The Intelligence of People Who Choose to Be Alone

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hey, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you wanna get some tips and tricks for your mindset and for your life, go ahead and text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. And I will send you some inspiration sporadically throughout the week. Today, we're gonna be talking about the intelligence of people who choose to be alone. because most people are afraid of being alone. They're afraid of what comes up when there's no one around them to distract them.

0:47The overthinking that comes up, the fear that comes up, the empty noise that's just sitting in the pit of their stomach. But what if solitude, being alone, isn't something that you should avoid? What if it is the exact thing that you need to set your entire life free? So today we're going to be talking about not just being alone, we're going to be talking about how to rewire your brain and your entire nervous system to become the most unstoppable version of yourself. So if you're out there and you want clarity and confidence and intuition and purpose, it doesn't come from being around more people.

1:27It comes from learning how to be alone and not abandon yourself. And so let's talk real quick about the difference between being lonely and being alone, because there are two very big differences. Being lonely feels like emptiness. It feels like disconnection. And you have this feeling inside of you of like, I'm not seen. I'm not loved. If nobody's around me, then I must not be good enough. There's something wrong with me. I need people to fill this void within me. and the reason why you feel that way is because a lot of us have been taught that we are only valuable if other people accept us. So not being around other people can make us feel like there's something wrong with us and it makes sense because we are tribal beings.

2:16Like a hundred thousand years ago our ancestors had to live in tribes because being cast out of the tribe meant 100 % death. Like you had to rely on the tribe. And so it's built into us to want to be around other people. But today you don't have to be around other people, but you can choose to be around other people. Now that's being lonely. Being alone on the other hand is a choice. It's an actual decision to decide I am going to take some time to actually connect with the person who matters most in my life, which is me. I'm going to work on my connection to myself. And it's this thinking within you of I'm safe, I'm grounded, I'm whole, I'm connected.

3:01You know, I don't need anyone but myself. Like I can want to be around people, right? That's okay if you want to be around people, but you don't need anyone. And that's a really powerful place to be because you know that you are the one that fills your own cup. And so being like lonely and feeling lonely feels like being cut off from the tribe. Choosing to be alone feels like being plugged in, not just to the outside world, not being plugged into them, but being plugged into like your own internal power grid, plugged in to yourself and tuned into yourself. I want you to understand people underestimate how much energy and power you can get when you protect your energy and you don't give it out freely.

3:50When you sit with yourself and you become comfortable with yourself, there is so much power that comes from that. And there's so much energy from coming back to yourself and reconnecting with yourself. And so when you sit in silence, here's what most people actually miss. When you finally stop being around all of the noise of the world and having to constantly be busy and constantly be doing something else and scrolling and scrolling and going on Netflix and shopping and having to be around other people. When you're sitting in silence and you're doing it for a reason to actually plug in, your own voice gets louder, which might be the most important thing that can happen to you.

4:34Because so many of us don't even know who we are. Like you think you know who you are. And so if I were to ask somebody like, yeah, I know who I am. Well, you know who you are in the past. You know the things that you've done. Knowing yourself is based in the past. You don't want to know yourself. You want to learn yourself. Learning is based in the present. And you can only do that when you sit in silence and shut up and discover who you truly are and start to notice your patterns and start to notice your trauma and start to notice what you need to work on. So when your own voice gets louder, it's one of the most important things that can happen to you because this is where your intuition really starts to sharpen.

5:16This is where your patterns, good patterns and bad patterns in your life, really starts to become clear. This is where your healing really starts to deepen because you're not running anymore. This is where your original thoughts and wisdom come from. And this is where your personal power comes from. You have to understand that your intuition and your soul, they're not going to scream at you. They whisper. And so you've got to be quiet to hear it. You've got to be quiet to hear your wisdom that you have. Like people always ask me because I talk about how I always work off my intuition and my gut feeling.

5:53People are always like, how do you deepen your intuition? You don't deepen your intuition. You shut up and you disappear and you be alone and you do nothing and your intuition will magically start to come up. Because if your life is always filled with stimulation, you'll never actually give yourself any space to hear your inner wisdom, to actually pay attention to your intuition. When you're quiet, you can listen to the whisper. You can start to feel these little nudges of, you know what, I don't really want to do this with my life anymore. I think that I should move in this direction. And if you're not quiet, you're usually going to miss those types of things.

