The Mindset That Changed My Life IMMEDIATELY

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. I put out episodes four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. So if that's what you're into, subscribe, because I've put out episodes four times a week for the past 10 years. And that's what all we're really looking to do is help you learn and improve yourself so you can make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Today, I'm gonna be talking about a mindset shift that I had a few years ago that changed my life immediately.

0:42And I mean like day one, I noticed a huge, huge difference in my life. And it comes down to really the power of what we focus on in our perception. If you can really understand this, it will actually change the quality of your life dramatically. So let me give you an example real quick. First, before we dive into it, right? Imagine that there's two people that are stuck in a traffic jam. Both of them are on their way to work. Both of them are definitely going to be late to work. But one of them is fuming. They're pissed off. They're gripping the steering wheel. They're screaming. They're cussing.

1:17They're just griping about all of the wasted time, how their boss is going to be pissed, all of that. The other one, calm. They're listening to their favorite song. They don't want to be late, but they're going to be late either way. And so they're dancing along to their favorite music. They're having a great time. They're in the exact same situation. but it's two radically different realities that these two people live in. Why is that? Because of what they are focusing on and their perception of what is going on. Because it is your perception, not your circumstances, that creates your experience and creates your life.

1:56Say that again just so you can get it down. It is your perception, not your circumstances, that creates your experiences in your life. And it all comes back to a quote that I heard a few years ago that really made me sit down and focus like, okay, how do I feel on a daily basis? How do I want to feel? And what am I focusing on that's making me feel the way that I feel? And if I want to feel differently, what do I need to focus on? And it made me just try to change my perception of what I focus on. And this is the quote. The quote is, your mind can make hell out of heaven or heaven out of hell.

2:32Your mind can make hell out of heaven or heaven out of hell. And I realize sometimes when I'm just stressed out and having a bad day, I'm living in heaven, but mentally creating hell. And it's not just like a cute little motivational quote that's like, hey, buddy, feel better. I mean, this idea of your perception is backed by a mountain of psychological research. And once you understand how this works, how you can change your perception, how you can change your focus, it'll change your life as well. And the reason why I'm talking about now is because this came from a topic I was talking about with a coaching client of mine.

3:12He's a extremely successful guy. He has everything he's ever wanted. He has a super successful business, makes a ton of money, has a nice house, has a great family. And he's sitting there living the life that he's always wanted, but he's not happy as he wants to be and he doesn't feel as fulfilled as he know he could be. And I've coached many people like this, many people who have everything they've ever wanted or in a way better situation than they were five years ago, but internally they just don't know how to feel better. And that's one of the things that I help coach them through is that how to enjoy the amazing life that they've actually built, how to enjoy their family more, and how to disconnect from working all the time.

3:56And, you know, I might be talking about people who are extremely successful, but the average person who's able to, you know, pay their bills, save a little bit of money is in the exact same situation. They're living a great life and they're just missing all of it. And they're sad and they're anxious and they're not living a life where they're living in what, you know, if you were to look at like what most people's reality is in the world right now. And, you know, if you were to go back 500 years, Yeah, most people nowadays are kind of living in like heaven on earth for those people. And so this isn't abnormal.

4:30This isn't like a weird thing that some people do. It's actually incredibly normal. We all do this in some sort of way. And in order to really dive into this, I want you to understand two psychological things that will really kind of take us home, okay? The first thing is this idea of negativity bias, which I'll dive into. And the second thing is the idea of the hedonic treadmill, okay? So when you look at the negativity bias, we were not born to be happy. We were born to survive. And I did an episode on the negativity bias months ago. But when you look at it, our brain was meant to survive. And survival means noticing danger, avoiding pain, remembering things that went wrong in the past so that they don't go wrong again.

5:13And keeping that pain and the bad in the front of our mind. Now, I want you to understand that negative and positive and good and bad are just human labels. But when we say the negativity bias, it means that we're focusing on the negative, which is just completely made up by us. But we're focusing on things that didn't go the way that we wanted to, that we would label as bad. And so we're naturally just focusing on the bad more than we're focusing on the good because that's what our brain is going to do. And the negativity biases has been studied extensively. There was a study in 2001 in Personality and Social Psychology Review by Paul Rosen and Edward Roisman, and they documented how negative events in our lives have a much stronger impact on our psychological and physiological states than the positive ones.

6:08So the negative ones have much more of an impact than the positive ones. Your body and your brain want to remember and focus on the quote-unquote negative, the bad, the pain, for protection in the future. This is the reason why we recall being insulted more than we remember compliments. This is the reason why most people can't take in compliments because it doesn't line up with the negativity that they hold about themselves. This is why we fixate on criticism. This is why we can have a bad day and we spiral after a bad day. And then we can have a good one and we barely even notice the good day.

6:48Even brain scans show it. When people actually see negative images in a picture, their brain lights up and fires way more than when they view a positive or a neutral one. Our amygdala, which is that fear center in our brain kicks into high gear. And it's not because you're broken. I want you to understand that. It's not like this isn't something that you can't start to work through. We're not broken in any sort of way. It's our ancient wiring that says it's better to overreact to danger than it is to underreact and die. And so the problem with that though, is now this same brain that's trying to avoid tigers 200 ,000 years ago is the same brain that now lives in a house with air conditioning and checks their emails and sits in traffic and, you know, has passive aggressive comments that they read on, you know, Instagram and they flip through and they see the news about all of this terrible stuff that's happening in other country, but they're not dealing with tigers anymore.

