
What if the reason your life hasn’t changed yet has nothing to do with motivation, discipline, or habits—but with unconscious programs you’ve never questioned? In this episode, I break down the single practice that can completely change your life in the next 30 days: self-inquiry.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob.
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Dial.
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If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. I put out episodes four times a week for over 10 years now to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. Because if you can grow and improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if you want to do that, hit that subscribe button. Today I'm going to be talking about the one key thing that you can do to change your life in 30 days. Because if you want to completely change your life in the next 30 days, I do believe that this is the most important thing that you can do and it's not something that you would have expected. Because if you don't do this, you will continue to run your life off of a set of old programs. Studies have shown that 95% of your thoughts you have every single day are wired into you by the age of seven, which means that most people are walking around in adult bodies with a child's processing system. And so if you do want to completely change your life and completely change the next year, the next 30 days, what you really need to pay attention to are the old outdated programs that are running in your brain unconsciously, that are running your entire life. Otherwise they will continue to run your life and you will continue to want more from yourself and then self sabotage and want more from yourself and self sabotage. And then what do you do? Five years later you're going to look back and you're going to realize you're in the exact same place as you are today. You're probably here listening or watching this episode because you probably have an idea that, that you can gain more control over your life if you can gain control over your mindset. And if you do that, your entire life will be better. And you probably are here because you understand that everything comes from your mindset. What you think of yourself, the world, what you think of other people, what you think is possible for you, what's going on in your fears and your limiting beliefs, all of that stuff. And I want you to understand that when I first started in self development, I, I wanted to become better. I wanted to change my life. I wanted to make more money and have more success and have less fears and limiting beliefs. And so I kept thinking to myself, how can I add more? How can I add more? How can I add more? How can I become better? How can I become smarter? How can I know more tips and tricks to master my mind? Basically what it was, was, it was addition, addition, addition. But there's this habit that is not addition that has the power to completely transform your entire life. At its core, it's not a productivity trick, it's not a morning hack, it's not a discipline hack. It's the habit that shifts your entire internal framework. And that habit is called self inquiry, which is if you can do this for the next 30 days, it will start to rewire who you are and change the entire path of where you're going. The habit, like I said, is called self inquiry. It is the ability to turn inward into question your assumptions and, and everything that you're thinking so that you can dismantle the subconscious patterns that are running your life and shaping your entire reality. If you do not do this, not much in your life is ever really going to change. Carl Jung says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will continue to run your life and you will call it fate. So what we're going to talk about today is the observation of what's really going on in your head and then questioning it, like really questioning it, until you pick apart all of the pieces of what's going on. Why you feel this way. Is this truly what you believe? Or is this your truth? Or is this something that was taught to you when you were younger? Where did I learn this from? That's what we're really talking about today. To take a step back, to observe it and to question yourself without judgment, without guilt, without shame, but with true curiosity. If you can do that for the next 30 days, your entire life can be different from this moment forward. So let's dive into it. Why is self inquiry the key to everything changing in your life? Because most people live their entire life reacting. They just react to life based off of old thoughts and old habits and old programs that they learned from somebody else. And so if you're constantly just reacting, you're never going to progress anywhere in life. You'll just live your life running off of autopilot without even truly realizing it. You'll be acting out old scripts that you never wrote in the first place. You might be holding on to beliefs in your mind right now that are running your life and have been running your life for the past 30 years. And you don't even realize that. You don't even really believe it. It came from somebody else. And they all come from different places. They come from childhood experience, they come from parents, they come from cultural conditioning, unresolved emotions that you have, things that your parents might have said to you, things that teachers said to you. It's all of these millions of teeny tiny moments of the past 20 years or 30 years or 50 or 60 years of your life. And these teeny tiny moments that you have stored away and stored as truth and been running in a set of patterns affects everything in your life. And I mean everything in your life, from the way that you respond to criticism, the way you handle relationships, the fears that you have, the ambitions that you do or don't have, what you think of yourself, what you think is possible for you, why you react the way that you do when something, you know that happens, somebody else would have completely reacted