Your Memories Are Not Accurate | The Mindset Mentor Podcast

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. 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. If you're out there and you want to receive some extra mindset tips from me, I send an email out every single Monday with some tips and tricks on how to improve your mindset and intentions to work on going into every single week. So if you want to get that for free, it is absolutely free. Go to Monday email.com right now. Once again, Monday email.com and I will start sending them directly to you. Today we're gonna be talking to you about how your memories are not real. Today we're gonna talk about how your memories have many problems in them, in the stories that we tell people. Before I dive into it, let me just give you a crazy statistic just to kind of blow your mind and see where we're gonna go for today. Okay? The statistic is this. Up to 50%, your memories of your entire life are not accurate. Up to 50%. That means half of the things in your brain are not true. Think about it for a second. When you think about how you are the way that you are based off of your past, but in reality, you're not the way that you are based off your past. You're based off of your memories of the past. And if you've based your entire life, oh, I am this type of person because this happened to me. I am this way because she was this way. I am this way because my mom was this way. It was because my dad treated me this way, because my sister, because my teachers treated me, because this is how I did in school. You, as a person right now and today are the person that you are based off of the memories that you have of your past. And now you realize that 50% of those memories are not accurate. So then you start to think to yourself, well, if the memories aren't accurate, if the past was inaccurate, who am I? Because I've based my entire being off of everything that's happened to me in the past. Oh, I am the way that I am because she said this to me, because he cheated on me, because this happened. So as we dive into it, I want you to understand, humans are very complex individuals. And what we tend to do is we tend to filter every single thing that happens to us through our filter of the world, right? So, for instance, example that I'll give you is, let's say that you fail a test in third grade. You fail a math test, and your teacher says to you, oh, yeah, you're just not good at math. And you think to yourself, subconsciously, well, this is my teacher. She's way smarter than I am. If she says, I'm not good at math, I must not be good at math. And what happens is, then you go in, you take more tests and more tests and more tests. Then you do great in English, you do great in everything else. But you always fail your math tests. Why? Because you're not great in math. You built an identity based off of what a teacher told you when you were in third grade. And then, you know, someone comes up to you and they're like, well, you know, why are you not good with your finances? Oh, I'm not good with my finances because I'm just not good at math. I'm not good at math, so I'm not good with my finances. If and what happens is this one event that happened to you in your past, your memory of that event changes the entire trajectory of your life. And somebody could be terrible with money simply because they have a perception of, I'm not good in math. I have a friend who. She literally thinks that her money problems stem from her not being good at math. And I'm like, you're telling me that math is an issue. If I gave her a million dollars and I said, hey, the next 12 months, I want you to get really good at math, could she get good at math? Yes, she could. Now, could she be as good as someone who is just naturally gifted in math? Maybe not. But could she get better? Absolutely. Would that improve her finances? Possibly. Well, especially if I gave her a million dollars, right? It would improve her finances. But it was one event that happened in your childhood, and it made you fail tests, and it changed your perception of yourself. And now you have money problems, and you think you have money problems because the fact that, oh, I don't. I don't know how much is coming in, I don't know how much is going out, all of that here. Do you want to know the simple thing about math? Math tends to be my subject. I'm really good at math, but math is only memorization. That's what it is. You know, I don't know that 17 plus 18 is 35. Because I just did some complex math problem. I know it because I've memorized it. So it's the same way for you, where it's like that one event can go through and change your entire perception of your entire life. And when we tell A story, and we think about something and we talk about something or remember something, we tend to do one of three things. So when you remember something, you tend to do one of three things. And this is super interesting with people. You know, I teach coaches how to grow coaching businesses, and in turn, I also teach them a little bit of how they actually work with their coaching clients. One of the things I always say is you always have to realize that when someone says something to you about something that happened in their past, about something that happened yesterday, about. About something that happened an hour ago, it will usually come out one of three ways. We will either generalize it, we will delete, or we will distort. So I'll go through each one of these. We generalize, we delete or we distort, or we do all of them or a couple of them. So when someone tells you a story of something that happened to them in their past and it's not true, or not necessarily not true, not completely true, there's parts missing. It's not their fault. They're not being malicious. They're not trying to lie to you. It's that most people are not even aware that they're generalizing, that they're deleting, and that they're distorting certain parts of their story. Now, it's important for you to understand this about yourself. It's also very important for you to understand this about other people as well. So, you know, before we dive into these three different things, I want you to understand that everyone is viewing the world differently at all points in time. Everyone is always viewing the world