The Secret To Finding Happiness In Difficult Times | The Mindset Mentor Podcast

Today we're going to be talking about a simple secret to help you find happiness and find it in some of the most dark times. And the first thing I want to say is this. Life is full of ups and downs. Life is unpredictable. You never know what's going to happen. And we can plan and we can hope that our plans come true, but doesn't always work that way. It's kind of like that phrase, like we plan and then God laughs. It's kind of like that, right? So with ups and downs, we could have a lot of downs. Like there's, there's loss, there's death, there's breakups, there's businesses failing, there's getting fired from your job. There's so many different things where we could go up and then we could go down. And when we have a negative emotion, we want that emotion to be gone as soon as possible. And we have a positive emotion. We want that emotion to be there forever. And so it's easy to get caught up in our emotions as life goes up and life goes down. But one thing that I learned when I was in a ten day silent meditation retreat, it's called vipassana, is they talk about the idea of something called anitycha. And Anita is Sanskrit, I believe, and anicc is the idea of impermanence. Everything in your life is impermanent. And they say whatever you look at, so you could. I'm looking outside right now, I'm looking at all of the trees, it's impermanent. I'm looking at the houses across the street, they're impermanent. I'm looking at this microphone, it's impermanent. My own body is impermanent. Every person you've ever met is impermanent. And even the mountains, like I'm in Sedona right now and I can see the mountains in the distance. Those are hundreds of millions of years old. But if you fast forward a billion years, there's a pretty good chance those mountains won't be there anymore. And so everything in this world is impermanent. So one of the thing, it's impermanent. And one of the things that we struggle with the most is trying to control the impermanence of life. The only thing that is constant in life is that life is constantly changing. And so one of the things that they teach to help you with this is when you're in the middle of a meditation, you have your eyes closed and you're sitting there and you start to feel a little bit of an ache in Your back, instead of moving, just allow the achiness to exist. Because the achiness is here now. But in three hours, the achiness probably won't be there. If you're sitting there and you feel a little bit of a scratch on the tip of your nose, instead of itching it, just let it be. Because eventually, 45 seconds, a minute down the road, it's not going to really be there anymore. It's going to be gone. And so it's training your mind to be okay with everything being here one moment and being gone another moment. And when we feel good, we want to feel good forever. And when we feel bad, we want that shit to be gone as soon as we possibly can get it gone, right? But neither one of those things in life, the emotions and the feelings and the ups and downs in life, none of them are permanent. And so I remember when I was younger, one of my first mentors used to always say, the amount of stress and anxiety that you feel every single day is going to be in direct proportion to how much you're resisting the way that the world is. If you resist the fact that you don't have as much money in bank account as you want, if you resist the fact that somebody broke up with you, if you resist the fact that, you know, maybe you didn't have the childhood that you want, if you resist the fact that you're not as far along in life as you wish that you were, you are going to have more stress and anxiety from that. And so the phrase that I try to tell myself I believe it might be from the Bible, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it is, is this too shall pass. And so when you're in. It's a powerful phrase because when you're in a really bad place, you could sit there and have a moment of clarity and say, hey, this too shall pass. Okay, this is okay. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to be going through this in my life. But this too shall pass. There will eventually be. I'm at the lowest of lows right now. This too shall pass. But it's also the exact same thing when you're having a really great day, you're on top of the world, and you think to yourself, this too shall pass. Now, for some of you guys out there, like, hold on, but if I sit there, aren't I ruining a beautiful moment by thinking that this too shall pass? Well, think about this for a second. If you have a really beautiful moment and you're with your child and they just scored their first goal and they just won their first game, whatever it might be. And you think to yourself, this too shall pass. It could make you sad or it could make you more present to hey, this moment will be gone. They will be 18, 19, 20 years old. They will go off and go to college and have their own lives. Maybe I should get off my fucking phone and I should be more present, right? Because it will pass. All of this will pass. Everything will eventually change. Everything will eventually be gone. And so what I want to dive into today is really some tips on how to work with your emotions, the ups and the downs of your emotions, and the ups and the downs of life, because we're going to find all of those. And really what I want to help you do is I want to help you find peace and happiness in the moment, no matter what is going on. Because really what matters the most is how you feel in everything. And feelings. I like to think of them like the weather. Like, I'm in Sedona right now. We're on vacation. We just decided to come up here. We were down in Phoenix and it's about a two hour drive and we love it. So we just decided to extend our stay. Yesterday it was snowing and it was cold. And what I want to do when I come to Sedona is hike. But when it's 14 degrees outside and we're getting 3 inches of snow, the last thing that I want to do is hike. And so there's a part of me that's looking out. I'm like, man, I just want to go outside. Like, I want to hike, I want to be a part of nature. I want to be out there. That's what I come here for is like that, being out in nature and hiking. And I'm not a big hiker, but at