you how to let go of what you can’t control, change the meaning you give to events, take power away from your fears, and use every obstacle as an opportunity to become stronger. 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 $100 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'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not you done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. Today we're going to be talking about the philosophy of stoicism. Over 2,000 years ago, the most powerful philosophy for self-mastery, in my opinion, was created. If you struggle with overthinking, worrying about things that you can't control, or letting other people's actions affect your mood, or just feeling like life keeps throwing shit at you and you don't know how to handle it, you need to understand how stoicism works. Because it teaches you how to control your mind when everything else can feel out of control. It teaches you how to stop creating unnecessary suffering in your life and also how

to take the challenges that life throws at you and actually use them so that you can become stronger. So today I'm going to give you four of the most powerful lessons from stoicism so that you can start using them immediately. Okay? Let's go ahead and dive in. Here's what is really fascinating when you look at stoicism, okay? Stoicism has two really famous names attached to it. One of them is Marcus Aurelius, who was the emperor of Rome at the time the most powerful person alive, and the other is a man named Epictetus. Epictetus was born a slave, and he was owned by another man. He had a crippled leg, and he owned nothing. And so you're talking about two humans at the absolute opposite ends of power, and they arrived to the exact same. And they arrived at the

exact same conclusions. And so here's why this is important. It means the playbook has nothing to do with your circumstances in life. It worked for a man who owned the entire world, and it worked for a man who had absolutely nothing. So stoicism is considered a philosophy, not a religion, but I like to think of it more than anything else as mental and life training, because a philosophy is something that you can agree with and something that you live by, but training is something that you actually do. And so let me go through the four lessons with you that I think will really change your life. Number one is this. Sort everything into two buckets. Let me explain what I mean by that. Okay. This is the center of the whole thing.

Epic Tid has said it very plainly. Some things are up to us and some things are not. That's it. So your effort, your attitude, your mindset, your standards, your response to life, what you say, what you think, what you do next, All of that, that's yours. On the other side of it, the other bucket, if you've got traffic and the economy and the weather and your ex and what people's opinions of you might be, or whether somebody does or does not text you back, none of those things are yours. They never have been. And where most people get this wrong is they don't sort everything in life into those two buckets.

They take all of it, both buckets, and they carry around the whole pile all day long, trying to control everything. And if you want to burn yourself out quickly, try to control everything. And so people wonder why they're tired all the time. And the reason why is because they're trying to control what they cannot control. I don't know about you, but that sounds really exhausting, doesn't it? So you're not tired because your life is hard. you're tired because you are mentally and emotionally invested in things that you have literally zero

control over, things that you cannot control no matter how hard you try. Like think about it. How much of your stress this week or the past month came from something that you had no control over, whether it be your boss, whether it be the business, whether it be your employees, whether it be your significant other, your children, like the amount of stress and anxiety that you, you feel on a daily and weekly basis is in direct proportion to how much you're trying to control that which you cannot control. You're trying to basically change the way that the world is, and it's something that you cannot change, which is really what Epictetus focused on while he was a slave. He couldn't control the majority of things that were going on, what he had to do, where he lived,

all of the stuff, but what he could control is his reaction to it and his mindset around it as well. And so here's how you use all of it, okay? When you catch yourself spinning on something, and you're stuck in it, you're overthinking, you're overwhelmed, just ask yourself right now, is there an action that I can take? So like, is there an action that I can take right now that has to do with this? If yes, stop thinking, stop the mental masturbation, and just go do it. If the answer is no, you're not going to ever solve it. you're just making yourself suffer by ruminating on it. And so that distinction alone will give you

hours back to your life every single day. So the summary of lesson number one, focus on only what you can control and let go of everything else. You will be so much happier in life. Okay. Lesson number two, nothing that happens means anything until you decide what it means. Okay, so Epictetus also says, this, people are not disturbed by events, but by their opinions about events. And that's exactly what cognitive behavioral therapy is built on. And so here's the mechanism underneath all of it. Something happens. That's the event. Then your brain writes a story about it. And that story, or the meaning that you give it, your brain makes this. And just so you know, like your brain is a meaning making machine. It's always making meaning. It's always making meaning about

everything that happens. And so there's the event and then there's the entire story that your brain makes up about the event. So like, let me give you example, right? Your boss walks past you without saying good morning. That's the event. But then you think and you create a story, oh my gosh, he might be mad at me. Did I do something wrong? Did I send an email that I didn't say to something correctly? You know, I think I'm getting fired. I knew this was going to happen. That's the story around the event. That is what actually sets you off. Not the event itself, but the story that your brain made up about the event. And so your heart rate doesn't respond to him walking past you. It responds to the story that you just unconsciously made up. And I want to be really clear. This is not like pretending that

everything is fine. Stoicism is not positive thinking, right? It is clear thinking is what it is. It is accurate thinking. It is working on the ability to see things as clearly as possible without a clouded lens of the world. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. Right. And so here's the tool. When you are upset about something and you're just, oh my gosh, something happened, I'm upset.

Imagine that a camera was recording the event and you could go back and watch the camera. Strip it all down to what the camera saw. right the camera records my boss walk past me if we're using that example right that's what the camera records the camera does not record he's mad at me that is your story because most of the stories that our brain tells us are not true they're just old stories from the past oh i did this my mom got mad at me now i have this pattern of being afraid of people in authority getting mad at me right And so we should all strive to see reality clearly and not through old stories and old patterns. Right. So that's what it comes down to when you look at it. You look at the event and then you try not to get yourself wrapped up into a story.

