The Mindset Mentor - Defeating LAZINESS with Ex Navy SEAL Commander | Rich Diviney | The Expert Series

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

This week's guest, Rich Diviney, shares stories from the Navy SEALs and reveals ways to DEFEAT your laziness. -- Thank you to our sponsors: Manscaped: Go to Manscaped.com and use promo code: DIAL to receive 20% OFF + FREE shipping! Grove: Go to Grove.CO/ROB to choose a FREE gift with your first order of $30 or more. AthleticGreens: Simply visit AthleticGreens.com/DIAL and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 FREE travel packs today! Indeed: Visit Indeed.com/ROB for your $75 credit! FelixGray: Go to FelixGrayGlasses.com/DIAL for the BEST Blue Light glasses on the market! AuraFrames: Visit AuraFrames.com and use code: MINDSET to receive $30 OFF of your new Carver WiFi frames! -- Rob Dial @robdialjr Rich Diviney @rich_diviney Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

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And if you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button since you never miss another episode. Today, I'm joined by Rich Deviney, who is a retired Navy SEAL commander, spent 21 years in the Navy SEALs with 13 overseas deployments. And I'm excited to dive in and talk about his new book. It is Attributes, The 25 Drivers of Optimal Performance. And I'm excited to talk about human performance, optimal performance, and more than anything else, what I'm really excited to dive into is just the mindset behind everything that you've done. And some of the peak people that you've seen, but also optimal people that you've seen that perform the best, the most consistently. So welcome to the Mindset Mentor Podcast. It's a

pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back in person with people. Yeah, I know, right? It's been a while. That's what we were saying is we're coming from Texas, so it's kind of normal. And then we came over here and we're both in LA

and we're like, this is, it's a little bit different out here than it is back home. I agree. I'm from Virginia Beach. And Virginia has been pretty good. We haven't, nothing's been too extreme. So LA has been on certainly at one end of the response. Yeah. I would say LA is on one side and then Texas is on the opposite side. Probably. Yeah. So, but we're getting back to normal. But I'd love to dive into,

before we dive into the questions and everything, I'd love for everyone to know a little bit about you, your story, and then also what made you decide to put this book out. Yeah. I grew up in Connecticut, and I grew up with three other siblings, one twin brother. My dad was a private pilot who would take us flying on the weekends. And so my twin brother and I loved flying from very early ages and decided we wanted to be jet pilots. And of course, the only place to do that was, as far as we knew, were the Air Force and the Navy. But the Navy guys landed on ships, so that's, like, really pretty badass, right? So the Navy it was.

We kind of focused on that. This was before Top Gun came out. We were really focused on that. And it was really the first Gulf War in the 90s, early 90s, and I was still in high school, and I came upon an article that was outlining all the spec ops forces in the 90s early 90s and i was still in high school and i i came up on an article that was outlining all the spec ops forces in the military so marine force recon army rangers green berets and seals and such and um and noticed as i as i read about them that these seal guys did everything

they were like in the in the snow in the desert in the jungle and they were underwater which was like i was a water rat i loved grew up on the coast so anything about the water i loved and i was just like man that's really cool um and so so when it came down to i was you know we both went to purdue and i was i was navy rtc and when it came down to selecting pilot or seals i kind of said to myself well i didn't want to be a pilot and and look over and wonder if i could be a seal so yeah uh so i picked seals unfortunately i got i got um selected fortunately i made it through training and then yeah spent just over just under 21 years over 20 years from 96 till the end of 16 um to in the teams and obviously very kinetic period did a lot of deployments overseas ran training which is really where i began to get very fascinated with uh defining

and articulating human performance at a very elemental level because again we all know and we've all heard that the true us comes out in times of challenge stress and uncertainty and i was like okay what's that true us well i had this laboratory instead of which i saw the true us all the time and um and my job as running training was to effectively articulate that, which has really got me keyed in. And then, you know, when I retired, I was speaking about leadership and high-performing teams. And I'd get constantly from organizations these questions about dream teams. And, hey, we put together the team of the best this, the best that. And they were good for a little while.

But as soon as things turned uncertain or crazy or unpredictable crazy or unpredictable the teams turned toxic and why was that and and for me the answer was obvious i said you were looking at the wrong things you were looking at skills versus attributes which is why i said you know i i could probably write a book on this i could probably write the book on attributes which i figured i i i should and i did so that's how it came to be yeah it's kind of like the phrase we've ever heard that you know if you take an orange and you squeeze it you get orange juice and that's what's inside yeah if you take a human you put them under pressure you find out what's inside yeah it's kind of like the coal and as we squeeze coal and put it under pressure you get

the diamond so what is that diamond because there's a diamond in all of us um the the the key is uh every diamond every diamond is unique, right? And so I'm really very fascinated with this idea that we are all, I like to use automobiles as the analogy. We're all automobiles, but some of us are Jeeps, some of us are Ferraris, some of us are SUVs. And there's no judgment because the Jeep can do things Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can't do. But the key is, can you lift your own hood? Can you start to figure out your own engine a little bit because you may be a Jeep that's running on a Ferrari track or a Ferrari that's running on a Jeep track and again

there's nothing wrong with that either if you choose to do it but you can at least start to identify some pain points to make your experience make your journey a little bit more uh successful if you know that you're if I'm if I choose if I decide that I'm a Jeep engine running with Ferraris, then I can start to do things to my engine to help me run better with Ferraris. Or I can say, no, I don't like this track at all. That's why I'm unsatisfied. I can find the Jeep track and do that. So part of that discovery process, I think, begins with this idea of attributes. Do you think it's better to going with what you said? If you're a Jeep, instead of going on a Ferrari track, do you find that's better for the average person to know themselves at a deep level and then just work on

those attributes they have versus trying to bring in skills or attributes that might not necessarily be their strongest points? Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't think I'd ever put myself in the position of telling people what was good or what was bad i think i think we all have an an incredible gift i mean human beings in fact i think we're the only species as far as we know that and we're separated by this idea that we can unlike any other species again as far as we know uh imagine and visualize what does not exist what is not there uh what could be potential basically um and so so that gift allows us to choose things and go in directions that uh that otherwise may not make sense at the time and so so i i would say to anybody who has a has a goal uh audacious or otherwise um first ask yourself why you want because because the why is

going to very powerful in your in your ability to kind of persevere towards that goal and it's going to be uh instrumental in whether or not you're happy once you get there, if the purpose is clear. But if it is clear, then go for it. If it means you're a Jeep that has to tweak yourself so you can run with Ferraris, then do that. Or if it means you're a Jeep that has to find the right Jeep track, do that. You talked about visualization, and I was going to hold this for later, but now we're going to go into it. So you, you talked about another podcast episode that your mom bought you a book when you were younger.

