How to Make "Success" Feel Normal

11 Jun 2026 · 17 min · 9 chapters

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In short

Mindset Mentor episode arguing that people self-sabotage because their subconscious “predicts” the future based on past models; to overcome resistance, they should “normalize” desired outcomes by repeatedly exposing their nervous system to familiar experiences (mere exposure effect), plus visualization and community/people who already have what they want.

Guest backgrounds

No guests are interviewed; host Rob Dial delivers the episode.

Key claims

Subconscious drives ~95% of processing and can resist goals the conscious mind wants; familiarity beats happiness-seeking; repeated real-world exposure (and mental rehearsal) makes success feel inevitable.

Notable examples

Test-driving a dream Porsche instead of only viewing photos; touring neighborhoods/open houses; renting a beach/mountain/luxury “future” for a week; Rob Dial’s 12-year Austin story driving through hill country views until he lived there; daily visualization to make outcomes feel inevitable.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Understanding Self-Sabotage

2:21 to 2:58

Learn about the unconscious barriers to achieving your life goals.

“Today, I'm gonna teach you the biggest reason why people never create the life that they want.”

The Role of the Subconscious Mind

3:03 to 3:52

Explore how the subconscious influences financial and personal expectations.

“number one, normal, but also number two, inevitable.”

The Mere Exposure Effect Explained

3:56 to 4:50

Discover how familiarity can shape your perception of success.

“that because it falls outside of the model that it's built for you in the world.”

Normalizing Success

4:51 to 6:08

Techniques to make success feel more attainable and natural.

“There's actually a psychological principle that's called the mere exposure effect.”

Experiencing Your Dreams

6:14 to 8:13

Learn the importance of interacting with your aspirations in real life.

“I want your brain, your body, your nervous system to normalize the feeling of every single thing that you want in your life.”

Making Your Aspirations Normal

11:47 to 14:00

Explore how to normalize your ambitions for a better mindset.

“And if it feels out of reach, it will always be out of reach.”

Normalizing Success Through Experience

14:00 to 20:45

Learn how to make success feel achievable by normalizing your dreams.

“The goal is to let your subconscious mind repeatedly experience this environment until it stops feeling like a fantasy and it starts to feel more like a future possibility.”

Normalizing Success Through Experience

21:17 to 22:19

Learn how to make success feel achievable by normalizing your dreams.

“to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrelson.”

Normalizing Success Through Experience

22:24 to 22:37

Learn how to make success feel achievable by normalizing your dreams.

“Eligible items are in stock and available for free local delivery.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

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1:53Welcome 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. If you're out there and you love this podcast, you'll probably love the live event that I'm doing later on this year. If you want to join the waitlist to be the first to learn about it and to get massive discounts for my in-person event in Austin, Texas later on this year, go to freedomwaitlist.com. Once again, freedomwaitlist.com. Today, I'm gonna teach you the biggest reason why people never create the life that they want.

2:27Because their brain and their nervous system are unconsciously fighting against the life that you want. And if you don't overcome that, you will self-sabotage every time that you're trying to do something out of your comfort zone. And you will never create a truly amazing life. So I'm gonna show you how to rewire that process how to make achieving your goals feel more natural, and how to train your mind to start seeing the opportunities that you might be completely missing right now. So if you've ever felt stuck, this episode could completely change the way that you see your future. I'm going to teach you how to make the life of your dreams feel, number one, normal, but also number two, inevitable.

3:09So you kind of are going to learn how to brainwash yourself into creating the life that you want versus holding yourself back. The first thing that you need to know is this, your brain is always predicting your future. So if you spent your entire life seeing people struggle financially, your brain is going to predict financial struggles. If you spent your entire life seeing people make only$50 ,000 a year, your brain predicts$50 ,000 a year is normal for you. If it looks at your history and it says, this is normal. This is what people like us do. This is how much money we make. this is where we live, this is what we deserve, this is how life works, then when you get to the point where you're starting to talk about creating a completely different life and being successful and being happier and being in better shape and making more money, your brain can actually resist that because it falls outside of the model that it's built for you in the world.

