Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Mark Divine On How to Live a Life of Excellence EP 65

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine sits down with John R Miles to talk about the secrets to living a life of excellence. Becoming passion-struck is all about living a life of excellence. Setting goals, overcoming challenges, getting results, and celebrating victories make living so rich and worthwhile. Like this? Please subscribe to the channel, and join me on my new platform for peak performance, life coaching, and personal growth: https://passionstruck.com/. Please post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally! Thank you for listening to the Passion Struck podcast. In this powerful episode, John and Mark Divine discuss Mark's unusual path to becoming a Navy SEAL. He explains the lessons he learned from BUDs and why he was given the nickname "Cyborg." We go into the five developmental plateaus for you to traverse on your passion-struck journey as a leader. We also discuss the importance of mindfulness, discomfort, meditation, yoga, and martial arts in creating an unbeatable mind and the importance of agility and adaptability. New Interviews with the World's GREATEST high achievers will be posted every Tuesday with a Momentum Friday inspirational message!  SHOW NOTES 0:00 Mark Divine Show Teaser 1:25 Show Intro and Mark Divine background 4:26 How he got the name "Cyborg" 6:58 Mark's journey to becoming a SEAL 18:07 Why no one can do it alone 26:20 Unleashing a 7 year period of creativity 32:46 How he created SEALFIT 38:31 The unbeatable mind process for integrated development 39:40 The five plateaus of leadership development 50:38 Why you need to change your fundamentals 54:17 The Five Mountain training to creating a life of excellence 107:44 Agility vs Adaptability ENGAGE MARK DIVINE Most people think of mental toughness when they imagine a Navy SEAL. They don’t expect the thoughtful, yoga-innovating, joking, and laughing professor of leadership named Mark Divine. After starting as a CPA, he switched careers and, at twenty-six, graduated as Honor Man (#1-ranked trainee) of SEAL BUD/S class number 170. Mark served for nine years total on active duty and eleven as a Reserve SEAL, retiring as Commander in 2011. He entered a seven-year period of creativity where he started SEALFIT, a fitness company that prepared civilians for the physical AND mental/emotional demands of Navy SEAL-like lifestyle, co-founded the Coronado Brewing Company, built www.NavySEALs.com, the leading website for SEAL gear and information, and launched US Tactical, a government contracting business. He is the author of the Unbeatable Mind, Staring Down the Wolf, Way of the SEAL, 8 Weeks to SEALFIT, and KOKORO Yoga. *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realmarkdivine/ *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdivine/ *SEALFIT: https://sealfit.com/ *Unbeatable Mind: https://unbeatablemind.com/ *Books: https://unbeatablemind.com/books-by-mark-divine/   ENGAGE WITH JOHN R. MILES * Subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles * Leave a comment, 5-star rating (please!) * Support me: https://johnrmiles.com * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m​. * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles ABOUT JOHN R. MILES * https://johnrmiles.com/my-story/ * Guides: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Coaching: https://passionstruck.com/coaching/ * Speaking: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking-business-transformation/ * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_struck PASSION STRUCK *Subscribe to Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-passion-struck-podcast/id1553279283 *Website: https://passionstruck.com/ *About: https://passionstruck.com/about-passionstruck-johnrmiles/ *Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passionstruck *Blog: https://passionstruck.com/blog/

a process of mental development that goes under this bucket, we call meditation, but meditation is a poison word because it means something different to everybody. And for some people just listening to headspace for three minutes is meditating. I say, no, it's not. That's just calming yourself down. So we meditate first to develop concentration power

and attention control. Most senior executives have that or executives of people listening to your body. Probably have a fair dose of concentration and attention control, especially military folks and whatnot, but it still needs to be trained. And we need to be able to like declutter environment and be able to focus more and better on the right things. Welcome visionaries, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs,

leaders and growth seekers of all types to the passion struck podcast. Hi, I'm John Miles, a peak performance coach, multi industry CEO, Navy veteran, and entrepreneur on a mission to make passion go viral from millions worldwide. In each week, I do so by sharing with you an inspirational message and interviewing eye achievers from all walks of life to unlock their secrets and lessons to become a passion struck. The purpose of our show is to serve you, the listener, by giving you tips, tasks, and activities.

You can use to achieve peak performance and for too much passion-driven life you have always wanted to have. Now, let's become PassionStrike. Welcome to the PassionStrike podcast with our guest today, retired Navy Commander Mark Divine. And I'm so thankful that you are here. I realize there are absolutely millions of podcasts out there and it's so special that you are here weekend

and week out watching and listening to the Passion Start podcast. And because of you, we are now well over a thousand five star reviews for the podcast. And I couldn't have done any of this without your support. It means so much to this show and helping us reach an even creator audience where we can share our mission of passion to millions worldwide. Mark Devine said in his book, Unbeatable Mind, for every mountain you climb and plateau you rest at,

there will be another and more interesting view ahead. Most people think of mental toughness when they imagine an ABCO. What they don't expect is this thoughtful, yoga innovating, joking, and laughing professor of leadership named Mark Devine. After starting out as a CPA, he switched careers at the age of 26, graduating on her man, top of his class, in SEAL Buds Class 170. Mark went on to serve nine years total on active duty and another 11 in the reserves,

where he retired as a commander in 2011. After his time on active duty, he entered a period of seven years of incredible creativity, where he started to still fit a fitness company that prepares civilians for the physical and mental demands of Navy SEAL like training. Co-founded the Coronado Brewing Company, built www.navyseals.com, the leading website for Navy SEAL here in information, and launched US Actical, a government contracting business. He is the author of five books, including Unbeatable Mind, Staring Down the Wolf, Way of the Seal, Eight Leaks to Seal Fit, and Kakora Yoga. And in today's episode, we discuss a ton of topics that you're not going to want to miss, including

how he was given the name cyborg by his Navy Seal teammates, the biggest lessons that he learned from Navy Seal training, and his path that he took from Navy Seal training and his path that he took to getting him to the Navy Seals. How do you disrupt your own self-narrative? The big four for tapping into mental toughness. How do you lead with humility and let go of that? You go yoga, Estanga training and how it develops mindset. Map in your five plate toes to living at your full capability and we end on the topic of what is more important today for a leader. Agility or adaptability. Such a great episode. So happy to have Mark on the show. Now let's become passion struck.

I am so excited to have Mark Devine on the podcast today. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. John, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. Well, Mark, I wanted to start off because before the show, I was able to talk to not one, but three of your SEAL team three officers who worked with you and across all of them, they all told me the same thing. And that was within a month to six weeks of joining. They realized that you were just the superior officer in all ways. And all of them talked just so highly about you. And I thought

maybe a good way to start this podcast out before we go into how you became a seal is how did you get the name cyborg? Well, it was an appropriate nickname, I think, for me because starting at SEAL training, like there was nothing that the instructors could throw at me that would hurt me or even cause me to show any sign of pain or discomfort. And so I carried that into SEAL Team 3. And so my unfortunate alpha-patoon teammates, of course, Dan O'Shea and his other just amazing people, they had me to lead them on runs and rocks and swims and and ops.

And I was relentless just at my in my pace and my ability to just go, right, without expressing any discomfort. And it was very good training for everyone. And I think it was a great example and model for them about fortitude and stick to it of this. Now where I got that, I can speculate. I think it came from my abusive father. I didn't believe it or not.

