Stop Doing These 4 Things Now to be Happy!

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast, the number one mindset podcast in the entire world. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast and you live in the United States or Canada and you want to get some inspirational texts from me sporadically throughout the week, text me right now. 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, I'm going to be talking about four things that you should stop doing immediately if you want to be happier. Let's be real though.

0:43Being a human is tough. Like, don't get me wrong. It's amazing. It's beautiful. But this shit can be really hard sometimes, can't it? And the craziest part about being a human is the more that I work on myself, the more I understand myself. And I've been working on myself going on 19 years at this point, where I really discovered self-development and started reading. I read my very first book around self-development and I was back in 2006. And the craziest part though about being a human is that 99 % of the time we are the ones that are making it tough. Our reality, our circumstances are not really making it tough.

1:26We're making it tough on ourself based off of the way that we're perceiving the world or the things that we're saying in our own heads. Often we get stuck in the past. We worry about mistakes that we've made. We ruminate on things. We regret some decisions that we made, some things that we had done in the past that maybe we could have done better. Also, at the same time, though, we can be really consumed by the future, by worrying about the future, thinking about everything that might happen so you can protect yourself, how things might turn out. Maybe you're constantly thinking about everything that you have to do today, and so it's constantly going on in your head.

2:01You sit down to meditate, and you can't even freaking meditate, your brain just continues to keep going. And we live in a world where we're kind of always chasing and searching for something. We're searching for happiness, for fulfillment, for meaning in our lives. And we've kind of been trained that way to constantly always been searching. I don't really think it's natural part of being a human. I think it's part of being, it's natural part of our society that we live in. And so with it being so hard, why don't we make it easier on ourselves? Why don't we try to make it easier on ourselves? and that's really what we're gonna dive into is just four different things that you need to stop doing immediately if you want to be happier and so what I want you to do is I want you to hear these four things and I want you to challenge yourself to see if you can do these four things if you can stop doing these four things today so that you can end up trying to be a little bit happier so use this as a challenge okay the first thing number one is to stop regretting the past it is very common to look back on your past and regret decisions that you've made things that you've done things that you didn't do opportunities that you've missed.

3:04It's pretty common. There's a lot of people that are listening to this podcast that are still ruminating and beating themselves up for something that happened years ago. And in reality, it's important to know that first off, you can't change the past. We all know that logically in our heads. But it's also important for you to remind yourself that you did the best that you could with where you were in your life at that moment. No matter what it is that you did, you did the best that you could. Because if you could have done better, you would have done better, right? And you can't change the past.

3:37And it's easy to have more knowledge now in this moment and look back at yourself two years ago and be like, damn, I should have done something different. Well, you have two more years of knowledge and experience. In hindsight, it's always 2020 to go, oh yeah, I should have done something different. But you didn't. And it's natural to feel that way. But it's also really important to understand that dwelling on the past, all of your mistakes, all of your failures, all the things you could have done differently, holds you back from moving forward in your life. And so if you're spending time and energy, your brain is consuming energy that could be used towards creating the life that you want, thinking about something that you literally can do nothing about.

4:14It's crazy. So you're wasting energy. Your brain is the most energy consuming organ in your body. Even though it only weighs about 2 % of your body weight, it consumes about 20 % of your energy throughout the entire day. So what does that mean? You're taking a portion of that 20 % and focusing it on something that you could do nothing about versus focusing on something that can change your life. So instead of regretting the past, we need to realize that it's our greatest teacher. We need to figure out a way to learn from it. Mistakes can teach us and we can learn, you know what? I did mess up here or that person was giving me a red flag here.

4:50I can't believe I to improve ourselves and improve our lives. We need to be the ones to extract the lessons. There is nobody that's going to come into you and say, hey, let's go ahead and go through each of your failures in the past and things that have happened to you in the past. Let's see where you can extract the lessons. No, we need to be the ones to sit down to extract the lessons. What was I supposed to learn from this? If my life is a perfectly crafted curriculum for me to learn and grow and get better? Why did life or God or the universe or whatever it is you believe in, why did life bring this challenge to me?

5:26What was I supposed to learn from it? What lessons have I still not fully extracted from it? Because you know you can't change the past. We all know it. It's all, you know, intellectually we know that we can't, but we still ruminate, right? So how do we get past that? Sometimes we spend a good portion of our day beating ourselves up about something that we can't do anything about, but we can. We can't do anything about the past, but we can't control a response to the past. So we have to stop living in the past. The past has nothing to do with your present moment. And you might think that it does.

5:54It doesn't. Your past has nothing to do with your present moment. The same way that the wake of a boat cannot steer the ship. It's the past. It happened. Don't let it control your current feelings. Learn from it. And then more than anything else, a big piece I think is important of this. I was coaching somebody yesterday in Mindset Mentor University, which is a group coaching that I have. And I was coaching a lady and I was like, listen, you just need to be nicer to yourself. You just need to give yourself more grace. She's like, I feel like I screw up a lot and I feel like I could have always done better.

