Success is hard until you build systems like this

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. If you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a favor. Send me a text message right now if you live in the United States or Canada. It's 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. I'll send you some text messages, motivational tips, tricks, mindset tips and tricks throughout the week to help you get better every single day. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to build systems to actually make success in your life easier.

0:44Because I think I probably know why you've been failing. You fail because you're still trying to remember to do the things that you're supposed to be disciplined to do. And success isn't necessarily about pushing yourself harder or white-knuckling your way through life. It's about building systems in your life that run without you having to think or make any decisions. Systems that remove friction from your life, trigger a behavior from you, and make you do it automatically and make you make the right choice easily. So today I'm going to actually break down the systems that you want to create in your life to make success easier for you.

1:24Because you're probably already trying to be consistent. You're journaling sometimes, You're working out sometimes. You're focusing when you remember to. But that's the problem is you're still relying on your memory or your mood or your motivation. And you just need to have better defaults that you go to. And that's what really the point of these systems are. So they take your habits that you want and they embed them into your day so deeply that you don't even have to really think about them. That's the difference between constantly trying and actually becoming who you want to become. Okay? So the first one is what I call the automation systems.

2:01One of the best things about being alive in today's day and age, and there is so much automation to make your life easier, but very few people actually use it the way that they should. So like, for instance, if you're thinking about 8 a.m. daily, every single morning, you get a notification and it asks you, how do I want to feel today? And it just clicks you out of your normal autopilot routine. You sit there and you say, how do I want to feel today? Maybe I should set my internal GPS. Maybe every evening you get a notification at 8.30 and it says, remember to journal about your day. And you're like, oh yeah, that's right.

2:37I forgot to journal today. I'm gonna journal about how my day went, what I wanna focus on for tomorrow. Maybe you have a calendar invite that just goes off every single Sunday as a notification. And it's CEO self-review. And you act as a CEO in your life. And you start to think about your life is if you were the CEO and you look back on how last week went, you look forward on what you got for this next week and you just say, hey, based off of last week, what do I need to stop doing? What do I need to start doing? What do I need to continue doing? That'd be really good in your life. Maybe if you want to get better at fitness and movement, maybe you have a calendar inside your Google calendar.

3:15There's a reoccurring event at 5.30 every day, Monday through Friday, and it says, go to the gym, don't skip it. Yeah, that would be really good. Or train, no matter what. Even if it's just going for a walk or doing some mobility. And it's like a reminder every single day, 5.30. Maybe you have a, if you wear a smartwatch, you have a smartwatch app queue that just sends an alert every 90 minutes. Stand and stretch for five minutes. So you stand up and do your stretching so therefore your body doesn't keep falling over and slumping over if you're one of those people who just sits at your desk all day long.

3:47Maybe if it's something around health and recovery, like you can have an auto schedule meal delivery or grocery list. Like we just have our groceries delivered to our house every Sunday automatically. So we don't have to think about it. It's just, oh, here's the healthy food is getting delivered to our house every single Sunday. You know, maybe you have a wind down alarm at nine o 'clock every single day that triggers that you have the alarm go off and it's connected to your Google house and it triggers the lights to dim. It turns on meditation music. It's like you have these, there's so many amazing little automations that exist in our life that nobody's really using.

4:21And it's like, oh yeah, I was watching TV. Oh my God, I didn't realize that it was this late. I do need to start winding down, right? You can have Amazon, if you use Amazon subscribe and you can make sure that your protein and your vitamins and your green powders are just on auto subscription. So they just show up at your house. You don't even have to think about it. You don't go a week without those things. You know, if you're trying to focus on being more focused and working harder, maybe you have focus mode on your phone at 7 a.m. And at 7 a.m. until 9 a.m., it's just focus mode. You can't get any phone calls, any of that.

4:51And you're like, this is my me time from 7 to 9 a.m. And then maybe you work from home, 9 a.m., you start actually working. You can have apps like Cold Turkey or Freedom schedule blocks in your schedule where you don't use your phone. Like you can't use social media, you can't use YouTube. And it blocks it from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Like there's so many different automations. You could have automations for your relationship. You could have a calendar reminder every Friday at 12. Text a friend just to say hi. Boom. That's awesome. And you're going to text a friend, hey, I was just thinking about you.

5:21I haven't seen you in a while. You're keeping those relationships going. You can take 30 minutes once a month and you can book out date nights for the next four weeks. And just all you have to do is show up on Friday now. You didn't have to think about it. There's no decision fatigue. Oh, which one should we do this Friday? Just no. You get the four places. You book them up. You get them done. Right? So that's the first thing is use the automations that are available by apps, by Google Home, by all of these different things, Amazon, that allow you to automate your life so you don't have to think about it as much.

