THE ED MYLETT SHOW - Secrets To Perform Like A Navy Seal w/ Rich Diviney

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Learn how to ELEVATE YOUR LIFE from one of the toughest men on the planet! Rich Diviney is an author, leadership expert, and former Navy SEAL Commanding Officer serving over 20 years as a Navy SEAL with more than 13 overseas deployments – 11 of which were to Iraq and Afghanistan. If you want the secrets to strengthening your mental fortitude and becoming an overall badass, THIS is the interview to watch. Life comes at us a million miles a minute so being able to adapt and perform under pressure can be the difference between success and failure, or for a Navy SEAL, life and death. In this interview, Rich is sharing training tactics on how to go from ordinary to performing like a Navy SEAL. You’ll learn how to train your brain to build resilience, and how to embrace and conquer FEAR. These are the same techniques SEALS uses to keep moving forward in the most fearful scenarios! Straight from the mouth of the Mann who selected and led the biggest group of badasses on the planet, you’ll learn what it takes to become a peak performer, build a dream team, and the number one requirement to building a strong team culture. Don’t miss out on this exclusive interview with one of the TOUGHEST men on the planet!   👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈  → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ▶︎ INSTAGRAM ▶︎ FACEBOOK  ▶︎ LINKEDIN ▶︎ TWITTER ▶︎ WEBSITE

This is the Ed Milach show. Hey, welcome back to Max out everybody. Today is a show that I call it a thick show. Meaning, you're going to write a lot of notes. It's very granular, very tactical. you're going to write a lot of notes. It's very granular, very tactical. You're going to learn a bunch. The reason you're going to learn a bunch is I have a very uniquely qualified man to visit with you. Rich Davini was a Navy SEAL, but he was also, and I can't say what group he was a part of, but let's just call it a very elite group of SEALs

without using the name. Rich was in charge of selection process and also human performance. So you talk about an elite, elite group like that and then, you know, understanding the attributes required to perform at that level and then the teachings. And so he's also got a book out right now, ironically called the attributes that cover these very, very things that we're going to get in depth of the today. So Rich, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Ed.

It's an honor to be here. So thanks for having me. So I got to tell you, it's an honor for me, and I'm going to learn today too with you. And I told you off camera, I can endorse your work because many of the things I've taught, you've just been able to apply them in scenarios that I can't even imagine in your life.

So first things first, I talk a lot about peak performance. You make a distinction in the book between optimal performance and peak performance. So any of you listening to this that are leaders of groups or just, you know, want a performance of high level consistently, I think this distinction is really powerful. So give us the difference.

Yeah, absolutely. And it really came to me as I left the military and people were asking me a lot about peak performance. What I realized was I wasn't comfortable with the term in defining what Navy Seedles or Spec Operators do. The reason is because peak, at least to me, peak is an apex, and it's an apex from which you can only come down. It usually has to be planned for and prepared for and scheduled.

For example, the professional athlete, the NFL player, you know, uses the entire week to prepare and plan to peak for three hours on Sunday, right? And so it really didn't apply to what we were doing every day, because when I thought about, for example, myself in some combat situations or even seal training when you're freezing in the surf zone, there was nothing peak about my performance, right? We were just kind of moving through. And so I really started thinking about it in terms of optimal performance. Optimal performance is really what's the very best I can do in the moment, whatever that best looks like, right? So sometimes that best looks like peak and it looks like flow states and everything's clicking, right? Other times,

that's like, hey, I am head down and I'm just taking step-by-step and that's all I got, right? And it's dirty and it's gritty and it's muddy and it sucks. And that's really in my opinion what's, it's not only spec-offs, I try to take all the stuff I learned in spec-offs and apply it to life, but that's really what life is. I mean, life, it's unrealistic and probably unhealthy to try to peak at all times during a life. It's just not going to happen, right? So, so optimal performance allows us to be comfortable with this modulation and be comfortable with the fact that sometimes if you're just head down, just taking step

by step, just grind it out, that's okay. You're, you're, you're actually performing the best you can, right? And, and I would, I would say the COVID, you know, 2020 for all of us, I would imagine that most of us in 2020 didn't say that we were performing at our peak for most of 2020, right? We were just doing the best we could. And that's, it's really just a more realistic, more practical way to think about performance, I think.

