crazy things I've done to change my mindset

Summary

when I left the military and started building businesses, my default mindset was scarcity, anxiety, skepticism, worry, fear, and anger. all of it, on repeat. I had to actually train it out. here is what worked.

1. the no complaining challenge. 30 days of catching every complaint before it leaves your mouth. it rewires what your brain even notices. easily the biggest single shift I made.

2. meditation and breath work, daily. not the cool kind. the boring 10 minutes that you do whether you feel like it or not. it lowers the baseline noise, which lowers the baseline reactivity.

3. journaling and self reflection, consistently. you cannot fix what you cannot name. writing names it.

4. a subconscious meditation track every night for over a year. literally fell asleep to abundance affirmations on loop. ridiculous, and it worked.

mindset is not a personality trait. it is the output of habits. if yours sucks, change the habits. it took me years and I still work on it. try harder.

Transcript

introduction: the importance of mindset in personal and professional growth

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How would you rate your mindset if we had to talk about abundance and scarcity and whether or not you are a skeptic, whether or not you’re anxious, where would you rate your mindset right now? This is the better human business podcast.

I’m Jerred Moon. And before we dive into the podcast, I’m not going to ask you to sign up for the newsletter. I know that’s what I’ve been doing over and over and over again. I’m actually going to ask you if you could please leave a review on the podcast. Now I’d love a five star review and a positive comment wherever you are listening to this podcast.

personal struggles with scarcity, anxiety, and skepticism post-military life

And if this is your first time, maybe give it a couple episodes before you give a review. That would really help the show out. It helps it. There’s all the algorithms and stuff. I don’t understand them. But apparently getting more reviews and positive comments leads to more people listening to the show.

So I’d really appreciate it if you could do that, but let’s talk mindset for a minute. So I think I need to go back to my beginning days as an entrepreneur and why I talk so much about mindset with a lot of entrepreneurs these days is because I see younger entrepreneurs coming up and a lot of them have amazing mindsets and it’s so awesome.

Like it’s so great to see people are just built that way and they have a positive mindset. Everything’s working the right direction. Sometimes that can be from just straight being naive or ignorant. Sometimes it’s like a, it’s like a puppy doesn’t know anything about the world yet. There are those entrepreneurs and there are some that have actually faced adversity and they still maintain that positive mindset.

the turning point: engaging in a no-complaining challenge and its transformative impact

But that’s not where I’ve come from and it’s not what I struggle with on a daily basis to this day. So my starting point as an entrepreneur coming out of the military, I feel like the military, it gives you a large dose of life experience. Like if you could, it probably ages you 10 years in maturity, like probably not actually ages you, but it probably gives you 10 to 15 years of maturity depending on what you did in the military, who you worked with, all those kinds of things.

But just some of the things that you can see and talk about and stressors and everything else. I feel like it gives you a lot of life experience. And so me coming out of the military and being an entrepreneur, I had a lot of mindset problems and I knew right off the bat, like I had some mentors that I was working with in the same industry and everything and I could just tell and they could tell I was, I was the person you didn’t want to be around with a lot of the mindset stuff that I had.

I had a massive scarcity issue. Scarcity is just thinking that there’s not enough for everyone. Everything’s going to run out. Everything’s going to fall apart. I had a lot of anxiety about whether or not things would work, whether or not I’d be successful. I stressed about that a lot, a ton of skepticism and what’s funny is a lot of people think skepticism is a good thing, but it’s only a good thing to a certain point.

incorporating meditation, breathwork, and journaling into daily routines for mindset improvement

Like when you’re being a skeptic about getting ripped off about something, that’s okay. But when you’re skeptic about everything, it actually limits your growth opportunities. Because if you are like, take for instance, our PT Biz Mastermind. Some people who have never invested in a program like that are skeptical about the ability for it to actually help grow business.

There’s a lot of skepticism around business coaching and stuff like, ah, what is it really going to work? And I definitely had that. And if you haven’t experienced these things before, then you realize, hey, they can work. And once you realize it, you would put money into business coaching or any kind of coaching all day because you realize there’s an actual ROI.

I had a ton of skepticism. Other things I dealt with, um, worried, but it kind of goes in the anxiety standpoint, but I was just constantly worried about basically everything. Worried about money, worried about health, worried about my kids, just worried about every single thing. I’ve dealt with a lot of fear and anger.

the ongoing journey: recognizing and managing negative emotions to maintain a positive outlook

Again, fear is in that anxiety and worry standpoint. But one thing I’ve learned is operating off of fear or out of fear is a place I will not allow myself to do or to make decisions. And so that’s one thing that I’ve really learned over the last couple of years. And I, I can recognize fear and, and be like, Hey, no, you’re about to make a fear based decision and I won’t allow myself to do it.

I have to get all the facts. I have to change the situation. I’ve also dealt with a lot of anger that’s come in waves. I don’t even really know where it comes from. It’s not like rage. Um, like I don’t have any like rage issues, like with my kids or my, my spouse, nothing like that, but like internalized anger, just angry.

