Where you’re messing up in your self development.
7 Dec 2023 · 22 min
Rob Dial argues that personal growth comes from removing obstacles, not adding more. Instead of collecting habits and books, cut out limiting beliefs, toxic relationships, and mental blocks that prevent natural success. A dusty mirror, an overgrown garden, and a clogged river show how clearing away what doesn't serve you reveals your true self.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast, the number one mindset podcast in the entire world. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you don't ever miss another episode of this podcast. And if you love this podcast and you want to receive from some motivational texts, inspirational texts, and you live in the United States or Canada, text me right now. 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305 and I'll just kind of send you some love every once in a while throughout the week. Today we're going to be talking about a simple secret to getting better and what really the core of self development is. And before we dive into it, I've been on this self development journey now since 2006. What are we, 17, 18 years at this point. And I want to be real with you. Life can be really hard. Like let's just be real life. Life is. It's amazing, it's torture sometimes. It's beautiful, it's fun, it can suck, but it can be really fucking hard sometimes. And more than anything else, it is a journey that we're on. And throughout this journey we do some things right, we do some things wrong, we get better, we take a step forward, we take two steps back. All of that. But at Some point, all of us, everyone listening to this podcast and myself included, at some point, we all get to the point where we wake up, we have woken up in some sort of way, and we look around our lives and we think about our lives and we realize that there is more for us. In some sort of way, there's more for us. There's more happiness, there's more joy, there's more money, there's more peace, there's more for us to be able to, there's more experiences, there's more traveling, there's more everything. And we look at what we currently have and we say, there's more for me. And if I want more, I have to be the person to work on myself. If I want more of the good things and less of the bad things, less of the stress, less of the anxiety, if I want more, we get to the point where we realize I have to be different. We discover that we have to evolve. And I use the word evolve very specifically. I don't want to use the word become better because actually when I wrote out this podcast, I wrote this bullet point, I put become better. And then I deleted it and actually wrote must evolve. Because better for me to think to myself right now, for you to think to yourself right now, I must become better. Better implies worse, which means that as you currently are, there's something wrong with you. You're currently worse. You're not worse, you're not. There's nothing wrong with you as you currently are. You are exactly where you need to be at the exact moment. But what you need to do is you need to evolve. You're either green or growing or you're brown and dying. And we need to be green and growing or else we're not going anywhere. We're stagnant. Now. I don't know about you, I don't wanna feel stagnant in my life. But if we want to have more joy, more money, more love, more peace, more happiness, more everything, then we know that we must evolve as people. And when you first start on the journey of self development, it's exciting. You're like, I can't wait to improve myself. I can't wait to evolve. I can't wait to get more, to have more fun, to have more money, to buy more cool shit, to have more happiness, to have more love, to be a better person. And then what happens is you go from this moment of living your entire life mostly unaware and having almost no self awareness to now transitioning to this moment of having self awareness and what that self awareness really, truly is, is you are now self aware of all of the shit that needs to change and all of the stuff that needs to go and all of the stuff that needs to evolve. And you start seeing all of your flaws and the things that you need to work through and all of that.
And.
And you're like, oh my God, it's too much. This is a lot. And what happens is you go from being unconscious and unaware of yourself to now being aware and seeing all of your flaws and sometimes judging yourself and shaming yourself and guilting yourself. And now when you screw up, you're aware of that screw up and think to yourself, man, I was aware of this. I shouldn't have done this. I shouldn't have fallen into this pit. Cause I know I do this. And the way I like to think about it is there's a Buddhist metaphor and they basically say like imagine that you're at your grandparents house, right? And your grandparents haven't opened the attic in 30 years. And you decide that you want to go into the attic. And you go up into the attic and you look and there's a mirror that you see in the attic and the mirror's just covered in dust. And you want to see how clear this mirror is. You want to see yourself in the mirror. So you take your hand and you start brushing away all of the dust. And as you're brushing away all of this dust to see yourself, there's all of this dust that comes into your face and you're coughing and you're sneezing and all of this dust is coming up in order for you to see your true self. That metaphor is basically the example of in order to. You've gone through this life unconscious to a lot of different things, but really what happens is now you're starting to. You're wanting to see your true self. And in order to see your true self, you have to get rid of all the stuff that is not you, all of the dust. And in fact, I want you to realize this. All of that stuff that is, that's coming up, all the things that you're now aware of, I want you to understand this. There is nothing wrong with you.
