The Growth Mindset Book Podcast: Mindset Mastery Chapter by Chapter

Who Wrote The Code Running Your Life?

• Michael Fox • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Ever feel like your reactions run you before you get a say? We dig into the real engine behind your results—your thoughts—and map how outside inputs like news, social media, and even loving family advice can, through repetition, hardwire beliefs that shape every choice you make. Instead of blaming willpower, we walk through a clearer model: inputs create thoughts, thoughts repeated become programs, and programs filter your world until they feel like facts.

We get practical about spotting those inputs in real time: the headline that spikes fear, the feed that sparks comparison, the song that trains you to expect heartbreak. You’ll learn how activation loops work—why one negative comment can trigger years of stored ideas—and how to interrupt them without shaming yourself. From early money warnings to report-card labels, we unpack how childhood messages still echo in adult careers, relationships, and risk-taking. Then we shift to tools: build a mental firewall, add friction to doomscrolling, set conversation boundaries, and intentionally feed your mind with sources that match the life you want.

Change starts small. We share a simple assignment: cut one negative input this week and install one empowering thought you actually believe, rehearsed at consistent times. Pair it with tiny proof—invoice a bit faster, make a micro-offer, or track acts of kindness—to create evidence for your new program. You’re not your limiting beliefs; you’re the author who chooses the code. If this resonated, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review so more people can find these tools. What’s the one input you’ll cut first?

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SPEAKER_00:

Today, what we're going to focus on is a book that is called The Master Key System by Charles Hinnell. And what I want to focus on this week is specifically the idea of our thoughts. Our thoughts control every single thing in our life. So if you have a relationship and you're not happy in your relationship, the reason you're not getting the results that you want is because of the way you're thinking about the relationship. If you don't have the money in the bank account that you want, the reason for that is the way you think about money. If you don't have the job or the business operating the way that you want it to be, the result isn't what you want. The reason it's like that is because of the way you think about it. If you don't have something in your life that you want, the only reason that you don't have it is because of the way that you're thinking about it. And that's what we're going to dive into today. And I want to just keep it really simple and discuss it from a very visual, easy way for us to understand it so that we can then take it and start applying it in our life. So when I say out loud to you that the only reason that you have results in your life that you don't like, do you believe it when I say to you that it's due to your thinking and thoughts? Thoughts are the root cause of everything in your life. In other words, if you're trying to find the cause of the effect in your life, the cause is always thoughts. There's no deeper source to go to other than the thoughts that we're thinking. Let's talk about this for a moment. How do our thoughts normally work in our mind? In other words, where do these thoughts and ideas, idea is just a collection of thoughts, but where do these thoughts and ideas come from? There's two ways that we can get thoughts. And the first way is from outside of ourself. What does that mean? Well, anything that's outside of our body and outside of our mind in the outside world is where thoughts can be generated. So let's use some examples so we're abundantly clear. You turn on the news, whether it's Fox or MSNBC or any other channel, and they start talking about a specific opinion. Will that generate thoughts in your mind? In other words, imagine you like Trump or you don't like Trump, and they either start talking about Trump in a way that you like or that you don't like. Will that generate thoughts in your mind? What type of thoughts will it generate for you? Will it generate positive thinking or negative thinking? The point is, it's that source outside of ourselves, the TV, that's causing us to have these thoughts. Let's use some more examples. How about we're talking to a group of friends and we're telling them about an idea that we have for a business, and they say to us, that is a terrible idea. That'll never work. There's no chance that ever is going to work. Will that potentially generate some thoughts in your mind? Will those thoughts be positive thoughts or will they be negative thoughts? How about you take out your phone, you start scrolling on social media, you're on Instagram, and you see something on there. You see a family member or a friend just got a brand new house, just got a brand new car, just got a brand new job, just got something that you don't have. Will that cause you to start having thoughts? And then what kind of thoughts will they be? Will they be positive thoughts or negative thoughts? What you'll find is that a majority of the thoughts that come from the outside world that are generated from things that we're seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting in the outside world, things that are generated outside, for the most part, can be negative. So if that's the case, if we know that thoughts are generated from the outside world, from outside of us, from friends, from family members, from television, from radio, from social media, from any source like that. And we also know that generally speaking, that specific source, whether it's TV, radio, social media, is generating negative thoughts for us consistently. What might we want to do to prevent these kind of thoughts from taking over in our mind? I can hear what you're thinking, and that is, well, we probably would want to cut off some of those areas and protect ourselves from sources that are going to cause us to think in a negative way. Now, here's something really important to understand. We have these sources, they're outside of us. They tend to cause