The thing that controls your mind.
1 Dec 2023 · 22 min
Your imagination creates real physical sensations: a nightmare triggers your heart rate, anxiety about a meeting makes you sweat. Research shows 85% of worries never happen. Rob Dial explains how to flip this by visualizing desired outcomes instead, using gratitude and joy to program your body for success.
Chapters
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast, the number one mindset podcast in the entire world. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you live in the United States or Canada and you want to get inspirational text messages through from me to your cell phone, whether that be through text message or through video, text me right now. 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today we're going to be talking about the thing that happens to be controlling your mind, controlling your life, controlling your body and taking over that you probably aren't even really necessarily aware of. Before we dive into it, I want to give you a real quick scenario and I want you to think about this. You ever had something happen like this before where you're in a dream and you know you're walking through the dream? Let's say, for instance, you're in a forest, right? You're walking through a forest and everything's beautiful, everything's amazing. And then out of nowhere, a tiger comes out of the bushes and it sees you and it starts to run after you and you start to run away and you're running as fast as you can, and you look over your shoulder, and you notice it's getting a little bit closer, and you're running as fast as you can. And you look over your shoulder again, and right as you look over your shoulder, you can see the teeth coming over and about to bite your face. And boom, you wake up, and here you're just, like, trying to catch your breath, right? And you wake up, and you're sweating. Your heart rate is up, you're out of breath. But the crazy part about that is that you never actually moved your body. You were in your bed the entire time, but how's that possible? You were in your bed the entire time, but you're sweaty, you're. You're out of breath. Your heart rate is through the roof, and none of it was actually real or happening. None of it. You were laying in your bed, not moving a muscle, and you woke up sweaty, out of breath, heart rate through the roof. How in the hell is that possible? Have you ever asked yourself that? How you can imagine something? And with that imagining something, it can completely change the state of your body. I remember one time I was at a Tony Robbins event years ago, and I was with my best friend, and Ton Robbins took us through to something called the Dickens process. And basically, the Dickens process is where you imagine everything that you want. Your dream life. The house, the cars, the clothes, the love, the traveling, the happiness, the impact in the world. You imagine this dream life in so much vivid detail, and then you imagine it being taken away, and it's starting to be taken away from you. And he says, you know, sit in your seat. But what I want you to do is I want you to yell as if everything that you ever wanted was taken away from you. And people are yelling and they're screaming, and we're literally sitting there for about 30 minutes. No body movements, nothing except for just yelling. And we're imagining everything that we want, and we're imagining everything getting taken away from us and how we would get worked up if everything was stolen from us. And they turn the lights back on when we get done. And I look to my left where my friend is sitting, and he is covered in sweat, like, looks like he just got out of the shower. And I'm like, what in the hell just happened? He looks like he just got out of the shower, but he didn't go anywhere. He didn't run. He didn't move any muscles. In both cases that I just said to you, whether it's the dream or whether it's the visualization. In both cases, there is a visualized future that the mind created. And with the mind creating that physical, that, excuse me, that visualization, that future, the body physically goes through something. So what's kind of crazy if you think about is that we can imagine a future and we can in this moment, feel that future as if that future is actually happening right now. Another. I'll give you another easy, fun example, right? Have you ever had a sexual thought in your life and then that imagined future creates a feeling inside of the body? Doesn't does your body will change to prepare. We could say, for instance. But it's a thought, it's just a fantasizing. But the thought and the fantasizing changes the body. I'll give you one more example. I'll give you one or two more examples. Just kind of give you as many examples as I possibly can. You ever been driving and all is well, everything's great and you start thinking about how your boss said he wants to meet with you one on one and you're like, oh my God. And you start to get nervous, you get shortness of breath, you start to feel anxious, your mind starts racing. What if I lose my job? And you actually feel while you're driving your car as if you are in that moment one on one with your job. Or maybe you're sitting and you're on the couch and you're just reading a book and someone in the book cheats on someone else and it reminds you of that boyfriend that you had a couple years ago that you were in love with that cheated on you and that moment that you walked in on him and the other woman and how much of an asshole he was, and you start to get pissed and you start cussing him out in your mind and your body literally feels like you're back in that moment. So not only can your body throw you into an imagined future, but your body, I'm sorry, your brain can throw you into imagined future, but your brain can also throw you into a past that doesn't exist anymore. You get the exact same feelings in your body as the moment when you walked in on your boyfriend cheating on you. But he's not cheating on you right now and you're not in that moment right now. So with those examples, I want to give you a few examples just to kind of get an idea. None of those examples is the body actually in that moment. It's none of those examples is it actually really, truly happening? You're just kinda sitting there. But what happens the mind creates feelings in the body, and when it creates those feelings in the body, it's as if that imagined future or that past is actually happening right now.
