How to Be Happy and Grateful Today

0:07Welcome 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 don't miss any more of these episodes. I put out episodes four times a week around neurology, psychology, early childhood development, cognitive behavioral therapy, how all of those things come together to make you the person that you are so that you can understand yourself and why you are the way that you are. If you can understand yourself, you can improve yourself. And if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life and make your life what you want it to be.

0:35So if that's what interests you, hit that subscribe button so that you know that I put out an episode every single week, four times a week, and you can listen to them when you want to. Today, I'm going to talk to you about how amazing and insane and incredible this human experience is. And my goal for this episode is hopefully to reframe your mindset in some way to help you through your day today and to have more gratitude for what you have. And I'm going to take you through something that I've been doing a lot recently that has made me so much happier and feel so much better every single day, whether it's a good day or whether it's a day where just shit hits the fan and it's all over the walls.

1:19It's just I still feel this overwhelming sense of happiness and peace. And so I want you to understand first off that if you take yourself out of your own head and take yourself out of your patternings and your fears and your limiting beliefs and all that stuff, life is amazing. And I really want you to understand that when I say it's amazing, I don't mean that it's perfect. I don't mean that there's not some shit going down right now. There's always shit going down and there always will be. Like go back 100 years, there was a whole bunch of shit happening. Go back 500 years, it was even crazier.

1:55Go back 1 ,000 years, 2 ,000 years, people were nuts in the stuff that they were doing, right? So I want you to understand that people are people. People are, as humans, we are animals, and animals do have animal tendencies. So there are some crazy rogue animals that do some crazy stuff. But what I really want you to do is I want you to look at your life and understand that you can have more gratitude for everything that you have. and the more gratitude that you have, the better that you can show up for the world, the better that you can show up for yourself, the better that you can serve the world and the more changes you can make in your life for the better.

2:29I remember I was watching something like 10 years ago and it was a comedian who has now been, you know, basically canceled. So I won't say his name, but he was talking about how everything is amazing and nobody's happy. And he was talking about, he remembers the first flight that he was on where there was wifi and they announced like, Wi-Fi is going to be on the plane flight. And everyone was like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is crazy. And everyone was excited. And then the guy next to him is using the Wi-Fi and he's all excited. And then like 20 minutes later, the Wi-Fi stops working. And the guy next to him says, this is bullshit.

3:02And he's like, it was insane that this guy was mad about something that he didn't know existed 20 minutes ago. And, you know, people tend to think like airline travel is the worst thing in the world. Everyone's like, oh my God, you know, I got to get onto a flight and And going to the airport is the worst thing. Everybody should be amazed. Like I'm always amazed by planes. Like we're on a plane that's going 600 miles an hour. And it's literally this piece of aluminum that has two giant fans that's making us go this way. It's a chair in the sky, you know, 30 ,000 feet. And you can go from New York to LA in five or six hours.

3:41Like that used to take 20 or 30 years. and we just think like, oh, this is the worst thing. No, this is the most amazing thing. You know, another thing that we have that's just so amazing and there's so many amazing things. When you take yourself out of your own body and just like look at around you, you realize there's so many amazing things. Like take, for instance, your phone. If you look at your phone, it has a camera on it. It has a camcorder. Like there used to be a time when I was a kid when a camera and a camcorder were two different things, right? There's a radio on it. There's CDs. There's books.

4:14There's a calculator. There's a voice recorder. There's GPS. There's a flashlight. There's a leveler. There's a scanner. There's a compass. There's a video game that you can play. There's your credit card on it. There's an alarm clock. There's a stopwatch. There's a timer. There's a calendar. There's a notepad. There's a photo album. There's, you know, you can write like you're writing on paper. I have a guitar tuner on mine. You can use it as a remote control. Some, you know, one of my cars, you can walk up to it and it's actually, my phone is used as the keys to start and unlock the car. It's insane.

4:43all of the knowledge that mankind has ever known is accessible. I can Google anything through my phone. It could get on the internet. It's so amazing and people just don't think about that. We're just so used to it. It's just another thing. It is the most incredible piece of technology ever created. And we're like, oh my God, my phone, it's not working as well. My call is breaking up because it's going to space. It's literally sending a message to space and coming back and hitting that other person from a satellite, right? So it's like, it's so amazing. It's the most incredible piece of technology that's ever been created, but we're just like, oh yeah, no, this is stupid.

