Navigating Change: How To Thrive in the Unknown

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 I believe more than anything else, that you should be doing is working harder on yourself. Your personal growth, your physical growth, your spiritual growth, your emotional growth. It's more important than it ever has been in the history of your entire life. Right now, I believe that you should be adapting to. To the changes that are going on in the world because there is changes happening all around us. And to be fully honest with you, I feel like we're at the point of maybe your life, my life, humankind, where we need to adapt or we need to be realizing that we're gonna be left behind. If we look back on the past few years, right, 2020 was crazy. 2021 was crazy. 2022 was also crazy. And 2023 seems like it's gonna be crazy as well. So if you're wanting to go back to the way that it was, go back to Pre Covid and pre2020, back to 2019, where everything was all peachy, you might be waiting forever. We might never go back to that. And it's not a bad thing. I want you to understand that it's not a bad thing. Things change, and things are supposed to change. The only constant in this world is change. If you look at. I like to look at nature for inspiration and kind of see how the universe works and how the world works. Nothing ever stays the same in nature. Nature is constantly changing. And we. You. You're never going to be in winter forever. You're never going to be in spring forever. You're never going to be in summer forever. You're never going to be in fall forever. Like, I live in Austin, Texas, and if you don't know, it has been so ridiculously hot for, like, the past three months. And it's so hot that, like, I don't even really go outside when the sun is up. It's that hot. And it's easy to look at it and be like, oh, my God, this is terrible. This sucks. I don't want to go outside. I'm literally sweating. As soon as I walk outside, whenever the sun is up, my car is hot, everything's hot. And it's easy to look at me and think, oh, my gosh, it's going to be this way forever. But it's not going to, because every single few months, we go through some cycle of change. The world goes through some cycle of change. And I believe that right now, humankind is going through a cycle of change. And I don't think that it's something to be afraid of. I think that a lot of people are very afraid right now because it's just changing. You know, I'll be honest with you. There's a lot of stuff that's really messed up with our society. Maybe we need some change. Maybe the change that's gonna be coming is for the better. And so for me, I don't think that right now is the best time to be just sitting back and just seeing what happens. I think that it's time to step up to the plate for all of us, to embrace the new normal that we're moving into and not to resist the change, but to embrace it. I was watching, I don't know if you ever go onto YouTube and you click on one thing on YouTube and then all you do is get served the same thing over and over again on YouTube. It's like the algorithm immediately hits you. I had something on YouTube that popped up and it was somebody talking about a near death experience. And it was so intriguing and I watched it. And then what happened? The next day I got onto YouTube and all my YouTubers are just full of all these other stories of near death experiences. So I've been watching them because they're just so interesting of like people who have died, been pronounced dead, and then come back to life and what they experienced in that time. And I would recommend watching them, they're pretty interesting. But one of the guys was literally dead for 45 minutes. He was in like, he, he was dead. They put him into a body bag. They put him into the back of a. A ambulance. And then they. The guy who was in the ambulance was like, let me just check one more time and see if he has a heartbeat. He had a, like, he had just one beat that came through and he's like, oh my God, this guy might not be fully dead. And they brought him back to life and he was talking about all of his experiences. And one of the things that a lady said when I was watching it this morning was when you go into, you know, whatever you believe, you believe. But she said when she went into the spiritual realm, whatever happens after you die, she said, there is no good or bad. There's no yes or no. There's none of that. What it is is, it's either growth or no growth. Good would be growing constantly growing, constantly evolving. Bad would be trying to be the same over and over again. And she was saying our experience here on Earth is To grow is to improve ourselves and to try to get better and become the best we could possibly be and help other people in that process. And so the thing that I recommend to you is to embrace the new normal, embrace that this is the cycle that we're currently in. We're switching from one season to another season. We can't go, oh, my God, I want it to be somewhere forever. No. Because fall's gotta come, and so now's the time for you to really be proactive. And humans just don't like change. I've been coaching people for 17 years now, and the one thing that I find is that everybody wants change, but nobody, not nobody, everybody wants change, but very few people want to change. And you have to be one of the people who says, you know what? I see what the world's going through. I see what's happening. I see all of this stuff. And this is a challenge for me to step up to the plate, for me to become better. And the reason why humans don't like change is because change is very unknown. We don't know. We know what the situation. We know what our comfort zone feels like. We know that we're safe in this little tiny comfort zone that we're in. But there's a part of you, if you're listening to this podcast, that wants to grow, that wants to be different. But there's also another part of you that's saying, hey, no, it's dangerous out there. Don't change. Don't go into the unknown. Because change is unknown, and therefore the unknown is a threat to the human brain. It's a threat to the human brain. Because if you think back a hundred thousand years ago to our ancestors, the unknown usually meant pain or death attached to it, possibly. If you didn't know what was coming up in the forest, you had to be on guard at all points in time because there might be something that was ready to attack you that was a hundred