The Past Does Not Control You

What if the reason your future keeps looking like your past is because your brain is constantly predicting what happens next based on what it already knows? In this episode, I’ll show you how your past shapes your thoughts, identity, and decisions—and give you four practical ways to stop letting old patterns control the future you’re creating. You’ll learn how to change the questions you ask yourself, create new evidence for who you want to become, and start rehearsing your future instead of replaying your past. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level. Get $100 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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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 episode. And if you're somebody who wants to build yourself into being a high performer, but you can't figure out how to break past your old self, your old procrastination, your old habits, your self-sabotaging, I'm running a free live workshop on the evening of August 27th to teach you the psychology of high performance. I will teach you how to break your old fears, break your old limiting beliefs, your old patterns, all of these that are limiting your capacity to succeed. So go to 2026workshop.com right now. Once again, 2026workshop.com. I will be live, it is free, and I will see you there.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Today, I'm going to show you why your brain is so obsessed with the past. And long story short, it's because your brain is doing exactly what it's built to do. But if you don't understand what it's doing, it will build you a future that looks exactly like your past. And if you're listening to this podcast, I bet the last thing that you want is for your future to look like your past. And so I'm going to show you why this happens, and then I'm going to give you four things that you can actually do about it to change your life. So let's dive into it. Here's the thing that you need to understand. Modern neuroscience increasingly looks at the brain as a prediction machine. Carl Friston, who is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive, built an entire framework around this idea.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Your brain is not just sitting there waiting for reality to happen. It is constantly generating a guess about what is about to happen, and then checking reality against that guess that it has. So like in plain language, here's what that means. Your brain is always answering one question, what happens next? And then it makes a guess, and then it's trying to prove that guess true. Here's the problem, though. What is the only material that it has to build that guess out of? It's your past. That's it. That's all it's got. So if somebody betrayed you in the past, your brain doesn't file that away as just history.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  It files it as evidence that this is what happens. And so the next time that somebody gets close to you, your brain runs a model and goes, okay, I know how this entire thing is going to end based off of what's happened to us before. And now you're not responding to the person who's right in front of your face. You're responding to a prediction that your brain is creating based off of your past from somebody who might not even be in your life anymore. If you really get this, this can change the entire course of your life. Your brain isn't showing you your past. It's using your past to write and predict your future. Holy shit, like, do you get that?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  This is why it's so important to separate yourself from your thoughts. Because a lot of times, your thoughts are just automatic. And if they're automatic, that means that they're coming from your past. And so you can't get caught up in these thoughts and, oh, I'm always so negative. This is just the way that I am. No, no, no. We're not trying to recreate our past here. That's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to change so that our future can be different from our past. And if we don't sit down and actually be diligent on it, we will always default to this pattern. And so for me, like, I did this for years when I was younger, before I get into self-development, started working on myself. I didn't even know that I was doing it.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I could tell you how I was a victim in my life, in my entire past, and everything that summarized my victimhood in like three minutes. Every hard thing that I had been through, all of the bad stuff, all of the losses, every reason why I was the way that I was. It was like I had said it so many times, it was basically like it was rehearsed. Like, I could probably have delivered a TED Talk on how much of a fucking victim I was, right? Like, that's how I used to be. People think like, I've always been positive. No, dude, like, I had to work on myself. My brain was defaulting to focus on the bad from my past. And the reason why I was doing this, and I understand now, is so it could protect me from the bad in the future.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So it takes the bad from the past, it throws it into the future, makes a prediction of it, makes us play smaller in our life than we should so that therefore we don't get hurt again, or we don't get injured again. We don't have to go through that pain that we went through in our past. But like, if you had gone back to that version of me when I was younger that was such a victim and asked, like, hey, tell me about who you want to become. I could not have given you five sentences. I could give you a TED Talk on how I was a victim. I couldn't even tell you what I wanted for my life or what I was trying to build. And like, once I started working on myself, I really realized, like, I was fluent in my past. I was fluent in being a victim, and I was like completely illiterate in my future.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  And now I've been coaching people for about 20 years now, and I can tell you the pattern that I see over and over and over again is that the people whose lives change are not the people who have like the easiest past. Like, a lot of times, they're actually the hardest past. But they are the people who actually stopped making their past their main character, stopped focusing on their past so much, because they were trying to get away from it. Because whatever you focus on, you're going to get more of. So if you focus on your past all the time, guess what your brain is going to build for you? More of whatever happened to you in your past, right? So let's talk about how to actually stop this. The first thing you need to do is you need to catch the time travel.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Our brain is always time traveling. You cannot change something if you don't notice it. So we need to become aware of this thing. So the next time, like, let's say for the next week, right? I don't want you to change anything in your life. I don't want you to try to change. For the next week, I just want you to catch yourself going back to the past. Because your mind is almost never here in the present moment. It's either in the past, or it's in a future model built out of the past. And so there's many, many, many moments throughout our day where this happens, where your default mode just kicks in. So when you catch yourself defaulting and going back to your past,

