
Have you ever wondered why you keep creating the same results in your life, even when you want something different? In this episode, I break down how your thoughts, fears, and beliefs are programming your brain every single day — and how your reticular activating system is shaping the reality you experience. I’ll show you how to stop living on autopilot, rewire your focus intentionally, and start creating the business, relationships, and life you truly want.
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Foreign. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you want to learn how to create the perfect morning routine, go to theperfectmorningroutine.com I created a workbook and a video for you to go through to create the perfect morning routine based off of science. Once again, that is theperfectmorningroutine.com to get it for free. Today, I'm gonna be talking about how to get and create whatever it is that you want in this life. And I'm gonna say something to you, and then I'm gonna back it up. I'm gonna actually explain it neurologically and psychologically. You are always manifesting in your life at every single moment. And I don't mean, like, you just sit there and then you close your eyes and you say, universe, I want to become a millionaire. And. And then you wake up the next morning and there's a million dollars in your bank account. You are always creating your future with every single thought and every single belief and every single action that you take. The question is, are you doing it on purpose or are you doing it on autopilot? Because most people are doing it on autopilot. And you don't need to read a book on how to manifest or any of that type of stuff because you've been doing it your whole entire life. And so, like I said, I'm going to talk to you about how we do it psychologically, but also neurologically, how this happens to you as well. And the reason why is because if you can understand the way that you work and the way that your brain works and your psychology, you can start to actually quote, unquote, manifest intentionally and use it to create the life that you want. The problem with that is that most people don't manifest intentionally. They don't focus their mind intentionally on what they want. So in turn, what do they do? They focus on what they don't want. They focus on what could go wrong. They focus on all of the things that they're afraid of and trying to protect themselves and trying to plan ahead so that they don't get caught off guard. They focus too much on what happened in the past so that that thing in the past doesn't happen again in the future. But I want you to understand this. What you focus on will actually create in reality. Whatever you focus on most, you will create in your reality. So one of the examples that I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of different examples. The, the number one fear that I hear from people, and I've been coaching people now for over 15 years, the number one fear that I hear from people is the fear of failure. People are just so afraid of failing. And I coach business owners and I've been coaching business owners for years. So business owners, CEOs, high level executives. Why do I coach them? Well, because 99% of the reason why a business fails has to do with the mind of the person who runs it, the mindset of the owner, or the mindset of the CEO. So when you start a business, you're excited, you're full of vision, you're full of possibility, everything that could happen. But then as you get further down the road, your focus goes from possibility and starts to, starts to drift off course a little bit. Well, what, what if this business flops? What if it fails? What if I spend all of this time creating this product and nobody ends up buying from me? What if, what if I'm not good enough? What if I'm just an imposter? What if I mess up? What if I put in all of this effort to try to grow this business and I lose time and then also lose money as well? So then what do you do? You start to focus because your focus has deviated from the goal that you're trying to hit to what you're afraid of, what you're trying to avoid. So then what do you do when you start this business and you're six months into it, you start to hesitate, you procrastinate a little bit. You find yourself scrolling on your phone. More than picking up the phone and actually selling your product, you tend to overthink every action that you are about to go into instead of actually acting in some sort of way in creating the business that you want. And so if you do this long enough, eventually things stall, the sales will start to slow down, and eventually the business dies. And the reason why was because the thing that you are focusing on the most, the thing that you were fearing the most, you created. Because you will create in your reality whatever you focus on most. So you're so afraid of the business failing, all of these little teeny tiny things happen. You procrastinate, don't take enough action, and slowly but surely what happens, the business fails. You created your reality, your focus became your outcome. Another example that I like to give that will, you know, take it out of business in case you're not a Business owner relationships. We're all in relationships with other people. You know, it's just. The relationship is just how you and another person relate. But let's say that we're talking about a romantic relationship. Maybe you've been in a relationship before. You've been so in love with somebody and then they just fell out of love. Or maybe you were cheated on, or maybe you were just ghosted. They just left you on read and you ever heard from them again. So you get into your next relationship, maybe you take some time to heal and you're like, okay, I'm ready to get in my