differently. And so all of this comes from this deeper context that people rarely explore within themselves. You must be the person to get the flashlight out and to actually explore these deep parts of you. The act of self inquiry is basically thinking, I'm gonna step out of my automatic ways. I'm gonna step out of my habits and my patterns and the things I learned from my mom and things I learned from my dad and start asking myself questions to see like, what the fuck is really going on here? Like, why is this belief driving this reaction? Why is this belief driving my entire life? Did I learn this? Do I personally believe this? Do I want to continue believing it, or do I want to believe something else? And the key here is to constantly question yourself for the next 30 days when practice for 30 days in a row. Self inquiry will really, really dissolve your limiting beliefs in yourself. It will really dissolve the fears that are holding you back from being who you could be. It will dissolve these automatic reactions, these unconscious programs. And really what it is, is it is the first step that you need to take to step into your own personal power. Not what you were taught to be or who you're supposed to be, but like you deciding who you are as a sovereign being, what you want to believe, what you want to do with your life. And it's really interesting to think that you could be a completely different person in 30 days if you put every thought, feeling, reaction, all of that under a microscope and question the hell out of it. The problem is this just going to be honest with you. It takes time and most people are lazy. And it takes a lot of questioning the foundation of, of what you think you are and what you think about the entire world. Because a lot of this stuff you learned when you were a child, before the age of 6, 7 years old. And we will be right back at the beginning of the year. 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Dial and now back to the show. So you're talking. If you're 47 years old, you're going to be questioning, oh my God, this has been running for the past 40 years of my life. Like that can be a really big hit to the ego. But if you really want to make a massive change, it is extremely important. When you look at the mechanics of self inquiry, what you have to do is you must train yourself to pause before reacting to something. Instead of just blindly following your first emotional impulse, you have to take it a step back for a second and observe what's going on. So it takes you being more present than you ever have for the next 30 days. You should probably get off your phone as much because that's stealing your attention and so you can think, oh, that's if I'm on my phone, I'm not as present. Okay, I really want to Focus on being present. I want to focus on how I'm feeling. I want to focus on what I'm thinking behind the scenes. And 95% of the thoughts that are unconsciously rolling through my brain that I'm not even noticing, I need to start to notice them. And so there's a couple different stages that you want to look at. The first thing that you want to do as you're starting to get into self inquiry is to recognize the trigger. The first step is just noticing when you are emotionally charged. Triggers can appear as anger, anxiety, sadness, defensiveness. It's any reaction or any emotion, good or bad. Anytime you feel an intense emotional response or like, you know the feeling when it's starting to bubble up and you're like, oh, I feel like I want to freak out right now. Okay. That's the opportunity to learn about yourself. So that's the first thing that we really need to notice. Okay. The second thing we need to do is we need to start to become curious. Instead of getting lost in the old pattern or getting lost in the old story, we want to be curious about why you feel the way, like why that emotional charge is coming up. In cognitive behavioral therapy, they say when you notice a feeling, the very next thing to do is to ask yourself one question. What was I just thinking? What you're doing is you're bringing this unconscious story to light and you're not always going to notice it, but you're going to start to notice, oh, well, you know, I feel emotionally charged. I'm starting to feel anxious. Why am I feeling so anxious? And then you take a step back and you're like, huh, I feel really anxious. I don't know why I feel anxious. What was I just thinking? Well, I was thinking about the fact that I have this presentation that I have to give and I'm not as far along as I thought I was going to be. Okay, well then what was I thinking? What meaning was I giving that? I was thinking to myself, well, you know, if I don't get it done on time, or if it's not done to the, to the perfectionism version of me that I would like for it to be, then I'm going to be a loser and I'm going to be judged. Okay, now you're starting to notice the inner workings, the patterns that are going on here. So you ask yourself stuff like, what was I just thinking? What belief or being or fear is being activated inside of me? Have I ever felt this way before? When was the last time? How does this Resemble that last time, right? You can ask yourself questions like, is this thought completely true? Is this belief universally true? And what I mean is, like, is this belief? Because we all have beliefs and we think our beliefs are true, but really, a belief is just a thought. You've been thinking for so long that you think that it's true, but if you ask yourself, is it written into the fabric of the universe, you're like, oh, no, it's actually not. Which means that who believes it's true? Me. Nobody else. You know, you can ask yourself questions like, what assumptions am I making right now about the situation? Oh, well, if I turn in the presentation, it's not 100%. My boss is going to think that I'm an idiot, right? That's an assumption that I'm making. People are going to judge me. That's an assumption that I make. I'm going to get fired. That's an assumption that I'm making. You can ask yourself questions