• 8:15Speaker 01

  or your problems, or your victimhood, when you catch it, don't fight it. Don't judge it, don't do anything about it for the next week. Just notice it, right? Become aware of it. Oh, hmm, look at that, it looks like I'm time traveling right now. I'm not even here. But just notice it, because you cannot change something that you're unaware of. Okay? And we will be right back. I used to take a whole bunch of different supplements every day and honestly, it was a lot to keep track of. Since starting IM8, I've simplified my routine so much, I just have one daily drink and I'm done. The problem with supplements is you think you need a cabinet full of them to feel your best, but you don't. IM8 is the way to simplify your supplement routine once and for all. IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials has 16 supplements,

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• 11:52Speaker 01

  the question that you're feeding it. So, your brain, you've heard me say this before, is basically like a search engine. Whatever you type into the search engine, it's gonna go and find evidence for. Your brain is gonna do the exact same thing. The problem is, is that most people are typing in past tense questions all day long. So, they're saying stuff like, "Why does this always happen to me?" And then their brain is like Google and it's gonna go find all of the answers why this always happens to me. And then they ask, "Why do I always act like this?" And your brain is gonna go back and find all of the times in the past and the problems and all the stuff where you acted like that. It's gonna find what you're looking for. People ask, "Why do people always treat me this way?" And then it's gonna find all of it. And the more evidence that it finds, because your

• 12:36Speaker 01

  questions suck, the more you're actually going to get deeper and deeper into these patterns, and it's gonna be harder to get out of them. And so, your brain goes, "Huh, great question. Let me go ahead and pull up the archives." It will find you the answer. I promise you this. Any question that you ask yourself, your brain is going to type all of that in and it's gonna answer that question every single time. It'll find you usually 15 answers. And now, look at that. You just turned yourself into a victim again. And now, you're living in a victim mindset. So, your question determines the search. So, what do we need to do? We need to change the question. So, instead of asking like, "Why does this always happen to me?", you ask yourself a question like, "What am I

• 13:19Speaker 01

  supposed to learn from this?" You see, it's like, it's the same circumstance that you're currently in right now, but it's two completely different things. "Why does this always happen to me?" You're gonna find all of the answers why it happens to you, and it's gonna make you more stuck. "What am I supposed to learn from this?" It's gonna go in, it's gonna actually start to challenge your brain to find what you're supposed to learn from it, so you can grow. Same circumstance, completely different paths in life. And so, instead of asking a question like, "Why am I always like this?", you ask, "How can I change? Why am I always like this?" It's gonna keep you stuck. "How can I change?", it's going to free you. It's the same brain. It's the same circumstance.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  It's the same searching power. It's just a completely different direction that you go from the current moment. And like, I want to be clear, like, I'm not talking about like, just positive thinking. I'm not asking you to lie to yourself. I'm telling you, your brain is going to be searching either way. You're not gonna be able to stop your brain from searching. You might as well point it somewhere useful. Like, remember this. There's a reason why there's something called the negativity bias in psychology, and it's because your brain will almost always default to the negative. It's a protection mechanism built into us hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we're not hunter-gatherers anymore. So, if you're going to change your life, you need to start

• 14:41Speaker 01

  changing your questions. Okay? The third thing you need to do, you need to give your brain new evidence. What most people get wrong about changing is they think in order to change their way and like, move into a new identity, like, identity is just built out of thoughts. No. Your identity is not built out of just thoughts. It's more than anything else. It's built out of evidence. It has a case file in your brain that it has been assembling about you your entire life. And right now, every piece of evidence in that file comes from your past. So, yeah, of course, your brain predicts the same future, because that's the only file that it's got. And so,

