The Mindset Mentor - Stop Being Triggered

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Why do you keep getting triggered by the same people and situations, no matter how much work you’ve done on yourself? In this episode, I break down how your reactions are actually coming from unhealed parts of your past—and why understanding them, instead of trying to control them, is the key to real growth. I’ll show you how to create space between stimulus and response, so you can stop reacting on autopilot and start building true inner peace. 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 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 yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn who you are so that you can grow yourself so that you can grow and have a better life. So if that's what you want, hit that subscribe button and join the journey. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to stop being triggered by other people. Because you can read all of the books. Listen to all of the podcasts. podcast episodes and still find yourself being triggered by the same things and the same people over and over again. And it's not because you're not trying hard enough or because you're

down or because there's something wrong with you. It's because you're trying to control your reactions instead of actually understanding your reactions. Because your reactions don't come from the present moment. They come from the past that hasn't fully been processed or healed yet. And until you really understand that, you'll keep repeating the same emotional patterns in your life, but in different situations. And so today, we're going to go deeper into what it actually means to become somebody who actually doesn't react to anything. So let's dive into it. To start off, I want to talk about something that I think a lot of people really misunderstand. Being triggered by somebody or something is not the problem.

Think about that for a second. being triggered is not the problem. Being triggered is the signal that you need to pay attention to. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's something to be curious about to look at and start to question when you are triggered. Because if you just start to guilt yourself and shame yourself for being triggered, you learn nothing. But if you start to get curious around why you're getting triggered, now you really start to understand who you are and what's going on behind the scenes. Because every time you get triggered, you're being shown a part of yourself. that is still sensitive, that is still reactive, that is still holding on to something, that is still not healed from the past. And most people's instinct, whenever they're triggered,

is to look outward and ask themselves questions. Why would they say that to me? Why would they do that to me? What did I do to them to make them react that way? And they're looking outward. But what you need to do is look inward whenever you're triggered. The deeper question here is why did that affect me so deeply in the way that it did? Why did that affect me so deeply in the way that it did? And I am now taking responsibility for being triggered. The way I like to look at being triggered is this. It's kind of like salt on a wound, right? If the wound is healed, the salt doesn't do anything. It doesn't hurt. But if the wound has not healed, it hurts like hell. That's the best analogy I can think of. So whenever you're triggered, the triggering is like the salt.

If you get trigger on just normal skin that's healed over, no big deal. But if you put salt on top of a wound, it's going to hurt like hell. That is the universal way of life coming to you and saying, hey, you haven't healed here yet. You need to start working on yourself in this particular area. So it's not about them. It's not about what happened. And it's not about the circumstances. is it's about why did it affect me in that way? And how do I need to heal myself? See, because most people

don't really look at it through this way. They don't really understand something that's really important is that when you're looking at something that's happened to you, every moment of your life, your mind is giving meaning to everything that's happening around you. Your brain is a meaning making machine. It's doing it all day long. It's giving meaning to this and that and this person and what they said and what they're going to do. And that meaning is what creates your emotional response. The meaning that you're giving a situation or circumstances is what creates your emotional response. And so when someone says something and you feel triggered, it's not their words that are actually triggering you. It's the meaning your mind is attaching to those words.

And that meaning is shaped by your past, shaped by your experiences, your identity, who you think you are, your wounds. You know, like a simple example is this. For instance, if somebody cuts you off on the road and there's no reaction, well, then there's no reaction. But if somebody else gets cut off on the road and they blow up because of it, it's the same circumstance, but it's different meaning attached to being cut off. It's not because of the event, but because the person who is triggered is giving meaning to that event. And it's something like, oh, that person doesn't care about me. Or they think that they're more important than I am or they aren't worried about my safety at all. So it's not the event. It's that your mind has attached some sort of meaning to that event. And now you're reacting to the

