The Mindset Mentor - That's Not Love!

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

What if I told you that the highest form of love that we give to another might not even be real, unconditional love? Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode. Today, we're going to be talking about love. I wanted to talk about this because I've gone through a lot of growth over the past two years, three years, four years, five years. I've been growing a lot for the past 15 years, but the past few years has really been a hardcore focus. I'd say since starting this podcast, I've been even more hardcore focused because in order for me to teach, I need to push myself harder than I'm even teaching you guys to push yourself. And I want to tell you a story and I want to talk to you about love and kind of my ideas and what I've learned through it. So I'll go back to April. So in April, my girlfriend and I,

we went and we traveled Italy for the entire month of April, which we tend to do about a month to two months out of the country every single year. And we were in Lake Como and we were in Varena in Lake Como. And it was one of the last days that we were there. And right across the Airbnb for us, there was one other door. There's this little tiny village that we were in and there was a door and then there was one other door and that was it. Just our door and then another door. And every once in a while, we would see the door open. And it was this older guy. He looked a lot like Willie Nelson. And he'd come out and peek his head out and spoke kind of some broken English. And he'd say, hey, how you doing? Like, hey, how are you? And he was just a painter and he just painted and

he was amazing. And one of the last days we were there, we just walked in. We started looking at all of his stuff. We started talking to him. We're there for about 45 minutes. And, you know, he talks to us about, you know, his family, about where he's from. He talks about how, you know, he did these incredible paintings, but the charge was so low. And he's like, you know what? I just get, you know, he was older. So he's like, I don't need to make a lot of money. I just want to be able to pay for all of my supplies and then also know that all of my paintings are all over the world. And that's what brought him joy. That's one of the things I've really learned a lot about most Italians when we go over there is that, you know, it's not all about the money. It's more of like having pride in what they do. So we buy a painting from him. It's a real cool experience. Great memory. He rolls up the painting, gives it to us. And, you know, we've got

a few more days in Lake Como, then we go to Milan and we fly back and we're in New York for a few days. And we have the painting with us the whole time. And then we go through airport check-in, we fly from New York back home. And we're getting into our place and I'm opening up the door and I look at Lauren and I go, hey, where's the painting at? Right? Because we had the painting the entire trip. It was always with us. It was always inconvenient, but we always had it. Excuse me. And so she's like, oh, oh my God, I don't know where it is. And we're like, oh shit, what are we supposed to do? We lost the painting. It was just,

it wasn't more than anything else. It wasn't about the money. It was just the memory of having it. And we were both really upset by it. I hate the way that I feel when I get done traveling. So I always shower whenever I get to wherever I'm going. So I'm like pissed, she's pissed. And in my head, the whole time I'm sharing, I'm like, fuck, damn it. I'm so pissed off. You know, like this was such a great memory. It's not about the money, but it's just the fact that we had this memory and how could she lose it? And that's going through my mind, of course, right? So I'm pissed off in the shower. She's pissed off in the kitchen. And so I'm sitting there and I get out of the shower and I come out and she's crying. She's been crying the entire time.

And my immediate thing, and I've done this my entire life, and I'm sure all of you have done the same thing, is when I'm hurt, I want to go and hurt. I want to blame somebody else. I want to put the blame on somebody else. And especially if they have done it and I feel hurt, then I want them to feel my hurt, right? Have you ever been in this situation where you want to basically pass on your hurt to somebody else? And I thought to myself, and I looked at her, I was like, that's not love, right? It's not, if she's going through some crap and I'm going through some crap, it's not really love to go ahead and have her feel even worse than she already does. Right? And so that light bulb went off in my head of like, that's not love. Like love doesn't try to hurt, right? Fear and anger tries to hurt. Love doesn't try to hurt. And you know, what I think

is that we should, in that moment, I was thinking about hurting, but I aim not to hurt and I aim to heal, to help, you know? And the thing that I realized is that the thing that we try to do is we try to give our darkness to somebody else thinking that our darkness will go away. But by hurting somebody, we're just creating more darkness. The only way to actually get rid of the darkness is to bring light to the situation, right? Love is supposed to be a beautiful thing and to bring beauty to a room when everything else is ugly, right? She was clearly hurting too. And real love would want to comfort, not to cut deeper. And, you know, love would, you know, basically the idea that I got from it was, you know, that's not love and love would seek to comfort, not cut. I thought about it. I was like, wow, this is pretty enlightening for me because this is not

the path that I've gone my entire life. My entire life has been the exact opposite. It's always been to give my hurt to somebody else whenever I'm hurting, especially if they're the person who has caused the hurt, right? You hurt me, I want to hurt you back. And so the thing that I realized and I've gotten to realize over the past year or so is that all love is conditional. If you're the perfect parent, there's a pretty good chance that your love is still conditional. And you might sit there and go, no, no, no, but my parents are really good people or I'm a great parent and my love is unconditional. I have my children more than I could possibly love myself and I love them more than I love me and I would clearly give my life for them. And I say, that's great. And there's nothing, that's a beautiful

thing, but your love is still conditional. And we need to get better at giving unconditional love. And what do I mean by your love being conditional? Well, they could do something that just, kids are crazy. We all know they're crazy, right? And they do something and it just sets you off. Like it's just, it builds up and it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. And it's just like one little thing could get you mad to get you to say something. You know, children are great at pushing buttons. They push your button, they push your button, you push your button, you push your button, you push your button, and you finally snap. And unconditional love, which is near impossible unless maybe you're a monk or Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or Muhammad or whatever you want to go by, is near impossible