7:50But it still treats most of those things like the emails or the negative comments or the traffic as some sort of a negative thing, which into the brain means threat. And that's how we end up turning these minor annoyances in our life into like personal catastrophes. It's natural. We will focus on the bad more than the good unless we are intentional about it. And that's how we can turn this heaven that we live in into hell. So that's the first one. The second thing is this concept of the hedonic treadmill, right? Where nothing ever really feels like it's enough. Let's say that you land your dream job.

8:26At first, it's amazing. You're energized. You're fulfilled. You're so excited about it. You're excited to go to work. Then you fast forward six months and the excitement fades. Your brain adapts. And suddenly you're just like, I'm craving something else. You want a raise. You want a promotion. You want a new title. You want to, you know, have more money. It's the same exact thing where when you move into a new house, you love the house and it's amazing and it's great. And then a year later, you're like, well, you know, we don't have a pool. It would be nice to have a pool. and you start looking at houses on realtor.com.

8:59This is this idea of the hedonic treadmill. There's a concept that was first brought about by psychologists, Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell. And it describes that we have a tendency to return back to a stable baseline of happiness. And everybody's baseline of happiness is obviously different depending on their life, depending on the way they were raised, depending on their parents, all of that. But we kind of go back to this baseline. No matter what happens to us, whether it's really good or really bad, we kind of go back to the same place. There was actually a really famous study that they did where they compared two very different groups.

9:35One group won the lottery and the other group of people had just become paraplegics. And surprisingly, a year later when they followed up with those people, the levels of both groups reported happiness extremely similar. One group had won the lottery, won millions of dollars, and the other became paraplegic and their happiness a year later was similar, very similar between the two because the thrill of winning millions of dollars wore off and the devastation of the accident that they had softened. And so we kind of always return back to baseline every time because our brains were built to adapt.

10:12And so what was once amazing kind of becomes normal. What was tragic kind of becomes normal as well. Like I'm sure you probably have things in your life that you wanted six months ago. Or, you know, I'm sure some people listening have a life right now that you dreamed about 10 years ago, but you probably still feel the same. So that's the hedonic treadmill, which, you know, I want you to understand we can change our levels of happiness based off of what we perceive and what we focus on. But if that's the case, if happiness doesn't come from what's happens to us, like somebody winning the lottery or somebody becoming paralyzed, realized, where does it come from?

10:53Well, it comes from what you focus on and your perspective of what happens to you. You know, your brain is bombarded with 11 million bits of information every single second. And your conscious mind can only take in 40 of them every single second. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And the ones that get through are based off of, you know, your reticular activating system, your reticular activating system deems what is important and what isn't important. And it deems what is important and what is important based off of what you focus on. And so, you know, if you're focused on danger, you're going to see threats everywhere.

11:32Like I have friends that were raised by parents that are extremely fearful. And it is just so hard for them to get past thinking that they're in danger all the time. They see threats everywhere. They're always in states of fear. You know, if you're focused on lack, you'll feel poor even if your needs aren't met. You'll always be in scarcity. If you're focused on stress, you'll find more things to stress about. But if you decide, hey, I'm going to shift my focus, obviously my brain's going to naturally go towards the negative with this negativity bias, but I'm going to intentionally shift my focus, everything starts to change.

12:07There was actually a study that a lady named Barbara Fredrickson did, and it was about positive emotions versus negative emotions. And positive emotions actually broaden our perception. And so people were shown positive images and people were shown negative images. And the people who were shown positive images literally saw more in a visual task that they were given. They saw more colors, they saw more shapes, they saw more options, they perform better on tests, which show that positive emotions don't just feel good, they actually expand your perception and they expand your mind and what you can see.

12:45Which means choosing to focus on something that might be positive or finding a silver lining even in the middle of chaos isn't like being naive. It's actually being really strategic of how you want to feel in your life. And so what we need to do is we need to actually start to rewire our brain through neuroplasticity by focusing on things to be grateful for. I would tell you if you were to rewind 15 years ago and tell me that I would be talking about being more, focusing more on gratitude, I would be like, okay, hippie, that's stupid. But I can tell you after focusing on it for the past few years, actually intentionally doing it, it's not just a mood booster.

13:26Like it's a neuroplasticity tool. It's actually how you change your level of happiness on the hedonic treadmill. It's a way to rewire your brain away from the negativity bias. And so, you know, Robert Edmonds and Michael McCullough ran a series of studies on the idea of gratitude journaling. And participants that were in the study wrote down things that they were grateful for every single week. And some didn't write down anything. The ones who wrote down what they were grateful for felt better in their lives. They reported they were more optimistic. They reported fewer physical symptoms than the group who didn't write down anything that they were grateful for.

