How to Be Happy Where You Are

Are you chasing success so hard that you've forgotten how to actually enjoy it? In this episode, I'm breaking down the powerful difference between the part of your brain that constantly wants more and the part that's responsible for true fulfillment. I'll show you why gratitude isn't just a feel-good practice—it's the missing piece that can help you stay ambitious, avoid burnout, and finally enjoy the life you're working so hard to build. 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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• 2:15Speaker 02

  Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're out there and you're ready for your next breakthrough, join me at my three-day live event in Austin, Texas this December. It is a complete deconstruction of the old patterns and habits and beliefs and fears that are holding you back from breaking through to your next level. So if you want 2027 to be the best year of your life, join us at freedomlive2026.com. We're going to be deconstructing your old beliefs and patterns and habits, and we're going to be reconstructing who you need to be to make it the best year of your life. And right now, there's a $50 off coupon that is going to be going away very soon.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  So join us, and I will see you live in Austin, Texas. Today, I want to talk about something that almost every ambitious person gets completely backwards. Because I know you're an ambitious person because you're listening to this podcast, and you've got goals, and you've got standards, and you've got things that you want to do in your life. And from the outside, somebody might look at your life and be like, you know what? She's got it all together, he's got it all together. But when no one's watching, and you're driving alone in your car, there's this like low-grade hum underneath everything. It's like this feeling of not yet. Ah, not yet, not there yet, I can't settle, I've got to keep going. And you've probably diagnosed this feeling as your ambition.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  That's just my edge, like that's what keeps me going. And I get it, because I have, I felt that way for years, first 35 years of my life, until I realized what it actually is, and it's not ambition. And so I want to actually challenge that today. Because in your brain, there's two completely separate systems. One of them wants things, and the other one enjoys things. And those come from two completely different parts in your brain, with different chemistry, trained independently of each other. Which means that you can spend 20 years making the wanting, the ambition system so strong, while the enjoying system is completely weak inside of your brain.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And this is why you can hit a goal that you've chased for three years, and when you hit it, you immediately just move to the next thing. I did that so many times, and so many successful people do this as well. And so today, I'm going to show you the neurological reason why your brain won't let you enjoy where you are, and I'm going to show you why it always ends in burnout. And then I'm going to give you the actual step-by-step process to fix it. Because by the end of this episode, you're not going to be less ambitious. You're just going to learn how to be driven in a completely different way than you have before. Because a person who is grateful and hungry is almost impossible to stop. Okay, so I want to start with one of the most fascinating pieces of research in this entire space of gratitude, and I would be shocked if you've ever heard of it before.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  But there's a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan named Kent Barage, and he spent his entire career on one question. Are wanting and liking the same thing? And everybody before his research assumed yes, like you want the thing because you like the thing, right? But what he found is they run on two completely different systems in your brain. Wanting runs on dopamine. It's big, it's loud, it's spread across many regions in your brain. But liking and enjoying, like actually feeling enjoyment, runs on completely different chemistry. It's concentrated in these tiny little clusters in your brain that are called hedonic hotspots. And most people are strengthening the wanting parts of their brain every single day,

• 5:51Speaker 02

  while the enjoying parts of their brain are really not being used. And then you wake up at 40, and you go, why does none of this feel like anything? And it's not because you're like an ungrateful person. It's because you've basically hypertrophied one system, and you've let the other system atrophy. It's like the equivalent of like being a, you know, bodybuilder with massive arms, and then you got teeny tiny toothpick legs, and you wonder why you can't stand up. It's because the wanting and liking systems, the wanting system's been built up and built up and built up. The liking and enjoying system, you just never have been using. And I want to be clear, like I'm not telling you to kill the wanting system.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I love the wanting system that lives inside of me. It's built everything that I have. But what I'm telling you is that there's a second muscle, quote unquote, in your brain that you need to strengthen, and it's gratitude in training. Like that's the training you need. And gratitude, what it actually is, like it's not positive thinking. It's not like, I'm just going to sit down and chill out because I just have everything that I want. It is a repetition for the only system in your brain that's capable of producing the feeling that you've been chasing with the other one for 20 years. And so you've been trying to get satisfaction out of the pursuit system part of your brain. Does that make sense? And like the pursuit system does not manufacture satisfaction.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  It never has, and it was never designed to. And that's why you will never feel happy with success is because that part of your brain was never designed to do it. That's why you can buy the Lamborghini, you can buy the BMW, and it's cool for like a couple of weeks, and then you go back to normal. That's why you can hit a million dollars, or $10 million, or a billion dollars in your bank account, and then you just don't feel happy about it. And you might go, that's not me. Please, I know people that are worth over $4 billion, and they're fucking miserable. So clearly, the money does not make somebody happy. Hmm, that must mean there's two different parts of our brain we need to work on, right? It's not that you need a better car, it's not that you need a bigger bank account.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Getting a nice car and getting a bigger bank account will not change the way that you feel long-term. You need to strengthen the different part of your brain, right? And listen, like I get it, I completely get it for all of you guys. I ran my entire life off of the wanting part of my brain for a long time. And I thought that's what made me ambitious. But wanting, and then achieving, and then never fully feeling the enjoyment in your life will burn you out. Working really hard with no real feeling of reward will burn you out. Burnout is not caused by working too hard, though. Like I've coached thousands and thousands of people. I've watched people work insane hours on something that they loved, and they come out energized.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  That's how I feel about what I do. But I've also watched people work 40 or 50 hours a week on something that they don't love and come out destroyed. The difference wasn't the workload, it's how much they are enjoying and getting enjoyment out of what they're doing, but also what they're achieving. And how much they're letting themselves feel the gratitude for their lives, for their achievements, for their challenges, feeling gratitude for the challenges, feeling gratitude for the losses, for everything. And we will be right back. Let's talk about Angie. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years, and they've made it easier than ever to tackle home projects.