5:50It makes taking the actions you want to easier. That's the first thing. The second thing is what I call the one-touch environment system. Good decisions don't happen by default all the time. James Clear says your environment is always stronger than your willpower. And so this system is about removing the extra steps between you and whatever habit might be. So like if you want to work out in the morning and you wanna go for a run, I always say what you should do is not like, hey, I wanna run in the morning and just plan on running in the morning. What you should do is have it so that when you wake up, you already plan out your entire day before.

6:25So you wake up in the morning, you've already got your socks, your shoes, your shorts, your shirt right there next to where you brush your teeth, next to the sink. By the time you walk into the kitchen, you should already have your coffee made because you have a timer that's on your coffee machine. It made it for you. You should have your water bottle already done from the night before. So you don't even have to think. You just wake up and you're like, all my stuff is done for me. As if I have a servant that just takes care of everything. All I have to do is just put my clothes on. They're sitting right there.

6:53Get my coffee, chug it, pick up my water bottle. It's already done. Go for my run. And we will be right back. And now back to the show, right? Put your meditation cushion already placed where you're going to be doing it in the morning. Or you could just put in your, if you really want to meditate and you're not meditating as much, put your meditation cushion right outside of your door so that you have to pass it in the hallway. It's like, oh, I can't go any further until I meditate for five minutes. You know, if you want to stop eating so much junk food, eat healthier, no junk food in the house.

7:23Like these things are all just little tiny things that you put in and you design your environment to make sure the action that you want to take to create the life that you want is just easier. Because so many people are focused on building habits when in reality just build systems that make the actions, the habits themselves, automatic, right? The reason why this works is because then you don't have to try. The next action is just there. Like you just win by setup, not willpower. So that's the second one. The third one is called the habit stacking system. If you've never heard me talk about habit stacking, it's one of the most important things you could do to create new habits.

7:57So habit stacking just basically is kind of like if this, then that. So after I make coffee, I open up my journal and you just journal. And that's what you do. I drink my morning coffee and I journal at the same time. After I brush my teeth, I will do 60 seconds of breath work. After I shut my laptop at 5 p.m., I will walk around the block. After I close the fridge at night, I will floss one tooth. Then you just get yourself to start flossing that way. After I walk in the door, I will turn off my phone so I could be present with my family. The reason why it works is because what you're doing is you're piggybacking on something that you already do every single day, like something that already happens.

8:38And you're taking a new habit and it's called habit stacking. You're stacking an old habit. I'm sorry, a new habit on top of the old habit that you've been doing for a while. There's no mental bandwidth required in this. I usually do about 200 pushups a day. How do I do 200 pushups a day? Because I drink two cups of coffee a day. And when I drink coffee and I push the button, I then have to do 100 push-ups before I could drink my coffee. It's so simple. Instead of going, oh my god, I got to remember to do 200 push-ups or I got to schedule to do 200 push-ups. No. When I do my morning coffee, I do 100 push-ups.

9:09When I do my noon coffee, I do 100 push-ups. It ends up just being 200 push-ups in a day. So how can you start doing that so that you can create the life that you want to and the body that you want to and the mindset you want to based off of doing things, new things that are stacked on top of old things. So that's number three. Number four is to create as much friction as you possibly can. I call this one the friction system. I don't want you to worry about being more disciplined. I want you to worry about creating more friction in your life. This system builds friction around your bad behaviors and then removes friction from your good behaviors.

9:46So an example would be if you use too much social media, then what you want to do is is at a certain time, let's say it's 9 a.m. is the first time you check your phone. What you do is you could check your social media at 9 a.m., but you have to have a contract with yourself that when you check your social media at 9 a.m., you log out of social media at 9 a.m. so that you therefore have to log back in next time you want to do it. Maybe you decide that you want to delete the YouTube app from your phone. Put your phone in a lockbox during work hours. They actually make phone lock boxes. It's not, it's not a fake thing.

10:21You can get a phone lock box if you want, or during working hours, you could just do what I always say to do is if you work from home, like I do, put your phone inside of the downstairs that's downstairs in my kitchen. And it's in one of the drawers. Like I'm not there. It's not my office. So I can't really reach for it as easy. If you have junk food, keep your junk food in the garage. So not in your kitchen. So you have to literally walk to go get it if you want to. Oh, your chips and all that, that's in the garage. You got to go walk to the garage. Block all of the websites that steal your time.

10:51During certain hours, you can use apps like Freedom or you can use Cold Turkey, whatever one you want to. The reason why it works is because as advanced as the species we think we are, they have found, like psychologists have found, is if it takes more than 15 seconds to start a bad habit, most people won't even do it. So if it takes you 15 seconds to walk from your kitchen to your garage to go get junk food, most people are like, whatever. That's how lazy we are as humans. They're like, whatever. If it takes you 15 seconds to log in to TikTok because you logged out this morning, you'll be like, I'll do it later.