thousand years ago. But unknown in 2023 is usually not going to kill you. It's just a little bit scary because we don't know exactly what it is. So as long as you know that there's. There's always going to be a part of you that wants to grow. There's always going to be a part of you that wants to change, that wants to improve, that wants to get better. But there's also always going to be a part of you that's afraid. There's always going to be a part of you that doesn't want to get outside of your comfort zone. It wants to stay inside of your cave because inside of your cave you're safe and nothing's going to attack you. But in 2023, nothing's going to attack you, nothing's going to kill you, nothing's going to come out and kill you. If you're just trying to grow your business or grow yourself or become better. And with all of the changes that are happening and so many industries that are changing completely, this isn't the first time this has happened. Industries have changed over and over again, and the biggest industries in the world are the biggest industries in the world, and then they collapse because things change. Like if you think back to like the railroads, right? Railroads used to be the main form of transportation for people. Actually before then was probably horses and before then was probably walking around on your feet. So horses were probably the main form of transportation for a while. And then what happened? Oh yeah, Trains came along and the railroads came along and I bet you, I bet you that the horsing industry suffered from that. And then what happened? Cars came along. Cars came along and what happened? The railroad industry was crushed. And then what happened? Planes came along and the railroad industry was crushed more. And now people don't ride horses and they don't ride trains as much as they used to. Industries change. Things change all the time. The only constant is change. Like if you think back to people used to use VCRs. If you use a VCR now in 2023, it's like, what's going on? What year are we. But people. VCRs were a huge industry at one point in time. And then what happened? DVDs came out and DVDs became a huge industry. And I don't know about you, but I still have some friends that have like a thousand DVDs in their house and they don't get to watch any of them. Why? Because now streaming is here. So things change. And what happens in that when industries change is. Is jobs are lost, industries collapse when that happens. But with new industries become new jobs and new jobs were created. And so when people say, like, AI is going to destroy the world and AI is going to destroy all these jobs, it's going to destroy jobs as any industry change does. But with that will be new jobs that opened up. There used to be radios that people used to listen to all the time. I haven't listened to the radio in like 10 years since I first downloaded Spotify. Now I just listen to Spotify. People used to have records and then they had eight tracks and then they had CDs, and then they went to streaming. It's just what happened. And that's always what happens, is that there's always some sort of change. And now so many people are like, oh, my God, AI is here. This is terrible. The world's gonna collapse. Robots are gonna take over the world and kill us all. All right, I don't think that's gonna happen, but AI is here and it's not going anywhere. And so AI is coming quickly, and it's coming really, really quick. And so for us, we need to look at it and say, okay, if I'm fast forwarding in the next couple years, I'm seeing how much things are changing. How can I adapt myself? You know, I don't think robots are gonna come and take over the world, but they will make things a lot more efficient. So what can you do now to make yourself more valuable? Is really what we need to start asking ourselves. What can you do now to make yourself a more valuable person in your family, to make yourself a more valuable person in the world, in your industry, Switching industry to make yourself valuable? What really, what it comes down to is as we learn, as we grow, we become more valuable. So really what it comes down to is if you've been working a job that you it's okay, or you don't like it, or it just pay the bills and you fast forward a few years, you got to ask yourself, is it possible that I could be out of a job in five years because of how much the world is changing? And if it is, what's a valuable skill set that you can learn right now? Not to wait until you get to that point, but how can I make myself more valuable right now? If you're gonna work for someone else, how can you make yourself unfirable? I don't know if that's a word. Maybe I just made it up. But how can you make yourself unfirable if there were layoffs in your job? They say, okay, well, we gotta get rid of these people. But yeah, she definitely needs to stay because she's a valuable team member. What skill sets can you learn to make yourself a more valuable member of any team? What's a skill set that you can learn or that you can strengthen that AI cannot replace? What is that like? For me, the thing that obviously the industry that I'm in is coaching. I don't really see AI coming in and competing against one on one, coaching. Could AI come in and write a book based off of all of this Google search it could do. Of course it could. But as far as talking to one person, one on one with life experiences and talking to another person who's been in your shoes and knows what it feels like, cuz that robot doesn't know what it emotionally feels like to be in your position, I don't think that's something that could be taken over by, by AI. I'm not saying everybody needs to become a coach because then there would be no reason for coaches cause everybody would be a coach. What I'm saying is how can you move and shift knowing that the world is changing and all that we need to be doing is constantly growing and constantly changing. This is your time to start thinking differently. Stop thinking, thinking the same way that you've been thinking more than ever you have to double down on what's different. What do you love to do? What is it that you've just been sitting back and what's that dream you've been thinking about for years but you've been like, ah, yeah, but I've got a family, I've got bills to pay. I'm not saying that you're gonna be out of a job in the next three months, but what I'm saying is if I'm looking in the future, and I'm always