The Mindset Mentor - This Simple Trick Will Make You Motivated Everyday

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Want to create a morning routine that actually works for you? Download the free workbook here: theperfectmorningroutine.com 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 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 if you're out there and you're trying to perfect your morning routine, I just created a simple workbook for you to download that shows you the step-by-step process to create an amazing morning routine based in science. If you want to download it for free, you can go to the perfect morning routine.com and get it now. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about a simple trick that will make you more motivated every single day. Because have you ever noticed that the days you feel the most motivated are the days where

you actually know where you're going? It's kind of like you're excited to actually be moving towards something. But if you look at the days where you're stuck, those are the most exhausting days. Because you feel like you're having to use so much energy. and so much force just to do something that feels a little bit productive. So what I'm going to teach you today is going to fix all of that. If you do this every single morning, I am positive, it will change the course of your life. It's not difficult at all.

It's not rocket science. It is so simple. But sometimes we doubt things that are very simple. So I need you to just trust me and do this and see how your life changes. Okay. So here's what I'm going to teach you. Most people, when we're trying to think of being motivated, we think what we need to do is we need to push ourselves. We need to be like, oh, I need to be more disciplined.

I need to work harder. I need to stop being so damn lazy. I need to wake up earlier. I need to force myself to go do this thing. Trust me, I did this for a very long time, years and years and years. And you can do it too. You can do it for a bit. But I promise you this.

eventually you will wear yourself down or you will burn out in some sort of way. You cannot force yourself all day, every day. It's kind of like pushing a boulder uphill. Like when I was younger and I was really trying to be successful in my early, early 20s, I was working like 110 hours a week, like 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every single day, Monday through Sunday for years. Eventually, of course, I'm going to burn myself out. and I ran my business head first into the ground, ended up going broke, ended up going way in debt.

You just can't go like that forever. And that's why motivation for a lot of people, it feels like something that's really a struggle because it becomes this internal battle. It's like you versus you. And yeah, you can like win the battle for the good guys for just a little while. You can force yourself and you can grind and you can get with that hustle mentality and all of but eventually, I promise you, every single person will burn out because pushing something takes a lot of energy. So what you actually want is called pull motivation.

What you want is a future that is so clear, that is so vivid, that is so exciting that you actually feel pulled towards that future, not that you have to push yourself towards that future. you don't want to put in the work because you have to put in the work, but because you actually want to put in the work because you want to get to that future as soon as you freaking can. You want to work hard because you're excited about where you're going and the destination that you will eventually get to if you put in the hard work. This is a difference between pull motivation and push motivation. And so this is where the 15-minute habit is going to come in, okay?

every single morning, I want you to do this. It is a very sacred time when you first wake up in the morning. Before you get to your phone, before you let the world in, if you got some kids, please wake up before they wake up so you can have this before all of the noise of the children and in the household and the noise of the world. I want you to take 15 minutes to brainwash yourself. That's it. 15 minutes. Preferably even before your spouse wakes up. What I found is like if I have like a simple conversation before I go into my meditation in the morning, plus that conversation will pop up in my meditation. And so for me, I'm like, how can I keep my brain like as closed as possible?

Nothing can come in before this 15 minutes of brainwashing. Now why do you want to do this in the morning and not some other time or right before you go to bed? Well, right when you wake up, your brain is naturally in a slower brainwave state that's called theta. It's associated with deep imagination. it's associated with memory, and it's also associated with subconscious programming. And so in this state, theta state, your brain is more receptive to visualization and suggestion. This is the brainwave state that most children are from zero to seven years old, which is why they pick up things so fast. It's also the brainwave state that you get into when you're in hypnosis.

So you're kind of, in a way, hypnotizing yourself. And so what that means is that your focus, like what you focus on in the morning in these 15 minute sessions, gets encoded deeper into your subconscious. So early morning mental imagery can actually influence your beliefs. It can influence your habits, your actions, and the motivation that you have at a neurological level. Before all the stress, before all the notifications, before the stimulation kicks in, your prefrontal cortex, which is your decision making, part of your brain, the executive functioning, it's quieter in the morning. It makes it easier to direct your focus without so much resistance, without so much, oh, I need to do something. This isn't productive. I need to do something else.

