How I Tricked Myself Into Believing I Could

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1:28Welcome 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 improve yourself so you can improve your life. So if that's what you want to do, hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm going to be talking about how I tricked myself and my brain into believing that I could create the life that I wanted to create. Because have you ever noticed that you keep saying that you want more in your life, but you keep acting like this old, outdated version of yourself?

2:05If so, more than anything else, it's not laziness, it's not distractibility, it's an identity protection. Your brain would rather keep these small and predictable than risk you becoming anything else, even if that anything else was powerful and uncertain because it's uncertain. Your brain doesn't like that. And when I was younger, I remember wanting to feel more confident and it never came. So I did something different. I forced my brain to update who I thought I was. And once my identity shifted, everything else in my life followed. And so today I'm going to teach you exactly how to do that for yourself.

2:46And if you stick with me through this episode, it could be the most life-changing episode that you've ever heard. Okay, so let's dive in. I want to be fully honest with you. When I was younger, I didn't believe in myself. I thought the way things were was just the way that they were always going to be. I saw other people's lives and I thought, oh, that must be nice to have that amazing life. I didn't wake up confident. I didn't wake up certain. I was shy. I was not the type of person that would just go out and create something. You know, I didn't wake up thinking like, oh my God, I'm the guy who can build an amazing life.

3:18I thought the exact opposite. I was more of a victim more than I was anything else. And so I had to trick myself into believing that I could create the life I wanted. And I know it sounds kind of weird, but I basically had to hack my identity before my brain had any evidence to support that I was that type of person. And that's something most people really never learn how to do. I had to learn how to believe in myself and believe the life that I wanted was possible before I had any proof that what I wanted was actually possible in the first place. And so something that a lot of people don't understand is that your brain is not a truth detector.

4:01Most of the time, it's usually lying to you. More than anything else, it is a prediction machine. It's always trying to predict the future based off of the past. And so neuroscience, it's actually called predictive processing theory. Your brain is constantly guessing what's going to happen next, and it's all based on past data. But the problem with that is that if you wanna create a better life, if you wanna create a different version of yourself, your brain has no past data to actually prove that that's gonna be able to be possible. So you have to kind of like believe something that has never happened before in your life will happen.

4:42and you don't have any proof that it's possible. And so it's not going to predict that it's possible. In fact, it's going to fight you. It doesn't really sit well with that prediction part of your brain. And so it means if you've failed before in the past, your brain's gonna predict failure. If you've doubted yourself before, your brain is going to predict doubt. If you played small before and never really won in anything big, your brain's gonna predict small. And so it's not really asking, like the job of your brain is not to ask what's possible right like what's possible for me your brain's not going to default to that your brain is going to default to what is familiar and that's dangerous because it means unless you consciously change your thoughts you will only create whatever you have created in the past you will never grow a life bigger than what you have and so for me I didn't feel confident, but I had to basically trick myself into acting confident.

5:42And there's a psychological principle that's called the self-perception theory that comes from 1972. There's a psychologist named Daryl Bem who actually created it. And it says this, we don't form beliefs and then act. What we do as humans is we observe our own actions and then we form beliefs about ourselves and then we act from what we believe about ourself. And so let me say that again. We observe ourself our entire life. Then we form beliefs about ourself and then we act in accordance with those beliefs. And so your brain watches everything that you do and then it decides who you are. And then it acts in alignment with who it has decided that you are.

6:29And so when I started showing up and actually taking action that I never had before, like even when I was terrified, things started to shift around me. And I, like when I was 19 years old and I got into sales and I had to start making cold calls, that was terrifying, but I had to force myself to start doing it. And my brain started seeing that I was pushing myself and doing things I'd never done before. When I started doing what was harder and not what was easier, which was completely foreign to me, my brain started noticing it. When I started reading more and working on myself more and working out more and taking actions that I had never taken before, and then in turn making more money than I had ever made before, my brain had to basically reconcile what was going on.

7:14My brain was like, why is he acting like this? And the brain hates inconsistencies. It's actually called cognitive dissonance. So instead of my brain being like, he's faking it. When you do it long enough, my brain slowly started shifting after a while to like, maybe this is the person that we are. Now there was massive resistance on the front end, but if you just keep taking action in the direction of the person you want to be, eventually your brain is seeing what you're doing. It's creating beliefs about who you are, and then it's going to be changing the actions in the long term. And that's the trick.

7:48I didn't wait for confidence, I forced my brain to update its identity file by taking long-term different actions than I had ever taken in my entire life. Then what I started doing is I started visualizing every single day. Like I was forcing my, I was basically brainwashing myself to believe that something was different or would be different, right? I first learned about visualization when I was 13. My mom told me to do it before I went into a championship basketball game because I was nervous. And I visualized for like 10 minutes. And then I never visualized again until I was 23 back in 2009.

