How I Tricked My Brain to Like Doing Hard Things
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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 you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes for free four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. So if you want a better life and you know that to have a better life, you need to work on yourself, hit that subscribe button. Let's join the journey together. Today, I'm going to be talking about how I actually learned to trick my brain to like doing hard things.

If I go back to the first half of my life, I would say that I was a very lazy person who made a whole lot of excuses, who very rarely ever did anything hard and put themselves out of their comfort zone. And if I would have fast forwarded my life and not made any changes, my life would be vastly different than it is today.

And so what I decided to do was try to figure out, and this is why I became so obsessed with neurology and psychology, is I was like, if I can understand the psychology of why I think the way that I think, and the neurology of how my brain actually works, I can figure out a way to get myself to take action, to do the hard things to grow myself. And so that's where we're going to dive in today, and we're going to go over four different steps of how to actually trick your brain into liking to do hard things. So,

Step number one, the thing that I did was I stopped fighting my resistance and I started to get curious about why the resistance existed in the first place. And so you might think that you're lazy. I thought I was lazy, but you're not. You're actually afraid. You're afraid of something. And you might not know what it is at this moment right now. It's usually subconscious. But what we want to do is try to identify what it is that you're afraid of.

And so neuroscience teaches us that resistance is not laziness, it's protection. And so the brain, its number one job is to keep you safe, not to make you successful. And it knows that in this moment, inside of your comfort zone, you're safe and you're alive.

And even though you consciously know that if you go and build your business, you're not going to die and there's no danger in building your business, your brain, the amygdala, the fear part of the fear center of your brain is going, no, no, no, we don't know what exists out there. Don't get out of your comfort zone. So it's not to make you successful, it's to make you safe. So anytime you approach something,

that is unfamiliar to you, that's going to require a lot of effort or involve some sort of risk, even though it's usually not a pain or death type of risk. It's like I have to risk putting myself out there and maybe get rejected or judged or

Anytime you put yourself out there like that, your amygdala lights up, which is one of the oldest parts of your brain. And it's like danger, danger, danger. Do not do it. And so it might look like you're just laying on the couch or just scrolling on Instagram. And I'm like, you're like, oh my God, I'm so lazy. It's like, no, no, there is a fear that is preceding all of that. You can consciously know that there is no physical danger in anything.

Say making a cold call. If you're new in sales, you can know that there's no real physical danger in picking up a piece of plastic, hitting a couple numbers, and talking to another person on the other line. But you still feel terrified to do it. As if you're walking into the dark at night in the middle of a forest. Why? Why do you feel terrified? Well, there's no actual threat. You will not die because

but you still feel the same physical fear inside of your body. So you don't do it. You know, you can consciously know that there's no real physical danger from starting a new business, but you still feel terrified of starting that business, even though you consciously want to do it. Why? Once again, there's no actual threat. You will not die from starting the business, but you still feel the fear. So you don't do it.

In turn, you do something else. You have some form of procrastination. And I like to use the phrase avoidant behavior instead of procrastination. Is avoidant behavior means you're doing something else instead of doing the thing that you need to do. And then you call that doing something else being lazy. When in reality...

You're afraid. So what do you do? You delay. And once again, you delay not because you're lazy. You delay because you're afraid of something. There is some sort of fear. And so the first shift that I made was this. Instead of judging my fear and judging my resistance, I started getting really curious. And I started like questioning it and listening to it.

So I started thinking about like, okay, I want to grow my business, but I'm not doing it. I'm scrolling on Instagram instead. So I started getting really curious. Like, I was like, hey, what are you afraid will happen if you grow this business? Like, what's your biggest fear? What's the story that you're trying to protect yourself from? What are you afraid of? And I started to get really curious. I started to find pieces of myself that I never really knew were running the show unconsciously behind the scenes.

And so you need to make the unconscious and bring it to the conscious. And then you need to write it down with pen and paper and work through it as if it's a math problem. Ask yourself questions around it. Try to poke holes in it. I always say, try to ask yourself as many questions and poke holes into your fears and poke holes into your beliefs. You know, am I really going to die if I pick up the phone and call somebody?