There's a lot of people in the seals who grew up with that who had the same kind of resistance to pain that I had. So I honor my father for that even though I would choose different means for him if he gets another opportunity in his next life. Yeah. Well, I have to tell you, I grew up with a father who, as we talked about before the show,

was not only a Marine, but a force recon Marine. And I have to tell you, he was, to this point, probably the most disciplined human And I have to tell you, he was to this point probably the most disciplined human being I have ever seen. He is really the person who taught me that if you put your mind to anything, you can make it possible. That is fun. So I want to explore that later on in our discussion, but I really want the listener or watcher to understand your path to going into the SEAL teams because you and I kind of did in reverse. We were both, as it turns out, with Arthur Anderson,

I think you were also with Pricewaterhouse, but I did it after I got out of the service and you were smart enough to do it before you even went in. So I served myself the experience you had at Arthur Anderson by flying your way, the partnership only to have it stripped away from you as they picked a huge fall after Enron Yeah, so I Tell this story in my book the way the seal I didn't grow up thinking I was gonna go in the military

So I said my dad was kind of an angry anger guy in fact He was in the army for two years, but he was in the army because he had a judge say, you can either go to jail or be, join the army. He goes, be. So he's in the 11th airborne, which was kind of a misfit unit that was over in Occupational West Germany. And so we were, the morale was really low. There was a lot of drinking and, you know, carousing and, you know, his two years was not very positive.

And so, you know, the military in my town, upstate New York, was kind of something you did if you really had no other options. You know, if you were down and out, and we certainly weren't a down and out family. You know, we came from a long line of a family business that had been around for over 100 years. And it was kind of expected that all the boys anyways in the family would go into that family business.

And all of them have, but me, I've got two two sibling brothers and a sister who are all in their family business, divine brothers in upstate New York. At any rate, so I was kind of marching to that drummer. I was like, okay, you know, I'm going to go into business because divine's do business. They don't do military. They don't do academia. You know, the only other plausible option my mom thought would be worthy would be to be an MD doctor at any rate. So I went to Colgate University, ended up majoring in economics, which made sense. And did the kind of the interview thing

at the end of my junior year and early senior year? And guess what? Lone behold, my solid B average somehow led me to this opportunity with Cooper's and Lyberne, the predecessor company, the price water to have Cooper's. And it was a joint program with NYU and a bunch of other big eight firms, like seven other of the other big eights where they had a cohort of 75 of us go to NYU together to get our masters in accounting.

And the idea there, John, was that they were testing to see whether hiring a liberal arts graduate with no accounting experience and no accounting. We didn't even have any accounting classes that co-gate. Hiring a liberal arts grad and sending them to get the accounting education would foster a more well-rounded business leader at the partner level. And honestly, most of us moved on to other things, but I have to tell you, there are a few people who stayed and one of them was my good friend, Carmen Desibio, who was CEO of Ernst and Young to this day,

or at this time. So they were right in that theory, but it took a lot of culling through, you know, a lot of people to get to that diamond and the rough, which certainly wasn't me at any rate. So the long story short, I started this, I worked for Cooper for two years during that time and went and got my masters. Now they, they allowed us to go to school full-time

during the summer and then part-time at night during the fall and spring semesters and then full-time the second summer and boom, we had our masters. I like a lot of my peers converted that or rolled that into an MBA program because a master in accounting wasn't really what I was in it for so I ended up getting an MBA and finance which took me another year and a half and I also switched companies to Arthur Anderson halfway through. Now all of that is interesting sort of but what's really intriguing is that I was an athlete it's probably pretty clear right for those who know me as a Navy SEAL most Navy SE SEALs are athletic and, you know, have a sports background. So I was an endurance trained athlete. I was a triathlete and a competitive swimmer in college, and I was a good runner. And when I got to New York, this is 1985, and I saw

all the white collar workers down there in their suits and ties overweight and pasty. And I was like, that there's no way in age that's going to be me. I'm going to continue training. Like, you're just part of me, my spirit. So you continue training. You're going to train for the rest of your life. You're never going to be like that. It's fascinating that that spoke to me that early in life.

And so I had this regimen where I would get up early in the morning and I would go for like a six mile run and then we'd go to work. And then lunchtime, when everyone went to lunch, I would go to the gym and I'd bang out, you know, what we now call a high intensity interval workout. And then I had two hours in the evening where I had an opportunity or window between work and school or two and a half hours. So I had to be down at the World Trades Center at 730, and they would let us off at 5.

So I was wondering, what can I, instead of like going home and relaxing, like most of my peers, I said, what can I squeeze in there, you know, in the physical training department? And I was walking home one night down 23rd Street in Broadway, and I heard these shouts coming from the second floor

of this building, and I stopped and I'm listening, and I looked up there, and it was a karate studio. Sato, World Sato karate headquarters and I was intrigued. And I said, well, that could be it. I've always been interested in that. And so I went up there and I was just blown away by the energy and by the man who was the founder of this style of karate, Mr. Tedashi Nakamura.

And I watched for a while and then I signed up on the spot. And I started training with him. Now, where this relates to how I got into the seals is this. It just so happens that Mr. Nakamura was also a Zen teacher, or Zen master. I would say, he's a Zen master, masquerading as a karate teacher. He believed that the meditation and the spiritual development was equally as important as a physical and mental development. And that was cool.

And that was new to me. And that was the first time that I experienced, and I know you're in Doshdanger, you're August, you understand this. That was the first time that I experienced this kind of integration of physical training with mental training using techniques like breathing and meditation, and also kind of this idea of spirituality independent of church-slash religion. And it really, really spoke to me. So I just started on this path.

I consumed everything I could. I started reading everything I could about Zen and meditation. And I started a daily practice of meditation to augment our weekly long sits, our hour long sits on Thursday nights. And then also we would go to the Zen Mountain monastery up in Woodstock, New York, for these long four or five day retreats where we do karate for a couple hours. Then we meditate for a couple hours. We do that like three or four times a day. So,

and I never stopped. And I've gone deep into yoga and deep into other meditative practices. All of this started when I was 21 years old. I feel incredibly lucky, blessed, you know, fortunate, whatever to have found this practice or a practice, a path to mastery when I was that young. And it completely transformed me. The first transformation came about halfway through that four year period that I was in New York. So right around the time that I was shifting and I moved from Cooper's and Lyreman over to Anderson, moved from the masters into the MBA. And I had not been meditating for a couple of years.

And I started to get like these signals From now what I call my internal guidance system my spirit if you will saying what mark you're heading down the wrong path and And so I would ask you know I would think about that and I also started a journaling Practice and so I would be journaling and I'm getting these signals and then I would ask questions And what came to me was that I was not meant to be in the business world, at least at this point in time. I wasn't meant to go back to the family business.

This whole thing was, you know, not my story. It was basically a story that was fed to me by somebody else. And so the meditation allowed me to start to see, to start to disassociate in a good way from my thoughts and emotions and to be able to look at them and ask, is that really my thought? Is that really something that I truly believe in and I feel in my deepest depths of being is right for me?