us these positive and negative thoughts. The thing is, how long have you been watching television for? How many years have you been watching the news? How long have you lived with family and friends? How about social media? How often during the day are you scrolling on it? What's happening is when let's use social media as an example. Social media, we keep seeing something on social media about how being overweight is a bad thing. And you see all these perfect people as you're scrolling on social media. It generates these thoughts of, I'm not good enough. Why don't I look like that? Why don't I have these things? And when that thought is generated over and over and over again because we're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, what do you think happens in our mind? Good news, I'm going to tell you. What happens is those thoughts, because we're hearing them over and over and we're thinking them over and over, they become a program. Just like if you have a computer and it's programmed so that when you press the enter key and you're in your word processing program, it'll go to the next paragraph. It's programmed to do that. So, in the only way you could change that around is if someone would rewrite the program for your computer so that it tells the enter key to do something different. We're very similar to the computer. What happens is we have these things from scrolling, from watching the news, these thoughts that come consistently. The world is a really negative place. You're watching the news, you're seeing people getting killed, you're seeing fires, you're seeing people getting raped, all these negative things. And what happens is because you have formed this idea, wow, this world's a pretty bad place. There's a lot of bad people in the world, and you think that a lot because you've been watching the television a lot, and you've been seeing that message over and over again, that creates a program in your mind. And the problem is when that program is formed and it's installed in your operating system, in your computer, in your brain, in your subconscious mind, now what happens is that program can be triggered anytime. Well, what do I mean? This is what I mean. Imagine that you've been programmed with the idea that the world is a pretty bad place because you've been watching on the news over and over that, you know, seeing all these negative things. So you have this program inside that says the world is a negative place. Then you're out with a friend and they say something about a person who did a negative thing to someone else. Do you know what happens? What do you think happens? That program that you have inside of your mind that says the world is a bad place gets activated. And when that program gets activated, what do you think happens? Do you think you think more thoughts like that or less thoughts like that? Well, obviously the answer is you think more thoughts like that. And the more thoughts you think like that, what is it doing to that program that's already installed that says this world is a bad place? The more thoughts you have, which agree with this world is a bad place, guess what's happening to that program? The program's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It's sort of like a snowball that's rolling down a hill and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The more that we have thoughts, the more that the outside world triggers that program that's inside of our mind and it generates these negative thoughts, the more that program expands like the snowball. The bigger it gets, the stronger it gets, the more powerful it gets. And guess what? You don't have to do anything. Because it's a program that's installed, what's happened is now anytime anything comes close to looking like the world is a bad place, that program's going to be activated. And all of those thoughts that were generated over all the years about how the world is a bad place will be activated. And no matter what you see with your eyes in the outside world, it will appear that this world is a very bad place. Why is this so important to understand? The reason it's important is did you choose to decide one day that this world is a bad place, that there is bad people living in this world? In other words, did you wake up one morning? Imagine you haven't watched any television, you were just kind of born into this world, but you have the ability to think, you're not a child, you you were born with the ability to think right away. It was a miracle. Would you think that this world is a bad place without having any knowledge of anything else? And the answer is no. But what happens is we turn on the television, we watch TV, we watch the news, we scroll on social media, we go on X, we look at all these sources that are giving us, based on an algorithm, they're giving us more of what it is that we are already programmed with. So if I'm programmed with this world is a bad place, or there's a million conspiracy theories out there, not to say that there aren't conspiracy theories, there probably are. But if I'm programmed that way, then every single time that I see anything that looks close to that, all those thoughts that have been stored in my mind, all of those ideas that I've heard and seen and watched, they're all going to be activated, and I am going to see the world from that perspective. The good news in all of this is you were programmed. You were programmed by all of these outside sources. You did not choose to have these kind of ideas and thoughts. They were programmed and they were programmed by outside sources. Listen, if you grow up in a family that is very negative about money, what do you think the chances are that you might be negative about money? Obviously, there's a very good chance that that's going to occur. Because if you're hearing all the time when you're younger that you better be careful, don't spend too much, don't waste money, money doesn't grow on trees, money's not easy to come by. If you hear that message over and over, what program gets formed in your mind? I know you know the answer. And that program is negative. The program is money is hard to come by. And if you have that program stored in your mind and you decide, I really want to buy that new thing, but then you have this program that gets