like, what emotion is beneath this? Right? Ask yourself, what if the opposite of what I believe is true? You know, how would I respond if I were not attached to this belief right now? And what you're doing is you're just questioning, questioning, questioning, questioning. What you realize is as you start to question your patterns, you question your fears, you question your beliefs, and you question all of this. Everything that you've built your life on to be fully transparent is just a house of cards. And it will come crumbling down. And that scares the shit out of most people. But more than anything else, it's a really powerful place to be because you realize these things that have been controlling you and controlling your thoughts and beliefs and your patterns and your reaction for your entire life are just things that you have been keeping alive. When you can pull them down like a house of cards and it just all falls to the floor, guess what? You can start to rebuild from there. And what do you do is step number three, which is you reframe the thought and you release it. The point is to challenge your thoughts. And then what you do is actually decide. And this is called cognitive reframing in psychology. You decide the thought that you actually want to choose in that moment. The way you release yourself from old beliefs is to prove that they're not true, to see it from a different perspective than you normally do. Dissolve the belief and then decide what you want to believe. Because when you dissolve the belief and you start to realize, like I said, it's like a house of cards will come falling. It doesn't hold as much value, and it doesn't hold as much truth to you anymore. And you keep doing this over and over and over again. The point is to prove yourself wrong so that it stops controlling your entire life. Once you uncover the belief behind the trigger, you can challenge it. You can replace it. And then you realize, like, oh, this has been running my entire life. I don't want this to run anymore. And so by becoming dedicated to doing this, you strip away all of these unconscious patterns that have been running your life, and it allows you to see the world clearly. Like, you will start to see the world with so much clarity, because you're not putting your own fears and limiting beliefs and stories and narratives on top of it. It's like you've been running, running around your entire life with a, you know, a dirty pair of glasses. You're not even really seeing reality. You're only seeing it through your own perspective based off of everything you've ever been through in your life. Now you can actually see things as they truly are. And that's what's really important here. It'll change every part of your life. It'll change your relationships. Like most conflicts in relationships don't come from the present moment. They come from past wounds being projected onto the present moment. You know, if a friend doesn't return your call, you might spiral into, like, oh, well, they don't like me, or rejection or whatever it might be. You don't think to yourself, oh, maybe they just missed the call. No, you think, oh, well, I'm not good enough and I'm not smart enough or whatever it might be, and maybe they don't like me anymore, and it activates some sort of old wound or feeling of being unimportant or your fear of abandonment from childhood. Like me, I realized this about myself. I realized that if I text friends or if I text guys or if I text girls, and, you know, it didn't really bother me if somebody didn't text me back, but if I text somebody, this was years ago, probably about six years ago, I realized if I text somebody that was a guy that I respected or, like, really looked up to in some sort of way, it would trigger me. And I start to have these stories running through my head. So I would feel triggered, I'd feel anxious, and I had these stories, and so I had to become aware of these stories. And I would think, like, oh, he must not think that I'm good enough. Maybe he doesn't have time for me. Maybe I'm not worth getting back to. And I realized it had nothing to do with the situation. It had everything to do with an old abandonment wound for my father that I had not healed. Because my dad would say, hey, I'm going to come pick you up. And then he would, you know, he said, I'm going to go pick you up. We're going to go fishing. And then he would get drunk at a bar and he would forget about me. And I realized, holy shit, I am projecting my wound from my father onto these other men that I respect. So it had nothing to do with the situation with them and everything to do with my unhealed trauma with my father. Self inquiry allowed me to recognize the difference between reality and what's happening in this present moment versus projection. And so what happens is, instead of reacting with resentment, we can pause and we can look at this and say, like, what's really going on here? Is it about this moment? Like, what meaning am I giving this? Is it really about them? Or is it, like, about an unresolved part of me? Right? Like, this can really start to change the way that you change. Like. Like, view the entire world. Like, these are the moments where you're going to learn and grow the most in your life. Not from reading a book or going to a conference or listening to this podcast. Like, life is giving you the lesson right now to make you change your life the most. Learn from it, stop running from it. And guess what? Where you're going to be triggered the most in relationships is romantic relationships. Why? Because whether you realize it or not, your significant other becomes a proxy for your parents. Everything within you that is unhealed from your relationship with your parent. Each one of them is 100% going to come up in your relationship until you deal with it or until you guys just act like it doesn't happen. And then it just push in the rug and push in the rug and push it on the rug. That's why so many people get out of relationships and they say, oh, like, I didn't. It didn't work out with him because of