The One Habit You Need to Reset Your Mindset

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 podcast episode. If you're out there, you wanna get my new free morning mindset priming routine. It's a free video lesson with worksheet that teaches you exactly how to set up your own morning mindset priming every single morning to set yourself for who you wanna be, how you wanna act in the world that you're trying to create. Go to morningpriming.com. Once again, morningpriming.com right now and get it for free. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about the one habit that you need in your life if you want to reset your mindset and make it the best you possibly can.

0:48And if you're listening to this podcast, you're here because you probably know, you have an idea that if you gain more control over your mindset, your life will be better in many different ways. You probably understand that everything comes from your mindset. What you think of yourself, what you think of the world, what you think of other people, what you think is possible for yourself, if you have some sort of fears, if you have limiting beliefs, all of those things come from your mindset. And the better that your mindset is, the better your entire life will be, the better your relationships will be, the more happiness, joy, success, money you'll make, all of those things, right?

1:27Well, when I first started in self-development, it was all about how can I add more? How can I become better? How can I become smarter? How can I learn the next tip or trick to get myself out of this place or to get better? And so I was like, I'm gonna get better. I'm trying to get smarter. And it was like adding more all of the time. These tips and these tricks and these psychological things to master my mind. But there's one habit that I believe has the power to transform your life at its core. And it doesn't happen to be a productivity trick. It's not a morning routine. It's not a discipline hack.

2:05It's not a how to create habits in your life. It's this one small thought process that shifts your entire internal framework. And it is this habit of self-inquiry. It is the ability to turn inward and question yourself. It's to look at yourself in the mirror, whether that's physically or just mentally, and to question yourself, to question your assumptions, to question your beliefs, and to dismantle all of the subconscious patterns that are shaping your reality. Because what it does is it shapes your perspective and from that perspective, it creates your reality and what you see of reality. It is this observation of looking at what's going on in your mind and seeing what's going on in your mind, seeing what you're saying to yourself, seeing how you're labeling the world, how you're labeling certain people and labeling certain instances, and then questioning everything.

3:08Like what's actually going on here? What is the reason? Why do I really feel this way? Is this truly what I believe? or is this something I learned from somebody else? Is this my truth or did somebody teach this to me at some point in time in my childhood? It's this ability to really take a step back and observe yourself and question yourself without judgment, without guilt, without shame, but to just sit there and look at yourself with true curiosity more than anything else. Now, why is self-inquiry the key to basically everything in this case? Because most people live their life just reacting.

3:54We've all done it, where we're basically coming to this world with all of the hardware that we need, the brain, the body, and then all of this software is downloaded from people that we know, from our parents, from observing the world, from observing other people. All of this software gets downloaded. and it's not on purpose. It just kind of gets downloaded from who we hang out with. There's nature, there's nurture, all of that. And we just start reacting to the world based off of our software and everybody else has different software than us. And what do we do? We just react to life based off of our software, based off of our old thoughts, based off of our old habits, based off of our old self-limiting beliefs or fears.

4:36And a lot of times what we do until hopefully we wake up at some point in time is we live life without realizing that we've been running on autopilot. We've just been acting out a set of scripts that we never actually consciously wrote for ourselves. And you know, you've heard me talk about it before. All of these scripts that we're just playing out come from our childhood. All of the experiences that we've had along the way. Our cultural conditioning. Our unresolved emotions and traumas. Things that your parents said to you. things that your teacher might've said to you in fourth grade after you messed up on something in just millions of little teeny tiny moments.

5:17A lot of times people are like, well, I want to go back to the moment where all this started. Sometimes you developed a habit, you developed a perspective, you developed a fear off of a moment that you don't even recall. It could have just been a little tiny moment that just shifted your life completely. And this affects everything in your life. And I mean everything in your life, from the way that you respond to criticism, to the way that you handle relationships, to the way that you talk to people, the way that you think about people, the way you react to other people. It has to do with your fears.

