The Mindset Mentor - Using Your Struggles for Good

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. In this episode, I am going to teach you how to grow from your biggest struggles. Follow me on IG for more inspiration here: https://www.instagram.com/robdialjr/ If you live in the US/Canada and you want to receive motivational texts from me, text me now at 1-512-580-9305 or click here https://my.community.com/robdial 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 of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you have not given us a rating review on Apple Podcasts or on iTunes, I would greatly appreciate if you would take two seconds out of your day, pick up your phone, just give us a rating review. That's how more people find us. The more ratings and reviews that we get that are positive, the more that we're shown organically, and more people can find us and listen to this podcast. So I would greatly appreciate it if you could do that for me. Thank you so much. I love you for doing that. Today, we're going to be talking about your struggles. We're going to be talking about life. And I want to tell you a quick

story to kind of give you an idea of it. It's the story of the butterfly. And it goes like this. There's one day, a man's walking through the forest, and he comes across a cocoon. And he notices a small opening inside of the cocoon, and it was moving a little bit. And he sat there, and he started to watch this cocoon, and this butterfly was coming out of it. And he was literally trying to come out of it for several hours and it struggled to come out. And it tried to force its body through this little teeny tiny hole until suddenly after a while, it just stopped making progress. And it looked like

it was stuck. And so the man seeing this butterfly was having trouble, decided to do what most people would want to do, which is help this butterfly. And so what he decided to do is he decided to get some scissors, took the scissors, and he took a tiny little pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon that the butterfly was not able to get out of. The butterfly pops out, easily emerges. And although it had this swollen body when it came out, so it didn't look like a normal butterfly. It had this swollen body and the shriveled wings. And the man didn't think anything of it, but he sat there waiting for the wings to enlarge

and waiting for the butterfly to be able to fly away. But it didn't happen. And the butterfly spent the rest of its life unable to fly, crawling around with tiny wings and a swollen body. And here's the reason why. Despite the kind heart of that man to want to help the butterfly, he didn't understand that restriction in the cocoon is actually what the butterfly needed to get itself through that small

hole. What it needed to do is it needed to force its body through. And by forcing its body through, the fluid from the body would come out and go into its wings and prepare itself for flying once it was out of the cocoon. So although the man was trying to help, he was actually hurting the butterfly. And the moral of the story is this. All of our struggles that we have in life, we all have them. They all pop up. We've all had them. All of them develop strengths in our body.

They develop strengths in our mind. And without the struggles, we'll never grow. We'll never get stronger. And when we grow and get stronger, we become more of a bigger, better version of ourselves. So it's so important for us to tackle the challenges that we have and not always to have to feel like we have to use others to help us with that. And so with this story, I want to dive into it and talk about it with your own life. But I also want to talk about it with people that are around you as well. And so with the first thing we're going to talk about is your own personal struggles.

And you've heard me say this millions of times on the podcast is that your struggles are a lot of times better than the best parts of your life is because they make you who you are. You know, and I was at a wedding last night here in Florida right now. I was at a wedding and it was my cousin's wedding and I was talking with my family. And we were talking about how with my father, my uncle loved my father. And we were talking about him and he was like, you know what? I'll always think the best thoughts of your father. He just had some demons he never overcame. And in my mind, I kind of see it the same way as this butterfly, right? My father had the story. If you don't know the story, my father was an alcoholic. He passed away when I was 15 from being an alcoholic.

And at the same time, he had demons that he never overcame because he walked in the room right after his dad shot himself when he was 12. And, you know, you look at that and it's terrible. It's heartbreaking to think that somebody can go through something like that. And there's many people that go through those types of things. But what happened was he didn't overcome those struggles. It was something that he kind of kept with him. It's like the phrase, the mountains that you're carrying, you were only meant to climb, right? And so it's like

he had this thing that happened to him, this mountain that he was supposed to climb in his life. I don't know if it was God or the universe or whatever it was. It was like, hey, Steve needs this. And that's going to be the thing that's going to help him triumph and become the best version of himself. That's the way I like to think of it. And he happened to never get past it. And so alcohol became a way of numbing for him. And so when people look at people who are alcoholics or drug addicts or addicted to food or addicted to sex or addicted to working, all those things, it's a form of numbing because they don't want to look at the actual issue a lot of times and work through it because it hurts to do. And I understand it. I get it. But when you look at that,

it's a version of the butterfly in the cocoon where the struggle was presented to overcome, to learn from, to get better from, but it didn't happen. And when I look at this and I, the reason why I'm saying this is because I want you to think of your life and the struggles that you've had in your life. First off, let's talk about the past, right? When you look at past struggles that you have or have had, do you feel like you have overcome them, learn from them,

grown from them and taking the lesson out of each one of them. I always say every struggle, everything that the challenge that comes into our life is like a mental gym. It helps you get the muscle of your brain stronger, of your getting past your limiting beliefs. It's something that we all need to have. I personally believe that some of us really just need to have something happen to them that absolutely destroys them a lot of times. It doesn't have to be everybody, have something happen to them that absolutely destroys them a lot of times. And it doesn't have to be everybody, but some people need something that absolutely destroys them so that they can come back and figure out who they truly are. And so when you look at this, the butterfly story, it's an example of the struggles. And so when I'm asking you, I want you to think about the struggles of your past.