5:24Some of you guys are listening to me on your phone. Most of you are listening to me on your phone, according to our statistics. And people will be like, oh, but it's so addicting. Well, you're letting it be addicting. It is a really great servant, but it is a terrible master. And so you have to decide how you want to use it.

5:44And so I want you to understand there's so many different places in our life where everything is amazing, but we're just so used to them that it's just like, you know, it's like you see wallpaper and the wallpaper is amazing when you first put it up. And then a week later, you forget the wallpaper is even there. It's like, yeah, plane, getting on a plane. That's amazing. But we just forget that it's amazing. Your phone. It's amazing. But you forget that it's amazing. Like, I remember I was I had taken up like think about crisis. I had taken a plane flight from my house over to Italy, and we went 600 miles to get there.

6:13Then we're finally there, and I'm sitting there on my phone, and I got a notification while I was having a cappuccino in Rome that there was motion in my front yard from a town that was thousands of miles away. And I can take a look, and I can go, oh, there's the Amazon guy at my house. and I can go through the speaker on my security and I can say through the speaker on the ring, hey, can you leave the package on the doorstep? And he leaves the package on the doorstep. Like that's, if you actually think about it, insane that I can take a plane flight over to another country that used to take, I don't know, five, six months to get to.

6:53If you were to take a boat and then take a horse to get there, I can get there, what, 12 hours? Then I can see somebody and talk to somebody that's at my house 8 ,000 miles away. And it's just like, we don't even think about how amazing these things are. You know, like I can then text somebody, like a friend back home from Italy, and they can get it near immediately. Like my grandparents, my grandparents, my grandfather was in World War II. And they used to write letters to each other all the time. Like they have this box that when they both passed away, we knew that existed and we found it. and it was all of these letters that they wrote to each other.

7:32My grandfather would write to my grandmother from another country and she wouldn't get it for weeks. And then she would write him letters back and not even know if he's still alive. And he wouldn't get it for weeks. Now we can literally text somebody and they immediately get it. We can do FaceTime with somebody and they can immediately get it. My grandparents, I had a conversation with them about the Great Depression, about like what it was like, and it was insane what the Great Depression was like for them. Like my grandparents were, my grandma was telling me, you know, she was a first generation American.

8:04Her parents came over from Poland and they came over and her father had a shoe store and he had a grocery store. And when the Great Depression happened, he felt so bad for everybody. He just let everybody have the groceries that were inside of his grocery store. And obviously his grocery business went out of his grocery store, went out of business. So he had to figure out how to start feeding his children. and so they had an empty lot next to their house and he just had to figure out how to garden and he had to start gardening and my great-grandmother had to start gardening and then my great-grandfather had to figure out a way to be able to start fishing so that he could feed his family like there was no government support at this time and they just talked to me about how hard it was like our life has gotten so good if you're listening to me right now your life is so good you can think of your life it might be great it might be good it might be terrible right now but I guarantee you it's still amazing if you really give yourself some perspective.

9:01If you're listening to me right now, the quality of your life is a hundred if not a thousand times better than a king's life was 500 years ago. Think about it for a second. Your life right now, you would probably not trade to be a king 500 years ago in the 1500s. Your life is way better. You kidding me? You live better than a king did. You have food, you have water, shelter, clothing, safety. You don't have to worry about someone coming and attacking your castle. And then all of us are like, but I want more. I don't have enough. I want to make more money. I want to make more things. I want to do more stuff.

9:39I want to eat more food. And I want you to understand that there's this thing that I've realized over the past, I don't know, 19 years of working on myself, is that you will not be given more than you currently have if you cannot be grateful for what you have. I don't claim to know how the universe works. I don't know. But one thing that I do know from at least anecdotal evidence in my own life and what I've seen in other people that I know closely that are successful or people who have a great life that they love is that you will not be given more than you currently have if you can't be grateful for what you have.

10:13If you think about it, if you're not grateful for what you have, you're kind of like an adult that's a child that constantly complains. The universe or God or life or whatever it is that's out there isn't going to trust you with more until you become a good steward for what you already have. And so really what you need to do is, I would hope that you do this, and this is what I've been doing a lot recently. Once I found out, you know, last year that Lauren was pregnant and that we were going to have a baby, I started thinking about like all the stuff that, you know, all the things that could come up from it.