4:07And so your conscious mind can want it, but your subconscious mind will actually resist it. This is why so many people are to battle with themselves. The problem is that your conscious mind is only a tiny fraction of who you think that you are. It's only 5 % of your operating system, 95 % of your cognitive processing every single day. That's your subconscious. So your conscious mind might say, hey, I want to build a million dollar business, but your subconscious is like, no, people like us don't do that. Well, then guess who's going to win? The subconscious every single time, because it's 19 times more powerful than the conscious mind.

4:40And so what I'm going to teach you today is like how to use one of the strongest psychological forces in human behavior to get what it is that you want. And that's familiarity. People trust what feels familiar. There's actually a psychological principle that's called the mere exposure effect. And researchers have found that the more often that people are exposed to something, the more comfortable they become with it and the more positively they tend to view it. So we naturally become more comfortable with things that are more familiar and we move towards what is familiar and we often become what is familiar.

5:17So when you repeatedly expose yourself to different environments, like successful environments and beautiful neighborhoods and higher levels of wealth and healthy relationships and loving families or whatever it is that is in the life that you want to create, you're doing something that's very, very important psychologically. You're making what was once unfamiliar feel familiar. You're teaching your nervous system that this is not something that is foreign to you. And it's not only other people that get this. This can be a part of your reality too. And it starts to feel normal. And the brain loves normal.

5:55The brain doesn't seek happiness. The brain seeks familiarity. So how can you get the life that you want to not feel out of reach, but to actually feel normal. That way you're not pushing yourself to get there. You're actually feeling pulled to get there. So this is a process that I call normalizing the life that you want. I want your brain, your body, your nervous system to normalize the feeling of every single thing that you want in your life. This is why rich kids often make money a lot easier. People look at someone who grew up wealthy and they assume like, oh, they make money easily because everything was handed to them.

6:33Yeah, sometimes that is true. But often there's something that's actually deeper happening in the actual nervous system of that person. See, wealth to them is normal. That's what they were raised with. So it's not this far out distant thing that they want. It's just something that they're going to have. It's like success is normal. Abundance is normal. Making a large investment is normal. Big opportunities are normal. So they don't see those things as impossible as I did when I was a kid. and I was, I came from nothing. And I was like, oh my God, that's so crazy that people get to these levels of wealth and status and success and happiness.

7:09So they don't see those things as impossible. They see them as a normal part of life. It's already normal. And because of that, the key here is this. There's no energetic resistance inside of them. There's no internal argument. There's no conscious mind versus subconscious mind. There's no subconscious saying, well, who do you think you are to go and try to get that? because it's already been normalized their entire life. So their subconscious isn't fighting the outcome. And that's the incredibly powerful thing that I want you to understand of what we're gonna really like dive into and deconstruct today.

7:41Let's talk about how you can normalize the life that you want so that you stop getting your own way and self-sabotaging, okay? I'm gonna use some materialistic examples, but we can use this for literally everything that we want. Not just like a car and a house and money and success and business, but like a loving family. if you've never come from that. A great relationship with your kids if you have never come from that either or even seen it in the people that you surround yourself with. So the first thing I want you to do is this. Stop looking at the car and go drive the car. Like don't just save photos of the car on Instagram.

8:16Don't just put it on your phone background. That's just admiring it from a distance. The real idea of normalizing, I should say, is to interact with it, to like be in the environment, be in the energy of it. Let's say that your dream car is a Porsche, right? Don't stare at photos of it. Go test drive it. Go to the actual Porsche dealership. You're not pretending, just so you know. You're leveraging the mirror exposure effect, which I was just talking about. You're allowing your nervous system to become familiar with something that probably feels distant for you right now. And we will be right back.

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11:23Whether 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. And if it feels out of reach, it will always be out of reach. So every minute that you spend in that car makes it a little bit less mythical to you. It's a little bit less impossible. It's a little more normal. And eventually your brain stops seeing it as something that belongs to other people and something that's out of reach for you and starts seeing it as something that will belong to you.

