How To Create Happiness & Find Your Potential

0:07Welcome 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. Here, I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, you can improve your life. So if that interests you, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. Today, I am going to teach you something that took me 17 years of working on myself to find out. And I'm going to teach you what I have found is kind of the only true path to freedom.

0:40Because we all want freedom. We want to be free from our mind. We want financial freedom. We want location freedom. We want freedom to do what we want, when we want, with whoever we want. In this life, we are all on a path of self-realization. Whether you realize it or not, that's really what we're all doing here. And so we're going to talk today about rediscovering who you truly are and how to actually bring out all of your potential into this world, how to identify your potential, and then how to get out of your own way so you're not blocking your potential anymore. Because we all came into this world who we truly are, these infinite beings that can create and do whatever we want to in this world.

1:22But at some point in time, we lost it along the way. We learned how to be somebody for our mother and our father. We learned how to be somebody for our teachers, how to be somebody for society, how to be somebody to get the grades that we wanted and the acceptance that we wanted in relationships. And so we became somebody else and lost ourselves along the way. Somehow we lost ourselves and we picked up guilt. We picked up insecurities. We picked up fear. We've picked up I'm not good enough. We picked up embarrassment. We lost ourselves in some way. And we think that these things are the problem, but they're not.

2:00They're actually a way to the solution. And so when you think, oh, guilt, Guilt is my problem. Shame, shame is my problem. My insecurities are my problems. My fears are my problems. My embarrassment, all of that are my problems. Those are not the problems. Those are actually the things that you need to work through to rediscover yourself. And so I'm going to give you an analogy that tends to help people, right? Imagine a river, okay? It's just nice, beautiful, flowing river. And I always talk about in life how everyone has their own river, you know, in life. You come up to it and it is your path in life.

2:33You just got to jump in and figure out what's right for you. It's your life path. It's who you are. It's what you do here. No one else can enter this river but you. But what I want you to do is I want you to just imagine a perfectly calm river that's just flowing. And now imagine that you're floating down this river and there's a bunch of big boulders that end up getting in the way. And when you see a boulder in the middle of a river that's just nicely flowing, what happens? It obstructs the flow. And what happens? It makes the water really rough. It makes it turbulent. You can go whitewater rafting at that point.

3:09And so a very calm, peaceful river becomes very rough, becomes turbulent. Well, that river is basically your true self. And every boulder that is inside of it, that fear, that worry, that insecurity, that guilt, that shame, that personality that you've built to be accepted by other people are just boulders that are put into the water. So you have this beautiful flowing river that just turns into a shit show because there's so many boulders that we've just thrown into the water. And so what happens is we like to look away from the rocks. We like to look away from the boulders and say, oh, I need to just keep working on myself, right?

3:50I need to keep working on myself and that will make it less turbulent. I need to keep reading. That will make it less turbulent. I need to start going to the gym. That will make it less turbulent. and this is where I lost for 15, 16, 17 years of working on myself. I was completely unaware of this. Okay. I always thought in self-development, I'm going to develop myself so I can get better because if I get better, I will create more of the life that I want. And that's good. And that's fine until a certain point. And then you realize that I was on the path of thinking that there was addition that was needed.

4:26I needed to add to myself. I needed to become more knowledgeable. I needed to work on myself more. I needed to add to myself addition in order to get what I wanted. But after working on myself for a really long time and not helping a little bit, but not really helping the amount that I wanted to, what I realized is that true personal development is not addition. True personal development is about subtraction. It's about subtracting all of the things that you've put into that water that you've put into it. It's about subtracting the things that are obstructing the flow of the water. It's about subtracting the fears, the insecurities, the embarrassment, the ways that you've lost yourself, the I'm not good enough, the I don't know if I can do this, I don't deserve this, whatever it might be.

5:12And so what I've come to realize is that the actual path to your growth is not addition, it's subtraction. And what I mean by that, it's the working of the removal of the boulders. So I'm going to say this one more time because I really want people to understand it. After 17 years, I realized that the path to true self-development, true personal growth, self-development, personal development, spiritual development, all of that is not addition. It is subtraction. It is removing all of the things from your life that are not actually you, but you kind of lost yourself along the way through them. And we will be right back.

