Creating Your Future: Stop Dwelling on the Past

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about why you should stop living in the past and why you should start living in the future. And so when you actually start to think about this, there's a really good quote that Alan Watts says, and I'm going to start to frame the way that I think about this and living in the future. He says, if you're on a boat and you're steering a boat and you look behind you, what are you going to see in that boat? You're going to see the wake up. And the wake of the boat is just what shows you where you have been. But the wake of the boat does not steer the boat at all. It doesn't steer the boat in any sort of way. All it does is simply show you where you have been. And one of the things that I see that holds people back a lot is living in their past. And it makes sense, but really what it's doing is it's holding you back. Because what we want to do is we want to be able to predict our future. And the easiest way to predict the future is, is to look at what we've already been through, because we can look at the past and we can place it onto the future and make some predictions of what our future is going to look like. The problem with that is that if you listen to this podcast episode, you're probably somebody who doesn't want your future to look like your past. But if you're living in the past, you're going to make your past look a lot like your future. Your tomorrow is gonna look like yesterday almost every single day. And really, when you think about the boat, I want you to think about this. Have you been living your life as if the wake of the boat is actually steering? Because it can't. There's no way that it can. The only thing that you're trying to do is you're trying to predict the future by living in the past. And let me tell you why this is by looking at the human brain. The human brain is designed to do one thing and one thing only. Like, the main thing of the human brain is to keep you alive. And the way that it does that is by trying to predict the. The future. Because if you can predict the future, you have a better chance of staying alive. You have a better chance of getting away from harm, getting away from things that you fear, getting away from enemies. And your brain can plan. It can make the Right moves. And then hopefully, what it really wants to do and it makes sense, is to avoid injury or to avoid death. And so the example I always give that kind of makes sense is let's say that you're alive 100,000 years ago, and you and your caveman friend. Friend. You're walking and you're walking by a lake, and boom, out of nowhere, an alligator comes out, snatches your friend, kills him, he's gone forever. Well, then you're going to avoid that lake as much as possible. And in turn, anytime you walk by a body of water, your body will actually start to feel as if it needs to be on guard. Even if you walk by a lake that you know there's nothing in, there's still a part of you that's like, I need to watch out for myself. I need to make sure that I don't get killed, because that's how my friend was killed. And what's even crazy about the human brain is if this happens in the morning, you will actually start to be more careful in the mornings. And it's really incredible if you think about it. I feel like a lot of people, we battle with our brains, we battle with ourselves, but it's one of the things that kept our species alive. And having this prediction mechanism inside of our brains, which most animals don't have, kept us alive. But what the brain does is it tries to take the past and throw it into your future so that you can try to predict the future and avoid pain. It is amazing for staying alive. It is absolutely amazing for staying alive. But it's terrible if you're trying to create the life that you want. It's terrible to try to create a successful life. It's terrible for. For wanting to grow a business. It's terrible for wanting to get out of your comfort zone, because your brain is predicting fear. Predicting fear, predicting fear, predicting fear. And what happens is a lot of us, we live in the energy of our past. And I don't know about you, I've had a lot of shit that's happened to me in my past that I really don't want to happen again. You know, I've had trauma that's happened in my past. I've had my father pass away. I've had him being an alcoholic. I've had things happen with both of my parents. I've had heartbreaks. I've had bullying. I've had times where I've been screwed over. I've had failed businesses. And if I live in the energy of the past, I will then create that in my future, or I just won't take any action because I'll be in too much fear. And so what I want you to start to do, and I want you to remember this for the rest of your life. Do you know yourself? Like, if you think. Do you feel like you know yourself? I bet most of you are gonna say yes. You feel like you know yourself. Knowing yourself is based in the past because you're basing off of all of the knowledge that you have accumulated. Knowing is based off of knowledge. Knowledge is based off of things that have happened and things that you've learned in the past. I want you to stop knowing yourself, and I want you to start learning yourself. Knowing yourself is based off of the past. Learning yourself is based off of the present. Your brain wants to predict the future. So what do you do? You start to give it a new thing to predict. Instead of allowing your past to predict your future, why don't you use your mind and the incredible mechanism that it is to predict a future that you actually want? And this is where your intention starts to come in. If you listen to this podcast enough, you know that I talk a lot about being as intentional as possible in your life. You can become really intentional, or you can let your brain predict your future from the past, or you can be in charge of the prediction through visualization. And visualization is a really incredible tool you've heard me talk about many times, but I think it's underestimated. I think that I don't even talk about how amazing it is. Enough. Because when you visualize your future, you decide what you want your future to look like, and you get so focused