How to Stop Quitting Everything You Start

0:06Welcome 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 episode. I put out episodes four times a week, absolutely free to learn and grow and improve yourself. I'm doing it almost 10 years now. And ultimately, if you want to change your life and make this the best of your life, hit that subscribe button and let's change together. Today, we're going to be talking about why change is so hard on a psychological level for people and how to actually improve at getting better with change in the unknown, in following through.

0:42If you're somebody who is bad at following through, I am going to teach you something that's going to be an absolute game changer. If you're the type of person who starts things and you're really good at starting or you have really good ideas, but you never actually fully follow through, today's gonna be a game changer for you. In order to create the life that you want, you're going to have to change. There's no way around that. And if you're not going to change, your life is not going to change. Your tomorrow is going to look exactly like today if you're not willing to change. And whenever you do something new, whenever you try to change, there is a psychological cycle that you will go through in almost any change.

1:20And this was actually found, it's called the emotional cycle of change. It was found by a psychologist, Don Kelly and Daryl Connor. And they developed this model that deals specifically with the emotional aspects of change. And if you can understand it and you can identify and pinpoint where you are, it will make pushing through whenever you're in that stage to get to the next stage even easier. And I always hear from people like, I'm pretty good at starting things, but I always give up on myself. I'm one of the people who always give up. And so when you understand the emotional cycle of change, it will make it easier to not give up.

1:59So there's basically five different stages that you will find yourself in in the emotional cycle of change. There's no way around it. Pretty much everybody goes through it. And you can use this to really understand where you are and anticipate the emotional responses of the change that you're gonna go through. And so when you understand each stage in detail, you can better prepare yourself and use tools to cope with the changing emotions that you're gonna have, okay? So stage one is something that's called uninformed optimism. In this stage, you're just excited about change. You're like, it's uninformed optimism.

2:37Oh my God, I'm going to start a business and I'm going to become a millionaire, right? You're just excited about this change. Oh, you know, it's New Year's. I'm going to lose 40 pounds this month, right? You just get excited and you are optimistic. But the reason why you're so optimistic is because you're only seeing what the future could be and you have very little knowledge about it. But the reason why you're so excited is because you're not really aware of the difficulties that you could face ahead. What's coming down the road for you? And this is the reason why everyone is always excited to start something new.

3:12Everyone's all excited, new year, new me. The one thing that you can do here to capitalize on this excitement is making basically a treasure map for yourself. making a list of making these massive lists of benefits of what you hope to achieve, writing a letter to yourself about how you want to make sure that you follow through with this. At this stage, people are filled with excitement. They're filled with enthusiasm. We see all of the potential benefits of the change, but we're yet to experience or understand any of the costs because in order for your life to be different, it's going to cost some stuff, whether that's money or whether that's time or whether that's energy or all of the above.

3:59In order for change to happen, there's going to be some costs. And so the reason why you're so excited in uninformed optimism is because you see all of the potential benefits of change, but you haven't experienced any of its costs at this point. And so this stage of uninformed optimism is, hey, positive emotion, excitement. It's going to be great. You imagine all of the benefits, but you haven't seen any of the costs. Everything has a cost. But what you have to understand is you usually don't stay in uninformed optimism very long. A few hours, a few days, a few weeks maybe, but then the excitement starts to really fade the more that you start to see how long you have to go or how much you have to do to get there or all of the effort or the time that is going to take for you to get to where you want to go, which brings us naturally and very quickly most of the time to stage two, which is informed pessimism.

5:00So basically you're starting at the top, you're excited, you're uninformed, you're optimistic, and naturally you're going to get to stage two. You cannot get around these stages. Naturally you get to stage two, which is informed pessimism. You went from optimistic to pessimistic. You went from uninformed to informed. As changes progress, negative emotions are going to start to pop up, especially once we start to have to face difficulties, especially once we have to start to take actions we've never done before, put in extra effort, extra energy. And the benefits that you were so excited about in the first stage, the benefits, the end result don't seem as real.

5:42And you start to think maybe this isn't possible. What you were as excited about, you're not as excited about. And so you start to see all of the costs that you didn't see in stage one, and you stop seeing as many benefits. So you see all of the costs and you see less of the benefits. So this stage is characterized with the emotions of frustration, anxiety, worry. You have a desire to quit. It's also the point where many projects end up failing and when many people end up throwing in the towel. It's either stage two or stage three where most people throw in the towel. As reality starts to set in for you, all of the positive emotions that you had before quickly turn to pessimism.