5:48It has to do with your ambitions, why you react a certain way to something when another person could have the exact same thing happen to them and they react completely different. All of these come from this deeper subconscious context that people rarely explore. And that's what I want to talk about with you today. Self-inquiry is the habit of stepping outside of yourself, outside of this automatic reactive way of being and asking yourself questions. What's really going on here? What belief is driving this reaction in me? When did I learn this? Do I want to continue with this? Do I want to continue to believe this?

6:34Or do I want to believe something different? And here's the key to it. When you practice self-inquiry consistently, it dissolves your limiting beliefs. It dissolves your fears. It dissolves your reactions, your unconscious programs. And so many people are like, give me the tip or trick. What is the thing that I need to do when I'm in fear or when I'm overthinking or when I'm in my limiting beliefs, as if there's like a shortcut to doing it. There is no shortcut. When you find yourself there, that's what you need to do is bring in self-inquiry and start getting curious. It is the first step to reclaiming your personal power.

7:14And so to develop this habit of self-inquiry, you must train yourself to pause before reacting, to pause before reacting. I was running a call yesterday on my year-long coaching group called Mindset University. And one of the questions that was asked by a lady, and she was asking a question and she was talking about how something happened in her life and how she was triggered by it and how she reacted. And all of her words, I had to pause and say, hey, can I just give you just honest reflection? all of the words that you're using are making it sound like you're a victim as if you have no control over your reaction oh well i couldn't do anything about it i can't control myself and i was like are you telling me 100 there is absolutely no way you can control yourself and she's like well no but it's really hard to i'm like okay well cool perfect first thing that we need to do is admit that it's not 100 impossible to control your reaction because if you're saying it's impossible that's not making you a victim.

8:20And if you're a victim, you can't change anything. In order for you to change it, you have to take ownership and say, I am the person that's able to do it. And so it was acting as if there was no moment for her to be able to pause and to take ownership of it. And as we started talking about it, she's like, yeah, well, there was a moment where I was feeling myself getting ramped up before I got triggered and then I blew up. And so it's this ability where we must train ourselves to pause before reacting instead of being like, I can't control it. Because if you say I can't control it, then there's nothing you can do about it.

8:56But we all know that if your entire family's life was on the line and you had to not react to something, you wouldn't react. Or if the person that your idol that you look up to the most was in the room with you, you probably wouldn't react the exact same way. So instead of blindly following our first emotional response, we pause before reacting and we take a step back and we observe ourselves and we start asking questions and getting really curious, right? Don't shame yourself or guilt yourself or beat yourself up, but just take a step back and act like you're watching somebody that you don't know and just be like, huh, why is that person doing that?

9:37Why is that person acting this way? And so it involves basically three stages, okay? The first one is recognizing the trigger, the thing that triggers you. The first step is to notice when you're emotionally charged. Before you blow up or before you cry or before whatever it is, you can start to feel your body change. Triggers can appear in anger, in anxiety, in sadness, in defensiveness, in rage, any reaction or emotion. and this is good or bad too. Like you can use this for good. You know, if you get really happy about something, what made me so happy? Why did it make me so happy? Can I bring more of that into my life?

10:18So any reaction, good or bad, anytime you feel an intense emotional response, it's an opportunity to notice it. And it's an opportunity to learn about yourself. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so that's the first thing is to just notice the thing that's triggering you. The second thing is to just become curious. So instead of getting lost in your story and getting lost in habit, you want to ask yourself some questions to kind of distance yourself from the thoughts. What's the belief that's being activated or what's the fear that's being activated? Have I ever felt this way before?

10:57Where did it come from? Is this thought or belief universally true? Like if someone feels like they're not good enough, is it absolute truth that I'm not good enough? It never is. What assumptions am I making about this whole situation? Oh, well, she acted this way, so that must mean that this is what she was thinking. What assumptions am I making about a situation? What emotion is beneath all of this initial reaction? What's the opposite of what I believe to be true? Is it true that that opposite could also be true? Because if it is, then that makes my thing not 100 % true. You know, how would I respond if I wasn't attached to this belief?