meaning, not the actual situation. Whatever it is, there's a negative meaning that you're attaching to it in that situation. So we need to learn how to get to a point of not being reactive. And when I talk about not reacting and not being reactive, I'm not talking about like becoming an emotionless statue. It doesn't mean that I feel nothing. That's not what I'm trying to say here. What I'm talking about is becoming aware of what's going on inside of me before I react to anything. It's, it is extreme self-awareness. I'm talking about creating space within yourself. Because right now, for most people, something happens and the reaction is just instant. And there's no space. There's no awareness that's in that space. It's just an automatic response

that you've been dealing with for 25 years. But the psychologist, Victor Frankl, says that growth happens in the tiny space between stimulus and response, between something happening and us actually responding. And in that tiny space, if we become aware of what's happening within ourselves, we can choose how we want to respond versus just responding in a pattern in a way that we have our entire life or something that we learn from our parents. So between, something happening to you and you actually responding there's a moment where you can decide how you want to respond without being swept away by old emotions or old stories or old meanings and so when I'm saying try to work towards never reacting I don't mean don't feel I don't mean

don't have emotions I mean don't let the feelings control you and we will be right back now back to the show. You can have feelings and not be controlled by feelings. Now that's, that's, I understand, very foreign to a lot of people. Because for me, for a long time when I was younger, I was just controlled by my emotions. I felt like I was just not in the driver's seat. But it's not about not feeling. It's about don't let your feelings control you. You are experiencing feeling. You can decide how you react. You can notice it. You can sit with it for a minute. start to get curious about it, understand it. Man, why do I feel this way?

Like, what's going on in my head? Why do I always get mad when this happens? What meaning am I giving this situation? What does this situation remind me of in my past that's not healed yet? And that is where your true growth will actually lie. When you actually start to get really curious about your emotions and your feelings and your reactions and why you are triggered the way that you're triggered and the meaning that you're attaching to situations

because your emotions are not problems that you need to fix. There's signals that you need to listen to. They're pointing you in a direction. Stop ignoring where they're trying to point you. And so you have to start to think that this also has to deal with the way other people interact with you. So it's like we need to understand about herself, but it's also very important when we understand this about ourselves.

This is also happening inside of everything. every other person around you. Like I always say when you see a male, like a 40-year-old man who's just an asshole to everybody, right? What you're seeing or, you know, he's having a breakdown or he's yelling at somebody, what you're seeing is a 40-year-old body that happens to have a little child still in it. So it's a child that is still hurting and wounding in an adult's body. So, and the reason why you can understand this is because people don't see you as you are. Like, really much understand. People don't see you as you are. They see you as they are through their beliefs, through their past, through their wounds, through their conditioning, through their patterns,

through what they learn from their parents unconsciously. So no matter how clearly you explain yourself, people will still misunderstand you because people can only understand from the level of their perception. And sometimes people just aren't going to be able to understand you. And it's not because there's something wrong with you. And it's not because you failed in explaining yourself. But sometimes it's just because they're filtering you through their own lens of conditioning over their entire life. So what I mean by that is like if you need to set boundaries to somebody, your boundaries might feel like rejection to somebody who has abandonment wounds. Doesn't mean that your boundaries are bad. It just means that they haven't healed that aspect of themselves. If you are a confident

and somebody reacts to it, your confidence might feel like arrogance to someone who's extremely insecure. If you're an honest person and you don't want to beat around the bush, your honesty might feel like an attack to someone who avoids truth. It's the same you, but it's just a different lens. And this is where most people get stuck because most people have other people react to them and they think, well, I need to change myself. And they're trying to change themselves or they're trying to fix the other person's perception. So they will try to explain themselves more to be accepted or they will soften themselves more for the other person. They will shrink more for the other person. But understanding this is really important because you understand that it's not just about how you

communicate and who you are. It's also about how somebody is able to receive you. And it's really important to understand this because as you start to work on yourself and you become more confident yourself and you become more confident in who you're becoming, it might trigger other people. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It can mean that there's something wrong with that person's perception based off of their past. They might not be able to perceive you at a different level. So some people can only meet you at the level that they're at themselves, right? So if they don't respond to you and the way that you want them to respond to you, they might be triggered by you in some sort of way. They might be protecting their own wounds and you don't realize it. If you're

