Mindset Is Everything! | That Can Change Your Life Forever

Your mindset is running every single area of your life right now. It's the reason why you haven't made the money that you want to make. Why you keep ending up in the same relationship. Why you keep falling back to the same old habits that you've had. It's why you can know exactly what you need to do to change your life and still not be doing it. And the terrifying part about it is that you don't experience this thing as something that's holding you back. You don't experience your mindset as something that's holding you back. You experience it in your everyday life as truth. You think, oh, well that's just who I am. Or that's just how relationships are. Or I'm just not good with money. Or people like me don't succeed and things like that. But none of that is actually true. Your brain has just been constructing a version of reality based off of beliefs that you did not choose. And then filtering your entire life through that system. And once you understand what's actually happening inside of your brain, you realize something that I genuinely believe every single person needs to understand. You could spend the next 30 years of your life trying to change your habits, become more disciplined, work harder, make more money, and improve yourself. But you can still keep recreating different versions of the exact same life. Because you've been trying to change the results without changing the thing that's creating the results. And it's ultimately the reason why I have dedicated my entire life to understanding the mind and teaching the stuff that I learn. So today I'm going to show you what mindset truly is, what's going on inside of your brain and your body right now, and why it's important to work on it every single day. Because your mindset isn't just something that's kind of affecting your life. It's deciding what your life will become. So let's dive in. I want to kill off the definition that you probably have in your head of mindset. When most people hear mindset, they think, oh, it's positive thinking. It's saying affirmations in the mirror. It's having good vibes. It's having a vision board. It's closing your eyes and manifesting and saying, all areas of the universe are sending me money into my mailbox. It's manifesting a Lamborghini by staring at it really hard. Like that's what most people think mindset is. That's not what I'm talking about. It's never been what I'm talking about. Your mindset is not what you say. Your mindset is the set of unconscious assumptions that your brain uses to interpret your reality before you have consciously thought about anything at all. It's not a thought. It's the thing that produces the thoughts. Do you get that? Like your habits, your goals, your morning routine. Those are like apps on your phone, right? Everybody's obsessed with the apps. Make sure you do the cold plunges. Your mindset is not an app. Your mindset is the operating system that all of the apps are running on. You can download all the apps that you want to, but if the operating system is running code from like 1994, they're probably going to crash, right? Every single time. And so what makes this really dangerous is that you don't experience your mindset as like a belief. You experience it as actual truth. Like nobody walks around going, well, I've adopted the belief that people can't be trusted. And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. If you're someone who's already doing pretty well in life, like you've built a business, you've built a career, you've built everything that looks pretty good on paper, but you know that you are nowhere near your potential and you've been sitting at the same level for a few years now, you need to be at my live event that I'm hosting called Freedom Live. It's three days in Austin, Texas. It is not for people that are just starting out. It is for people who are already running, but they know that they're running at like 60% of their capacity. I'm going to teach you how to operate at your peak performance, 95 to 100% of your potential so that you can build a true life of freedom. Go to freedomlive2026.com or scan that QR code right there. There's currently a $50 off coupon if you join right now. So once again, go ahead and go right here or go to that QR code right there. And now back to the show. No, like people walk around thinking people can't be trusted and they think that it's a fact. So it's not like you experienced just this thing. Like you experienced your mindset and these unconscious set of beliefs as true. Like it's written into the fabric of the universe that people cannot be trusted. And people who believe that actually believe it to be true. So let me show you real quick, the three major places where your mindset is just running your life right now. Number one, your mindset decides what you see. You have to understand your brain takes in about 11 million bits of information per second. Everything that's hitting your eyes, your ears, your skin, what you taste, what you hear, feel, everything. Your conscious awareness though, only processes about 40 to 50 bits of information per second. 