11:40And you can go and just ask yourself questions. How do you ask yourself a question? It's very simple. Start a sentence with who, what, why, when, where, or how. So how does this pop up in my life? When has this happened before? What do I want to believe? Why do I think this way? Who could I have learned this from? Where did this originate? Who, what, why, when, where, how? It could come from anywhere. And so it's just about really asking yourself questions. And what you'll realize is that if you ask yourself enough questions, you basically dissolve the belief. You dissolve the fear. You dissolve the limiting belief about yourself.

12:14You dissolve all of these because you kind of like back it into a corner and you realize that what you thought was truth was just something you've been thinking for a long time. What happens is most of the time we have a thought and we have a thought for so long, we believe it to be true, but it's not absolute truth. We just think that it's true in our mind. And so that's the second part of it, just become very curious and start asking yourself a bunch of questions. You notice a trigger, then you become curious and ask yourself questions. And number three is about reframing and releasing whatever that thing is.

12:45So the point here is to challenge your thoughts. The reason why a lot of people who have a certain belief system don't like to hang out with people who don't have the same belief system is because people do not like their thoughts or beliefs to be challenged. If your beliefs or thoughts cannot be challenged, if you have a problem with that, that is something that you need to work on. You want to challenge your own thoughts, challenge your own beliefs. The way to release yourself from old beliefs, old thoughts, is to prove that they are not absolutely true. They're not 100 % true. And to see from a different perspective than you normally do.

13:26When you can see from a different perspective, usually that idea starts to dissolve. That belief starts to dissolve. This is what dissolves the belief because it doesn't hold as much value anymore. It doesn't hold as much truth if there's another possibility. And you keep doing this over and over and over again. And once you uncover the belief that's behind the trigger, you can challenge it and replace it. If you're realizing that you have a deep belief that I'm not enough, ask yourself, is that true? Is it true that I'm not enough? What if I am enough? What if that's just BS? So by you becoming dedicated to doing this, you strip away the subconscious patterns that have been running your life unconsciously.

14:10And this allows you to see things with more clarity than you've actually ever seen things in your entire life. To see things more than anything else as they truly are. And so like a couple of examples of where this really will change your life and change your reality. The first one is in your relationships. Because a lot of times we're not present in our relationships, we're projecting in our relationships. And so let me give you an example. Most conflicts that happen in a relationship don't come from the present moment. They usually come from past wounds being projected onto the present moment.

14:45So like if a friend doesn't return your phone call, you might spiral into feelings of rejection or not being good enough or whatever it might be. not because of the actual miscall itself, but because it activates within you an old wound or feeling of being unimportant, or maybe your fear of abandonment that came from childhood. Like, so for me, I'll give you a great example for me, right? If I sent a text message, this was for years and I couldn't understand it. If I sent a text message back in the day to a female and she never texted me back, whether that was someone I was dating or whether that was just a friend that was a female and they didn't text back and never bothered me.

15:24If I text a friend, there was a guy friend, didn't text me back, never really bothered me. No big deal. But if I text somebody that was a man, that was an older man that I respected, that was doing amazing things in the world, and they didn't get back to me, even if it was just a couple hours, I would feel myself get triggered. And I was like, I was like, this is so odd. It's like, it doesn't matter with people that I know or people that are my good friends. But if I see someone that seems like they're doing amazing things that's out there and it's a man, most of the time, it's a man that's doing something well in the world.

15:58I would be like, well, well, maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe they don't have time for me. Maybe it's, maybe I'm not worth texting back. And I was like, where's all of this coming from? So I noticed the trigger and I was like, where's this coming from? And I started getting really curious and I was able to kind of play it back to, I realized it came from my abandonment wound for my father. So, you know, not being there, my father would say that he would pick me up and then he would go to go fishing and then he would go to a bar and he would get drunk and he would forget about me. So I had this abandonment issue specifically with men and I was projecting my wound onto these other men.

16:38You see what I mean? It had nothing to do with them. It had nothing to do with the situation I was in. It had everything to do with an unhealed wound. Now, if I would have never asked myself questions and tried to figure myself out more, I would have never figured that out. And so self-inquiry allows you to recognize the difference between reality and projection. And so instead of reacting with resentment, whatever it might be when that friend doesn't text you back, you can pause and ask, like, what meaning am I giving this? Is it really about them or is this some unresolved issue within myself?

