2 Feb 2023 · 17 min
In this episode of The Mindset Mentor, host Rob Dial explores the principle of "seeking discomfort" as essential for personal growth. He opens with a vivid lobster metaphor, explaining how lobsters must shed a hard exoskeleton under stress to grow a larger, tougher shell, and likens this process to humans breaking out of comfort zones. He reinforces the idea with a "plastic bag" analogy, emphasizing that the mind stretches permanently when challenged. Rob shares his own pivotal experience—the death of his father—as a painful yet transformative event that forced him to confront hardship and become stronger. He then cites Michael Jordan’s relentless self‑discipline as a real‑world example of thriving on discomfort, arguing that greatness stems from constantly pushing beyond limits. Building on these concepts, Rob describes his coaching initiatives: a 14‑day "push" program with six daily pillars and the "Iron Mind 60" challenge, both designed to force participants into sustained discomfort through habits like cold showers, daily workouts, and abstaining from alcohol. Throughout, he urges listeners to view hardships as catalysts, to actively seek discomfort, and to adopt structured challenges to reshape their identity. The episode also contains sponsor reads (banking, hiring platform, frozen meals, wireless, e‑commerce, nutritional supplement) which serve as commercial breaks but do not contribute to the core message.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host Rob Dial and if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never ever miss another podcast episode. Today we're going to be talking about your growth as becoming the person that who you want to be and all of the things that you must go through in life, all of the good things, all of the bad things, all of the hardships and how they make you who you are and how they expand you with every hardship that you go through. And to give you the example of what I'm talking about, I'm actually going to talk about an animal. I'm going to talk about a lobster. And if you know anything about lobster, you guys have all seen lobsters and you've maybe you've caught them before, maybe you've eaten them before. But you know, if I were to say, hey, is a lobster hard or is a lobs? All of you would probably say what?
Right? A lobster is hard, right?
But what most people don't realize is that a lobster is actually an extremely soft animal that has a hard shell. That hard shell is called an exoskeleton. Now the exoskeleton actually never grows. And that's an interesting thing that a lot of people don't know about lobsters. The exoskeleton doesn't grow. Now, how does a lobster grow them? Well, the actual inside the soft animal that is inside of the exoskeleton always grows. And it is one of animals in the world that never stops growing until
the day that it dies.
But what happens, though, is it actually has to. The way that it knows that it's getting to the point of growth is it gets really uncomfortable. And it feels the stress of its actual internal soft body squeezing up against the hard shell that it has the exoskeleton. And it knows through this stress, through this being uncomfortable, that it's growing. And it actually has to go into a rock and get away from all of the predators and all the animals that could eat it. It breaks its shel off, it grows a new shell. And once that new exoskeleton grows, it is now able to go back out into the wild. And when it grows a new shell, the interesting thing about this is that the shell actually is harder than the last shell that it had. So it gets harder and harder and harder. So if you see a massive lobster, those things have way harder shells than some of the younger lobsters that are there. So every single time that it regrows a new, larger exoskeleton, it is a lot harder than the last one. So that makes it extremely stressful for the lobster because every single time that it needs to grow, it's actually going to. It's going to be harder to break through the shell that it has. And once again, this never stops until the day that it dies. So this happens over and over and over and over again. But the stimulus for growth for a lobster is stress and discomfort. Stress and discomfort. That's how it grows. Now, if lobsters had doctors, like humans do, they would go into the doctor and he would say, hey, you know, doctor, I'm Mr. Lobster. I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling uncomfortable. I'm having a real crappy day. You know, it's been really hard. I'm just so stressed and uncomfortable lately. And the doctor would say, hey, no worries, man. Here's some pills. Go ahead home, take these. And the lobster would never grow. This is how growth works for us, is for us to grow, we must go through stress and discomfort. Now, do we want to go through stress and discomfort? Absolutely not. But sometimes in life, we have to go through stress and discomfort in order to grow. We have to literally get out of our comfort zone, AKA seek discomfort, and that will break our shell, our comfort zone that we have so that we can grow and become better. It's kind of like the phrase one of my favorite phrases, which is, the mind is like a plastic bag. And what do I mean by that? If you take a plastic bag and you pull it, it will never go back to the same