No. Is it really that big of a deal? Not really. They might say no. They might hang up on me. Am I blowing this out of proportion? Actually, yeah, I am. So for me, what I discovered was really profound. Most of the resistance wasn't about the task at all. It was about some sort of fear that I had behind what I thought would happen. And I realized that the fear, once I brought it to the surface, was completely ridiculous.

Oh, you know, the fear of being judged or failing again or losing control. And once I saw the fear for what it was and I named the fear, the emotional charge that was behind it kind of loosened. It wasn't like it just completely went away, but it was like instead of fighting somebody in the dark, I just flipped the light on. I was like, oh, there he is. And so then I started questioning it and poking holes in. I found out that all of my fears are just complete bullshit.

And the control over me was weakened as I started questioning and poking holes in it. So you have to learn to question yourself more often. And I realized throughout this process, I wasn't lazy. I was just scared of something. And when I brought the thing that was the fear to the surface, I was able to work through it. So that's step number one is I stopped fighting my resistance and I got really curious with myself. The second thing is that I rewired my identity around what difficulty meant.

and what difficulty meant to me. And so the root of all sustained behavior change is identity shift. Like the root of everything is I need to shift my identity. Because if I don't shift my identity, it's the reason why, you know, 80 to 95% of people who lose 20 pounds gain all of it back within two years. It's the reason why 70% of people who win the lottery go broke within five years is because actions shifted and reality shifted, but identity didn't shift.

And so you don't consistently do something. You don't consistently do hard things because, you know, you should. You do them because you believe that's who you are. I am somebody who does hard things. Now, believe me, for the longest time,

That wasn't me. I backed away from doing anything hard. And I would just throw excuses at everything as to why I wasn't having the life that I want. You know, and I also thought that I was lazy and I thought that I wasn't mentally strong enough to create the life that I wanted to.

So I started looking at myself differently and speaking to myself differently. And no joke, I'm not kidding you. Like I, as a child, was obsessed with basketball, like obsessed with it. I wanted to be in the NBA more than anything else. And even though I wanted it more than anything else, I was the type of person where every time I would shoot, I would think to myself, I hope I don't miss.

That's the type of person that I was throughout my entire life though. I hope I don't miss. I hope I don't miss. And I started saying to myself as I got older and as I started learning this into my 20s, as I started changing the way I spoke to myself and I stopped saying, I hope I don't miss. And I started saying to myself, it's going in. And I get it. This sounds dumb. It's not a huge difference, but it actually worked. And of course I still miss shots. But what happened was I became more confident when I was taking shots.

And in turn, I actually kind of made more shots. And I took more shots because I felt more confident and it helped me get better. Now, I realize that's just about basketball. And that is a true story about basketball with me. But I'm talking about my entire life was the same as that analogy I just gave you. You know, when I worked out, the thing that I always thought for years was, I can't wait for this to be over. I can't wait. Like, can I just get through this shit? That's the way I always thought about working out.

Now, you know what I shifted in my 20s when I started becoming aware of this and started trying to do harder things and in in trying to become more mentally resilient was I started saying to myself I'm strong and this is easy. I'm strong and this is easy and try this please try this if you're the type of person who you notice yourself in the middle of a workout being like I can't wait for this to be over you're gonna notice that you are actually weaker when you do that, but if you tell yourself you're strong and

You're actually going to lift more weight. And it's not like some weird woo-woo-y like self-development BS. Try it for yourself and tell me that I'm crazy. And what was weird is I started working out longer. I started lifting heavier. And then I started doing what I needed, like the things that needed to be done in my business and in my life and in my relationships from the viewpoint of the benefit that I'm going to get at the end from doing the hard things.

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And now back to the show. And so I decided to start seeking out hard things to do that were harder for me because I wanted to build mental resilience. And so I remember back in 2014, like way before people started doing cold plunges and it became like this huge thing people did. I remember finding Wim Hof and he was talking about, you know, how it changed his mind. And so in 2014, I started doing cold plunges.

I wanted to test my mental boundaries. I wanted to make myself mentally stronger. And so this is before like you could go buy a cold plunge. Like they didn't even exist on the internet. And so I bought a large children's pool and I filled it up with water and I put it in my backyard and I kept it out there all winter.