6:28And anytime I do something, even if I do it well, I'm always like, man, I could have done better. I'm like, you just need to be nicer to yourself. You need to get better at practicing self-compassion. We need to learn to be kinder to ourselves, to forgive ourselves and forgive our mistakes. So many people beat themselves up over things that they cannot change. And so a lot of times we're looking in the past and saying, man, I should have done so much better. But instead we should go, you know what? Hey, you did the best of what you could. I'm proud of you for what you did. You could have done better.

6:59But you know what? I'm proud of you because of the fact that we're going to take the lessons from what happened, from our failures, from our past experiences, and we're going to grow and we're going to get better. And so we need to understand that it's a natural part of being a human to want things to change from our past, but it's never going to happen. So that's the first thing. Stop ruminating on the past. Number two, now let's jump into the future. Stop worrying so much about the future. The future is the great unknown and it's natural to worry about something that's unknown. It is natural for a human to worry about something that is unknown because an unknown is a threat to the human brain.

7:29It's the animalistic side of you and the unknown is dangerous. The brain wants to solve the unknown, but worrying doesn't solve it. It gives us a false hope that, well, man, if I worry about this, maybe I'll have more control over it. And you don't. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, it gives a statistic all of the time. Psychologists have found that 85 % of the things you worry about never actually happen. And of the remaining 15%, 12 % happens better than we think that it will. Meaning 3 % of what you worry about actually happens. One out of 33 times that you worry that thing actually happens.

8:03What a waste of your time. What a waste of your energy. Worrying about the future leads to stress. It leads to anxiety. It leads to all of that. And that is also another thing that is killing your energy throughout the day. And so you're worrying about the past. You're worrying about the future. And you're spending precious cognitive energy and physical energy as well because you're putting your body through so much stress that you could be using towards actually creating the life that you want. And so it can cause you to miss out on opportunities because you're too focused on what might happen and you're not actually physically present.

8:35So you're missing things. And so to stop worrying about the future, we need to focus on the present moment. We need to practice getting into our bodies. And this is the thing that's really interesting. It's like, I've come to realize that my brain is almost always in the past, but mostly it's almost always in the future. And the only thing that's actually physically present in this moment is my body. And so when I notice that I'm in my head and I'm out somewhere else, I'm like, oh, I'm not in my body. I'm not here. So if I want to get into the present moment, my body is always in the present moment.

9:02So usually I close my eyes, I do six deep breaths, and I try to get myself here in this moment. and say, hey, dude, stop worrying so fucking much. Chill out a little bit, right? Everything's going to be okay. You know, I put on that Bob Marley song, every little thing's going to be all right. It's called Three Little Birds. If you need to put it on 40 times a day, do it. You know, and so when we get ourselves out of the future, get ourselves into the present moment, we get ourselves into the body, we can take better action in this present moment to prepare for the future. So you can figure out what it is that you need to do.

9:31You can look at your to-do list. You can say, hey, I can't do everything at one time, but I can do the next step. What is the next step? And being proactive versus sitting and worrying about the future, which never actually does anything in the present moment. And so if we're going to go out and create the lives that we want, we've got to remember to get ourselves in our body first, ask ourselves, what's the next action I can take, and then take action on that thing. So that's number two. Third thing I want you to stop doing in order to be happier is stop thinking so much that you forget to be here, which goes us back to a little bit of what I was just saying.

10:06so many people are not even here. I mean, your body's physically here, but your mind is somewhere else. You know, you've been there before you in a conversation with somebody and you're talking to them. And then you realize like, they're only like 30 % here. There's 70 % somewhere else. You're like, Hey, where are you? I'm sorry. I've just got a lot going on today. Right? They're so focused on the past. They're so focused on the future, whatever it might be, what they want, what they don't have, what they need to change, what they're afraid of, what they're worried about. And we ruin a perfectly fine present moment by constantly being out somewhere else.

10:43And your life is only a collection. When you die, if you were to be able to die and look back on your entire life, your entire life is just a collection of present moments. How many of those present moments were you actually present? Think about that. You know, if you can't stop thinking about a future, you're like, oh my gosh, well, I just have this goal that I really want to get to in the future. When I get to that future, then I'm going to be happy. Then I'm going to be excited about life. Then I'm going to be present. I promise you this, that if you train your mind to constantly be in the future, to constantly be thinking about what you have to do, to constantly be thinking about everything else that's coming up in the future, then when you eventually do get to that future goal, You know, if it's like, hey, I want to be a millionaire or whatever it is, right?

