The Mindset Mentor - Mindset is Everything!

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself if the life you're living is actually being shaped by beliefs you didn't even choose? In today's episode, I break down why your mindset isn't just positive thinking—it's the operating system that's controlling your habits, relationships, health, money, and every decision you make. I'm going to show you how to identify the unconscious beliefs running your life and give you practical steps to finally start rewriting the story. 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 yet 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 be talking about the most important.

thing in your entire life, your mindset, because your mindset is running every single area of your life right now. It's the reason why you haven't made the money that you want to make, why you keep ending up in the same relationships, while you keep falling back to the same old habits that you've had, it's why you can know exactly what you need to do to change your life and still not be doing it. And the terrifying part about it is that you don't experience this thing as something that's holding you back. You don't experience your mindset as something that's holding you back. You experience it in your everyday life as truth. You think, oh, well, that's just who I am, or that's just how relationships are, or I'm just not good with money, or people like me don't succeed and things like that.

But none of that is actually true. Your brain has just been constructing a version of reality based off of beliefs that you did not choose. And then filtering your entire life through that system. And once you understand what's actually happening inside of your brain, you realize something that I genuinely believe. Every single person needs to understand. You could spend the next 30 years of your life trying to change your habits, become more disciplined, work harder, make more money, and improve yourself.

but you can still keep recreating different versions of the exact same life because you've been trying to change the results without changing the thing that's creating the results. And it's ultimately the reason why I have dedicated my entire life to understanding the mind and teaching the stuff that I learned. So today I'm going to show you what mindset truly is what's going on inside of your brain and your body right now and why it's important to work on it every single day. because your mindset isn't just something that's kind of affecting your life. It's deciding what your life will become. So let's dive in. I want to kill off the definition that you probably have in your head of mindset. When most people hear mindset, they think, oh, it's positive thinking. It's saying affirmations in the mirror. It's having good vibes. It's having a vision board. It's closing your eyes and manifesting and saying all areas of the universe are sending me money into my mailbox. It's, you know,

manifesting a Lamborghini by staring at it really hard. You know, it's like, that's what most people think mindset is. That's not what I'm talking about. It's never been what I'm talking about. Your mindset is not what you say. Your mindset is the set of unconscious assumptions that your brain uses to interpret your reality before you have consciously thought about anything at all. It's not a thought.

It's the thing that produces the thoughts. Do you get that? Like your habits, your goals, your morning routine? Those are like apps on your phone, right? Everybody's obsessed to the apps. Make sure you do the cold plunges. Your mindset is not an app. Your mindset is the operating system

that all of the apps are running on. You can download all the apps that you want to. But if the operating system is running code from like 1994, they're probably going to crash, right? Every single time. And so what makes it really dangerous is that you don't experience your mindset

as like a belief. you experience it as actual truth. Like nobody walks around going, well, I've adopted the belief that people can't be trusted. No. Like people walk around thinking people can't be trusted and they think that it's a fact. So it's not like you experience it just this thing.

Like you experience your mindset in these unconscious set of beliefs as true. Like it's written into the fabric of the universe that people cannot be true. trust it. And people who believe that actually believe it to be true. So let me show you real quick the three major places where your mindset is just running your life right now. Number one, your mindset decides what you see. You have to understand your brain takes in about 11 million bits of information per second. Everything that's hitting your eyes, your ears, your skin, what you taste, what you hear, feel, everything. Your conscious awareness, though, only processes about 40 to 50 bits of information per second. 40 to 50 out of 11 million. So basically all of reality

is getting deleted before you're even aware of it. Do you get that? Like you've never once really seen reality in your life. You're seeing a compressed version based off of what your brain is filtering in and filtering out. It's basically deciding what makes the cut. And there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system is your brain's filter. You've probably heard me talk about in a podcast tons of times. The part that should make your hair stand up, though, is that the filter is set by what you believe. And a lot of your beliefs, probably most of your beliefs come from childhood and they weren't even yours in the first place. Your brain isn't like a camera. It's not just seeing things. Neuroscience is increasingly seeing your brain as a prediction