And the answer's kept coming back. No. So that kind of led to my first early life crisis. It's like a 21, 22 years old, I'm thinking holy shit. I don't know what I'm supposed to do in my life because what I'm doing is not it. And that's what I learned that the quality of my life would be determined by the quality of the questions that I asked. So I started to ask myself better in different questions. Simple things like if that's not it, then what is? Who am I really? Who am I really? And I later learned that that meditation itself is one of the most profound yogic meditations from Ramana Maharshi. Who am I? And so I started to ask that question. And the

answer I was getting is I'm a warrior. I'm a warrior. And then I started a juxtapose that with this deep passion I had for physical training, for mental development, for this warrior path that I was learning through Nakamura and Zen. And I thought, well, geez, you know, I've got some skills that make sense that this, that I would be a warrior. And I'm inspired by that. And so maybe I'm meant to be a warrior like in a military sense, because you know, you could be a warrior in any setting. It really is how you decide to act and show up, you know, to, to take risks that, that are challenging and uncomfortable.

And you do it anyways in spite of the consequences. That's really how I define a warrior. So I thought, maybe, maybe I'm meant to be a military where I still hadn't thought about the seals. I didn't even know about the seals. So this is where synchronicity comes in. Because now I started to get this messages from sitting on the bench and reflective journaling.

And I started to believe it. And so yeah, I think I am meant to be a warrior. Now, what am I supposed to do about it? And one night, again, walking home from work, I passed a Navy Recruiting Office and I saw a poster on the window facing out. It literally stopped me in my tracks. And the cover or the headline was be someone special

and it had imagery of Navy SEALs doing cool shit. And I just stared at that for like 20 minutes. It's like, holy cow. Yeah, I think that's because that's before a lot of the books, way out, way before. That was it. And I saw that, you know, of course,

I could go on and on with the story, but I won't talk to the recruiters. They said the enlisted recruiter said, you don't want to be an officer, you got to be enlist and I said, well, you don't have a master's degree. So maybe I should talk to the officer. As the officer said, you don't want to be an officer, you got to be an illicit. And I said, well, you don't have a master's degree. So maybe I should talk to the officer as the officer said, you don't want to be a seal.

Those guys are snake eaters and blah, blah. And I said, no, I want to be a seal. You don't understand. And they said, okay, don't get your hopes up, right? From the civilian world, we're going to take like one or two people this year, which is about all they ever take. Sometimes it's zero. Because as you know, most of the officers come through the Naval Academy or ROTC and the

seals are such a small group. They only take about 20 a year. And so I was coming in through a completely different path through civilian route to officer Canada School with a guarantee to seal training. There's so many other cool parts of that story, but I'll just kind of pause there. So that's how I ended up getting in. I went from CPA to NBC, and I will just say, November 1989, November 1989, four years after I graduated college and went to New York and started this process, I got my MBA in finance, I got my certified public accountancy certificate,

I got my first degree black belt, and I was on a bus to officer at Canada School. Wow. Isn't that cool? That is very cool. And one of the amazing story and path to getting there. My father, while he became a force recon, and he said because they paid me $150 more a month, if I would do that, then be a normal infantry grad. So everyone's got a different purpose for being there, right? I actually really wanted to be a Navy SEAL. That's what I originally service selected,

but unfortunately I had a number of TVIs playing Division 1 sports and had a problem with Vertigo and hypovistibular dysfunction. So it kind of took me out of being able to do it. But I understand that you were not only a bud's graduate, but you were the honor graduate of the class of 170. And one of the things I always ask Navy SEALs who come on this podcast is going through buds

and your active duty deployments, what was the biggest lesson that you learned from being a Navy SEAL? Yeah, there were so many, but what was the biggest lesson that you learned from being an AV SEAL? You know, there were so many, but I think the biggest lesson for me that started at Buds and continued on into the teams was that it wasn't about me, right? We call it the SEAL teams for reasons,

not the SEALs or SEAL individuals, SEAL teams. Nobody can do it alone in the SEALs. And people mistakenly think, yeah, we're a bunch of individualistic badasses. And it's just not true. Like, the reason that buds exist is to select the next crop of teammates. And the instructors are beholden to the rest of the SEAL teammates to pick the right teammates to come out of the team. Incidentally, the reason that most people who don't get injured are performance dropped

is because they fail that test. You've got to prove at SEAL training, bud's training, that you're both a good self-leader, that you're a good leader of other men or in the future women as well, and that you're a great follower, a great teammate. You have to meet all three. And they don't state this. It's not even in their criterion. And if you had asked a budget instructor, he may or may not say something similar. But he probably

will say we are selecting our next crop of teammates. So when I went to seal training, there were several reasons that I think that I was on our men in my class. So we had 185 seriously qualified people start training. You have to be, you have to be a badass, even to be standing at the front door of seal training, right? All the qualifications, all the medical, all the training prep people now, like with my business seal fit, young guys trained for five, six, seven years

just to qualify and just to go to get a shot. They're hardcore. So we had 185 hardcore folks. 19 of us graduated. As you mentioned on, I was number one, the honor man, but my entire bo crew, our small team of seven, seven of us were also standing there on graduation day. So seven of the 19 was my team. I don't think it's ever happened before.

And it was because when I showed up, A, I had the presence of mind to be really non-reactionary to take everything that was thrown at us to be able to take a deep breath. And because of all the meditation to be able to just pause and activate my deep diaphragmatic breathing and just look at it and be like, what can we do right now that's going to make the most sense to move forward out of this shit storm that they're creating because they're trying to cause stress, put us in the fighter flight. So how can I keep my team calm and how can we together come up with a nice solution and then we'll find our way through this.

And you know, those skills, I teach those skills now called the big four skills. And now the seal training is actually implementing the big four skills into their training to have as well as the Air Force pair rescue and some other units. So this kind of a cool thing to be able to help influence the next generation of warriors. But we we practice these big four skills, which are breath control, which interrupts that that knee jerk fighter flight reaction, followed by positive internal dialogue and getting control of also the fear based thinking, and then leading to developing positive internal dialogue, which leads to a much more creative solutions

and better performance because positive energy enhances performance, whereas negative energy grades it. The third skill is imagery level. So we worked as a team to visualize the win, to know what we are all commonly working toward, what does mission success look like. And the fourth skill is just chunk it down to the smallest unit that you can chunk it into and just focus on that. So it helps keep you really, really present and just target focused on one thing. And your mind is not trying to do four things poorly, it's just doing one thing really well. And your mind is not looking way into the future

and thinking, oh my God, look at the totality of what we got going here. Nine months of training, how can I possibly do this for nine months? Or hell week, how can I stay awake for six days and six nights? You don't do that. You just chunk it down to like, what do I have to do

right now? Well, let me get through this evolution. They put this boat in your head and run up the beach. Okay. I think I can do that. Anyway, so all of those skills allowed us to be very present as a team and to be cohesive as a team and to solve problems as a team and to get our ego out of the way. So we call it check your ego at the door and put your focus on others. And that one idea with a lot of little ways to train it or ways to look at it, probably was the most profound leadership lesson that carried me. And what you reference other people saw on me that was different when I, when they checked in the SEAL Team 3 or I checked in the SEAL Team 3.