40 to 50 out of 11 million. So basically all of reality is getting deleted before you're even aware of it. Do you get that? Like you've never once really seen reality in your life. You're seeing a compressed version based off of what your brain is filtering in and filtering out. It's basically deciding what makes the cut. And there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system. It's your brain's filter. You've probably heard me talk about it on podcasts tons of times. The part that should make your hair stand up though, is that the filter is set by what you believe. And a lot of your beliefs, probably most of your beliefs come from childhood and they weren't even yours in the first place. Your brain isn't like a camera. It's not just seeing things. Neuroscience is increasingly seeing your brain as a prediction machine more than anything else. It's not waiting for reality. It is guessing what's about to happen and then it's hunting for evidence to confirm that guess. Do you get that? Like that's the crazy thing about it. You're not seeing what's actually happening. Your brain is guessing what's about to happen and then hunting for evidence to confirm it's guess true. Ooh, that's either really exciting or really scary based off of your beliefs, isn't it? So if you believe underneath everything that opportunities don't come to people like you, your brain will delete all of the opportunities. Not ignore them, delete them. You'll walk directly past the thing that could have changed your life and you'll never see it. And then you'll say, see, nothing ever works out for me. And your brain goes, correct, prediction confirmed. So that's number one. Number two, it's in control of what your body does. That's crazy. This is the part that turned mindset from something I found interesting and something that I found like urgent. I need to learn this. Because your mindset is not just in your head, it's in your bloodstream. Researchers at Yale gave people a milkshake, same exact milkshake, identical milkshake, but two different labels. One group was told that it was an indulgent 620 calorie shake. And the other group was told that it was a sensible, guilt-free 140 calorie shake. Same shake, different stories. They then measured the ghrelin, which is your body's hunger hormone, the thing that tells your brain that you're full. The group who thought they drank an indulgent shake had ghrelin drop three times steeper. Their bodies responded to the label, not the actual liquid that was in their body. Actual hormones, actual chemistry, responding to a belief. Now that story is crazy. Do you want to hear another crazy story? Researchers followed 660 people over the age of 50 for more than two decades. And they measured one thing. Their attitude about aging. Did they believe that getting older meant becoming useless and forgotten? Or did they believe that it could mean more wisdom, more freedom, and becoming more of themselves? The people who had a positive perception of their own aging lived on average seven and a half years longer. Seven and a half years longer. Not because of exercise, not because of income, not because of gender, not because of loneliness. They controlled all of those things because of their belief. To put that in perspective, they lived longer. Like that's a bigger longevity effect than lowering your blood pressure. Bigger than lowering your cholesterol. A belief bought them seven and a half years of their life. Isn't that crazy? That's their mind affecting their body. So let me say this as clearly as I can. Your mindset is a physiological event as well. It's not fluffy. It's not soft. Every belief you hold gets translated into your nervous system, into hormones, into immune function, and how fast your cells actually age. You're not just thinking your thoughts. You're metabolizing your thoughts. So that's number two. Number three, your mindset affects what you do. And this is the one that I really want you to focus on. Okay, there was a study that was done on humans back in the 60s where they did these experiments on something that they called learned helplessness. It's not the greatest experiment. I promise you that. But animals were exposed to stress that they could not escape. And after enough repetition, when the escape route was opened, when they could get out, they didn't even try. The door was open and they stopped looking at it. And yeah, it's brutal to do to an animal. I do agree. But it tells you something about humans and it tells you something about animals because we do the exact same thing. And the part that's really wild is that most people would never even really talk about about 50 years later, one of the original researchers of learned helplessness went back with modern neuroscience and basically said like, hey, we've got it all backwards. Helplessness isn't learned. Helplessness is the default of animals. Passivity is the factory setting of the brain under stress. What has to be learned, and this is really key, right? What has to be learned, what gets built into your prefrontal cortex through repetition is the belief that you have control. Do you understand how big that is? It has to be learned, which means nobody has to teach you to give up and to be helpless. Giving up is free. It comes standard. What has to be built is the belief that your actions matter. And if nobody built that into you as a kid, if you grew up in a house where nothing that you did ever changed anything, where chaos came no matter how good you were, you didn't learn helplessness. You just never got to be taught control over your entire life. So you walk around as a fully capable adult today with the door standing wide open and you don't even look at it. And