That's real world stuff, you know, as I reflect on it, I think about the, you know, the most successful people I know, or the people that perform at a high level, really the key is they do it more consistently than other people. They do it under pressure, which we're gonna talk about in a little while as well, whether you're an athlete or a dad,

it's under pressure, how do you perform, how do you respond to certain conditions? So you were in charge of the selection process and you make a distinction in the book. And by the way, when you're listening to this everybody, these are attributes you wish to embody if you're going to be happier and a higher performer. It's also attributes you want to find in people you want to surround yourself with as friends as associations, colleagues, business partners, etc. You make a distinction

though that's awesome between skills and attributes because this is something I think most people discount themself. Well, I don't have the incredible natural talents or skills, so I'm discounted from performing at a high level. He makes the case guys in the book, seals are regular guys. And I have to say, I've got to know a few. And I don't know that I disagree with that, Nessir. I think there are extraordinary things about a few of them, but I tend to agree with you as an outside observer. So what's

the difference between skills and attributes? Yeah, it's a distinction that I had to make when I was running the assessment selection because we were our particular program. We were bringing in very experienced seals and we were putting them through our process and we were still getting about a 50% attrition rate, which is natural. And okay, but the problem was we weren't able to effectively articulate why. And we weren't able to say why to ourselves, to be comfortable with that. We weren't able to tell our senior leadership why, but most importantly, we weren't able to tell the candidates why they weren't making it.

And these are guys who are coming in. They really, they were kind of all stars and rock stars and to be able to tell them something like, well, you couldn't shoot very well or you couldn't do this very well. It just didn't seem to fit right. So I had to really break it down. To, you know, in a very general basic sense, skills are not innate. They're not inherent to our nature, right? And none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball

or shoot a gun in the military sense. We can be taught them, we can sometimes sit down in a class and learn them. They direct our behavior in known situations. So here's how and when to ride a bike, throw a ball, shoot a gun. And because they're visible and because they're set up that way and kind of steps that you can learn and teach, they're very easy to assess, measure, and test. And this is why most teams, especially business teams who are kind of putting together dream teams,

make a mistake of focusing only on skills, the best salesperson, best graphic, design, or best marketing, whatever it is. What the problem with skills is, is that skills don't tell us how we're going to operate when things go south and sideways, and the environment turns completely uncertain, right? Because you can't necessarily apply a known skill to an unknown environment. This is where attributes come in. Attributes are innate, right? All of us are born with levels of adaptability,

of situational awareness, ofcipline of resilience, right? They don't direct behavior. They inform our behavior So they tell us how we're gonna show up to a situation So my level of adaptability and resilience for example informed the way I showed up when I was learning how to write a bike and I was falling off a Doesn't times, okay? Because they're hidden though because in their background They're very difficult to assess measure and test and the most them because of their background, they're very difficult to assess measure and test. And the most visible and visceral environments that you can see these things are in environments

of challenge uncertainty and stress, which is why the laboratory I had, which was seal trading, and whether it's basic whether the buds or the seal training I was running, it's all about throwing guys into challenge uncertainty and stress. It was just showing these qualities. And I always joke, you know, when I take it back to buds, you know, which is basic underwater demolition seal train, the basic course for a guy to become an 80-seal, you spend hundreds of hours running with boats on your heads.

You spend hundreds of hours pting with 300-pound telephone poles and freezing in a surf zone. And, you know, over a 20-year career, I've been on hundreds of combat missions, and I've done thousands of training evolutions. And never on any one of them did I carry a boat on my head, or a telephone pole on my shoulder, right?

So what they were doing to us in Buds wasn't training us to pee a Navy seal, right? It wasn't teaching us the skills to be a Navy seal. What it was doing was teasing out these attributes, it was seeing if we could do the job, right? And so this is where we have to start thinking about making distinctions when we're putting together teams and even in our own performance,

our performance, especially in challenge on certain distresses driven by these attributes. And that's really important to know. Well, I think also when I hear that, I think of so many things, I think of even with our own children, you know, they were always evaluating their skill set, but if they're really gonna be flourishing their life,

why not help them identify what their giftedness or attributes are from what you call it? Then I'm thinking of all the people every crudited into different businesses I've had. And I think you get these people with these perfect skills, perfect background, you're like, they're gonna just crush this, and they're such a great speaker,

they're gonna be great in sales, except you don't know how they're gonna respond under pressure, failure. And it's these attributes, and I have seen people with frankly far lower skill levels with exemplary attributes, long-term have this optimal performance. I always use Tom Brady,

because people think I'm a wack job, but like I think I'm Brady, not tremendous skill set, but some of these attributes that you write in the book, I was actually thinking of him from an athlete standpoint. Yeah. He was a little bit of a gift. There's 25 of them in the book, guys. When you were selecting, and I'm sure all 25 were important, where there are two or three

that really were requisite or stood out that were, you know, you really look for in people. Because I don't want to give away the entire book. But what are, what are a few of them if you that you could share with us that are attributes that are just, they're almost mandatory for optimal performance? Well, so, so first, so I answer that question because I know people are curious, but the first thing I want to caveat is that the list of attributes to be a Navy SEAL is going to be different than the list of attributes required be a Navy SEAL is going to be different than the list of attributes required to be an athlete or a salesperson or a teacher or whatever. So that list changes.