trying to look in the future and say what's coming up next? What's the world gonna be like in two years? What's the world gonna be like in five years? And how can I make myself a valuable asset to the world based off of what I see coming in the future? If you're wanting it to stay the same forever, you're going to have to deal with the possibility of being left behind in the future marketplace. And so there's a lot of things that we can do. What are those things we could do? I recommend hiring mentors. If you're saying, okay, here's a valuable skill set that I want to learn, can you hire a mentor to come in and do that to teach you so that you can instead of you can fully 100% if you want to go and make all of the mistakes and figure it out over the next five years. Or you could hire somebody who's already really good in whatever industry you want, that you're in, or that you want to be in and say, hey, can I just pay you to teach me? Can you just teach me how to get to where you are? I want to pay you to teach me how to not make the mistakes you made so I can be where you are. And instead of 10 years, I want to be there in two years. So hire mentors, go to conferences, meet people who are around the industry that you want to move into or the industry that you want to improve in. The real point is get better. I have a sign that's on my desk and it says, be better. That's. It doesn't say anything else. Be better. Because I'm trying to constantly remind myself, just be better. Today when I go to bed tonight, I want to be better than I was when I woke up. And if you look at like, college is a really great example of things changing. I don't believe that paying into a system that puts you into debt that you can't pay off is going to live past my lifetime. I really don't. The Internet is making most degrees obsolete now. Are there still going to be doctors and lawyers and architects and in all of that that are still being needed? Absolutely, 100%. But there's many jobs that the Internet is making pretty obsolete. Like when I went to school, before I dropped out, I was a business major. You could learn to be a business person or from going to school and learning from somebody, or you could just go out and start a business. You could go and actually hire a ment of somebody who's running a business and you could see what they do and learn from them and get better. And so I really don't believe that. You know, I hope I live to 100 years old, that when I live to 100 years old, which is, you know, 63 years from now, I don't believe that college is really going to be what it is now and what it has been in the past. And that's just an example of things changing. And that's fine. It's always fine. Things should always change. And we should try to embrace as much as possible. You know, college used to be necessary for financial success. Like, if you wanted to be financially successful, it was almost always necessary for you to do it. But now, when you look at some of the biggest companies in the world, Apple, Google, Netflix, Tesla, none of them require college degrees anymore. They don't require them. They want skillset more than they want a college degree. You know, the average College is about $20,000 per year. So then I start thinking to myself, okay, if I was 18 years old and I had $20,000 that I could spend into my education, I could go do that and go to a school and they could teach it to me, I could do that, or I could invest that money into Traveling around the world, meeting people, figuring out my passions in life, going to conferences, meeting people at those conferences, trying to find a mentor, hiring a mentor. When you look at people like, I love going over to Italy because you can see the art. Art's incredible, and the architecture is incredible, and everything was made by masters. And the way that those masters were always made was they were apprentice of somebody else. They found someone who was a master. When you look at Michelangelo, he didn't learn how to do it all on his own. He was an apprentice under somebody who was already a master. He learned from them faster, and he became better through that. So can you look at mentors as if you're an apprentice? Either you pay them to help, you know, help you get better, or you donate your time to help you get better. If you're young, become an intern for someone that you want to mentor. You give them your time. If you don't have money, if you have money, you can say, hey, you know, maybe I could give it to you. I could give it to a charity of your choice, whatever it is, to try to get some time to learn. Because you can either go to school and you can learn from someone who is learning from the book, or you can go learn from someone who's actually doing what it is that you want. So it really comes down to, like, what's. What's moving and shifting. If you look at it, the Internet is exploding. Learn how to make money online if you want to. A lot of people send me messages, and they're like, rob, go. You know, I want to go, and I want to travel the world, but I want to figure out how to make money online. Well, if that's the case, there's a million ways to make money online. There's a million ways to make a million dollars online. But it really comes first with the. With. With the awareness of that's what you want to do, and the intention of I want to learn. I know before I started my business online and started making money online and before I actually started my first business online, which was an Amazon business, before I went and started coaching and doing what I'm doing now, for years I was just researching all of the different ways you can make money online, because I honestly didn't want to work for someone else anymore, and I wanted to travel the world. And so, you know, you could figure out ways to make money online. You could spend more time with your kids, you could travel more, you could build your own business so that you're free. And really what it Comes down to is, how do we keep getting better? How do we keep learning? Another thing I think that people really need to double down on that. Most people try to remain ignorant in is financial literacy. Like, we're not really taught financial literacy. And everything is changing right now with blockchain and Bitcoin, Ethereum and all of that. Who knows what it's going to be in five years or 10 years or 20 years. But I do know that financial literacy is definitely needed, and they don't