Do you feel like you've fully overcome them or have you tried to look away and look at something different? One of the things that I found with people, and it's going to be hard for me to explain because you can't see me. One of the things I found with people a lot of times when you're coaching them is that imagine that all of your problems and everything that's happened to you in your past are over to the left. Most people don't look to the left. They constantly keep their head to the right so that they can't see the left. And so what happens a lot of times of being a coach, if you really want to help somebody and help them improve is to kind of turn their head from the right to the left and say,

hey, do you see this thing that's in front of you? Do you see this thing that's holding you back? You're not going to become the person that you want to become unless we work on this first. A lot of times people think, oh, once I make all the money that I want to, once I get the success that I want to, the business that I want to, the family that I want to, all of these things, then I'll be happy. And it's all external. But I'm going to tell you this, the external will never change the internal. The internal has to change in order for it to change the external. The external can never change it itself. And so when you're looking back at your struggles and the things you've gone through,

there has to be a moment, if you haven't, if you're listening to my voice and you haven't overcome something that happened to you six months ago, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, if you still feel like you have something that's stuck, like you're still maybe just a little bit stuck with this one thing that happened,

you got to go back, you got to live through it, you got to work through it. And that is your version of overcoming your struggles so that you can figure out who you need to be. Maybe you had a really bad breakup three years ago, and you've never been the same since it. A lot of us have had very bad breakups. And you get stuck into these breakups and thinking about it and not working through it or trying to drink yourself away or get so busy that you don't pay attention to it. And it's like, you know what? We've sometimes got to go back and relive those memories. It's like a broken bone, right? You have this breakup that happened and it breaks. You break the bone. And then if you've

ever seen somebody who has a bone that doesn't go back into place correctly, what do you have to do? So if you break your bone and you have your bone two years later, you realize, oh my gosh, my bone wasn't set in place correctly. And it's regrown in a place that it's not supposed to be. What do you have to do? You have to re-break the bone and reset it the correct way. And so a lot of our struggles that have happened to us in our past, if we haven't gotten past them, it's like a broken bone that was set, but it wasn't set in the correct place. And you're never going to be the same until you break it a little bit.

It's going to be painful. It's going to hurt. It's not going to feel good to re-break a bone. But long-term, it's going to make your life so much easier. You're going to become so much better from it. Hey, when you're trying to nail an important project, you may need a little bit extra help.

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for everything. That's sugarwish.com slash dial for $10 off. Don't miss out, sugarwish.com. And so I want you to think about that. Are there any struggles in your past that you have not overcome? Are there any things that are still hanging you up a little bit? Are there any triggers that still happen in some sort of way that show you that you're not free? Because if you're triggered by something, you're not free. And so is there anything in your past that you feel like you still need to get past? That's the first thing I want you to think of. Let's talk about your present moment. Let's talk about your future as well. How can you change your perspective whenever you see these struggles come up to, okay, this is just the universe testing me. This is what I'm supposed to have in order to get to

my next level as a human. I remember years ago, I was coaching a girl and she was one of my first coaching clients years and years ago. And she worked at a place and she absolutely hated her boss. Her boss is just a terrible person. She said, hey, listen, you know, I have this boss and I'm trying to be positive. I'm so positive when I'm outside of work and I try to be positive in work. And then she just brings me down, she brings me down, she brings me down. What do I do about her if I'm stuck working with her? And a lot of people ask me questions about this,

about coworkers, about family members, all of these things where it's just like, you can't really get rid of them sometimes. You're just kind of stuck there for at least a little while. I said, what I want you to do is I want you to see this challenge as just like, hey, it's a new level of the video game and the universe is testing me to see how positive I can be. I can be positive in positive situations, but I have that boss who's

really pissing me off. Can I be positive and amazing in that situation? Because if you can be a positive person in that situation, you can be positive anywhere. So see it as a challenge that's presented to you for you to see how good you can become in your positivity, in your growth, in your love, in your joy, in your happiness, in your internal state so that you can know that no person can break your internal state. So as you go through your present moments and into your future moments, how can you pre-program yourself to, I don't want to say be excited about your struggles because there's no time where I'm like, yay, this is going to be so much fun. But looking at it from a point of, you know what? I've been given this

for a reason. I don't know what the reason is right now. We never do at that point. I don't know what the reason is, but it's been presented to me for a reason and I'm going to figure out what that reason is and I'm going to make the best out of it. How can you what the reason is, but it's been presented to me for a reason. And I'm going to figure out what that reason is. And I'm going to make the best out of it. How can you have the thought of I'm going to make the best out of every struggle, every situation possible? Because like the butterfly at that point in time, I can then spread my wings and I can fly away. It's a necessary, the struggle is necessary for the butterfly to fly.

