Forget Goals. Build Systems Instead

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1:34Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. I hope you have an amazing day. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you're someone who wants to build yourself into the highest performer that you could possibly be, but you can't figure out how to stop self-sabotaging and get past your fears and get past your limiting beliefs so that you can live at your potential, then I am running a free live workshop on the evening of August 27th to teach you how to become a high performer.

2:06The psychology, the neurology, everything that's behind it. So if you wanna join me, go to 2026workshop.com right now. Once again, 2026workshop.com. It is free, I will be live, and I will see you there. Today, I'm gonna talk about how to build a system in your life to make success easier. Because everybody wants to know the secret of becoming more successful. And they think it's to set bigger goals, to work harder, to become more disciplined. And those are okay, but what if you're actually focusing on the wrong thing? Because your future isn't necessarily determined by the goals that you chase, as much as it's determined by the standards that you refuse to compromise.

2:49The things that are the absolute non-negotiables in your life and the things that are non-negotiables between a successful person and an average person are night and day different. And so if you want to reach an entirely different level in your life, you probably don't want to just raise your goals. You probably need to actually raise your standards and your minimums. And if you use what I'm going to teach you in today's episode, it could completely change the way that you operate in your life. So let's get into it. So I'm a pilot and in aviation, the FAA gives you legal minimums that below this line, you're breaking the law.

3:26And they're very specific numbers that you cannot go past or below or whatever it might be. Like one of them, for instance, is how much extra fuel to plan on a flight that is past the amount that you need. And yeah, you could do that if you want to, but almost every good pilot that I know is not going to stick to that number. They've got their own number and it's much stricter. So instead of like 30 minutes, it might be 45 minutes. It might be an hour of extra fuel because 30 minutes might be what they recommend, but it doesn't leave you a whole lot of room if things go bad. And so let me show you how this actually ties back into your own life so that you can use it because this is important to understand.

4:06Okay. What we need to figure out is your personal minimums in every area of your life. And after you set your personal minimums, for instance, in aviation, you write them all down with pen and paper, and then you have to follow those in every single flight that you have. And I realized as I was setting my own personal minimums, like, oh my God, this is what we need to do in our own lives. Like people kind to have an idea of a personal minimum, like I'm probably not going to eat food that's been on the floor outside. Like that's in the back of your head. But once I realized this in aviation, I was like, I need to go home with a notebook and ask myself some questions.

4:45I asked myself a question I never asked myself before. Where in my life do I have a goal, but no floor that I've actually written down? And the answer was everywhere. Like I had all of these goals in life, in my relationships, and my business and my physical goals and my bank account goals. And those are all like ceilings that I'm trying to break through, but I didn't have any real floors written down. Like none that were written down at least. Like they're kind of in the back of my head. Like I'm obviously not gonna do this. Am I gonna just be like actually write them down? So the floor is the standard that you will not allow yourself to fall below.

5:21These are absolute non-negotiables, no matter what, that hold our entire lives up. This is like the, I will never fall below this line. And otherwise it's like you're building your life on like faulty foundation and that's gonna make your life crumble at some point in time. And so I do think goals are very important, but I actually think, to be honest with you, that identifying your floors and raising your floors incrementally might actually be more important. So if you wanna change your life, you should change your floors. You should change your non-negotiables. Let me explain to you exactly what I mean by this, right?

5:54A goal is what you're reaching for. it's what you want to hit it's outside of your normal and your minimum is what you refuse to go below and i say it this way no matter what i'm doing this to dip below this line is absolutely unacceptable and your life isn't determined by like your best days where you're just breaking through ceilings your life is determined by your floor your non-negotiables on the days where you don't really feel like doing what you set out to do. And when you honor a minimum, you feel proud. And I'll give you examples like a fitness minimum, for instance, or a bank account minimum or a business minimum.

6:32But when you honor a minimum, you feel proud about what you've done every single time. Because a lot of times when you're hitting a minimum, it's because you've had a hard day. It's because you got bad news, because things are kind of off the rails and you really weren't expecting this to happen today. But you still said, you know what? I'm going to hit this minimum because it is important to me that I show up for myself, right? It is a standard that you will hold. It is a boundary that you're setting for yourself. So you've got to figure out what are my floors now? And you probably have some that you've just never really gotten clear on.

