The Mello Millionaire with Tommy Mello - Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Mark Divine doesn’t just talk about elite performance—he lived it as a U.S. Navy SEAL Commander. Now, he’s on a mission to forge resilient leaders through a powerful blend of discipline, mindfulness, and mission-driven mindset skills. As the founder of SEALFIT, Unbeatable Mind, and host of the hit podcast The Mark Divine Show, he’s trained everyone from special ops candidates to Fortune 500 executives to tap into their full potential. His bestselling books—including Unbeatable Mind and The Way of the SEAL—are required reading for leaders everywhere. 00:00 Introduction to Leadership and Mental Toughness03:00 Mark Divine's Journey: From SEAL to Leadership Coach05:50 The Concept of Kokoro: Merging Heart and Mind09:06 Four Skills for Mental Toughness12:00 Leadership Development: Evolving Character and Trust14:56 Creating a Winning Team Culture17:48 Closing Thoughts and Personal ReflectionsMeet me at Home Service Freedom 2025 ⟶ https://homeservicefreedom.com/Check Out My Social Media:Tiktok ⟶ https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymelloInstagram ⟶ https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/Facebook ⟶https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/My other podcast: Home Service Expert ⟶ https://open.spotify.com/show/4WHQ3ldGThHsP1cfzNF33GLearn more about Mark:Unbeatable Mind: Mark Divine ⟶ https://unbeatablemind.com/Mark Divine Show ⟶ https://markdivine.com/podcast/SEAL FIT:⟶ https://sealfit.com/Veterans Integration Program ⟶ https://www.markdivinecouragefoundation.org/veteran-integration-program/TakeawaysLeadership, Mental toughness, presence, power, Kokoro breathing, Breath control, calm mind and body, Mental toughness, emotional resilience, successful company, business, character development, winning culture, trust, collaboration, emotional healing, personal growth, daily practices, mental clarity.

To me, the best leader is one who just gets out of the way, hire really well. Yeah, then get out of the way. Grounded, focused, fearless. Our guest today doesn't just teach mental toughness. He embodies it. You're not willing to give it all, then do not continue. From Navy SEAL commander to elite leadership coach. Don't ever give up, ever.

He's the founder of SEALFIT, Unbeatable Mind, and the Veterans Integration Program, transforming thousands of lives through the power of discipline, mindset, and breath control. You know, every day I kick ass, go to bed, and then I do it again tomorrow, and you don't let anything else distract you. As the host of the Mark Devine show, thanks so much for joining me today. He's interviewed some of the world's top thinkers, athletes, and military leaders. As a certified yoga and meditation teacher, he's proven that true strength isn't just about power. It's about presence. He's coached CEOs, military leaders, and athletes to master breath control.

and achieve maximum performance in their daily lives. Most of the time, Village breathes your nose, which keeps you controlled. Prepare yourself. This conversation will challenge the way you think about leadership, resilience, and the warrior mindset. Today we're here in California with Mark Devine. I really appreciate the time today, Mark. Talk to me a little bit about what you're doing these days and what got you started. When I went in the Seals, I was 25 years old.

The four years before that, I was in New York City, getting my MBA and CPA, but The one thing that was really unique for me was I'd gotten into a martial art, right? And I had a sensei, or was actually the founder of this whole school, was really into Zen meditation. And so here at 21, I'm learning how to meditate, which is basically mental training, right? We were using concentration training to develop focus and awareness, like all this stuff. A lot of that work really is what led me to the SEAL teams because it basically changed the way my mind work. So you got a master's degree and a CPA. before entering the day.

Yeah, yeah. And I had no interest in the military when I was in my early 20s. Like I came up, you know, from the family where that was kind of taboo. Like you didn't, you went in the military if you couldn't figure anything else out and left, you know? But sitting on the meditation bench developed this,

this like mental clarity, right? And so what happened for me, and in my experience was that I developed like this little spaciousness in my mind, right? Whereas before meditation, I was completely merged in my thoughts, right? I believed in my thoughts. I developed this kind of like opening, this aperture, this spaciousness.