differently. I'll give you a great example. Let's say you and I and a friend are driving in my truck, right? I'm driving the truck and you're next to me in the passenger seat. And your friend is in the backseat. And I really need to find a mechanic. Reason why I need to find a mechanic is because my truck is running kind of weird. It's like, you know, making weird noises. I get off on the next exit. The only things that I'm going to see, I'm going to filter out everything in my perception. Most likely that doesn't look. I'm a filter it all out. That doesn't look like a mechanic shop. I'm going to look for Jiffy Lube. I'm going to look for Pet Boys. I'm looking for whatever it is that could possibly help me fix this problem. Now, let's say you're next to me and you are really hungry. Like, I'm talking about hangry as can possibly be. You're sitting next to me. You're not going to notice any of the mechanic shops. What are you going to notice? Every single restaurant that we pass. Everything that looks like a restaurant. You're going to notice the gas stations because, you know, inside of there, they have some food that you could pick up really quickly and you could help yourself with. You're going to notice all of those. The person behind you, your friend really had, I mean, drank way too much water this morning and they need to pee. I'm talking like, they got to go, they're about to burst. They're not going to see a mechanic shop. They're not going to see the restaurants. They're going to see every single place that go to the bathroom. They might see the restaurants, but they don't see the restaurants for the food. They see the restaurants for the bathroom. So you start computing the entire world of where can I go to the bathroom? Where can I go to the bathroom? Where can I go to the bathroom? They'll look at bushes and be like, is there a place I can hide behind bushes to go? Right? They're going to find every place they can. We're all seeing the same thing, but we're all seeing something different. Think about that for a second. We're all seeing the same thing, but we're all seeing something different because we're all filtering the world through what we're filtering it through at that moment. Now, if you realize that that's just a quick moment of getting off in an exit, there's a car problem, you need to get some food, your friend's got to pee. But if you think of someone's entire life and all of the events that's happened to them, all the successes, all the failures, all the happiness, all of the heartbreaks, all of the things that teachers have said and that parents have said to them, and think of that. It's a massive filter where someone's going to see something completely different than someone else is going to see something. And so I want you to understand this as you start thinking about your own memories, but also start thinking about other people's memories. Realize that every single person sees the world differently. Even though they're all seeing the exact same thing. Everyone's viewing the world differently. It's like we're wearing different colored glasses. All of the things that we've been through make the color of the glasses. Okay? So I want you to. I'll give you another example real quick. Let's say that we're walking down the street, you and I, and when you were younger, you were attacked by a dog, and you have this massive fear of dogs, and we're walking down the street. I love dogs. I love them. And there's a dog that barks internally inside of me. Nothing's going to happen. And so everyone might be like, ooh, a puppy. Where's that dog at? Right? Internally in you is like, oh, shit, something's wrong. I'm gonna be attacked again. And that could be completely subconscious. And you might simply. You might even simply think that just because you saw a dog, maybe it didn't even. Maybe didn't even bark. And just seeing a dog heightened your state of emotion and brought you back to that and put all of your focus on that dog. So we could be seeing things, the exact same things, but we're all seeing something different, right? And so let's dive into it. That was a good prep. Okay. We generalize. We delete or we distort. I'll give you a good example of generalization. When I used to run my first office as a sales company, I used to have sales reps come in, and we do these things called phone jams. And everybody would make phone calls, right? And they would come in and they would have a goal, like, rob, I want to make 50 phone calls in the next three hours. I'd be like, cool. I'd get their goal, I'd send them on their way, and then I'd come back a few hours later, and I'd be like, hey, John, how have your phone calls been going? And they're like, oh, my God, nobody's home. I'm like, really? Yeah. Nobody's home. I made so many phone calls, and nobody's home. And so I'm like, okay, we live in Broward County. There's 1.7 million people in Broward county, and you're telling me that nobody is home? Well, no, of course, Rob. There's some people home. But I'm just saying, like, nobody's home. That's an example of generalization. Something happens, and then they generalize that everything is that way. And so somebody could tell you a story and they could generalize. And this is the one that's probably used the most when I hear people tell stories is that they generalize everything. Everyone's doing this. Everyone, you know, they put up a piece of content. They put an Instagram story. And, like, for instance, this is a good one, right? Women who put up content on Instagram Maybe they put up something motivational and they put up something around business and all that stuff, and they'll say, oh, everyone in my DMs are just creepy guys. Everyone that's following me is creepy. I'm like, everyone? You're telling me there's not one non creepy guy that's following you? On all of Instagram, you have 10,000 followers. That's 10,000 creepy guys. And they're like, well, no, not. That's not 10,000 creepy guys. And so what happens is people tend to see your brain wants to work quickly, and so it'll see up. This happened, this happened, this happened. And it's two quick things. Three quick things. And then it generalizes all of it. Oh, everybody's this way. Everything is this way, right? Nobody's home, Everybody's creep. And so your brain will generalize so