In this solo episode of The Mindset Mentor, Rob Dial shares a simple, three‑part daily framework designed to make each day feel successful and, cumulatively, build a great life. He begins by emphasizing that the ultimate goal is to feel good, noting that money and external achievements rarely bring lasting happiness. Using the metaphor of a dog’s unconditional, present‑moment joy, he argues that prioritizing one’s own wellbeing is the foundation for better relationships and productivity. Dial critiques overly complex morning routines that become exhaustive checklists, advocating instead for a streamlined approach that focuses on three daily pillars: mind, body, and soul. For the mind, he suggests activities such as 15‑minute reading, journaling, language practice, instrument practice, or other screen‑free brain‑gym exercises. For the body, he recommends consistent movement—whether heavy lifting, animal‑flow, yoga, walking, breathing exercises, hydration, or step goals—emphasizing consistency over intensity. For the soul, he proposes meditation, prayer, time in nature, gratitude, good deeds, or spiritual reading. He stresses rotating a few options within each pillar to avoid monotony, and highlights the importance of “filling your cup” first to prevent burnout, which he defines as doing too little of what makes you feel alive. Throughout, he encourages listeners to prioritize self‑care, share the episode, and offers a free journaling mini‑course at mindsetmentorjournal.com. The episode ends with a call to make others’ days better and a reminder to follow him on Instagram (@obdialjr).
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Today we're gonna be talking about the three parts to making a day successful. I want to make this as simple as possible, and I want to think of a day that we have. We want every day. If you were to take a step back and zoom out of a day, what you want is really just to have a good day, right? Like, we want to feel good. And, you know, we all want. But every day of your life will be amazing. Would that be a good life for you? It probably would. Now, there's no reason why you. You have to choose between the two of them, but I'm just giving you an example of, like, what we really want is just to feel good. We want a great day. And if you take a lot of great days and you put them all together, you make a great life. More than anything else, we just want to feel good, right? And so I'm gonna be honest with you. I have worked a lot in my life. I have built businesses, I have made money. I've done all of these things, and I thought all those things would fulfill me and found out that none of the things fulfill me. So when people say, like, can money buy happiness? The answer is no. But it can buy fun, it can buy cool stuff, it can buy experiences, but it can't make you happy. My goal in life from now on, as I continue to grow and do things in business and make money and see what, create something called quote, unquote, success, my real goal in life, knowing that none of those things have actually fulfilled me is. Is to be more and more like a dog. That's it. Like, if I could be more and more like a dog every single day, I'd create a pretty good day. Create a pretty good life. Like, when you look at a dog, they're like your ride or die. And they are pretty much happy no matter what, right? Like, if I leave my house and I come back five minutes later, my dog acts like he hasn't seen me in five years. And no matter what, they love you and they're just happy and they're just down to do whatever. And when we feel good as a person, we come from a better place. And when we come from a better place, it makes it easier to create a better life. If we feel like shit, it's much harder to create an amazing day and much harder to create an amazing life. So if we could just concentrate on feeling good, feeling full, feeling fulfilled, and we could concentrate on that every single day and come from that place, it makes our actions that we take even better every Single day. And so it starts with a morning routine. What do you do in the morning? And you know, over the past 10 years, I would say I've seen tons of people talk about morning routines. One of my first mentors wrote the biggest book on morning routines, the, the, the miracle morning. And when we look at it, one of the things that I've seen morning routines become for people is basically like 17 different boxes that I need to check off or else I don't feel good about myself because I didn't finish my morning routine. And so it could be 10 different things, it'd be 17 different things. And what it turns into more than anything else is it turns into another to do list. It becomes a checklist of things I have to do or else I don't feel good throughout the day. I feel bad about myself because I didn't get all 17 things checked off. And what I've been trying to do is instead of have like 17 things to do, I. Every single morning I've been trying to simplify my life, been trying to simplify everything. Because we live in a really fast paced world. Everything is go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And we can't go at that speed forever. And what I'm gonna teach you today is just basically a tool to step back every day, to fill your own cup, to ask yourself, what do I want? What do I want my life to be? What do I want today to be? And how do I want to feel before I go into my day? And the thing I want you guys to all understand is you have to learn to prioritize yourself. Like you have to learn to prioritize you. A lot of people, I get messages all the time. A lot of people are people pleasers or they are people who are constantly making their entire life about other people. They're making their entire life about their children, they're making their entire life about their spouse. They're making their entire life about their employees. And all of that is good. All of that is great. It's great to put other people in their success and their happiness, above you in certain situations. But I'm here to tell you, we all need to get better at prioritizing ourself. It is not selfish to prioritize yourself. When you prioritize