And I could actually observe my thoughts, metacognily, or from a distance. I grew up in a really kind of negative family, a lot of, you know, a lot of programming that just wasn't serving me. And I wasn't really happy at the time either. And yet here I was in this great career, right? I was getting my MBA at NYU Stern business. I was getting my CPA, working for Cooper's and Libraint, which is now Pricewater's Cooper. Everything was green light go from the outside perspective.

But inside, I was like, this isn't working for me. And I started the question, the storyline that I was living. And what I saw Tommy was that. That story wasn't my story. It was someone else's story. So anyways, fast forward. I find myself in seal training in 1989. And my buds class, 185 kids, hardcore young men.

And I was put together with a team of six others. We call it a boat crew. They're trying to create and sew the most intense chaos and inject fear into the team or into the, into the class. They want to see how you're going to react. And most people are reacting, you know, not well, right? And so when this started happening literally on the first day, everyone else was just reacting and they're using reacting with the wrong actions, right? Things they were leading them, you know, down the wrong path. It's going to take more time or they're just going to fuck it up.

So I automatically just kind of assume this coach role, right, while I was there. I was a little bit older. Yeah. And we just started to see extraordinary results. And I found how valuable the breadth work was, the meditation, the visualization, the radical focusing. And I started to build these things into a, like a teachable system. So through Navyseal.com, I started to mentor other Navy SEAL candidates and other special ops candidates. And I began to teach them this stuff.

That led to a nationwide contract from the Navy where the Navy hired me to mentor Navy SEAL candidates across the country who are coming into the Navy, right? So the SEAL fit is a training system for physical mental toughness. And we used to have 30-day live-in academies. What kind of training? Anything you can imagine. So hardcore functional fitness. So we developed something called the SEAL-Fit operator workouts, which combined, you know, like power lifts with Olympic lifts with functional fitness, cross-fit style workouts, rucking, running. and we learned so much.

It was an incredible growth spurt for me. And out of that period, I think those lasted maybe four or five years. I ended up with three entire training programs, three best-selling books, right? My Kokoro yoga, eight weeks to seal fit, and unbeatable mind. Tell us what the word Kokoro means in your book title.

Kokoro is, I would put that practice more in the spiritual mountain. Kokoro means heart and mind merged into your actions. It also means whole mind. My real passion is integrated development to bring whole mind or holistic, you know, approach to living into the world. And so what is whole mind? What is Kokoro? It's where your body is your mind. Like you don't live from here up.

You have complete access to the intelligence of your heart, your gut, your body. bio, your entire interreg nervous system, you're able to experience what I call simultaneous mind, which is where you have complete contextual, broad-based perspective awareness, while simultaneously are able to radically focus on what it is you're focusing on. That's Kokoro. In your other book, Unbeatable Mind, you talk about the four big skills for mental toughness. Can you walk us through those and why they're important? These skills are like your money.

If you can master these as a daily practice, right, it'll bring you absolute clarity. So the first one is breath control, right? So breath control is how you maintain a calm mind and a calm body, right? And so that non-reactionary experience that I was having in the seals, it's because of the box breathing. Yep. Because, you know, frigging grenade would go off and I'd be like, inhale, exhale.

no reaction, still calm, but I'm able to now respond instead of like freak out. The second skill, Tommy, is mental management. So where are you putting in your mind? And is it the right thing, right? And then the correlator to that is what's the quality of the thoughts of the thinking, right? So in order to do that, you have to be calm and you have to be able to create a little space and to be able to observe your thoughts. The third skill is mental imagery.

So we use visualization in a past orientation to clean up shit. So, you know, heal from traumas or anything could have should have wooded us, right? We clean that shit up. The other visualization is to develop a future view of your desired end state in life. So the closer you get to your vision, the more capable you are. The fourth one is radical focusing today. You have one thing you're going to do today. That's the most important thing.

