The Power Of Optimism: The Key To A Positive Life

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be talking about something called pronoia. We're going to talk about how the world, the universe, God, whatever it is that you want to call it, is conspiring to make your life amazing. Now, we've all heard the phrase paranoia, right? Paranoia is the thought that everyone and everything, the world is out to get you, and everyone's gonna come in, they're conspiring to make your life terrible or to bring you down. That's what paranoia is. But did you know that there's a phrase that is the exact opposite of paranoia? If you didn't, it's pronoia. So instead of the world being against you, the world is for you. The world is conspiring to make your life amazing. And pronoia was actually coined by a sociologist named Fred Goldner in the 1980s. It's derived from the Greek words pro, meaning in favor of in noia, which, you know, comes from the Greek word for mind. And so it means that the world is conspiring to make your life amazing. And you might be listening to this and be like, woo, Woo. This sounds ridiculous. The world is on my side. Okay, whatever, dude. And it sounds overly. It sounds naive and it sounds overly idealistic. I. I get it. But really what it comes down to is about having a proactive, A mindset of proactive positivity. So viewing life's obstacles, everything that happens to you, good, bad, indifferent, as chances for growth, and looking for the beneficial aspects of every situation. So instead of just saying, like, everything's amazing and being naive, it's like, hey, this thing that happened to me, it does suck, but I'm going to figure out a way to make it amazing. Like, the way that I like to think about it is that I remember when I thought about my father passing away when I was 15. It was the worst day of my life, but it was also the best day of my life. And the reason why it was the best day of my life, because I said to myself, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I will not die with this being something that is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I will make it amazing. And so that's what paranoia really means, is that no matter what happens to you, no matter how challenging it might be, it really comes down to, I'm going to make something of it. And it was brought to me as a lesson, something to learn from to get better from going through your challenges is never easy. You're gonna go through the rest of your life. You're gonna have hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of more challenges that are going to be presented to you over the course of your lifetime. But are you grateful for your challenges? Like, if you think about your challenges of the past, right? And you start to think about them, this is one thing I've really tried to make myself over the past couple years get really good at, is becoming really grateful for my challenges. Because I used to look back at challenging things in life and being like, oh, that person fucked me over. That screwed me up. I really hated going through that. And I would look at challenges, like, the hardest challenges of my life through a very negative lens. And then I realized, and I'm curious with you, if you look at the most challenging moments of your life, would you ever. You probably don't want to go back to them and relive it, but you would never want to take the lessons that you learned from the most challenging things in your life out of your brain, would you? No. Because you learned, you got better, and you improved through it. And even though they were really hard to go through, you can now look at them and go, damn, I'm so glad I went through them, because I'm so much wiser now. I'm so much better now after going through these things. And so really, what it comes down to is looking at your challenges, saying, well, every challenge I've ever had in the past, even though it was hard, I'm grateful that I had them because it made me better. So the next time a challenge comes up, I can look at it and say, you know what? I don't want to be going through this. But I know that it's brought to me because it's my opportunity to learn and grow. And so you can start to look at your challenges differently. You can start to look at your life experiences differently, good or bad. It's not always easy to go through things, but it's easier if you know that something great will come from it. Like, there's a. I haven't really talked about it at all, and I'm not gonna talk about it publicly, but I have gone through a situation where a company owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I could be sit here and I could be pissed off, and I could be like, fuck them. And I could try to throw them under the bus and all of these things. And I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. He's like, Man, I'm so sorry that you had to go through this. This is terrible. Talking to someone today and she was like, I'm so mad for you. And I was like, listen, it's not the best thing to go through. I'm not super stoked about it, but I trust that I have to learn this lesson now because if I were to learn it in 10 years, it would be a much bigger situation. And so I have to learn this now with it being this amount of Money instead of 10 times the amount of money that is now. And so not something I want to be going through. Not super stoked about it, but I'm sitting there and I'm going, you know what? I had to learn this lesson. There's a reason why. And I trust, because I really, truly do trust with every fiber of myself that this is a lesson I have to learn for some reason, for something coming up in the future. And so if I can look at it that way, I can go, you know what? It is challenging. But, you know, every challenge has made me better, and this is going to make me better. So, you know, you have the challenge in your life. You have the life experiences, you have people in your life, you have people that you love, you have the ones that are really friggin difficult. You can look at all those