So it's incumbent on you as a team leader or a leader if you want to understand what attributes you need for your team to figure out what that list looks like. And this is how we also position ourselves properly in the environment, right? Sometimes, some people have a better makeup for being a nurse than they have for being an ADCL, right? And that's because the attributes they come to the table with. If we were to talk about buds, you know, seal training, I would say the most important attributes are the grit attributes. So you're talking about courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience, and then probably the drive attributes, which which you know, they're a five, they're self-efficacy

There's discipline, there's open-mindedness, there's cunning, there's narcissism, which we can get into that later if we want. Narcissism is an attribute. Narcissism is an attribute, yes. Okay, no, you're not doing that later, I gotta know this. That's fascinating to me. Honey, and narcissism, just give me a little flavor, then you go right back into that. Absolutely, yeah, so, and it's the most asked about one little flavor and then you go right back into that. Absolutely, yeah. So, and it's the most asked about one anyway,

which is good. It was probably one of the most fun to write. Well, let's start with narcissism. Narcissism is obviously a pejorative word, and narcissistic personality disorder is a bad thing, right? The DSM-5, which is a psychology bible, will state nine criteria, which we'll define up. I think if you have five or more,

then you have narcissistic personality disorder. However, when you read those nine, what happens is when I read, I was like, wait a second. Okay, I don't have that, but sometimes, I kind of have a little of that, right? And it really kind of maybe think about why I became a Navy SEAL in the first place. And think about when my friends would talk about why

they became Navy SEAL. Certainly, we were Patriots., certainly we loved our country. But we really, we just kind of wanted to be bad asses and we wanted to see if we could do something very few people could do. There's nothing wrong with that. And that's a little bit of narcissists of talking. This is biological, right? When we are, when we're paid attention to by our parents as infants, we are getting hits

of dopamine, which is a very powerful, feel good chemical, serotonin, which is kind of a bonding trust, I'm protecting you chemical, and then oxytocin, which is another bonding chemical. So that combination is powerful when we're getting paid attention to. This translates to adulthood.

It's all of us, to some extent, want to, at some point, feel special, feel loved, you want to be paid attention to, okay? That's a natural thing. And if you, if you have an audacious goal to be a rockstar a Navy SEAL, an entrepreneur, very successful to stand out to be special, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a little bit of narcissism speaking and it can drive you. And that's why I put it then. I love it. So I gotta be honest,

you have thinking of all these friends of mine that are what I call peak performers, but to your point, optimal performers, because they don't just peak, they do it consistently. And there is a little bit of a quality of that. And even a little bit of self-thinking,

meaning, I wanna get this attention. I wanna do something significant. I wanna prove something to to myself that's special. And so I really want to acknowledge that I agree with you on that. And I kind of jumped in there. I think you were on a little bit of a role before I did that. But in the side that answer you were giving, you create this mind gym. You also talk about resilience.

I'm surprised that wasn't what you went to first. But obviously, it's where you went. But is was one of them across the board. Is it not? It is. Although we have to recognize resilience is just the ability to bounce back, right? You still have to get through it first. Yeah, but you make a distinction in the book. I'm not interrupting you, but you make a distinction. It's not just, you make a distinction about how you bounce back when you bounce back. I'd love for you to go into that a little bit because this is huge. When you get rejected and sails,

if you get knocked down, that's fine. It's oftentimes it's the length of time you're looking, the length of time you look your wounds. That's right. Can you talk about that? That's one of my favorite parts of the things you teach. I just believe it's so true and it's subtle. Almost nobody would make this distinction

other than someone like yourself. So speak to that a little bit. Absolutely. So resilience, again, resilience is the ability to get knocked off baseline, right? And then get back to baseline, which is extraordinarily important in any factor of human development, whether it's weightlifting, whether it's physical, whether it's mental, whether it's environmental, right? Then there's, and then so just to give another distinction, we were also

really interested in what's called anti-vergility, which is a great book by Nassim Tali. Right. That's the ability to get back to baseline. When you come back, you're stronger. Right. You've moved, you've shifted your baseline. To be able to do either, all right, you need to be, you need to have the ability to reflect appropriately and for the, for the right amount of time. And so the example I give in the book, which you probably enjoyed, was a former CEO of mine used to tell us what his grandfather told him,

which was the two-minute rule. And basically, two-minute rule was this, anytime that you have something bad happen, okay? Something negative, bad, it's awful, it's horrible. You have two minutes to wallow, to mourn, to do whatever you need to do. After that two minutes, you stop and you get back on track. You're back in it. Same thing happens when anything good happens. Any big success, all that stuff for motion, whatever, two minutes to rest on your laurels, patch yourself on the

back, feel like you're the big man or woman, get back to normal and then get back to baseline. So it's a mental exercise to help get back on baseline. Now, obviously, certain trauma, it's gonna take more than two minutes, but I think the concept still remains to be able to reflect enough about something that happened and ask the right questions. So frame it properly allows us to get back to that baseline

and many times grow from it and then move on. And this is the this is the crux of optimal performance. And in fact, growth because we can't grow, we can't move on until we can't take those steps unless we we shed that that trauma. I think this should give people hope, you know, I think some people think they're weaker than they are sometimes. Like, I get knocked down. And, and guys, this is a guy who led and selected the biggest group of bad asses that walked the planet. We say, and they get knocked down. The question mark is, can you get back to baseline or an anti-fragility?