Yeah. And it was actually about, you know, visualization, the law of attraction and all of that. And, you know, it's funny to hear somebody who is,

you know, ex Navy seal talk about visualization, law of attraction, but I talk about all the time, but in it, but I try to, I know it's, I know what type of audience I have. So it's like some of them can be woo-woo-y and some of them can be very analytical because I can dance on both sides of that when I speak. I'm curious with you, what did that book do for you? And then as going into becoming a SEAL,

what was that like? Did you use the stuff that you learned from that book when you were going through everything 100 and i and i i'm i'm someone who was enamored with the woohoo when i first learned about it uh but but just because i'm a skeptic by nature and i really love understanding and breaking down why things logically happen i i was dissatisfied with it even though it was working i was dissatisfied with just that with the inability to explain and so as i started really getting into neurology and neuroscience and i say getting into i was just fascinated with it like you i just read and and listen as much as i can hang out with neuroscientists as much as i can um i recognize one of the things i did recognize is just our human systems you know we take in about 11 million bits of information per second through our five

senses um and so our brains are automatically doing a massive amount of deselection all the time in other so things are happening to us that our brains like you don't even have to notice that for sure and and and for example like the bottom of your shoes right now the bottom of your feet in your shoes right now until i just mentioned that you weren't noticing it because our brains like you don't need to notice that right now our frontal lobes only process our conscious minds only process about 2500 bits out of that 11 million um and so what i realized in talking to neuroscientists and kind of reading about it and having discussions and thinking on it is that is that when we when we actively or proactively place an idea uh whether it be a thought a goal or or or even just a something to

focus on into that into our brains what we're doing is we're telling our conscious minds out of the 11 million bits uh notice whatever you know bring to my attention throw into that that pool of 2500 something you know anything that relates to that and so we the example of this is for any of us who've bought a car okay and as soon as we buy the car we start seeing it everywhere right um and it's not because the car suddenly increased in sales and everybody bought it when we bought it it's because it's because it's front it'd be we we basically told our brains notice that for sure um and so when we set a goal and we visualize something um what we're doing is we're tweaking our our system and we're tweaking tweaking our brain to say hey notice things that have to do with that and so this is where i think a lot of serendipity happens i met this

person suddenly this person appeared right yeah well these signals i think these cues are all around us all the time we don't know what form they're in because oftentimes we're not noticing them and so i think uh i think a reasonable explanation for me for the law of attraction is if you set a goal if you set the intent you're you're hacking into your your human system and saying out of 11 million bits out there notice everything that has to do with this and bring it to my attention yeah yeah there's there's two sides of it it's like does the universe actually bring it into into and am i actually attracting this or for the analytical person it's just, I'm going to tell my brain exactly what I want it to focus on. And it's going to find that

there's the car's a great example. I had a, an example that happened about six months ago. I had a, a friend from middle school that I hadn't seen in probably 18 years passed away. And I was looking through his photos on Facebook and I saw an old friend of mine that I haven't seen since middle school as well, Ryan. And this is back in Florida where I used to live. I live in Austin, Texas now. So I see him, I'm like, damn, I wonder what's going on with Ryan.

I haven't seen him in so long. Next day I'm at the coffee shop and I'm working and literally I see a guy walk by with his dog and I was like, oh my God, that's Ryan. And then he walked in and walked back out and I was like, that's not Ryan. And it still blew me away because I know how the reticular activity system works. And I was like, that's not Ryan. And it still blew me away because I know how the reticular activate system works. And I'm like, holy shit, it does actually work that way.

So it's almost like setting your, I always say you get in your car, if you want to go somewhere you've never been before, you just set your GPS. So it's almost like you wake up every single morning, you just set your GPS for what it is that you want and tell your brain or the universe, whatever it is, or both of them together, this is what I want. want but most people they don't focus on what they want they focus on what they

don't want right and then they can't figure out why they keep getting more of what they don't want that's right in other words they're they're they're pre-loading into their system what to notice right because i've had the i've had the opposite happen where i've thought of someone and then like a day later they show up i see them right i mean so and it's actually them right so so i you know again i would love for there to be some science around you know those other instances where it seems like the universe is bringing us things because that's happened to me many times as well too um but ultimately if we take a very broad uh view of this which i think you'll agree with if you wake up in the morning and just set the intent to notice positivity uh notice you'll be grateful so this is why this is why gratitude is such a

powerful uh feeling and emotion because a well a it's neurologically dosing you with right with just massively good neurochemicals and neurotransmitters and and hormones um but b it's making it's it's causing you to focus on really really good positive things you know and um and we all know we've all had these experiences where our day starts out shitty and the day just stays shitty right you know um and that's because we've we've primed ourselves you know uh and or the day starts out great and it's a great day you know um it's because we've primed ourselves and and we've we've set these conditions of what to notice. Because if you say 11 million bits per second and then do the math, there's a lot of shit coming in one day of

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watching The Secret, reading books and realizing that, oh man, if I just set myself up to look for the things that are positive in my life, I just find more stuff to be positive. Yes, I totally agree. And so I'm curious, you know, when you become a Navy SEAL and you go through Bud's and Hell Week, which has become super famous, everyone thinks, which is rightfully so, because people think, how can somebody do that? Like that's living on their edge for five days straight. Right. Five days and you get like, what, three or four hours of sleep?

Yeah. Do you find that when you were in that moment that you were visualizing the end of it or that you were telling yourself positive stuff? Like, did you use this when you're going through what they call absolute hell week? Yeah, the bad news is absolutely not none of it yeah you just get through it so there's a difference between in the moment of challenge stress and uncertainty when things are really bad this is why inspirational quotes are awesome

but they're not necessarily transferable to the moment you need tools you need you there need to be things you can do in the moment because and i you know guys used to tell me uh when guys wanted to be seals i used to talk to guys about it um and i remember giving a uh i was on a ship i was a navy ship and some of the sailors were like really interested and so they had a gathering of like five or six or something guys who wanted to go to buds and the first thing i told them was i think you guys are going to realize something is that is that when you're actually doing the job of a Navy SEAL, there's no cool soundtrack in the background going. I mean, it's not cool.

There's nothing cool about it. It usually sucks. It's you're cold, you're wet, you're dirty. I mean, when you're diving, it's always at night. It's always in shitty conditions. It's usually in harbors, which are usually just dirty and murky anyway. So it's not as sexy as a commercial for recruiting?

No, and when you're jumping out of airplanes, you've got so much gear that you're really, and you're at 22,000 feet, for example, it's three degrees per thousand feet. So the temperature drops three degrees per thousand feet. So at 22,000 feet, if you're getting in the bird at 60 degrees, it's a nice balmy LA 60 degrees, right? At 22,000, it's sub-zero, right?