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there's nothing wrong with you. The journey that you are on in your life is perfect for you. It is absolutely perfect. Your life is a perfectly crafted curriculum for you to go through what you need to go through to learn whatever it is that you're here to learn on this planet. Your journey is designed for you and is far more intelligent than you can possibly understand. So I want you to understand that where you are is perfect and in the circumstance you are currently are you're currently in is absolutely perfect for you. But where I see a lot of people go wrong and this is where I went wrong for years, probably about a decade. And this is the really, really big secret that I'm going to share with you today on self development and improving yourself and you know, becoming a more involved, evolved version of yourself. Where I see most people go wrong and where I went wrong for decades is trying to add things. So we think I want to improve myself. I need to add new habits. I need to make sure that I wake up at 5am every single day and have 40 things to do on my morning routine checklist and I need to go to the store and I need to buy every single self help book that I possibly can and read the first 12 pages and then go to the next one and read another 12 or 13 pages and then go to another one. Never fully actually finish a page. And I need to go to conferences and I need to do all of this and all of these are great. I mean I've done all of them. I've done the morning routines, the checklist, the prior ed, 400 self development or business books or mindset books or neurology books in my lifetime. And all of it is great and all of it's important. But I want to tell you that the secret to self development that took me over a decade to realize is that self development is not about addition. Self development is about subtraction. And I didn't know this for years. I didn't know it. It's subtracting all of the things from your life before adding anything else to it. You know, and what I want you to realize is that when you look at it and you think about this, you realize self development is about subtraction. You start asking yourself what do I need to subtract? I didn't know this for years, a decade. I had way more knowledge than I ever had. I had all these books that I read, I had done all kinds of stuff, but I felt the same inside of myself. And the secret to self development is doing less. It's removing things from your life before you add anything to your life. I didn't know this for a very long time. And so you look at your life and you say, well, I want to evolve, AKA get better. I want to get better in some sort of way. And once again, I'm using that lightly because once again, better implies worse. But I want to get better, I want to evolve, I want to become a different version of myself. What are the things that I need to do? And we start thinking about the stuff we need to add to our lives and the new habits and the new working out every single day, and all the stuff we need to do when in reality, the very first thing we need to do is remove a lot of shit from our lives. And we need to basically pull the weeds. It's like you're walking up to a garden. You know, if you're 27 years old, 37 years old, and you're listening to this let's say you're 37, and you're now becoming aware of yourself and starting to work on yourself, it's like you have a garden that's been sitting there by itself for 37 years. If you're gonna try to create a brand new, perfect garden in that place, what do you have to do? First you have to pull out 37 years of weeds. And so when it's. Another way of thinking about it is like when your computer gets a virus and has a virus, you don't add a bunch of programs to it and hope that those programs remove the virus. No. What do you do? You say, oh, my gosh, my computer has a virus. You try to identify the virus and then remove the virus as quick as possible so that the computer can get back to its normal working order. It's the same thing for you. You need to remove the viruses from your mind. You need to remove the viruses from your life. You need to uninstall the programs that are holding you back from being the person that you could possibly be. And I'm going to say something that's really surprising, I think, to some people, and some of you are going to question whether there's the validity of it. But success is not hard. It's not. I struggled for years to try to get to what I thought successful means. And whatever success means to you, it could be business, it could be money, it could be marriage, it could be relationship with your children, all of that stuff. Whatever success means to you. And success can mean all of those things. None of them are hard. Success is not hard. I want you to understand this as a human on this earth, as a living, breathing, sentient being. Success is, and all that it is is natural. To be a human means to think something and to be able to create into reality. That is what is natural for us. But you have too many shitty programs running that it's in the way of everything. And this is what I came to realize for years, is that I was trying to force my way and white knuckle my way and put 110 hours a week into being successful. And when really I just had to take a step back, ask myself if I was in alignment with my true purpose and what I felt like I should be doing and doing what gave me energy and then going down that road. Success is natural for you. The problem is, in order to get there, we have to remove all of the shit that's in the way. There's something incredibly powerful inside of you that you are keeping covered up. And for years you've unconsciously been doing this. But you have to remove these things. And as you start to find these things that need to be removed, I promise you this, it doesn't feel powerful at first. You start noticing these things. You start feeling at first when you're starting to work these and you're not feeling powerful, you're feeling angry, you're feeling frustrated, you're feeling sadness, you're feeling anxiety, you're feeling all the stuff that's in the way that is in the way and that is blocking you. And all of that stuff are the things that you need to remove in order to make yourself be more in alignment and make everything much easier in your life. Your power is covered up with all of your programmings from your childhood, all of your conditionings from your childhood, all of your dogmas that you've picked up in your lifetime, all of these beliefs that you're trying to believe into being true, but they really don't hold a whole lot of weight. Beliefs in yourself, beliefs in everything that that's around you, beliefs in other people. If you could understand