Can you get even better than baseline? And there is a time factor. So those of you that are knocked down or get knocked down, you need to begin to evaluate how quickly this two minute rule and whatever, however that manifests itself for you. Because we all do, but I do feel like, and I would say I don't have a lot of attributes, but one of mine has been the pace at which I get back up to baseline or then eventually exceed it. And in mind, Jim, what you created, I guess, in the seals. Are there, it sounds to me like you believe resilience can be developed and built, but

even though it's an attribute, it can be expanded, true or false, and how do we do that? Absolutely true. And so the idea is develop a working relationship with our brain, which was really the kind of the goal of the mind gym was to help guys begin to figure out this gray matter between their ears and try to access that and more proactively use that gray matter. Because again, we're just from a basic standpoint, I mean, we, you know, and our nervous system, which is all connected, which we all know, but, you know, the sympathetic response versus the parasympathetic response, this is active doing something versus recovery. Recovery is one of the key elements required. In fact,

probably the key element required in any type of resilience or antipragility. You have to take time for recovery. This, we know this intuitively. When you lift weights, you tear the muscle. The only way you grow muscle is to rest. Okay? If you lifted the same weight every day, you just keep on tearing, you go into entropy. So you have to tear it, and then you have to allow it to grow back,

which is what recovery is. Accessing or kind of understanding our neurology a little bit better allows us to more actively and proactively shift into parasympathetic and initiate some recovery more effectively, more often, and in some cases on demand. And that was really the key kind of goal of the mind gym was to teach guys, begin to teach guys how to do that, more effectively, more efficiently

and more quickly. So I used to call, you know, sometimes, you know, recover in between gun fights because honestly, resilience, we talk about the two minute rule and you know this and I think of a lot of your audience knows this. When you're really, when you're really kind of performing at a high level, whether it's optimally or peak, whatever that looks like. Sometimes the situation in the environment doesn't allow for recovery in the moment. And so this is, you can watch any war movie where the guy who's, the guy's next to his buddy,

his buddy gets shot and he, and you'd spend the next two minutes while the guys, you know, in the movie is crying over his buddy in the mourning, all that, that doesn't happen in the real world. You don't have time to mourn. You have to win the gun fight, right? Which means it's incumbent on us, and obviously combat's an extreme case, but it's incumbent on us that if the recovery is not available in the moment,

you have to have to have to make it a priority later. All right, so if you're in the moment and something bad happens and you're just like, okay, I gotta block that out and I just to move forward and make this, I got to finish the mission, I got to win the fight, finish the mission. Once that's all done, you need to go back and you define time to recover. This is very hard for top performers to do because we're so we're so kind of seduced by the performance part of it. We love breaking through, like getting through, but recovery is huge. Just think of it in the terms of if. We love breaking through, like getting through, but recovery is huge.

Just think of it in the terms of if you don't recover effectively, it's like you're benching three times a day every day, right? I've seen this take out more people than most people realize. I've seen people have really good careers and whatever it is they do for a window of time and they don't recover, they don't recover. Then what happens is they're fatigued and they make huge mistakes or they fry. They just fry out. And so this is a huge thing. By the way, I don't know that we've done an interview that in 20 minutes has had this much stuff in it this quickly.

I think everyone this is like crap, like, you know, pulling over the side of the road and writing things. But on recovery, is there anything other than sleep because sleep's the go-to? Any other things you'd offer say, hey, this is a recovery technique. Well, some of the quicker ones can be breathing. And I know you've had Dr. Andrew Heuberman on this. I was thinking of him when you've been talking. And he's the book. He and I have been friends now for, got, got four years and we've,

we've been working on a lot of this together. And so, so a lot of my neuroscience comes from just breaking out with him and hanging out with him and his friends. But, but you know, breathing techniques. So we can do certain breathing techniques will help us shift into parasympathetic. There's vision techniques, which, which Huberman talks about, open gaze, for example,

real fast way for your audience, open gaze is just, it's different than focusing, instead of focusing on something in front of you, just go soft and start noticing your peripheries, right? That open gaze has been proven to start shifting your nervous system into parasympathetic and start going that way. So those are some micro techniques. A little bit more macro techniques is really start to think about anything

that produces relaxation and joy in your life. Think about doing more of, okay? This doesn't have to be meditation. Some people like meditation. I, meditation I find difficult personally. And so, and so I had to find different ways. For me, my meditation is I go running. I go running in the woods here in Virginia.