That's probably that, I think. That's great. It's interesting. I was listening to a podcast maybe six, seven weeks ago, and it had Brank Leason on it, you might know from the teams, but he was talking about skill breathing techniques and actually credited you for some of that skill. The other interesting thing is I few months ago had Chrisacity, one of my classmates on the program. And I asked him the same question. And he said, the first answer was that he realized that trying times end. And he said, they're kind of like a rubber band. But he gave a very similar answer to you. He said, if you wake up and you are trying to get to dinner, you're never going to get there. He goes, I was just trying to get to the next task. And I knew if I could get over this one, I could get to the next one, and then I could

get to lunch, and then from that, and he said that in teamwork really formed his career all the way to he was an astronaut. He said, what he learned in the teams was so valuable when he became an astronaut because the two are very similar. Astronauts are trained very differently as our different seals are on a team. So it's interesting you and another gentleman Bob Adams, who was Buds Class 81, all gave very specific and complementary answers to that. Oh, that's cool. Brands great. I have never met Chris. I'd love to do a podcast with him as well. He's one of my heroes. All those astronauts, I met Bill Shepherd, Captain Bill Shepherd when I was a lieutenant

and it actually sparked my interest. And I actually spent a few months spinning my mind up, thinking, I wanna go down that path to be an astronaut. The problem was I had an MBA and an economics degree. I would literally have to go all the way back to my undergrad and redo my undergrad and then get it either a master's or a doctorate. And I just looked at that and said, you know, at my age, which to them was like 32, I was like, this doesn't really pass the reality test anymore. So I have to wait until I get invited on a SpaceX

flight or something like that. But Chris is growing mine. Did you know that Forbes Magazine recently cited that 70% of individuals who do personal development, masterminds, and one-on-one coaching, benefited from better work performance, increased communication skills, and overall better relationships? And we, at PassionStruck, are obsessed

with self-development, coaching and mentorship. That is why we've created a free resource to help you unlock your hidden potential. Because people doing great things in business and life are just like you, only they've had a coach along the way. And we've got that covered too. Let us show you the systems and frameworks that we teach both minded individuals to help them step into their sharp edges, cover too. Let us show you the systems and frameworks that we teach both

minded individuals to help them step into their sharp edges, execute on their passion journeys and get predictable results time and time again. Go to passionstruck.com slash coaching right now and let's get igniting. Well I wanted to kind of switch gears. I think that was a great backdrop for the listeners to kind of understand some of the foundation you had. What amazed me is how you left the teams. And not only did you found a seal fit almost in parallel, you started one of the first restaurant brewery concepts and in Coronado. restaurant brewery concepts in Coronado. At the same time, you start Navyseals.com. And at the same time, you start a government contracting company.

Thanks for a listener who's on this show and many of them are aspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, people who are trying to move their life forward. Just doing one of those things is daunting enough. How did you manage to do all four simultaneous? Well, they weren't exactly simultaneous. They all came in about a five year period of time that was like extremely,

not maybe like six or seven years, period of time, there's extremely creative for me. And so you have to appreciate what happens and when you begin to train your mind using techniques like yoga meditations and meditation and you kind of unlock like the right sequencing, just like you have sequencing in Ashtanga or sequencing in martial art or sequencing in CrossFit. Meditation I discovered has a particular sequencing to it and when you when you get the right sequencing down you unlock progressively deeper capacities more expanded awareness more ability to focus and concentrate radically greater insight and perception of things that you don't really have any business and knowing rationally but you just just know. You're tapping into trans-rational knowledge, intelligence that may be flowing all around you. And I just became, because of my

meditation practice, which I stuck with throughout the seals. And then, like I said, I've never stopped doing it. I was suddenly going from, I'm a Navy SEAL officer, and I think I want to be an entrepreneur. It all of a sudden, having this intense creative outburst of these businesses, these ideas, and that flowed into developing content, creating entirely new ways to train for the seals, and then obviously now for corporate world, in five books, I'm working on two more now. And so this is a natural outgrowth

because human beings have far more potential than they allow themselves, or they even believe about themselves. We call it 20x. So I learned that I'm capable 20 times more than I thought it was. And then there's a 20x on that and a 20x on that. And I don't think, you know, I think it's virtually unlimited. What we're capable of. That period of my life,

where my early entrepreneurial years were kind of that flowering of that expression of that 20 times potential. But the sequencing of that or the timeline of that wasn't all like I started them all together and they were all successful. So the first one was the courtyn out of brewing company and I started that when I was on active duty with my brother-in-law, we launched it in late 96 and we were profitable within three months and the business is doing like 40,000 barrels a year right now and it's really successful. Now I didn't do everything right with that. My brother-in-law was a really poor choice for a partner and then he brought his brother in and I was too

co-dependent to say no and I ended up in a big battle for them because they they we just didn't share the same ethical code. So I ended up selling my interest and I'm basically walked away from that whole thing. Well about about two years into that, not even two years, so about the same time I started that, I did actually start NavySeal.com, but it was just an idea. So I looked at what was happening with the internet, and I said, you know what, I think I'd like to do a site

about the Navy Seals that could be helpful in recruiting, and because that seal didn't have anything, I said, I would hate that a non-seal would do that, right? It's got to be a Navy seal that does that. So I was able to register the domain Navyseal.com for 35 bucks. And I had a, my graphic artist was also web developer. And just on the side, I heard that is not the only domain you were able to obtain. I got a few hundred but anybody wants to buy us, we did the main email me. Yeah, I heard you jumped on that one pretty good when it happened and had the foresight just as you did with the release. I got a whole bunch of others too. I had no idea that

those domain categories like business.com ended up selling from $6 million and I could have jumped on all those but but that was pretty early. Anyways, I got NavySealed.com. I still don't run the website. It's really more lead-gen right now. Did a tremendous amount of recruiting and we had some cool success. Because NavySealed.com, we had like three categories. GetSealed Smart, which was kind of became the foundation for my mental development program

called Unbeel Mine. GetSealed Gear, which is where we made most of our money That was like buying e-commerce, buying cool watches and stuff that Tactical gear, yeah, tactical gear stuff that Navy SEALs either created or used that wasn't at that time early in the 2000s It wasn't available at Amazon or wherever because Amazon was books, you know, I mean, and then it was Get Seal fit and that that became a separate mean? And then it was Get Seal Fit. And that became a separate business called Seal Fit.

In the Get Seal Fit category, we used to do a lot of, I had forums and we used to have training groups and I did a lot of mentoring and we were having a lot of success with helping people get through buds. And so a little bit later on in 2005, as the war in Iraq was ramping up,

the Congress wanted to grow the seal force. They said, we need 500 more seals and they were literally just going to like throw them into the program and force the seals to loosen the standards so we get the 500, which is what the special forces did. And it really hurt the special forces for a while. And fortunately, the seals pushed back and said, no, you can't mass produce Navy seals, it'll ruin the force. So we're going to take a number of different initiatives to improve the throughput or

another work in throughput of seal training or in other words, to reduce the historically high attrition rate of 85 or 90%. One of those initiatives was to create a nationwide mentoring program for seal candidates. This is before they even go to Boo Camp. And they put it out to bid on a government contract. And there was an organization that was already working with their recruiting command that they said, okay, you run this and then you bid it as a subcontract. Because we need experts to do this. Well, I learned of this and I put a bid in for it. And I'm just a small little Navy SEAL.com. So I changed, I did a DBA. I said, I'm now US tactical. And I bid on it, you know, given all of our experience, mentoring Navy SEALs through NavySeAL.com and

having success. The other people who bid on that were like SCIC, which is a billion dollar company, Blackwater, USA, this company, and a few others. And I won it. And these guys were Blackwater in particular, it was pissed, because they thought they were entitled to that contract. So I stood up the nationwide mentoring program. So that's how I got into government contracting.