I need to go take action. What's my to-do list for the day? So it also holds back the thoughts of like, well, that's not possible. I can't do that or I'm not being realistic. So when you visualize your future, first thing in the morning, you're essentially just brainwashing yourself and setting the blueprint for your brain to follow the rest of the day. you're basically setting your intentions for who you want to be, how you want to be, what direction you're moving towards first thing in the morning. Okay, so here's what you want to do. This is a step by step process, okay?

The first thing that you want to do, step one is to calm your body. Now, the good thing about being in the morning is usually your body is actually pretty calm. But a lot of people we get woken up are cortisol that are highest as soon as we wake up. And so sometimes you can feel like it's a little chaotic inside of your body. and we will be right back. And now, back to the show. So you want to calm your body because if your nervous system is chaotic,

your mind is also going to be chaotic. It won't work if you're like this. So what you want to do is you want to slow your breathing down. Inhale slowly and then exhale even slower. Even better if you want to calm your nervous system is when you exhale, do it with a hum. In through the nose as deep as you can and slow and then out with an exhale as deep as you can as long as you possibly can.

Let your body just kind of settle. It should only take probably two to three minutes. It's pretty easy to start relaxing, right? Now, this isn't, I use the wrong word, it's not just relaxing. You're just basically telling your brain and your nervous system, hey, we're safe. We can relax. This allows your thoughts in your visualization to go deeper into your subconscious,

easier. Okay, so that's number one. step number two is to build your future out in your mind and here's the part where most people don't really go deep enough i don't want you to just think about it i don't want you to just visualize it some people are really good at visualizing some people myself included i don't when i say i'm visualizing i'm not even really seeing a whole lot i'm actually like bringing the feelings up like i want you to not just try to see it and think about it i want you to try to experience it i want you to try to feel it in your body. And it could be visualizing where you want to be if you have one year from now,

like 365 perfect days in a row where you could be. It could be five years from now. It could be 10 years from now. It's completely up to you. This is where there are no limits. I want you to go in as if you're four years old again and anything is possible. You're not being quote unquote realistic because realistic just means you have your own limiting beliefs you're placing on top of yourself. And I want you to think like, what does your life look like? Who are you? you. Where are you waking up? Who's around you? How are you spending your days? How do you feel inside of your body? How much money is in your bank account? Like, what are you doing every single day? If you have the perfect life one year from today or five years from today or 10 years from today. I want you to make it

feel real. I want you to not just see it. I want you to experience it. Like how would it feel to live that life. Let's say you want to have a house on the beach. What would it feel like to wake up and be able to hear the ocean and go outside and breathe in the salt air? Right? Like that's what you want your brain to do

because your brain does not know the difference between something that is vividly imagined in something that's actually happening. There's been brain imaging studies that show that many of the same neural pathways activate during vivid, vivid, vivid mental imagery as actual real experiences, which is why your brain responds to imagined scenarios almost as if they're happening in real time. So a lot of times we don't push ourselves and, you know, get excited

to go take action because we think like, well, that's not, I've never done that before. I don't know if I can do this. You're kind of tricking yourself in your brain, your subconscious, think like, oh, I have done this before because you actually have visualized it. Okay. So that's step number two. And then step number three, this is a key part. Become obsessed. Like actually, obsessed. This isn't like just a nice visualization exercise. This is identity work. This is direction for your life. This is your fuel. You're creating a version of your life that becomes so compelling that your brain starts organizing itself around it. So you're not just going to visualize in the morning. You're definitely going to visualize in the morning, but I want you to think about it all day long.