So it's freezing. And oftentimes, and you're stacked with gear you have oxygen you have uh face shields all that stuff and because the temperature change is so drastic a lot of times that your your face mask frosts over right so so you're going up so it's just you just you almost laugh at how shitty it is sometimes um so uh by the way humor we can talk about that how humor is a hack to getting through bad stuff, right?

I've got that, I love that hack. Yeah. But no, I think, I think you have to, you have to

preload yourself with vision, purpose, positive thinking, inspiration, whatever that is, that gets you

into the moment. But once you're in the moment, it actually, there's is, that gets you into the moment. But once you're in the moment, it actually, there's something more that has to happen. You have to be able to, I mean, there's a process. You have to be able to take in the environment and ask yourself some questions about the environment that allow you to move through. For example, the first question is, what about this can I control okay and then once you ask that and you can answer it you say okay i'm going to move to that and then you move to that and then once that's done and so when you do that by the way you get a dopamine reward nor transmitter um once you hit that you ask it again

and you say what can i control now this is how you by the way so i talk often about moving through fear i know you're going to see huberman one of the things huberman i talk about is what makes up fear fear is the combination of anxiety plus uncertainty right and you can have one or the other without having fear you know you can have uncertainty without or you can have anxiety without uncertainty that might be i'm nervous for a presentation that's coming up um it's to the boss he can be mercurial you know but i i know the stuff i know you know i know it's not a big deal i'm just a little nervous okay there's uncertainty there without anxiety you can be anxious you can be um no that's anxiety without uncertainty you can be uncertain without being anxious okay that's every kid on christmas

eve right there's no fear there if you add the two if you if you combine the two you start to get fear and this is where challenge stress and and and kind of strife start to happen you can buy those down by by buying down either or either one or both okay you can buy down anxiety through physiological mean anxiety is largely internally focused it's an internal response so you can do that through breathing visual tools that he will talk about um You can do it through visualization if you have time. So you can bring yourself out of or bring yourself down from an autonomic hijack or an autonomic response of anxiety. Or you can buy down uncertainty, okay?

To buy down uncertainty, you have to take your environment, you have to begin to do what I call chunk it, okay? And you have to ask yourself some questions and answer those questions. First thing is out of this environment, out of this thing, this whole thing, what do I understand? Okay. Those get those answers. Okay. Out of that list, what can I control? All right. Once I get that, okay, I'm going to control this. I'm going to move to that. It's almost like setting your horizon, really move to that, get a reward, ask again, move to that, get a reward, ask again. And you step through that. And then, so there's a, you know, for those of your audience who might not know

the specifics of Hell Week, right? You start Hell Week on a Sunday afternoon. You break out for a Sunday afternoon and you go until the following Friday. That's when they secure you. And you sleep maybe two or three hours, if you're lucky. When I was, by the way, a funny story about Hell Week. When they gave us our first sleep period,

it was like Wednesday. And I remember them saying, okay, get in the tents, lay down. You know, you didn't know, you weren't, you didn't trust what was going to happen, week when they gave us our first sleep um period it was like it's like wednesday and i remember them saying okay get in the tents lay down you know you didn't know you weren't you didn't trust what was going to happen but you said we all laid down and you after about 10 minutes you realize oh they're they're going away for a while right and um and so everybody around me starts falling asleep and i can't fall asleep my legs are killing me you know because you know how when you're up and moving for a long time your blood starts yeah rushing back and it's like itchy and you know my legs were hurting so bad i couldn't fall asleep i was like gosh what the hell and so finally i'm like okay so i got up and i leave the tents and i

go around to the cage area where there's the bathrooms and these two bronchers the bronchers are students who are just like keeping watch you know just make sure students you know aren't wandering off into the surf zone or whatever and they run up to to me and say, hey, dude, what's going on? I was like, I don't know. I can't sleep. And they're like, don't quit. I was like, I didn't say I wanted to quit. I just don't.

I can't sleep. I was like, well, don't quit. I said, I told you, I don't want to quit, right? So anyway, if you're lucky, you get three hours of sleep. I think I got back and maybe was able to get a half hour. But there's a saying when you are in BUDS training, it's kind of a truism too, is that if you think about Friday of Hell Week on Monday, you'll never make it. And the guys who do never do because it's too much. It's kind of like if you have a really audacious goal and you're focused too much on that end thing in the moment and you realize how far it is and how much work it has to do.

You may give up at that point you know so so i think there's a there's a real value in not um focusing on the goal on the on the end state too much depending on where you are in the in the in the pathway you know one of the things i also say is that you have to be very resolute in your outcome but be flexible in the approach and that means know where you're going, but just be flexible. The rock climbers are great examples of this, right? They look at the face of a cliff and they say, okay, top, that's where I'm going. And they may even map out a kind of visualize a plan of how they think they're going to get there based on what they see. As soon as they start climbing though, they all recognize and all admit that that's going to change, right right they're looking for the best handholds and footholds and what they might have thought they

seen as a good one might be a shadow so they have to move so that the pathway will change and sometimes they'll find that they actually have to move like right and down yeah to get to the next best handhold or foothold which means they're moving away from their goal yeah to find a better way to the top which means sometimes when we're going towards our goals, it'll feel like we're moving away. And we have to be flexible. We have to be adaptable to be able to do that. Yeah. Yes.

You kind of talk about, you know, the dopamine reward systems, which is important because I find it so many, so often working with, I've worked with tens of thousands of people is that they have these big lofty goals that are four or five, six years in the future, but then they give up because it's too far away. Like you're saying from, from Sunday to Friday, it's just too far away. But when you chunk it up, what you're saying, we can go deeper on it is the dopamine reward system is you might say, okay, we're in the water right now and this is terrible, but I'm going to get done with the water eventually. And then it's, you, you get done with the water and there's a little bit of dopamine that's released in your brain. That's like, Hey, you with the water eventually. And then you get done with the water, and there's a little bit of dopamine that's released in your brain that's like,

hey, you did it. Congratulations. And it makes you a little bit more driven to continue going. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly right. And just to relate it to something more every day, I mean, anybody who's losing weight, we all know that that process is extremely difficult.

And when you start it, start on January 1st or whatever, right? By January 5th, you're going to look in the mirror. It's not going to look like you lost much, right? It's going to be painful getting to January 5th. In fact, sometimes those are the most painful days, those first few days. And you will look no different on January 5th than you did on January 1st, most likely, if you're doing it in a healthy way, right? So if you give up then because, oh, this is not,

it's not showing anything, it's not looking any different, you're lost, you know? The person who has never run in their lives and they're overweight and they want to run a marathon, you know, to think about a marathon at that moment is not a good idea. What you need to do is say, okay, well moment is not a good idea what you need to do is say okay well what's the what's a good goal well maybe it's to buy some running shoes okay that's goal right i get those running shoes now i'm gonna i'm gonna put the running shoes

by the side of the bed when i get up tomorrow morning i'm gonna put them on that's all i'm gonna do right and then the next morning i'm gonna put them on and walk out to the mailbox and then maybe a week later i'm gonna jog it out to the mailbox or whatever it is but these are it's basically this whole adage of eating the elephant one bite at a time or, you know, or chunking it up. But it's neurologically actually true because you're setting a reward system for yourself. It has to be subjective because the goals have to have meaning to you. It can't be given to you necessarily.