next relationship. So you get into your next relationship and this time you're laser focused on keeping this person. You're focused on you being what they need. You're focused on not messing it up. You're focused on trying really hard to keep this thing going and to keep it afloat. And in doing that, you forget to actually be you, which is who the person's supposed to be falling in love with, right? You, not this person that you feel like you need to be. And what happens, ironically, because of that, your energy feels off. And because your energy feels off, that person senses it, so their energy is a little bit off. When relating to you, you start to get a little bit too needy. The connection between the two of you starts to fade. And not because either one of you can really put a finger on what went wrong. It's not like you did something bad or they did something bad. The connection just kind of faded because it's not there, because you weren't there. Like you as you truly are, your true self was not there. And they were trying to connect with a fake version of you, but they didn't feel for some reason, whether it was consciously or unconsciously, that there was any sort of connection. And so you weren't wrong to want love, but your focus was so fear based and it wasn't heart based in some sort of way. And so what happens? You're so afraid of being alone or you're so afraid of being left again that what happens? You end up creating the reality that you are most afraid of and you are most focused on. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. So let's think about this for a second. Because the first thing that I always think about when I work with humans is like, why? Why would we focus on the wrong things? You know, why would we focus on the negative and not the positive? Well, I want you to understand that negative and positive are just labels. That we as humans put onto something. But when we say something's negative, it's really what we're trying to do, is protect ourselves. A lot of times that's what it comes down to. You're trying to protect yourself from being hurt when your business fails. You're trying to protect yourself from being left with someone that you fall in love with. The human brain is wired for protection, not expansion. I always say that our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. The thing that kept our species alive was that our brain was wired for protection. We could look into the future and we could see what we wanted to do and how we wanted to make sure that if we went this way, we got around the lions that were over to the side. So our greatest strength is our greatest weakness. We protected ourselves. Our species survived, and our species got to where it is. But that protection now, today in modern day, doesn't help you create the life that you want to. You don't have to worry about lions, you don't have to worry about food, you don't have to worry about water. You, you need to figure out how to get rid of that protection mechanism that you got inside of your brain. I guess you won't get rid of it. How to work through it is a better way of saying it, and how to actually create whatever it is you're trying to create. Because your brain, it's always looking for what's wrong. It's always scanning for danger in some sort of way. It's trying to survive, not help you thrive in any sort of way. And if you're not intentional, like very, very intentional, your focus defaults back to fear. It goes back to lack. It goes back to your old patterns. And so why does it do this? Well, when you start to look at your brain neurologically, there's a part of your brain that's the, the most important part of brain, of what we're going to talk about today, which is called your reticular activating system. And if you've never heard of it before, if you have heard of it before, I'm explaining it probably more in depth than you may have heard before. But if you've never heard of it before, your reticular activating system is basically your Brain's filter at one second, like one second right now, there's 11 million bits of information that are bombarding your brain and body through all five of your senses. 11 million. Like if I say right now, think about the bottom, the feeling of the bottom of your right foot. You're now Thinking about the bottom of your right foot that was always coming in, but you weren't paying attention to it. You were filtering it out. Now, if I say think of the feeling on, you know, your left thumb, well, now you can feel what it feels like in your left thumb. You weren't thinking about that just five seconds ago, but now you are. That feeling was always coming in. Your brain was filtering it out. So it goes from 11 million bits of information, and it only allows approximately 50 bits of information into your conscious awareness Every single second. That's.00045% of incoming data. So most of what happens in your world is filtered out. What decides what the 50 bits of information are that make it in this thing in your brain called the reticular activating system. And what programs your reticular activating system, what you focus on, it's going to look for your beliefs, it's going to look for proof to your beliefs, your thoughts, it's going to look for proof for your thoughts, your values, your emotions, all of these things program your reticular activating system. And the reticular activating system is just basically a bundle of nerves at the base of your brain stem that just filter stuff out. It just allows information and that's relevant to you, and it filters out the rest. The key part is relevant to you. If you think I'm an idiot, you're going to find all of the ways that you're an idiot. If you think I'm unlovable, you're going to find all of the ways that you're unlovable. If you think