All right. Lesson number three, rehearse losing something before you lose it. And this is like a really counterintuitive thing that the Stoics did. Okay. They called it premeditadio malorium. I probably butcher that. But that's what they said, right? basically it is imagining the bad thing before the bad thing happens in psychology today it's actually called negative visualization and i know it sounds like the worst possible advice to visualize and imagine the worst thing happening to you because everybody out there tells you that you should visualize the life that you want visualize the outcome see the best case scenario and there's definitely a benefit in that and you should do that too but here's why i think you should actually do negative visualization as well and what it actually does for you. It takes the fear out of the fear.

Because once you've already lived it in your head, it can't ambush you. It can't surprise you. There's no uncertainty. So you're basically rehearsing, losing or not winning at something so that you can own it and not be afraid of it. Because fear thrives in the ambiguity. The more that you bring your fears to light, the less they have control over you. And the more that you kind of realize they're not that big of a deal and they're probably not going to happen. So Seneca, who was another really, really famous Stoic, would deliberately spend days eating poor people's food, wearing rough clothes, and acting like he lost everything because that is something that he feared. And then he would ask himself, is this what I was afraid of? I was afraid of losing everything and being in this situation.

And he didn't do it because he just wanted to be miserable and make himself suffer. He did it so that he could look at the thing that he's most afraid of and take his fears power away from him. Right? So psychologists have found that 85% of what we worry about never happens. Out of the remaining 15%, 12% of it happens better than we thought, and only 3% of what we worry about actually happens the way that we think. So that means one out of 33 circumstances that we worry about

will ever actually turn up to be what we thought it was. And so here's the practice. It takes about five minutes, right? take one thing that you've been fearing and imagine it all the way through to the end. Like losing your job, and then what, and then what, and then what? Your business failing. And then what, and then what, and you go as far as you possibly can, the absolute worst that could happen. It will make you more mentally resilient towards it.

But most of the time, and I've done this with many people, when you actually go to the end of your fears, you realize that what you're fearing is ridiculous and it's catastrophizing. and it will probably never happen the way that you actually unconsciously think that it's going to be doing it. Their brain is just catastrophizing everything. But then once you see that and you're like, oh my gosh, that's not going to happen like that,

logic comes in and you go, that's probably not going to happen this way. I need to stop fearing this thing. It takes the power out of your fear. Okay, that's lesson number three. And lesson number four, the obstacle is the training. Marcus Aurelius wrote in a line

that basically says, the thing that's standing in your way becomes the way. What blocks the path becomes the path. Ryan Holliday, who studies Stoicism, says the obstacle is the way. And most people read that as like a motivational quote. It's not. It is the mechanism for your growth is really what it means. Remember, like I said, the whole thing is a mental in life training program. All of Stoicism is. And you cannot train anything without resistance. You cannot build. You cannot build. muscle without weight. You cannot become stronger unless you keep adding more weight. You cannot become resilient to anything if you don't have any challenges in life. What's the phrase that's

like calm sea never made a skilled sailor? Right. You cannot build a mind that handles hard things without doing hard things first. So the difficult person at work isn't ruining your week. they're only in place to help you get better at patience, right? You don't get patient in an empty room. It's like the people who get mad at their children for interrupting and being loud while they're meditating. Silence doesn't make you a better meditator. Finding the silence in the chaos is what makes you better at meditating and have more peace

inside. Like for me, every day that my son's been alive, basically, like 95% of the days he's been alive, I've done breathwork and meditation with him. I used to do breathwork with him on my chest when he was a newborn. And so we still do it every single morning. He now has about a two to three minute max on sitting still. That's about it. And then it's I'm sitting there and I do breathwork and then I meditate.

And then it's dada, dada, hey, dada, dada, look. Dada, play with me. Dada, read this book. Dada, look, da, look. And there's a part of me, it's like, ah, it'd be so much easier if this was silence. But I'm not training if I'm not constantly trying to be pulled from something. You become a better meditator when you are challenged while you're meditating, right? You become stronger in everything that you do when you have more pressure, right?

So you have to understand the thing that you keep praying to have removed from your life is usually the exact thing that would build the part of you that you say you want. Like think about that. You like pray for patience, right? But you don't just wake up in your patient one day. You wake up to a kid who won't listen. and a line that won't move and then being stuck in traffic. All of those things are building your resilience to make you more patient.

You pray for more mental or internal strength. You don't just wake up stronger. You get handed something heavy in life, something that's going to challenge you so that you can get stronger. You pray for your business to grow. You know, money just doesn't come in easier when you pray for it. You get a problem that's big enough that you have to become the type of person who can solve it, which then makes you better at running business,

and then your business ends up growing. Right? So like life or God or the universe or whatever you believe in, it's not ignoring you, it's answering you. You're getting exactly what you asked for, but in a way that forces you to grow, not in just like being gifted it by waking up one day. And oh my gosh, you've got it. Like you asked for muscle.

You just got handed the weight. That's the way that it works. So here's the question that I want you to use. in these circumstances, right? Most people ask, why is this happening to me? Oh, my business is hard. My wife is doing this. My children are doing this. My employees are doing this. My boss is doing this. Why is this happening to me? Which makes you a victim. That question has no useful answer. It never has. So whenever you start feeling that way, just replace it with what is this asking me to become? You know, when your business gets hard, what is that asking me to become? When your children are

challenging. What is this asking me to become? It's the exact same situation, but it's completely different frames of looking at the actual situation. And I'm not telling you to fall in love with your challenges. I'm telling you to stop waiting for them by thinking that they're the thing that's holding you back. No, they are like the thing brought to you so that you can challenge yourself so that you can grow from it. Right. So if you really want to master soicism, the four lessons I think are the most important. Number one, sort everything in two buckets. Number two, nothing that happens means anything until you decide what it means. Number three, rehearse losing it on purpose.

And then number four, the obstacle is the training. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dowell Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave you every single episode. Making sure mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.