Why You Feel Stuck and How to Get Out of It

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. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, do me a massive favor, share an episode with someone that you think would get something out of it. We'd be able to impact more people's lives and hopefully change the world in some sort of way. So if you do that, I'd greatly appreciate it. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about why you are stuck. And I'm not gonna give you any of the reasons why you think that you're stuck.

0:38We're actually going to go way deeper than you think, way deeper into your psychology. And today's episode will be pretty deep, but I hope to challenge your beliefs on what it takes to change yourself and what it takes to change your life. And I want to give you a different perspective of what it takes to change your life than maybe you have ever thought of. It took me probably 16, 17 years of working on myself and being in self-development before I realized this truth. And that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the idea, yes, the idea of time. Man lives in time and man invented time.

1:19Time does not exist outside of the own construct that we have made in our own minds. And inventing time is our favorite way to play the game of escape. So what we do, I have realized, is we trick ourselves and talk about time and use time as a way to delay changing our lives. And if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I promise you it's going to make a whole lot of sense as we go through it. The idea of it is this. Most people aren't stuck because they don't know what to do. Most people are stuck because they think that changing themselves takes time. Now, if you would have told me this five, 10 years ago, I'd be like, yeah, it does take time, dumbass.

2:03But now I'm looking at it, I'm going, no, no, no, no, no. It actually doesn't take any time to change yourself. And that's what we're going to talk about is the idea that change takes time is actually completely false. Maybe you've been believing that changing yourself takes time. And maybe this is exactly a thing that's been keeping you stuck. And so when you look at it, the idea of, hey, I'm working on myself. This is taking time. Time is like real seductive. It gives us hope. Yes, we're doing it. We're working on ourselves. Good job, Rob. It gives us hope. But really that hope is just some counterfeit hope.

2:42I'm changing. I'm getting better. I'm working on myself so I can be happier in the future. I'll be happier in the future if I just keep on working on myself. But as long as you keep thinking in terms of tomorrow, then you don't have to change today. Time becomes kind of this like safety blanket that we wrap around our fear. And it says like, hey, keep working on yourself. You know, you're, sweetie, you're a work in progress. One day you're going to feel better. One day you're going to feel happier. But if we're being brutally honest, how many one days have gone by and passed you already? You know, if you've been working on yourself for a while, three years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, it's probably quite a few one days where you're like, one day I'll feel better.

3:35One day I'll feel happier. And then you fast forward five years, you know, like, I feel pretty close to exactly the same as I did five years ago. And what you have to say is that the future becomes this place where we place all of our action because we're too afraid to take action today. Does that make sense? Like we use time as an excuse for why we don't change right now. We use time as an excuse for why we don't change right now in this moment. Think about this. When you are truly in danger, like if your house was on fire right now, or you're standing outside and your child is running towards the street and there's a car coming.

4:16What happens? You don't schedule a plan. You don't make your to-do list of how to get out of a burning house. You don't put your vision board together. You don't journal about it. What do you do? You act in this moment. Now. Time disappears. And that's what you have to realize there is only acting from the now. So the mind bender of this is your psychological and emotional emergencies that you have of loving yourself more, of fixing your trauma, of becoming a better person. For some reason, we don't put the same amount of urgency as if our house was on fire. And so we'll say, oh, I'm working on myself.

5:02I'll fix them in time. Oh, I'll start meditating in the future. Oh, I'll start journaling in the future. I'll start working on becoming more vulnerable in the future because I need to do X, Y, Z first. And this illusion of time is our scapegoat for not changing ourself right now. You cannot change yourself in the future. You can only change yourself right now. So you have to stop kicking the can down the road. But you have to realize that your fears don't want you to change. change because change, even though it could be an amazing change, is a threat to the brain. And the reason why is because change is uncertain.

5:41And even though you know that you won't die if you become happier, you won't die if you have more joy or more love in your life, you won't die for any of those things. Your brain is going, but I don't know. We've never done this before. So we need to protect ourself. Tell him to do it in the future. Tell him I'm making progress. And then you fast forward two years and you're in the exact same spot. And so let's bust this myth that's really poisoning a lot of our growth. And this was poisoning a lot of my growth for a long time. The lie is that this takes time. You don't need more time. You need to be more present.

6:21Let me explain what I mean by that. Time doesn't create clarity for you. Time doesn't make you more courageous. Time only delays what you could do right now. And so we've kind of been sold this linear model where it's step by step, kind of like I can't go to the gym today and wake up tomorrow and be a different person. And so we think, oh yeah, like, you know, it's going to take time to lose these 40 pounds, which it will. So we think our self-improvement's the same. Being a different person is the same. Oh, you know what? I'm going to heal myself over time, step by step. I'm going to learn to love myself in phases.

7:02You know, I'm going to get the house in order when I finally feel in peace. And so what I want you to understand is that you don't need a five-year plan to heal yourself. You don't need a planner or to-do list to start loving and forgiving yourself. You don't need the circumstances in your life to change in order to choose to be happy. And I use those words very particularly. Choose to be happy because happiness is a choice and you can choose to be happy in this moment regardless of your circumstances. But the trap is I will change when this happens in my life or I will change. I'll be happier when I get this amount of money my bank account.

