← The Mindset Mentor
The Mindset Mentor
7 Habits That Changed My Life
00:20:09
What if everything in your life—your success, your happiness, your future—was 100% your responsibility? In this episode, I break down the seven mindset shifts that completely changed my life.
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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 podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. Because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button and follow along. Today I'm going to be talking about seven different mindset habits that helped me get my life together. If you're listening to this podcast is because you want to work on your mindset because you know working on your mindset will improve your life. So let's dive into it. The first one, which I think is one of the most important ones, is getting to the point of my life where I accepted full responsibility for my life. Up until a certain point in my life, I was the best person at making excuses. I was the best person at blaming other people. I was so good at telling you why it wasn't my fault that I was this way or that I wasn't successful or that I didn't have the life that I want. And I've told this story before, but I was on a coaching call with my one on one coach at the time. I was 20 years old and he was my mindset coach, life coach, sales coach, and in my sales I wasn't doing as well in my sales as I was supposed to. And I wasn't doing as many outbound calls as I was supposed to, and I wasn't having the success that I wanted to have. And I was showing up a little bit late to all of our calls without my assignments done. And he had this, like, coming to God moment with me, and I'll remember this conversation for the rest of my life. And he said, rob, if you look at a business and a business fails, whose fault is it? And I was like, it's the business owner. He goes, okay, say it's a big business, Like, a really big business. Thousands of employees. If the business fails, whose fault is it? And I was like, well, I guess that's the CEO's fault. He goes, okay, if a business succeeds, if a business is able to take 1,000 people that work in this business, get them towards one common goal, and the business succeeds, whose fault is that? And I was like, well, it'd be everyone's fault who worked there, but it'd also be the CEO's fault for getting everyone to go in the right direction and succeeding. He said, okay, so if the business fails, it's a CEO's fault. If a business succeed, it's the CEO's fault? I said, yes. He said, okay, if you get to the end of your life and it's not the life that you wanted, and you look back with regret and you didn't have the love and the happiness and the joy and success that you wanted, whose fault would that be? And I was like, that would be my fault. And he goes, okay, if you got to the end of your life and it was the life that you wanted, you had the joy, the happiness, the love, success, everything you wanted. It was the life you wanted. Whose fault would that be? And I was like, I guess that would be my fault. He goes, the problem with you is that you're not acting like you're the CEO of your life. You're acting like it's everybody else's fault, nobody is coming to save you. Put on your big boy britches and actually start to do something with yourself. And I was like. It was like, at that moment, everything clicked in my life. And I was like, 10, four. I got it. And so if you're out there and you're still saying, I can't control this, it's my mom's fault, it's my dad's fault, it's my spouse's fault, it's the government's fault, it's the president's fault. You're not going to get to the life that you want. You have to accept full responsibility for your life. You have to stop blaming external circumstances and finally take ownership for your life. And this will shift you from having a victim mindset, which I had for years. I was such a victim, it was everybody else's fault but my own, from being a victim to being an empowered person. Because when everything is your fault, when everything's your responsibility, it means that you're the one that's in control. And you can hold yourself accountable for the choices that you make towards the actions that you take. And you can understand that that responsibility is not something that should cripple you. It's actually the responsibility that leads to you controlling over your life, to getting in the driver's seat and creating the life that you want. And so you just make peace with your past mistakes, use them as learning tools, get past it, let it go and say, from this moment forward, I'm the one that's in control of my life. So the first thing is accepting full responsibility for my life. The second thing was developing a growth mindset that goes along with this one. But a growth mindset is basically the idea that I know that no matter what I do, I can grow. I can continue to get better. Everything. I have a tattoo on my wrist that's an X with the line above it, which is the roman numeral for 10,000. Because I love the idea of the 10,000 hour rule, which means that with 10,000 hours of dedicated, focused practice work at anything you could become a master at. It might not be exactly 10,000 hours, might be a little bit less. It might be a little bit more, depending on what it is. But you can master anything that you want to. And for me, the reason why I love this and I got it tattooed on my wrist was because for me, I realized years ago that I want to get as close to mastery of this guy named Rob. And if that's the case, I'm going to need to be very, very focused on trying to improve this guy. I believe that all of our abilities and all of our intelligence can improve. I don't believe in the phrase, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Neuroplasticity