The Mindset Mentor - The Art of Starting Over

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Have you ever wondered what it would look like to completely start over and become the person you actually want to be? In this episode, I walk you through a five-step process to close the chapter on your old patterns, design the life and identity you want, and start making decisions as the CEO of your own life. You don’t have to wait for a new year or a perfect moment to change—you can choose to start writing your next chapter today. 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 $100 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'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And today is the last day to get your ticket to Freedom Live before the prices go up. So if you've been stuck in the same place for the past few years, I promise you it's probably not because of lack of talent or drive or potential. You're probably stuck because of your unconscious patterns that were built into you in childhood. And in three days at Freedom Live in Austin, Texas, we're going to find them.

we're going to break them. And I'm going to send you home with a 12-month plan to make 2027 the best year of your life. Once again, prices go up today. So if you've been thinking about joining us, today is a great day to get your ticket. Go to Freedom Live, 26.com before the prices go up. Once again, Freedom Live, 226.com. And I cannot wait to see you our face in Austin, Texas. Today, I'm going to talk about how to start over. Because starting over is one of the most powerful things that you can do. Because it's something. point, you have to realize that you don't have to keep being the same person that you've always been. You don't have to keep the same habits. You don't have to keep the same beliefs or fears or patterns or even the same identity. You can change because so much of who you are today was created

before you were old enough to consciously decide who you wanted to be. But you're not that kid anymore. So you get to decide who you become from this point forward. And so today I'm going to give you a five-step process to actually start over completely. And I'm going to show you how to close the old chapter of who you've been living and then how to actually start a new chapter intentionally writing the next one. So here's the frame I want to give you to work for today's episode. Okay. From the moment that you were born to right now, let's pretend that that was chapter one of your life. And to be honest with you, you didn't get to write most of chapter one. Most of it was written for you. You know, you picked up habits, you picked up fears, you picked up beliefs about yourself, about money, about love, about what people like you get to have.

So you learned how to handle conflict by watching the adults around you and how they handle conflict. You know, maybe they yelled. Maybe they went silent for three days. Either way, you learned how to be you by watching adults be them. So you have to understand a lot of what you picked up. I do want you to understand it is good. I'm not saying you have to change every aspect of you. Some of the best parts about you you learned from other people. But some of the stuff isn't the best parts about you. And for most people, those patterns that they have that they want to get rid of, they've been quietly like running their entire life. And those patterns, I see them like kind of like puppet masters, right? And honestly, we're the puppets. You're conscious, you're awake. You're making decisions all day long. but are you actually the one that's making them? You don't decide to be defensive when your partner criticizes you. It just happens. You don't decide to put off the hard phone call. It just happens.

It's not you that's actually choosing them. It's the pattern that you picked up from childhood that's choosing them. And Carl Jung has a famous line about this. And it says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life. and you will call it fate. It just runs your life and you just think that's the way that it is. But you have to understand for most of your life, you've been loyal to those patterns.

Loyal is the key word. Not because you pick the patterns, you're just loyal to them because they're familiar. And familiar feels like, hey, this is just who I am, I guess. I guess this is just who I am. I guess I just am this type of person. And so what I want you to understand is chapter, one is what happened to you and who you unconsciously built yourself into being. Chapter two

needs to be written by you. You're the one in charge from now on. For me, I'll give you a great example of how this worked in my life. I hired my first coach, like one-on-one coach, talked to him every single week at 20 years old. I was coming to a crossroads in my life and I was realizing, okay, well, I can either continue on the path that I've been on, which is lazy and negative and not making money and being broken. and making excuses and all of those things, or I could decide to be a different person. And as I played my life out in my mind

of what my life could be like if I went to the left and I played my life of what it would look like if I went to the right, I started actually seeing like, oh, I need to really change myself. And we had this conversation, and I've told this before, but this conversation changed my life trajectory completely.

I used to be late to calls. I wouldn't hit the assignments. I would make excuses. I would blame everybody. I was negative. And he goes, Rob, I just want to have a real conversation with you if that's okay. And I was like, yeah, of course. He goes, I have a question for you. If a business succeeds and somebody is able to get all 10,000 people in the business to move in one direction and it's a successful company, whose fault is that? And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, who is at the helm that kind of moves that entire company? I was like, well, that's the CEO's fault if they're successful. He said, okay. If a business fails, if they don't make the money they need to and they have to go and they go under water completely and they should fail, whose fault is that? I said, that was the CEO's fault. He said, okay, cool. Let me ask you a question. If you get to the end of your life and you look back

on your entire life and it's everything that you wanted, you had all this success and love and money and happiness and joy that you wanted to, whose fault would that be? And I was like, that would be my fault. He goes, okay, but if you get to the end of your life and you're still negative and making excuses and you realized you didn't live up to your full potential and you weren't able to have the joy and success and happiness that you wanted. Whose fault would that be? And I was like, well, that would be my fault. And he goes, do you want to know what your problem is? This is like really the punch in the gut. He goes, your problem is that you're not acting like the CEO of your life. You get to the end of your life and it is a successful life and it's everything that you wanted. That's your fault. But if you get to the end of your life and it's not what you wanted,