They have to have meaning to you. So if you set something too small, it's not going to work. I run, I try to run once or twice a week. So if I tell myself, I need to get meaning to you. So if you set something too small, it's not going to work. I try to run once or twice a week. So if I tell myself, I need to get back into running, I'm going to put the shoes by the door, I need to do a little bit more than that. There has to be a little bit of challenge, a little bit of ability to say, cool, okay, I did something new, different novel, and it felt like I moved towards something. Yeah.

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And that, that process of just falling in love with those little teeny tiny things and doing them consistently will eventually get you the end goal. But I feel like most people, what they do is they try to focus on the end goal and go, I'm like you said, I'm never going to make it to a marathon. Right. Or they look at themselves and they say, oh, I've, I've lost no weight in the past five days. Yeah. This, I guess it's just my genes. It's my family. Yeah. But in reality, what, what they should be doing is saying, well, at least I showed up for myself and I worked out today. At least I decided to eat something healthy when really what I wanted was just a pizza. Yeah. And it's just about finding little things to celebrate yourself as often as possible

to fall in love with the process of becoming who you want to be versus just getting to the end goal. Yeah. And I would also recommend, because I've been guilty of not doing this, jotting down what you're doing. Because if you can go back, if you see where you started, if you write down, hey, to day one, day one, I put my shoes on and walk to the front door. And that's day one. And then you just do that over a day. Three months later, four months later, even if the goal you're looking to achieve is a year away, you'll still look back and be like, oh my gosh, look how far, look where I started and look where I am now, right? So to see what you've done also.

So, you know, some people can do that through journaling. You know, it's funny. Journaling is the one thing that I highly recommend that I don't do. Really? Because I don't do it. I always say, oh, I should do it. And I, you know, I just never, maybe that's why I wrote a book just to get some of my ideas down on paper finally. But yeah, journaling is actually a great process. I think if you just take some time at the end of the day and just jot down, hey, what did I, what did I accomplish today? What happened? What did

I learn? You know, what, what can I be grateful for? I think that's a really powerful process. It's a, it's a cool tool that I should probably start doing, but I definitely recommend. Yeah. So, so I'm curious, cause you were talking about fear just a minute ago and I have a friend who, uh, he went down and lived in it with the native Brazilian tribe in Brazil, like five days into the jungle. Like they don't have cars, they don't have any of that stuff. Right. And he had to walk around. He was down there for 40 days, did a whole spiritual journey with them. And he had to walk around the machete at all points in time. Cause he's like, if you see a Jaguar, it's too late. It's already been seen you for a really long time. The one thing that he said

is he said at that point in time, I realized the difference between what he calls a primal fear, which means there's some sort of death attached to it. And then intellectual fear, which is like judgment, worry about enough money that's in a bank account, all that different type of stuff. Do you notice that when you are in those situations that that's true where you can tell the difference of when you're in situations, you're really cold in buds, or maybe you have something that's going on in mission, there is no thought of like any of the intellectual fears popping up in your head, is there? No, you're right. I think it's very basic. You get to have a very basic stuff. But what's interesting is a lot of the guys you talk to because i'm one of them who get through seal training will say at some point for example when you're freezing in the third serve zone said to themselves during training i mean they can't

they can't kill me so it's not like they're allowed to kill me so they got to end this at some point right and i literally remember saying that i saw it was so it was so miserable i was like well i mean they're not going to kill us they're not allowed to right so yeah so uh so so you almost um you almost try to make intellectual what might feel primal at least in that moment because you know it's real uh or you know it's it's not necessarily real um which is interesting because it's a great it's a great distinction that i had not considered so i'm actually glad you brought it up because when you get into combat you then have to make a little bit of a transition but not overly so because because i think if you get i think if you get too focused on the primal part that's when your amygdala your starts to kick in you know because

you because we want to survive that's all we want to to do. And so I think one of the things SEALs are very, very good at, and spec operators or anybody who kind of, you know, first responders who run into danger are very good at is compartmentalizing away some of that primal fear so that you may move, you know, not considering. And listen, you jump out of an airplane at 22,000 feet, there's many, many things that go wrong. and other than understanding my parachute malfunction procedures if something happens i didn't think about any of them because it doesn't it wasn't it wasn't really the time to do it to to to go down that spiral was not productive i needed to focus on on the job getting it done you know certainly i was prepared but uh but so i think there's a

there's a level of compartmentalization that actually is very effective in being able to set aside even a little bit of the primal fear. In day-to-day life, however, we have to recognize that most of us, and I count myself in this category now that I'm not in this, I'm retired,

I'm just living day-to-day life, very, very few of our fears are even approaching primal. It's almost all intellectual. And so that's what we have to recognize is that it really is, you know, what is it? False evidence, all false evidence appearing real, which is an acronym. It really is kind of that because you're placing things

and perspectives and judgments around it that I think it'd be healthy to interrogate once in a while. So let's go back to BUDS because I know know isn't it like 90 of people drop out yeah something like that what's what do you feel is the difference between someone who stays in and someone who drops out in the middle of the five days yeah if i had that answer we would uh we would patent it and uh and then go sell it to seal training did you notice anything as you're with those people, though, of like, oh, this guy's about to drop? Well, there's sometimes I notice. And so this is where we could talk about humor.

So first of all, compartmentalization. If you can compartmentalize, the guys who make it through can all compartmentalize. That's an absolute. So give me an example of what that would look like. In the moment where you're going through Hell Week, what is compartmentalizing that look like? That's like, okay, I'm running for hour whatever with this boat on my head and every part of my body is aching and I'm miserably hot, right? And I say to myself, okay, well, pretty soon I'll be in the cold water and I'll feel better, you know? Right.