in science proves that that's false. And so now what I want to do is I want to look at my challenges and realize that all the challenges, all my biggest challenges in my life, have come and turned into my biggest learning opportunities. I want to look at all of this challenge. I want to look at those mistakes and pull the lessons from them. Instead of looking at myself as a failure, but go, okay, I messed up on that. How can I grow? How can I get better? How can I have a growth mindset with everything that I do? How can I look for feedback on how I can improve? How can I use as many things around me as an opportunity to grow? How can I surround myself with people that are better than me so that they inspire me to be better by looking at them and going, you know what? I could be like them. They inspire me. I want to be like that person. How can I find people that are successful individuals that are still alive, or maybe successful individuals that died or had a whole lot of wisdom? And how can I read and listen to them and learn from them so that hopefully I can get to a point where I feel like I am a being that's full of wisdom, that has knowledge to share with others? How can I keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone so that I can look for ways to grow with this growth mindset? And so that's another one of the big things that really changed my life, is developing a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is like, well, I am the way that I am. I'm going to be this way forever. I don't believe that we can turn ourself into anything that we want to. And that's one of the most beautiful things about being a human. So that's number two. Number three, this really changed my life over the past probably three years. And so I heard about this, you know, practicing gratitude before. I was like, that's cute. That's awesome. But, like, if I'm too grateful, I'm not going to be motivated. If I'm, like, so grateful for the stuff that I have, I'm not going to keep working for the what I want. So I, like, kept kind of pushing gratitude off for a while, and then I realized that, you know, I was succeeding and I was getting better, but I wasn't any happier. And it didn't make me happy to have more success. It didn't make me happy to have more money, didn't make me happy to buy more shit. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to practice gratitude every single day. And that's number three is practicing gratitude every single day. So I woke up and I would focus on gratitude every single day, Find anything in my life I could be grateful for. And people are like. Sometimes what I say is, people are like, well, I don't have all the success that I want. Or the happiness that I want or whatever it might be. And I'm like, it doesn't matter where your life is. If you're listening to this podcast, you have a million things to be grateful for. And the biggest ones are that your heart's still breathing and you're still a heart still beating and you're still breathing. Those are the two biggest things you could focus on every single day. Oh my God, I woke up today. That's amazing. Then you can look at, is the weather nice? Did you, you know, have a great cup of coffee? It doesn't have to be huge things that you can be grateful for. And what it does is it shifts your mindset. People always say, like, how do I shift my mindset from scarcity to abundance? You focus on gratitude because when you focus on gratitude, you start seeing how rich your life actually is, how amazing your life actually is. You can keep a gratitude journal if you want to, to track positive moments. You can start your day by listing three things you're grateful for. You can find all of the things that you appreciate in every single day. But more than anything else, like what I like to do is I just wake up in the morning and I take a few minutes and I just close my eyes. Then I just do some breathing, deep breathing, and I just think of things that I'm grateful for. Sometimes it's big things, sometimes it's small things. Sometimes it's things in between. It's just there's so many things that when I am in. Go, go, go. Focus, build, build, build. Mode. I start thinking in too much lack and too much scarcity. When I wake up in the morning and I focus on what I can be grateful for, it sets my overall tone for how I want to feel throughout the day. And I have just found. And we will be right back. Don't let overpriced phone bills suck the joy out of the holidays this year. Right now, all of Mint Mobile's Unlimited plans are 50% off. You can get 3, 6 or 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. 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It's not going to be the end all be all of everything that we're doing, you know, and it made me start learning to appreciate people more, expressing appreciation for other people. And so it's really about developing this habit of gratitude when things are good, but especially when things are difficult, when things can be hard. Because when things are hard, we start thinking about all of the stuff that's wrong and all the stuff that we want fixed and all the stuff we want to be different versus going, you know what? Even though shit has hit the fan, I still have so much to be grateful for. And if you do that, it really makes you start to focus and almost like rewire your brain for looking at the good and finding the good and everything that you have in your life versus the lack and the scarcity and what's not enough. Because there's always going to be scarcity in life. There's always going to be abundance in your life, but it's really what you focus on that matters the most. So that's number three. Number four was letting go of perfectionism. I recognized eventually at one