that is also your fault. And so for me, I was like, everything changed. I had to start over. Right? And I had to realize that a lot of this stuff was programmed into myself when I was very young. And so I had to start over completely from who I was, who I wanted to be and what trajectory my life was going to go on. And so the question becomes, how do you actually start over without burning your whole life to the ground? How do you do? Okay? Let me give you a step by step process. Number one, here's what I want you to do. Audit chapter one. Before you can decide who you're going to be and what you're creating, you have to look at everything that you're carrying with you from chapter one. All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. So I want you get a piece of paper and go through everything, who you are, your habits, your beliefs, your fears, the way you talk to yourself, the way you handle money, the way you handle stress, the way you handle conflict, your job, your purpose, your passion, every single detail about you and your life that you could possibly put on a piece of paper. I know you know it. I know it's in your head, but it has to be on a piece of paper.

And then go through each and every line of everything that you see and ask yourself, do I want to keep it or do I want to let it go? So keep, let go. And you go through every single fear and belief and your job and what you're doing with your life and where you live and it could be even your hair color, everything. Right. Another way of thinking about this question of like keeping it or letting it go is like, is this helping me or is it holding me back?

That's the audit. I want you to be brutally honest with yourself. Most people audit their life like they're filling out a Tinder profile. Oh, all of the good things. No, no, no. Nobody's grading you on this but you. Once you have that list, now you get to close chapter one. Now it's time to be an adult and to move and create chapter two.

Okay. Number two is I want you to close the chapter without shame. Most people look at like the let it go column and all of the things I need to let go. And then they get embarrassed and they get mad and they're like, oh my God, I'm 38 years old. How am I still doing this? Like I should have figured this out a long time ago. No, stop, shut up. That's not what you're supposed to be doing here.

There's no shame in any of this. There's no guilt. There's no shame in starting over. The adults who raised you did the best that they could with what they had. And you learned a lot of things from them, good things and bad things. You did the best that you could with what you knew. Now you know more. That's it.

So you have to look at starting over as like not a shameful thing or, oh my God, I should have done this 10 years ago. Starting over is one of the strongest things. things that a human can do, it's not easy. It is hard as hell to go, I'm just going to brush everything off, throw it all off of the table, and I'm just going to start with a clean slate. And you need to be strong to meet that challenge. You don't need to just shame yourself, okay? There's a researcher at Wharton named Catherine Milkman, who studied something that's called the Fresh Start Effect, and she found that people are way more likely to go after their goals right after a new beginning. So a new year, a new month, a birthday, and they found that gym visits go up, Google searches on like diet

or workout plans, those go up. And the reason why is because those dates give your brain permission to say, that was the old me, that was the last chapter, and it creates this separation between who you were and who you're becoming. So you know what that means, you know, like most people are waiting for the calendar. They're waiting for January to give himself a fresh start. You don't have to wait for January. You can create that landmark moment for yourself right now on this piece of paper. And so write it at the top of your brand new page. Next to it, write, chapter two begins. Right. Does that sound too simple? Yeah, it's supposed to be. I want to make this simple for it. You don't need to overcomplicate it. Overcomplicating things just

hold you back. So you're just drawing a line so that your brain knows the old stuff, that belongs in the old chapter. I'm not bringing that with me anymore. The old chapter is now closed. You need to know that you're writing the new one, okay? Which brings us number three. We want to design your life in detail. Two is you deciding, but the question is, what are you actually deciding on? So I want you to picture your life 10 years from today, not vaguely in detail. Not like I want to be happy. That's not a plan. Not like I want to make more money. That's not a plan. Like give me as much details you possibly can about you and the life you're living in 10 years. Where do you want to live? What does your morning look like? How much money do you make? What does your business look like? What's your

marriage look like? How do your kids talk about you when you're not in the room? How do you feel in your body when you get out of bed? Write it like you're describing a movie that you've already watched. Here's why the detail matters. If you don't decide what chapter two looks like and get really clear on it, your old patterns will come back up again and write it for you. And take a guess on what they're going to write. Chapter one again. And so we need to actually detail the life that we're trying to create. And then we go into number four, which is to design the person that you're becoming. And you want to design this person in as much details you possibly can. Who do you need to be to create the life that you wrote down on a piece of paper? And I promise you this,

it is somebody different than who you are right now. Does that make you uncomfortable? Good. That should make us uncomfortable because what means we're going to have to change? We're going to have to grow because the person that you are right now, if you could create that life, you'd already be living in that life. And so I don't mean that you cannot create that life ever. What I'm saying is that you need to change in order to create that life that you put down on a piece of paper. So get a specific about the person that created that life as you possibly can't. What is that time does that person wake up? How do they handle money? How do they handle conflict? How does that person talk to their spouse when they're frustrated. What does that person do on the days that they don't feel like

they want to work and they want to take a day off? How does that person talk to themselves after they make a mistake? How do they talk to other people? Write it all down, the person that you need to become. And so now you've got two pages. You've got the life that you're creating and you've got the person who builds it. Okay, great. And I want you to hear this. Change is not impossible, right? People act like it is because they've tried it a bunch of times and it didn't stick, but it didn't stick because of the thing I'm about to tell you, which is the last one, right? You need to switch your loyalty. And this is a big one for a lot of people. This is the one that matters the most out of everything, right? It's only hard to break habits and patterns because you're too loyal to your old self. Key word in that? Loyal.