least going out in nature, right? Going out for an hour, two hours, whatever it might be. And so I could have sat there and been really pissed that it was snowing and be really pissed that I wasn't. Oh, I made these plans. I thought I was gonna be able to come to Sedona to be able to go out and hike and have some fun and all of that. But now it's snowing and I could get really pissed. But if I get pissed and I resist the fact that it's snowing, is that going to stop the snow at all? No. What is it going to do? It's going to change my internal state. That's what it's going to do. It's going to change my internal state. So the only thing it's going to do is piss me off. But now when you fast forward to today, today the sun is out. I literally do not see one cloud in the sky. It's a beautiful day. It's like a high of 45 degrees, 50 degrees. Perfect day to go out and go hiking. And now I appreciate today more because of the fact that it was snowing and I didn't see the sun at all yesterday. And so what I want you to realize is that your emotions in life are exactly like the weather. But resisting the weather doesn't change the weather. All it does is change your internal state. And too many people are out there trying to force life to change when really what they need to do first is accept it. Now some people are saying, but if I accept it, that doesn't mean that I'm okay with it. Like, I don't. Like, there's not enough money in my bank account. Okay, well, you have to accept there's not enough money in your bank account, and then you have to go and change it. And so life can be intense. Life can be overwhelming. Emotions can be intense. Emotions. Emotions could be overwhelming. It could be down, but it could also be, you know, down in the depths of your soul. And you can go through a dark night of the soul, but it could also be joyful. It could be amazing. It could be full of bliss. But everything, all the ups and all the downs are all temporary. We control almost nothing. Like you can barely control. You can barely control your bowels after Taco Tuesday. And you think that you're going to change the fucking world. You're going to change the way that other people are. Right? It's just like some things we have to just realize that we just can't change. And what we can do, though, is we can change how we respond. What we are in control of is how we respond to everything that happens. You know, if we resist the world, if we resist the weather, the rainy days, the sunny days, all of that, it's only going to change our internal state. And so the only thing that we can do is actually change our mindset around life, around our circumstances, around everything that we have, don't have where we want to be, where we are. That's the only thing that we could change. And so when we experience negative emotions, the very first instinct that we have is to resist them or suppress those emotions. We may want to distract ourselves. We might want to ignore the feelings or numb ourself with alcohol or with weed or with social media or being busy with work or watching as much Netflix as we possibly can. But by resisting and suppressing it only makes our internal state worse. Resisting those emotions only make those emotions stronger. And the way I like to think about it is, you know, when I was back home a few years ago, I caught a 600 pound grouper. And when the grouper was so big, we couldn't bring it up with a pole anymore. And so we literally had to pull. I had to pull it physically with my hands up as we were fishing. And, you know, we thought we were catching something way smaller. And I ended up having to put gloves on to pull it up. And, you know, we ended up releasing it and everything was fine and it swam away and all of that. But there was times when it was pulling so hard that if I would have tried to hold on to it, it would have yanked me in the water or it would have literally ripped through the gloves that I was wearing. And all I could do when it was really, really going is just let go. And sometimes that's how life is. Sometimes life is going and it's really, really going, and we want to resist and we want to suppress and we want to change, but sometimes we just got to take a step back and say, okay, life like this is what it is right now. My finances are not what I want them to be. My relationship is not what I want. My career is not what I want them to be. Whatever it might be. I need to take a step back and I need to stop resisting it. Because when I resist it, when I try to pull and push and change the universe, it only makes everything else worse. So instead of resisting our emotions, what we do is we just learn to accept them. Now, when I say acceptance, I don't mean that we have to like the circumstance. What I mean is that we have to figure out a way to be okay, okay, and not let the circumstance change our internal state. It means that we acknowledge it, we accept it, we see it, and we let it pass. This too shall pass. The same thing as when you're sitting down and you're in that meditation. You're there for 20 minutes and you start to feel that little ache in your back. You so badly want to just go for it and you just want to move. You feel that little itch on your nose, you want to do it, but you just sometimes have to let things pass. And if we can accept life, if we can accept our emotions, if we can learn to observe all of those things and maybe have some curiosity as to why is life this way? Why am I feeling this way? What are my thoughts around what's going on in these circumstances? Instead of trying to push them away, usually it makes it easier to accept them. Because just as the weather changes, life changes as well. When we think things are amazing, you know, we're sitting there and life is amazing. We think it's going to be amazing forever. When we think things are terrible, we think they're going to be terrible forever. But it doesn't rain every single day. It's not possible. It's not sunny every single day. It's not possible. There's got to be the ups and the downs. There's got to be the seasons of life. Everything changes. And so really what you have to just remind yourself is this too shall pass. Everything shall pass. Everything shall change. Everyone that I love will eventually be gone. And that can be a really stressful thought if you allow