10:43And I started thinking about how amazing life is and how all of the this just the challenges that I've had and the blessings that I've had and every good and bad and all that stuff and just like how amazing it all was and so the one thing that I've been focusing on every day for you know about the past year now is to set in the way I see it is in what I've been calling is like set my GPS for how I want to feel today right and so I'm setting my GPS every single morning for how I want to feel and so every single morning for about a year now I do breath work and you could do you could find breathwork on YouTube and they, and you can go through and do it.

11:16And then what I do is I mentally and emotionally and physically, all of that stuff, set my GPS for how I want to feel. Sure. There's things I want to accomplish and there's things I want to do for the day. And there's my to-do list and there's my schedule and there's my business and all that stuff. But really what matters is like, how do I want to feel today? When I do my to-do list, when I go into my business, when I talk to my employees, when I'm on zoom, when I'm going and talk to somebody that's at the cash register? How do I want to feel? What is the underlying feeling through all of that?

11:45And so what I've been doing a lot recently is I've been, it's very, very simple. I've been waking up, I've been doing breath work. And then what I do is I think of how I want to feel for the day. And I just focus on one feeling. It could be happiness, it could be gratitude, it could be joy, it could be love, it could be peace, it could be calm, whatever it is. And I just imagine that there is a hole in the top of my head and that whatever that feeling is is a liquid and I'm just pouring it through the top of my head and then what I do is I find three things that I can be grateful for and I just start there and what's interesting is I my my goal is to only find three things to be grateful for but once you find one thing to be grateful for you start finding a lot of other things to be grateful for and it goes to the next thing into the next thing into the next thing it doesn't have to be like oh I'm grateful for my house or for the amount of money in your bank account it could literally just be I'm grateful for the sun coming out today I'm grateful for my breath I'm grateful for my uh my air conditioning I'm grateful for my heartbeat.

12:39I'm grateful that I slept well last night. I'm grateful for the breeze on my face. What I found is that if you wake up in the morning and you think about what you don't have, you will go through the rest of your day focusing and finding things that you don't have. If you start your day focusing on lack, you will find all of the lack that exists in your life. And we all have lack in our life. But if you start your day and you start focusing on what it is that you have and what you can be grateful for, your brain just naturally starts finding more things to be grateful for. And what's crazy about it is it just kind of snow.

13:16It's just, it's kind of like an avalanche, just kind of keeps going and going and going and going and going. And it's like, it starts off as just like a little tiny bit of snow falling. And then it's like a whole lot of snow falling in this avalanche. And it's like, I'm going to focus on three things to be grateful for. And then you realize three hours later that your brain is still finding all these things to be grateful for. And so instead of going through your day with this feeling of lack, like I've done many times for years of my life, I go through the day feeling of all of this abundance of everything that I have and everything to be grateful for and how great my life is.

13:47And when I set myself up and I set my GPS for how I want to feel that way, I feel amazing throughout the day. What you focus on, you will receive more of and you will notice more of. If you focus on what you don't have, if you focus on your problems, if you focus on all of that stuff, you will get more of those things and you will notice more of those things. But if you focus on what you're grateful for, you will get more things to be grateful for and you will find more things to be grateful for. Because ultimately we think that something needs to happen externally outside of us to make us feel a certain way.

14:18Like, oh, well, if she acts this way, then I will be happy. Or if I get that bonus, then I will be happy. Or if I get this thing. But that's not the truth. It doesn't matter what happens externally outside of you. It is all an internal game. When you finally understand that this entire life is just an internal game that you're supposed to be playing and that you just need to master your reactions to the world and figure out how you want to show up, it doesn't matter what happens outside of you because it's your reaction that changes the way that you feel and change the way that you think and change the way that you see the world.

14:53And so ultimately what I would recommend for you is to try to wake up every single morning and remind yourself of how amazing this life is. There are so many things to be grateful for. And I say this all the time, but if you have nothing else to be grateful for, you woke up today and 150 ,000 people who were alive yesterday are not alive right now. So if you have nothing else, quote unquote, nothing else to be grateful for, you can be grateful for the fact that you at least woke up. Because I guarantee you all 150 ,000 people, if they had the opportunity, would immediately change positions with you right now if they could.

15:25So you have some stuff to be grateful for. You've just got to search for it. You've got to find it and you've got to remind yourself of it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave 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.