really teach us that in school. I always say there's a lot of people, like, we know that we need to know our finances. We know how to budget, we know how to invest. We know we need to know those things. But it's a skill set. It's a knowledge base that needs to be built. And so a lot of people are like, I don't really want to put the time into learning it. And I always say, here's basically the way I see money. Money in the economy is just this big giant game. And if you live inside of a country, you're in the game, you're in it. There's no way out of it. If you're going to be living in a country, making money, paying your bills, paying taxes, all of that, you're in the game. You should learn how to play the game, because it is a game. And so it's like you could just go, oh, yeah, I don't want to learn it. Fine, don't learn it. But you could go, you know what? There's a lot of stuff changing in financial. There's a lot. I want to be financially free later. I need to learn how to be more financially literate. You're in the game, you need to learn how to play it. And really what it comes down to is how do we start to build ourself into somebody who is unbreakable? The future is very uncertain. It will always be uncertain. If the future is uncertain, you need to be certain in yourself. You need to be certain in who you are in your skill set and growing yourself. And don't wait until it's too late. You might have another 12 to 18 months before things start to change. But don't wait those 12 to 18 months. Everything's going digital, everything's changing. That's amazing. I'm excited about all this stuff, not scared about it. I want to learn, I want to grow. I want to try to become better. And you got to learn more. What's changing? You gotta learn what to do with your money. You've gotta educate yourself. You gotta spend your money on your self education, not material possessions, you know. 80% of American households didn't buy a book last year. 80% of American households did not buy one book last year. Get ahead of everyone else. Cultivate a growth mindset. Try to make yourself get better. Read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck and she talks about the differences between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And there's tons of studies that show how a growth mindset will help you become more successful, happier, more joyful, have better emotional intelligence. There was a study that was done in the Journal of Child Development that found out that students who had a growth mindset were more likely to get higher grades and test scores than those who had a fixed mindset. Growth mindset means I can grow, I can change, I can get better. Fixed mindset says, this is how I am and this is how I'll always be. And what's crazy about it is it was especially true for the students who had the worst academic challenges. And so what it showed was that a growth mindset can lead to better academic outcomes. And as students were more likely that students who had a growth mindset were more likely to persevere when they got bad grades and seek out resources to improve because they saw their challenges as an opportunity to grow, to get better, instead of saying, I, oh, this is how I am, this is how I'll always be. There's another study on growth mindset in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and found that individuals that had growth mindset about their personality traits, meaning that their personality could change and they could become better. And they weren't just always going to be this person forever, were more resilient in the face of social rejection. They experienced less stress and more positive emotions. They were also less likely to retaliate against people who rejected them in their life. So a growth mindset can contribute to better emotional regulation, resilience, and give you better well being as well. And so really what it comes down to right now, and the point of this episode is you need to prioritize yourself. Your mental, your physical, your emotional, spiritual self. You need to prioritize all of that. Now's the time for you to grow and become the leader that you really can be. You don't have to lead on a large scale. You don't have to change the entire world. It could be on a smaller scale, it could be just you because you interact with people all day long and everyone you interact with sends a ripple effect out into the entire world. It can be on a small scale. It could be you, it could be your family, it could be your children, it could be your parents, your friends. Help them get through their changes and just disappear for a little while. Disappear for six months and work on yourself. Delete any of the apps that are in your phone that hold you back from growing or that take your time away from growing and becoming better. So instead of scrolling on Instagram, you can actually work on yourself. Because really what it comes down to is we need to learn how to grow and how to change. We need to force ourselves to become better because there is either growth or no growth. That's what exists. One of my very first mentors used to always say, you're either green and growing or you're brown and dying. How can you step into the face of adversity, in the face of uncertainty, of what's coming in this world and make sure that you're always green and growing so that you're well prepared for the future ahead? I. I don't say this because I want it to be doomsday. I'm saying this because this is an exciting time to be a human, to learn, to grow and to become better. Now is your time to get better. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it. Robdial Jr R O B D I A L J R and if you love this podcast episode, you'll also probably love my book that is just coming out. If you want to order it, it's called Level up and it is. The subtitle is how to stop or how to get focused, how to stop procrastinating and how to upgrade your life. If you go to robdial.com book before October 3rd and pre order it. When you pre order it and enter your information and show proof that you bought it, you'll also be entered into a drawing for over $25,000 in cash and prizes. There's going to be a pool of people who are going to win some cash and prizes and you're also going to get a free mini course, which is how to stop procrastinating on that website as well. So you can go to robdial.combook to pre order. And with that, I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.