5:51And now back to the show. They are the things that are in the way of that river just flowing very nicely. So the first step in personal development is to acknowledge and confront these barriers, to acknowledge and confront these boulders that we have placed in our own rivers, not to identify with them and say, oh yeah, well I am this way. No, no, no, you don't identify. Like if you go, if you're going whitewater rafting and there's a boulder that's next to you, You don't point to the boulder and go, oh my God, it's me. That doesn't make any sense. That's stupid, right? So it's not to identify with them, but to see them as they are.

6:26If you're going whitewater rafting, how do you calm that river if you want to? Remove all the boulders. And so you have to understand that the removal and the subtraction of those boulders in which you think of yourself and the things that are holding you back and seeing them and the removal of them as the path to your true greatest self. if you look away from the river and you're like well no those boulders don't exist it doesn't move the rocks it doesn't move them and so it's not about the avoidance of them it's about the removal of the blockages and the thing that I've come to find is what most people try to look away from their pain they try to look away from their trauma they try to look away from the things that have happened to them in their past and they try to act like they didn't happen and in turn what happens is that people never really overcome their traumas they never overcome the things that happened to them.

7:16And it can be painful. I promise you this. It can be painful to go back and relive some things from your childhood, from your heartbreaks, from your being cheated on, your divorces, whatever it might be. But you've probably heard me say, and I've said it over and over again on this podcast, the cave that you're afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek. That cave that you're afraid to go into is where your freedom lies. So the cave that you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek. That is where your freedom is. Acting like it's not there is not going to make you free. And I promise you this, it's not always easy.

7:52In fact, it's never easy. Almost never easy. We'll put it that way. But it will make your life so much better. The way I like to see going back in safely, whether this is, you know, journaling through something, meditating through something, seeing a therapist or a coach to work with you through these things, the way that I see it is kind of like something happened to you in your past and it's like breaking a bone. And if you break a bone and then that bone doesn't get set properly and it grows a kind of little, a little bit off center. The only way to fix that bone later on in life is to break it again and reset it properly.

8:31And sometimes that's what it feels like when you go back and you relive some of these things to reset them properly. Because a lot of times what happened to you when you were younger was you processing life as a child. You were processing life as an eight-year-old. Now, as a 38-year-old, you can go back and reprocess it as an adult in a safe way with a whole lot more intelligence and emotional intelligence to see things from a different perspective. And so the cave that you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek. So here's what we do. The first thing is to admit the boulders. Write them down.

9:09write down all of your fears. What are you afraid of in this life? Write down all of your guilt, the things that you're feeling guilty for, the things that you're not forgiving yourself for. Write down all of your shame. Write down all of the stuff that you say to yourself in your head, all of your shit talking, the things that you say to yourself. Write it all down, put it on a piece of paper so you can see it physically in front of your eyes. Write down all of the things that are in the way of you and your greatest self, your true self. and what I want you to do is I want you to see them and I want you to try to disidentify from them and what I mean by that is you don't get caught up in them.

9:44You see them. It's like watching a movie, right? Like if you've ever, if you go to like a really good movie, the really good movie, really good actors, like you get caught up in the movie, don't you? You can put yourself in the character's shoes and you can feel what they're feeling. You can get there and you notice that your heartbeat is just like beating because you're so nervous for them. You're so excited for them or you're so hoping that they don't get caught, whatever it might be. And you're in the movie, even though you're just sitting on your couch watching it. And so it can feel the exact same way.

10:16We can get caught up in our thoughts, in our heads. We can get caught up in our emotions. We can get caught up in all of that stuff. But you really have to understand those things that you wrote down on the piece of paper are not you. Those are the things that are in the way of you and your true self. And you have to learn to let go of these things. You have to learn to work through them. You need to look at them and you need to say, okay, my guilt that I have for this thing that I did five years ago, I'm going to forgive myself. I did the best that I could at that moment because if I could have done better, I would have done better.

10:49Now hindsight's 20-20. Of course, you can see how you could have done something different, but you did what you thought was best at that point. I did what I thought was best at that point. I understand it and I forgive myself. And you let go of it. You start to journal through it. the fear that you have, the being a people pleaser. Okay, I can see how I'm a people pleaser, but I can see how that's not actually truly me. I can see that that is a behavioral adaptation that was required of me to keep the peace in my family when I was a child. It was a behavioral adaptation that gave me some form of benefit, but I'm ready to let go of it because it's not my true self.