And I had one year in government contracting, John. So trust me, I didn't build a really successful business in exit. I had one year, because a year later, by the way, we were a huge success. We took the pass rate on the screening test, the PSD from 35% to over 85% in one year. Meaning when guys were showing a boot camp,

none of them could pass the screening test. And yet, all the recruiting districts said that they could, but they were sending the boot camp, and they were gun decked. And so we turned all around and we were sending much better candidates to bootcamp, which meant we were getting more through bootcamp and then more through buds. And that program actually did increase the throughput by 5% and helping to improve the quality of the force at the same time.

But one year into it, Blackwater had challenged the prime contractor, which company called J.H.T., saying that they had sized out of their small business status. And that challenge was upheld and the whole contract got thrown out. And lo and behold, the recruiting command resubmit the contract, the RFP, as a full and open, any size business can apply. And Blackwater wins it. And and we were like, what? How could this happen?

Like, we're already doing it. The recruiting command loved us. Fisk Norfolk,, Fleet Industrial Supply Center, Norfolk was the command that that was managing this contract. And it just so happens, they run hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts through there for black water. And black water, obviously, was curing favor with these people. They were taking about the dinner. Who knows what they were doing, right? I don't even mind saying that a loud because everyone knows about blackwater, but they were doing whatever was pretty common in government contracting, which is kind of a fraudulent business. And so we were entitled to get a debrief from Fisk. They kept putting us off, putting us off. I had

every one of my guys on non-compete, And so they couldn't go work for Blackwater. Blackwater was calling me. My guys were calling me. I didn't take Blackwater's calls, but my guys were like, we wanna work. And so I said, okay, I will release you guys from your non-competes. Go work for Blackwater.

And Blackwater hired every single one of them the next day. When I had my debrief with Fisk Norfolk about a week later, they said, well, the reason that Blackwater won this contract is because their staffing plan was superior to yours. But they hired everyone in my guys. They did what's called a bait and switch, right? So they stacked their proposal with all these, you know, dev group combat vets who worked at Blackwater, but we're fully employed. And as soon as they won the contract, they hired everyone in my job,

everyone in my company who was already doing the job. So it was fraud. And everyone said, you need to fight this. And I went back to my meditation bench and I sat there for hours. And I just said, you know what, my intuition is telling me not to fight this. But instead, what my intuition is telling me not to fight this, but instead to find a way to train these candidates, all soft candidates using the techniques that I wanna train, not what the government will allow me to train, which wasn't much. And so that led to me launching SEALFIT, right?

Within months after losing this contract, I had taken what little money I had saved from the first year and I launched SEALFIT. And I launched SealFit. And we had a training center in Nceneers, California, and we just launched the website. And so SealFit was up to the races. And that SealFit gained a worldwide reputation pretty quickly with our intense three day,

50 hour, Cacoro Camp, or SealFit Challenge Camp, which is model up to Hell Week, our innovative training programs called the Operator Workouts, and I had this 30-day living academy, which is like a American shawl in monk kind of training school, where people would come and live with me, and we'd feed them and sleep on site, and we would literally train from zero dark 30 until 10 at night

and sometimes around the clock, teaching them a full spectrum of physical skills, mental skills, leadership, teamwork. It was quite extraordinary. And that creative period there out of those 30-day academies came the books, eight weeks to seal fit, unbeatable mind, some another whole incredible outflowing of creativity. So it also helped show me that everything happens for a purpose. Had I fought black water, had I gone down the negative path, it would have sucked all my energy and all that creativity would never would have sprung forth. But I chose just to let black water have their way.

That government content was never meant to be for me. I'm proud of it. And I turned all my creative energy on creating the next thing, which became seal fit. So that's a long window way to answer that. So incredibly, it's a really cool period. I still run seal fit and we're kind of doing a reboot on it now because it needed to be kind of attuned up after COVID-19 because we got shut down with all of our events. And so I'm going to look at turning it into a franchise model where Navy seals who want to transition and love training can have a franchise to teach SEAL fit in their neighborhood. So that's coming up for SEAL fit. And then unbeatable is really going to gang busters

in corporate training and team building. And so we're taking the same model of like, how does a Navy SEAL team think, work, and really adapt and overcome in volatile and uncertain times and we're teaching business organizations that and how to grow and develop a team like that. So that's going game busters. Is that in some ways similar to the general Macrystal team of teams type of approach

or an organ that we're really working on individual teams. So we put people into what we call bo crews of eight to 10 12 max and then we have a certified coach Who's fully trained and certified in the unbeatable mind process for integrated development right integrated development training Developing you physically mentally emotionally intuitionally and spiritually and there's a lot of other tools So we're focused on that but in the organizational context if we're working multi-year over year focused on that, but in the organizational context, if we're working multi-year over year, yes, we would say then these individual teams would work with other teams in a team of teams approach. So you'd have spontaneous collaboration and kind of loose lines of authority nearest to

where the operations are, whatever the battleground is for that particular company, so that they can be really flexible and adaptable and malleable to be able to adapt to this quickening pace of life that we have right now. It's a lot of businesses that can't evolve to be more nimble and agile are going to get killed. Things are just moving too fast for the old ways to work. You're absolutely correct. It was one of the biggest things that I learned

when I was in Fortune 50 companies, and it is so hard to turn that aircraft carrier. And the only way you could really do it is if you had an initiative and you put it into the hands of that small group that you're talking about. And oftentimes I found it work fast if you separated them completely from the campus so that they weren't having any distractions, but you have to have that leadership style where you kind of empower them to do it and then be hands-off enough to just allow them

to go do their job similar to what you did in the teams. So I know of another friend of yours is David Goggins. I'm a big fan of some of the stuff that he evangelizes. One of, I guess it's called Goggins Law at this time. He says that he thinks that only 30% of people are living to their full capability. I actually think based on the research I have seen, I'm sure you've seen the Gallup poll

that looked at the billion full-time workers across the globe and found that only 15% of them are engaged. I think the number is probably less than that and I think we're, and as I was writing my upcoming book, Passion Struck, I kind of found three, what I call, Contagions, and I call them the Contagion of the Mind, the Spirit, and the Ego, said otherwise. It's apathy, comfort, and showmanship are plaguing so much of society.

And I happened to be listening to one of your podcasts that you were doing just recently, with another SEAL, Retired Commander, where the whole topic of humility came up. And I was hoping you could kind of talk to the audience. I recently did five solo episodes, all covering ego, humility, the need for diplomacy, why playing smallest is such a disservice to yourself. Maybe you can go through this in your five pillars. Why we as a society are stuck in that first pillar of development

and struggling to get to the fifth one because ego indifference other things are cladding our judgment so much. Yeah, so you're referencing, I think, what I call the five plate toes and these are plate toes. Yes. Yeah, so you're referencing, I think, what I call the five plate toes and these are like my version of a developmental stages that individuals can go through or do go through as well as cultures. First plateau is a survivor. Second plateau is the protector. Third plateau is the achiever. Fourth plateau is the equalizer and fifth plateau is the integrator. You won't be able to tackle full potential until you're operating at the integrator level.