11:27It's just that little bit of a buffer is what you need to give yourself for this friction. Now, on the other side of that, how do I make the habits that I want to do so much easier? It's the reason why I said, put your meditation cushion inside of the hallway so you have to walk by it. If it takes less than 15 seconds to start a good habit, you'll do it without thinking. So it's like, oh, you know, my clothes are already right here for me to go for a run. It'll take me less than 15 seconds to get, I'll put it on. No big deal. Oh, my meditation cushion's right there. I don't have to think about it.

11:59I'll just go ahead and sit down. Sit down, set my timer for five minutes. I'll do that. And so you want to start thinking, how can I make my bad habits take at least 15 seconds to do? And how can I make my good habits take less than 15 seconds to start? You want to make the right thing easy to do and you want to make the wrong thing hard to do. Okay. The next one is what I call done by default system. You want to take the decisions out of your day as much as possible. If it's a daily decision for you, it's not a real habit. It's a negotiation. And so here's how you need to fix it. You decide once, not every time.

12:36And so an example of what I mean by that, like something that's just very simple, is I work out at 8 a.m. every day. That's it. Like that's, you made the decision, you just have to do it. Not like, oh, what time should I work out today? It's like, no, I work out at 8 a.m. every single day. I write every weekday at 9 a.m. And that's just how my days start. You know, you actually schedule and you have it. So it's just done. I meal prep every single Sunday. I don't get to feel like it or not feel like it. Like I just do it every single Sunday. And so what it comes down to is that it's just like done by default.

13:10Like this is when I do it. This is why I do it. And I just do it. Like the most successful people in this world do the boring things over and over and over again. That's what it comes down to. They're just the most consistent people in the world. And so the reason why it works is because deciding once eliminates decision fatigue. You would be surprised how few things you do simply that you want to do simply because you have to make a decision before you do it, right? Like think about before date night and you've got to figure out where the hell you want to go. So much decision. Oh, we could go to this place.

13:44We could go to this place. It takes an hour to figure out where you want to go, right? This works because you decide once and then you don't have to worry about deciding again. You just do what you said you were going to do at the time that you said you were going to do it, okay? And the last one is what I like to call the accountability system. Most people, and this is a weird thing, I've never been able to figure out why this is, but most people won't do it for themselves, but they will do it for someone else. It's this weird part of human nature. And so what you wanna do is create external systems to reinforce your internal goals.

14:19So the way I like to do this is to find somebody outside of you that you have to connect with around whatever it is that you need to get done. So there's a couple different ways of doing this, right? If you want to go to the gym, hopefully you could find a friend that wants to start working out with you. That'd be really nice. Sometimes you can find that person, but you can't always find that person. If you can find somebody who wants to go to the gym with you four times a week, amazing. Figure out the days and the times every single Sunday, plan it, get it done. Now you have someone to help you, to motivate you and all of that.

14:54Now you might be sitting and you're saying, well, Rob, I live in the middle of nowhere. all my friends are losers, my family's losers, nobody's doing anything great in their life. I don't have anybody to motivate me. Cool. Then I want you to find your most annoying friend and say to them, hey, I want to start going to the gym every single week, four times a week. If I do not send you a selfie picture of me in the gym four times a week, then by Sunday night, I will have to pay you$100 every single time I missed a selfie. You're going to want to make sure that you go to the gym. And so accountability doesn't mean like, oh, I have to have an accountability partner and they have to have the same goals as me and they want to grow and they want to do all of this.

15:34That would be fine if you could find that person. But most of the time we can't find that person. So you take your most annoying friend, the one that pisses you off, the one that you want to pay$100 to least out of every person you know on this earth, and they are your accountability buddy because they are going to be annoying to have to pay$100 to. The first time you have to pay them$100, it's going to piss you off and you're not going to want going to have to pay him$100 again. So you say, hey, for the next, let's say 60 days, I need to go to the gym four times a week. And I need you to hold me accountable.

16:04And in order to do that, I'm going to send you a selfie four times a week. And every day that I miss, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks. That person is going to call you every single Sunday and ask how it went. They will be so annoying. And when you do eventually fail or like fall off, I don't want to say fail, you fall off and you have to send them$100, you're going to be so pissed that you never want to do it again. And that's going to motivate you to show up better and to hold yourself more accountable and actually take the action that you want to. And so those are the systems that you can build into your life that make the habits that you're trying to create automatic.

16:42You don't always need better actions or better habits. Sometimes you just need better systems. Systems run above the habits. And when you create the right systems, it actually makes you take the right actions. 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 if you're out there and you want to learn more about coaching with me outside this podcast, go ahead and go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

17:11Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.