Yep. Your schedule might be still full, but there's one thing that you got to do that's going to move the dial. So what do you think most people are lacking when it comes to mental toughness? They're lacking the mental skill to be able to manage and control their thoughts. And so they let negative thinking just dominate and excessive chatter. So they can't get quiet inside. And I think that's the key. And the corollary to that is they can't manage their emotions. Right. And so they let, you know, fear and kind of negativity and doubt enter, right?

And mental toughness and emotional resiliency are really kind of two sides of the same coin. Mental toughness is like, okay, you know, like we talked about Goggins and Jocko, right? It's like extreme discipline, right? You can, you can have a mind that's like a steel trap and just radically focused. but if you aren't emotionally mature, right, eventually you're going to burn out or eventually you're going to drop a grenade on your own project. And so just by doing physical training, you're also training your mind. You're also training your emotional awareness or you have the opportunity to access and to understand your intuitional, you know, guidance.

Gratitude, right, that's training your positivity and your optimism. And then you begin your box breathing. Now you're training arousal control, you're training concentration, you're training attention control, you're training mindfulness. At the end of your box breathing, you're doing your visualization. Over time, as you do this work, you're becoming much more aware of emotional patterns that aren't serving you, right? And that's where the emotional mountain, I said five months, physical, mental, emotional,

intuitional and spiritual. The emotional one is the one that's most challenging for individuals because we're dealing with like child of trauma, you know, stuff like that. Well, as you decided to do a PhD, I'm curious. I thought about either a second master's degree or a PhD, but... I would wait until you want to free up some time, you know, when your time freeze up. But I started mine when I was, you know, 58.

Yeah. And I wanted to change, you know, the perception in my line of work is important, right? How people perceive me. And so people always perceive me as the Navy SEAL, mental. toughness leadership guy right and I was the OG to kind of create a business around that and um and now we have a lot of other seals who are involved in that stuff right and more coming in every day you know what I mean so and frankly it's you know it's part of my past right I don't want to spend the rest of my life talking about Navy SEAL shit I'm very proud of it I love the teams got a lot out of it I helped a lot of

eyes, but I'm really about developing people to be the best version of themselves. So, and I want to get in also leadership development and corporate work. And we do a lot of work with corporations, but, you know, to do it right, you need to have that validation of, you know, doctorate. Where do you even start to train a leader? Like, what was the, what's the path? Leadership development, we call it vertical. It's really about changing who you are.

not what you know because you know you said like you hire for character and you train train the skills same thing at every level of development that you reach you know the skills are going to be that you have are going to be more effective and you're going to have access to new and more skills those horizontal skills so for leadership development it's about evolving your sense of self it's about evolving your character it's about becoming more focused more aware increasing the application but you're on your perspective of what you include and what you respect. To me, the best leader is one who just gets out of the way and learns to trust.

But, of course, verify, right? And so leader will set the strategy and the vision. And like, you know, what you've done with your company, be an exceptional hire, right? Hire really well. But then get out of the way. You go to work to grow. And the work then becomes,

enjoyable. You know, I try to get these, my team to work on themselves as much as possible. That's good. You know, a lot of my, the team has a high IQ. Right. It's getting their EQ, though, the way they view themselves. You know, realize how you're talking to people. How do you make people feel?

Right. But this new chapter that I'm going to, it's so hard for me because I'm no longer the one doing the work. And it's just, it's a weird position to be in. But as I started to manifest who I would need to become, It was not the guy doing the work. No, it can't be. But you can build into the culture the mechanisms for that kind of growth.

Yep. You know what I mean? I think that you can process eyes the growth opportunity. Well, yeah, that's the thing too is like I'm really focused right now on, on it's like I suppose I have to travel just to get out of their hair. Like you said, get out of the way. Yeah. Like sometimes I've caught myself walking in their office unannounced. And they're busy.