And some of the times it froze over, like one of the times I remember it actually completely froze over into ice. And so it was cold and I was like, I'm going to just do this not because I want to. I've never wanted to do a cold plunge. I've done it because of who I'm becoming in the process of doing it. And so I rewired my internal statements and narratives in my head from like, I avoid doing hard things or I'm lazy too. I grow from doing hard things.

I will do today what others will not so that tomorrow I can do what others cannot.

And I didn't just like repeat affirmations. I reinforced this identity by taking micro actions daily, by choosing to do cold showers, by deciding to walk up the stairs instead of take the elevator, to seeking discomfort, to finishing a workout and going two extra reps instead of stopping at 10, to forcing myself to follow through on everything that I said I would. And each time I followed through, it wasn't about the result. This was one of the most important things. It wasn't about the result.

It's the fact that I showed up. The result was just whatever. But I showed up. I did what I did not want to do. And I was building my mental resilience regardless of the end result. And that was giving me confidence. And I started attaching my self-worth to the effort, not the end result. I did it. I showed up. I said I was going to do it.

The end result's the end result. But I'm going to pay attention to the effort and my self-worth is attached to the effort because my brain is always watching. Your brain is always watching, waiting to be told what kind of person it's operating for. And so I train mine to believe over and over and over again through tons and tons of repetition that growth is safe, that we seek hard things, that failure is data, that the hard path is the path that I decide to go through.

And so I changed my identity of myself. I'm not someone who does hard things from that's what I was to I am someone that does hard things. Like I don't back away from the challenge. I'm someone who goes after the hard path. And so that's the second thing that I did was I really tried to wire into myself the way that I looked at difficulty and the fact that growth comes on the other side of doing something difficult. So that's number two. Number three is I started associating pleasure with challenge.

And so dopamine is the brain's motivation chemical and it spikes not just at rewards, but it also spikes at the anticipation of rewards. And what we often misunderstand is that this reward, quote unquote, doesn't have to be external. So your brain releases dopamine, you know, when you go and you see an amazing sunset or when you get off the plane at the country that you wanted to go to. It releases tons of dopamine when you do those amazing things.

But it also releases dopamine just when you feel good. And we can make ourself feel good just by any of our thoughts. And so it doesn't have to be just external of traveling to a country, you know, falling in love or having an amazing dinner. It can be internal as well. It can be internal sense of pride. I'm so fucking

i'm proud of myself for showing up and doing what i said i was going to do for you know we can release dopamine by having a sense of meaning and working towards it we can release dopamine by finding what we're aligned with and staying in alignment with it we can release dopamine by feeling fulfilled by thinking about how excited we are for our own growth and so i rewired the association i stopped thinking

about just the hard tasks as chores and these dull things that had to be done, I started thinking about the hard things and I started linking them in my mind with expansion. It went being better. And so I rewired the way that I thought about what I was doing. And every time I chose to do something hard, I didn't wait until the end to feel good. I told myself, this is what evolution feels like. I need this to grow.

This is a good thing. Thank you so much for showing up for us. And I spoke to myself like there was someone else that was with me when I was doing the workout or when I was doing the meditation. I'm so proud of you. I'm so glad that you're doing this. And as I'm talking to myself in these positive ways, as if I'm like the biggest hype man ever, I start feeling really good. And as I start feeling really good, I'm linking the thing that I'm doing, this challenging thing with my mind going, hey, this is good. This challenge is good.

It's not something to be afraid of. We actually like doing this. And I'm training my brain the same way that you train a dog. You know, you just keep, it pees inside, you take it outside. Pees inside, take it outside. And over time it goes, well, I guess I just pee outside. My brain goes, we do hard things, we get dopamine. We do hard things, we get dopamine. We do hard things, we get dopamine. Hey, over time your brain goes, I just want to do some hard things because it gives me dopamine.

So I don't need to back away. I'm not in danger. I'm growing. I am creating a better life for myself. First off, before anybody else. Then also for my wife, for my children, for the world. I'm creating a better life for everybody that I can. It is the greatest form of self-love.