that I'm not smart enough, you're going to find all of the ways that you're not smart enough. And when you focus on what you're afraid of and what you're trying to avoid, and you focus on failure, your reticular activating system basically scans your environment and it scans your past for proof that you're a failure. If you're focusing on failure, you see what I'm talking about here? And so you have to understand that there's this thing that has to be programmed. Same way that if you think of a computer, you got to go into computer program what you want it to do. It's the same thing. You've got to kind of go into the computer of your own brain and program what you want it to focus on so that it finds it. I remember I had a call probably three months ago at this point, and it was someone that was in Mindset University. This, this program that I run where we meet twice a week and for an entire year. And we do coaching sessions every single week, twice a week. When you focus on something, you're going to find it. And one of the ladies had asked the question. She said, rob, I. I just don't trust myself. And I was like, okay, why don't you trust yourself? And she said, I don't trust myself because, you know, I used to have, I used to be addicted to alcohol. I said, okay. I said, why else do you. And I don't trust myself because I went through a divorce six years ago. I was like, okay, so those are reasons why she doesn't trust herself. Those were, were right in the front of her mind and they were very easy for her to pull up. When I asked her the question, I said, I'm curious if there was any reason to trust yourself. Two reasons. Give me two reasons why you should trust yourself. And she's like, hmm, well, let me think about that. She's like, well, number one, I used to be addicted to alcohol and now I'm not addicted to alcohol and I've been sober for 12 years. I was like, okay, that's pretty good. On what else? She goes, I lost £100 and I've kept it off for the past five or six years. I was like, that's pretty damn good too. So you're telling me you don't think you can trust yourself, but you overcame an addiction to alcohol, which is very hard to do, and you lost weight 100 pounds and kept it off, which is very hard to do. Both of those two things sound to me like you should be able to trust yourself. And she's like, oh my God, you're right. I never think about how I did those before. And I was like, the reason why is because you're filtering out the reasons why you should trust yourself. Because your belief is that I can't trust myself. So top of mind, you're thinking of all the reasons why you shouldn't trust yourself. So when you focus on something, you're going to find it. And when you find it, you're going to take action towards whatever you're focusing on. You know, when you focus on opportunity, your reticular activating system picks up on signals or people or opportunities or possibilities in your day to day life that maybe you wouldn't have noticed before. Your reticular activating system is basically the ultimate bouncer at the door. It decides what is important to you and important enough to let in and what else to completely ignore. So if you're focused on fear, you'll filter and just find everything that's a threat in your life. If you're focusing on gratitude, you'll filter and find everything in your life that's blessings. If you're focusing on opportunity, you'll spot opportunities in your life everywhere. If you're focusing on rejection, you're going to see why you're rejected all over the place. You're not really seeing reality, you're seeing a curated feed that your brain thinks that you care about based off of what it's going to go through, based off your reticular activating system. On top of that, then you have something that's called the confirmation bias in psychology, which is is we look for and try to find evidence for what we already believe. So if you already believe that you are not lovable, well then you are going to find that in your day to day. And then you're also going to find it throughout your entire history. Because in psychology, for some reason humans always want to prove themselves correct. And through the confirmation bias we're trying to confirm our beliefs. Our brain is not going, hey, is my belief helping me or not? If it's going, I've got a belief, I need to prove it true. Oh yep, I'm unlovable. Oh yep, I'm a loser. Oh yep, I'm not smart enough. If you believe something like people always let me down, your brain will filter out all of the events that showed where people were there for you. And it will only find the events that show that you are not able to trust people, that people will always let you down. It'll filter out all of the times when people were there for you. And this is how your focus becomes a reality. This is a self fulfilling prophecy. And so what you need to do is a couple different things. Number one is you need to become very self aware of what you focus on consciously and unconsciously about yourself and about the world throughout the entire day. Because I guarantee there's some stuff that's really good and I guarantee there's some stuff that definitely need to be adjusted. And so if you think you know what I'm focusing on, the fact that I'm so afraid my business is going to fail, I promise you if you're focusing on that, you're going to get that. Whether it's a month from now, whether it's a year from now, whether it's two years from now, you're going to get that thing. So you need to figure out and become aware of what is that you're currently focusing on. That's step number one. Step number two is you've got to figure out what it is that you need to focus on in order to get the life that you want. So you say, okay, in order for me to grow my business to a million dollars a