size that it was before. The mind is like plastic, not elastic. So it's not like elastic, like a rubber band. We pull it, it immediately goes back. But when you push yourself and push yourself and you do something that you've never done before, your mind is like that plastic bag. It will be pulled, and then once it's pulled, it will never go back to the same size. That's the exact same way that you have to realize that you work. But if you are going to your comfort zone, AKA your shell forever, until the day that you die, you'll never grow, you'll never get bigger. You have to seek discomfort. You have to do things that push you to be better, because the only way to break through your shell is to literally push as hard as you possibly can towards whatever it is that you're working towards. So just like the lobster, you have to seek discomfort. When you know that you're getting uncomfortable, that means that it is actually a time of growth for you. It' something to run from, it's something to run towards. And each time that you push yourself, it's going to get harder and harder. Exactly like the exoskeleton. But here's the thing that's interesting about it. Every time we become stronger, every time we become more resilient, and if we get more discomfort and we fight through it, we're going to become better every single time. On the other side, think about the hardest things you've ever done. Think about the hardest things you've ever gone through. I bet you can think about, and I want you to bring it to the front of your mind right now and think about the hardest thing that you've ever done. Whether it was, you know, a death of a loved one, whether it was a sporting event that you had to push yourself for, whether it was getting prepped to go speak in front of 200 people. Whatever it is, think about how hard that time was for you. And then think of how much you grew from it. Like, for instance, for me, I know that the very first thing that really pushed me and challenged me the most was my father passed away. And I always tell people it was the worst day of my life, but it was also the best day of my life. And it pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. And I don't think that I would be where I was had I not gone through that. And the reason why is because, you know, people can judge me online, they can judge me for my podcast, they can judge me and talk crap, or they can do all of these things, but nothing will be worse than what I've already been through. So if you've been through crap in your life, you're stronger because of it. Nothing will be worse than the stuff that you've already gone through. You have to seek the stress. You have to seek the discomfort if you are trying to grow yourself Teachers
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With your first purchase. All you need to do is go to athleticgreens.com dial once again. That is athleticgreens.com dial to check it out and give AG1 a try. You know, I was watching this, this series the Last Dance on Michael Jordan. And for those of you guys that don't know, I was obsessed with Michael Jordan when I was a kid. I mean, like, literally obsessed. And I watched every single game from when I was like 6 years old until he retired the second time. I guess you could say the retired the second time and left the Bulls. I watched every single game when I was a kid. And you can see in this somebody who is absolutely focused, and he says that he would never push somebody to do something he had never done on his team. And he was a hardcore team, and he was known as you, like a tyrant, where he would push people and push people and push people, but through pushing, he made them better. Nobody on the court, nobody in the NBA Finals, any of that stuff in the playoffs would push harder than he pushed then. And he said that he would never do something, have them do something that he didn't do himself, because he was always constantly pushing himself harder than anybody else. Why was he the greatest that's ever lived? And if, you know, if you want to debate it, I'll debate with you on. On whether LeBron or. Or Michael Jordan's better. But I'm gonna go ahead and say, you know, Michael Jordan's better because he was to wear 23. LeBron would not exist without Michael Jordan. But, you know, I digress. We'll go back into what we were talking about. But you see somebody who was before everybody else, he'd arrived two hours to practice before everybody else. He'd go through the entire practice, leave an hour to two hours later than every single person as well. The way that you get better, he wasn't born with talent. The way that you get better, the way that you become incredible at what you do, is by pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, by seeking that discomfort all of the time. You can't sit back and just allow the world to happen to you. You can if you want, but you're not going to have the life that you want. So next time something happens to you, whether it's actually something that you go and seek or something that happens to you, you know, like an event in life that you can't really get around, somebody dies or somebody gets sick or, you know, you get fired or something like that. Next time that happens to you, don't think that it's happening to you. Think that it's happening for