point in time when I was trying to be perfect or trying to be perfect and trying to be perfect, that perfectionism, perfection itself is just an illusion. And so I had a mentor years ago, and she had on her wall, progress over perfection done is better than perfect. And so she, I guess, struggled with it as well. But it's literally on her wall, Progress over perfection. She had a whiteboard, and it was on. She wrote it on her whiteboard, and it was there for years. Progress over perfection done is better than perfect. And it's this idea of nothing will ever be perfect. Everything can always improve. I'm sure even if you were to get the greatest artist in the world, if you were to ask Michelangelo to look at the statue of David, he could probably find some of the imperfections. But you look at it, if you've ever seen it in person, you're like, that's the most perfect piece of art I've ever seen in my entire life. If you were to see him, could he tell you some things that are not perfect? Sure. But imagine if he just never finished it because he was trying to make it perfect, and then we wouldn't have this beautiful piece of art to. To see hundreds of years later. And so it's this idea of letting go of perfectionism because you'll never get there and accepting that what you're really trying to do, if you're trying to be perfect, is you're trying to mask some sort of fear. Perfectionism is never the problem. There's always, it's always the downstream effect of the problem. And the problem is that perfectionism is a mask that you wear to cover up some sort of fear. Oh, I'm just a perfectionist. No, no, no. You're afraid of failure, you're afraid of rejection, you're afraid of other people's opinions, you're afraid of something else. And so perfectionism is not a badge to be wearing on our shirt. It's a moment to take a step back and find some self reflection and say, what am I afraid of if I think I'm a perfectionist? What's the fear behind it? Because there's always a fear behind it, I promise you that. Fear of rejection, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of abandonment, fear of other people's opinions, fear of being kicked out of the tribe, fear of not being loved, whatever it might be. And so you've got to understand there's some sort of fear when you feel perfectionism. It's really a calling for you to be like, hey, take a step back. What are you afraid of? And so it's important to do this and to not compare ourselves to unrealistic standards and to just really appreciate the journey of, hey, I'm getting better. I'm always getting better. Nothing's ever going to be perfect. Done is better than perfect. I'd rather finish something at 95% done than to try to get 100% perfect. Because you can get something done, like if it's a work project, you know, or a painting or whatever is a piece of music, you can get it 95% done in a week, two weeks, whatever it might be that you're building, right? To get that 95 to 100% perfect, probably never going to get there. So it's like, get to done is better than perfect. Get to it. Progress over perfection. It's okay. And so number four is just letting go of this perfection that I had. Number five is reframing failure as a learning opportunity. So many people really struggle with failure and I struggle with failure for a long time. And I realized after studying a lot of very successful people is that the most successful people in the world have been failures majority of their lives. Like, it's like the creator of Honda says, success is 99% failure. You just need that 1% to just be as grand slam. And so the most successful people have usually faced 10 times more failure than someone who's unsuccessful. And so I thought to myself, okay, if that's the case, then I just need to work faster and work harder so that I can get all my failures out of the way and eventually find success. And I can use my failures as, as a stepping stone to become greater and become better. And to let go of my fear of judgment and my fear of criticism and my fear of failure, my fear of not being good enough. Then when I do quote, unquote, fail, it's really an opportunity to learn. It's an opportunity to adapt and refine my strategies so I can find the thing that actually works. Sometimes you got to throw a lot of stuff at the wall before something sticks. And I'm just trying to throw as much of the wall as fast as possible so I can find the one thing that sticks. That's the one thing I've found with the most successful people is they focus on speed, speed to fail as often as possible so that they can eventually get there to success faster. Unsuccessful people I found delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay. Because they don't want to mess up or fail in some sort of way. And then they never actually find that diamond in the rough that that is their success they were looking for. And so that's number five, number six. Huge thing for me and a huge thing for a lot of people out there is cultivating this habit of positive self talk. I tell people, when I was younger, if you would have had a radio like a speaker on the side of my head that broadcast everything I was saying to myself, I was just like such a so hard on myself for mistakes and for failures and for not doing things right. And I was just not really super positive with myself. Now I tell people if I had a speaker on the side of my head that was just broadcasting my thoughts, you'd be like, that dude's completely full of himself. And it's not that I'm full of myself, it's that I want to speak better to myself than anybody else in the world does. And the reason why is because this world, success, happiness, joy, failure, creating life like life as a human is hard. I don't want to beat myself up and make it even harder. I want to make