6:30Oh my God, this is gonna be amazing. I'm gonna become a multimillionaire by growing my business. Oh shit, I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I have the time. I don't know if I'm smart enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not pretty enough. I can't do this. And it turns into pessimism, right? The benefits of the change that you wanted to go through seem less real and less important. And the costs become much more apparent. The effort that it's going to take become much more apparent. The time it's going to take, the energy it's going to take become much more apparent. Now you see those and you go, oh my God, I don't know if I can do it.

7:03And this is where you start to question if the benefits are worth all of the effort it's going to take. because it's easier to sit on the couch and do nothing. And this is where people start to question the worth of the effort and look for reasons to give up. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so that sounds terrible, right? Like, oh, informed pessimism sounds terrible. It couldn't possibly get any worse, right? Well, it does. And the lowest part where you'll get to is stage three, which they call the valley of despair. One of my favorite phrases that you could come up for something.

7:42This is the lowest point of the cycle. And if you haven't given up in stage two, but you will give up if you don't go to stage four and five, if you give up at some point in time, you're going to find yourself in stage three. In stage three, this is where people experience the pain of change and the benefits seem so far away that they start to feel unimportant. So if you look at it where it's like, I want to grow a multi-million dollar business. and you're so excited. And then you get to stage two and three and now you're like, oh my God, it's gonna take me years to get there. Oh my God, I have to do research and development.

8:17Oh my God, I gotta learn marketing. Oh my God, I've gotta do sales. Oh my God, I've gotta hire people. Now you're starting to see all of these costs and you're like, I don't know. All of this effort doesn't seem worth it in order for me to make the money. This is the easiest place to quit. The easiest thing to do in this moment, throw in the towel. No way, dude. I don't want to have to hire people. I don't want to have to go through this. I don't want to have to take years to get to a million dollars in sales. I don't have to research and design. I don't want to have to have, you know, 60 hour weeks.

8:48The easiest thing to do is quit. It's easy. It's so easy to want to quit and just return to your old ways of doing things. It's the lowest point of the emotional cycle of change. It's called the valley of despair. And this is where many people give up. and the pain of change is really apparent and it's really felt and the benefits of that change seem just so far away and they don't seem possible a lot of times. It's easy to quit and go back to all of the old ways like I said a minute ago. It's easier, it's the easiest thing. Quitting is the easiest thing to do in the world because it requires you to not have to do anything.

9:27You don't have to do shit, you just have to quit. And so the problem with giving up is that whatever you want to start next because there's always some new shiny object. Whatever it might be, you're gonna have to go through the exact same process. So if you want to grow your own business, but you quit because you decide that you wanna go and do sales for another company, you're still gonna go through stage one, two, three, four, five in whatever it is that you wanna succeed in. So the problem with giving up is whatever you decide to do next, whatever you decide to start next, you're still going to go through the exact same process.

10:04you're going to go through one, two, and three to get to four and five, which you're going to cover in a second. This is the reason why the grass always looks greener on the other side, because when you're in the valley of despair and you're looking at somebody else's patch of whatever it is that they're doing, you're looking at it through uninformed optimism. Of course, it looks really good. Oh my God, look at how green their grass is, but you haven't seen the years of work that they've had to put in in order to make that grass look that way. So to persevere, which is what we all want to do, it's important to have a really compelling future, a vision of what it is that you want to achieve and why you want to make this change.

10:43I always recommend to people, whenever you're starting something new and you find yourself in stage one where you're all excited, is to write a letter to yourself in this moment for you to read when you're about to quit. It's like the phrase is perfect for it. When you think about quitting, remember why you started? Well, when you think about quitting something and you're in stage three, when you're in the valley of despair and you read a letter from yourself of like, I believe in you, don't quit. Here's the reason why we're doing it. And you go through all of the benefits. It's easier for you to be like, you know what?