The integrator is someone who has development spells physically, mentally, morally, emotionally and spiritually. They've cleared up all the baggage. They're not showing up with judgment and righteousness. They have literally checked their ego and trained their mind to open up through a lot of things. One of the things that they open up to is the vast potential of the mind. Another thing they open up to is this idea or this notion of this experience that we're all kind of connected. We're all connected. We've got the same similar motivations and fears and desires all in the

inside regardless of a skin color or where we grew up. And at a spiritual level, energetic level, we are truly connected. So my thoughts, behaviors, actions have an impact on you and the rest of the world. And so you tend to make decisions that are much broader in scope. And I call that world-centric leadership. Like you make decisions that are not just good for you and your company, but good for the world, good for the human beings, good for the environment, etc. Because you recognize that everything is interconnected, a butterfly effect. So that's the world-centric leader. And it's estimated somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the

human population is there, and I think it's closer to 5, but it's starting to grow fast. So it's possible within 20 years, we'll have 30 percent of the human population. That's one of my goals. In fact, my mission is to train 100 million people in these skills so that they can operate as world-centric warriors and leaders. However, we certainly don't have that now. We certainly don't have that in America. We have roughly 15% or so are in survival mode.

And these are the people who are the victims or who are on the streets or who are broken, unhealthy, at some sort of disease crisis. And there's a lot of people in our country who have are in that survival mode. And they just it's like, I mean, Maslow, these Maslow's higher can ease. If you don't have your basic needs met, you can't really actualize. You can't move beyond. You can't really actualize. You can't move beyond. You can't thrive. The second level is the

protect. Let me just say also, John, this is really important that there's no judgment to these levels. Like if someone's here as a protector, and like I've got a protector energy, and because sheep dogs and first responders and military men and women, we're all protectors. So we have a healthy dose of protector in us. But you can get stuck at protector and the people who get stuck at protector again, it doesn't make them bad people. But they thrive in bureaucracies.

So a lot of government bureaucrats are protectors, religion, people who are really, really dogmatic in their religious structures are protectors. So they're stuck in there, They're not open-minded. So protectors aren't open-minded and willing to see things from other people's perspective, willing to accept that the other perspectives are valid as valid as there's are. So you see a lot of extreme conservatism in that protectors, a lot of people in that Trump kind of category who really supported President Trump or in the protection. Not all. There's others that are achievers and even integrators

that support them because like, hey, he's the worst, the least best option in their mind, the least worst option. But anyway, so that's the protector. Protectors are probably about 20%. The third plateau is the achiever. The achiever is like the part of you and I that wanted to be a Navy SEAL.

It's the part of us that wants to get a master's or a PhD or, you know, it's the part of us that thrives in corporate America. And so entrepreneurs and white collar professionals and executives, professors and legal and CPA technicians and all that, these are all achievers, right? They are out there building things, trying to make the world better, you're creating things.

The shadow side to the achiever, if we don't continue our growth and move beyond, just pure achievement for achievement sake, because that can be one dimensional. The ego can still be there, right? And so that's why you get things like Enron that we talked about. Enron were achievers, but they were in it for themselves and they were breaking the law, right? And they brought down Arthur Anderson as a result. So you have a lot of greed, you have workaholism, you have burnout, right? And you have a lot of acting over the past, you know, 50, 100 years and from achievers that have done serious damage to the environment and to world community, right? And so achievers, being an achiever in the self doesn't mean you're doing world-centric good work. You

have to continue to work on that. And I would say there were probably 25 to 30% achievers in this country. The fourth category is the equalizer. And the equalizer is the person like the equality movement or everything is going on now with racial justice. So equalizer really into social justice, equality, environmental issues. And so it's generally a higher stage of development and just the achiever, not like I said, you can have both. You can have all, you will have all of these in us, right? Because a lot of us listening are like, well, I believe in that stuff too. So I must be an achiever. But I'm also a CEO

of this company. So I'm an equalizer and an achiever. True, you've got both. That's great. So let's see how we can move into the integrator. The problem, the shadow side with the achiever, true, you've got both. That's great. So let's see how we can move into the integrator. The problem, the shadow side with the achiever, or I'm sorry, the equalizer, which is the fourth plateau, is that it's often seen as my way, the highway. So this is why it's dysfunctional when you have the populist faction in the liberal party who are massive equalizers in such a conflict with the second plateau right when conservative, right? Because they're operating from completely different world views. And they're not willing, the plateau person isn't willing to look at

through the lens of the equalizer and the equalizer is not willing to look through the lens of the protector who wants to protect the status quo equalizer wants to change it. And so you just get this stuckness, which is what's happening with our political system. And it's really, really painful because there's no willingness for anyone to really grow out of their paradigm shift. And the only way you can have, you can move forward as a culture and really evolve to more positive culture and inclusiveness is to stop things so righteous and stopping so and inclusiveness is to stop things so righteous and stopping so cocksure that you've got all the answers and that your way is the right way,

and that's the shadow of the equalizer. So, the way through all that is to evolve to the integrator, which is the first fully moral centric, inclusive care and concern stage of development that includes spiritual awareness, awareness that we have, we're spiritual beings having this human existence instead of questioning it because you're a scientist,

achiever, or not believing it, or believing that you need the church to find God, which is the protector. It's when you get to that integrator experience, you feel that they feel the presence of God inside of you. And you see it inside of everybody else regardless if they're a survivor, you know, at a survival level or an achiever level or an equalizer level. And so you begin to really open your heart. And that also is experienced as more whole-mind thinking. So you begin to think with your heart and you begin to think with

your belly brain. And then you begin to think with your whole body because you're opening up to the experience of whole mind and integration and so it really greatly expands your capacity to have care, concern and understanding and perspective of all you humans and then eventually all sentient beings. That is profound. And as we get more and more human beings, you know, into that integrator world perspective, that flat fifth plateau, then everything will just shifting because the quality of the decisions that are going to be made day in and day out will be radically different than they are right now. And I have a vision of very positive vision of the future because I believe that 20 years we're going to have potentially over a billion people at this integrated world-centric perspective. And they're going to demand the elimination of nuclear weapons. They're not going to say,

it wouldn't be nice, they're going to demand it, right? And they're going to demand that we go all in, healing the environment and making sustainable decisions across the board. You're starting to see early signs of that right now, obviously. But everything's still trying to be solved through the political structures, and it's really not how these are going to be solved. You can't solve this by throwing money at it. You know, you solve what's happening in the world by changing consciousness. Well, I think that is an incredible explanation. And for the viewers or listeners, if you want more information on this, you just did a great podcast on this recently that I happened to listen to before the show.