11:25And you can see those things on a piece of paper and you can journal through them in how they are not truly you. The act of you letting go requires you to observe all of these and not to try to suppress them or any of that. Don't try to suppress them, any of that stuff. Don't try to fix them. Just say, hey, here's the way that it is. If you get emotional from it, allow yourself to get emotional. Relax into it. Release it. Surrender to your emotions and allow them to flow through you. A lot of times people will go and they'll start journaling something that was tough that happen at one point in time and they start crying and they're like, I don't know why I'm crying.

12:01You don't have to know why you're crying. It's probably your body's been holding on to that so tightly for so long that this crying is just an emotional release that's been stuck in your body. And so don't fight it when it comes up. Just allow the emotions just to kind of flow through you and just be what they are. Because if you resisted, it persists. What you resist persists. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to identify all of these barriers, all of these boulders that are inside of the water that are causing so much turbulence in your life, but are not your true self. And by the removal of these rocks, of these boulders, our emotional barriers, we allow the water, which is our innate energy, to kind of just flow freely.

12:47And you allow your true self to start to come out, start to come through. And one thing that you'll notice is when you start to remove these things and let them go, it's not fighting them, It's not resisting them. It's just like, hey, I see that you had some benefit for me at some point in time in my life. I appreciate you for being in my life the way that you were. But now it's time for me to release you. The process doesn't involve changing the river's course, making it go around a different bend to get around all of the boulders. It's about removing the boulders and letting the river just flow in its true direction.

13:19And I get it. It's not, it sounds easy. I'm going to be honest with you. It's not very easy. It requires significant personal work, but I promise you that it's worth it. It brings you closer to the state of inner peace. And so, you know, for me, one of the things that I realized is that I had this feeling just based off of how my childhood was that I was kind of like, almost like addicted to stress. And I remember listening to a podcast and there was a podcast host was asking a therapist and he was like, Hey, can people get addicted to stress? And therapist was like, yeah, absolutely. Especially children who have, you know, turbulent households or parents that have drug or alcohol issues.

13:58They become addicted to their stress because it is so omnipresent when they're younger that as they get older, they continue to find ways to stress themselves out just because it feels normal to them. I was like, holy shit, I think that's me. And so then I started looking at myself and I started saying, hey, the stress that I feel, it's not me. Are there things that I do throughout my day that stress me out more. Oh my gosh, I'm drinking a fucking shitload of coffee. Well, that kind of stresses me out. Okay. I'm usually putting way too much on my plate. Well, that stresses me out. I'm doing things I don't necessarily want to do.

14:29That stresses me out. And so I looked at it and I was like, that's not truly who I am. Like if I look back to videos of me when I was playing as a kid, I was never a stressed out little kid that was there. So that was a behavioral adaptation based off of my past in some sort of way. And so I started identifying and it wasn't like a quick fix. One time I just thought of it and then it was gone. It was like, I started noticing where I was doing things that were stressing me out that weren't a hundred percent necessary, but it felt natural for me. And then I was like, is this something I actually truly want to do?

14:59It's not. Okay. Will it stress me out? It will. What if I just say no to it this time and just try it out? And so the long term of doing this is it will lead you to, to definitely be way more calm, to feel more balanced, more fulfilled. and then really to have a more enriched life is because your river becomes more calm. Your energy becomes more calm because there's no giant boulders sitting in there making it turbulent and messing up the calm water that's who you truly are. And so I hope this analogy kind of helps you understand that each of us are this way. All of us have this beautiful flowing river and you come up to it and some of you guys have a couple boulders and some of you guys out there have a whole couple miles of white water rafting and giant boulders that you just need to start picking through.

15:46And it might be another year, another two years, five years. It might be a lifelong journey of you just removing these boulders, but I promise you one by one by one, as you remove them, your life becomes way more calm and your inner peace becomes much more prevalent than the inner stress, the inner turmoil, the judgment, the lack of self-love, all of that. So try it out. Identify your barriers, identify your boulders and start removing them to find your true self. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, the best way that you can say thanks is to share this in some sort of way.

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17:22So if you're interested, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave 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.