how powerful you are, it would blow your mind. But you have all of this shit that is in the way and that is blocking you from your potential. The way I like to think of it is this. And I gave this example of a few months ago, but I like to think of it like a river that's flowing. If you've ever seen a nice calm, peaceful river just flowing, that's like your life. And to jump in that is to just basically be in the flow of life. If you've heard that phrase to be in flow, to be in the flow of life. But when you have all of these, these things that you think about yourself, these negative beliefs, this negative patterns of talking to yourself, these people who talk down to you, toxic environments that you're stuck in, this job that you hate, you're basically taking a boulder and you're putting it in the river. And when you take enough boulders and you put it into a river, what happens? It becomes whitewater rapids and it becomes insane, it becomes crazy, it becomes just shit. Everywhere is basically what it becomes, right? And so it becomes this nice peaceful river to you might drowned in this river. And each boulder that you put in is just some belief that you're holding onto about yourself. And so it's really not about doing more, it's about doing less. It's about removing all of those boulders from your life. And when I say doing less, I mean way less of what you've been doing. Way less. I don't mean sit around on the couch and do nothing. Now if you're sitting around on the couch and you're meditating for an extra four hours a day, I think that's a great way to use your time. But I gonna assume that most people listening to this podcast are not doing that. I'm not saying, oh, you need to do less and then you need to spend more time on Instagram. But I mean, doing less of the things that are holding you back, doing way less of what you've been doing, doing way less of what you've been thinking, doing, having, you know, way less of what you believe about the world and about yourself. And what's really crazy is as you start doing less of those things, you start getting more. You start getting more peace, more happiness, more joy. Success kind of seems to flow to you. You get people, opportunities, places, things that come into your life that are just fully aligned and feel right in your life that you just were kind of energetically blocking for years. You get things that you never thought you could possibly have that are just kind of effortlessly flowing to you. And you need to really self analyze and ask yourself, what do I need to do less of? You know, for each of these things I'm about to tell you in a second, for each of these things, I want you to ask yourself, is it helping me grow into who I want to be? Then you start going through all these different categories in your life, and you start removing all of the things that are not helping you grow into who you want to be. And so, for instance, the thoughts in your head, are they helping you grow into who you want to be? There are some thoughts that might be helping you grow into who you want to be, but there might be some thoughts that are actually holding you back from being who you want to be. There's thoughts in your head that. Where you're talking trash to yourself and you're not nice to yourself, whatever it might be. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough, I'm not worthy of success. I'll never be successful because of xyz, because of what I look like, because of my gender, because of what people think about me, or because of where I grew up, because of my family. And there's all these thoughts in your head. You've got to ask yourself, with those thoughts in your head, are they helping me be who and grow into who I want to be? Then you got to look around you, outside of you, the people that you surround yourself with, are they helping you grow into who you want to be? If they are, certain people keep them. If they're not, maybe you need to make a really tough decision around that. Think about, you know, spending time on your phone. Is it helping you grow into who you want to be? Who you follow on social media, spending time on TikTok, is that helping you grow into who you want to be? Or is that something that's just a boulder that needs to be removed? The job you work, is that helping you grow into who you want to be? Where you live, is that helping you grow into where you want to be? What you do in your downtime, is that helping you grow into who you want to be? What you consume, whether it's food or drugs, is that helping you grow into who you want to be? The things that you do on your phone and the phone time that you have, are those helping you grow into who you want to be? Video games, is that helping you grow into who you want to be? Is Netflix helping you grow into who you want to be? And I want you to understand that before any big breakthrough, there must be some sort of a breakdown. Almost every single time that I've seen myself and seen clients and people I've worked with over 17 years now have some sort of big breakthrough, there's almost always a breakdown. And that breakdown can happen to you just out of nowhere. And that was just something you're supposed to do. Or you can start to break down pieces of your life and you can start to say this is no longer serving me. I'm not going to allow this to exist in my life anymore. And you start to break down things yourself to allow a breakthrough to start to come through. And I want to leave you with this question and this thought. I guess it's a series of questions, but really just a series of questions that are just a thought. I want you to think about today. When you get down done with today's podcast episode, you can turn this off, sit in your car in silence for the rest of the drive and start to think about this. What if success was effortless for you? What if it was? What if you are the one that is getting in the way of everything that you want? What if this life doesn't have to be so much of a struggle and what do you need to do to be more in flow with your life and struggle much less? So that's what I'm gonna leave you with today. 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 get some inspirational text messages from me sporadically throughout the week, I'm gonna send some love to your phone. Text me right now if you're in the US or Canada it is 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305.
Instagram Teen accounts have automatic protections for what teens see and who can contact them. Plus time management tools and Instagram will continue adding built in safety features to help create age appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online@instagram.com teenaccounts.
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