you, it's pushing you because you have been too stagnant. One of the things that's really interesting that I've talked with a lot of people that I've talked with is when something really catastrophic happens in life, a lot of the time it's that they were just extremely stagnant at that time. They weren't growing, they weren't pushing, they weren't reading themselves. And then boom. It's like the universe throws something at them to shift their mindset, to shift their life, to make them move, because they weren't moving. It's like a bunch of ducks just sitting on the water. You know, they'll just be sitting there for the longest time, but if you throw a rocket in that water, they're all going to scatter. And that's kind of what happens with people, is like the universe throws the universal rock at you. It's, it goes into the water, it goes all over the place. And you're like, holy crap, I gotta fly away. And you fly away to somewhere else. You go somewhere else outside of your comfort zone, not just that pond that you've been sitting in for the past six months, year, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, whatever it is for you, you have to seek the discomfort to grow. And you know, I was originally taught this when I was back in my Cutco days. And we used to do these things called pushes. And literally we're in the middle of a push right now for my coaching course where I teach coaches how to grow and monetize their following and how to you actually become professional coaches and you know, make six figures doing it. And what we're doing right now is we're pushing them. We're in a 14 day push where they have six pillars that they have to hit every single day for 14 days. And they're pillars that are required of them or else they don't qualify going through it. And it pushes them outside of their comfort zone and pushes them and pushes them and pushes them. And we literally have somebody that we hire just to check on every single person every single day. So they have the hardcore accountability so that they can't fail. Like they literally have to push themself as hard as they possibly can in order to grow. That's why we call it a push. It's a 14 day push. And I know the reason why we're doing this is because they will be different people on the other side of these 14 days. You know, if they're not used to Growing their Instagram following, the way that I teach people to grow their Instagram following. And they've been slacking a little bit. They've been slacking. They've been slacking. If they are required to push themselves really hard for 14 days, well, on day 15, they're going to have a much higher standard of what their daily activities should be like, of how many people they should reach out to, how many people they should get into conversations, how many people they should get onto phone calls. The mind is like plastic, not elastic. So what can you take from that? Even if you're not in my course, no big deal. What I'm trying to say is, can you push yourself really, really hard for the next 14 days, for the next 30 days, for the next 60 days? You know, I do this thing twice a year called the Iron Mind 60 challenge. And this is. This is not me, like, promoting a bunch of the shit that I do, because this wasn't supposed to be this way. But I've realized that I built a lot of the stuff that I. That I teach around pushing out of the comfort zone so that they can mentally and physically break themselves out of who they are or who they used to be. And I do a thing called The Iron Mind 60 challenge. 60 days in a row, they have to hit six pillars to push themselves every single day for 60 days. Stuff like no alcohol. Stuff like taking a cold shower. Stuff like working out every single day. Stuff like sticking to a diet. Stuff like journaling and meditating and visualizing all of that. Because I'm trying to break somebody out of who they thought they were. Because who you think you are is just a fabrication of your own mind. You can wake up today and be a completely different person than you were yesterday. You're just playing a character that you've been playing for years. So you have to realize that the whole entire fabrication that you've made up is only to stick inside of your comfort zone that you're in. But you can either have the universe throw that rock at you just like that, that duck that's on the pond,
and make you fly out of your
comfort zone, or you can mentally go, you know what? I'm going to be like the lobster. I'm going to push myself. I'm going to seek discomfort. I've been stuck in this comfort zone for so long, I will no longer be here anymore. I'm going to push myself so that I can break the mold of who I am. So by the time I'm done pushing myself, the old me won't even be recognizable. I'll be a completely different person. So you have to be like the lobster. Don't run from hard times. Embrace them, break through them, get more resilient from them. And until the day you die. Just like the lobster, never stop growing. So that's all I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with someone that you know and love. And for those of you guys that have been sharing this on your Instagram, I greatly appreciate it and I'm gonna 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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