I don't wear headphones. I don't time myself and I just think. And I just let my mind wander, right? That is recovery for me. Visualizing. Visualizing is a hugely powerful technique because the brain, if you visualize correctly and deeply, the brain doesn't recognize the difference between real experience and visualized experience.

So you can create the same neuro transmitters and horror moments that you would in the real experience just through visualization. So for example, I have two boys, they're teenagers now, but when they're babies, they used to nap on my chest, right? Such a wonderful feeling as a parent just to have your kid sleeping on you. And what I would do sometimes is I would just visualize that. And as I visualize that deeply,

those all those feelings would come back. All those chemicals would be flooding me. That's recovery as well. So think about some breathing, think about vision, think about visualization. And then you could do things like yoga, mean, yoga, meditation, the float. I'm a big fan of float tanks. I don't know if you ever tried the ice float tanks.

Love those things. And so, and then of course, sleep is the kind of the coup d'acroix. Yeah, I want to go back through that. So guys, we've talked about float tanks on the show before. And I've recommended it to friends of mine that even are struggling with some depression and mental, even minor mental illness. So, float tanks are big. For me, the things that you've listed, which, you know, for me, is float tanks, I do. Open gaze is something that I did as a child, rather naturally, and something, so it's something that I go back to. And the visualization stuff

that he's talking about, guys, can also, you can almost call it like awake dreaming. and the visualization stuff that he's talking about, guys, can also, you can almost call it like a wake dreaming. And it's something that I do. And one of the things is I'll repeat the same ones over and over and that it'd give me a previous good feeling. So for me, it's a very random moment in my life that when my daughter was a little girl, we're on a boat and she asked me, Daddy, can I drive the boat? And she sits in my lap and just the way her, just my little girl, felt, you know, I had my arms around her. It was a little bit windy and cold and it was like one of the my favorite moments of my life. Well, I've played that video thousands and thousands of times guys.

And so that when I get into an anxiety or stress state or fatigue state, I go right to that video and it takes me back to that moment. I do it guys silly things like before I do my labs, my blood draws with 10 miles of blood, I'll look away and I go back to the boat with Bella and I because it's, silly things. Like before I do my labs, my blood draws with 10 vials of blood, I'll look away and I go back to the boat with Bella and I, because it's become reflexive. Those neurotransmitters, those synapses have been so connected now that I can go there anytime I want. These are real things that you can be doing to recover.

And also to perform it in optimal level. I love that you talk about this because it's very rare. I'm listening to you. I'm thinking, were you a little bit pun intended fish out of a water in the seals the way you talk and think around the other guys? Not every dude I know is like you. I was a little bit fish out of water. Yes. You had to be man. You had to be. Let's talk about stress and fear. You're so eloquent on this topic. It's one of the things that holds most people back. It steals dreams, it steals careers, it steals performance. How do you deal with that and how do you

look at it? Well, so two things. First, let's recognize stress for what it is physiologically and evolutionarily. Stress is designed to get us moving, okay? Our body senses agitation and stress when we're supposed to be doing something. So if we're hungry, for example, we'll get our body will get stressed, we'll feel agitation, that's designed to make us go look for food. If we're lonely or depressed or we feel agitated,

that's designed to go encourage us to get out and look for companionship, okay? Stress starts to tip into fear because fear is a little bit different. Well, again, we'd have to get here a moment on the line to really give us the technical details here, but it's a little bit different in the sense that you need two things for fear to start showing up in ourselves. And the two things are anxiety and uncertainty. When you combine anxiety and

uncertainty, you begin to feel fear. The way I'll explain this is you can have one without the other and fear doesn't exist, right? So I can be anxious or you can be anxious about a presentation we're going to give next week to the boss. And we're anxious about it. We know when it's supposed to be. We know what we're presenting. The presentation's done. We're just anxious. Okay, we're not afraid. We're just anxious. That's anxiety without uncertainty. We can be uncertain and not be anxious. Okay, well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve. All right, so that's, and that doesn't, that's not fearful. When you begin to combine the two, when you have anxiety and uncertainty, and other ways, we don't know the outcome, we just don't know what's

going to happen. That's when fear starts to, up, that's when the in big deal starts to get kicked in. And when that happens, our brains start moving into this fight or flight choice. If it kicks in really fast, then it's an automatic response, and we've heard of fighter flight without thinking, right? You're either running away or running towards. But most of the time, a lot of us have a conscious sense and a way to think through this. The neat thing though about fear is that if you choose either one,

so there's fight or flight, there's the freeze response. The freeze response really ultimately is just a, it's an oscillation between the two. It's kind of, I'm trying to decide what to do. Either one that we choose is going to fire off a different circuit in the brain. If we choose to step into our fear, we choose to fight, which is really step into our fear, it's not put up our dukes and punch, right?