it to be. Or it can be a really freeing thought, knowing that, hey, everything in life could eventually be gone. This moment could be gone. My children will be gone, my family will be gone, my house possibly gone. Why don't I just sit here and actually love and appreciate it? And we accept because eventually, on it's a rainy day, the sun will be back out. And when we accept our emotions and we know that eventually they'll pass, we know our emotions will pass, we know life will pass, we can find peace and happiness in the moment. And one thing that I like to ask myself when I'm in a. In a circumstance I don't necessarily like, is to ask myself, what's beautiful about this moment, right? So I was sitting yesterday and it was snowing, and I immediately thought, damn it, I wanted to go on a hike today. Doesn't look like that's happening. It's cold as hell out here. This isn't what my plans were. Probably should have checked the weather before I came here. I'm sitting outside, I'm thinking to myself, what's beautiful about this moment? I could look around. I could see the colors. I could see that I was healthy. Everyone around me that I can think of as healthy. Business is going well. And instead of thinking about this one thing of the weather's not what I want it to be. I was like, you know what? There's a lot of beautiful things in this moment. And I've been doing this for a really long time. Whenever I find myself in the moment of getting too much in my emotions, in Life of this isn't what I wanted it to be is just asking myself, taking a step back and saying, hey, what's beautiful about this moment? How can I find peace and happiness in this moment? Because it can be challenging, but if we look for it, we can always find it. And so let me give you a couple strategies that I kind of find that help me when I notice that life or emotions are getting really a little bit more intense than I want them to be. The first one, if you've been listening to podcasts long enough, this is always the first thing I do, is 60 breaths, I close my eyes. Because when you close your eyes, you actually use less brain power. Your brain can start to relax a little bit because you're not using, you know, visual brain power to look around and see life. So I close my eyes, I take sick, deep breaths. I go in through the nose, out through the mouth. When I I breathe out through mouth, it's a long exhale, like I'm breathing out through a straw. A long exhale actually slows your heart rate down. And so when I notice my emotional state change, the very first thing that I do every single time is close my eyes, take 60 breaths, and try to get myself to be center again. Next thing I do is I focus on gratitude. I ask myself, what's beautiful about this moment? You know, I have to shift my focus from what I don't want to what I do have and what is amazing about my life and all of the things that I have. And even if you were at the lowest of lows, like years and years ago, when I was five months behind on my car payment and I was living off of literally just pasta from Walmart for two months, and I was, you know, in debt by a lot, a lot of money, I could still find gratitude in those moments for a lot of things that I did have. So that's the second thing. So you take a couple deep breaths, six deep breaths. I ask myself what is amazing about my life? And it could just be, hey, you've got your health. It could just be, hey, you've got family, you've got healthy kids. It could be that, you know, wind is blowing on your face and it feels good. There's always something to find gratitude. And if you can find gratitude for the littlest, tiniest things, you could definitely find it for the biggest things. So that's the next thing. Another thing I like to do that really helps as well is to connect with other people. Sometimes I notice that when I am two in my Thoughts and two in my feelings and woe is me. I've been alone for a really long time. And one of the things that I find that changes the way that I feel is being around other people. Now, being around the right people is an important thing to bring up who you're around and who you surround yourself with. You know, I always say, like, there's batteries and there's vacuums. Vacuums take energy from you. Being around them for a few minutes makes you feel worse. Don't be around those people. You want to find people that are like the batteries, not the vacuums. The batteries are the people who give you energy, who make you feel good. So who in your life makes you feel good? Try to be around those people. Try to do something for someone else, because that will always change your internal state, make you feel better. And the last thing is just practice acceptance. Journal through. Take your journal out and take all of your thoughts, put them onto a piece of paper and start to ask yourself, like, I don't have to enjoy this moment, but can I accept this moment? Can I accept what's going on? Can I accept life? Can I accept these feelings? Can I accept everything that's happening to me? Because when you can find real acceptance, especially in the lowest moments of your life, is when you can really find that you become present and the highest of highs, the lowest of lows. But when you can accept and be present when things are not going the way that you want them to go, oh, man. When you get to the high moments in life, they are freaking amazing. So much better than if you didn't practice that acceptance when they're low. And so the secret superpower to mastering your emotions is to learn to accept and imagine that your emotions and that life are like the weather. This too shall pass. So that's what I've got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, if this impacted you in any sort of way and you feel like there's other people around you that need to hear this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in at robdial Junior. R O B D I A L J R. We have over, you know, I think, like, over 450,000 people that follow me out there. So I'd love to connect with you out there, send me a message, whatever it might be. I don't always get time to go through every single message or respond to every single message, but I always read every single message, so. So with that, I'm going to leave the same way 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.