Here's the way I want you to think about it. Okay. Do you remember? the feeling you had when you were like 15 or 16 years old and you had like your very first love and you're just like, oh my God, you're so obsessed. Like you think about them all day long, right? No matter what you're doing, they're always right there in the front of your mind. Like it's, it's pretty much impossible not to think about them, right? It's obsession. That is the exact same thing of the way I want you to think about your future. I want you to visualize it in the morning and I want you to be obsessed with it and thinking about it all day long. And the reason why this works is because your brain is always moving towards something, whether you realize it or not. It's always

predicting the future. And so the question is, like, are you consciously choosing what it's focusing on and moving towards? Or are you letting it default to what it's always been thinking about? It's always moving towards something. It's always predicting the future. I want to become so obsessed that it doesn't even have time to think about what if this doesn't work out. I want it to be like, yes, this is so exciting. We need to get there sooner. Because most people don't consciously choose what they focus on. They just wake up and they just start moving towards something, but they move towards avoiding stress. They're trying to avoid failure. They're trying to avoid discomfort. If you do that, that's not going to motivate you. If you're thinking about what stresses you out

and thinking about failing and thinking about whatever's discomforting to you, that's the discomforting to you, that's not going to motivate you, it's going to paralyze you. That's why push motivation, where you're trying to force yourself to do it, is so hard because you're fighting against a brain that is afraid to take action because it is visualizing a future that is pretty doom and gloom. And so it's imagining a scary future, which is not what you want. What you want to do is imagine an amazing future so that you feel pulled more towards it. This is how you actually start to get yourself to feel like you want to take action towards the future that you want. And so you have to realize, like, when you create a powerful future in your mind and you become obsessed with it, everything changes. So now

you're not sitting there and being like, how do I just, how do I just force myself to work today? Like, how do I get my ass off the couch? How can I just make myself do something? Like, I know I need to do it, but I'm just not doing it. Instead of asking yourself those types of questions, it's like, what do I need to do right now to get to that destination faster? Like, what can I do to get there as fast as I possibly can? You're not dragging yourself through life anymore. You're being pulled towards your future. And I did this back in 2017.

In January of 2017, my goal was for my girlfriend and I, at the time, my wife now, to be living in Italy July 1, 2017. I wrote it everywhere. It was all over my goal, my mission. It was all over my mirror. And so every single morning, I would visualize what it would look like to wake up, walk the streets of Rome, and get a cappuccino and be able to sit with the sun on me. And so what I started doing is I started doing it every single morning. I became obsessed and became obsessed.

And then I started thinking, like, how can I get all five of my senses in on this thing? And so I would go outside at my house. I'd sit in the back porch. And I would take an actual chair and put in the backyard. And I would sit in the sun and imagine the sun on my face in Italy. and I would have my own cup of coffee and I would hold it in my hand and I would taste my coffee.

I would never open my eyes, but I'm imagining that I'm drinking this in Italy. So I would taste that coffee. I would smell that coffee. I'd feel the sun on my skin. I would visualize myself walking the streets of Rome to go get it. So by like month two,

maybe three of doing this, I was like, we need to fucking get there faster. Like we got to go because I was so obsessed with it. I was like, I can't wait till July. And so we actually got there on June 1st, 2017, because I was like, I don't want to wait anymore. I just want to get there.

That is what it's like to be pulled towards your future, that you work harder to get there sooner. That's the difference between force versus inspiration. Force says, I have to do this. Inspiration says, let's go. Like, let's just take action. Force drains you. Inspiration fuels you. And so the part that people don't realize when you look at this is when you're sitting down to

this every single morning, you're not just. visualizing. You are visualizing, but you're also training your brain to start noticing and filtering people, places, and opportunities and notice possibilities and take more action naturally and brainwash yourself to believing that this future that you want is possible. Because now your brain has a target that's exciting. So here's what I want you to do. Tomorrow morning, before you do anything else, take 15 minutes, calm your body, build your future. in your mind, feel it, experiences, pretend that it's real, and then go into your day, carrying yourself as the version of you that's working towards getting there as soon as possible.

Because once your future becomes extremely clear and you get excited about it, you don't need to chase motivation anymore. You don't have to force yourself to do anything. You will feel pulled by it and excited to go take action. So that's what I got for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-L-J-R. Once again, if you want to download my free workbook on how to create the perfect morning routine based by science, you can go to the perfect morning routine.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way. 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.