And then I'm in the cold water freezing my ass off, you know, and I'm like, oh my God, I can't move. Well, soon I'll be drowning the boat. That's compartmentalization. That's basically, or like basically or like hey i'm just gonna make it to the next meal that's my next you know i'll just get there it's it's kind of it's almost that ability to move the horizon yeah um it's it's the ability to i mean in the book i describe it very uh uh kind of precisely and that is from a mental from from a brain aspect, what it is, it's the ability to assess the information that's coming in. Okay, assess it's relevant. So out of all this information, what is relevant to me in this moment? Then from that list, prioritize, okay, from this list of what's relevant, what order do I need to put on it, put it in? And then from that order, focus on the top thing and forget about everything else for a moment that's compartmentalization you know so so in a um in a like a environment like hell week which is kind of extreme where the idea is you don't necessarily want to focus on what you're doing in the moment you want to focus on maybe one other thing beyond that you're saying okay what's

relevant well you know what's all this information well yeah i'm running blah blah it's hot all that stuff but but let me let me prioritize the way i focus i'm going to focus on the cold water over there that i'm probably going to be in you know i don't know just focus on that right that's so the compartmentalization you know from a psychologist standpoint we've we've often heard compartmentalization um negatively described as this um this act where people kind of put put away things that they shouldn't that they don't want to focus on at the detriment of their own psyche for sure which happens by the way and it happens especially when you're really good at compartmentalization but ultimately the the the effective use of compartmentalization is the ability to focus on exactly what you need in

the moment um at the and and and ignore everything else you have to ignore, you know. And to the extent that you're not even emotional about it, right? This is like you see the Hollywood movies of, you know, people in gunfights and the buddy next to the star, you know, gets killed or dropped. And he spends the next five minutes, you know, kneeling over the body, crying and mourning during the gunfight, right? That doesn't happen, right? You don't have time to do that. You basically have to win the fight minutes you know kneeling over the body crying and mourning during the gunfight right that doesn't happen right you don't have time to do that um you basically have to win the fight you know before so that's effective compartmentalization whatever happens whatever happened whatever happening i need to focus on what what's important in the now and then once that's complete i move on that's that's what compartmentalization is so let's go back because

now i got a question on that there's so many things i got questions on but let's go back to to watching someone who's you think is going to be dropping out soon so the difference between someone who is and this is the humor story which i love between someone who you can tell they're probably going to make it versus someone you're like this guy's on his way out yeah what did you notice the difference between them well okay so so from a compartmentalization standpoint if you if you saw someone just in the way they were moving or the way they were looking not focusing on the moment they were kind of like you know but it's very hard that's very hard to see because that's usually a really mental exercise right so so you don't guys just quit you know humor becomes a much more visual way to see this because one of the things that every high-performing team

and human has is the ability to laugh when things get tough um because well let me give you this story when i was in hell week you know i was in the surf zone and freezing there for a long time during surf torture and surf torture is you you link your you link arms with your with your classmates you you march out into the surf arms with your with your classmates you you march out into the surf zone until about knee high turn around you lay back the water crashes over you and recedes and it's the coldest thing i mean anybody here in southern california knows that the water out here is not really that warm especially in november when we're going through um so it's really cool a lot of people quit and and during my hell hell week as as most hell weeks this happens the instructors

pulled up a van on the beach and got out with a megaphone and said okay anybody who quits i uh we have hot chocolate blankets and donuts for anybody who quits right now right um and of course it's like the survivor thing yeah so so a lot of people like oh that's a um and i remember the guy next to me. It's funny. This guy next to me, he was just at my house this weekend. You know, we hadn't seen him in a few years. And we were remembering this story. The guy next to me yells at the top of his lungs, hey, do you have any chocolate glaze donuts?

Because if you don't have any chocolate glaze, I'm not quitting. Okay. And I remember him laughing and I burst out laughing. Yeah. And at that moment, I was like was like okay this is fine right and i but i looked over my left right and the guy to my left was stone-faced i mean he hadn't even heard the joke you know he was just he was lost in his pain i said to myself i remember saying to myself this guy's not gonna make it you know and sure enough within a minute a minute or two he quit but what happened there what humor does is when when we laugh it releases three chemicals

two neurotransmitters one hormone dopamine which is obviously we know feel good chemical this is good keep going serotonin which is kind of um feeling of safety um bonding you know uh here we'll be able to elaborate all it does a lot of things but generally feels good um and then oxytocin which is known as the love hormone okay oxytocin is actually a hormone but actually moves in many cases not as fast but faster than normal hormones usually neurotransmitters are they well they are they're very rapid in our system they get released rapidly and they dissipate rapidly hormones take longer to enter our system but they also last longer um oxytocin is actually in between you know it moves fairly rapidly um so you kind of feel it and you get it when you um acts of uh of love and affection and

gratitude hugging shaking hands people look at their babies a lot of times that's all oxytocin so so you get all three of those chemicals just by laughing you know actually did i say serotonin i'm wrong about serotonin it's dopamine it's endorphins and it's oxytocin okay uh serotonin is for uh for something else and endorphins are painkillers endorphins are painkillers right that's the humans the human beings natural opiates right so dopamine you get flooded with dopamine so when that when my buddy made his joke right i got i laugh i get flooded with dopamine this is good keep going you're fine uh endorphins hey it doesn't actually feel that bad i'm getting i'm masking my pain i'm getting some opiate hits and then um and then oxytocin we're bonded we're in this together yeah all three of those things and so it's a hack

laughing is a hack into kind of keeping going it's it's a it's it's it can help push us through these these bad times because we're flooding our body with these rebuilding good chemicals. This is why you hear cancer patients who say, you know, when I was going through my treatments, I decided I was just going to watch funny movies, you know, and just laugh a lot longer. And it worked. I began to recover. The phrase laughter is the best medicine is not actually just a phrase, right? It's actually a truism because it releases these chemicals. So, yeah, in the cases where guys couldn't laugh, you would say, yeah, this guy is not going to – if you can't laugh, you know, this guy is not going to do well.

And then you see that translate. It's actually – it's a brilliant strategy because it translates as you move through your career. Because I can remember the things I missed the most about the teams were those times of where we were i mean laughing so hard we were in tears yeah and the environment might have been miserable around us but we were just yeah we were joking around is there any is there any moments you can remember where it was just you shouldn't have been laughing because it was that scary but something popped up was there is there always like a kind of a class clown that's in, in each of the groups? And did you know about this before? Or is this after you got out? You're like, oh, this now makes sense with the chemicals and stuff. Or is it when you were in a group,

you realize like, and you're, you know, commanding over these people that if somebody's cracking a joke, it's not like, Hey, shut up, be serious. It's like, Hey, this is probably actually good for everybody at this moment. Yeah, no, I mean, mean you you recognize how good it feels because you i mean buds is the is the is the where this all begins i mean no one makes it through buds without laughing no one you know so so that's where it starts and even the instructors will crack jokes so you realize it's a culture but i think there's a difference between cracking a joke um so everybody feels better versus cracking a joke uh and this it's not when there was never a time i say this is not the time to crack jokes because no one cracked jokes at those times because that would

mean well i'm like we're talking about the way we're supposed to do the operation or you know hey we need to understand this step so that's you don't crack a joke that's like serious stuff no but no when i mean when when things are bad you always you always wanted and appreciated someone cracking a joke you really did um i think that was that was largely recognized but i don't think this is something i think this is a human thing to be honest with you i think this has happened since you know since we could all begin to communicate as we were we were cracking jokes with each other making each other laugh so um there's a story that reminds me of just going back to how you know humans in hell and they've