yourself, it actually can be one of the most selfless things that you do. And the reason why is because when you show up better, the people around you become better. Your children become better, your employees become better, your spouse, brothers, sisters, everybody become better when you become Better. So we have to learn to prioritize yourself. And all of this that I'm going to teach today will help you lower your stress, your anxiety, and help you focus on small incremental improvements every single day. And those small incremental improvements, compounded over your entire life, make massive shift shifts. And this is so simple, it's easy to do, but this is also very easy not to do. If something is easy to do, it is always very easy not to do. And here it is this year. Here's what I've been focusing on every day. I need to make it a priority to do something for my mind, my body, and my soul. That's just it. Just three things. And you might be like, oh, that's a cliche. Like, mind, body, soul. It's kind of like when I think of, like, the cliche of, like, hey, mind, body, soul. It's kind of like walking into somebody's, like, farmhouse, and you'd see, like, mind, body, soul next to, like, live, laugh, love, or like the gather sign. And they're cliches because cliches are true, right? And so each day I need to do something, preferably in the morning, before I do anything with anybody else, before I turn on my phone, before I talk to anybody else. I need to do something for my mind, for my body, and for my soul, and that's it. And if I do that, it's really weird. Everything else seems to work itself out, and I come from a better place to work through some of the challenges and some of the issues that might pop up or arise. And it makes everything easier to kind of work itself out or become easier for me because I filled my cup and I'm coming from a better place. So let's talk about. These are kind of my thoughts around it. I want to help you thought jog of what you could do for your mind, your body, your soul. So for me, what I think for my mind, there's two real big pillars for my mind. And I don't have to hit both of them every single day. I've just got to hit one of them per day. One of them is reading. I'll read for 15 minutes. It's not a certain amount of pages and that type of stuff. It's just like, hey, I need 15 minutes just to work on my mind and to sit there and to read and to learn something new. Because when I find. When I learn something new, I become inspired to then take that and teach somebody else or take that and use it in my life. So Reading is a really big pillar for me, and I do that a lot. Another really big pillar that's under the mind is journaling. Now, if I have time, I will read and journal, but that doesn't always work out. And so journaling is just sitting down and simply journaling through how I'm thinking, how I'm feeling, some of the challenges that I've had, some of the wins that I've had, things that I'm grateful for. What would make today amazing? What do I want? My business and my relationships in my body and my life and all that stuff. And so reading can be a piece of it. Journaling can be a piece of it. But then I was sitting down, I was like, what else could be a piece of it? How else could people use this? Right? What if you finally decided to learn that language or to get better at a language, to take 20 minutes every single day and to actually practice? What if you practice 20 minutes every single morning of a new language or the languages you've been trying to get better at? If you look at it, that's over two hours a week, that's over a hundred hours over the course of the year, and it's only 20 minutes in the morning. If you had 100 hours of practice in growing and improving in a language over the next year, you'd be way better than you are right now. So what if you decided to learn a language? What if you decided to go, you know what? I wanna get better at the language that I speak. Maybe it's not learning a new language, maybe it's learning my language. And I wanna get better at the words that I use. And so what I'll do is I will learn a new word every single day. And then my job is once I learn that word and I use the context of how to use it correctly and how to pronounce it correctly, my goal is to then take that and use it multiple times per day, right? What if it's 30 minutes of working on an instrument and trying to become better? And maybe you play guitar and you decide, you know what? I want to get better at my scales. And so every morning I'm gonn 20 minutes and I'm going to play a scale to a metronome. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to slowly, every single morning, make the metronome go a little bit faster, a little bit faster, so I can speed up my hands, my fingers, the movement between the two of them, and I'm going to start Working on my scales every single morning. Or maybe it's learning the piano and learning jazz chords. Maybe it's sitting down and painting a little bit more. Maybe it's doing a puzzle, maybe it's doing a crossword puzzle. Maybe it's doing a thousand piece puzzle. Maybe it's sitting down and practicing gratitude. Maybe it's finding brain games to be able to do, to try to, you know, make myself grow. The same way that I would go to the gym to try to get bigger muscles. When I look at my mind, is there ways that I can kind of take my brain to the gym to learn to grow. And the important piece of this for me, of the mind, the body of soul, is I try to do as many of them as possible away from a screen. So like, sure, you could watch documentaries and you could try to learn about history and all that stuff. But if you're just looking at another screen, I don't know about you, but I look at screens all damn day. Last thing I want to do is have a morning routine where I'm forcing myself to look at screens. And so how can you improve your mind every single day, right? The next thing is this, your body. How can you improve your body every single day? This year? A big piece for me. And about 95% of the days this year I have done some form of working out or movement because I stopped focusing on the end result and just