how to achieve anything by lying to yourself
13 Oct 2025 · 23 min
Rob Dial explains how to deliberately reshape your identity through positive self-talk. He breaks down the neuroscience: your reticular activating system filters what you notice based on belief, neurons wire together through repetition, and your brain accepts repeated statements as truth. Pick one limiting belief, write its opposite, repeat it for 7 to 30 days, and act as if it's already true.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. 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 want to get some inspirational mindset motivational text messages from me throughout the week, text me right now if you're in the US or Canada. 512-580-9305 once again, 512-580-9305 today we're going to be talking about how to achieve anything that you want by lying to yourself. Because you already lied to yourself every single day. You lie when you say that you're not good enough. You lie when you call yourself lazy or stuck or unworthy or not worthy of love. Right now you're living inside of a mental script. And you didn't even write that mental script. You just unconsciously downloaded it throughout your childhood, teenage years, adolescence, all of that. The only difference between that is that those lies are actually holding you back. So today I'm going to teach you how to lie to yourself in the direction of who you want to become. And I want it to happen fast and I want to make it as real as we possibly can. Because your brain believes repetition and repetition only, not reality. And the identity that you have of yourself is not based in any truth. It's based in habit. And so let's change your internal script, not by being fake, but by being intentional of who you want to be. So let's dive into it. The thing I really want you to understand is that your brain does not believe reality. It believes repetition. And so the science behind this, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, there's a part of your brain that's called the reticular activating system, and it filters out almost your entire world and everything that happens to you and your five senses based off of what you believe is true. So if you've never heard me talk about it real quick, science behind it. At any moment in your five senses, your brain could take in about 11 million bits of information per second. And your brain filters out all of those 11 million bits of information, except for 40 bits of information. It's basically the bouncer at the door, and the bouncer will filter out everything that you do not believe and only let in the things that you believe. So if you think to yourself, I always mess up, your brain will look for evidence to prove yourself right. If you believe I'm learning faster than I ever have and I'm becoming better, your brain will also start scanning for proof of that as well. If you believe, oh, well, I'm just not disciplined person, then your brain will highlight every single time that you haven't been disciplined, every time that you've skipped a workout and hit your snooze alarm, it's going to pay attention and highlight those moments. But if you believe I'm becoming the type of person that follows through, your brain will start to pay attention to every single tiny win in stacking them. If you believe I can't stay focused, then your brain is going to pay attention to every moment where you start drifting in your focus and calling it failure and then saying, oh, I must be adhd. But if you believe I'm training my focus every day, I'm becoming more focused every single day, you'll start seeing every minute of concentration as progress. Do you see what I'm talking about here? Whatever you focus on, because there's a trillion things in your reality to focus on. Whatever you focus on in your brain and believe to be true, your brain will search for evidence to prove that true. In psychology, it's called the confirmation bias. You're always looking for ways to prove yourself yourself, right? And there's a thing in Neurology, it's called Hebb's Law. And Hebb's Law says that neurons that fire together wire together. Which means if you start thinking something over and over and over and over and over again, that thought will strengthen itself. Your repeated thoughts become your default neural pathways. Now, the problem with that is that up until this moment, if you've never known this before, you've just unconsciously started downloading the world from other people, from your parents, from society, from everything. And you started to build unconsciously who you think you are. And from that, you have created a reality based off of who you think you are. From this moment forward. It's like you 2.0, where you need to start paying attention to what you want to believe and actually start lying to yourself, because you're already lying to yourself. So you need to start lying to yourself into becoming the person that you want to become. Because the truth is, most of us are already running lies on repeat all day long. Oh, I'm just not good with money. I can't focus. I'm not creative. I'll never be successful. I have troubles with saving money. I don't know anything about this. I'm not good at math. I'm not good at English. I'm stupid. I'm not pretty, whatever you're saying to yourself. So I want you to understand this. The problem here is not the lie. I don't want you to stop lying to yourself. The problem is not the lie. The problem is that you believe the wrong lie. You're not bad with money. You can't. It's not that you can't focus. You're not good enough. You're not. Not creative. All of those things are not true, but you believe them. That's the problem. You are believing the wrong lie. I want you to start lying to yourself, to build yourself in who you