11:15Screw it. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to fight through. I'm going to continue to take the right action regardless of how I feel. And if you do, you're going to start to go up and things start to get better. But most people give up by stage three and then they start at stage one and something else and they go to stage two and something else and they go to stage three and something else and then they give up and then they get into another thing and it's this cycle of just starting things over and over and never having any real success but if you do fight through the valley of despair you will eventually get to stage four which is called informed optimism so you're informed you know what to do and you're optimistic about it because you have a pretty good idea of what it's going to take for you and you're starting to see some results.

11:58At this stage, the possibility of success in your mind increases. And this is where you actually start to have, oh my God, positive emotions. Success is actually starting to seem possible. You've had a little bit of success. You've had some breadcrumbs of success. And the benefits of your actions are now starting to show. It's like you planted these seeds months ago and now you're actually starting to see the fruits of your life. Oh my God, these flowers are starting to grow. And the cost of this change is now starting to seem worth it. It's starting to seem easier. It's starting to, you're starting to kind of feel like you're moving.

12:40You're not spinning your wheels anymore. You have a little bit of grip in these wheels. You're starting to see a little bit of the fruits of your labor. You're starting to see the success in front of you. and oh my God, there's a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel. I think that I can do it. And once you get there, it's like, I'm gonna keep on going. But most people don't get to stage four because they just keep giving up on themselves over and over and over again. And then when you go from stage four, eventually years down the road, you're gonna get to stage five, which is success and fulfillment.

13:11Success and fulfillment is the final stage of the emotional cycle of change. Very, very, very few people get here. And the reason why is because they usually give up. Because as I said earlier, giving up is the easiest thing to do in the world. The benefits of this new behavior of starting this business, of getting into this relationship, of working on your self-development, of trying to improve your body, the benefits of this new thing are fully experienced. and the cost of change, you now know was worth it. You're at the point where you're seeing the results. You're seeing the money in your bank account.

13:53You're seeing the happiness in your relationship. You're seeing the body being different in the mirror. And it doesn't really seem worth it until you cross the finish line, whatever your finish line is. And everybody listening to this has a different finish line. All of the actions though, and this is what's great about it. When you get to stage five, all of the actions that were so difficult in stage one, in stage two, in stage three, all of these actions that were so difficult are basically a routine. Now they're a habit. They're kind of locked in. Like you are now the person that just does those things.

14:32When you were at stage one, two, and three, you were the person that was trying to take those actions, trying to build those habits. In stage five, it's just your habits now. It's just your actions. It's just a part of who you are and what you do. And finally, your success and your fulfillment mark that final stage of the emotional cycle of change. The benefits of this new behavior, of this new life, of finally deciding to do something different are fully experienced. And now you're looking back and you're like, so glad that I did it. And so this being the beginning of you deciding that you want to do something new, you want to set new goals.

15:13I recommend that you decide, I'm going to do this for the next year, no matter what. I'm not going to allow myself to give up. I know I'm excited about it right now. And I'm probably going to go into stage two and I'm going to have informed pessimism. And I'm definitely going to go into stage three, which is the valley of despair. But you know what? I will not give up. I'm going to dedicate the next 365 days of my life to getting better at this thing. If you do that, you're going to start to see the fruits of your labor a year from now. Five years from now, you're going to see all of it was 100 % worth it.

15:50The actions that were so difficult for you in the beginning are going to become part of who you are. And that's the beautiful thing about it. And so these are the five stages that you're going to go through, psychological stages that you're going to go through anytime you do something new, anytime you have some sort of change that you have in your life. And if you can understand the emotional cycle of change, you can identify where you are. Some of you guys right now are identifying, holy shit, I'm in the emotional cycle of change. I'm literally in stage three. I've been thinking about quitting.

16:20You know what? Maybe I should remind myself why I started in the first place. Maybe I should keep fighting through. Maybe I should try to get to stage four as soon as possible. We keep going through. Maybe I could start to get to informed optimism and start being informed to go, you know what, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. If you put this effort forth, you're gonna find yourself a year, two years, three years, five years down the road, eventually getting to what feels like success and fulfillment. And you're just a completely different person with completely different actions and completely different habits.

16:51So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode and you wanna share it with other people, please share it on your Instagram stories. tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you want to make this the best year of your life, I have a free workshop that's called Thrive in 2025 where I'm going to teach you how to reprogram your habits and create the best year of your life. If you want to join us for free, it's going to be live. Go to habits2025.com. Once again, habits with an S, 2025.com. And with that, I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every single episode.

17:22Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.