I can be angry at people for not meeting my expectations. I could be angry at people just for not, not holding themselves to higher standards. It’s almost, I’d say that’s where most of my anger can, can come from is working with other people. And I don’t mean like on my team necessarily, but just like being around other people who aren’t holding themselves to any kind of standard.

encouragement for others: starting with the no-complaining challenge to initiate a mindset shift

For some reason it gets like inside of me that like, I’m, I’m angry about it now. And I’ve worked on that a lot. And to be honest, it doesn’t happen as much, but how do you change these things? Like that’s where I was. I was like the worst. You wouldn’t even want to be around me. When I started being an entrepreneur, scarcity, anxiety, skepticism, worry, fear, anger.

It’s like oozing out of my pores. People can tell like my other entrepreneurial mentors. So how did I change it? And do I still struggle with it? Well, here’s how I changed it. This is started on this podcast, actually this podcast feed. If you go back like way, way back in the day, me and the cohost at the time of this podcast, we did a challenge.

It was the no complaining challenge. And I think we did it for a week. I ended up doing it again for a month. And if you actually can do this challenge, and I say, set a small timeframe, like a day, 72 hours a week, try to not complain for a full week about anything. And I’ll never forget when I first did this challenge, I was meeting my wife in New York.

conclusion and invitation for further engagement through the newsletter

We were going on a family trip. She had to travel ahead of me. And I, it was a bad travel day. Like I had like a lot of like delays, all the, all the crap that can happen with travel. And she was picking me up in a car. I got in the car and I was going through this challenge. And she was like, she knew that it was a crazy day, but I hadn’t, I hadn’t complained about it at all.

And then when I got in the car, she just expected me to like complain and she’s like, how was that? And I was like, I, I learned a lot about who I am and how to handle myself and in these annoying kinds of situations. And I’ll definitely be better next time something like this comes around. And she was like, wow, this is a crazy challenge.

Because I, that was just my response. When you know you, you can’t complain and you actually stick to it, it starts to help you realize what’s actually happening in your life and how you can react to things differently without it being so stressful, without causing anxiety. So that’s the first thing that I would recommend you do that I’ve done.

And again, try to hold myself to like, we all complain. I do think it’s human nature. Like I still complain. It’s like, I, it’s not like I’d never complain, but I try to catch myself in any complaint situation and, and flip it, reframe things. I’ve done a ton of meditation and breath work. I’ve done holotropic breathing, which is basically like hallucinate.

It takes like an hour to do the full session. Like I’ve done a lot of different things, but one thing I think you could do is the no complaining challenge. And another thing that I did was I listened to like a subconscious, like hypnotic meditation for over a year. Every night I would put headphones in my ears and I would listen to this same meditation soundtrack every single night I, as I would fall asleep and then I would fall asleep and it would continue playing in my ears because I think it was about an hour long and I don’t know if it helped, but eventually I started changing my mindset, doing all of these things.

I did journaling. I listened to this, this, like I said, hypnosis thing every single night that was about abundance mentality, all these kinds of things. And I did that for over a year. I journaled a lot. I dealt with a lot of my emotions. And so these are some of the things that I’ve done, but I’ve had to work heavily on my mindset.

And is it a hundred percent fixed? Am I good to go? And the answer is no. I still struggle with all of those things, but I’ve turned the volume down on scarcity, anxiety, skepticism, worry, fear, anger. I’ve turned the volume down on those a lot. Like the volume was up at max level when I started as an entrepreneur.

And when you become an entrepreneur and you’re responsible for your income, like let’s say when I was in the military, that volume was at like 50 just naturally when you become an entrepreneur and you really don’t know what you’re doing, that, that, that, that volume on all of that gets turned up to max volume, a hundred percent.

And I had a lot of trouble dealing with it, but then I have been able to deal with it. And I’ve turned that volume down to like 10, 20%, like it’s still there. And what I also realize is when I’m not doing something for my mindset, specifically, I’m not doing meditation. I’m not doing breath work. I’m not working on a no complaining challenge or I’m not listening to meditations or whatever.

When I’m not doing that stuff, the volume starts to get turned up little by little. And the more you let that volume get turned up, the more it starts to take over your life. And I think the biggest part about it is recognizing these things. So my recommendation for anyone listening who feels like you might be in a similar situation, if you’re anything, if you’re a mess like I was, start with a no complaining challenge.

Seriously, start with a no complaining challenge. Try 72 hours, try a week. And then anytime you catch yourself complaining, just, just reframe it. Like think about how you could react differently or how you could respond differently. That’s how I think everyone should start. Start with a no complaining challenge.

Then you can get into some meditation if you need to, or breath work. And hey, if you want to know the exact soundtrack that I listened to for over a year, every single night, go sign up for my newsletter, Jerred.com, J E R E D.com and reply to one of those emails. Any email I send you, ask me what that meditation soundtrack was, and I will shoot you the answer to that.

But that’s it for this one. If you want to change your mindset, you have to try harder.