6:32And so that is like your inner compass. I always tell people like your gut feeling, your intuition is your personal compass of what you'd be following in your life. But most people don't give themselves space to actually feel it. That's where your purpose is at. That's where your healing is at. That's where your authentic identity and your wisdom are all at. And so when you look at solitude, which is, you know, just being alone, it actually boosts your self-awareness. And there's multiple studies that have proven it, you know? And so in 2017, there was a study that was published in Personality and Social Psychology Review that found that people who embrace solitude show greater creativity, stronger emotional regulation, and higher self-reflection skills.

7:16So people who disappear are more creative, they have better emotional regulation, and they have better self-awareness. neurologically speaking solitude actually turns on your default mode network it allows the default mode network which is the part of the brain associated with self-reflection and with insight to actually kind of like look at yourself from another point of view like a third person it makes it activate more freely than anything else so you kind of look at your life from an outsider's perspective and say like what should i do what should i change what what do i who do i want to be.

7:52Dr. Wynn, who's a psychologist at Durham University, found that time spent alone without any distractions. So time spent alone doesn't mean like sitting in the room by yourself with your phone without distractions reduces stress. It enhances people's focus and it supports some mental clarity. So like some of the things that I hear the most that people struggle with right now are solved by just sitting alone with no distractions. Reduces stress. Ding, ding, ding. Most people want that. Enhances focus. Most people are like, oh my God, I have no focus. I have ADD. I'm all over the place. Ding, ding, ding.

8:30And it supports your mental clarity. Oh my God. So I can actually think clearer as well. And so the most powerful people in the world, the people who you look up to that are like, man, that person is so centered are usually the people who are really okay with being alone. Like they can sit alone with themselves, like really sit. Why? Because they don't need external validation anymore. Like they've learned to build themselves up without having to be around anybody. They move with purpose and, you know, their expectations are of themselves, not what other people have of them. They live by their own expectations.

9:06And more than anything else, it's most important is they know who they are. They really know who they are, not who the world wants them to be. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. You know, Paulo Coelho has this quote that says, if you are never alone, you cannot know yourself. So many people are never alone. They're running from something. They're afraid of something. There's trauma that they're trying not to come in contact with. So they're constantly trying to keep themselves busy all the time. If you constantly feel the need to be around people, if silence terrifies you, if like stillness makes you feel like a little bit itchy in your own skin, it's not like a personality quirk.

9:48It's avoidance more than anything else. That is unprocessed pain in disguise is what it is. There's a quote that I've said many times in this podcast that I love, and it is, the cave that you're afraid to enter holds the treasure that you seek. Like so many people, I talk to so many people like, I want to be a high performer. I want to be successful. I want to have a bunch of money and I want to have a bunch of joy and I want to have a great relationship. Like they want to be high performers in every aspect of their life. And they're like, what's the, what's the tip or what's the trick or what's the hack to, you know, being more productive or the mindset trip to, to make me decide to do this thing when I don't want to do it.

10:26Right. I want you to understand like there is no tip or trick or hack. None of that stuff is going to help. It's not going to heal you. It's like trying to find a hack or tip or trick to improve your life when what you really need to do is heal certain aspects of yourself is like spraying perfume on a turd. Like it might smell a little bit different in the room, but the turd is still sitting on the floor. Like silence is the place for you to heal, AKA for you to clean up the turds in the floor. Like, does that make sense? Like some people are like, I just want it to smell better in here. And it's like, clean up your mess, get it together, clean up the turns that are on the floor and stop trying to spray perfume on them.

11:09And so I want you to understand that when, when you're alone is really where all this power comes from. And you can build yourself and your life when you're alone. And I'm not talking about like, go full on monk mode and be a minimalist or like go completely off the grid and don't talk to anybody ever again. What I'm really talking about is you deciding that you're going to be alone to claim your own energy and to pull it away from all of the external sources that you're outsourcing your energy to and to really bring it back to you. Because when you're alone, you can work on a few different things.