7:04And then what do I need to raise my floors to so that it makes it easier to actually hit my goals? Because it will make it easier to hit your goals when you actually start to raise your floors incrementally. So let me give you a couple of different categories and I'll give you some examples of how you could use this in your life, right? So let's say fitness, for instance. Everybody's got fitness goals, especially if it's around New Year's. Everyone's like, I want to lose 30 pounds. I want to work out five days a week. That's great. I think that those are important, but what are your non-negotiables that make getting there easier?

7:38For instance, you could say like, I never go more than two days in a row without moving my body. Okay, that's a good one. So I might miss a day because things happen, but I never go more than two days. And that's what a minimum is. And you can also find your minimum for like what it is that moving your body means. It means no less than 30 minutes. So it's not like I'm going to stretch for three minutes and that's quote unquote move my body. It's like, no, no less than 30 minutes. You know, and it might be yoga counts. It might be a long walk counts. It could be that you do a 30 minute high intensity interval training on YouTube.

8:11Some days shit's going to hit the fan, but at least I'm doing those 30 minutes. That's what you're saying to yourself. Or it could be, hey, no matter what every day, I do no less than 8 ,000 steps a day. And we will be right back. Support for today's episode comes from Square and they've got big news. During Square's biannual releases event, they launched a wave of innovative new tools to help local businesses run faster, smarter, and more profitably. Like Square AI, which brings all your business data to your fingertips for deeper insights and faster decisions right from the Square dashboard and dashboard app.

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10:56and now back to the show and you know your goal could be 10 ,000 steps it could be 12 ,000 steps and you might hit that on most days but when you have a day that's busier than normal or something happens one of the kids gets sick or you're sick or whatever it might be you're like you know what I'm gonna just get 8 ,000 done and I won't let myself go to bed before then that's what you could say, I will not let myself go to bed, even if it requires you to walk around your neighborhood at 10 p.m. Now, is that going to happen very often? Rarely, probably because of the fact that you now know that there's a minimum that you're definitely going to hit no matter what, that you don't want to have to walk around your house at 10 o 'clock in the evening.

11:35So you're going to definitely make sure that you schedule it out and get it done, right? So there's some fitness examples. The second thing would be like health and food, right? People, they'll build rules as restrictions. They'll say like, I don't eat this or don't eat that or whatever it might be. But, you know, some days kind of go crazy and some days you forget to get food or some days something goes wrong. And so you've got to build floors. And so a floor would be like, hey, I stop eating at 8 p.m. every single night or I don't keep junk food in the house or I never eat fast food. I will fast instead.

12:05Like that's a that's a personal minimum that I have is you will never catch me eating fast food. I will fast and eat nothing instead of put shit inside of my body. Another thing you could have is like, I don't eat seed oils or I don't eat anything that has more than three ingredients on the package or don't drink alcohol on the weekdays. Once again, the point of the floor is not to be like, oh, I only do this when shit hits the fan. The point is designed so you're saying, hey, as a person, this is who I am. I do not do less than this. so what are my floors now? Let me look at all of my floors.

12:43And then where do I need to raise my floors so that I can actually get closer to my goals? All right. So let's use another one. Let's say your relationship, right? Your romantic relationship. I'll give you some examples. Maybe it is, we do a date night every single Friday and understand that every couple of months shit might kind of hit the fan. So maybe it's, you know, we'll do it every single Friday. If you know, things get kind of crazy, never more than two weeks in a row. It could be something like if a conversation gets heated and somebody uses our code word like flamingo or what a fork or something like that.

13:17If that code word is used and we're starting to get heat in an argument, we disconnect for 30 minutes. We leave, we go in separate rooms, we do breath work, we center ourselves, and then we come back and talk about it clearly so we don't say something that we regret, right? Or it could be we never go to bed angry, even if we have to stay up for two hours and talk about it. Or we have at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted conversation every single day. Or I tell my partner I love them every single day. Do you see this? I'm hoping, I hope we get the point across. It's just like, this is who I am.

13:49I do not fall below this standard. That's what we really need to figure out for ourselves. Okay. The next one is your kids, right? This one's different because you can't have a minimum that's like, I never lose my temper because that's a fantasy. That's not a minimum, right? If you fail, you're not a bad parent. It just, you know, makes you realize, okay, then I need to probably think I should not never lose my temper, but I should probably come up with something better. And so the minimum shouldn't be like, I never lose my temper. The minimum could be like, I never let a rupture go unrepaired.