They're working on stuff like the got a minute manager type of stuff. Yeah. So I'm working on it. You know, I talk a lot about winning together, like my team. Like my second book was called Elevate, Build a Business where Everybody wins. Nice. You talk about winning together and let the team be the hero. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Nobody without your team. Your team is the company, right? Without your team, no company. And so it goes back to kind of like egoic leadership thinking that you have to be the one that solves all the problems. Yep. That's a big mistake. Yeah, you have to be the one with all the great ideas. And you have to be right all the time.

And there's nothing that shuts a team down more than those things. So to make the team a hero, like I say the team is the new leader, right? you do things together that create incredible intimacy, right? Now, this is challenging for a lot of Americans and American executives, right? But for instance, in my company and we teach this to our client companies, we box breath before we start in a meeting together, right? So it might do 10 rounds of box breathing. Everyone's sitting in silence, eyes close, and now what you're doing is like everyone's kind

of like creating this resonance, this field of like real kind of deep connection. That's an example of a way to bring, you know, create a community of practice with your team where everyone is doing some similar things together that are really breaking down the barriers and softening that ego grip. And then what happens is to get into this more contextual right brain, like energetic field. We develop these practices so that the team becomes the main thing. And you're showing up so that you don't let your teammates down, right? You're doing the work so you don't let your teammates down.

We talked about, you know, exercise and reading, right? So it'd be unfathomable to me. Like if my leadership team wasn't taking care of themselves physically, wasn't doing things to grow, right? Even in SEAL teams, even after all that training, it takes a platoon or a troop probably a good, you know, good six months, sometimes a year to really create this kind of, this energetic flow state where the team is just. just they don't even need to talk they're just you know they're just firing an all

salons I love it um six months to a year to master these techniques yeah and what what uh we talked about a lot of stuff yeah we sure did and I uh the one thing like to finish off is give you the mic let you tell the audience whatever maybe we didn't talk about something so I'll let you close us out no thanks man first of all I appreciate you doing this yeah it's great to meet you um talking a little bit about like the state of affairs in the world. I think a lot of people do themselves a great disservice by wgging out, by stressing out about the future. And we have this kind of idea that there is a world out there. And there's not

one world. There's eight billion worlds. Everybody's, everybody's world is different. Yeah. So stop fretting about the world out there and worry about your world. And the best way to start worrying about your world and taking control of your world is through a practice of learning how to win in your mind before you step out into that world. Everyone's dancing around trauma thinking that they don't have it, right? They're bringing their child self, maladapted child self into their relationships. So get over yourself and get some freaking, emotional healing going. It's critical. If you want to go to the next level, that's what's holding you back.

If someone wants to reach out to you, you've got a podcast, obviously. Where do they find the podcast? That's Mark Devine Show. Just search for it wherever podcasts are found. Spotify, Apple. And if someone who wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that? My website, Mark Devine.com, has a lot of information there, and you reach out to me at info at markdevine.com, directly. I'm on social media, of course. Search for Mark Devine. And Unbeatablemind.com is the training that we're talking about. We do work with executives and organizations.

And that's a good place if you want to tap into some of this training. Yeah, this was amazing. I really appreciate the time today, Mark, and this is a great podcast. Thanks very much. Thank you. Ooh, yeah. All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to this episode. Like always, we're going to close it out with the Tommy Truth,

which is a little slice of wisdom from me to you, that can help guide you in whatever you're striving towards right now. When it comes to mental health, clarity, the mindset, working out eating right, I didn't have any idea the effect it would have on success. When I started focusing on me and really doing the right things when it comes to my habits, whether that's cold plunge, getting in the sauna, working out harder, long walks, reflection,

day by day, night by night, over and over, and staying committed to myself, it changed everything. I became a morning person. I started doing the hard things first. I started enjoying each and every day like it was a fun token. I started really to look at my life like I was made to be here. The chance of me are one in 400 trillion that I made to be on this earth and I'm taking advantage of each and every day.

And I feel like a bull. I can take on anything and I'm ready. Whatever you throw at me. My mind is clear. I'm focused and I'm ready to take on the world. And I'm very, very excited because this is the first time in my life I felt that I'm invincible. And that's it, guys. to you next week.