The Mindset Mentor - The #1 Key to Creating Perfect Habits

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

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Welcome to the Mindset and Motivation Podcast, one of the top motivational podcasts in the world. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we come out with a short, to the point, no BS episode to help make massive changes in your mind and transform you from who you are now to who you want to be. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast starts now. Welcome to today's episode. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode of this podcast. And last but not least, if you are looking to change your life and try to become the best version of yourself before 2020 starts,

so that you can get a headstart on your New Year's resolutions goals, join us in the 30 day habit mastery challenge where over the course of 30 days, myself and a group of hundreds of people are going to be picking two habits that we want to create and two habits that we want to break, holding each other accountable to hitting those goals. And I'm going to be coaching them every single day for 30 days in a row with a Facebook live inside of the private group. So if you're interested, you love the podcast and you're at the point where you're ready to make massive changes in your life. You're ready to make changes. You're tired of all of the excuses and the things that you've been saying to yourself as to why you're not where you want to be. You're tired of procrastinating.

You're tired of negative thinking. You're tired of all that stuff. If you're at that point, go to habits30.com. Don't put www first. Just go to habits with anans30.com. Join us. Check it out. There's a video on there that explains the entire thing. Let's see if it's right for you. I would love to see you in the group. All right, so let's go ahead and dive into today's episode. All right. Why is it so important to master your habits? Well, the main reason why is because Harvard did a study and found out that 45% of what we do is completely autopilot, which means that 45% of your life, you're not even actually paying attention to because your brain can click off and your body can go through the motions. So if you think about it, if you want to change your life, the easiest way to change your life is to start

becoming more aware of the 45% of your life that you don't have change your life is to start becoming more aware of the 45% of your life that you don't have to pay attention to. Because here's the deal, we all have great habits that we love and a lot of us have bad habits that we want to get rid of. And if we're gonna truly change our life, what we should do is strengthen the habits that we love and completely get rid of and replace the habits that we hate. So if we have 45% of habits that we want to change or replace or figure out, how do we do it? And the first step and the easiest step is this, is how can I make it easy on myself? That's a question that I ask myself every single

time that I'm trying to succeed at something, every time that I have something on my to-do list, every time that I'm journaling through something, I ask myself the question, how can I make this easier on myself? And the reason why is this. In society, we're taught in order to be successful, we have to struggle our way to success. In order to make the money we want, we have to struggle our way to get there. In order to create the habits that we want, we're going to have to struggle to get there. And I completely disagree with that. I've struggled my way to success, but I've also tried to make it easier. And I'll tell you this, you can get to success both ways, but I would prefer not to struggle and to make it easier on myself. So you can choose which one you want. But the first thing that I want you to think about is how can I make habits easier? Because you have to realize

your brain will resist change. The reason why you have habits is because your brain wants to click off. Your brain is the most energy consuming organ in your body. And when it has to think, when it has to process and put a lot of energy into something, it's burning the most energy. So it wants to be able to click off, power down a little bit, and put you into autopilot. And so you have to realize, with that being said, your brain wants to create habits. It wants to hand over from the prefrontal cortex, the basal ganglia. The prefrontal cortex makes decisions. The basal ganglia doesn't make any decisions. And when a habit is created, the prefrontal cortex stops having to work and the basal ganglia, which makes no decisions,

automatically just goes, does what it's supposed to do. The problem with making a brand new, you know, change in your life is that your brain always views that change as a threat. It views it as something that it doesn't want. And the reason why is because your brain, as advanced as humans are, we still have parts of our brain like the amygdala, which is completely fear-based, which only cares about your survival. And in order to care about your survival, it creates fears. It creates problems all of the time. So anytime that you want to do something different, you want to step out of your comfort zone, create new habits, your brain is naturally

going to resist because change is automatically seen as a threat to the brain. So then how do we make it easier on ourselves? We need to sneak in the back door in order to create habits. Instead of just busting in the door, because that's what most people think, they need to struggle their way to success. So they try to bust in the door and they try to work really hard and work really hard and work really hard. And eventually they tire themselves out. And immediately the brain clicks up and says, no, we don't want to do this. We don't want to do this. We don't want to do this. We don't want to do this. And so how do we trick the brain? Well, instead of busting the door in, let's kind of open it up, just open up the back door a little bit and just sneak in. And how do we do that? We try one thing

at a time. And so, you know, the way that I learned this was from a book that I was reading where the author was trying to make himself get really good at habits. And he was trying to make himself, he thought to himself, what is the one habit that I really need to do that I've been resisting my entire life? And that habit was flossing his teeth. And so he asked himself, how can I make this easier on myself? So let's say that the author is 35 years old. He's been waiting 35 years to finally create this habit of flossing his teeth. But instead of trying to think about flossing all of his teeth, he said, how can I make it as easy as possible? And the way that he can make it as easy as possible on himself is this, create the habit of flossing one tooth per night. And it's kind of silly when you think about it because you think if you're going to start flossing your teeth, wouldn't you want to floss all of them? And yeah,

of course you would. But when you floss all of them, it's too, for some reason, for your brain, too high of a barrier to entry. Your brain freaks out about getting all 30 something teeth, 40 something teeth, whatever we have in our mouths, right? So then you say to yourself, I'm just going to floss one tooth. And so he would floss one tooth. And then as he was flossing his tooth, he'd go, you know what? I'm going to floss my other teeth. And he'd start flossing his other teeth, but he snuck in the back door. He didn't bust the whole thing in. And he thought to himself, how can I use this as well?

He created the habit of flossing his teeth. He thought, how can I use this in other parts of my life as well? Well, I've always wanted to meditate, but I can't get myself to meditate. And so he thought to himself, okay, instead of thinking about meditating for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes, why don't I just meditate for one minute? I will dedicate one minute of my morning to actually sitting on my meditation pillow and meditating. And that was it. Super low barrier to entry. And what would happen? He would sit down to meditate for one minute.

And after the one minute, he'd go, you know what? I'll go for another five more. I'll go for another 10 more. And the habit was created because the barrier to entry was low. The brain was not resisting something that had that small of a barrier to entry. So the number one habit that I can give you is how can I make this easier on myself? If you want to start going to the gym more often, we all know that once you're at the gym, it's a lot easier. The hard part is getting yourself to the gym. So instead of thinking about going and working out and planning out your entire hour long workout or 45 minute workout, make your brain think that all you're going to do, and you can make this decision, you're going to go in and you're going to, you know, do one set of bicep curls. That's it. And if you go and you do one set of bicep curls and walk

out, then you went to the gym and you created your habit. But what happens? You get that low barrier to entry. You get to the gym because your brain isn't resisting you. It doesn't create procrastination or other things that you should be doing. You go to the gym, you do that one set, and then you decide to do the rest of it. So if you're trying to create a habit, the number one key to creating a habit is to find the lowest barrier to entry of that habit so that your brain doesn't go off and say, this is a threat, we shouldn't do this. And it allows you to jump in and create the habit.

So what's the habit that you wanna create? What's the number one habit that you're really trying to focus on? Because if you can look at that habit and say, what can I do to make this habit easier for myself? Then you'll be able to do it more often. You'll be able to go into it and the brain will not resist. So that's all I got for you for today's episode.

If you like this one, please share it with someone that you know and love. And I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.