14:20You know, if I snap, I go back to my child, I get on the floor and I'm like, hey, I was frustrated. It wasn't about you. I'm so sorry. And I say that before the day ends, right? it could be I eat dinner with my family five times per week. It could be I finish all of my work stuff before I walk into the house. When I get home, I put my phone away and now I'm in family mode. Work mode can start again tomorrow at 9am. Another could be like I don't discipline when I'm angry. So if you're hot, you might say like I need a minute. You take a couple minutes and get into a better state because whatever you say in this, the angry state is not going to be good.

14:56So it's like you might take a few minutes and then you come back and you decide what you should do. Or like when you feel, oh, I feel a fire boiling up. I'm just, Hey, I'm just going to disconnect from him. I'm going to another room. I'm going to center myself, right? These are all different standards that we need to set ourself to in some sort of way. And the last like quick category I can give you is like business, for instance, for those of you guys that are business people, like a goal is a revenue number. A minimum is what keeps you actually alive long enough to hit the revenue number. So it could be something like, I don't let cash go below six months of operating expenses, right?

15:29That's a hard floor. It's not a preference. I don't sign anything on the same day that I'm shown it. Or before I make a big decision, I sleep on it for at least 24 hours to allow my brain to fully process it and I can see all the angles. Or every single Monday morning or Friday afternoon, I look at the company's numbers and then I project what I need to do next week. Or I don't start a project until I've decided what I'm going to deprioritize and set, right? Do you see how this works? So the important part of all this is it has to be written down onto a piece of paper, right? There was a sociologist named Diane Vaughn and she studied the Challenger disaster, you know, that happened with the space shuttle.

16:11And she came up with a phrase that I think about pretty often. and it is normalization of deviance. And what it means is if you break the standard a little, nothing bad is really gonna happen. And so your brain files that away as proof that the standard wasn't a big deal. It was kind of too strict. So the next time you break it a little more and a little bit more and a little bit more and the deviation quietly becomes a new normal in your life. That's how marriages end. That's how a body falls apart. That's how a business fails. It's not a big dramatic moment. And it's like a slow drift away from the standards over time.

16:46And so you have to sit down with pen and paper and write them down because a standard that only lives in your head will, depending on the situation in your mood, it will accommodate whatever you need at that moment. Right. And that's the point of the floor. The point of the floor is there is no deviating away from this thing. And so the three rules that you want to follow in this, right? Number one, write them down on a normal day. a day when it's just a normal Wednesday it's just nothing's wrong nothing's going crazy like never in the moment you're just going to write them down going get coffee tomorrow morning and you're right down the floors in your life the second thing that you want to do is make them binary so that you cannot debate it like this isn't a suggestion it's a minimum did I hit this goal yes or no did I hit this floor yes or no like did I drop below it okay I said I was going to do 30 minutes and I did 25 minutes.

17:42Yes, I did drop a look. That's binary, right? And then the third one is to read them again often, right? We're not forgetting these. These are not some fun exercise that we do at the beginning of the year. We forget it by March. These are standards that we live our entire lives by. And so I want you to think about it. Like what are your non-negotiables? Because you probably have goals. You probably have a vision board. You probably have something that you're writing towards. You probably have an idea of how much you want to weigh and how often you want to go to the gym and how much money you want to make.

18:10And you probably thought about them 400 times, but almost nobody listening has ever written down their floors. And when you figure out your floors, you actually start to go, okay, that floor is actually too low for what I'm trying to build my life to. So I'm going to actually need to raise that floor. Your floors are what's holding up everything else that you're building in your life. And these are the things that you will never fall below. And the people who truly succeed in life aren't necessarily just ones with the biggest goals. They're the ones with the strictest minimums and they raise those minimums little by little, month by month.

18:47So set your floor first and then you can go as high as you want. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with someone that you know and love. And if you're someone out there who is not living up to your full potential, even if you're doing good in life, but you know you want to be doing great, go to 2026workshop.com. I'm going to teach you the psychology, then the neurology, and the biology of a high performer. I'm going to teach you how to break past your old fears, your old limiting beliefs, your old identities, and your old patterns that are capping your success.

19:18So once again, go to 2026workshop.com. It is free. I will be live, and I will see you there. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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