11:43The first thing, your mind. You can journal. You can get under the hood. You can ask yourself the tough questions that you've been avoiding. You can discover who you truly are. You can start to find these patterns that are running your life that you're completely unaware of. You know, we have 60 to 90 ,000 thoughts a day and 95 % of them are the same ones that they were yesterday. And most people don't even realize those patterns. So you can work on your mind. You can read books that challenge your way of thinking about the life and about spirituality and about psychology and about philosophy.

12:17Like you can really stretch your way of thinking. You can sit down and you can actually start to think and you can reflect on what your beliefs are. And you can ask why. And you can challenge your beliefs and you can test your beliefs. You can also have space to process the past pain, aka clean up the turds, right? So you can work on your mind when you're alone. Your body, you can work on your body. You can move your body however you want to, whether it's dancing, whether it's workout, whether it's walk, whether it's yoga going for a stretch, it could be a different thing every single day. No music, no TV, you, silence, connecting with your body.

12:53You can breathe. You can breathe with intention. You can do breath work. You can tune into how your body feels and how your body holds stress and start teaching yourself how to release stress, which many people don't know how to do, how to self-soothe. You can work on claiming and calming your nervous system because so many people are just outsourcing the nervous system to everybody else as well. So you can work on your body. You can work on your spirit. You can meditate. You can pray. You can breathe. You can connect to something greater. You can ask yourself better questions, not just to find answers, but to find insight, like to find out who you actually truly are.

13:28Like so many people are looking for somebody else to lead them. You don't need a guru. You are your guru. Not me, not some influencer, No one but you. You don't need a 10-step program. You just got to shut up and be still. You need you. If you feel like you always have to be around people, then you're probably not as secure as you think that you are. I don't mean that to be mean, but let it sing in for a second. If you constantly need to be around other people to feel safe, if you have to fill your schedule to avoid silence, if you get anxious when you're by yourself, then you're probably not just like, oh, I'm an extrovert.

14:10There's a pretty good chance that you might be externally dependent. And that's not judgment in any sort of way. I say that with complete love, but it's more of an invitation for you to develop a deeper relationship with yourself. The most secure people in this world are not the loudest. They're the ones who are the most comfortable in complete silence because they face their own shadow and they've made peace with it. you know when I did a 10-day silent meditation retreat one of the things that was the most interesting to me is every time I would talk about it with people after so many people went oh my god I can never do that what no I could probably do like two or three days I can never do 10 days and I was like what are you afraid of like think about that for a second what are you afraid of finding like you you do nothing for 10 days it's just you and your thoughts and so maybe people are like, oh my God, I could never, that would be so scary.

15:02I'm like, what are you afraid of? What are you afraid of finding? There's a quote that says all of man's problems come from his inability to sit in a room by himself. I'm like, man, that is so true. It's where all of our problems come from, our disconnection from ourself. And so I want you to understand solitude, being alone, it's not punishment. It's a privilege. So instead of saying like, oh, I'm alone. So like, this is my time to come home to myself. Like so many people are like, man, I wish I could just have some silence. And then when they get silenced, they're like, oh my God, I'm freaking the fuck out.

15:31So ask yourself, what parts of me need my own attention? What parts of me have I been avoiding by staying busy? What would I hear if I actually listened to myself? And then don't call it boredom. Don't call it being bored. Call it relaxation. It's self-care. And so this week, I have a challenge for you. I have a dare for you. I want you to spend 30 minutes alone each day. No phone, no distractions. You can sit in silence. You can journal. You can walk. You can stretch. You can stare at a wall. I don't care. Just be. And then start to notice if you start getting uncomfortable and just ask yourself like, what is coming up right now?

16:11Don't judge it. Just witness it. If you notice yourself getting anxious, allow it to come up. What's happening right now? Why am I getting anxious? And just start asking yourself questions around it and And let the silence show you who you truly are. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. I love when I get onto Instagram and I see hundreds of you guys have been sharing this stuff. It really means a lot to us because that is how this podcast actually grows. And if you love this podcast, that's how you can pay it forward so that we can impact more people's lives.

16:42And if you wanna learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. and with that I'm gonna 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