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Rob Dial (1:04)
Now.
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Rob Dial (1:41)
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. So if that's what you're into, subscribe. Cause I put out episodes four times a week for the past 10 years. And that's what all we're really looking to do is help you learn and improve yourself so you can make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Today I'm gonna be talking about a mindset shift that I had a few years ago that changed my life immediately. And I mean, like day one, I noticed a huge, huge difference in my life and it comes down to really the power of what we focus on in our perception. If you can really understand this, it will actually change the quality of your life dramatically. So let me give you an example real quick. First, before we dive into it, right, imagine that there's two people that are stuck in a traffic jam. Both of them are on their way to work. Both of them are definitely going to be late to work. But one of them is fuming. They're pissed off. They're gripping the steering wheel, they're screaming, they're cussing, they're just griping about all of the wasted time, how their boss is going to be pissed, all of that. The other one, calm. They're listening to their favorite song. They don't want to be late, but they're going to be late either way. And so they're dance along to their favorite music, they're having a great time, they're in the exact same situation, but it's two radically different realities that these two people live in. Why is that? Because of what they are focusing on in their perception of what is going on. Because it is your perception, not your circumstances, that creates your experience and creates your life. Say that again just so you can get it down. It is your perception, not your circumstances, that creates your experiences in your life. And it all comes back to a quote that I heard a few years ago that really made me sit down and focus, like, okay, how do I feel on a daily basis? How do I want to feel? And what am I focusing on that's making me feel the way that I feel? And if I want to feel differently, what do I need to focus on? And it made me just try to change my perception of what I focus on. And this is the quote. The quote is, your mind can make hell out of heaven or heaven out of hell. Your mind can make hell out of heaven or heaven out of hell. And I realize sometimes when I'm just stressed out and having a bad day and I'm living in heaven, but mentally creating hell. And it's not just like a cute little motivational quote that's like, hey buddy, feel better? I mean, this idea of your perception is backed by a mountain of psychological research. And once you understand how this works, how you can change your perception, how you can change your focus, it'll change your life as well. And reason why I'm talking about it now is cause this came from a topic I was talking about with a coaching client of mine. He's a extremely successful guy. He has everything he's ever wanted. He has a super successful business, makes a ton of money, has a nice house, has a great family, and he's sitting There living the life that he's always wanted, but he's not happy as he wants to be, and he doesn't feel as fulfilled as he know he could be. And I've coached many people like this, many people who have everything they've ever wanted or in a way better situation than they were five years ago. But internally, they just don't know how to feel better. And that's one of the things that I help coach them through, is that how to enjoy the amazing life that they've actually built, how to enjoy their family more, how to disconnect from working all the time. And, you know, I might be talking about people who are extremely successful, but the average person who's able to, you know, pay their bills, save a little bit of money is in the exact same situation. They're living a great life, and they're just missing all of it. And they're sad and they're anxious, and they're not living a life where they're living in what, you know, if you were to look at, like, what most people's reality is in the world right now, and, you know, if you were to go back 500 years, yeah, most people nowadays are kind of living in, like, heaven on earth for those people. And so this isn't abnormal. This isn't like a weird thing that some people do. It's actually incredibly normal. We all do this in some sort of way. And in order to really dive into this, I want you to understand two psychological things that will really kind of take us home. Okay, the first thing is this idea of negativity bias, which I'll dive into. And the second thing is the idea of the hedonic treadmill. Okay? So when you look at the negativity bias, we were not born to be happy. We were born to survive. And I did an episode on the negativity bias months ago. But when you look at it, our brain was meant to survive. And survival means noticing danger, avoiding pain, remembering things that went wrong in the past so that they don't go wrong again, and keeping that pain and the bad in the front of our mind. Now, I want you to understand that negative and positive and good and bad are just human labels. But when we say the negativity bias, it means that we're focusing on the negative, which is just