7:46No, change cannot happen in the future. Change can only happen now. If you say, I'm going to change next Tuesday, when next Tuesday rolls around, it is just another present moment. So instead of delaying that shit for next Tuesday, why don't I just change right now? Change happens now. Change can only happen in this moment. And that means, why don't I actually change myself now? And we will be right back. And now back to the show. The real reason why this is hard, because this is not easy, I will be very honest with you in this, is what I'm saying probably starting to make some sense. But the reason why it is so hard to change in the moment is because it requires immense amount of presence.

8:37And that is something that we are getting worse and worse at as humans with social media and with phones and the fact that humans' attention spans in the past 20 years has gone down 33%. If we want to change in the moment, we've got to learn to be as present as we possibly can. This is one of the reasons why meditating is good, why mindfulness is good, while distancing yourself from social media and from trying to keep busy all the time is a good thing to do. Because if you want change, and even if you believe that you can change, your subcontracting subconscious is still running half of the programs throughout your entire day.

9:19You know, I think the last article that I saw, the most updated article that I saw was Harvard said that about 49 % of what you do on a daily basis is autopilot. 49%. So we can try to change, but still 49 % of us is still doing exactly what it did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Your subconscious will still pull you back into your old programming if you're not radically present. And here's why. This is the reason why you keep repeating the same things you've done your entire life. Your old relationships. You keep falling off of the self-care wagon. You keep chasing happiness as if it's like the next goal.

10:03Not because you're broken, but because you are living in default mode. We all do this. I'd find myself doing this multiple times a day and I have to pull myself out of it. I go back into default mode of old Rob. And default mode is a thief. It steals your now. It steals your present moment. And if you're not fixing yourself in the present moment, it also steals your future self. And so change not only takes a lot of action from you, it also takes a lot of presence, like immense amounts of presence. and that presence is so that you don't get wrapped up in your old patterns, to not get stuck and go back into autopilot.

10:42So we must become, if we're really trying to change ourself, like change can, you can be a different person right now than you have ever been your entire life and you can carry that through the rest of your day, but you have to be really paying attention that you don't dip back into your old self. You see what I'm saying? It's like, you know, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, one of my favorite quotes is Alan Watts, you're under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. You can change not over time, but in this moment. And so in order to do that, we must be very aware as, I mean, as aware as we possibly can be of every action that we take to make sure that every action that we take is not from old patterns or habits, but they are the actions that are aligned with your new self.

11:31the thoughts that are aligned with your new self in the direction that you want to go in your life. And if you're really thinking about this, it is very daunting. It is a huge task and you will not be perfect, but you will change your life faster than you ever thought possible. What you thought would take a year to get done, you'll get done in a couple months. Why? Because you have five times more presence over the past two months than you have your entire life. And so what I want you to really think about and to kind of bring all this home so you really understand is the only place where all of this happens, like every moment of your life, every moment that's ever happened to you in your past, every moment that will ever happen to you in your entire future until the moment that you die will be a present moment.

12:20It will be a moment just like right now and just like right now. and now this present moment. And so the only place where your peace exists, if you want a more peaceful life, is right here and now. Be more peaceful now. The only time where love and acceptance exists is right now. It's not in the past. It's not in the future. It is, if you want to feel love, the only time that you can feel love, right now. That's it. And you can feel it right now. And you can also feel it right now and now we have another present moment. The only chance that you have to live is this exact moment. And the only place where you can change is actually right now.

13:04So what if you stopped delaying your life and saying, I'm going to change in the future? What if you stopped negotiating with time? What if you stopped postponing your peace and postponing all of the joy and happiness? Like if you want more joy in your life, feel joy right now. Nothing has to happen for you to feel joy. Nothing has to happen for you to feel peace. Nothing has to happen for you to feel love. It is a feeling that arises from inside of you that you can feel right now. Like stop outsourcing your freedom. Stop outsourcing your emotions. Stop outsourcing all of that. What if you just realize that everything that you already want to be is in this moment?

13:49And if you just started acting like that was the case, what if the version of yourself that you want to be in the future where you're like, I know, like, I know what it feels like to sit there and be like, man, I know there's a better version of myself in the future. I know there's a more evolved, a more peaceful, a more loving, a more wise version of myself in the future. What if that version of yourself that you want was actually a decision right now to be that person? and then an action, one action after another action to just do it. Because change happens now. Now is the only time that change happens.

14:26And so think about this for a second. What if you just, whenever you're starting to think about these things, if you just close your eyes for a few seconds, took 60 seconds away from being all over the place and in the, you know, Tokyo drifting your life from one meeting to another Zoom meeting, you just take you know three four really deep breaths you just let your shoulders drop and then just ask yourself the question what have I been putting off for tomorrow that I could move on right now like what have you been putting off for tomorrow that you could just do right now what have you been putting off feeling for the future for later on down the road that you could just do right now and what if you just said to yourself like I'm not waiting anymore not for peace not not for love, not for permission, not for happiness.

15:12I'm going to feel all of it in this moment. The best version of me does not exist in the future. The best version of me exists right now. And then every time you catch yourself thinking that changing your life takes time, remember that change can only happen now and time is just something that we made up to just delay our progress. And so if you're still listening, guess what? We're in this present moment together. there is no tomorrow where change happens. There's no perfect moment coming for you. There is only now. Right here, right now, in this moment. Change happens now. So my challenge to you is change your life right now.

15:55So 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 want to see about coaching with me outside of this podcast, Go ahead and go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'll 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.