The struggle is necessary for you to grow into the fullest, most biggest potential of yourself that you possibly can become. So that's with your own struggles. Now let's talk about other people's struggles as well. Here's the thing. You have to realize that life is going to have some pain. There's going to be some things that happen.

Pain is 100% inevitable. Suffering is optional. And so our job as friends, as boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, father, mother, cousin, friend, everything that we could possibly be in this world, our job is not to protect everybody from every little bit of pain. Our job is not to put somebody into a bubble so that they never experience the pain of the world. Because we realize, obviously, when you're talking to this, that the pain and the struggle is something that's necessary for people to go to. And I see some people, they try to protect, for instance, their children as much as they possibly can. And I get it. I understand it. Because you love your children. You want to take care of them.

You don't want them to have to go through really hard things. But sometimes things present themselves. And the reason why they're presented is because that person has something that has been presented to them and they need this struggle. They need this for their next level of their life. And so we want to take away people's pain. Our job as members of society and being around other people is not to remove people's pain. It's to help them lessen their suffering. Let me explain what I mean by this. With my father passing away, if we want to go back to that example, nobody could have really changed that except for him. That pain was presented to me. We can look at it and try to remove that pain as much as possible and try to make sure it doesn't happen to me when I was a child. But really what we need to do is

we need to be there when the pain happens and someone is creating their own suffering. That's what we need to be there to help somebody work through. And so if you have children or you have friends and you're trying to protect them from the world and from the things that are happening, that's not your job to do. You know, if you have a friend that's in a relationship or wants to get into a relationship and she keeps picking the wrong people, your job is not to come in and try to save her

from the pain of failed relationships. Your job is try to help her remove the suffering because the pain is the struggle that is therefore needed for this person to grow their wings. And here's the thing. We want to help people. We don't want to see people that we love go through pain and suffering. We don't want to see them go through those things. But you have to realize it's the same way that the guy was watching the butterfly and he decided to take the scissors and snip it. He was doing it from a place of love. He was doing it from a place

of, I don't want to see this thing go through any more pain and struggle. He's doing it from a place of a good heart. But what happened was that place of a good heart actually debilitated the butterfly. And so you've got to think about that. When you see friends going through stuff, you see your children going through stuff, you see family members going through stuff. Our job is not to remove somebody's pain. That's not what our job is to do. Our job is to be there for somebody after they go through it, while they're going through it, to be their support, to be there to listen to them. Because all too often, we want to remove other people's pain. And I get it. It's so hard to, even as I'm saying it, it's hard to accept. Because I do what I do because I want

to remove people's pain, right? I do what I do because I want to remove people's pain, right? I do what I do because I don't want people to have to go through the things that I know that they'll go through. But I do this because I know that some people go through things. Everybody goes through things. And sometimes they need help removing the suffering. I would say that's my main job is I just want to help people remove their suffering because the pain they're going to go through, you're going to go through pain. I'm going to go through pain. We're going to go through those things. But how can we help each other not suffer as much? There's people that are still pissed off today and still struggling today

and still sitting there and something is wrong inside of them because if something happened five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, they won't let it go. They're still suffering over something that happened 20 years ago. And so it's like our job is to help people remove their suffering so they don't have to go through those things. Because in order for them to go through those things and to help them learn and help them grow and help them get past those things is helping them become the best version of themselves. It's like if you saw a friend that was at the gym, right? And they're doing bench presses and they're at the point where they're struggling and they need someone to spot them, right? The point're doing bench presses and they're at the point where they're

struggling and they need someone to spot them, right? The point of a spotter is not to then come in and immediately pick up the whole thing and do all of the work themselves. The point of the spotter is to help them with just a little bit of help that they need because maybe they were lifting 200 pounds and they're capping out at 190 right now. They need that 10 pounds support on your side. It's not to take the entire weight off of their shoulders. It's to help them just a little bit because we know that at that point in time

when the struggle is happening the most in that workout is when the muscles are actually being broken down so that they can grow. And so to be there and think that you have to lift all of somebody's pain, all of somebody's weight, all of those things is not what you're supposed to do. You're just supposed to be there just the same way the spotter would be.

You're there to help them, to protect them, to make sure that they get it onto the rack. And that's exactly how life is. So when you think about your struggles in life, your struggles in your past, please think back and think if there is anything that's holding you back and see if you need to break the bone and reset it.

It's not going to be very fun. It can be painful, but it is necessary. And then as you see people that are going through things that you know, how can you be there to support and realize your job is not to remove someone from pain. Your job is not to protect your children from everything that's happening outside the world. Your job is to help them when they go through things to become better, because that's ultimately when they become the strongest, best version of themselves. And they're now emotionally intelligent, intellectually intelligent,

and understand how to work through the world. That is the best that we can do for others. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. For those of you guys that spend time on Instagram, if you want some positivity, some motivation inside of your newsfeed as well, go ahead and

follow me there. I post at least three times a day, videos, pictures, quotes, all that stuff to help you as much as I possibly can. So I'm not just helping you on this podcast, but I'm helping you as much as I can all over the internet. And once again, it's RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode, making sure mission makes someone else's day better. I appreciate you all, and I hope that you have an amazing day.