So, um, there's a story that reminds me of just going back to how, you know, humans in hell and they've been using this is there was a guy who went over and he was, uh, he lived with some tribe in Africa and he's like, man, I'll tell you what, they were the funniest people I've ever been around. Like they would be in the middle of an intense hunt and just one guy would just rip a fart and everybody would just laugh because of the fact that it was just, they'd be in this intense thing. There'd be a line that was off to the corner. One guy would rip one and then they'd all just start laughing about it but i could see how

10 000 20 000 years ago that could actually be part of the thing where even if they didn't have communication that's yeah it's the same way we do yeah it bonds yeah i mean again yeah this is one of the reasons why we we as human beings look for a sense of humor as one of the qualities it's one of the top qualities either sex looks for in in a partner is is can this person make me laugh can this person laugh because we know what that signals to us is that when the times get rough they will be there and they will lift us up or they will help or they will or i'll be able to help lift them up it's why it's such an important quality for human beings in just the the the getting too. I think it's, yeah, it's largely a species thing.

Interesting. Talk to me about any self-talk that you used to have when things like this were going on and you were in something intense. Is this something that you would consciously try to have some self-talk of like, this is gonna go well, this is the way that I want it, this is gonna go the way I want it to?

Like, did you have strong internal self-talk when stuff was going on? I did, but I never, I tried not to specify the moment because I knew the moment was sometimes me climbing sideways and down. What I would often do if I had the time, if it were a more, a longer duration challenge, such as all of Bud's, right? And I'm just like, again, I mean, I'm only halfway through, right? I would remind myself what my goal was. I do self-talk. Hey, this is, I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be an ABC.

I do that type of stuff, right? But I would never, I would really, I'd never, I guess a couple of times I tried to, this is going to go well. And that doesn't work very well. Because sometimes it doesn't go well. Right. And the key is not to back yourself into a corner where immediate success is necessary. Because if it doesn't come, then, gosh, you're worse off than you were.

I think it's better to, again, understand, be resolute in the outcome. I know this outcome. I know where I'm headed so that when things don't go well, when things seem like I'm moving away from my goal, I still know I'm going to get there. I might not know how. It might not feel like that. But I still know I'm going to go there. Was there ever a moment where you're like, I don't know if I'm going to get out of this? No. I can't recall a moment where i thought that because i think um well depending well certainly in the seal world in the combat world that type of

thought i think can be a can start a negative spiral right in the wrong direction uh because that means you're focusing on the wrong thing you know uh it's you always have to say hey i'm i will i will find a way i mean this is let's just solve the problem you know let's let's work through this so i don't i don't ever remember doing that and i've i've uh i've tried not to do that throughout my my life um now that's not to say there were times i didn't just feel shitty and miserable right and feel like man i this just feels bad you know um i there were times i can say gosh i don't know i don't know what the way ahead is you know i just don't i feel like i'm not i don't know i but i never relinquished my outcome you know i always said i'll get there

but man it doesn't feel like i'm getting there you know so i think that's important too yeah when we're going back to the the the original question I had with compartmentalization before we dove back into fear, it's obviously extremely important to be able to do that when you're in those moments. But when you're coming back to civilian life and you can realize that there's some aspects of that that are probably not good for being a civilian or relationships that you have. Do you find that there's any tools that you use to be able to, I mean, it's got to be so trained into you after 21 years to be able to kind of untrain that from yourself?

Man, what a great question. That is difficult. It really is too, because it's, so this gets into attributes and it gets into this idea that we can develop attributes um so in other words if you're low on something you can make a choice to say i want to develop that right you can't train it like a skill because you can't you can't be taught and it can't you can't teach it right but you can say hey i want to be more patient so i'm going to proactively work on my patients and I'm going to proactively throw myself into environments that test and tease out my patients, right? So I'm going to go

drive on the highway at rush hour, right? Or I'm going to pick the longest line of the grocery store. I'm going to do that deliberately. The same thing is required if you're trying to come down off an attribute. So coming back from, you know, I was always vigilant, but I was certainly, I've certainly been hypervigilant. Now, I don't think I'll ever not to be hypervigilant. You know, that's the thing. But what I can do is I can deliberately tell myself when I'm walking through the streets in New York City, you don't have to worry about the people right behind you.

You can relax a little bit, you know. Maybe in New York City, my knee might... I took a glance. My knee can't... I did a scan and i'm fine right you know one skip but i don't need to keep on scanning right um so i think there's a deliberacy in your ability to relax and that's very difficult this is i think that this is where a lot of the seeds of ptsd happen with most uh service members is they can't turn it off and

they they're hyped up and they're amped up in areas that they shouldn't be. And that's very, very stressful to the nervous system. In fact, even sleep, my own sleep issues have come from hypervigilance. I kept on waking up. I slept so lightly and I kept on waking up. And I'd wake up at 3 in the morning. I couldn't fall back to sleep. And when I finally got checked out, they're like, yeah, your brain is not turning off properly. You're just too hypervigilant.

It comes from directly from all my time overseas when my brain didn't turn off you know so uh so it's it's difficult it takes it takes work and it may even require professional help so if you're having trouble with that doing it on your own go seek help because there are people who can help you you know know, so. For sure. Yeah. I'm curious if you and Andrew Heberman ever talk about PTSD and if you guys, you know, with how many people come back and have the issues that come back, I mean, rightfully so from the way that stuff they've gone through, stuff that they've seen and they come back and it's, they can't turn it off. I have a friend who didn't sleep for more than like an hour for a year and a half and he ended up just having a,

you know, he had mold in his place. He didn't realize, and it set off a certain part of his brain, but he would walk down the streets and he thought that the buildings were going to fall on him and he just couldn't fall asleep. And every time he'd start to fall asleep, his brain would wake him back up, which I could imagine is, could be, you know, part of PTSD. Do you guys ever talk about that or how that, you know, is there, is there research going on, do you know, around that and how maybe they can be helped through figuring out what's going on inside their brains and the chemicals that are that are going on yeah well i know andrew would be able to talk very effectively about the about the chemical reactions we but we are both reticent to get into the psychology of

it right because he's into neuroscience and i'm not even in the medical field right so however I think what we have talked about and I think what we can say in general purpose you know is that is that a lot of growth personal growth ability to to move beyond and grow from a challenge and stress requires an ability to effectively reflect back on that experience and ask yourself some very empowering questions about it. What did I learn? How can I grow? How can I use those things to move forward and persevere, right? Now, the only way you can ask those questions effectively and get effective answers is to do so from an objective an objective emotional state which means you have