not careful, you will accidentally change yourself in order to meet other people's expectations of you. You'll start to carry labels that were never yours in the first place. Like, oh, you know what, maybe I am too much. Or, you know, maybe I am selfish. Or maybe I am hard to love. That's really, that's really challenging, right? Or maybe someone just can't clearly understand you because they're just not able to understand you with the level that they're right in their right now. And, you know, obviously I want to kind of walk this line very carefully because it doesn't mean that you ignore all feedback from other people. It means that you become clear so that you can learn the difference, right? Feedback from another person looks like, hey, this is how your,

your behavior impacted me. Somebody projecting their own crap on top of you is like, hey, this is who I've decided who you are. Right? There's a big difference between those two things. You cannot explain yourself into clarity with someone that's committed to misunderstanding you. And so at some point, your piece might look like, hey, I know who I am, even if that person doesn't know who I am. Because their lens is not your identity. Don't ever take on what somebody else says about you, because that means that they're filtering you through their lens. I'd rather make up my own identity of who I think I am and who I am versus looking to other people to tell me who I am when I know that their filter is already clouded, right? So the right people, the grounded people, the self-aware ones,

they don't need you to change yourself. They don't need you to shrink so that they can understand you. They will see you clearly because they're already looking through clarity, not through clouded lenses. And that's the shift that you really need to understand is you won't fit everyone's lens and everyone's perception. And everybody's lens is not about the truth about you anyways. And so really what you start to become like peaceful with is to accept yourself as you truly are. Once you go on this journey of self-discovery, you start healing these wounds and coming in contact with who you truly are and starting to work through your triggers. Peace comes when you start to really figure out who you are and you accept it and you stop fighting against it. And you stop trying to control everything around you.

And you're just okay with who you are. You don't need to be accepted by other people. And when you're truly okay with yourself, you don't need everyone to accept you. That's the key. Like, what really matters to everybody listen to this podcast, what really matters more than almost anything else is not about do other people accept you? It's do you accept you? Because if you accept you, it doesn't matter if other people accept you because you fully

100% already accept yourself. To accept yourself and to love yourself and to truly know. know yourself might be the highest form of enlightenment that we could all get to. And so the deepest truth of all of this, of being triggered, of going on this journey of self-discovery is understanding that healing is not when life stops triggering you, because you'll always be triggered. We're probably not going to become a monk and get fully enlightened in this, you know, this life that we're in right now. But you realize that you may never get to the point we're not triggered, but real healing is not not being triggered.

It's when your reaction to those triggers changes. Like the same situation that used to ruin your entire day, you now just pass us through and you don't even notice it. The same comment that used to hit a nerve and make you feel like less than barely even lands anymore. Like that is the proof as real as it can be that you're healing and that you're growing and that you're becoming better and that you're developing a deeper relationship with yourself. that's what we all should be working towards. And that's how you really know that you've grown. Not because life got easier in any way, but because you became more grounded within yourself.

And this is what I love about stoicism. Like the stoics really understood this deeply. Like they didn't try to control the world. They worked on themselves. They focused on what was within their control, their thoughts, their responses, their inner state. And I think that's one of the reason why stoic philosophy is making such a big comeback in the past five to ten years is because there's so much truth to it and so many people resonate with it. You know, to become more stoic and everything that we do requires us to keep working on ourselves. You know, we can't control most of the circumstances in our life, but we can't control how we react to the circumstances in our life. And that's what we should be trying to master. That's pretty much the only thing that we can really

control because the world is always going to be unpredictable. People will always say things. Situations will always happen. But your peace, that's something that you can build. That's something that you're in control of. That's something that you can get more of. And when you get to a place of peace, your calm doesn't have to be something that you're forcing. It's just something that you are, something that other people feel by being around you. And so I want you to remember this. The goal is not to stop reacting completely. The goal is to heal the part of you that feels like you need to react. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram story tag me at Rob Dow Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. 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.