want to become. Because what you believe is going to change your reality. And so what if you ran a new script so often in your head that you actually just started accepting it as normal? Because beliefs are not reality. Beliefs are just thoughts that you've been thinking for so long that you believe that it's actually true? Well, if that's the case, what if I started thinking something different over and over and over and over again? So much that I actually started to make myself believe that it's true. So I want you to install new lies into your brain. If you know you want to be somebody who follows through, start saying to yourself, I am somebody who follows through. Now is your BS Meter going to go off? Yes. But you just keep. It's crazy. You just keep lying to yourself and you start firing those neurons, they start wiring and you actually start to believe over the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Holy shit. Maybe I'm someone who actually follows through. I'm somebody who follows through. That's a really good lie. I get clear and clearer every day with what I want. I am unstoppable. I always figure it out. I show up with confidence even when I'm scared. I'm becoming somebody that people can count on. You just start lying to yourself and what's really great, because once again, let me say this one more time. You're already lying to yourself about who you think you are. That identity that you have yourself is a figment of your imagination. Start lying to yourself at least to become the person that you want to be and change your reality in that way. Because your identity is a story. It's not a fact. Most people act from the past. This is who I've always been. So this is just who I am. But you could flip it if you want to. Instead of acting from your past self, which is a version of you that doesn't exist anymore. It's kind of like they say. You never walk through the same river twice because it's not the same river and you're not the same person. Every seven years, every single of the 40 trillion cells in your body are recycled, which means that you're not even the same person that you were seven years ago at all. Except for that you think that you are. And so if you can act from your past self, like many of us have for so long, you could also act from the future self and let that shape your behavior in the present moment. And this isn't like some weird woo woo, fake it till you make it type stuff. This is actually based in science. When you look at the placebo effect and we will be right back. Teachers are deep into new units this time of year. IXL lets kids practice the exact skills they're learning in class, helping lessons stick and boosting confidence. Heading toward the spring. IXL is an award winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning. Whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or reviewing science concepts. It covers math, language arts, science and social studies from Pre K through 12th grade with personalized interactive content that adapts to the child's level and PACE. 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And your brain is not just noticing the reality that's happening around you at all point in times. It's shaping and bending your reality to meet your beliefs. Think about that for a second. And so another piece of this, besides just believing, is visualizing exactly what you want. There's been many studies in academic performance, athletic performance, that shows that if you just visualize yourself doing something, like going for a run or playing the piano, the same motor cortex activity occurs in your brain as if you're actually doing that thing just by visualizing yourself doing it. So by changing what you believe and by visualizing what you want, you're not really faking it. What you're doing is you're installing it, which is what you really need to do is install the new program within yourself. And so when you look at it, let's talk about how the lies of your life become your reality. Your identity is basically your belief plus action plus repetition. That's it. Belief plus action plus repetition. You're not born believing that you're incapable or not good enough or not smart enough. You learn that at some point in time, like my son, when I was watching him learn how to walk or try to get onto a couch, the amount of frustration that he would have, he'd be like, oh, you could see he's getting so close. And he would get. He would get mad, he'd get pissed. He'd yell like he. But he wouldn't give up because he didn't think to himself, I can't do this. He hasn't learned that yet at that point in time, right? So let's use the same process where we learn something but kind of work it backwards. And so here's what I want you to do. The formula is this. I want you to choose the new identity. Who do you want to be? Figure it out. Be very detailed about it. Don't say, oh, I want to be a successful person. That's stupid. That's not good. Be very detailed of exactly what it is that you want. Then speak it out loud to yourself. Speak it out loud to yourself as often as you possibly can. I am somebody who follows through. I am somebody who follows through. I am somebody who follows through. And then anchor it with emotion, which is like how you feel and movement in some sort of way. Walk around your house like the type of person who follows through. Journal as if you're the type of person who follows through. Speak as if you're the type of person who follows through. Take action as if you're the type of person who follows through. And then what you do is you reinforce this with small wins. You're using confirmation bias in your favor. So if you say, I'm the type of person who follows through, and then you show up to a zoom call two minutes early