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  Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. And now, back to the show. You know, people think gratitude is soft. Gratitude is not soft. Gratitude is strategic in the brain. I'm going to explain to you what I mean by that. Because the more I can feel gratitude for everything that I have, the more that I want to build an even more incredible life to be grateful for. And when I push, and I hit a goal, and I succeed, and then I allow myself to truly feel that gratitude, my brain releases dopamine. And my brain goes, damn, like, that felt great, let's do it again. And it wants to keep achieving. And this is why dopamine is a chemical of motivation.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  It wants to keep achieving more of what gave it dopamine in the first place. So if you never truly enjoy your successes, you don't get the dopamine, and then you don't want to keep achieving more. So, as I actually said, gratitude in this case is a very strategic thing. It's not like a soft, little mushy woo-woo thing. Like, let me, let me shift gears for a second. Just, I want to tell you something that I believe, right? And you can take it or leave it. But I believe that there's something running, this whole world that we live in, right? You can call it God, you can call it universe, you can call it source, whatever you want to call it, I really don't care what words you use. But I've come to believe, and I have a deep-seated belief in this, that it operates on stewardship.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And if you think about it practically, it makes sense. Imagine you gave somebody a small team to manage in your company, and every day, all they did was complain. Like, oh, my team's not big enough, and, you know, I can't do what I want because our budget's not big enough, and nothing's ever right, and my salespeople's numbers aren't where they should be. Like, if they're constantly complaining about the small team that you gave them, would you ever give them a bigger team?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Hell, no. Of course you would not. And it's not because you're punishing them. It's because they can't even handle the small team. Like, they've given you very clear information about the fact that they can't handle this tiny little bit that you gave them. And so if you gave them more resources, I guarantee they would still complain with more. That's like exactly how I think life works out. Like, if what you do is complain with a little that is in your life, why would you ever be trusted with a lot? Like, do you think about that for, for a second? If you're like, well, my life, it's not very great, and boo hoo, and my bank account and all this stuff. If you complain about the, the small blessings that you do have,

• 14:25Speaker 02

  why would you ever be trusted with more? People don't think about it this way. And I don't mean in like some, some mystical way where the universe is like keeping score and like with a notebook or anything like that. No. You see, the person who's grateful for what they have, and takes care of it, and sees himself as a steward of what they have, they notice more. They are better at everything they do. Better people want to work with them. They act from like a full tank instead of an empty tank, so they last longer. They don't burn out in year three of building something, so they're still standing in year 10 where everything starts to compound later on.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  So like gratitude doesn't like just like summon the blessing. That's what I'm trying, that's what I'm trying to say. Gratitude makes you the kind of person who can handle the blessing when it compounds and becomes greater than you thought that it could be. And so I really want you to think about this question, because I have an honest question for you, okay? If right now, you were handed everything that you say you want, right now, today, in this moment, but you still have the exact same identity and operating system that you've always had, would you enjoy it? Or would you eventually find something wrong with it in like six weeks, like you've done with everything that you have now? It's a real question I want you to think about,

