The Power of Habit | 6 Habits to Change Your Life

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. Today, we're gonna be talking about the power of building habits. We're gonna talk about six different habits that you need to create in your life to move the needle today. Because you don't need more motivation. You need better habits. Because right now, whether you realize it or not, your life is being run by invisible habits that you might not even be aware of. And most of them, a lot of times, are working against you.

0:44They can be draining your energy, stealing your time, and then quietly stealing your potential. And if you keep saying something like, someday I'll get my life together, but your habits don't change, then nothing else in your life is going to change. And the scariest part about this is that if you don't change, you will wake up in 10 years from now and you will have the same problems that you do today. But the difference is you're going to just be older and those habits and problems are going to be 10 times harder to break. So let me show you how to change your habits so that you can change the entire course of your life.

1:20First thing I want to talk about is let's stop pretending that you need 500 habits, like new habits to fix your life. You need maybe one, two or like three habits that will create a massive ripple effect in your life. So you don't have to think like, I need 57 habits. No, you just need a few. And I'm going to give you six different ones to choose from today. And the truth is 80 % of your life results come from 20 % of the things that you consistently do. And if I'm being honest with you, it's probably like 5%. And these 5 % are like the biggest needle moving habits that you can create in your life.

2:01They are super important. And so let's find your 5 % because these are not the same for every single person that's gonna be listening to this episode. But I'm gonna give you six categories that I want you to explore and I want you to pick out the ones that you feel you need the most in your life right now. Number one, the first one is you need one habit that keeps you healthy and in shape. I'm not saying that you need a six pack. I'm not saying that you need 5 % body fat. I'm not saying that you need to run a marathon, on. But you need a body that can carry out your mission in life. You need a body that can keep up with the life that you see in your future that you want to create.

2:40And if you don't have the body that you need in order to bring you there, you need to create it. And I don't mean like this isn't about punishment. You're not punishing yourself. You're not punishing your body. I want you to understand that when you feel better physically, everything in your life is easier. You work better mentally. You work better emotionally. You have more energy. Like you need this vessel that you live in to be as full of energy as you possibly can every single day. And the first thing that you really need to understand is that you need to move more and you need to move every single day.

3:18You don't need to walk 10 miles, but I cannot highlight this enough. so few people nowadays move their body as much as they need to. And then they wonder why they're depressed and why they have a foggy brain and why they don't look the way that they want to, why they don't have energy that they want to. You need to move your body more. So go for a daily walk outside. Move your body, clear your mind, do strength training two to three times a week. You'll get some muscle on your body. And I want you to realize this, if you're trying to burn fat, One little secret a lot of people don't know about is the more muscle that you create in your body, the more your metabolism works to burn fat.

4:00So if you just try to bring on more muscle into your body, number one, you'll probably look better. Number two, you'll burn a whole lot more fat as well. Do some yoga throughout the week. Do some running throughout the week. Go for more walks. Do more stretching. Give your body some love. It needs some love. So many people are neglecting their body. Free your body from sitting down in this position that we're all stuck in all day long. Another healthy habit, prep one healthy meal per day. Like your body is your home. It's the only home you're ever going to have. Treat it like it's the foundation of your life.

4:33Start treating your body like it's a temple and stop treating it like a tent. That's a Jimmy Buffett reference for any of those parrot heads out there. So that's number one. Number two, you need one habit that is a creative outlet for you. This one is really, really underrated. But if you're always consuming content, whether that be reading or on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Netflix, if you're always consuming, you're never creating. And your creativity is screaming inside of you to get out. Humans are made to create. Every single person is creative. You have seen how creative children are, right?

5:12I want you to realize that didn't die inside of you. You weren't just like born without creativity. You weren't the kid that just was, you know, popped out and you just decided to stare at walls. I'm sure you had a creative mind when you were a kid. It didn't die inside of you. It's just buried under all of the errands on your to-do list. And so you need something that is just yours. Not something that you're going to do to make money, but something that's yours that is your creative outlet. What is it? It could be guitar. It could be singing. It could be dancing, painting, pottery. It could be writing for 10 minutes a day.

