The Mindset Mentor - Podcast: How to Build Real Self-Esteem

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

What if the reason you struggle with self-love is because you were never taught to fully accept yourself? In this episode, I break down how childhood conditioning, self-judgment, and the need for external approval can shape the way you see yourself, and why true self-love starts with self-acceptance. I’ll show you how to reconnect with your childhood self, give yourself the love and validation you’ve been searching for, and finally build a healthier relationship with yourself. 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 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 Freedom Live26.com. There's currently a $50 off coupon on that website. Once again, is Freedom Live.26.com. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to build up your own self-esteem and also your self-love as well. I have found that people can be so cruel to themselves. And what's crazy about is that we'll speak to ourselves internally, harsher than we would ever dare speaking to another person. Like you would never speak to someone that you love the same way that you speak to yourself. But we normalize this because we've been doing it for so long. It's such a habit. And we don't even notice that we're abusing ourselves

as much as we are. And so when you look at self-love, what I think is actually a better phrase for self-love is self-acceptance. To be able to accept every part of yourself. Yes, every part of yourself. Because some of you guys are already getting trigger going, but yeah, but he doesn't know about this part of me. He doesn't know that I think this. He doesn't know about this. I want to keep this hidden from everybody. And the reason why I say self-acceptance is because it's not really about love. It's about acceptance. And the barrier to self-love is self-love. acceptance. When you fully accept yourself and you get past all of your self-judgment, the only thing that's there is self-love. So the natural state of a human is love. If you've ever hung out

with a baby, the natural state of a human is love. The only thing that's in the way of that is the acceptance of ourselves. And so I want to prep you for how today is going to go. Before I talk about how to actually love and accept yourself, I think it's really, really important. And I need to talk about why you don't love and accept yourself and how that happens throughout your life. Because if we don't talk about that, then this isn't going to really make any sense. And so when we talk about how and why and all of that stuff, I'm going to dive deep into childhood and how to actually raise a child and how most people are raised as children. And then it's going to start to make a lot more sense why we have the habit of self-judgment

and not the habit of self-acceptance. So when you see a baby, you don't see a baby with self-love issues. I've been around my son every single moment of his life almost. And I've never seen him be like, I don't love myself. I don't accept myself. Like a baby arrives into this world unfiltered, unapologetic, like fully themselves. They don't question if their laugh is too loud or if their body is good enough. Like my son has a little bit of fat that hangs over his pants when he wears a little tight.

pants. He doesn't like hold that up and look at himself in the mirror or anything. He's just like, yep, it's there. And so if that's the case, that means that we have been conditioned at some point in time to not accept ourselves. The conditioning happens later on in life. And that is learned, obviously, from adults. And so when you look at that, why is it so hard to accept ourselves? Well, it really comes down to just the way that we are socialized to fit in with society nowadays. Parents are under intense pressure to socialize you to make you fit in. And a child really just does not fit in with social constructs. From the moment that we're able to start walking around and to speak and to be in public, it's kind of like we start to mold and shift a child to what is appropriate or what is normal or what is respectable in some sort of way. And those rules that we learn over our young childhood, two, three, four, five, seven, ten years old, those external rules kind of mold and shift into our internal voices. So the reason why they say that most of the time your internal

voice is actually the voice of your primary caregiver that you spent the most time with when you were a child. So if you guys that are primary caregivers, make sure that you're saying the right things to your children. And so I've been trying for 15 years to try to figure out why it is the way that it is. And if there's a way to raise a child to get around this. And I don't think that there is. And the reason why is because most parents don't have a psychology degree. And even if they do have a psychology degree, they probably still have a whole lot of stuff that they inherited from their parents. The sad part about it is that most parents will almost always emotionally reward or punish a child based off of how they act. Not on purpose, but it's just kind of a fact of the way that

most people raise their children. If you're good, you get my love. If you're bad, I will remove my love. So even if parents don't consciously mean to withhold love, they do. And then the other thing is even if they're mad, but they try to say the right thing, children can interpret tones, they can interpret attention, they can interpret approval. All of those things is like currency. And they quickly learn what buys them connection to their parents and what costs them connection to their parents. And there's no, you know, this is a child we're talking about. There's no reasoning behind this. There's no processing behind this. The child doesn't understand everything. And so they just realize at some point in time, unconsciously, hey, certain ways that I act makes my parents

love and accept me. Certain ways that I act makes my parents feel like they do not love and accept me. And certain ways that I act are not acceptable. And because the children are hardwired for survival in attachment to their primary caregivers, they will trade authenticity for approval without even knowing that they're really doing it. I was looking up statistics before this episode and they find that about eight to ten times more than a child is actually like praised,