11:29Let's say that it's easy because that's a number, right? And we can, it's quantitative. We can take that. So I want to be a millionaire and then I'm going to be happy and I'm going to be excited. And then I can finally be present and I can chill, right? When you get, if you constantly are constantly, constantly thinking about that future moment, that$1 million in your bank account, when you eventually do get$1 million in your bank account, you won't be happy and you won't be here because you have trained your mind and your body to not actually be in the present moment. So if you were to hit that$1 million in your bank account, you're going to constantly think about, well, what's next?

12:02Well, I need to get to$2 million, right? You will never fully enjoy life if you cannot figure out a way to untrain and unpattern, repattern, reprogram, rewire yourself to actually be back here in this present moment. So many people, majority of people that I meet nowadays are gone. They're somewhere else. can you figure out a way to be here, to be present? Because when you get to that future moment, you won't even be there mentally because you've trained yourself not to be here. So can you stop trying to be so somewhere else? Okay, that's number three. And number four, another really important thing is to stop looking for happiness in other people.

12:46One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to search for happiness in other people, to rely on other people to make us happy. And it's important to have relationships, like to have great relationships. If you want to live longer, you should focus on having great relationships. There was a long, it's still going on. It's about an 85 year study on Harvard that found out what makes people happy and what makes people sad and all that. The people who were the happiest had great, deep, positive relationships. The people who were not very happy in their lives ended up not having great relationships or they had no relationships or they had toxic relationships.

13:24And so the people who actually had toxic relationships actually didn't live as long as the ones who had positive relationships. So I do think that it's very important for us to have positive relationships and to focus on that. But what I'm telling you is don't expect that another person will ever make you happy. Nobody can ever make you happy. Happiness is not based off of what externally happens outside of you. Happiness is a state of mind that you decide to be in and bring that to the external. Happiness is fully 100 % internal. Now, you might think to yourself, oh, well, you know, when I went to Disney World, I was happy.

14:01Yeah, you can be happy because you decided it was that state of mind of, oh my God, I'm going to Disney World. And then that state of mind made you happy. And so you have to realize it's the state of mind more than anything else. We can't look at other people and think, well, I will be happy when she starts acting this way. I will be happy when the government starts doing this. I will be happy when the person that I want to be elected gets elected. Whatever it is that you're thinking. Looking for happiness in other people will lead you to disappointment. I promise you that. People are not perfect.

14:32And people will inevitably let you down at some point. And that's okay. Because people are people. People are not going to be perfect. So, you know, if I'm saying, well, I'm only going to be happy when she makes me happy. Well, if she ends up screwing up something at some point in time and quote unquote, lets me down, well, then I'm basing how I feel based off of somebody else. And so you cannot look for your happiness in other people. When we place all of our hopes and our expectations on other people, we set ourselves up for disappointment. We set ourselves up for heartache. And it's not saying, once again, don't focus on relationships.

15:07A hundred percent focus on really great relationships, but stop looking for your happiness in other people. You need to focus on yourself. You need to identify things that make you happy. How you can get yourself, you know, wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, drink your water, and then meditate and make a decision. No matter what happens today, I will be happy. Life can throw everything at me. All of the shit can hit the fan and go all over the walls. I'm still going to be happy. And the reason why is because it's a decision. It's a state of mind that I've decided that I'm going to be in no matter what.

15:41And so it's really important for you to understand that. We also need to take responsibility for our own emotional well-being. Because if we're saying, hey, I'm only going to be happy when this person makes me happy. Well, then we're also saying, well, you know, I'm a victim to my feelings based off of external circumstances. So, oh, you know what? I'm sad. I'm sad because it's her fault. Or I'm sad because it's his fault. Or I'm sad because I didn't get what I wanted to. Just the same that happiness is a decision, sadness is a decision. And I'm not saying don't be a human. Feel your feelings.

16:07That's what I'm saying. but more than anything else realize that we are the ones that are in control of it. You are not a victim of your circumstances, right? You are the one that is in control of how you feel, what you perceive your life to be. It means learning to manage your emotions, not relying on other people to regulate them for us, developing really healthy coping mechanisms depending on what's happening in our life, stuff like exercise and meditation and therapy. All of those things will definitely help you with coping mechanisms as well. And so it's really important for you to just know happiness is a choice and you can choose to make that choice at any moment.

16:42And so those are the four things that I want you to stop doing if you want to be happier immediately. So number one is stop regretting the past. Number two, stop worrying so much about the future. Number three, stop being somewhere else other than this present moment. And then number four, make sure that you stop looking for your happiness in other people. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories right now. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. I really appreciate every single time that you guys share it.

17:13And the reason why is because that is how we grow. That's how we impact more people's lives. And that's how we, you know, slowly change the world from our little side of the big old globe that we're on. So if you would share it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. There might be someone out there that follows you that really needs to hear this today. And so if you'd share it, I would say thank you for doing that. And with that, I'm going to leave it 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.