5:43It could be making videos. It could be editing. It could be gardening, photography, even Lego building, puzzles, just something that is just you creating something that you're putting out to the world. It's not about being good or being perfect or mastering this thing. It's about getting your internal world out into the external world. So that's number two. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. Number three is you need one habit that builds your knowledge. The fastest way to change your life is to upgrade your brain. Not just once, every single day. So if you want a better life, figure out what knowledge you need in order to create that life and then download that knowledge into your brain every single day.

6:29Read five pages a day. Listen to 10 minutes of an audio book while you're walking. Replace TV and scrolling with the podcasts are going to download the most knowledge into your brain. You want to download knowledge into your brain. That's it. If you want to change your life, you need knowledge, you need a skill set. That's it. What do you need to learn? And then what skill set do you need to learn? That's it. You should download both those things into your brain. Everything in this world can be taken from you, except for one thing, and that is the knowledge that's in your brain. The smartest people I know are not born smart.

7:03They built themselves. They become obsessed with learning. You need to become obsessed with learning. Knowledge doesn't change your life. I understand that. But applied knowledge, that's a weapon. And that's what you want to create in your brain. So that's number three. Number four is you need one habit that evolves your mindset. You want to know why so many people are stuck for decades? It's not laziness. It's mental stagnation. They need to grow their mindset. You do too. That's why you're here for this podcast, right? Your world will change when your inner world expands. And so you need to build stuff into your life that develop your mindset.

7:42Journaling to try to really become more aware of yourself or journaling through a hard moment or emotion. Practicing 60 seconds of gratitude. You know, developing affirmations and repeating a truth that you want to believe in. Brainwash into yourself every single morning. Meditating and watching your thoughts and not judging them at all. Visualizing who you are becoming in the life that you're creating. Hiring a coach to help you get better with all of that. Mindset work isn't therapy. It's basically like mental strength training. And you can't build a strong life if you have a fragile mind. So that's number four.

8:20Number five is you need a relationship strengthening habit. Because success and achievement without connection is just loneliness with more money. Like we as humans are wired for connection, but most people who are trying to achieve unintentionally neglect their most important relationships, friends, partners, children, and especially themselves. And so maybe you wanna make sure that you have one intentional conversation per day with someone that you care about. Maybe you have a daily phone down dinner where you have dinner with your family every single night and you never look at your phone during dinner.

8:58Maybe you send one gratitude text every morning to somebody. Maybe you have a weekly date night, no matter what, with your partner. Or if you don't have a partner, maybe you have a weekly date night with yourself, right? The reason why this matters is because your relationships shape your nervous system. The better that your relationships are, the safer, the stronger, and the more joyful that you actually feel in your life. So that's number five. And number six is a wealth-creating habit. Money won't buy happiness, but the stress of not having money will rob you of happiness. And I always say the only problems that money solves are money problems.

9:38And so, you know, I'm not just talking about like making more money. Of course, you can have a habit where you make more money, but you can also have a habit where you learn how to save money. You can have a habit where you learn how to invest money so that your money makes money babies and makes you more money without you having to do anything with it, right? So it's not just making more, It's learning how to actually steward the money that you have and you will continue to make. And building trust with yourself and your financial life. And so it could be a habit of checking your accounts weekly and to track spending daily in an app that helps you with that.

10:13It could be reading one finance article per week. It could be 10 minutes a day on a side hustle that makes you more money. It could be learning how to invest so that you make sure that your money makes you more money. because you'll never really feel rich if you feel out of control. And the more that you can, like you can, money's a game. And whether you realize it or not, we're all in the game. If you wanna not learn how to play the game, that's your prerogative. But if you're gonna be in the game and you can't leave this economy that we're in, you might as well learn how to play the game and get better at it.

10:45I promise you this, it won't take away any of your problems, but it will take away your money stress. That will make your life a whole lot easier. So that's the six habits that you can build within yourself. Now let's talk about how to simply put habits into your life. I'm gonna make these simple. And if you've been following this podcast for a while, you may have actually heard a couple of these before. But if you've ever tried to change your habits through like hype and willpower and force, you know you can do it for like three or four days. Sometimes you can do it for like two weeks if you have like really strong mentality and willpower.