they will be reprimanded. Eight to ten times more. The average toddler hears no, 400 times a day. And they hear, yes, 30 to 40 times a day. So what happens is it turns, into the child thinking, I'm not good enough the way that I am. I'm not doing things right. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. And so those numbers are not just statistics. Like, they become a blueprint for a self-image. And so if you think about that, the majority of feedback

that we get from parents or correction or disapproval or any of that stuff comes from looking and going, well, if I do this thing, my mom loves it. accepts me. If I do this thing, she doesn't. Okay, I want her love and acceptance, so I'll just continue to do this thing and I'll stop doing this thing. And so what ends up happening, and this is a really, really important part of what I'm going to teach today is we end up learning to grow up, scanning for what's wrong with us instead of recognizing what's right with us, which is why self-love and self-acceptance is so hard because self-judgment ends up becoming a habit so that we just fit in with everyone else. And so the child learns that they have to change themselves. They have to let go of

certain aspects of themselves in order to be what they think their parents want them to be. And you know, you can have a kid that's having the best time ever. They're three years old. They're running around. They're screaming. They're having fun. And then their mom yells at them to be quiet. And so they think to themselves unconsciously, obviously, okay, I was having the best time in my life. I was screaming. I was laughing. As naturally as I am. and I got yelled at. So that means that naturally as I am, something is not right. So then I must be wrong.

And so we learned from a very young age during this socialization process that we are not good enough as we are. And so we must act a certain way in order to be accepted. Even if that certain way is not me. In that result, we end up feeling like we're unworthy because of the socialization process and we feel like love is conditional and we look at the lens of the world through that way and then we start bringing that into everything after being raised by our parents. So every classroom we try to be accepted, every workplace we try to be accepted, every

relationship, we feel like all of these things are like a test that we have to pass. And your personality, you have to realize the reason why it's so hard for us to accept ourselves is because our personalities through the socialization process is built upon repressing who we truly are. Somehow I am bad and I need to look to others to see if I am right. I need their validation. And so then we get older and then we turn this into wanting approvals as others as I was saying. So then we seek other people's approval. If I do this, do you like me? Do you want to date me? Do you love me? If I get good grades and I get to number one and I beat everybody else, will you love me? If I win this football game, do you love me? Do I look sexy enough for you?

Do I look good enough for you? Am I fit enough for you? Am I too fat for you? Do I get enough likes on Instagram, Facebook? Show me that I'm accepted. If I make more money, will you accept me? like we do all of these things to change ourselves into who we think we need to be for other people to accept us when really we just have to look to accept ourselves. Like we're trying to do or become something so that we can be accepted. So we swap like mom and dad's approval for society, for bosses, for partners, for strangers online, but it's all the same game. Am I enough for you to love me?

And here's the secret of all of it. This is the most important part of it is, What you're searching for from the external world, love, acceptance, tell me that I'm enough, show me that I'm loved in some sort of way, is actually what you're searching for from yourself. Nobody in this entire world, not even your parents anymore, can fill the void that you feel like you have except for yourself. It's kind of crazy.

It's kind of wild when you start to go into it. And so when you realize, oh, I feel like I need to be loved. Give it to myself. I feel like I need to be accepted. I need to give it to myself. I need to feel like I am enough. I need to tell myself that I'm enough.

I need to feel that I am loved. I need to tell myself that I love myself. Just kind of a weird thing to do. But once you start doing it, you realize it starts to actually heal you. Because when you give it to yourself, you don't need it from anybody else. It's nice to have it. You know, it's nice to be accepted by other people. It's nice to be loved by other people.

But you don't need it. means if I don't need it, then I don't need to change who I am because I don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks about me. I want people that want to accept who I truly am, not me having to change myself and be somebody else for you to accept me. So the secret is that we can validate ourselves based off of who we are as a person and nothing else. Not any achievement that you have or how much money is in your bank account or what you look like or your weight or where you live or any of those things. The secret is we have to validate our Your looks don't matter. Your looks don't matter. Your mind doesn't matter. Your car doesn't matter. Your

job doesn't matter. Your social media followings don't matter. We just have to learn to accept ourselves as we are by ourselves. Now, how do we do that? It's kind of, it takes time. We'll talk with us. It is a skill set that has to be built because we have this skill set that's really in habit, that's very strong of self-judgment. We have the self-acceptance muscles are quite weak. We need to work on those. And so we need to learn to accept ourselves as we currently are. Fat, skinny, short, tall, no money, whatever. Your negative thoughts, your short temper. Acceptance first, no judging. Now, acceptance just so you know it doesn't mean resignation. It means that you're telling the truth about who you are right now without the constant background noise of shame. It doesn't mean,