activated because this is your program that's installed about money. You might not get that thing that you want because of the program that's installed. Now, sometimes that's a good thing, but there's many times it's not good because I actually shouldn't use the word good. It's not something that we would want to have happen. We don't want our programming to automate, especially programs that we didn't choose to have installed. If I have programs about relationships, about money, about job and career, about health and wellness, if I have those and they're installed and I'm not aware that I have these programs installed, it's a problem. Because what's what's essentially going to happen as I move forward in my life is that I'm going to react to the world based on the programming that I have been programmed with over the years. Does this make sense? This isn't a bad thing. This is a good thing. The reason it's good is because we are now becoming aware that there are programs that are installed in our mind, just like there are programs that are installed on the computer. And here's the question: if you have a program that's installed on your computer and you don't like it and you want to do something about it, what do you do? Well, if you're not good on computers, you hire someone, they write a program, and that program will now do something differently because it's been reprogrammed. Here's the question for you. Do you think that you can be reprogrammed? Do you think that these ideas, these thoughts, these programs that you have installed in your mind, in your brain, in your subconscious mind, do you think those can be reprogrammed? Or do you think you're just stuck like that forever? The good news is you're not stuck like that forever unless you're not aware. The good news is they can be reprogrammed. But what we need to understand is that it's the thoughts that generate everything. It's the thoughts that create the programs. And the thoughts are coming from these outside sources. That's what we're there's two sources. One of them is the outside sources. Okay. That's where a lot of the thoughts that we have are generated. We see someone judge another person. We have thoughts that pop up in our mind. We see someone in front of us driving a car very slowly, well under the speed limit, we're behind them. Does that generate thoughts for you? It might generate thoughts like what in the world's going on? Move, hurry up, move faster. Right? It is automatic. And if we don't understand what's happening, if we don't understand the programs that are installed, then what we're gonna do is we're going to react to life from today forever. And again, it's not our fault. Did anyone ever teach you this in school? Did your parents or friends or family members ever talk to you about this stuff? Maybe you saw a video, maybe you went to a seminar and they they talked about it a little bit. But for the most part, if you go and you start talking to people and you ask them, where do their thoughts come from? And are there programs installed that is causing them to react to life, what do you think they would say? They would say, no, what are you talking about? I don't, I've never heard of that. What do you mean? The reason I can tell you that this is true is because I talk to people every single day about their thoughts. And most people are just not really clear on what's going on. Most people are living, and this isn't a bad thing, but they're living like a robot because what's happening is the reactions are occurring based on the programming that's installed in their mind. And so we really need to become aware first of the process. We need to become aware of where the programming is coming from. And again, we said that it's coming from the news, it's coming from TV, it's coming from radio, it's coming from friends, it's coming from family members, it's coming from social media, it's coming from anything that exists outside of us that we are seeing with our hearing with our senses. We're picking up things from the outside world and it's doing one of two things. It's either causing us to have thoughts which will create a new program, or a program's already installed, which is the case for most of us, and it's causing that program to get stronger and stronger and stronger. So if you're wanting to do something in your life, you want to start that new business. You want to go off on your own and get your own, you know, uh shop, but it's gonna cost you more money to do that. And there's a fear if this doesn't work out. That thought process, what if this doesn't work out, is coming from programs. It wasn't something that you decided one day, hey, you know what? I'm gonna start believing from this day forward that if I want to go do something that I may not have the money or it may not work out, I might be a failure, I might not be good enough. That's not something that you would choose on your own. Unfortunately, when we're born into this world, we start getting programmed literally immediately. Our parents are telling us all the time stop, be careful, don't do that. And they have right to do that. It's not like we're judging them for doing what they did. Their thought process was, I want to protect and take care of my child. However, it's causing programs. And some of those programs are good, right? Some of those programs may prevent you as a child from getting burnt on the stove. At the same time, some of the programs may prevent you from being more confident for taking risks, for doing things that you want to do. Because if you're programmed to be timid and fearful, then anytime you have the opportunity to take a risk to do something that may benefit you, that timidness and that fear, that program will be activated. And what do you think is going to happen? It might prevent you from doing the things that you really want to do. And not because you really thought about it. It was a program that was installed that ran and created your thoughts. They created your thoughts. You didn't create them, they created it. Whoever you got that from, friends, family, news, radio, TV, social media, whatever the source outside of you, some point, someone said something enough times that you believed it is true and it got programmed, and that program was forming your mind. A perfect