and not late like you normally do, guess what? I'm reinforcing that with a small one. See, I am the type of person who follows through. I was early to this damn meeting, and I'm normally late to it. If you say, oh, I'm going to work out today, and you work out today, you're like, see, I am the type of person who follows through. What you're doing is you're figuring out who you want to be. You're speaking into existence. You're taking action from it, and then you are reinforcing the small wins by looking for proof that who you want to be is who you're becoming right now. And this was actually done by Carol Dweck, who wrote a book called mindset. She's a PhD at Stanford. She found out that for her students that she was working with, if they just believed that they were intelligent, they became more intelligent. Students who believed that they were intelligent, they told themselves they were. They visualized themselves being intelligent, improved their performance without any new teaching methods at all. They simply just became smarter by thinking that they're smart. So if they can do that and people can heal themselves because they think that they're healed, I bet you could be the type of fucking person that just follows through, Right? So let's figure out how to start lying to yourself in an empowering way. The first thing you want to do is you want to start to name your old lie. Like, find the lies that you're telling yourself. The disempowering old lies. Oh, I'm just not consistent, or I always mess things up, or I'm just never going to be successful, or I'm too distracted to focus, right? And write them down with pen and paper. Then what I want you to do, that's the disempowering thing that you say to yourself. I want you to find the empowering opposite of that thing. Write the opposite of that lie as the new lie, the empowering one. I am deeply focused when it matters. I am the type of person that follows through. I keep promises to myself. I am becoming known for following through. I am the type of person that people can rely on. And so you identify the old lie, which is the disempowering lie. Then you find the empowering opposite of that. You write it down, and then you start to speak it out loud to yourself. Yes, out loud to yourself. So that you're not only thinking it, you're also saying it, and you're hearing it. You have to say it before you believe it in your brain. And your beliefs will eventually catch up the more that you do it. Once again, repetition, repetition, repetition. That's how neurons start to actually fire together and wire together, is through repetition. The more that you say it, the more that you'll actually start to believe it over time. So you say it out loud to yourself every single day. Then you need to start to actually act it out. Walk differently, work differently, introduce yourself differently, shake somebody's hand differently. What you're doing is basically looking at your future self, and you're saying, that's who I'm becoming, and I'm going to borrow the behavior of my future self. And you start becoming that person. You start acting like that person. So now you're thinking it, you're saying it, you're acting as it. Guess what's going to start to happen. You're going to start believing it. And not to say that you won't go back into your old lies. You definitely will go back to your old lives, because those neurons have been firing together for a very long time. So catch your brain in the old script and then overwrite it. And your voice is going to, you know, say to yourself, you're not really that person. Shut up. You've always been this type of person. You're not that type of person. And you can say to yourself out loud, no, not yet, but I'm becoming that type of person. Watch me. And so you can actually do this in your life, because here's the truth. You've already been hypnotized. You've already been lying to yourself. You've been hypnotized by your past. You've been hypnotized by your parents. You've been hypnotized by your old relationships that you were in, by your old mistakes. You've already believed stories that weren't true. You took behaviors and and turned them into an identity. You've believed stories that were not true. So the question is, if you're going to lie to yourself, why not lie in the direction of who you want to be versus lying to yourself for who you don't want to be. Right? You're not the story that you've been telling yourself. You are the storyteller. Tell yourself a better story until it actually starts to become fact. And so here is my challenge for you. I want you to find one belief that you need to install. Like the one belief that is the biggest belief out of all of them. I want you to write it down, get very clear on the exact belief it is, and I want you to speak it over and over and over again for the next seven days. The first day you're going to be like, this is complete bullshit. Cool. Keep doing it. Keep showing up. Keep doing it. Keep showing up. And then I want you to start to speak it and speak it and speak it and move as if it's already true. Do it for seven days, even when it feels fake. Especially when it feels fake. And then I want you to watch how your brain, after seven days, after 10 days, after 30 days, actually starts to believe it, starts to find evidence for it and starts to actually move towards it. 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 robdial Junior R O B D I A L J R and if you're out out there and you want to do some coaching with me outside of the podcast, I've got programs from 12 weeks to 12 months to absolutely change your life. Go to coachwithrob.com right now to learn more about it. 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.
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