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10:58Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. And now, back to the show. I read about it in a book that I was reading. It was called Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy. And at that point in time, I was trying to win something in the company that I was in. I owned a franchise with this business when I was 23. and I owned all of basically, I ran all of Broward County, which is Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

11:43And there was this thing called President's Banquet. And if you hit a certain amount in sales, you would win a free trip to President's Banquet. You would stay at Encore and Encore was like brand new at the time. And we would have to dress up in tuxedos. And then we were taken out to a five-star restaurant. And then the famous thing that the owner of the company and the president always did is they would hand out a$100 coin to every single person at dinner. And then everybody would go take that$100 coin and go place the bet on just one thing at the craps table. And so what I started doing is I started actually, no joke, in my studio apartment at 23, going into my closet and visualizing what it would be like to be at President's Banquet in Vegas, what it would feel like, what it would smell like, what it would be like to be handed that chip and go place that$100 chip at the craps table and go all in on that one thing and what I would feel like and how proud of myself I would be.

12:41And so I was like just trying to brainwash myself into believing that it's possible, but also knowing that it's going to happen. Like when people hear visualization, they think like fluffy self-help type stuff, but visualization has hard science behind it. Like there was a study that was done at Harvard where they found out that participants who practice playing piano in their brain visually, like visualizing it without actually like physically touching one. Their brain scan showed that mental rehearsal activated the same motor cortex regions as physical practice. And so the brain doesn't really distinguish between vividly imagined experience and real life experience.

13:24And so this absolutely changed my life. If the brain predicts off of past memories and it doesn't know the difference between real life and vividly imagined visualizations, could I possibly place a memory into my brain that believes that it's already happened before? And the answer is yes. Then I didn't know it at the time, but in psychology, this is actually called memory encoding. I was not just seeing success. I visualize success and what it would feel like and what it would look like and what it would smell like and how I would be and how I would stand and how I spoke and how I would show up as a person and how I handle criticism and how I handle pressure and success and how I would feel when I succeed and how proud of myself that I would be.

14:16I visualized every single aspect of the man that I wanted to become and the life that I wanted to create. And I would basically think to myself, okay, well then what I want to do is I want to create a memory through visualization in my brain right now, so vivid that my brain thinks that it's actually real. Because if it thinks that it's real, then it's going to place it as a memory and then use it as past data to predict the future. Do you see what I'm doing here? like I would ask myself stuff like, you know, if I was already him, like the guy I want to be, how would I walk into this room? How would I show up today?

14:56How would I handle this conversation? And then I would start acting like him. Even if it's felt like slightly unnatural, actually, especially if it felt slightly unnatural, because the feeling of unnatural didn't mean that it wasn't true. It meant that I was breaking out of old ways and creating new ways. And so I started visualizing. I started looking at my fears differently. When most people think of fear, they think of fear as, hey, fear means that you need to stop. But fear is not danger, not for what we deal with today. Most fears that we fear is just like the fear of other people's opinions and judgments and failure.

15:32That's not going to kill us. And so most of these fears are not something we should really even worry about. Like even novelty triggers fear because your amygdala fires, not when you're just unsafe, but when something is uncertain. And uncertainty, obviously, is really required for you to grow. And so I needed to figure out how to use that in my brain if I was going to grow. And there's some research that's been done at the University of Toronto that shows that excitement and anxiety are nearly identical physiologically inside of our brain, Nearly identical. And they call it a, so basically there's this thing called anxiety reappraisal.

16:13Whenever you're anxious and whenever you're excited, your heart rate spikes. Your body releases adrenaline. It releases cortisol. The only difference between anxiety and excitement is your brain's interpretation of that moment. And so when I felt fear before doing something I've never done before, launching something, Instead of asking myself, like, what am I scared of? I started asking myself, like, is this actually unsafe or is it unfamiliar? And so when you start to ask yourself these questions, like I said, it's called anxiety reappraisal. It's the practice of changing how you interpret anxiety from seeing it as a threat to seeing it as your body preparing you to perform.

16:58So instead of trying to eliminate the feeling, you can actually reframe that feeling and use it as useful energy that can help you focus, that can help you react quickly, that can help you perform better. And that changed everything for me because most of what we call fear is really just our nervous system encountering something that it hasn't really encountered before, encountering a future version of you that it hasn't met yet. And so when you can become aware in that moment and you can go, I'm feeling fear, I'm feeling anxiety right now. And you can change the interpretation of what you're feeling and why you're feeling it.