machine more than anything else. It's not waiting for reality. It is guessing what's about to happen and then it's hunting for evidence to confirm that guess. Do you get that? Like, that's crazy thing about it. You're not seeing what's actually happening. Your brain is guessing what's about to happen and then hunting for evidence to confirm its guess true. Ooh, that's either really exciting or really scary based off of your beliefs,

isn't it? So if you believe underneath everything that opportunities don't come to people like you, your brain will delete all of the opportunities. Not ignore them, delete them. You'll walk direct. directly past the thing that could have changed your life and you'll never see it. And then you'll say, see, nothing ever works out for me. And your brain goes, correct.

Prediction confirmed. So that's number one. Number two, it's in control of what your body does. That's crazy. This is the part that turned mindset from something I found interesting and something that I found, like, urgent. I need to learn this. Because your mindset is not just in your head.

It's in your bloodstream. Researchers at Yale gave people a milkshake. Same exact milkshake, identical milkshake. but two different labels. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. One group was told that it was an indulgent 620 calorie shake, and the other group was told that it was a sensible,

guilt-free, 140-calorie shake. Same shake, different stories. They then measured the ghrelin, which is your body's hunger hormone, the thing that tells your brain that you're full. The group who thought they drank an indulgent shake had ghrelin drop three times steeper. Their bodies responded to the label,

not the actual liquid that was in their body. Actual hormones, actual chemistry, responding to a belief. Now that story's crazy. Do you want to hear another crazy story? Researchers followed 660 people over the age of 50 for more than two decades, and they measured one thing,

their attitude about aging. Did they believe that getting older, meant becoming useless and forgotten, or did they believe that it could mean more wisdom, more freedom, and becoming more of themselves? The people who had a positive perception of their own aging lived on average seven and a half years longer, seven and a half years longer. Not because of exercise, not because of income, not because of gender, not because of loneliness. They controlled all of those things because of their belief. To put that in perspective, they lived longer like that's a bigger longevity effect than lowering your blood pressure

bigger than lowering your cholesterol a belief bought them seven and a half years of their life isn't that crazy that's their mind affecting their body so let me say this as clearly as i can your mindset is a physiological event as well it's not fluffy it's not soft every belief you hold gets translated into your nervous system into hormones into immune function and how fast your cells actually age. You're not just thinking your thoughts. You're metabolizing your thoughts. So that's number two. Number three, your mindset affects what you do. And this is the one that I really want you to focus on. Okay, there was a study that was done on humans back in the 60s where they did these experiments on something that they called

learned helplessness. It's not the greatest experiment, I promise you that. But animals were exposed to stress that they could not escape. And after enough repetition, when the escape route was opened, when they could get out, they didn't even try. The door was open, and they stopped looking at it. And yeah, it's brutal to do to an animal. I do agree.

But it tells you something about humans and it tells you something about animals because we do the exact same thing. And the part that's really wild is that most people never even really talk about. About 50 years later, one of the original researchers of learned helplessness went back with modern neuroscience

and basically said like, we've got it all backwards. Helplessness isn't learned. Helplessness is the default of animals. Passivity is the factory setting of the brain under stress. What has to be learned, and this is really key, right? What has to be learned? What gets built into your prefrontal cortex through repetition is the belief that you have control. Like, do you understand how big that is? It has to be learned, which means nobody has to teach you to give up and to be helpless. Giving up is free. It comes standard. What has to be built is the belief that your actions matter. And if nobody built that into you as a kid, if you grew up in a house where nothing that you did ever changed anything, where chaos came no matter how good you were, you didn't learn helplessness.