it's not because you're lazy or because you're broken or because you're weak or because of any of that stuff that people always think. It's because your brain never got the update that effort changes your outcome. And parents pass it on to their children, they pass it on to their children, they pass it on to their children. You can't opt out of passing it on. There is no neutral here. So what do we actually do to change this? There's three things. Write each of these down, okay? Number one is find the sentence. Everybody has a core belief about their life that they've never really truly examined. And it's usually like maximum of eight words long. Nothing ever comes easy for me. People always leave. I'm always behind. I'll never amount to anything. People I love will eventually use me. Whatever it might be, try to figure out what your sentence is. Take a piece of paper and I want you to finish these. I'm going to give you some sentence stems and these are going to help you find it, okay? Life is blank. Finish that sentence, okay? Number two, people are blank. Finish that sentence. Next one, money is blank. Finish that sentence. And the last one, I am the kind of person who blank. Whatever comes out is the first thing I want you to go with. First thing that comes out of your mind, it's not a thought. That's the lens that you look at your life through. Ask yourself, whose voice is in that? Whose voice is in it? Because a lot of times it's not yours. It's something that you learned, okay? That's number one. Number two, change the search terms. Your brain answers whatever question you feed it. So stop feeding it garbage. I've said this before on the podcast before, but if you go into Google and you type in, is coffee good for your eyesight? You will see a bunch of research that shows that coffee is good for your eyesight. If you go in and ask, is coffee bad for your eyesight? You will see a bunch of research that shows that coffee is bad for your eyesight. Your brain is the exact same way. It will find proof to whatever questions you ask it. I always say it's like cosmic Google, right? So instead of asking the question, why does this always happen to me? And making yourself a victim, which most people do. Oh, why does this always happen to me, right? Ask yourself, what is this supposed to teach me? It's the same event. It's a completely different lens. Different search terms, right? Instead of asking, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? Ask yourself, what does this part of me need right now? It's the same brain. It's the same power. It's completely different results. Do that 10 times a day. Not once, not twice, 10 times a day. You just go in and say, okay, here's this. So instead of saying this, I'm going to say this. Instead of saying this, I'm going to say this. Instead of asking this, I'm going to ask this. And you actually start to update what you're asking yourself throughout the day, okay? And number three, go get evidence. And if you have somehow tuned out to everything else in this podcast episode, this is the most important part. You do not change your mindset by just talking to yourself. Is talking to yourself important? Absolutely. Where you really change it is by giving your brain undeniable proof that the old story is wrong. When you stand in the mirror and you say, I'm disciplined, your bullshit meter is going to go off immediately because there's no evidence for that. It's thinking about how you slept in last night and how you haven't worked out in three months. But if you go and you do the hard thing once, well, now there's a data point. If you do it again tomorrow, there's two. There's another data point. Do it 400 times and your brain has no choice but to update the model of what it thinks of who you are. It can't keep predicting failure against that much contradictory evidence. So don't try to become somebody new tomorrow. That's overwhelming and you'll do probably nothing. Just ask yourself, in this single moment tomorrow, what would somebody who believes life works out for them do now? What would somebody who is disciplined do now? What would somebody who cares about their family do now? What would somebody who cares about their health do now? You ask yourself those questions and then you just do that. And so to wrap this up, your mindset is the most important part of every single thing that happens in your life. Every episode for this podcast for over a decade, four times a week, is me having a conversation with you that I wish somebody would have taught me as a kid. I'm making these episodes for me as much as I am for you. So when I say mindset is everything, I'm not being cute. I'm not making some slogan for a t-shirt. It decides what you see out of 11 million bits per second. It decides what your hormones feel in your body. It decides whether you look at the door as open or closed for certain events in your life. It decides what you pass on to your kids. And according to research, it decides how many years you're going to live. There's no part of your life that mindset is not touching. And so if you're sitting there going, damn, like I've been living out a chapter that somebody else wrote for me, good. That's the point. This is the first real moment where you can take back your life because you can't change a lens in your life if you don't know that you're looking through it. Now you know. 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