So if you want 45 minutes deeper, deep dive in it, it's a great episode. So I wanted to like personalize this point a little bit and I've shared this story in the past, but I was a senior executive at Lowe's. I was one step below a sea level, was told I was in the top right-hand quadrant, was constantly ranked at the top,

thought my career was going gangbusters, and all of a sudden had this third party that was brought in to evaluate the whole team because our boss thought that the team had an ego problem. And looking back, we probably did. I think it kind of edged in flowed like sometimes you weren't a position to listen sometimes you weren't, but I remember they brought in this psycho analysis. A person who was a psychologist and they did a psychoanalysis. And as I look at your five different levels,

she said something that was so profound for me. And she said, you have fast tracked your career to where you are now. And you've achieved so much in such a short time. But John, you're not going to get to where you're destined to go unless you start changing some fundamental things. And I remember listening to her because at the time, I was probably at that achieving level, maybe somewhere between the third and fourth level, but I was still self-projecting more than I was doing things in service to others

and the broader thing. And it took me really years before I really did the in-depth work that was necessary to get me to where I'm at today. And I would hope I'm at the fifth level, but I don't know. You know, I think it's constantly a work and progress that you have to do. Jerry, and we can get triggered down into earlier levels. You have a major injury or life-threatening situation. Boom, you might be happy at fifthth, by toe and then suddenly, no, you're sucked down to 1st, by toe survival.

And that's a difficult situation. So like I said, yeah, they really is kind of like, where's your center of gravity most of the time, you know, 80% of the time. If you're 80% of the time acting out of your heart and you truly believe that all human beings have worth the same worth as you, and you truly believe in making decisions that are good for all and good for the environment.

And you feel that. It's not an intellectual, uncandy exercise. You're at fifth plateau. I say that's where you're at, but you're work with passion, struck, helping people find their purpose, doing things in service to the global community. These are all kind of signs. Like a lot of the entrepreneurs who are saying, screw it, we're not going to, we're not going to wait for government to solve these problems. We're going to build something that's solved these problems because my heart goes out to humanity.

That's world-centric thinking. Yeah, so if you were someone in the audience and they're like, say they're sitting at the second plateau or they're at the third plateau and they want to move up, what would be your advice on what's the first step? Because I always say to me it all comes down to you got to make a choice, you got to do the hard work and you got to step, I call them the sharp edges, but you got to step into those areas of your life that scare you. And I think so many people don't take the time to do the self narrative work that they need. So what's your advice to someone on how you take that step?

It really depends. This is a very individualistic path, right? So if someone is really unhealthy, John, meaning like, let's say one of your buddies back at lows was 75 pounds overweight or 100 pounds overweight, and they have an exercise and maybe they're still smoking. They could be smart, they could actually be skilled in the tactics of leading whatever it is they're leading, but they're not operating, they're in survival mode, right? They're literally not able to access their full power or even their heart because their body is blocking them. So if someone is unhealthy, diseased, you know, has had a life of complacency, they need to start with their physical structure. This is why I put the five mountain training

that we do in the order that it is, which is first is physical, then comes mental development, and then comes emotional development, then you get into intuitive and spiritual development, which actually are kind of natural outgross of the first three. So you've got to get your body back into balance, which also gets your brain back into balance and gets your heart, the physical organ, your heart and your gut, your

biome, your heart brain and your little brain. Healthy. And that has a dramatic effect on your mood, your anxiety, your stress levels, your sleep, and suddenly you're able to make better decisions. Boom, right there, you've improved your mental and emotional mountain, your second and third mountains. So you got to get physically healthy and don't have to go crazy, just get yourself a fitness coach and a nutrition coach dial in your exercise, dial in your sleep, dial in your nutrition and then learn how to breathe properly. Breathing is massive. So we start people actually with breathing and then we get them dialed in and all those physical things. Then some people are listening to this and saying, okay, I agree with all that, but I'm afraid you cross fitter and I've been doing box breathing for years. So I got that part. What's next, Mark? Great.

A process of mental development that, you know, goes under this bucket, we call meditation, but meditation is a poison word because it doesn't it means something different to everybody. You know, for some people just listening to a headspace for three minutes is meditating. I say no, it's not that's just calming yourself down So we meditate first to develop concentration power and attention control Most senior executives have that or executives of people listening to potty probably have a fair dose of Concentration and attention, especially military folks and whatnot, but it still needs to be trained. And we need to be able to like declutter environment and be able to focus more and better on the right things. Second skill then is to develop what I call mindful awareness. And this is where you create a metacognitive capacity to think about your thinking. Now we can do this at some level, naturally,

as smart adults, but then I'm talking about getting yourself basically up to PhD level where now you're developing an experience of, I'm able to be in my contextual mind, which is right hemisphere, and I'm able to think and watch what's happening in my content mind, which is left hemisphere, and I'm able to choose content.

I can decide to kill off the negative content and the stories and the beliefs that aren't serving me, and I can choose to replace them with more positive stories about myself, my future, who I am, and what I'm going to do about it. This is similar to what I was telling you about the process that happened to me on that Zen bench when I went from CPA to Navy about it. This is similar to what I was telling you about the process that happened to me on that zen bench when I went from CPA to Navy SEAL. I had developed that metacognitive awareness to be able to think about my thinking and make better decisions and choose a new story. This is really the first step toward total freedom because you become, you're not a slave anymore to all that conditioning. I tell my people, say, if you're not training

yourself, someone else is training you and the world's training you and the results will prove themselves which ones more effective. You got to take responsibility for training your mind and training the content of your mind and deciding what is a thought and a storyline that is going to make sense for you and is going to be, vision for your future that you have or that you can have. So that's kind of the second mental mountain is opening up to that metacognitive awareness and then developing it further to a weakened awareness, which I call witnessing. Now, waking to awareness is where now you develop the experience of I am the aliveness, I am spirit, I am and you're able to have that I am watching the metacognitive watcher, which is watching the thinking. That's a little probably esoteric for this, you know, moment to go deeper in, but it is a natural experience of this meditative practice that we do it, unbeal in mind. And then we also develop

our imagery work. Image work is powerful because we can use it in a retrospective sense to look back at our past and re-contextualize and change the energy of any childhood trauma that we have, such as like related to my father's abuse. I had to re-contextualize, recapitulate, re-energize that with a more positive story and also with forgiveness. So we use imagery for that. And we can also use support from emotional doctors like therapists and processes like somatic therapy. So now we're getting into the third using imagery. We practice it in the second mountain, but it's starting to be used in the third mountain, which is emotional development. This is where a lot of people trip themselves up because it's easy for people to think, yeah, I'm going to train my body, my mind, and that's good. It's going to make me more successful. But then at the emotional level, what they don't realize is they've got this huge ego or they're projecting all this stuff on other people and they're transferring their mommy issues on the women and daddy issues on the

guys and such and such. And that's all part of their emotional life that's hidden from them. That's why they call this shadow in the emotional therapeutic world. So you got to start to clean up your baggage, your emotional baggage so you don't carry it into the team room with you. And that's hard work. And guys don't like to do that. It makes them very uncomfortable. They think it makes them look weak.

And there couldn't be further from the truth. True humility is strength projected, not weakness. And true humility can only come from recognizing that we're all human and we're all flawed or we're all incomplete. And so really what we're doing is just removing the things that make us incomplete to allow our wholeness to shine through. We block ourselves from being whole by these emotional, I guess, reactions that we have at a young age or some point in our life when we really didn't understand what was going on and we miscontextualized things. So that leads to a lot of emotional problems and emotional patterns. My recent book, Staring Down the Wolf is all about

how I had to develop my own emotional maturity so that I could be a complete leader and how a lot of the things that were disasters like the Cornell Abruin Company were because of emotional immaturity and codependence and things that I really dragged into my adult life from childhood and nothing to do with my seal skills, my physical fitness was awesome, my mental focusing power is awesome, I got the business up and running and successful all the great, but it was the emotional piece that torpedoed me. So that's the third mountain.