Because I am choosing to do the hard thing for me. It doesn't take any self-discipline to do the easy thing. It takes a lot of self-discipline to do the hard thing. And the hard thing is always the thing that helps your life become better. And so I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this for future me. It's the greatest form of self-love. And my nervous system began to like, and it's not like an overnight thing. It was like over years, began to recognize that challenge was a sign of like,

dopamine and becoming happier and self-trust and not stress. And so the hard thing kind of like became sacred for me. And so I really rewired that in myself. So that's number three. And number four is I rewrote the meaning of pain. And let me explain what I mean by this. For a long time, I thought pain of effort meant doing something wrong. Like if it felt right,

hard or heavy or uncomfortable, maybe I wasn't aligned. Maybe I wasn't ready. Maybe this wasn't meant for me. But then I realized something that was really crazy is that pain is the price of growth. You want to grow a muscle? It hurts a lot to grow that muscle. You've got to tear that thing apart and it regrows stronger. Yes, changing yourself hurts. Yes, building a new life takes energy. Yes, showing up every single day when no one's clapping for you is really exhausting.

But the pain of hard work is nothing compared to the pain of regret. And so I rewrote the meaning of pain in my head. And so you have to understand, like, you either basically bleed on the battlefield of becoming the better version of yourself, or you stay in the mental prison of your mind, wishing for a better life every day until the day you die. You know, like, for instance, I always hear from people like growing a business is hard.

It takes a lot of energy. And guess what? It is. It's hard. It takes a lot of energy. You know what's harder though? It's harder in my mind to wake up on Monday morning when the alarm goes off and have to get out of bed for a job that I don't enjoy. And then get showered and get dressed and make my breakfast and get out of the door before...

I'm going to be late to get to a job that I don't enjoy and then drive and get stuck in traffic for 30 minutes for a job that I don't enjoy and then spend eight hours of my life every single day doing a job that I don't enjoy and then leaving there and getting in traffic again, coming back from a job I don't enjoy and then knowing that I have what, three hours until bedtime and I have some food and I watch some Netflix and I scroll on my phone and in the back of my head I'm going, I got to get to bed because I have a job that I don't enjoy tomorrow.

And I have to do that, what, every single day for the next 30 years, 40 years, if you're lucky enough to retire? Whoa, like that's way harder than the effort it takes to build. That's so much harder than the effort that it takes to build a business.

And so I made a choice like pain is inevitable, but I'm going to choose the pain that I want. I'm going to choose the type of pain that leads to somewhere that I want to be. I'm going to choose the type that shapes me into a better person and creates a better life for me. So I'm going to choose the pain that will give me the life that I want. And something really unexpected happened. The more I leaned into that effort, the more I actually enjoyed it. And it became like a sacred thing for me.

the more I trained my mind to expect the challenge, to expect the pain. And I felt more joy in doing that. And I felt more confident in myself for showing up because I was doing what I truly felt that I should be doing in this life. Not like, oh man, I wish I could be doing something else. And the pain didn't go away. It's just, I finally gave my pain meaning. I gave my pain meaning. Now, when you think of challenges...

And I think about challenges and I look at them. It's like, yeah, that's going to be a hill to climb. That's going to be hard. But I see them as a good thing. They're going to make me better. And I remember that this is the price I pay for the future that I want. I have to be willing to pay that price. And the weight might be heavy, but carrying that weight is going to make me strong. And so you have to understand there's pain either way, but it's way more painful to do something that you don't love for the rest of your life. And so I rewrote what pain meant inside of my head. And so ultimately,

I want you to understand this. The most important part of all of this was as I was doing all this, I started to fall in love with who I was becoming. I didn't just trick my brain through hacks. I partnered with my brain. We were doing something together. I was doing it with compassion and curiosity and commitment. And I showed my unconscious, my subconscious, that it was safe to grow. There was no danger in growth. I wasn't going to die from growing. And so I reprogrammed my internal narrative from protection to expansion.

And then most importantly, I stopped chasing easy. And I started getting excited for doing harder things because I was starting to see how I was evolving. And so the hard things are still hard. They aren't less hard. But now I've learned to run towards them because I see the benefit that's on the other side. And really, I like who I'm becoming. And I think that if you just start doing harder things and reprogram yourself to do harder things, you'll like who you become as well.

So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor, share it on your Instagram. There's people who follow you right now that have never listened to this podcast and this episode could possibly change your life. So if you could help me by sharing it, I would greatly appreciate it. I love seeing hundreds of you guys share it every single time I put out a new episode. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it. And with that, I'm gonna leave the same way I leave you every single episode, making sure mission makes somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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