completely made up by us. But we're focusing on things that didn't go the way that we wanted to, that we would label as bad. And so we're naturally just focusing on the bad more than we're focusing on the good because that's what our brain is going to do. And the negativity biases has been studied extensively. There's a study in 2001 in Personality and Social Psychology Review by Paul Rosen and Edward Roisman. And they documented how negative events in our lives have a much stronger impact on our psychological and physiological states than the positive ones. So the negative ones have much more of an impact than the positive ones. Your body and your brain want to remember and focus on the quote, unquote negative, the bad, the pain for protection in the future. You know, this is the reason why, you know, we recall being insulted more than we remember compliments. This is the reason why most people can't take in compliments because it doesn't line up with the negativity that they hold about themselves. This is why we fixate on criticism. This is why, you know, we can have a bad day and we spiral after a bad day and then we can have a good one and we barely even notice the good day. You know, even brain scans show it. When people actually see negative images in a picture, their brain lights up and fires way more than when they view a positive or a neutral one. You know, our amygdala, which is that fear center in our brain, kicks into high gear. And it's not because you're broken. I want you to understand that. It's not like this isn't something that you can't start to work through. We're not broken any sort of way. It's our ancient wiring that says it's better to overreact to, to danger than it is to underreact and die. And so the problem with that though, is now this same brain that's trying to avoid tigers 200,000 years ago is the same brain that now lives in a house with air conditioning and checks their emails and sits in traffic and, you know, has passive aggressive comments that they read on, you know, Instagram and they flip through and they see the news about all of this terrible stuff that's happening in other country, but they're not dealing with tigers anymore. But it still treats most of those things like the emails or the negative comments or the traffic as some sort of a negative thing, which into the brain means threat. And that's how we end up turning these minor annoyances in our life into like personal catastrophes. It's natural we will focus on the bad more than the good unless we are intentional about it. And that's how we can turn this heaven that we live in into hell. So that's the first one. The second thing is this. This concept of the hedonic treadmill, right? Where nothing ever really feels like it's enough. Let's say that you, you know, you land your dream job. At first it's amazing. You're energized, you're fulfilled, you're so excited about it, you're excited to go to work. Then you fast forward six months and the excitement fades. Your brain adapts, and suddenly you're just like, I'm craving something else. You want a raise, you want a promotion, you want a new title, you want to, you know, have more money. It's the same exact thing where when you move into a new house, you love the house, and it's amazing and it's great. And then a year later you're like, well, you know, we don't have a pool. Would be nice to have a pool. And you start looking athouses on realtor.com. this is this idea of the hedonic treadmill. It was a concept that was first brought about by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Keith, Donald T. Campbell. And it describes that we have a tendency to return back to a stable baseline of happiness. And everybody's baseline of happiness is obviously different, depending on their life, depending on the way they were raised, depending on their parents, all of that. But we kind of go back to this baseline. No matter what happens to us, whether it's really good or really bad, we kind of go back to the same place. There was actually a really famous study that they did where they compared two very different groups. One group won the lottery, and the other group of people had just become paraplegics. And surprisingly, a year later, when they followed up with those people, the levels of both groups reported happiness extremely similar. One group had won the lottery, won millions of dollars, and the other became paraplegic. And their happiness a year later was similar, very similar between the two because the thrill and of winning millions of dollars wore off and the devastation of the accident that they had softened. And so we kind of always return back to baseline every time, because our brains were built to adapt. And so what was once amazing kind of becomes normal. What was tragic kind of becomes normal as well. Like, I'm sure you probably have things in your life that you wanted six months ago, or, you know, I'm sure some people listening have a life right now that you dreamed about 10 years ago, but you probably still feel the same. So that's the hedonic treadmill, which, you know, I want. You understand, we can change our levels of happiness based off of what we perceive and what we focus on. But if that's the case, if happiness doesn't come from what's happens to us, like somebody winning the lottery or somebody becoming paralyzed.