But it's step into our fear that flips the circuit in our brain and we get a dopamine reward for doing it. Which means it feels good. Which means keep going, this is good. Now this again, this is by design. Human beings are exploratory endurance creatures. We were meant to go out and find new food, new shelter, new discoveries.

And so we were meant to step into the unknown and do that. Our bodies were designed to encourage us to do that as we, as every step. That dopamine hit is really powerful because it helps us say, hey, this is good. Keep going. People often make the mistake of thinking the dopamine comes at the end of the task at the out when you get the outcome when you finally get there. That's not true. We can actually get it every step of the way.

So what people have to recognize is as we feel this fear coming, we can, first of all, we can try to stay out of the autonomic overload and stay in our kind of conscious thinking by just doing some internal techniques. So these same breathing techniques to shift us from sympathetic to parasoethetic work in taking us down a little bit off that autonomic and get us into a conscious thinking mode, right? So so now we're we're able to look at what we're what we fear and make a choice. Okay, so breathing helps visualization helps even open gaze helps helps us buy down that anxiety and then and then buying down the uncertainty

Is a matter of again, uncertainty anxiety is more defined as internal. That's an internal response is a matter of, again, uncertainty. Anxiety is more, I define as internal, that's an internal response. Uncertainty is the external environment. In other words, things are happening. We don't understand. One of the ways that you can help buy down external uncertainty is to ask yourself

a very, very basic question. And that is, what can I control right now? This is actually what seals do habitually. You do it without thinking. In the seal teams, you call it control your three foot world. But it's basically what can I get out of all of this? What can I control? And then you say, okay, I'm going to pick that.

I'm going to move towards it. Well, guess what? As soon as you move towards it, you get a dopamine reward. Yes. And then you get to ask the question again, all right. This is exactly how we step through moment by moment, the real tough stuff. And it's neurologically backed, which is really cool. I love this. I think that the average person does the complete opposite of what you just finished with. Rather than

find the thing they can control, they stack their anxiety and fear and their weakness by literally finding the very many things they cannot control and feeding that stimulus to themselves thereby feeling far more ill prepared than they really are incapable of changing their conditions, incapable of changing their circumstances. Guys, of a lot of things we're gonna cover on the show, that last piece, as I've really watched the last many years

of the people that I coach and just in just in general in life That last thing is what he's talking about what seals intuitively you finding the thing they can control and Going there most people have the tendency to Discard that and find the things they can't control it rules you in your relationships It rules you it ruins you in business ruins you with your money Ruins your happiness. And so a huge thing that you just said right there. I'm gonna step out of the things just for a moment.

Just ask you something about this particular team you were a part of, not just the seals, but this very unique, very special group that you were a part of. Rhymes with picks. You, what's that operate like? I haven't asked the other guys this. So like, you know, is everyone getting along? I mean, is there, is where the dynamics like? Does that not matter?

So if I'm a leader here and I'm building a company or a team, for example, you know, what are the interwork? Is there's a lot of narcissism you said? I assume ego's yet everyone's got to come together to work together when there's a common mission. What are the dynamics like? Would it surprise us? Is it is it just like any other team summer really unified summer not? Yeah, I think it's more of the latter again. I wouldn't say there's the there's ego, but I there's there's not a lot of narcissism.

I think narcissism is kept in check. So here's a quick, the quick risk of narcissism, which I need to cover so people understand the risk of narcissism is that it's like a vampire staring in the mirror when it's inside you. You can't see it inside you, okay? You can't see when you're when you're narcissistic. Only people on the outside can see that. So, so when you when you have, so the teams you've generated this environment and this group of guys. And of course, there's a lot of seals. So you have your certain teams and your platoons and your troops and stuff. So there's smaller groups within the larger group. But when you have this group of guys who you trust so well and count on you and you count on them, it's a very open and honest

exchange so that it keeps that narcissist in check. That's one thing. The trust helps you keep each other in check. One thing that happens in the SEAL teams, I would say any spec ops team or even any military team that actually goes out and does combat, is that environment and the job keep you humble. One of the things I loved about being a Navy SEAL was the ocean. I love water, I love being underwater, I love everything about water.

However, the water is a very hostile environment to human beings. I mean, it's cold, the bone crushing pressures at depth. I mean, it'll kill you like that if you're not thinking. I mean, the ocean, we always joke, the ocean will humble any man, any woman in a second, right? Um, that's a way to keep humble, you know, a bullet. I don't care. I don't care if, you know, and this is something I used to talk to my guys about. I mean, um, it could be a nine year old Somali kid with an AK 47. One bullet can take out a 36 yearyear-old experience Navy SEAL top operator on the

planet. One bullet, right? That's humbling, right? So I think it behooves us as individuals and in any team to understand that environment can always have a say, and we have to say, by the way, if anybody, if any of us doubt this just look at 2020 2020 humbled all of us though you have seen that comment right so so I think that That the the teams now of course in any team there are guys you like there guys you don't like you know You always there's always a commonality though in the mission. There's always a commonality in the purpose And there's a trusted respect for what people do and what you bring to the table. So I think that's really what's congealed everything.