to cleanse yourself as much as possible from the emotions of a of an event recover enough so that the emotions event aren't triggered when you actually do the reflection this is the problem this is where a lot of folks need psychological help because they have to reframe the events so that it doesn't trigger those emotions because as soon as you trigger you get yourself into a brain state where you can't effectively reflect and you start reliving it again and so i am certainly not in a position to be able to help anybody do that um what i am in a position to do is help most of us who um you know who experience little tragedies you know and and spin on them for no for no reason uh and you can actually ask yourself you can actually more deliberately get over the emotions of them

because you can actually say well i probably overreacted you can kind of think through it a little bit um and say that if you want to look at those and i call it honoring your antagonist if you want to look at those antagonists in your life um effectively and grow from them then do some recovery so that you're not you're you you distill the emotions around it as much as possible and then effectively ask some questions about it now that distilling process may it may take a few hours it may take a few days it may take a few years um in the serious traumatic events whether it be war or otherwise that humans go through go get help to do that seriously um and i'm not i'm not joking if you feel like you can't do it you need to get help to do that. Seriously. I'm not joking. If you feel

like you can't do it, you need to get help because there's so many people out there who can help you reframe that. But if you're just feeling like you can do a little bit better in life and you feel like you've been through some lows that you want to learn a little bit more from, then you can actually be a little bit more proactive in the process. And in fact, you can probably reflect one of the first exercises you can do for yourself is you can say, okay, let me think back to an experience in my life that was painful and I got through it, you know, and then ask yourself, okay, what did I do back then? What were the, what were the steps that I took in that? Because that's a, that is an example of you growing from challenge and trauma uncertainty. So if you have an example, if you,

we all do, I mean, we all have antagonists. It's funny. The theatrical definition of protagonist is a person, place, or thing that is for the main idea. And an antagonist is person, place, or thing that is against the main idea, right? So it doesn't have to be a person. It doesn't have to be,

it can be a weather event. It can be a layoff. It can be, oh, a global pandemic, right? But it doesn't even have to be evil. It can be like, like you know something that just happened and it's like oh my god that was a challenge so so the idea of honoring one's antagonist is to be able to um do the do the appropriate recovery and if the the answer to am i recovered enough is can you look back on it with a degree of objectivity you know know, if the answer is yes, then it's time to effectively reflect and then effectively reflect, you know.

But some people, they don't take enough time with that recovery. So it's important that you take enough time for that recovery to get to that objective place. And if you're finding trouble doing that, go get help. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, especially when you see the numbers of what could be happening with PTSD just

over this past year that we had. Yeah. But, um, with, with the attributes, you know, you make a clear distinction, the difference between attributes and skills. And, um, for anybody who hasn't read the book yet, I do recommend that everybody goes out, gets it, but, um, give us a little bit of an idea of the difference between the attributes and the skills and uh what can be built upon between the two of them yeah so uh so again you know i had when i'm talking about i'm really fascinated with elemental human behavior like i said so what are those things and so in doing that and looking at even the seal training i had to say okay to separate skills from these attributes things skills are things you know we're not there are things that we learn right none of us are born with the ability to throw a ball or ride a biker right or shoot a gun and kill in this in the seal case all right we're we learn those things we're taught those things okay skills also

direct our behavior in known certain environments right so here's how and when to throw a ball or here's how and when to shoot a gun or ride a bike or whatever and um and because they are tangible and visible uh they're very easy to assess measure and test you can see how well anybody does any one of those things you know and so oftentimes we get seduced when we're selecting teams or businesses or hiring or even judging ourselves um with those tangible results right you know because because it can be put on a resume it can be put on a stat board you can see how well someone's sales numbers we often judge ourselves sometimes on our skills but what skills don't tell us is how we how we show up in challenge and stress and uncertainty when the environment becomes uncertain it's very difficult if not impossible to apply a known skill

to an unknown environment right so this is where we lean on our attributes our attributes are innate okay we're all born with levels of adaptability and patience and situation awareness and resilience okay certainly they develop over time and environment um but we can see levels of these things in very small children right anybody who has small kids or hangs around with them will say well yeah that two-year-old is really patient and that two-year-old is really impatient right they're there right um so we're born with them um they inform our behavior rather than direct it so they tell us how we're going to show up to a situation so so my son's levels of resiliency and perseverance for example um informed the way he showed up when

he was riding when he was learning how to ride his bike right and falling off a dozen times okay um and then because they're hidden they're not necessarily kind of in front they're hidden in the background they're very difficult to assess measure and test right it's very difficult to sit across from someone say in an interview process and see and assess how adaptable they are or how resilient they are right so they get missed on a lot of assessment and hiring procedures or practices the both the best most visceral visible ways you can see these things are in environments of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, which made the SEAL training that I was running, and then even basic SEAL training, perfect laboratories, because they're just like,

that's the, it's all about throwing guys into stress. But we as just regular people in regular life can actually start to look at our behavior and our performance during times of challenge and stress and say, and to start to start to ask ourselves okay how did i show up covid 2020 is actually a great example for all of us we all went through this you know this period of really deep stress challenge uncertainty and we can start asking ourselves hey where did i fall on these attributes so the thing about attributes also the good news is that we're we all have all of the attributes we're actually born with all of them The difference in every one of us are the levels to which we have each. So if we take adaptability and 10 is high and 1 is low, I would be, say, a level 8 on adaptability,

which means when the environment changes around me outside my control, okay, it's fairly easy for me to go with the flow, right? I just roll with it. Someone else might be a level 3, which means the environment changes around them outside their control. It's very difficult for me to go with the flow, right? I just roll with it. Right. Someone else might be a level three, which means the environment changes around them outside their control. It's very difficult for them to show the flow. They're still adaptable. I mean, they still adapt eventually, but it's tough.

They have to drag themselves kicking and screaming. It just means they're low. And again, there's no judging on. So if we line all the attributes up on the side of a wall and they're all dimmer switches, all of the dimmer switch positions are different, right? So all of our lines would be different um and there's no judgment there because we like judging our hair color right there's no it's just how we show up right um we can develop

attributes that we're a little lower on but you have to do the process which i described it has to be self-motivated it has to be self-directed um and you have to make a deliberate step into those environments and in some cases it's somewhat contextual right because again because we're not so i i my sense is you can probably achieve conscious competence in an attribute that you're that you're a little lower on i don't think you can achieve unconscious confidence so for example a person who's inherently impatient and then has kids, okay, and says, okay, I need to develop my patience. That person may develop their patience with their kids, right? Right.