xyz. And they get into another relationship, and guess what? It comes up again. Xyz, whatever it is. And. And then they get out of that relationship and they get into it and they say, oh, my God, I can't. Why do I keep attracting the same person? Because the universe is trying to give you a lesson that you need to fix yourself. It was never about them. It was always about you. Right? So it'll help you in your relationships, it'll help you in work and Success, like so much, people chase success as a way to validate their worth. And they work tirelessly and they fear that if they slow down, they're going to lose significance. Like, for me, this is another thing that happened. I became a workaholic when I was younger and would work 110 hours a week for my first three or four years of running my first business in my early 20s, because I was trying to actually prove my worth. It wasn't. I wanted to make, of course, yeah, I wanted to make money, I want to be successful, I want to be number one, all of that stuff. But really what I was doing is I was trying to prove my worth. And I realized at the core of it was me trying to prove my worth to my father, who had passed away 15 years before that. Right. And so you have to understand, once you start questioning yourself, a lot of things are going to bubble up to the surface. But if you don't question yourself, then you have to understand you're going to be doing the exact same thing over and over and over again. And it's going to run your entire life. Because your mind is constantly narrating and judging and analyzing. It's filled with the things that you should do. It's filled with comparisons, it's filled with, you know, habitual loops of thought. When you really take a step back and look at self inquiry, it creates a space between you and your thoughts and allows you to see it from the outside instead of getting caught up in the drama of all of it. And so instead of identifying with every anxious thought, you can observe it and you can say, that's really interesting. Do I want to believe that? Is that who I want to be? Is that what I want to believe? Do I want to hold on to this belief? Is this belief ruining my life? Maybe I should let go of requires brutal honesty and willingness to face really, really uncomfortable truths. And that's why most people stay away from it. But if you really want to change your life in the next 30 days, this is one of the most important things you could possibly do. It's honestly probably the most important thing that you could possibly do. And so I want you to understand this isn't about just sitting down and saying, I'm doing this because I want to be better. This is you saying, in order for me to change the fabric of my entire life, I need to figure out what the hell is going on behind the scenes. I need to rip everything up from the roots and I need to plant new seeds there. Most people are trying to plant new seeds and not rip up the roots of all of the weeds that are around them. This is your job to figure out who you are for the next 30 days. Question every single thing that you know, that you think you like, that you don't like, that you hate, that you feel all of that. And what you'll actually start to realize is the more that you do this, it'll kind of be weird the first couple days, but after that, you're really going to start to notice the patterns running your life. You're really going to start to notice the things that are not you, that you think have been you. The beliefs, the thoughts, the fears, all of those things. And once you start to notice them, you go, yeah, that's not mine. Do I want to believe this anymore? I don't. What do I choose to believe? I choose to believe this. And so you're ripping off the roots and you're planting new seeds. And that is how you change your life the most in the next 30 days. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video based off of what you have been watching on YouTube recently. YouTube is bringing up this video right here and it thinks that you should watch this one next based off of your algorithm. And if you want to make sure to never miss another podcast episode, go ahead and click that button right there. Subscribe and I'll see you on the next video. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me Robdial Jr R O B D I A L J R if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast, you can go ahead and go to coachwithrob.com, once again coach with rob. 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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Episode: How to Change Your Life in 30 Days
Air Date: February 2, 2026
Host: Rob Dial
In this episode, Rob Dial explores the single most powerful habit for radically transforming your life in just 30 days: self-inquiry. Instead of relying on productivity hacks or external additions, Rob asserts that real, meaningful change requires questioning the unconscious beliefs and patterns that have been running your life, many of which were programmed before age seven. Through personal anecdotes and actionable steps, Rob explains why and how anyone can use self-inquiry to take control of their mindset, break self-sabotaging cycles, and reframe old narratives for personal transformation.
Rob outlines a three-step method to practice self-inquiry:
In “How to Change Your Life in 30 Days,” Rob Dial delivers a powerful message: transforming your life is less about adding new habits, and more about questioning and unlearning the old scripts that unconsciously drive your choices. Through self-inquiry—actively observing, questioning, and reframing automatic thoughts and triggers—you can eradicate limiting beliefs, heal old wounds, and open the door to authentic, lasting change.
Action Step: For the next 30 days, ruthlessly question every thought, belief, and reaction. Observe your triggers, ask probing questions, and consciously choose new, empowering beliefs. This challenging—but liberating—process is the foundation for mastering your mindset…and, as Rob always says, “When you master your mindset, you master your life.”