17:35It makes it feel safe for you to move forward when you feel fear instead of just like shutting down and backing away. And so another thing that I started working on besides just like the fear and the visualization and the actions was the language that I was using. Like I got really hardcore on what I was thinking in my head and what I was saying out of my mouth. And your language shapes your identity, whether you realize it or not. Like there's research in psycholinguistics that shows that language that we use affects our perception of ourselves and our own mental cognition. And so when you say something like, I am anxious, you're making an identity statement.

18:17I am anxious. That means that is part of who I am. You're saying, this is who you are. But when you say, I'm feeling anxious, you create a temporary state. Like one of them locks it in and says, this is who I am. Another one allows movement out of the feeling. And so I stopped saying things like, I'm not good at this, or I'm just lazy, or I'm not that type of person, or I always struggle with X, Y, Z. and I started saying I'm becoming somebody who takes action. I'm learning how to whatever overcome my fear. I'm building the capacity to be able to handle more. I am strong and I started talking to myself differently and talking to myself talking to other people about who I was differently.

19:07See I was always a person in my life who was just playing not to lose. Like when I remember when I was younger in basketball, I was obsessed with basketball. I used to play like two or three seasons every single year. And I remember shooting the basketball every single time and hoping that I wouldn't miss. And so I started changing my words to be the type of person who wasn't, you know, the type of person that was playing not to lose. And I started trying to be the person who was playing to win. It's a subtle shift in language, but it's a massive neurological impact because your subconscious mind tracks patterns in your language and it uses them to update what is called your self schema.

19:46And this is your internal model of who you think you actually are. And once your self schema updates, your behavior changes automatically. And so the real thing I had to do is start working on what was going on in my brain and what I thought of myself and what I believed of myself and what I visualized was possible and the identity that I have of myself. And I had to update my identity before I had any evidence. I had to know that I was the type of person that was going to become everything that I wanted, successful, happy, everything that I wanted when I was living in a studio in not a very good part of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

20:25And so like most people wait for evidence before they believe, but evidence only comes after actions are taken. That's really hard to shift your identity if you're only waiting for evidence. Like you cannot behave consistently in a way that contradicts your identity for long periods of time. And so I basically had to start to install an identity first and not from like a delusional sense. Like I was like, I'm just the most successful people and person in the world, not from delusion, but like I was using it for direction more than anything else. I wasn't trying to be arrogant, like, oh my God, I'm going to be so wealthy and successful.

21:04I was using it for self-orientation more than anything else. And so I decided from this moment forward, I'm somebody who follows through. And then I started following through, even when it was inconvenient. I decided like from this moment forward, I am somebody who does the hard things, even when I don't want to, especially when I don't want to. And then I leaned into discomfort. It's like James Clear says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you want to become. I started taking the actions that I didn't really want to because they weren't convenient, but I knew that I needed to in order to actually start to shift my reality and shift my identity as well.

21:46And it comes down to neurons that fire together, wire together. And neurons that don't fire that you've had weaken. That's actually called neural pruning. And so every time you take an action that is against your old identity and you do something different, you weaken your old neural pathways that really think who you are. And you start to build new ones to prove who you're becoming. And so that's really important for you to understand, hey, yeah, I'm updating who I am. I'm changing. And my brain and my identity and my body are going to have to update with me. And so really it starts to shift your belief.

22:26And belief is not a feeling. Belief more than anything else is a memory. It's accumulated emotional memory of your actions that you've taken in your life. So when you do the hard things, when you start believing that you can do the hard things, and you start believing that you can grow, and you start believing that you could become better and you take those actions, your identity and your life starts to update. But you need reps. Like you need reps under discomfort. You need reps under doubt. You need reps under fear. Not waiting until you feel like you're ready because ready is not a feeling.

23:00Ready is a decision. Ready is a byproduct of your repetition. And so what it comes down to and how I really tricked myself is I acted before I felt. I interpreted my fear as growth. I I visualized vividly who I wanted to be and what I was creating. I changed my language about myself. I collected little pieces of proof to prove to myself that I was becoming that person. I exposed myself to these things that stretched me consistently and made me grow. And I let my brain and my identity start to update by noticing my behavior. And that's the trick. You're not trying to convince yourself. You're trying to condition yourself.

23:40Your brain is plastic. Your identity is fluid. Your fear is interpretable. You can change what your fear actually is. And your language is programmable. And so the question is, are you going to let your past predict your future, or are you going to deliberately design the person that you're becoming? That is completely up to you. 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 in at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. If you want to learn more about coaching with me outside this podcast, go to coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

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