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I wanted to do an episode on this and talk about this is because I've kind of talked about it before on episodes where I kind of talk about it real quickly. But I don't think people actually really, truly get this like deep down in their souls. Like if I can get you to understand in your bones what I'm talking about, then this is really important for you to understand. Like this is the reason why I'm doing it. Not to just talk about it and brush over it real quick. Like I wanna do an entire episode where you understand that your mind creates the feelings as if that moment is actually happening right now. Whether you project yourself into a future that has never happened, it might never happen, or you project yourself into a past event that has actually happened, you are making yourself feel as if you are in that moment. So you're basically taking your body out of the moment and putting it into as if it's actually happening. You know, like if you think about it, some people listening have had something happen to them terrible 10 years ago. And it was so bad and it was. You would never want to relive it. You would never. People couldn't pay you enough. Like, think about this. People couldn't pay you enough to go back to that terrible moment in your life 10 years ago. They couldn't pay you enough to go back to that moment. But they wake up and they relive it over and over and over and over again every frickin day. And they put their body through the exact same stress and it's not even happening. They couldn't pay you to go back into it and to go back to that moment. But you're waking up and putting yourself back into it over and over and over and over again. Whether or not you understand it. That is a choice. Think about that. Some of people that are listening are putting yourself back into a moment that, that people would not pay you, they could not pay you millions of dollars to go back to that moment. So there's some of the people that are listening, that are putting ourselves into our past. Some of you listening, wake up and you imagine a fake future, and you create anxiety in your body as if it's actually happening. You imagine the things that could happen to your children, and, oh, my gosh, you get worried about what would actually happen if that happened. Oh, my gosh, I'm so worried about my child that's going off to school. And you start to actually imagine the bad things that could happen as they go off to school. And you're actually making your body feel as if the things that you're imagining are actually truly happening. You're putting your body through so much stress by doing that. Or you're thinking to yourself, oh, my gosh, I just started this business four weeks ago. What if this business fails? And you start thinking about it in detail of what it would be like if it failed and you ran out of money and you weren't able to pay your bills and your wife ended up, you know, stressing out about the money because you didn't. You didn't provide for the family. You start getting really stressed, and you start making yourself feel in this moment as if you are not able to pay your bills, as if your business has already failed and it's not actually happening. And then we start to realize that when you look at worry and you look at all of the studies that have been done on worry, you've heard me say it many times on the podcast. 80%. You know, psychologists have found this 85% of what you worry about will never happen. And out of that 15 remaining percent that does happen, 12% of that 15% will not be near as bad as you think it is. Which means only 3% of what you worry about lines up with what you're actually worrying about, but you're thinking about it all the time. You're putting yourself, you're putting your mind and your body through such extreme stress. And so you start to think about that, and you start to realize, man, my mind does really make me stress out. I am looking at where I don't want to go. Like, all too often, I ask people, what do you want? And the response that they come back with is what they don't want, because that's all they're thinking about is what they don't want. And they never actually ask themselves and get detailed on what is it they actually want. So if that's the case, if our brain is always projecting into the past or the future, why don't we project it into a future that we want? Why don't we change what we imagine? And why don't we change the way that we feel? And we imagine what we want, we imagine what we love, we imagine what it would feel like to accomplish the goals and the things that we actually truly want in our lives. Think about this for a second. We can feel fear in our bodies right now for a future that we're imagining, right? We can feel fear right now in our bodies for a future that we're imagining, right? We can. Well, if that's the case, that means we can also feel gratitude for something that hasn't happened yet, right? We can. If we can feel fear for a fake future, we can feel gratitude for a fake future. But it just depends on what we're actually imagining. And so instead of saying, you know what, I'm so afraid, like, I coach a lot of business owners, I've worked with business owners for a really long time. And a lot of business owners, their mind, I would say most business owners, their mind is the problem in the business. They are the problem. Their thoughts are the problem. And so a lot of business owners are sitting there and they're thinking about, oh, my gosh, what if I can't pay the bills in six months? What if this product doesn't work? What if this. And they start to imagine the future that they don't want. And in this current moment right now, they feel as if their business is already failing because they're imagining that future. Their, their brain is making their body feel as if it is currently happening right now. Well, if you're coming from a state of fear, in a state of worry and a state of trying to avoid failure, do you think you're going to make the best business decisions when you feel that way? No, you're going to