things and you can look at all of them, you can think of them through this lens and go, man, I'm so thankful for all of it. I'm so thankful for all that. You know, there's somebody in my family who has actually has paranoia disorder. Since he was little, he's always thought that the world was out to get him. And he would always like, even like check candy after. When he was a little kid, he would check candy after they went, you know, trick or treating because he was afraid that someone had put something in there to try to, you know, like put a razor in there to try to kill him. And so he's always had this paranoia disorder. And you know, what if we became addicted to a thought process of thinking that the world is actually for us, like, how much would that change it? Because there's some people that are addicted, like they're fully addicted to thinking that the world is against them. And when they think of the world's against them and they think that something's wrong, what happens is their body is in constant stress, their body is in constant anxiety, there's adrenaline rushing through the body, there's cortisol rushing through the body. And it's like that thought process of the world is out to get me. Someone's trying to screw me over. There's no good people in the world. That thought process is not only our brain going through it, but it's putting our body through a lot of unnecessary stress. Can we become addicted to another thought process that creates the chemicals that we want? And really, that's what I'm trying to focus on. And so let's go over a couple keys that will help you get a little bit better at developing this muscle, this skill set of pronoia. Because I don't expect anybody to be perfect at this. You're not going to listen to this one time and be like, you know what? Forever my viewpoint has been changed. There's going to be times we're going to get ourselves caught. And so it's like, how do we get ourself to be better at this thing? First thing I'll recommend is to cultivate gratitude. If you were listening to one of the episodes that I just put out this week, I talk about how to actually be happier. And one of the ways to be happier is to just be grateful for what you have is to not want more things, but and be like, I gotta get more things that I don't have. It's not wanting what you don't have. It's wanting what you do have and being grateful for it. And so one of the aspects that will help you develop this muscle of seeing that the world is actually here to help you is trying to develop the muscle of gratitude. That's the first thing. The second thing is to start to embrace the challenges. One of the worst things you can do when a challenge comes is to try to fight the challenge. Cause here's one thing that I've realized. The more that I fight something that is challenging, the more challenging it becomes. And the more that I can go, you know what? Here's a challenge. I'm going through this thing. And you know what? I'm gonna try to realize that. Because I believe that every single challenge is a lesson. And so as I'm going through the challenge, I'm gonna go, okay. Damn, this is really challenging. I don't wanna be going through it, but I am going through it. I might as well. If I'm going through it, I might as well extract all of the lessons that I can from it. Cause I could just like white knuckle my way through the entire thing. Be like, I gotta challenge. Or I could say, you know what? I'm going through this challenge. There's a lot of wisdom in every single challenge that's available for me. What wisdom is here for me right now. And so the next thing is to try to embrace your challenges. The third thing is to practice mindfulness more often, more than anything else. I noticed that with mindfulness, it doesn't just have to be meditation. It doesn't have to be, you know, sitting out in a forest and being under a tree and, you know, then hugging the tree and becoming a tree hugger, any of that type of stuff. What it comes down to with practicing mindfulness is being present every single moment and not allowing our brain to run rampant all over the place. And so really, what it comes down to is practicing mindfulness is bringing our brain to the present moment as often as possible. This could be as simple as, you know, like when you're washing your hands after you go to the bathroom, start developing the habit of trying to bring your brain and all of your senses to that moment. Start noticing the warm water, Start noticing the smell of the soap. Start noticing everything that you possibly can right when you're walking up the stairs, Notice what it feels like on your legs and under your feet, the carpet under your feet. And when you really start to do the mundane things and you can be as present as possible, you'll be much more present anytime that you do have challenges in front of you or any of that stuff. How does this help with paranoia? Well, then when you're in the moment, you're in all of these challenges. Instead of just being in the future and being completely out of your head, it allows you to bring yourself to the present moment and actually start to see, like, how can I get better? How can I improve? How can I get as many lessons as possible as I possibly can from this? Okay, that's the third one. And the fourth one to help with paranoia, which is kind of outside the box, is to start celebrating others. That's the fourth one. I've got a fifth one, I just realized. So the fourth one is to celebrate others. And what I mean by that is a lot of times, what gets in the way of thinking that the universe is on our side is sitting there and going, well, I should be here. I should have this by now, right? Oh, I should. I don't know why I'm not there yet. There's something wrong with me. Oh, look at her. She's got this and I don't have this. And then we get jealous of somebody else. All of these things in this attitude is keeping us further away from what it is that we want in the Life that we want. So if we can start to celebrate others and see someone else's success and