for a normal human like us. We're not perfect. And that's what unconditional love is. Unconditional love is perfect. And the reason why I say this is not to make you feel worse about your unconditional love, but to try to bring more unconditional love into everything that you do. Or as my friend Dean would say, any condition, right? No matter what the condition, you choose love. There's a Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher. One thing he says is that at all points in time, our mind decides that it could either love something or someone or hate something or someone. So everything that comes in contact, see love or hate, love or hate, love or hate. And he says, it's just easier if you just, before you do anything, just always decide that you're

going to choose love. So in the moment, your spouse does something that pisses you off and you want to get mad at them, you want to yell at them, you want to throw things, you want to get sad, you want to get whatever it is that you normally get, whatever your normal pattern is with them, can you just decide to choose love? Is that possible? Is that a challenge? I'm going to tell you right now, it's a freaking challenge, is that possible? Is that a challenge? I'm going to tell you right now, it's a freaking challenge, that's for damn sure, because we so badly are programmed to think that I'm hurt, I want to hurt you back. If you have hurt me, then I want to give you hurt back. And so next time that you're hurt, you have to consciously go, nope, I'm going to love. I'm not going to let this hurt continue to perpetuate. I'm going to decide to love. And what happens is, in turn, whoever it is that happens to be hurting you, whether it's

on purpose, not on purpose, is if you just constantly go with love every single time, they will stop hurting you. And the reason why is because in your patterns changing, their patterns will start to change. It's like if you have a friend that knows really well how to bug you and they know that just to bug you or to make you, whatever it is, like they just know how to really just push your buttons. They're only pushing your buttons

because they know that it is your button. But if you stopped reacting to that button, then they would never do it anymore, right? It's the same thing where it's like, there's a pattern that you get stuck in with other people that you spend lots of times with and you spend time with them and they know, you know, this thing will piss them off, but they're stuck in this pattern and they try to get out of it, but they still can't get out of it. So next time you're in that pattern with them and you notice what is happening,

you pause for a second and you choose, you think, you know, get outside of the jar and read the label. When you're in the, when you're in the jar, you can't read the label. I always say it. So get outside of the jar of your head, of your life and look at it and go, okay, what's going on here? Can I choose to love in this moment? Next time that your children are pushing you and pushing you and pushing you and pushing you and pushing you. And normally you would react because just so you know, the average child is reprimanded eight times more than they're praised. Why do we have the feeling?

You know, everyone has the feeling of I'm not enough in some sort of way. The reason why is because of the fact that we literally were reprimanded eight times more than we're praised if we were average. And so knowing that, knowing that children get reprimanded and reprimanded and reprimanded, and it slowly but surely starts to, you know, kill their confidence in their, their natural beauty. Next time your children just push you and push you and push you and push you and push you instead of reprimanding, can you sit down and try to conquer that with love? Right? I'm not saying don't reprimand them, but I'm saying, can you give them a, uh, can you, can you change the perception of what it is that they're doing by changing

your words, right? Can you still get the point across of instead of giving them negative reinforcement, you give them positive reinforcement. Hey, I love you, but do you feel like this is the right thing to say to your little brother? No. Okay. What do you think would have been the right thing to say? Oh, it would have been this.

Okay. Do you feel like that would make you happier to treat him that way? It would. Okay, great. And it's to sit down with them and to actually choose love instead of saying, hey, don you happier to treat him that way? It would? Okay, great. And it's to sit down with them and to actually choose love instead of saying, hey, don't talk to your brother that way. Don't do that to your brother.

Don't do this. And to have the child's own smart intuition be able to be used at that point. It's always our choice to choose love or to choose hate or to choose fear or to choose sadness or to choose anger. But in the moments when things get the toughest, that's when you need to become the most aware, step outside and choose love. So next time you feel like hurting somebody, make sure that you decide to choose love instead. Because hurting them is not love. That's not unconditional love. That is conditional love. And you won't be perfect. I know that. And you know that as well. But it's just about trying to get better every single day. But with that, I'm going to go ahead and share the good deed of the day from one of our listeners.

This listener chooses to remain anonymous. And she says, I'll remain anonymous if that's right with you. It's a particularly difficult year at my school after lots of layoffs. Everyone is overloaded and struggling, including myself. I was thinking about my struggle and how my bosses are struggling to find ways to be supportive. I wanted to let them know that they are appreciated. So I took them flowers and left them anonymously in their offices before they got to work. Hopefully it gave them a little bit extra gas in the tank to get through the week. So if you guys want to share your good deeds, just like that beautiful good deed with everybody, once again, it can be anonymous.

It doesn't have to be anonymous. It's completely up to you. I just want to inspire other listeners by hearing your good deeds and going, you know what? I'm going to go do something good for someone else because that's how I end every single episode. So if you have a good deed that you want to share with us, I can't guarantee that it'll get onto the podcast, but give me a little bit of context. Don't make it too long. I'm sorry, but I've gotten some emails that are like 2000 words. I'm like, I'm sorry, I can't read this entire thing. That's going to be an extra 20 minutes. So, send it to me in a few paragraphs. Let me know what's going on. Let me know the good deeds that you've been doing. I want to inspire other people on this podcast to be able to go out there and do something for someone else.

So, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.