You just never got to be taught control over your entire life. So you walk around as a fully capable adult today with the door standing wide open and you don't even look at it. at it. And it's not because you're lazy or because you're broken or because you're weak or because of any of that stuff that people always think. It's because your brain never got the update that effort changes your outcome. And parents pass it on their children. They pass on their children. They pass on their children. You can't opt out of passing it on. There is no neutral here. So what do we actually do to change this? There's three things. Write each of these down. Okay. Number one is find the sentence. Everybody has a core belief about their life that they've

never really truly examined. And it's usually like maximum of eight words long. Nothing ever comes easy for me. People always leave. I'm always behind. I'll never amount to anything. People I love will eventually use me. Whatever it might be, try to figure out what your sentence is. Take a piece of paper and I want you to finish these. I'm going to give you some sentence stems and these are going to help you find it. Okay. Life is blank. Finish that sentence. Okay. Number two, people are, are blank. Finish that sentence. Next one. Money is blank. Finish that sentence. And the last one, I am the kind of person who blank. Whatever comes out is the first thing I want you go. If the first thing that comes out of your mind, it's not a thought. That's the lens that you look at your life through.

And ask yourself, whose voice is in that? Whose voices in it? Because a lot of times it's not yours. It's something you learned. Okay. That's number one. Number two, change the search. terms. Your brain answers whatever question you feed it. So stop feeding it garbage. I've said this before in the podcast before. But if you go into Google and you type in, is coffee good for your eyesight? You will see a bunch of research that shows that coffee is good for your eyesight. If you go in and ask this coffee bad for your eyesight, you will see a bunch of research that shows that coffee's bad for your eyesight. Your brain is the exact same way. It will find proof to whatever questions you ask it. I always say it's like cosmic Google, right? So instead of asking the question,

like why does this always happen to me in making yourself a victim, which most people do, oh, why does this always happen to me? Right. Ask yourself, what is this supposed to teach me? It's the same event. It's a completely different lens, different search terms, right? Instead of asking, what's wrong with me? Like, what's wrong with me? Ask yourself, what does this part of me need right now? It's the same brain. It's the same power. It's completely different results. Do that 10 times a day, not once, not twice, 10 times a day. You just go in and say, okay, here's this. So instead of saying this, I'm going to say this, instead of saying this, I'm going to say this. Instead of asking this, I'm going to ask this. And you actually start to update what you're asking

yourself throughout the day. Okay. And number three, go get evidence. And if you have somehow tuned out to everything else in this podcast episode, this is the most important part. You do not change your mindset by just talking to yourself. Is talking to yourself important? Absolutely. but where you really change it is by giving your brain undeniable proof that the old story is wrong. When you stand in the mirror and you say, I'm disciplined, your bullshit meter is going to go off immediately because there's no evidence for that. It's thinking about how you slept in last night and how you haven't worked out in three months. But if you go when you do the hard thing once, well, now there's a data point.

If you do it again tomorrow, there's two. There's another data point. Do it 400 times. and your brain has no choice but to update the model of what it thinks of who you are. It can't keep predicting failure against that much contradictory evidence. So don't try to become somebody new tomorrow. That's overwhelming and you'll do probably nothing. Just ask yourself like in this single moment tomorrow, just ask yourself, what would somebody who believes life works out for them do now? What would somebody who is disciplined do now?

What would somebody who cares about their family do now? What would somebody who cares about their health do now? You ask yourself those questions and then you just do that. And so to wrap this up, your mindset is the most important part of every single thing that happens in your life. Every episode for this podcast for over a decade, four times a week, is me having a conversation with you that I wish somebody would have taught me as a kid. I'm making these episodes for me as much as I am for you. So when I say mindset is everything, I'm not being cute. I'm not making some slogan for a T-shirt. It decides what you see. Out of 11 million, bits per second. It decides what your hormones feel in your body. It decides whether you look at the

door as open or closed for certain events in your life. It decides what you pass on to your kids. And according to research, it decides how many years you're going to live. There's no part of your life that mindset is not touching. And so if you're sitting there going, damn, like I've been living out a chapter that somebody else wrote for me. Good. That's the point. This is the first real moment where you could take back your life because you can't change a lens in your life if you don't know that you're looking through it now you know so that's what i got for today's episode if you love this episode please share it on instagram stories tag me in at rob dial jr 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 the same way 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.