oh, I accept myself, so therefore I don't want to grow a successful business and I don't want to become better and I don't want to evolve myself and all that. No, no, none of that. Acceptance is the vehicle that you're in in this journey of life. You can still get an amazing shape and have great relationships and become a multi-billionaire if you want to and all of those things. But accept yourself first in the road to get there so much easier. So when you actually start to think of it, how do we do it? Because self-acceptance isn't really that easy because once again, it's a muscle that is weak within us. Well, I want you to think of it this way. You don't want to love and accept yourself as you are, 45 years old,

all of the stuff that you've been through. Because that tends to be hard for most people. What is the best way to do it is to pretend that you're talking to yourself as a child. Like that little kid still lives inside of you. If you could go back to when that child learned that they needed to change themselves to be loved, when their parents said, you're too loud, you're too much, you're too emotional, children are supposed to be seen and not heard. And they felt that. disconnection, that removal of love from their parent, and you could be there in that moment as the 45-year-old adult that you are now, what would you say to that child? What did they need

to hear? You know, how would you be there for them emotionally? This is how you actually start to love and accept yourself. Not yourself as you are today, but that child that created these behavioral adaptations that we're now dealing with as adults. One of the ways to do it, I recommend that everybody do it. I had this for probably four years, is you change the background of your phone to a picture of you when you were just a cute little kid. Because you look at your phone, if you're average a couple hundred times a day. So every time you pick up that phone, you see that cute little kid a hundred times a day. And you remind yourself, that is who you're trying to heal. Because if you heal the child, guess what happens to the adult? It's automatically

healed. You as an adult are automatically healed. That's who you're trying to be there for. That seven-year-old kid that told that he wasn't good enough or smart enough unless he ended up getting good grades or whatever it might be for you or the one that had to achieve and get number one and spelling bees or be the best basketball player they possibly could be what does that child need and then you allow yourself to be that human being that one person who needed you back then you're the only person that can heal yourself it is one of the crazy parts of life nobody can heal you. Only you can heal you. And so you allow yourself to be a flawed individual. Allow yourself to have flaws and to mess things up and to be there for yourself the same way that

you would be there for a friend. If your friend ended up screwing something up, you wouldn't shame them for screwing up. You would be there for them. If your child messed something up, how would you be there for them? You know, and like I think about it because it's great that I have a child now because you know, my son, like, not even purposely do it, but just fart in my face sometimes. And it's not on purpose. He's just moving my face right there. He's like, let's one out. And I'll laugh at it. You know, Lord and I will laugh at it. It's not like I'm like getting mad at him for it. It's like, oh, this is one of his, what we would call quote unquote flaws as an adult. Like if an adult rips a fart in the middle of public, you're like, oh my God, he's so disgusting. Like, I don't

look at my son. I'm like, oh, my God, he's so disgusting. You know, he was walking yesterday. and he tripped and he hit his head and he started crying immediately. And it wasn't that hard, but it was enough to just really scare him. And so I picked him up immediately. Lauren was in the room. She saw it happen as well. And I held him and she was on the other side. We both gave him a hug.

We both kissed him as he cried. And we were there for him as he was going through something. Don't we all need someone like that for us that's there for us when we're going through something? You can be that person. You can be the person. that takes care of you. It's the most important relationship that you will ever have. Not to your spouse, not to your children, not to your parents. Your relationship to yourself is the most important

relationship that you could possibly have. And you don't need to earn that relationship or your self-worth or your love or any of that. Your self-worth is not a trophy that you can earn. It's the ground that you've always been standing on. And so give yourself permission to be human. It's okay. to screw up. It's okay to feel anxious. It's okay if I need some rest sometimes. It's okay if I'm not perfect. And you say it out loud and you start hearing your voice to affirm and to actually make it real. And so how do you actually start to love and accept yourself? How do you love yourself? Well, you need to accept yourself. How do you accept yourself? You need to accept your childhood self. You need to talk to yourself and be there the same way that you would be for that little kid.

And you see yourself in the background of your phone over and over and over again every single day. you're like, ah, I'm not healing the adult. I'm healing that child. And when you heal the child, the adult automatically is healed. 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 2026.com. Once again, Freedom Live 2026.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.