on your future that your brain does not go to the past. Your brain doesn't know the difference between something that is actually physically happening in reality and something that's visualized. Now, when I say this, I understand it sounds like bs, but this is fact. This is psychological and scientific fact that your brain, majority of the time, does not know something that is actually happening right now in your future or in your present moment and in something that is visualized. So even, for instance, I'll give you a great example. Let's say that you're asleep and you're dreaming, and you're going on a walk in a forest inside of your dream, and you're walking on a path, and then about 100 yards in front of you. Oh, my God. Do you know what you see? You see a tiger. There's a tiger, and he doesn't see you. But you stop. The tiger's walking across the path, and then it turns its head and it gets eye contact with you. It sees you. You don't have any other option now. You've got to run. So you start running. You turn the other way, you run, you run the opposite direction. And you look behind you over your left shoulder, and you see this tiger. And it's getting closer. And you start running faster. And you're running and you're running and you're running faster. And then you look over your shoulder and, oh, my God, it's getting closer. It's getting closer. Then you look over your shoulder one more time, and you see right over your shoulder, right before the teeth go into you. And you wake up, what happens? Are you sitting there and you're calm? No, you wake up and you're. You're out of breath. You could be sweating. Your heart rate is through the roof. But I want you to realize something that never actually happened. It was only imagined. Hey, if you're loving this episode, please do me a really quick favor. Give us a like down below for the YouTube algorithm. And if you don't want to miss another episode of this podcast, make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you get notified and hit every single time I put out a new episode. And so what's incredible about humans? I've said this before on the podcast, but I don't know if I can overstate this enough. Like, if I can say it and make you understand the importance enough. The incredible thing about humans is that we can predict ourselves into a future. And by imagining a future, we can feel those feelings right now. In this present moment, we can feel the feelings of whatever it is that we're trying to imagine, good or bad, in this present moment. So if we're imagining that we're getting attacked by a lion, what's going to happen? Our brain is going to start to go a certain way. We're going to be out of breath, we're going to feel fear. Our heart rate is going to go through the roof. All too often, we're imagining a future that looks like our past. So if I have a failed business somewhere in the past, which I have multiple failed businesses in the past, and I'm trying to create another business, but I'm thinking in my past of, oh, my God. Well, remember that one time when you lived off of pasta for two months Cause you were so broke? Remember that one time where you almost lost your car because you were five months behind on your car payment? Yeah. All of that came because your business failed. And I can feel how anxious I felt when that was going on. And I could say, oh my God, well, if I start another, another business, what's gonna be different? This could be exactly the same. And so what does it do? It stops me from either starting the business or it stops me from putting the effort that I can into my business. Because why, why put 100% effort into it when there's a chance that it could just fail in the first place? Because your brain doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happening and something that's visualizing. It means that this, this means that your brain, it thinks and it stores everything that happens to it. Everything that's happened in the past, everything that happened in the present moment, but also everything, everything that's visualized as true. So think about this real quick. With that failed business in the past and you wanna start another business, guess what your brain's going to do? It's going to make predictions about your new business based off your old business. So if you have a failed business in the past or know someone who has, guess what it's going to do? It's gonna make predictions based off of your business, based off of your uncle's business, based off your parents business that failed. Why? Because it wants to protect you from pain. It wants to protect you from working too hard and then having a failed business. And so what does it do? It predicts the future based off of what you've seen in the past. And you're like, you know what? I'm not gonna start that business. Cause I already know what's gonna happen. Or if you've been another example, if you've never started a business or don't even feel like you wanna start a business, maybe you've been cheated on in a relationship in the past and you remember how painful that was. Oh my God, it was so painful when you had to go through it. Guess what your brain is going to do? Well, if you get into a new relationship, it's going to make predictions about your new partner and them cheating on you. Why? Because it wants to protect you from pain. It's like the story of a woman gets cheated on by her. She's in love with a guy, they're about to get married, he cheats on her. So she gets heartbroken and it's terrible. She gets into another relationship with a new guy and she takes the last relationship and what does she do? She places it on the new relationship and tries to predict the future because she doesn't want to have that pain again. So what does she do? He goes out with his friends. She texts him, she's like, hey, how's everything going? Where are you? And you know, she says, oh, I'm just out with the guys right now. We're just at the bar getting some drinks. And then she sends him a text message in an hour, hey, how's everything going now? And she doesn't hear from him for another hour, a couple hours, and. And she's like, oh my God, he's cheating on me. Oh my God, there must be some other girl. There must be some other person