11:18But eventually you're gonna find yourself right back in the same Netflix stained hoodie that you wear every time you sit down and watch TV wondering what happened to your habits. And a habit doesn't need to be hard. It just needs to be done daily. It's the consistent chipping away until it eventually just becomes part of who you are, not something that you do. And so this is the three-step method that I teach my clients to start any habit. The first one, you've probably heard me say this before, it'd be on this for a while, is you need to anchor it to something that you already do. Don't rely on your memory.

11:57Attach your new habit to a current habit. It's called habit stacking. After I brush my teeth, I do 100 pushups. After I pour coffee, I read five pages of a book. After I put the kids down for bed, I do a five-minute breathing technique. After I take my morning shower, I do two minutes of breath work. I don't know, whatever it is. You take one habit that you do every single day and you attach the new habit onto it. It's called habit stacking. Habits love anchors. You're trying to anchor a new habit onto an old habit you already do. It's basically like this. It's like putting a new train car on a track that's already running.

12:41You're just attaching it and it just keeps going and takes off and has a whole lot of momentum to it because it's already on the back of another one. All right, so that's the first one. The second thing is you want to make it so small that it's almost laughable because it's not the habit itself that we usually resist. It's the changing of tasks. It's doing something new that our brain usually resists. Our brain usually doesn't want to do something new. And so if you want to meditate, don't go, I'm going to meditate for 20 minutes. Like just sit quietly for 60 seconds. That's it. If you want to start writing, don't write a novel.

13:16Don't say I'm going to write a novel. Don't say I'm going to write 20 pages today. Like start by writing one sentence. Like stupid simple is what you want to do. Don't run five miles. Just put your shoes on and walk for two minutes. Like what you're doing is you're trying to just get this thing started. You're not working towards the outcome. You're trying to just get yourself started in this thing and to continue to keep showing up every single day. And what you'll do is you'll start to build an identity of the person who does X. Like you're going to build your identity of the person who meditates.

13:49You're going to build your identity of the person who writes every single day. You're going to build your identity of the person who loves going on runs by just those small little steps. Small steps make the larger steps easier. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is to celebrate yourself when you do this habit. Your brain loves rewards. It sounds ridiculous. Every time I say it, I feel ridiculous. But then I read another article about how much your brain loves to celebrate. And because when you celebrate, it releases dopamine and we all like dopamine. And when we get dopamine, we want more dopamine.

14:23So our brain goes, hmm, that thing that I just did, I got dopamine for. I'm going to do more of that thing. So, you know, even if it's just like a smile, a fist bump, like, hell yeah, you're doing amazing. You know, put on your favorite song and dance like an idiot for three minutes and 30 seconds, right? We don't change through shame. And most people are trying to shame themselves into changing. We change because we build self-trust in ourself. We change because we build more connection with ourself by celebrating ourself. And so tiny little wins turn into more trust within yourself. More trust within yourself turns into bigger wins, which turns into more momentum.

15:03And over time, it will create an entire identity shift. And so if you really want to change your life this year, what I want you to figure out is what are the two to three of the six habits that I just gave you that you're going to start this week? Don't do all six. Please don't do all six because if you do too much at one time, you're going to run this car right off the track. I promise you that. I've seen everybody be like, I'm going to do every single one of them. Do a couple of them, whatever it might be. And you want to do these things every single day. and as you're doing them, remind yourself, this is who I am now.

15:37I am this type of person that does this. I am the type of person who does this. Because what we're doing is we're shifting our, through our actions and our habits, we're shifting our identity. And if you become the type of person that just does this, it makes taking your habits so much easier. A quick example is like, if you think about somebody who's severely overweight, they might not have the habit at all of going to the gym and working out and being healthy. But if they just start doing it every single day and they don't stop and you see them five years down the road and they're in incredible shape and they go to the gym every single day just because they love it and it's become a habit, it's just become who they are now.

16:17And that's really what we're trying to build within ourselves is the identity shift that this is who I am now. 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. And if you wanna learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, 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.