And one of the things I miss, the comrade, people ask me if I miss the job, I don't miss the job because obviously I'm 47 years old, you kind of age out of that stuff. And I was tired of deploying away from my family. I missed the times where we were like laughing hysterically and you know, together. Whether it was like in the middle of a combat zone or on a training mission or whatever, those bonding moments are something very, very unique

that is probably one of the number one things I loved about those teams. Yeah, thank you for your service, by the way, and for doing that. We're all thankful for that. And that should be said. One thing I did here and there was open and honest exchange. I think one of the things that happens

that erodes a culture and a company or in a family is not open and honest exchange, not candor. There's whispering in the corner. There's conversations that aren't open. And people aren't exchanging honest opinions about where things stand and what needs to change. It's a huge thing. If you run an company or you're leading a family, you ought to ask yourself, how open and honest are the exchanges that we're having?

Because I think that has an awful lot to do. Obviously, the mission, all these other things are critical as well. But I would say most people don't have as open or honest exchange is what you guys were used to dealing with out of necessity. Then, and I think some people don't understand how necessary it is in their business life. I mean, you can add on one thing, because I think it's important, because this is going to surprise people when I tell, when I say this, Navy seals with the way we do this is

we're vulnerable. And people are like, what? Wait, Navy seals vulnerable. But the way the, the way the seal teams would define vulnerability is I'm open and honest about my strengths and my weaknesses. So that, you know exactly when you can lean on me and you know exactly when I'm gonna be leaning on you. I mean, it was so apparent at times, right? You'd, and so there's a concept I talk about

in the book called, it's kind of throws the whole task organization of a team on its head, it's called Dynamics Abordination. This is a concept that says, hey, every high performing team in a Dynamics Abordination environment understands that any problem or challenge can come from any direction at any moment, right? And whenever it does, the person who is the closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up a lead and everybody follows, right? And we just, and that shifts like a flock of birds. But so often it was like on a team, it's like if a guy stepped into an environment or a situation where he was like, oh, wait, I can't, he'd have me say, I can't handle this, who's up, right?

And the person who was up came up, right? Vonerability was on demand, right? And that's how you have to be. No, so that's why ego goes away, right? I am only, I'm confident, but not egotistical, right? And that's how you have to be. So that's why ego goes away, right? I am only, I'm confident, but not egotistical, right? And I'm confident in my abilities and I'm confident in my inability so that I can share that with you

and dynamically subordinates in these environments. Dynamically subordinate. What an ironic distinction that one of the keys to the seals cooperating together is vulnerability with all these badasses, but I certainly understand it now that you've said it. One more thing I want to ask you,

by the way, I just can't even get over that we've gone almost 40 minutes now. I feel like we've gone 15 minutes. And thank you for being so willing, you know, sometimes someone's on a show is like, well, you gotta get the book, yeah, you gotta get the book. There's the more you share,

the more people want the book. And there's really one question left, and then we'll finish with something because I don't think enough people do it and you talk about it in the book. I think the quality of our life and our performance is often linked to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. And a lot of times, the repetitive questions you ask yourself were installed in the software program of your brain by your parents when you were very young or by some traumatic event

in your life. And it's causing you to ask questions potentially, some of which you may not even be conscious of that don't serve you. So you talking the book about this as an optimal performance and a recovery technique, too. So talk to you a little bit about quality questions that we ask ourselves or each other. Yeah. I mean, I say that I say that almost verbatim because I believe it so much. What everybody has to understand is our brains, our question answering machines.

That's how our brains make sense of the world. Okay, it's constantly, and usually unconscious, constantly asking questions about our environment, bouncing it off our hippocampus, seeing if we've seen it before, and we relate it to something, that's what our brains do. When we, when we lodge a question consciously into our frontal lobe, our brain has no choice

but to begin to answer it. So I do this experiment with classes I teach sometimes. I say, okay, take out a piece of paper, write down this question. How could I double my income in the next six months? I say you have 30 seconds, write down as anything that pops into your head, write it down, right? And I give them 30 seconds.

Usually everybody will come up with two, three, four, five answers, okay? And I say, okay, the point of this is not to get your answers, although I'd love to hear your ideas, but the point, three, four, or five answers. Okay? I said, okay. The point of this is not to get your answers, although I'd love to hear your ideas. But the point of this is not to get your answers. The point of this is to explain that anytime you lodge a question, any question into your frontal lobe, your brain's going to begin to answer it. So, like you said, oftentimes, we unconsciously ask the wrong questions.