• 15:25Speaker 01

  your job today is not to just like, think differently or to feel differently. Your job is to hand your brain at least one piece of evidence that doesn't match the old file by doing something that you normally wouldn't do, by doing something outside of your comfort zone, by doing something that the version of you that you want to become would actually do. So, that might be like a phone call that you've been avoiding. It might be a workout when you don't feel like it. It might be a post that you've been sitting on and avoiding for six months, and it has to be done today, because the past has 10,000-day of like, head start of evidence on you. You're not gonna beat it with one day. That's fine. And so, you're only going to beat

• 16:10Speaker 01

  your old identity the same way that it got built, one piece of evidence at a time. And so, every time you do something different and your brain goes, "Huh, well, that's new. Like, all right, let me update the file on him." And you do it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, and your old identity has no choice but to update itself, because it is built on evidence. And you are giving it new evidence as much as you possibly can. Okay? And the number four is I want you to rehearse forward as much as you rehearse backwards right now. Like, you are already excellent at mental rehearsal, whether you realize it or not. I need you to understand

• 16:51Speaker 01

  that. You're probably elite at it. Like, you can replay a conversation from 2009 in HD with the lighting and with the smell of the room, with what they were wearing. And that's not like a flaw, that's just a skill of being a human. You've just been pointing that brain of yours at the wrong direction. You've been focusing too much on the past. And so, in the normal 20 minutes that you'd spend replaying your past, I want you to spend it pre-living instead. And be specific about the future you're creating, because vague doesn't work. Think about the future that you want in vivid detail. Don't just think like, "Oh, I want to be successful." Where do you want to wake up? What does the room look like? What's the first thing that you do? How do you handle

• 17:36Speaker 01

  something that used to wreck you? What's your body doing? What's it look like? Who are you when no one's watching? You should be living in your future and what you're creating more than you're living in your past. Your future is way more exciting. Like, you should be thinking about that more often. Become obsessed with the future that you're creating and do it every day, because repetition is what makes it feel familiar. And familiar is what the brain moves towards. And so, your brain is going to rehearse something today. That part is not optional. The only thing that you get to choose is what it rehearses. If you don't take charge of it, it will default to the past. I promise you that. And so, what you want to do is you want to be very intentional about what

• 18:21Speaker 01

  your brain focuses on. Make sure that it focuses on the future and that your future is vividly detailed and more exciting than the past is. Okay? And like, I need to quickly warn you, I guess, because this part gets misused constantly. I'm not pretending that your past didn't happen. I'm not telling you to forget your past. If something real happened to you, that's real. Like, grief is real, trauma is real. What was done to you was done to you, and some of it probably actually might need professional help, not just like a podcast. And I want you to go get that. So, I'm not saying skip over it. There's a difference between processing something and then like, marinating in it, right? Processing has a direction. It's going somewhere. Marinating

• 19:04Speaker 01

  in it is just like a circle that doesn't get you anywhere. It's just like mental masturbation, right? And so, here's what I want you to write down today. I just want you to answer this one question. If my brain builds a future out of whatever I give it most, what have I been giving it? And get very detailed on what you've been giving it. Sit with it. Write it down, because your past already happened. It's done. It's over. It cannot touch you anymore. I always say that your past is basically like the wake of a boat. If you turn around and you look behind the boat when you're on it, you can see the wake and it shows you where you've been, but the wake cannot steer the ship. But so many people are letting the wake of their life, the past steer their ship.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  So the only thing that it can still take from you, all of these things have happened to you in your past, is your future. But it can only take it from you if you just keep handing it over. And so stop rehearsing all of the things that have already happened. Start rehearsing what you're building. Start rehearsing the life that you want. And you have to be more obsessed with the future that you want and what you're building more than you are with your past. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with someone that you know and love. And if you're someone who wants to build yourself into a high performer, and you want to see what it would be like to bring your real true potential out in the world, but you know that you're the one holding yourself back, you need to be on my workshop coming up on the psychology

• 20:30Speaker 01

  of high performance. You can go to 2026workshop.com right now to register for free. I'm going to teach you how to break free from your fears, from your limiting beliefs and your old identities that are capping your success. Once again, it's 2026workshop.com. It is free. It will be live and I will see you there. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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