it even easier on myself because I believe in myself more than anybody else. And so you have to become aware of these positive talking patterns that you need to adapt in your life and also start to be aware of these negative self talk patterns that you need to get rid of. When you notice yourself talking negative to yourself. Challenge that thought and reframe that thought into something different. Replace your limiting beliefs with empowering affirmations. And I've said This for a while recently, but like, for a long time I thought affirmations were kind of corny and stupid and I never talked about them. Now it's like I have my affirmations. I have the way that I speak to myself. I am constantly trying to brainwash myself into believing what I want to believe about myself so that I can be the person I need to be. I don't get in my own way and I create in this world what I want to create. So I would recommend for you. Life is hard enough as it is. Being an asshole to yourself doesn't make any easier, I promise you that. And so how can you start to talk to yourself the same way that you would talk to your friend? You know, if you have children and they're trying to, you know, get better at a sport, you're not going to talk trash to your young five year old. You're going to try to build them up. You got this. I believe in you. I know you can do this. Whenever they have a success, celebrate them. Whenever a failure, hey, no worries. You can do it. I know you can. And so you've got to learn to be your best friend and speak to yourself the way that you would speak to a friend, a loved one, your children, and then focus on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. So that's number six. And then number seven is to get into this habit of feeling fear, because we all feel fear. I was talking earlier on a live that I was on, on a zoom call with this course that I'm running, mindset 2.0, and I was talking about the fact that like even yesterday I felt visceral fear and I had to talk myself out of my feelings, talk myself out of what I was thinking about and what I was mulling over and then take action anyways. And so it's this thing of feeling fear but doing it anyways. Most of the time when we feel fear, we back away because we think, oh my gosh, I must be unsafe. If I feel fear, there's something wrong, I must be unsafe, so I need to back away. And we create this habit of feeling fear, backing away, feeling fear, backing away. And it's a habit we've created and it's kind of a pattern that we just go into. You have to feel the fear and do it anyways. And how do you do this? Well, you don't let your fear control you first off, but you remind yourself that the feeling of fear, and I want you to really understand this, the feeling of fear is the physical Manifestation of your comfort zone in this moment. If I feel fear, let me take a step back. If I'm not feeling fear, I'm in my comfort zone. If I feel fear, I'm at the edge of my comfort zone. And you know if you're listening to this podcast, that everything that you want is on the outside of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is where your dreams go to die. And so if you want something more, something better in your life, you're going to have to get out of your comfort zone. And so you have to notice, ooh, okay, yeah, I feel some fear. I really do feel some fear right now. That means that I'm on the edge of my comfort zone. Normally, what I'll do when I feel fear is I will back away. But I want to remind myself that I'm supposed to be getting out of my comfort zone. Growth is on the outside of my comfort zone. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to lean in just a little bit. This discomfort is a sign of growth. And so you use this fear as a signal that you're about to grow rather than something to be afraid of. And you keep moving just a little bit forward. You don't have to blast past your comfort zone. Just take one step out of your comfort zone and prove to yourself you're not going to die. It's this idea of keep moving forward despite fear, despite uncertainty. And really, that's what it comes down to is those are seven things that are just mindset habits that have really helped me get my life together and create something amazing for my life. When before I started working on my mind, it wasn't really going in the best direction. So that's what I got for you for today's lesson. If you're out there and you want to master your 2026 goals, I have a free 30 minute workshop video that will help you figure out your goals, get very clear on what they are, and plan them out. If you go to goalsmastery2026.com you can download it for free. All you have to do is get out a pen and paper, push play, and at the end of the 30 minutes, you'll have all of your goals for next year planned out with a plan of what you need to do each day to hit those goals. So once again, if you want to download it for free, it is goals mastery2026.com and with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I 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.
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Distributor hey there, it's Katie Nolan, host of Casuals, the sports podcast where we don't care how much you know about sports, we're just happy that you're here. Every week I hang out with some of my good friends to discuss the biggest stories across sports and entertainment, but in a way that's like fun and not boring. Want to know Sue Bird's favorite Diana Taurasi story? Or how heavy the Larry o' Brien trophy is? Or even what baseball team is right for you based on your moon sign we got you. Listen to Casuals every Tuesday and Thursday on the SiriusXM app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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