12:11So sit in it. Smell the leather. Feel the steering wheel. Take it for a drive. Experience it. Like feel the way your body shifts when you hit a corner. Let your nervous system gather evidence that this isn't some like mythical object that's reserved for just special people. It's just a car. It's a nice car. And one day it will be yours. Not can be yours. Not might be yours. One day it will be yours. Even better, go rent it. There's apps like Turo. T-U-R-O. I have no affiliation with them. You can rent almost any cards you want that somebody else puts out. It's like Airbnb for cars. Rent it for a weekend.

12:47Maybe you rent it for a week. I want you to internalize the experience, to normalize the experience because every hour that you spend inside that car sends the message to your subconscious like that this isn't impossible. Like I'm in this car now. I'm experiencing this. This is real. This is attainable for me. And this process, like I said, is called normalization. You're getting your nervous system to make it feel normal to you. Another example of something you could do, normalize the house that you want. Like the same exact thing applies for your dream home. Figure out where you want to live, what part of town you want to live in, and then start spending time there.

13:25Drive around the neighborhoods, walk the neighborhoods, go to the open houses. There's always open houses on the weekends. So go into whatever app that you use, realtor.com, Zillow, whatever it might be, and you can see what open houses are happening this weekend. Go into the open houses, look at the houses, experience it, be in them, drive the streets, like spend time in those environments. Most people think like, oh, I'm gonna do this for motivation. Sure, you could do it for motivation, but I really think that you should be doing it for familiarity. The goal isn't to impress yourself. The goal is to normalize this experience inside of your body.

14:02The goal is to let your subconscious mind repeatedly experience this environment until it stops feeling like a fantasy and it starts to feel more like a future possibility. Like most people wait until they can afford something before allowing themselves to experience it. I think that's completely backwards. Go experience it first, normalize it internally, and then make it familiar in your life and you're more likely to get it. When you walk into a beautiful home every single weekend, eventually they kind of stop feeling intimidating they're still beautiful they're still amazing but they start to feel normal that's what we're trying to do and once something feels normal your subconscious stops fighting it like i did this when i first moved to austin so i moved to austin 15 years ago at this point i used to drive around the nicest neighborhoods and there's these hills in austin most people don't realize there's these beautiful hills like these rolling hills it starts the texas hill country right there's these huge properties these beautiful houses there's amazing views and sunset views in the hills of Austin.

15:01And every single time I drove through them, I would tell myself, I'm going to live here one day. This is where I'm supposed to be. I'm going to live here one day. I'm going to live here one day. I don't know how. I don't know when. I don't have any money. I don't have any plan for it. But I kept going three to four times a week. I kept normalizing. I kept seeing it. I kept believing it. And it took me 12 years to get here. But today, I actually live in that part of Austin. My backyard views are the hills with the sunset facing west that I used to stare at and be like, I'm going to get this one day.

15:34But I never stopped believing it was possible. I was trying to basically like brainwash all 40 trillion of my cells in my body to believing that it was possible. And so it always felt like it was more inevitable than anything else. This isn't like I'm something special, like I'm some special person. That's how I did it. I trained my nervous system and brainwashed myself to believing it could happen. Anybody can do this. I think everybody should do it. Okay. Another thing I think you should do is I think you should rent in your future. So one of my favorite things to recommend to people is to once a year, save up your money, rent your future.

16:10If your dream is to live on the beach, rent a beach house for a week. If your dream is to live in the mountains, Rent a mountain cabin. If your dream is luxury, then go experience luxury in some sort of way. Not because you're pretending, but because you're actually trying to train your subconscious. Sit there, look at the ocean, close your eyes, like really feel it, smell the waves and smell the ocean and hear them and feel the breeze and the mist on your face and say, I'm going to own a house like this. I'm going to own a house like this. One day I'm going to own a house like this. and you're not doing this from desperation.