When the alarm goes off and you hit the snooze, who are you being loyal to? When you say, oh, that's just who I am. Who are you being loyal to? Who are you protecting? You're protecting the old you. You're defending, and people don't realize they do this, you're defending a version of yourself that you don't even want to be anymore. Why would you do that? Like that's the one thing that you're trying to move away from is that person and you're like, no, but that's just who I am. Right? And so, like I told you the study recently, but I need to bring it back in here because it really, you know, helps a lot. Hal Herschfeld, who is a psychologist at UCLA, scan people's brains while they thought about themselves today, and then scan the brains when he thought about themselves 10 years from today.

And when they thought about their future self, the parts of their brain, like their brain activity looked less like they were thinking about themselves, and it looked more like they were thinking about a stranger. Do you understand that? Your brain, to your brain, the future you is basically someone else. The future you is a stranger and it is really hard to be loyal to someone that you do not know. It's hard to be loyal to a stranger. So of course you're staying loyal to the old version of you. The old use family, the old version of you, you know, that's just an old buddy. The new you is a stranger. And that's why change feels so hard. And that's exactly why the past couple steps we went over just really matter so much in detailing. The more detail that you give the new you,

the less of a stranger they become. And so here's what I want you to do. Every time that you hit a decision point where you feel like you're going to, the alarm goes off, and you want to hit the snooze button, you are going to go for the second drink of alcohol, or you have a sales call that you're putting off.

I want you to ask yourself one question, who am I being loyal to right now? Hmm, it's a good one, right? Who am I being loyal to right now? Is it the old version of me or is it the new version of me? And I want you to pick one. You don't, and here's the thing. don't have to pick them forever. You just have to pick them this one time. Oh, I want to hit the snooze

button. Who am I being loyal to if I hit the snooze button? I'm being loyal to the old version of me. Okay, who do I want to be loyal to? The new version of me. Just one time. Just one time. Because I don't want you to think about forever. If you think about forever, you'll get overwhelmed to do nothing. Just this one time. Be loyal to the new version of you one time. And then the next time, just be loyal to the new version of you, that next time. and every time you choose the new you, that stranger gets a little bit more familiar. You start stepping into that new version of yourself and it becomes a little bit more familiar and less like a stranger and less like a stranger.

And eventually, the new you isn't new anymore. It's just you. You know, you cannot be loyal to who you were and who you're becoming at the exact same time. Like you have to pick one. You have to figure out what your loyalty is going to be. Are you going with the old version of yourself? or the new version of yourself. And I want to say something to you

with as much love as I possibly can. Okay? You're an adult. It's time to stop acting like a child. And I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it as like permission more than anything else. When you were a kid, you didn't get to choose a lot of things.

You didn't get a vote in a lot of your situations. Somebody else decided where you lived. Somebody else decided what you ate, what you believed, how you were allowed to feel. It's not that case anymore. you don't live in your parents house anymore you're an adult so why are you still living by their rules no one in this world is coming to save you not your parents not your partner not me you are the only one that can save you and honestly that's the best news you could possibly get because if no one's coming

to save you then nobody else gets to decide your life but you it's fully up to you the life you're building who you want to be how you want to act all of it is up to you and And so this is the step-by-step process of the actual way to start over, to close the chapter on chapter one of who you were, and to actually start writing chapter two, which is the book that you get to write. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, you will absolutely love my event called Freedom Live in Austin, Texas.

If you've been stuck in the same place for the past few years, it's not because you lack talent or drive. You're stuck because of patterns that you cannot see that were patterned into as a child. And in three days in Austin, Texas, we're going to find them, we're going to break them, and I'm going to send you home with a 12-month plan to make 2027 the best year of your life. And today is the last day to get your ticket to Freedom Live before the prices go up. So if you've been stuck in the same place for the past few years, I promise you it's probably not because of lack of talent or drive or potential.

You're probably stuck because of your unconscious patterns that were built into you in childhood. And in three days at Freedom Live in Austin, Texas, we're going to find them, we're going to break them. and I'm going to send you home with a 12-month plan to make 2027 the best year of your life. Once again, prices go up today. So if you've been thinking about joining us, today is a great day to get your ticket. Go to Freedom Live, 26.com before the prices go up. Once again, Freedom Live, 26.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way to 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.