example. What happens when you go to school? Well, some of us are very intelligent and book smart and we do extremely well. But I wasn't one of those. I was the kid that was in class that couldn't pay attention, that couldn't focus because I didn't enjoy the topics that were being taught to me. There were some classes I loved, but most of the time I didn't enjoy them. And then we would have a quiz and I would get a grade back, and it wouldn't be a good grade, and I would see my friend, he got a great grade, and I would compare myself to him, and I would say, well, because I've got this grade, something that came from the outside and came to me, that must mean I am not as good as my friend, that I'm stupid. This is how the programs get formed. But again, there's no one there at the time to teach us. The teacher doesn't say to us, at least most teachers don't say this, that, hey, look, you know what? You took that test. What was really going on? Does that really indicate or mean that you're not smart? Absolutely not. Again, this is the teacher telling you. Imagine if the teacher said this. It doesn't mean that you're not smart. It just means maybe, you know, you don't really enjoy this material. Maybe it's that you weren't feeling well the day of the test. Maybe it's that you didn't study enough because you weren't really enjoying it. But if they gave us the idea that the fact that we didn't do well on the test didn't have anything to do with us, meaning it didn't have mean that we weren't good or we were stupid or anything like that. It didn't mean that we were that limiting belief, wouldn't that have been amazing? Because as a child, we would have realized that no, it's not that. It just has to do with something else. But no one trained us that way. So if we weren't trained that way, then what happened was we became completely reactive to our environment because we were constantly being programmed by all the sources, by news, TV, radio, friends, family, social media. Why do I keep repeating them? Because here's what I really would love you to start to focus on. What sources of those are you focused on the most? Now, for most people today, and you see it, you go out to a restaurant and you're with you, you look at a family sitting at the dinner table. Most of them are on their phones and they're scrolling and they're looking and they're doing this and they're pointing at their phone to a friend, you know, the person at the table to look at. We're being programmed. We're being programmed. Again, just having the awareness that that's happening is everything. Just listening to this, what we just talked about today so far, just having this awareness is key because what it's going to tell you is that all the results that you currently have in your life, all the feelings that you feel on a consistent basis, the anxiety, worry, doubt, fear, all of those things are happening because you've been programmed. It's not your fault. We're amazing. We came here to our bodies as this perfection, and we are that way. We were just programmed to believe that we weren't. And it's interesting because most of our life, what we spend doing, is spend time trying to figure out how we can go back to what we were when we came here, which is perfection. And you really don't have to go back to anything. What we really need to do is realize that anytime we have some kind of negative concept of ourself, it's only because of the programming that occurred that came from outside of us, and the repetition of that message caused us to have these beliefs. A belief is a bunch of ideas or thoughts, right? That that happen over and over again. It becomes formed into this program called a belief. And these beliefs or programs are super powerful, they control our every move. So going back to what we originally started with, our thought, we have these thoughts that come in. If we aren't careful about which thoughts we let in from the outside, what do you think is going to happen? What's going to happen is what's been happening and continue happening is you're going to keep getting reprogrammed with new programs and other programs that already exist will get stronger and stronger and stronger. And you will feel stuck in life because you keep replaying these programs over and over. You keep replaying the program. I'm not good enough. I can't do this. People are way better than me. And we go into this comparison game, and it never works because we are in reactive mode. So, what are your thoughts on what I'm discussing so far? We've really just discussed one little piece of this, and I think I'm going to end it fairly soon on this, and we'll pick up next week, continuing where we left off. But why is this so important for you to hear today? What's a takeaway that you're going to take away from today? One might be, gosh, I've had these beliefs about myself. I've had these negative beliefs about myself, and they were all formed from coming from the outside world. Now, I want to just add this one piece. We talked about there being two sources to our thoughts. One is from the outside world, which we've discussed a lot today. The other is our internal thought process, which happens without the influence of the outside world, without the influence of news, TV, radio, friends, family, social media. Now, let me ask you this question. How many of you have thoughts internally that were not somehow influenced by one of those sources outside? It's not a bad thing. Again, we're becoming aware of what's happening to us. But most of the thoughts that we decide to have on our own come from out there. But when we realize and become aware that that's the case, what we start to do is we want to start guarding the that outside world from coming into our mind. Right? If we knew that there's all this virus out there, what would we do? We would build layers to protect ourselves from wearing, if from getting these viruses. We'd put on a mask. We try to prevent that thing that's on the outside coming in. If we were a computer and we were worried about someone getting onto the computer, we would put a firewall or we put virus software and we put that on the computer to protect from that outside world coming in and impacting us. So might it make sense that we should do the same thing when it comes to being