You work us, just work on those three in that order, and that's a lot of work as you alluded to. It's a lot of work. So don't worry about intuition and spirit, except to be open to spiritual experiences, starting to happen more and more frequently, and synchronicity, and the awesomeness of life and grace to start showing up, right? Because the work we're doing in the first three mountains will naturally be integrating us and allowing our, you know, heart to open and like our whole-mind experience is really felt as a connected spiritual being, you know, that this starts to understand things from a really different perspective.

So those kind of, the intuition naturally opens up and then the fifth mountain we call it Kakoro instead of spiritual. And that means whole mind, or merging your heart and mind and your actions. And this is where you, like you alluded to, you take your whole life as service. And that service can be like as a gardener,

then have to be heat, or just being a mom or dad, or it could be like serving 100 million people or colonizing Mars, like Elon Musk is a service to humanity. At some level, that is appropriate for you. And that's really the kind of the natural evolution that integrated level kind of opens up through that Kakoro HeartMind service action.

But it can't happen if you block yourself because you're emotionally weak or unaware or you're physically and mentally shut down. Well, I don't think I could have done that segment any better if I studied to do it and then try to deliver it. So that was some wonderful words of wisdom. And I understand you're similar in your approach that I am. If I'm gonna work with someone,

I like to work with them for a year. But I understand you'll do an entry kind of 30 days of working with them, you know, with the goal that they'll continue. But I don't think I sure as Hectin realized how long it was gonna take me to do the self-work. And like I've said, it's never ending. We've had a lifetime of conditioning, right?

I'm 58. I started this the emotional part when I was like 32. I was drawn to marry my neighbor after buds. So I graduated buds in 1991, 1991, and I moved to apartment in Cornelow, and my next door neighbor was Sandy Chapman, who was a therapist. And we just had this great long talks, and she started, you know, we just talked philosophy and emotional development and life. And then I went in a couple deployments and you know, lost touch with her when I came back in 95, and I ran into her again, and I'm, or 94, ran into her again on the beach and we immediately connected

and we were married nine months later. And so by living with a therapist, you know, I was kind of forced to down this path and then, you know, I really got into it and I really saw the results start to show up and I'm like, okay, so I've been doing therapy at EMDR and things like the Hoffman process. And it's a really, really important work,

but like, my point was gonna be, John, if you're listening to this and you haven't done this work and you're 50 years old or 40 years old or whatever, that means the world has been conditioning you mentally and emotionally for 40 years. And maybe you've chipped away at some of it, but guess what, there's a lot of work to do to unravel the false stories, you know, what we would call

the false self in you, and that takes time, so you gotta be patient, but it's very rewarding once you get in it. It can be a little painful, but once you embrace the suck of that pain, you recognize the benefit for opening up to, you know, the awesomeness, you know, the Buddhists say, you have like 84 positive qualities to include humility that

exists within us, but you got to kind of get out of your own way in order to let them exist. So you don't have to develop humility. You have to get everything else out of the way to let the natural humility flourish in you. Mark, I'm going gonna let you tell the audience if they are not familiar with how to contact you. And I'll put this in the show notes.

What are some ways that they can do that? Yeah, appreciate that. I'll have people like to read the book. Unbeatable mind is kind of my, the signature book self-published. I'm actually doing another edition of that. I'll have done by the end of the year. The way of the seal is also another book

that is talks about this philosophy but applied toward getting things down in a big level and staring down the wolf is the emotional development. And my podcast is called Mark Divine's Unbeatable Mind. So I have some, you know, phenomenal guests that that's where I, instead of me being the content guy, I get to interview other brilliant people in this so much fun. And sometimes like you And sometimes I do these solo riffs on certain topics I can do with the five plateaus. My personal website is markdivine.com, diviene.com. That's also over going in overhaul, but it's got a lot of the general info there. And then the training at Unbeatable Mind, which is if you're looking at the video, it's got a picture of me staring down a wolf behind me. That training is Unbeatablemind.com and you're right, we do have a, I was convinced to put a

30-day course together. It's virtual, but you also can plug into a live training with me during the month. That's like an introduction and it's a video that I lead every day that's 15 minutes and then there's journaling exercise. So it's about 20 to 30 minutes a day. It's a really, really cool course. And I introduced these introduced those big four skills and how to develop mind power and focus power, all that.

That's it, unbuelemind.com, four slash challenge. They can learn more there. Okay, and I'll just give a couple of shout outs for your episodes. I love the one that you did with Ashley, not too long ago. My buddy, yeah, so if you wanna hear about career growth, that was a great episode.

Also the one with John Foley, who I've known for probably 30 years now. Got a great, I've got a great, great story about him in the Seattle seafar, and I really thank you to the great job on the Tampa New York mental toughness episode that you did the sell along. So listeners, please, please piggyback off of that and check out his podcast, because it's great. It's got like 1500 people who've given it a five-star rating. I have one last question for you and I don't want you to go into a big in-depth thing, but I just want to ask you on this whole path

to this unbeatable mind. Do you think it's more important to have agility or adaptability? I think they're equally important, right? There's, I'm not a big this or that kind of guy, right? So, agility is really the ability to adapt fast, right? So you can't really have one without the other. So you have to have both. You have to be adaptable, but you have to be able to do that in a fast way. And the seals be called a fast twitch iteration. I'm glad you said don't go in the long dissertation, because I could literally give you a whole mini-class on this right now.

It's really important to be able to adapt fast to be agile and adaptable in today's world. But that's a skill that is not a hard skill. It's a soft skill. And it's an outcome of the training that we are just kind of talking about that you become very intuitive and spontaneous. And when your team is operating at this level, at a world-centric level, and we're all intuitive and spontaneous, you get spontaneous creativity. And so you get very, very fast twitch iteration where you can adapt on the fly using the Udalupe,

you have the observant deciding that loop and it's really, really powerful and there's no problem you can solve with this kind of thinking. Yes, well, I know you and I historically kind of grew up with emotional intelligence EQ and I am just seeing more and more that agility and adaptability quotient are as important if not more important to do this. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. Absolutely one of my best podcasts I've ever had. So I really appreciate that you take in the time

and providing your words of wisdom. Yeah, it's been an honor, John. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. What an incredibly impactful interview that was with Mark Devine. So lucky to have him as a guest on the show. And he had such powerful information today. And I hope you got as much out of it as I did.

Now, during the show today, I also brought up a couple other episodes that I've done. And referenced on the show, I want to bring those up. One of those is one with Navy SEAL and retired astronaut Chris Cassidy on the importance of being present in life. And also I mentioned Dr. Bob Adams, who also is a Navy SEAL and became an Army flight surgeon before starting his personal practice in North Carolina

where he's a family physician. And you don't want to miss that one either where he talks about physical toughness, what he's learned from 30 years of being a doctor and how he's applied his Navy SEAL training along the way. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I'm so thankful for you all being here today and listening to this podcast and taking up your time with it. If there's a guest or topic that you would like to hear on this show, please DM me on Instagram at JohnRMiles. Also, if you're listening to the podcast and you want to view it on YouTube, check out our YouTube channel at JohnRMiles. Thank you so much and remember remember let's be passion struck.

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