How To Level Up Your Life | The Mindset Mentor Podcast

Rob Dial reframes life as a video game where challenges let you level up. He uses his grandfather's death, business failures, and relationship struggles to show how treating hardship as learning opportunities changes everything about how you grow.
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Today we're gonna be talking about how to level up your life, and I'm going to be giving you a little bit of a reframe. I want you to go on a journey with me, and I want you to just play this on for a little while, right? Doesn't matter what your beliefs are. Let go of your beliefs for a second and just think this way with me and see if maybe we can reframe the way that you think about your life and the way that you've thought about your life. Okay? Think for a moment, and I want you to just think about this for a second. What if you are a human? You have a human body, but what if you are a soul that is inside of this body, and the soul is the energy that is behind the body that's there? So I'll give you an example of what I mean. So I was talking about this one time with my mom, and the example that I gave her is, you know, her father, my grandfather. I was in the room when he passed away, and I was talking to her about, like, what if we are a soul inside of a body? What if we are a spiritual being having a human experience? And we were talking about. I was like, when I was in the room when grandpa passed away, two minutes before he passed away, he weighed exactly the same as he did two minutes after he passed away, which means that his body didn't change. What happened was the energy that was flowing inside of him that we can call soul left. It was gone. It was no longer there. The energy that was keeping everything working. And so when you look at that and you're like, okay, so that does make sense, because it's kind of like there was something that was inside of his body. There was something that was. That was moving his body that was giving him spirit, whether it's consciousness or whether it's soul or whatever it is that you want to call it. It's kind of like his soul was in this body for a little while and then it was done, right? And the way I like to think about it is kind of like a video game character. So you don't have to play video games to start thinking this way. I haven't played a video game in probably over 10 years at this point. But I view my life like a video game. I view my life as if I am in a video game. And with any video game, you always start at level one, as you do with anything new, right? And you get into level one and you get your bearing straight, and you're pretty bad at it for a while, right? Like, whenever you play a brainy video game, you're not that great. You get your bearings straight and that's kind of what it's like to be a human and you learn this new game that you're in. But how boring would the game be if the person, if you were playing a video game, you're in this character and you're just walking around and you're just exploring, you're just seeing things, you're seeing trees and you're seeing, you know, places and buildings and all of that stuff. Like, and you stay in the same level. If you stayed in the same level forever in a video game, wouldn't that video game eventually just get boring to you? Like, it wouldn't be fun anymore. What makes video games fun? Some sort of challenge? Some sort of challenge in the opportunity to get to another level, to level up. Up to get to another. So go from level one to level two, right? And to go from level one to level two, there's always something that has to happen. There's always some sort of challenge, right? And that challenge could be like something that you need to figure out in the game. It could be overcoming a fear. It could be that there's a big bad guy that you have to conquer. And you might go and you might try to conquer this bad guy and you might lose, you might fail a little bit, and you might fail, and you might fail, and you might fail, but eventually you figure out what you did wrong and you get a little bit better and, and you get a little bit better, and you get a little bit better, and then you conquer the bad guy. And what happens, you get onto a new level, you go to the next level of the game. That's what makes games fun, that's what makes people addicted to games, is that they are able to come to a challenge, overcome the challenge. Actually usually fail at the challenge a lot. And you're like, oh, I failed. Oh, I died. Oh, I died, oh, I died. My character died. My character died. My character died. And then eventually figure out how to out figure fight this character, this bad guy, right? And you start to get a little bit better and your skills improve. And with each time that you get a new challenge, a new bad guy, there's new lessons that you learn and you get better. That's what make them fun. How boring would it be to play a video game where the character just sits on the couch and scrolls on their phone and watches tv? Nobody would ever want to play that video game. Eventually you get to a point where you're like, I need something fun. I need a challenge. And video games become addicting because there's always a new challenge. There's always something to get to, and there's always an end result that we're working towards. There's always something that you're trying to get to, whether it's getting to the next level, conquering this person that's, you know, this bad guy just came in, or getting to the end of the game. The challenges are what make it fun. The challenges are what make you better. And there's always lessons in all of those challenges. And sometimes you fail, and you fail and you fail and you fail. But eventually you succeed. And with each succeed, you go to a new level. You level up, you get to a new level. And with new levels come what? New challenges, new lessons, new fun things, new ways to explore. How different would your life be if you started looking at your life through the lens like it was a video game and you were just a video game character? Like your life is a video game? And you could also change a character anytime that you want. You're still gonna have this body. But what if you could change the personality of this body? What if you could change the personality of this soul, this thing that is inhabiting the energy that's inside of the body? What if you could change it anytime that you wanted to? Well, you can. That's the beautiful thing about it. When you look at humans, you realize that your personality is not set in stone, and your personality can change at any moment. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, you know, one of my favorite quotes in the entire world is, is Alan Watson. He says, you are under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. You can change your personality like this. The problem with you trying to change your personality is you don't think that you can change your personality. You don't think that you could be somebody different. And my favorite example of this, that really hit home for me, there's a great documentary called Jim and Andy, and it's where Jim Carrey. It's a documentary about a movie that Jim Carrey did called man on the Moon, where he actually became his character. He was a method actor, which means that when he left the studios, the cameras turned off every single night before he went back to the studio. Never broke character. And the craziest part about it was that he was playing this guy named Andy Kaufman. And Andy Kaufman was a real live human who Died. I think it was like the late 70s, early 80s. Just shift your personality to be a new video game character anytime that you want to, the same way that you could go, okay, you know, for today, I'm going to be this video game character, you know, and she's the. The. The woman, right? And she is the one. She's the badass ninja woman and all that stuff. And tomorrow what I'm doing is I'm gonna be the big, strong, muscular guy, and then the next day after that, I'm gonna be the. The other person. And you can change your video game character anytime that you want to. What if you could just change your video game character anytime that you want? You could just change your personality and step into a new version of yourself. What if you stopped playing the same damn character every single day and decided to level yourself up? You decided to stop staying the same and stop playing small, and you decided to take on more challenges. You decided to push yourself more, to get yourself out of your comfort zone, to do things that you've never done before, to face challenges with a different mindset, knowing that all of your challenges are brought to you. To you, for you to learn, for you to grow, for you to level your character up the same way that a challenge brought to a video game character in the game that you're playing. What if all challenges brought to you in your human existence were brought to you for you to fucking level yourself up? But you've been looking at it as if you're, I don't want to go through this. This isn't what I wanted. This isn't. What if you were looking and say, oh, new challenge. Thank you, universe. Thank you, God. Thank you, thing that's out there, the thing that's controlling this video game. Thank you for bringing this to me because I know there's new lessons and there's an opportunity to grow and become better and face these challenges, and overcoming these challenges is going to make me better. What if that's how your life works? What if your life was that way? How different would your life be from here on out if you looked at life through that lens? Like, you chose this life, you chose this round that you're on, you chose this game that you're playing. You chose this character. You chose who you are. You chose that body. You chose exactly who you are. You chose your challenges before you came into this life. What would you think if you thought to yourself, how different would you view your life? If you viewed your life as, I signed up for this, my Soul decided to inhabit this body, and it signed up for this. This is the game that I need to play to become better. Think of all of your biggest challenges in life, right? Think about all of the challenges. Think of one of your hardest challenges you've ever had in your entire life. And what I want you to do is I want you to understand that you probably didn't want to go through it when you were going through it. We never really do want to go through those things, but think about how much you learned by going through that challenge. Now, I understand you never want to go back to that challenge and go through it again, but you'd probably not want to change your challenge, right? The challenge that you had that was so hard, that you overcame, you got so many lessons from, and you leveled up yourself, you probably wouldn't want to take that away, right? You wouldn't want to go back and change that challenge. You wouldn't want to change what happened. Why? Because then you lose the lesson. You lose the strength you got from it. You lose the knowledge that you got from it that took you from level two to level three or level five to level seven. Everything that's brought to you, what if you can look at everything that's brought to you as a chance for you to level up in your job, in this human experience, in this video game that we're in, is to find the challenges, to put yourself in places that are challenging so that you can grow, you can become better, and you can level up. So, you know, we can go back to talking about my grandparents. You know, I remember when I was in the hospital and I was journaling when I was in the hospital with my grandfather the night that he passed away. And I still have my journal from it. And I remember journaling and thinking about the type of person that he was. And, you know, he was asleep and I was awake, and I was in the hospice room with him. And I remember journaling through, like, how incredible of a human this guy was, right? And