started focusing on the consistency of doing this every single day. It's not like I lift heavy every single day. It could be something completely different, I'll tell you mine. But the mindset shift that I had this year was I'm going to start looking at my body and treating my body like somebody that I am in charge of taking care of. It's not me, but it's like this other thing that I am in charge of taking care of. And so a lot of people, it's like, oh yeah, I haven't worked out in three days cause I just forgot or I didn't plan the time or I've just been so busy. And for that I always say, just don't go two days in a row, right? That's my thing. If I miss today, don't go two days in a row, I won't miss tomorrow. And so the reason why I started thinking of it as like a separate being outside of me is, is cause if you look at like a child, children wanna move, they wanna run around, they wanna move their bodies, they wanna dance, they wanna climb on things, they wanna go all over the place. They wanna run, they wanna play. Outside, you're still that little child. Deep down inside of you, your body wants to move. But we are so stagnant nowadays. And so researchers, I was actually researching this whole thing, analyzed 13 studies of sitting and activity levels and found that people who sat more than 8 hours per day were or had no physical activity, had a risk of dying that was similar to those that pose the same risk of people who have obesity and smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. That's how bad that just sitting all day for you is. And so can you get in 30 minutes of some form of movement every single day? That's what I've been looking at. Right? So some days, three days a week, it's like I lift heavy. The other four days. I'm usually doing what they call primal movements, animal flow, which is, you know, body weight, movements on the ground and different movements that would be considered similar to Brazilian jiu jitsu. And so it's like it's just moving my body in different ways and allowing my body to do this thing. It's like because if you had a child, a three year old for instance, and you just locked them up inside of a room and you never let them move their body, they'd be tortured. What if it's like the same for us? Like, can we get our body to move? It wants to move. You know, this could be yoga for some of you guys out there. It could be stretching, it could be doing 10,000 steps. And make sure you get your 10,000 steps in. It could be hiking, it could be going on a 2 mile walk with no phone. It could be 10 minutes of deep intentional breathing to relax your body, to relax the stress that's built up in your neck and your shoulders. It's just 10 minutes of deep, intentional breathing because we have so much stress nowadays. Can I try to just calm my body down for 10 minutes a day? It could be doing meal prep so that you don't get off track. It could be drinking a gallon of water because just so many people are dehydrated nowadays. But what's something that you could do every single day for your body and the last one is your soul, right? It could be meditation, it could be prayer, it could be spending time in nature and just being in silence, going for a walk on a path. It could be sitting outside of your house and just staring at the trees with no plan and just allowing yourself just to kind of relax into just the soul, the movement, the person that you are. It could be going out and doing a good deed every single day. Could be sitting there and just feeling gratitude. It could be reading a book on spirituality, or it could be listening to spiritual guides on leaders, or it could be reading the book of your religion, whatever it might be. And what I would say is, you have mind, body and soul. And so what I recommend for everybody is this, is you don't have to hit all of these checklists every single morning in order to feel good. But what if you just have mind, body, soul? And for each one, you had three things that you could do every single morning for each one of them. So, like, for me, I told you, like, for the movement practice, it could be going and lifting heavy. It could be doing animal flow. It could be yoga. Those could be my three pillars so that I don't have to do all of them every single morning. But I can rotate them, I can move them so that it doesn't become boring or mundane. But you basically have three that are in each one of these three categories. And so for me, like, I'm 37 now. I've made my life hard in a lot of different ways, thinking I need to do a million things a day, and I'm only successful when I get my entire checklist done. But what I've come to realize is, how can I set myself up for success? How can I fill my cup first? Because too many of us, we live for other people. If you're parents out there, you live for your children, and that's a beautiful thing. But you gotta fill your cup first, right? There's so many people that are trying to pour from an empty cup. And you can do it for a while, but it will catch up to you at some point, and then you'll start to feel burnout. And burnout is not doing too much. Just so you know, burnout is not usually doing too much. It's doing too little of what makes you feel alive. It's doing too little of what fills you up. And once again, none of this is what I said today is rocket science. I'm not trying to blow your mind. It's easy to do, but it's very easy not to do. It's just about being intentional, about filling your own cup and focusing, number one on your body, number two on your mind, number three on your soul. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram Stories and tag me obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R And once again, if you are out there and you want to journal more, as I said, that is something that I do almost every single morning. I have a free actual mini course video and 30 days of prompts on how to journal and how to get yourself better on it. So if you want that absolutely free, once again, it is mindsetmentorjournal.com and with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. There you go. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