think, hell yeah, man, that's awesome. Like, I remember I used to be younger and I would see people on Instagram that had things that I wanted, like a car, had the business that I wanted, or had a house or whatever it was they were traveling somewhere that I wanted to go to. I'd be like, man, that sucks. And I'd be pissed off and jealous that they had this thing. Now I've just realized it's way easier if I'm just like, hell yeah, Congratulations. Me too. One day I will have that as well. One day. I will get there one day. But when you have jealousy towards somebody, it actually keeps you further. That energy of jealousy keeps you further away and distances you more from the thing that you actually want. And so how can you start to celebrate others more and develop that and help that help you with paranoia? And then the fifth one, which is now the last one on this one, is to start getting better at positive affirmations. I, when I was younger, had somebody that came in, and when I was like 19, 20 years old, there's a guy that came in to speak at a company that I worked at, and he was very successful and I was not. And he had said something about developing positive affirmations and more self love. And so what he said, and I didn't have much confidence at this point in time in my life, what he said was that every single morning after he gets out of the shower, he looks at himself in the mirror and he says, I love you, looking in his own eyes at least 100 times. And I was like, well, this guy's got a lot of money and I don't. And he's successful and I want to be there, so maybe I should do what he does. And what I realized I started doing it, is that the more that I started doing it, the more I actually started to rewire my own thoughts about myself. And I went from not being confident to being much more confident simply because I started to actually change the way that I thought about myself. I've been really taken aback recently with all the messages I get of how many people just talk so much shit to themselves. And it's like, life is already hard. Being an asshole to yourself just makes it so much harder. And so why don't you actually try to rewire that negativity out of your brain by using positive affirmations as well? Right. Okay, so let's talk about a couple three benefits of actually having paranoia in your life. You know, when you adopt this, this outlook, you can really start to have a profoundly positive impact in your mental state, but also your emotional well being as well. So how does this actually help you besides, you know, making your life better in a million different ways? Number one, it will actually start to reduce your stress and anxiety by taking all of these different adversities and reframing adversities into opportunities. Your pronoia can help you reduce your anxiety. Because usually when we have anxiety, it's that we have fear of going into the, going into the future. There's something that's coming up for us that we are afraid of, that we are. The anxiety is our body's anticipation of fear in the future, right? And so what really what we're doing is we're actually saying to ourselves, this is something good that's going to be happening in the future that will reduce your stress and your anxiety immensely. So when we believe that the universe, the world is on our side, we can start to approach every situation, every single challenge, everything that's coming up in our future in a sense of really being much more calm. So that's the first thing. Second thing it does is it will 100% boost your happiness and your optimism. Pronoia really fosters a positive outlook in your life. And once again, positive outlook doesn't mean that you're resisting and not seeing the negative. It means that you're turning every single negative or searching for a way for every single negative to actually turn into a positive. And so you're really cultivating a sense of joy and happiness and satisfaction in your life. And third thing that it will do, you will be much more resilient than other people. Pronoia really helps you develop resilience and the ability to bounce back from adversity and not be taken down by so many different things. And by viewing your challenges as opportunities for you to grow, for you to become better at every single up and down that you get, you become more resilient. The people who are not resilient are the ones who get, you know, they're just like a, you know, I don't know why the thing that popped in my head was like a, a beach umbrella because I've been a beach many times and you always see like the people who, there's always one tourist who's, whose umbrella just the wind comes and they just, they're chasing their umbrella down the beach, right? It's like when you're not resilient and you're in life, you're oh, everything woe is me. Everything happens to me. I'm so the world is out to get me. It's like the smallest little breeze can just knock you over. And so when you actually decide, you know what, no matter what happens to me, I'm going to find a way to make something amazing from it. It makes you more resilient. It makes you much more resilient in every single thing. Are you looking for the lessons in your life? Are you looking for all of the opportunities in the shit? Are you trying to see how the universe is on your side? You know, if you really just take a step back, you can start to connect the dots and see that there are many things that are happening around you that are trying to help you improving it better. You just have to start to look for it more and more. And that is the viewing the world through the lens of pronoia. 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 once again, if you want to pre order my book, it really, really helps when you preorder the book because it counts for the first week of sales and then allows us to hit the bestseller list. Whenever that happens, all you gotta do is go to robdial.com book and once again with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way, 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.