that it can make some quick computations and then make adjustments from there. And so people tend to do that. That's one side generalization. Second one is delete. They will remove pieces of the story or reality to meet their narrative, right? So they can meet. They can take pieces of their story and actually change it around to meet their narrative or. Or to meet their perception of the world. And so people aren't necessarily lying to you. They're just deleting certain parts of the story that don't meet up with the story that, you know, the narrative that they're trying to tell you. And once again, this is not done maliciously. Most people do this completely unconsciously, and so they delete. The third side that they do is they distort. Right? They distort. So one of my team members, he's one of the salespeople on our team, and he was like, one day he was not fully booked with appointments, and I said, what happened yesterday? He's like, yeah, I didn't get all my appointments booked. I did everything I could. And I said, you did everything you could? And he's like, yeah, everything I could. So we went through every single situation of how he could have gotten more appointments. I said to him, listen, if I gave you a million dollars to get your appointments booked yesterday, could you have gotten it booked? And he's like, yeah, of course I could. So then I said, okay, so you're telling me that you did everything that you could? He's like, well, yeah, shit, I guess I didn't do everything that I could. Right, you could have gotten it done. And so those are just examples. People tend to do that. They tend to generalize the delete, distort. Now, we're talking about other people mostly right now. Let's talk about yourself. Whenever you think of a past event or you're telling a story, you are not outside of this. You will generalize what happened. You will delete information, and you will distort stories simply based off of your true memory or based off of the narrative that you are actually trying to tell. And so I want you to understand this when you think of your memories of the past. And this is why there's been a lot of research recently where people have been going through and saying eyewitness accounts maybe aren't as reliable as we thought they were. To say that this person did this might not be as reliable as we thought it was, because people will only remember about 50% of what actually happened. And so there's a lot of times where there's, like, shootings that happen, right? It's terrible. It's shitty that that happens. But people will think that there were four people like their stories whenever this happened. They'll be like, oh, there were four shooters when there's only one. Because their brain was. There's just so many things happening, and they're in such a heightened state that their brain is just trying to pull in as much information as possible. And they will generalize, delete, distort. And there's many different ways where things will happen and people will just be telling a story. And there could be three people and the exact same thing happened, and they could tell three completely different stories based off of their own filter of the world, their generalization, their deleting, or their distorting. And so it's really interesting to think this because you can start listening to people tell stories to you, and you can start to see that there's holes in their information once again, not because they're trying to do it, but simply because there's stuff that's missing from it, and that's the way it is. But then with ourselves, we can sit down with ourselves and we can say, okay, all right, am I generalizing this thing that I'm looking at right now? Am I deleting information that could be information that I completely missed? Am I. You know, and a good example of deleting information that I can tell you is like, we. We take that example for being third grade in failing a math test. Someone can think. They're terrible at math, and they can completely delete in your head the one math test in fourth grade that they passed and they did really well at. And they'll think, oh, that was just a fluke, and they'll delete that from their mind because it doesn't match up with the narrative. So there's deleting and there's distorting as well. And so we've got to start asking ourselves, are we not remembering the world that we thought that it was? Could it have been different than it actually we remember it? Yes. And if my entire person that I base myself off of is based off of my memories of the past and the way I relate to the past, is it possible that I'm not the person I actually think I am? Because things happen differently than I thought they did? And so you've got to start thinking to yourself, because the one thing I really want you to do, and I want most people in this. I want everyone in this world to do, is start questioning who they are. Start questioning who they think they are. Because who you are is just someone that you've just decided to be. When I woke up today, I decided to be Rob Dylan. Decided to act like I've always act. But if I had something I wanted to work through, I could go, you know what? I'm gonna decide to act differently. I'm decided to be a different person. I'm gonna decide to act like a different person today because I want to step into who I want to become. And if our past creates who we currently are, and a lot of times, what we tend to do is we usually take our past, throw it into our future to make predictions. We have to realize that our past doesn't matter at all right now. This current moment is just a completely clean slate. Because if I don't remember my past completely, and I'm trying to make predictions on my future based off of my past, I'm trying to make predictions off of a future that's only 50% correct on average. And so I should just go, you know what? I'm going to start at the clean slate. I'm not going to be that person anymore. The results of the past don't matter. What matters is what I do now and. And how I go into my future. Because your past, your memories, all of those things aren't 100% true. 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 obdialjr. R O B D I A L J R and I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. Make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.