14:06There was another study where participants wrote gratitude letters to other people like people that they're grateful for in their life, even if they didn't send the letter to that other person, they showed significantly improved mental health outcomes weeks and months later. Why? Because every time you focus on something good or you name something good or you think about things to be grateful for, you're training your brain away from the negativity bias and you're training your brain to notice the good, which I know a lot of us, we don't notice a whole lot of good. You're basically building a habit of seeing light in the dark.

14:46Our brain will automatically find bad. We need to actually be intentional about finding the good. And I've been focusing, and I've said this for a couple of years now, of how I wake up every single morning and I focus on things to be grateful for. And every single night I speak to or pray to whatever might be creating this whole world that we live in and talk about all of the things that I'm grateful for before I do anything else when I go to bed. And so we need to actually start focusing more on the positive. And we actually can make the positive things stick in our brain more. You know, we need to stop just like going to the next thing when something positive happens.

15:25We need to stop for a second and we need to savor the good. There's actually a thing that psychologist Rick Hansen explains that he actually says that we can install positive experiences into our brain. And the way that we do this is by holding them in our awareness for 20 seconds. And so this allows them to sink into your long-term memory. And let's be honest, I don't know if you're like me, I will accomplish something and I'm immediately onto the next thing. Or I'll get a compliment and I'm like, yeah, whatever, thank you. I'm not going to say it nice to that, obviously, the person, but I just kind of go onto the next thing.

16:01So what he calls this, he calls it taking in the good. And it's really, really simple. When something good happens, pause. Like, let it land. Like, feel it for a second. Like, really stay with it. Because when something bad happens and it's a shock to the system, you feel it. And you feel it deeply. And that's why if I say, like, think about the worst moment of your life. You can recall it immediately. Where you were, what you were feeling, what everything looks like. it's because it was a shock to the system. It landed. And so when something good happens to you, when you get a compliment, when you have an accomplishment, when you create an amazing paper and get an A plus on it, you got to let it land and you've got to feel it and you've got to stay with it and you've got to let your brain and your body digest it for 20 seconds and you don't rush past it.

16:53It's kind of like a mental rehearsal that deepens your joy. And it allows you to, you know, change your location on the hedonic treadmill over time because you're starting to really focus on and feel the great things that are happening in your life. Like for me, truthfully, I've been doing this a lot as a parent. Like I know that my son is learning about life and how to be happy and how things are happening through me. And so I am consciously slowing down myself as many times I possibly can. like when he smiles and he's in like full happiness or like, you know, we're dancing in the kitchen or something like that.

17:31I'm trying to take these mental snapshots of how amazing life is right now. And it's actually changing the way that I feel when I wake up every single day. And I'm also at the same time being a parent, I'm trying to make his level of happiness high as I possibly can from the start. So hopefully, you know, as he gets older, his hedonic treadmill, like his level of happiness where he's on in the hedonic treadmill is higher than the average person. It's higher than mine ever was. And it really comes down to our perspective in life. Like our perspective is a choice and it requires practice. You know, the ability to choose your perspective to reframe situations is one of the most powerful cognitive skills that we have.

18:19Like you don't have to believe everything that you think when you think something negative or think something bad about yourself or be fearful about it. You don't have to believe everything you think. You can question every single one of your thoughts and you can change your perspective in the moment. You can reframe. It's called cognitive reframing, where you change your perspective and your thoughts in the moment. And you sit there and you examine and you challenge and you reframe those negative beliefs. You can change how you feel and how you act in those moments. You have to understand that reframing is not like just lying to yourself.

18:51It's not you know toxic positivity where like everything's going to shit you're like no i'm i'm really good i swear i'm really good no it's like this idea where you sit back and you you have something happen to you and you think to yourself like what else could this mean like what part of this is in my control what good can come from this how can i grow from this it's not to be like no i swear i'm okay even though i'm i'm going nuts right it's not toxic positive thinking it's it's more like uh It's more like mental jujitsu more than anything else. And this is how you train your brain to find things to be happy, regardless of circumstances, because it's already trained to find the negative.

19:30I want to at least train it to find more positive. Is it always easy? Hell no, right? But I can tell you it has absolutely changed my life. I've never been so happy as I am right now. And it's not because of my circumstances. It's because of me intentionally thinking of how blessed I am every single moment. And so when we, you know, look at everything that happens outside of us, we like to believe that our happiness and our peace and our well-being comes from what happens to us and comes from outside of us. But study after study after study show that's not true. It's not what happens to you. It's what you focus on.

20:03It's your perception of your life. It's not how good your life is. It's how grateful you are. You know, your brain is always interpreting. It's always filtering. It's always narrating your story. But you, if you're more intentional and you don't let yourself just go to default all the time, you get to shape that story. So every morning that you wake up, you get to decide like, what is the world that I will live in today? And how can I wake up in the morning, focus on what is it I'm grateful for, and actually start to notice the thing that's around me? You know, believe me, it's not delusion. It's really taking full ownership for how you're going to be in your life, how you're going to feel in your life, how you're going to act in your life.

20:41And when you take full ownership of your perception, that's when your life really starts to feel amazing. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tab me in it, Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. If you're interested in coaching more with me outside of the podcast, go to mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. You can see the information there. And I'm gonna leave it 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.