programmed from the outside world? Might it make sense that we put protection in place from the news, from the TV, from the radio, from our friends, from our family, from social media? Might it make sense that we put something there to protect so that their programming doesn't come in and affect the current programs that are already there? And even more importantly, they don't create new programs inside of us. Because if they do, are we living in a reactive world or are we living in a world where we're gonna be more responsive rather than reactive? And the answer is unless we put these blocks in place, unless we're aware of it first, right? We've got to be aware first what's going on. Then secondly, we have to put these blocks in place. Whether it's social media blocks, whether it's certain family members that are always negative about certain things, we got to be aware that when they're talking, we got to be really careful about being around them when they're talking that way. Or we've got to be thinking something completely different as they're speaking about that negative thing. We've got to block out that negativity because if we don't do that, it's going to continue to cause these programs that are internal to grow and to get stronger and really take control of us. So this week's assignment would be this. Let's try to figure out one area, whether it's social media, news, TV, radio, friends, family, one area. Maybe it's a specific friend that you hang out with, it's always negative. Maybe it's I've been scrolling like for five hours on social media, and perhaps that's causing me to. Have these programs. So maybe what you do is you say, all right, rather than doing five hours of social media this week, or today, I'm going to do one hour less. Rather than spend an hour with that friend, I'm going to spend 20 minutes with that friend. Set up a system that works. Don't try to fix this all at once. If you think that you're going to be able to go out and block everything, I'm going to turn off the TV, I'm not going to watch the news. I'm not going to listen to the radio. I'm not going to interact with friends and family. And I'm off of all social media. What I can tell you is it's never going to work that way. You know that. If you if you try to do anything all at once, it doesn't work. So we just take very small steps. One step is we're aware of what's happening now. We're aware that programming, these thoughts that are constantly coming in, which when they come in are creating a program inside of us, they're coming from the outside world. So I'm going to be very aware of that and start paying attention to where could I have gotten that program about not being good enough? Where could I have gotten that program about how relationships are terrible and, you know, women are this and men are that? Where did I get that idea from? Did that come from watching TV shows all the time and they're planting those seeds which are coming right into our mind and creating these programs inside of our subconscious mind? That's where it's all coming from. So all I want you to do this week is pay attention to what's going on. Be aware of what's going on. Be aware of the programming that is occurring. Be aware that those outside sources are causing us to think thoughts. And those thoughts are either creating programs or they're enhancing and making stronger programs that already exist. That's what I want you to do this week. Small steps. One small step at a time. Because if you take one small step, you're bound to create a habit over time. Because one small step is easy. 100 steps at once is a lot harder. One step at a time. You are not your programs. You are perfection. You're just got programs that were installed on top of perfection. And what we're going to start doing is figuring out how do I get rid of these programs now that they're already there? And one way to do that is to, again, become aware of what's going on and start blocking off some of the channels that are coming directly into our mind. When you listen to a song on the radio and it's talking about a terrible breakup and how you feel incomplete without that person, what program is being programmed in your mind? Do you think that's a positive program about how relationships work? Or do you think maybe that's a negative program about either a man or a woman and how relationships don't work and how this person was cheated on and that person's cheated on? I can't have trust in relationships because I'm getting the message over and over. You watch TV and you watch a show or you watch a movie, someone's usually always being cheated on. There's someone always taking advantage and they're hiding the fact from their spouse. Because that is a program, we start to believe that, oh my God, our world is terrible. Everyone's cheating on everyone else. That's not true. That's not true. There are some people that cheat, but there's a lot of people that don't cheat. And we need to become aware, and the awareness will cause us to become stronger, to become more confident. Because just knowing this and starting to be aware and watching it, you'll see how you've been programmed and you'll also see how I didn't choose to put this program in there. That program's not me. It isn't who I am. I am the perfection that lies underneath it. That's all I have for this week. Have a wonderful week. I hope this helps. By the way, if this helps you, don't keep it to yourself. If you got value from today, share this specific podcast with someone that you know that will help them. Because if you were unaware of what was actually going on and you were unaware of the programming, there's a lot of other people that are unaware. And what my goal is, is to spread that word, spread the message out so that more and more people in this world will feel better about themselves and realize they just happen to be around bad programming. And those bad programs became fact in their mind, even though it's someone else's opinion. Have a wonderful day. I love you. I have nothing but love. I'm saying, sending blessings to you, to your family, to your friends for health, happiness, peace, love, and joy. Have a wonderful day.

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Michael Fox

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