then the next day, he passes away, and I remember thinking to myself, like, he's one of the biggest mentors I've had in my entire life. This sucks. This isn't what I want. This is a challenge. But what am I supposed to learn from this? Like, what was this brought to? Why was this character, him put into my character's life, into my character's game? What was I supposed to get from it? And I remember I went to my. My grandmother's grandparents house and my mom and her three sisters. I was There I was the only other person that was there. I was my mom, her three sisters, my grandmother. When they told my grandmother that her husband of 70 years that she was with for 70 years passed away, I remember seeing her face and her reaction and how difficult that was. And I was like, what am I supposed to learn from this? What about love? Am I. What about life? Am I supposed to learn from this? I remember I went upstairs after, like, 15 minutes after, and I just fucking journaled. And I was like, what am I supposed to learn from this? What am I supposed to get from this? This has been brought to my life for a reason. I'm not going to let this hardship just disappear in vain and not get something from it. So I journaled on everything. And I journaled through, like, why did I love my grandfather? What were the habits and traits and characteristics? And how do I wanna be more like him by seeing him and how he was in the world? How can I be more of him? Cause that's the best way for me to be able to take his life and honor it is for me to take the qualities and traits that I loved about him and put it into my life. And I wrote down all the things I loved about him and all the lessons that I could get from it. Right. Fuck. Was it challenging? Yes. Did I learn a lot from it? Yes. Did I learn a lot from the challenge? Yes. But I also learned a lot from the 30 years that I basically had from him as well. Then, you know, about a year ago, our dog Toby, who was 13 and a half, he passed away and learned a lot about. Through that process, because five years before he passed away, we realized he had something called Cushing's. And Cushing's usually kills a dog within about two years. It's a tumor that's either on their pituitary gland or. Or there's another. It's either on the pituitary gland or another gland. I can't remember what it is, but usually they only live for two years. He was able to live for five. What we did was we completely changed his diet. We started focusing on all of the medicine, not medicine that we could give him, that was just medication, but medicine that was actually herbal medication. We started giving him all these different types of herbals and changed his food and all of this stuff. And he lived for five years. And I was like, damn, okay, what can I learn from this situation? You know, he was given two years. We were able to get five extra years out of. Out of his life by switching and talking and, like, really figuring out the herbals and the things that helped his body. And I was like, oh, my God, that's incredible. And I started taking and using that in my own body. Of, like, it really matters what you put in your body. It really matters how you use your body. It really matters how you focus on your body, right? And I wrote down. When he passed away, I wrote down everything that I learned from it. I wrote down, like, what I was feeling and the challenges and how hard it was for me to go through this thing, but I want to just go through this thing in vain. I wanted to be able to take the lessons that were going that I was learning from him passing away. And then the same week, we had to get Bear, our puppy, we had to get him fixed. And you know, our vet that we had taken Toby to for years, you know, about six, seven years, our puppy, we had to get him fixed. And, you know, our vet that we had taken Toby to for years, you know, about six, seven years, at that point in time, had to have the conversation with us of, hey, we have to put him under. This is the same week. This is like, five days after Toby passed away. Just so you know, we. We. He. He has to have the conversation. Like, hey, just so you know, some dogs don't wake up. Like, there is a risk, there's inherent risk of putting a dog under. And he knew that Toby had passed away five days before. He was really close with Toby, and he had to have that conversation with us before putting them under. And I remember going home, and it's like, hours and hours and hours. It's like seven hours before we hear from them, obviously. And I remember thinking to myself, like, please make Bear be safe. Like, please make Bear be safe. Like, please. I don't. If. And I thought to myself, and this is the exact thought that I had to myself, I know that. I trust that what happens is exactly what's supposed to happen. And if Bayer has complications and something goes wrong, then it was something I'm supposed to learn. I'm supposed to learn from this challenge. I'm supposed to get a lesson from it. It's just another challenge that's brought to me for me to learn and for me to grow and for me to level up my character. But, fuck, I really just don't want to learn a lesson this week. Like, I don't want to learn another lesson. And so I thought to myself, and I trusted fully in, like, what's gonna happen is exactly what's supposed to happen. And whatever happens There's a lesson and there's a challenge. In every challenge, there's a lesson and there's an opportunity to level up to make my video game character just a little bit better, you know, and then I start to think about, you know, that's a lot of examples with death. So let's use another example, right? There's also, like the video game of building a business, right? When I look at my businesses that I've built, I've had a few businesses I've built over time. You know, when I first stepped into the video game business, the video game, the business building video game, the first one, the first time that I tried that game, I failed, and I got kicked in the face and kicked