be closed off. You're not going to be thinking correctly, you're not going to be thinking expansively, and you're not going to have as much creativity because you're really more in a. You can't be in a protective mode and also a creative mode at the same time. Those are two exact opposites. No, you have to be open to be creative. And so if that's the case, what if instead of me worrying and thinking about my. And imagining my business failing and imagining not being able to pay the bills, or what if I just imagine my business being a freaking incredible success, what if I imagine, you know, if I'M trying to get to a million dollars this year. What if I imagine hitting a million dollars in revenue this year and what I would feel like to know that I hit that goal, what it would feel like and what that would do for myself and what that would do for my family and what that would do and the trips that I would take with my family. And how instead of my children having to look at books of the Coliseum and pictures of the Coliseum, I'm gonna take them to the fucking Coliseum and they're gon, they're able to take the tours and they're going to be able to experience life. And I start living through this rich imagination of the future that I want and feeling those feelings inside of my body right now, feeling the gratitude, feeling the joy, feeling the happiness, feeling the smile on my face for what I created for myself, for I created for my family. When I'm in that state, guess what comes with that? Yeah, that comes openness. That comes creativity. Then I start to notice that people, places, opportunities, things, things that look like quote unquote synchronicities in front of me that maybe I was just missing all the time because the fact that I was so closed off and I've been closed off for way too long. What if I open myself up to all possibilities? What if I start imagining the future that I want and I start saying, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to actually feel gratitude in this moment for my business. Hitting a million dollars in 12 months, wouldn't that be amazing? What would that feel like inside of your body? It would feel good. And instead of having to push ourself to try to find motivation and push ourself to take the right action. What do we do instead? We end up feeling pulled towards the future that we want. We end up feeling pulled towards everything that we actually truly want. And we're actually driven towards that future versus having to force ourself and white knuckle our way through life to try to get things done. That's what's really important. I think most people really get wrong in life is that they can't not, they can't. They are not aware of what they're thinking about all day long. And they're not aware if they are aware of those, they're not aware of how that's holding them back because they're thinking about what they don't want. And when you think about what you don't want in the future, it's gonna be really hard to motivate yourself to take action when you've already decided that that future that you don't want is where you're gonna end up, isn't it? It's gonna be really hard to take action. No, I want to imagine a future that is so freaking exciting that I wake up every morning and I'm like, I need to get to. I need to get to work, because I want that future to happen. I've shared this example many times before. I shared it in my book Level Up. But I talk about visualization, and visualization is super important in this, where you can visualize the future that we want. We can visualize what we want it to feel like. And when I set a goal on January 1st of 2017, on January 1st, I was like, by July 1st, 2017, I'm going to be living in Rome for six months with my girlfriend at the time, which is now my wife. We're going to be living over there. And the first thing that pops up is, holy shit. I just started my business last year. I don't know if that's possible. How am I going to do it? She doesn't have a business yet. How are you going to be able to afford it? You know, I just. I'm still getting everything off the ground. I don't know if this is possible. It's fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. And I was like, that's not exciting. Fear is not exciting. I don't want to be driven towards a fearful future. So what do I want to do? I want to visualize what it would be like to live there and what it would be like to walk the streets of Rome every single day and to wake up every single morning and go get my cappuccino and be able to sit outside and have that croissant and sit in the sun and think to myself, oh, my gosh, you wanted this for so long. Because in 2012, five years before then, I was like, all I want. I was traveling, backpacking for three months by myself. And I was like, I just want to figure out a way to make money online so I can travel. Because that's all I want to do, is be able to travel and have fun and impact people. And I thought to myself, how amazing would it be to be in that reality where you created everything you ever wanted? Were you able to travel? You're able to make money, able to impact lives? And I started feeling those feelings. And so what happened is, after I would feel those feelings and visualize it every single morning. It made it so much easier to take action every single day. I was so much more motivated and driven because I was like, I need to get to roam in this future that I want. And I was inspired by the future that I was imagining versus terrified of the future that I was imagining. If our brain is going to imagine something no matter what, why don't we imagine the things that we want? You are in control of what your brain does. You're in control of what your brain imagines. Step into the driver's seat, stop imagining the things that scare the shit out of you and start imagining the things that inspire you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, once again, 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. And with that, 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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