that's here. I have to protect myself. And so then she starts getting maybe more aggressive and wanting to make sure and doesn't matter if it's guy or girl. We've all seen this either happen with ourselves or with other people, haven't we? Where because of the fact that we were hurt in another relationship, we place that onto the new relationship and what happens is we can, the person can be over a, oh my gosh, what's going on? How's everything going? Oh my gosh, I haven't heard from this person in two hours. I bet they're cheating on me. And then get too micromanaging of the relationship. And the person that you're in a relationship with is like, dude, this is too much like, I'm just trying to have fun with my friends. And she doesn't trust me. And so what happens? The person feels like they don't have enough space and they break up with you. And so what happened is you actually created what you didn't want to happen because you brought the past into your current relationship. And this is usually completely unintentional and it's usually subconscious self sabotage that we all end up in. It's just a subconscious self sabotage. People who are always like, I can't stop self sabotaging. I don't know what's going on. I'm always like, what future are you imagining? Because the future that you imagine, you're gonna feel right now in this moment. You know, if you're texting that person, they're not texting back. You're going to feel in this moment, the future that you're imagining, that is not real future right now of that person cheating on you. You're going to feel the feelings of being cheated on. You're going to feel the feelings of the business failing because you're trying to predict the future. So then that begs the question, if we're always trying to predict the future. What do we do? Well, what we do is we create our own future. We don't just go into the future and just hope that things work out. No, we have to get first, very clear on what it is that you want. Get very clear of every single detail of the future that you're trying to create. Second, what you need to do is you need to make sure that you have time every single day to visualize a future that you want. What does it look like to have that future of that successful business? What does it look like to have that successful relationship? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What is it? And you place yourself into the future that you want. Instead of allowing your brain just to try to predict a future that is based off of the past, you have to learn to stop living in your past and start paying more attention to the future that you want and being very intentional of creating that future and visualizing that future every single day. And let the feeling of excitement of that future drive you to the actions that you need to take. Because most people, we like, let's just be honest, we like familiarity. We like to go back to what it is that is familiar, which is why a lot of people go back to the past. So can you make yourself if think about this for a second, Just really think about this. If the past happened, and you can try to predict the future off the past, and you can feel the past in the thing that you're imagining in your past and putting it in your future and imagining that future, can you make your visualization feel so real that it has the same emotional or higher emotional charge than the past? Can you make yourself feel familiar with the future? Can you be more familiar with your future than you are with your past? Because the past only happened once. That time you were cheated on. That was that event that happened. It's over. But what happens is we accidentally visualize that past into the future that we are currently trying to create. What if you visualize the future that you want to happen every single morning? Because the past is stored as a memory in your brain. If you visualize something today, tomorrow, that visualization will also be stored as a memory. So they're basically equal. Because once again, the brain doesn't know something that's actually happening or something that's imagined. And so maybe you were cheated on one time and that's what happened, and you have that emotional charge around it. Well, if I visualize today being in an amazing, loving relationship where I feel Accepted. And I feel the feelings and I imagine what it would look like and what it would feel like. And I try to fill up my body with those feelings tomorrow, that will also be a memory. And if I do it again, it will also be another memory. And again and again and again. If I visualize it for 30 days straight, then I have one memory of being cheated on and 30 memories of having a great, emotionally safe relationship. And that way I can actually use my memory based off of what I'm visualizing in the future that I want to drive me forward to create the relationship that I want. Or if we go back to the business side of it. You know, I have two failed businesses that I've had in the past personally, right? And I've. They were struggles and they were hard, and I had to reset my entire life twice. But if I'm sitting there and I'm saying, well, I want to imagine the future of having a super successful business, what it would feel like to have a super successful business that feels good to me, that employs people, that gives me the financial freedom to not have to look at what my bank account looks like and to say yes, to go on weekend trips and not have to pinch pennies for the next month with my friends. And so you can start to actually say, okay, okay, yeah, I have two failed businesses in the past. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to visualize for the next 30 days, I'm going to visualize for the next 60 days, and I'm going to visualize a successful business. So that. That is so much more. That emotional charge of that memory is so much more powerful than. Than the emotional charge of the failed businesses. So instead of feeling the fear about the future based off of the past that is being thrown. I'm sorry. Feeling the fear of the past that's being thrown into my future. What if I were to just feel the gratitude for the present moment and feel gratitude? If I can feel. Think about this for a second. If I can feel fear for a future that hasn't happened yet based off of my perceptions of fears of what could possibly happen, If I could feel fear for the future, is it possible that I could feel gratitude for a future that hasn't happened yet? If I can feel fear for a future that hasn't happened yet, can I feel grateful and gratitude for a future that hasn't happened yet? The answer is absolutely, 100% yes. Can you learn to be grateful for the future that is coming? Can you learn to be grateful for that. And really, it comes down to our brain and how powerful it is. When you look at the placebo effect, which is where people believe that they're healed and they actually heal themselves. Like people get. They say, oh, you have this disease. Doctors come in. You have this disease. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and give you this. This is a new pill. And this pill is absolutely going to take away your disease. 33% of people, on average, heal themselves by thinking that I'm healed. Can I also create the future that I want to create just by visualizing that future all the time? Yes. You are who you are based off of your past and your perception of the past. If that is true, can you become who you want to be based off of your visualization of what you want your future to be? And every single time you visualize it, it stores as memory. Every single time you visualize, it stores as a memory. And there's two ways to change your brain through neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to rewire itself. And so if I'm wired right now in fear, Can I start to rewire myself in gratitude? Yes. There's two ways that your brain will change itself. Number one is by one very heightened emotional event, which could be that breakup. It could be that failed business. It could be a car crash. And now every single time you get into a car Just based off of one car crash, you feel those feelings of fear. So the brain will change itself off of one really big emotional event. The brain will also change itself off of repetition. And that's the important part here, is that you can't visualize for four days and be like, well, where the hell's this future that I want? And I thought I was going to have this amazing future. No, it's got to be day in, day out. Day in, day out. I'm envisioning this future that I want. You can change your brain through one heightened emotional occurrence that happens in your life. And you can also change it through repetition. What you want to do is you want to bring in repetition day in, day out, day in, day out, and start to visualize the future that you want and actually start to change your brain. Because ultimately, there's a thing that's called the status quo bias. And the status quo bias explains that our innate preference, we innately will prefer the current state of affairs that we have. Any change, even if they are beneficial, can be perceived as a loss. And so you can want to be different, but prefer not to change. Really, what it comes down to is you have to want to change more than you want to be the same. When people visualize what they want to move towards that desired future, it can make you feel uncomfortable. You can resist that change. People like familiarity way more than they like anything else. And so the status quo bias is a psychological underpinning of this tendency to just be like, yeah, I don't want to change because it's going to. I don't want to change because it's going to be too scary. I don't want to change because it's just easier just to do what I've always done. And so our brains are wired to prefer the known over the unknown. The future can feel unknown. But if I visualize a future every single day, day in, day out, guess what the future starts to feel like? It starts to feel known. It starts to feel like something that is actually going to happen. It starts to feel like, hey, man, as much as I know what happened to me in my past, if I visualize this enough, it's actually going to. I can make the unknown in the future feel known by doing it over and over and over again. Because why? Once again, the brain doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happening and something that is being visualized. And so you want to mentally rehearse your future in your mind over and over and over again. And it can be hard. There will be resistance. And you can feel like you're doing it wrong, but you're doing it right. Your body and mind are just unfamiliar with it. It can be uncomfortable. What we're trying to do is we're trying to feel comfortable and create the unknown, to make it feel like it's more known. And so you mentally rehearse your future every single day. And you write down everything that you want. You write down everything that you want. You get very clear on this, and you say, I'm going to visualize this this morning because it's important for me to stop feeling fear about my future and to actually start to feel excited about the future that I'm going to. And how do I feel excited? By making the future feel like it is known. And that is the power of living in your future versus living in your past. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at robdial Junior. R O B D I A L J R. And if you love this podcast. You'll also probably love my new book that is out. It is called level up and it is how to get focused, stop procrastinating, upgrade your Life. It is 16, 17 years so far of coaching people, working with people. It's three years of writing, it's 16 rounds of edits. It's everything that I know of how to take action to create the life that you want. It is not just a self help book. It is deep psychological stuff to actually start to change your life, to change your brain and create the future that you want. So if you want that, you can go to robdial.com book if you're listening to this podcast before October 3rd you can get it on pre order and everybody that pre orders we'll get automatic mini course which is how to stop procrastinating. And you'll also get entered into a prize pool of over $25,000 in cash and prizes. But that is only for pre orders. If you order it before October 3rd at robdial.com book so go to that website, order it and with that I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.