in the face, and it was really, really bad. And I could have given up and said, no, no, I'm never going to play that game again. I'm never going to play the building a business game. I'm just going to just work for someone else's business. I'm not going to play that video game anymore. But then I was like, you know what? I want to play this video game. I feel like this is what I'm supposed to I feel like this is supposed to be what I do. So I played the video game again, and you know what I did? I was able to do better. The second time I played the building a business video game, I was able to do better because of all of the failures and lessons and challenges that I had in my first time playing the video game, that made me better the second time I played the video game and I got better at it and I did pretty well. But then the third time I played the video game, that's when I finally succeeded in the game and I was able to take the first time I played the video game of building a business and the second time I played the video game of building a business and take all of the lessons and all of the challenges and everything that I learned and grew and leveled up my character and put it into. The third time I played the business and that's what I succeeded. But I could not have succeeded the third time playing the video game if I didn't have the challenges, if I didn't have the failures, if I didn't have the struggles, if I didn't have the wins, all of those things, all of the lessons from the first time playing the video game of building a business and the second time of playing the video game and building the business and all of those lessons and levels and everything that I went through and the challenges leveled up my video game character in building a business. Think about every relationship you've been in, every single relation. You can just decide to step out of the relationship video game if you want to, but every single time that you play it, there's challenges, there's heartaches, it's hard, it's not fun to go through, but there's lessons in what you want, what you don't want, who you want to be, who you don't want to be, all of those things in every single time that you play the video game and when you decide to play at anything, you have to realize anytime you play a new video game, anytime you step into building a business or being in a relationship or whatever it is, there's one common thing that you have to realize. You always start at level one so you can see other people at level 20 in the game, and you'll be like, damn it, I just want to be at level 20. I just want to be there. But you have to realize in order for them to get to level 20, they have to go through all of the hardships, all of the challenges, all of the lessons to level up their video game character. Level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 to get to 20. When you start, you're level one. Oh, man. Maybe you're at level one of working out and building the body that you want that video game. Okay, you can't look at someone else's body that's at level 20 in the video game and think, well, I just want their body. No, they had to go through all of the hardships, all of the challenges. With all of those hardships and challenges, there was always lessons. You can't see someone else at level 20 and just want to be there. You have to realize that you are the only one that's in this game. You can only go for this game, only this character. You could change a character around, but you have the same body. You can't compare yourself. You can't compare yourself at level one to someone who's at level 20 because they've gotten there. Because of all the challenges, the only one that you could compare yourself to is who you were yesterday. And can you continue to grow this video game character and to look at every single thing that happens to you as perfect as exactly what it was supposed to. Exactly what's supposed to happen. It was brought to you for you to learn, for you to be challenged, and for you to grow row and Then you start to look at and go, okay, well, hold on a second. Instead of me waiting for the challenges, what if I were to actually go out and find my own challenges? What if I were to go out and actually see the challenges? Maybe it's a great day, but maybe I'm going to challenge myself today. I'm going to grow a little bit. So instead of actually coiling away and staying in your comfort zone, you actually start to test the boundaries of your comfort zone and go a little bit further and a little bit further, a little bit further, and find challenges to level up your video game character. How would your life be different if you viewed your your entire life this way as a video game? Hey, universe, thanks for kicking me in the crotch. It's not what I wanted, but this is a challenge that you brought to me and there's something I'm supposed to get from it. I'm supposed to learn, I'm supposed to grow. I'm supposed to get these challenges. There's lessons in every single challenge I have. Thank you for helping me level up. If you look at your life that way, number one, it makes it a whole lot easier. It makes you a whole lot smarter, a whole lot better as you start to learn, extract lessons. But overall, I'm just going to be honest with you. It makes it more fun and makes it easier. How much more fun would your life be if you looked at the entire thing as a video game for you to learn, grow and improve before you're done here? So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, if this hits your soul, please do me a favor and share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at robdial Junior. R O B D I A L J R. I love seeing hundreds of you guys share it every single time. We put up a brand new episode and we only grow from you guys sharing the podcast. So I greatly, greatly appreciate you every single time that you do share it. And I'm going to leave you 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.
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