16:45You're not doing it from lack. You're trying to do it from certainty. I don't know when, I don't know how, but I know it's coming. And you're kind of in a way brainwashing yourself. Stop being brainwashed by the rest of the world and by Instagram and by your parents and all that. Brainwash yourself. And then what you do is you just let go of when it's going to happen and just focus on the destination and focus on the work that you need to do to get there. Those are the two things that you can control. Now, what do you do when you're not test driving a car or, you know, renting a car or going to open houses or renting a house?

17:19Then what you do, visualize every single day, right? On the days when you're not renting houses, test driving, all that stuff, visualize what it is that you want. One of those powerful ways that you can normalize what it is that you want is through visualization. The more that you do it, the more familiar it starts to feel. And the more familiar that it feels, the less resistance you will have towards it. And that's exactly what you're doing when you visualize your future. You're mentally rehearsing a life before it actually arrives in your reality. Your brain doesn't distinguish between vividly imagined experiences and an actual one.

17:54And so this is why visualization is so powerful. You're essentially giving your brain practice reps. You're rehearsing success. You're rehearsing confidence. You're rehearsing your future. You're rehearsing the loving family that you're going to have. having the love of your life in your life, the beautiful children that you're going to have and the amazing connection and relationship that you're going to have, the loving home that you're going to live in, the great relationships with your friends and your family. And every time you do it, you make that future just a little bit more familiar, a little bit more normal, and a little bit less impossible.

18:30That's why I always recommend spending a few minutes every single morning just visualizing exactly what you want your life to look like. not because you're just doing it because it's some woo-woo thing or because it's magic, because you're actually training your brain and your nervous system. And the difference that this turns into is instead of it being like, oh, this is possible, is you're actually kind of like convincing yourself to believing that it's inevitable. Like you want your brain and your subconscious to start feeling like this is inevitable. Not like, oh, will this happen? But like, when will this happen?

19:03Like that's a completely different energy, completely different psychology, completely different nervous system response. And then you'll take completely different actions because of it. And then if you continue doing this over and over and over again, the renting of the car and going to the open house and visualizing every single day and spending some time with loving family so that you're in that energy, something starts to change within you. The life that once felt impossible begins to feel possible. And once it becomes possible, it becomes more probable. And eventually probable starts to feel inevitable.

19:34Because if you've repeatedly exposed your brain and your nervous system to a future that once felt like it was completely outside of your reality and you do it over and over and over again, boom, you're normalizing it. So my assignment for you is this. What I want you to do is I want you to pick one thing that you've always wanted. One thing, not 10, one. I want you to be laser focused on that thing and ask yourself, how can I make this thing feel more normal? Maybe it's test driving the car. Maybe it's visiting the neighborhood. Maybe it's renting the house. Maybe it's spending five minutes every morning visualizing it.

20:09Maybe it's joining a community where people already have what you want. Maybe it's surrounding yourself with people who have a great marriage. Maybe it's being around other people who are great parents. Whatever it is, normalize it. Start normalizing it. Because when your subconscious mind stops seeing it as impossible, like actually starts seeing it as familiar, you begin acting differently. begin noticing different opportunities. You take different actions. You make different decisions. And eventually, the life that once felt out of reach and maybe even a little bit impossible will start to feel inevitable.

20:45So that is how you normalize the life that you want. So that's what I got 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. And if you want to learn more about the waitlist to come to my in-person event in Austin, Texas later this year, once again, go to freedomwaitlist.com. Once again, freedomwaitlist.com. And I'm going to leave you 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. Hey, everybody, Ted Danson here to tell you about my podcast with my longtime friend and sometimes co-host Woody Harrelson.

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From the publisher

Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin for high performers ready to break through the patterns, beliefs, and identity blocks keeping them from the next level. Join the waitlist: https://freedomwaitlist.com/

Feeling stuck? It's time to take back control. If you're ready to master your mind and create real, lasting change, click the link below and start transforming your life today. 👉 http://coachwithrob.com

 

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