year, parts of me are going to have to die off. I'm going to have to change, I'm going to have to have different beliefs, I'm going to have to have different thoughts. What are the things that I need to believe and say to myself over and over again in order to actually create this million dollar year business? Because your beliefs, just FYI something that you believe, your belief is just a thought that you've been thinking long enough that now you think it's true. You've just been thinking that you're a loser or a failure or whatever it is for so long that you just think that it's true now. It's not objectively true. You just think it's true because you've been repeating it for so long. So if that's the case, why don't I change my thoughts, repeat them over and over and over again and eventually I'll start to believe them? Because all you're really doing in this case is you're kind of just brainwashing yourself. I wish that every person would take very seriously their own brainwashing because if we're not, we've been brainwashed, you know, accidentally by our parents, by society, by ads, by social media, other people, all of that stuff. Very rarely do we sit down and go, okay, from this moment forward, I'm going to brainwash myself. I'm going to wake up every single morning and I'm going to figure out what I need to say to myself. What do I need to think and what do I need to actually believe in order to create the life that I want, I need to be in charge of my own brainwashing. And so that's the second step. There's. And the third step, you need to become hardcore about it. You need to do this every single day, multiple times a day, every single morning. You're basically waking up in the morning, you're sitting down at your computer of your brain. You're saying, I need to program myself for something today. What do I need to think, what do I need to believe, what do I need to search for? For people, places, opportunities, all of those things. I'm going to program my reticular activating system to think the way that I want to Think and to search for what it is that I want to prove to myself whether that's I'm lovable, I'm not a failure, I'm good enough, I'm going to grow a multi million dollar business. Because whatever you focus on, you will get in your life. And the way for you to actually get whatever it is that you want is to have whatever it is that you want as this magnificent obsession that you think about all day long. All day long. So much so that you actually start to believe that it's true. And then you start to believe that it's true and you start to actually go, oh my God, if this, if this actually might be true, then maybe I should take some action towards it. So therefore you're not holding yourself back from going and getting it, you're actually taking action towards the thing that you're trying to create. So how do you get whatever you want? You unprogram all of the stuff that you've been unconsciously telling your reticular activating system for years and years, and you start to reprogram all of the stuff that you want your brain to believe, the stuff that you need to believe about yourself, about the world, about business, about love, whatever it might be. And you program that into yourself every single day, every single morning, multiple times a day if you need to. Just get really hardcore on it. And eventually what happens, you do get what you want. So that's what I got for you. Today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at robdial Junior. R O B D I A L J R. And once again, if you want to go ahead and get the perfect morning routine, go to theperfectmorningroutine.com, download it for free. And I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
Host: Rob Dial
Date: May 15, 2026
In this episode, Rob Dial guides listeners through the psychology and neurology behind "getting what you want." He demystifies the concepts of manifestation and intentional focus, stressing that we are "always manifesting" through our recurring beliefs, thoughts, and actions. Drawing from his coaching and studies alongside renowned thought leaders, Rob breaks down how to understand and intentionally program your mind—particularly your brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS)—to achieve your goals.
Rob recounts a conversation with a client from Mindset University:
Rob: “Give me two reasons why you should trust yourself.”
Client: “Well, I used to be addicted to alcohol, and now I’m not addicted… I lost 100 pounds and kept it off.”
Rob: “Both of those two things sound to me like you should be able to trust yourself.”
(22:45-24:00)
Reveals how limiting beliefs filter out personal accomplishments.
On Focus:
“What you focus on will actually create in reality.” (03:00)
On Fear in Business:
“Your focus became your outcome.” (06:40)
On Authenticity in Relationships:
“You weren’t wrong to want love, but your focus was so fear-based... you end up creating the reality that you are most afraid of.” (09:15)
On the Brain’s Wiring:
“The human brain is wired for protection, not expansion.” (13:15)
On the RAS:
“Your reticular activating system is basically the ultimate bouncer at the door.” (17:45)
On Self-Programming:
“I wish that every person would take very seriously their own brainwashing because if we’re not, we’ve been brainwashed, you know, accidentally by our parents, by society...” (31:25)
Rob Dial’s central message is that you already possess the power to create your reality—but you must intentionally focus on what you want, not what you fear. Mastering your mindset is the key to getting what you want, and this starts with understanding how your brain works, directing your RAS, and consistently reprogramming your beliefs and focus for success.
Rob’s Closing Wisdom:
“Make it your mission to make someone else’s day better.” (End)