We say, why am I so bad at this? Why does this always happen to me? What about this sucks, right? This is what you're talking about. You're focusing on what you can't control. If we shift that, if we consciously shift that and say, how can I grow from this? What are some of the things I learned? One of the things I fall back is what can I control now?

Our brains will answer those questions, too. And we will begin to come up with better answers and solutions faster. This is what I think high performers do habitually because they don't focus on those things that are disempowering and don't mean anything in their progression. Take conscious control.

And I would say that people always ask me, hey, could you give me a list of questions, right? It's obviously as you know, subjective task. But I'd say that people always ask me, Hey, can you could you give me a list of questions, right? It's obviously as you know, it's subjective task. But I'd say if you are absence anything, okay? And you can't think of any question. Here's the question you should ask. What's the better question right now? Ask that question. You will come up with questions. You know, by the way, to your point, your brain is going to answer whatever question you ask it. And so ask the quality, I love that by the way, ask because we do say it very similarly,

but I've never said it that way before, and I've never really thought about it that way. Your brain's gonna go to work on answering this question so you better control what it is. Yeah, absolutely. If you don't know what the question is, ask yourself what the better question should be. That is so freaking good.

All right, last thing, man, I've enjoyed this so much. We're gonna do it again, and just because there's literally not been a wasted second of this conversation. Like I said that in the beginning, it would be a thick interview, but I don't know that I knew it would be this thick.

And so thank you in advance. Everybody follow Rich by the way on Instagram. Go get, please, by the way, go get the attributes. What do you say, look, it's 25 unique drivers of optimal performance. It's sort of like a 25 hidden drivers, yeah, because they're not visible, but they're all enough. They know, yeah. Well, guys, get the book too. But you talk about milestones. A lot of achievers listen to my show, not everybody that does, but I think everyone on the show wants to

be an achiever. And I robbed myself most of my life from even acknowledging milestones. So I know I'm robbed myself of dopamine and I'm robbed myself of all kinds of different things. But I was sort of surprised just from a guy that's been in your background that it'd be one of the things you'd mention. You know, that is a really important criteria.

And it seems like a small thing. You go, wow, all the things in the book, you want to finish with milestones. I just kind of know my audience a little bit. And I think when your reticular activating system goes to see milestones and look for them, you probably have more of them than you realize. And that's the thing. I think some of us are like, the only milestone is when I hit my big goal. The only milestone is when I, you know, crushed the million dollar income.

There's lots of other milestones that you have in any given day that I think just were oblivious to and then we're not stacking them. So would you speak to that last? Yeah, well, I think, first of all, like you said, to recognize milestones gives us an automatic physiological reward. So why not take it, right?

Why not capitalize on that physiology? The other thing that I think Milestone does, especially in the achievement of longer term goals, is that it allows you to be flexible. Okay, so I always say kind of be resolute in the outcome you're looking for, but be adaptable and flexible in the pathway you get to get there. Right? If you, as you're going through the process of achieving a goal, it's going to be uncertain, it's going to be unknown. So rock climbers have a lot to teach us about this, right? Because a rock climber looks at the face of a cliff that he or she wants to climb and says, okay, the top is the outcome, right? But no rock climber is going to say,

at the bottom, I'm going to do that, that, that, that, that, all that. They're going to start climbing, right? And they're going to adjust as they go, and they're going to recognize the not holes and the, the, the, the, the footholds to adjust as they go. And they're going to recognize the not holes and the the the the footholds that they need to get. And oh, by the way, sometimes the foothold, the best foothold that they need is actually going to be down, right? Which means sometimes when we're looking to achieve our goals,

it's going to feel like we might be moving away from them because we're just getting another, we're just going to get getting to a better not hole, all right? So, so, but that's a milestone. We have to figure out these every knothole that you make, whether it's up, down, sideways, or whatever, is a milestone that should be celebrated. Cause what it does it do, it gives you a different view.

It gives you a different view of the rock of that face of that rock and gives you a different view of the potential knotholes and footholes. And I'm getting terminology wrong because I'm not a climber, but you get it. Very good, brother. Wow, that's the perfect analogy. I have permission to steal that from you when I speak, right?

Sure, yeah, absolutely. Oh, so good. I'm stealing most of what we did today. I'll try to credit you sometimes. I enjoyed this thoroughly. Guys, you cannot have listened to something that had more content than you did today. So Rich DeVinny, thank you.

Everybody in the max out universe, please share this program. I cannot even imagine the multitude of applications for the content we covered. They for leaders, for family members, for people that want to perform at an optimal level. People looking for more happiness. People looking for more control in their life. Like people looking for more mental health, mental well-being. The applications and who you could share this with is so vast. And that's thanks to Rich Divini. So thank you today, brother.

Everybody else, God bless you and max out. [♪ Music playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in the background, playing in I'm not sure