17:11and this simple shift can turn tension in a relationship to more self-awareness. These are the moments in life where you learn and grow the most. It's not from reading a book. It's not from going to a conference. It's not from listening to this podcast. All of those are great, but in the moment where shit is hitting the fan is life giving you your lesson that you need to learn from. Stop running from it. And guess what? This is why like being in a real long-term relationship, like a romantic relationship is so triggering for so many people. Whether you want it to happen or not, your significant other becomes a proxy for your parents and everything within you that is unhealed from your relationship with each parent will 100 % come up in your relationships until you deal with it.

18:01That's why so many people will get out of a relationship because of X, Y, Z. They dump this person because of X, Y, Z. Then they get into another relationship and X, Y, Z pops up. And they're like, oh my God, this is happening again. Let me get out of the relationship with this person. They dump and they get into another relationship and X, Y, Z pops up, whatever this thing is, right? It's like, because no, it's not about them. It's about you and this thing that you need to heal. Oh, I wasn't attracted to the same type of person. Well, I wonder why, right? So that's the first thing. It'll really help you in relationships when you start getting into self-inquiry.

18:33The second place that'll really help you out a lot as well is work, success, business, career. You know, there's many people who chase success as a way to validate their worth. So they work tirelessly and they fear that if they slow down, they're going to lose their significance. And then they'll burn themselves out or they'll get anxiety or they'll have this sense of emptiness even if they do succeed. Like this is also another thing that happened to me, right i became a workaholic to prove my worth you know that's what i was trying to do i'm gonna i'm gonna be successful so i can prove that i'm worthy and then i realized at my core that i was trying to prove myself my worth to my father that had passed away more than 15 years before that right so you cannot you're starting to see how it all stems back to childhood almost every single time but you don't get to know this about yourself if you don't take a step back and question yourself Other people, it's not that they're working too hard, and that's what they're proving their self-worth.

19:31Some people have fears of starting a business, fears of pursuing their dreams. They're not good enough. They're paralyzed by fear. There's fear of rejection, the fear of failure, fear of success, the fear of not being good enough. All of those things keep them stuck, and they so badly want to succeed, but they're not succeeding because of it. And so you need to identify these fears. You need to reframe these fears. Your mind is always constantly narrating and judging and labeling and analyzing. It's filled with all of these things that you should do and should not do and comparisons and habitual loops of thoughts that you have.

20:06And so self-inquiry allows this space between you and your thoughts where you can step into deeper awareness and start to like distance yourself from your thoughts and say, hey, hold on, let me take out of my own brain and let me like just look at this as if I'm somebody else looking at this person. So instead of identifying with every anxious thought or fear, you can observe it and be like, okay, that's very interesting, but I don't have to believe that. And this is really a huge, huge game changer for people who want to work on their inner peace. In fact, there is no inner peace without self-inquiry because you cannot change something if you're not aware of it.

20:43And so most people don't want to do this though. Hopefully you're the type of person that wants to do this. Self-inquiry is not easy because it requires brutal honesty. It requires the willingness to face uncomfortable truths, to go back and think of some of the hardest moments in your life. And that's why most people stay away from it. But if it's important for you to change your life, then this is one of the most important things that you can do. And so what I want you to do is to take this process and start to think to yourself, okay, if I am triggered, let me take ownership of it. Why am I triggered?

21:15Once again, it's almost never because of the present moment. It's almost always because you're projecting the past onto this present moment. And as you starts to take a step back and you start to question yourself, you start to be curious, you'll learn more about yourself than you ever knew about yourself. And that is the real first step to making massive, massive changes in your life and in your mindset. 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 at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you want to download my morning mindset priming routine, go ahead and go to morningpriming.com to build your own routine out.

21:52that's gonna make you feel powerful and amazing throughout the day. So once again, morningpriming.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave it the same way I leave you every single episode, making sure mission makes somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.