• 15:50Speaker 02

  because no amount of success or achievement will ever change how you feel inside. Right? You fix the internal, and the external changes. You fix the external, it doesn't change the internal. So how do you train this? Before I give you the actual steps on how to train it, well, there's one thing. There was a study that was done out of Indiana University, where they had people do a gratitude exercise every morning. And then three months later, they scanned their brains. They found out that the people who had the gratitude group showed a greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. That's the part of your brain that gives things meaning, which means that gratitude actually changes your brain. So gratitude is not like fluffy stuff. It's an actual practice. It's mental training to change your brain.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  So let me give you the, the step-by-step process. The first one is this. Get specific, and I mean like painfully specific. Most gratitude practices fall short because people are like, I'm, and they just take like a bucket of life. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for my job. Like, those are like categories in life. And your brain has heard my family 10,000 times. So I want you to go like more granular. You could say, I'm grateful for my son, yes. Or, but you could even go more granular than that. I'm grateful for the specific way that he says words wrong that I know he's going to grow out of in a few months. I'm so grateful for how fucking cute it is when he wants to say crackers, and he says coggies instead.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I'm so grateful for when my son wants to say avocado, and he says capu, right? Like, I'm so much more, I'm, I'm even like feeling good about that right now, thinking about how he does that, right? So the more detail that you can be in your gratitude, the better. That's number one. Number two, I want you to catch the complaint and convert it, okay? You can't stop your first thought, but you can always change your second thought, right? And so this week, I want you to catch yourself complaining. You will do it, and don't shame yourself for it. Just ask yourself one question when you complain. What in this exact situation would I miss if it was gone? Right? So let's say like you're stuck in traffic. What in this exact situation would I miss if it was gone? Well, if my car was gone, like...

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I'm really grateful, actually, that I do have a car because a lot of people don't have a car, right? Okay, there's something I can be grateful for. Like, let's say you're slammed at work, right? What in this exact situation would I actually miss if it were gone? My job. If my job were gone, like, people want to make the amount of money that I make, or, shit, some people just want a job. So I'm grateful that I do have a job and I can pay my bills, right? Or like, your kid is being crazy, because we know kids can be crazy. What in this exact situation would I actually miss if it were gone? Your kid is alive. Your kid is in the house. Your kid is healthy. So much to be grateful for in that moment. So we can take our complaints, and by asking ourselves that question, completely change the way that we feel. And you're not lying to yourself about anything. You're just refusing

• 18:49Speaker 02

  to let your brain run old patterns of complaining when there's something right in front of you you can be grateful for, right? And you're choosing to get stronger in the gratitude parts of your brain. You're finding gratitude, right? So that's number two. Number three, last one, terminated in action. This is where, like, what separates gratitude from, like, passivity. Every time you get grateful, close it with a question. So ask yourself, when you talk about your gratitude practice, so what am I gonna do with it? Right? So let's say you're grateful for the fact that you are so healthy right now. What am I gonna do with it? I'm gonna go use my body, right? I'm grateful for my business. Okay, so what

• 19:32Speaker 02

  am I gonna do with it? I'm gonna go serve a client better today. Because gratitude that stops at just a feeling is just that. It's just a feeling. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you really want to etch it into your DNA, gratitude that has a feeling and then ends in action, that's like stewardship of the thing that you're grateful for, right? That's the loop. Get grateful for it, so you take care of it. And if you take care of it, it grows. And if it grows, that means there's gonna be more for you to be grateful for. Okay? And so, here's what I want you to do. I want you to write this down. Answer this question. What am I currently treating as not enough that I once prayed for? I promise you, every person listening to me, there is something

• 20:14Speaker 02

  in your life that you're stepping over on the way to you're complaining about something else. There's a version of you five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, who would love to have something that you have now. Question number two, if nothing external changed for the next 12 months, what would I have to change inside of me for that to be a good year? Whatever comes up for that one, that's the actual work. Because you're not unhappy because your life is too small. I promise you that. You're unhappy because you've spent so many years training the part of your brain that chases, and you have spent no time at all on the part of your brain that feels gratitude. And the more that you do gratitude, the more that part of your brain actually starts to strengthen. You

• 20:59Speaker 02

  can fix it. It's like a muscle. But you just never really went to the gym for that one. And when you fix it, you don't get soft. You don't lose your edge. You don't lose your ambition. You become somebody who can outwork everybody else, because now, you're not running from past trauma, and that's what gives you your quote-unquote ambition. You're running because you're grateful, and you want to create even more things to be grateful for. Because when you achieve the things that you're working towards, and you allow yourself to actually feel it, you'll be more excited to actually run and go get that thing. Because, in all honesty, if we're building these lives, what's the point of

• 21:38Speaker 02

  building a beautiful life if you don't actually, truly let yourself enjoy it? So, that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories, tag me at Rob Dial Jr., R O B D I A L J R. And once again, if you love this podcast, these are like 15 to 20 minutes. Imagine what it would be like if you and I had three days, full immersion, in person, working on deconstructing your old beliefs and habits and patterns and fears, and reconstructing you into the person that you need to be, so that you can break through to the next level. That is what we're gonna do at Freedom Live 2026. So go to FreedomLive2026.com. Once again, FreedomLive2026.com. Join us, and I'll see you in Austin, Texas. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same

• 22:21Speaker 02

  way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.