But when it comes to other kids, they're still very impatient, right? So, I mean, sometimes it's contextual. But the good news is you don't have to develop all the attributes you're on. You just have to look at your path, look at your own engine, look at where you want to go and ask yourself, okay, in the context of what I want to do and my goals, which are the ones I'm strong at and which are the ones I actually need to develop a little bit like me and, you know, say courage and jumping out of airplanes, right? I don't, I don't like heights. I never did. And so I had to say, okay, well, I need to actively and proactively develop my courage about jumping out of airplanes. And so that's what I did.

My business partner and I, who's off camera, we were talking about this earlier where, you know, how can somebody it's when you're in the seals, like you said, it's just stress, challenge, uncertainty. You can put people through that and you can see what's inside. But if someone's listening to this and they're in a business and they're like, well, I want to hire somebody and they seem like they're the right person, the skill sets look like they're right. is there a way to take that and actually put it into a business setting of stress challenges and uncertainty yes there is and it's but it's it's a little bit more difficult because it's subjective right um you have to uh well the first thing as a business as a team you have to do is outline the attributes

that you're looking for okay because the list of attributes that say uh are required to be a good navy seal is gonna be different than the list of attributes required to be a great nurse or a teacher or whatever um so first you have to come up with that list and then you have to then say okay what are some environments that i can create to test and tease those and they're gonna have to be a little bit more uncertain and a little bit uncomfortable it doesn't have to be masochistic right i mean you don't have to you know you certainly don't have your employees yeah you don't have to, you certainly don't have to throw guys. With your employees. Yeah, you don't have to take your employees down to the surf zone in Coronado and throw them in there.

And because it's not contextual, it's not going to teach you anything anyway about what you need. It's going to, you know, so, but like, for example. It might be a fun team outing to do that. Well, not that fun. And it might be a little bit illegal. Who knows?

But I would say, you know, an example would be if you and I wanted to hire someone who's great at sales. Well, we know that sales, there's a skill level. There are certain skills that could be applied to the job of sales, right? But a lot of sales is attributes, right? It's adaptability, it's flexibility, it's emotional intelligence, things like that. You and I could say, all right, as a hiring process, we're going to bring this person in and we're going to have them give us a sales pitch on this coffee mug okay and we tell the person hey when you come in you're going

to give us a sales pitch on the coffee mug okay that person comes in sits in front of you and i and begins to pitch right or or is about to start now if we let them go okay that person most likely will have rehearsed and done everything and they will do a fantastic job. And you and I are like, man, that guy or gal was really good, right? We would have learned almost nothing about what we need to know. Or right before they start, we can say, hey, you're no longer, something's changed. You're no longer pitching this coffee mug. You're going to sell this pencil.

Okay, and there's an AV problem. So there's no slides. Let's see what happens. Now, at that point, we're going to see something different. And and this point you and i would have to proactively disengage from judging skill because what we're what we were what we were going to see in that moment might look pretty ugly right but now we're not looking at skills anymore we're looking at how they're adapting and and what i would be looking for particularly is like okay how frustrated how how flustered are they getting when we just said that or like okay let me try this and then they start it might be ugly but they're really humorous about it they're laughing they're funny i'd be

like okay that's someone who who has some of the attributes i'm looking for right versus someone who's getting frustrated flustered angry angry you know starting to you know it may be ugly but you know we're looking we're starting to look at attributes instead of skills and so so you can begin to and this is some of the work i do with businesses, is A, helping them identify the attributes they're looking for, and then B, helping them come up with some environments inside of which they can start seeing this stuff. So they can, A, they can hire properly, but they can also start developing their current team members because they need to look at their own team and say, okay, what are we as a team? How do we show up? Are we hitting everything we need to hit? Do we need to develop this?

What are we as a team? How do we show up? Are we hitting everything we need to hit? Do we need to develop this? You know, one of the great experiences out there is these escape rooms, you know? You know, business teams that go to escape rooms, that's a great way to start seeing attributes. You have to do some work and say,

okay, what attributes am I looking for? But, I mean, you can start to, you know, you're throwing people into uncertainty and challenge and stress, you know? And you can start seeing how people show up so that so the person who seemed like the rock star who's now suddenly you know or you thought hey maybe this is this person might be a leader because he's this person's telling me that they they who starts barking orders and yelling at people and you know and dictating it's like oh actually that's not what we're looking for in leadership right um whereas the

quiet person who said nothing is now like hey let's solve the problem how about this and it's calm and you can start to see stuff which is cool so so i don't own any stock in escape rooms i'm not plugging it for any reason that sounds like a lot more fun hiring process right than anything else it's just like let's do a group interview and then we're all going to go to the escape room and see who can be the best yeah the key is knowing what you're looking for because if you do it without knowing what you're looking for it's a waste of time right and you have to and you can't be looking you can't you can't be looking for the wrong things a lot of people say oh i want to take my team out to do some uh some off-site physical activity okay and they do some sort of competition okay well all you're doing is seeing who's the most competitive

people i mean and you're not necessarily because guess what competitive people. I mean, and you're not necessarily, because guess what? Competitive people are great in some scenarios, non-competitive people are great in other scenarios, right? So you want both, right? So you have to make sure you understand what you're looking for before you either create the environment or throw people into the environment. Yeah, I love that. And so when you're talking about, you know, the person stepping up and being a leader in different ways, I love the way that you talk about leadership. So before we dive in and talk about it, how do you frame leadership so people can kind of get an idea of the way that you see it? Yeah, leadership is a confusing word because we often conflate it with being in charge. And they're not the same thing. One's a noun and one's a verb. Leadership is a behavior. It's not a position. And we don't get to self-designate

as leaders. We don't get to say, I'm a leader, right? To do so would be saying, like, you're good looking or funny, right? You don't get to make that decision. Other people decide. Other people decide whether or not they look at you as someone they want to follow. And it's done. And they do that because of the way you behave. And so leadership becomes a series of behaviors. And this is a very basic concept that most people miss way you behave. And so leadership becomes a series of behaviors. And this is a very basic concept that most people miss, but know intuitively. If we think about it, if everybody in your audience right now, if I give them 10 seconds and say, think about someone in your life who you consider a leader, okay? Picture that person, all right? Once you have that person

in your brain, in your head, ask yourself, what did they do? Why do you consider that person a leader? And immediately, the people in your audience and you and I are going to start thinking about behaviors. Well, they were humble. They were accountable. They took a risk on me, but they had my back. They pushed me forward and they showed me who I was. They pushed me to be a better person, right?

All these behaviors. It's not that no one, I guarantee no one's sitting in the audience saying, they told me what to do. They gave me a good list of jobs to do every day. They gave me a raise when I deserved a raise. They wrote some nice thing. That's not what great leaders do. And this is why when you're in organizations or teams, it's often, sometimes too often, where the person in the hierarchical position of leadership is not in fact seen as a leader. It's like the guy over there or the gal over there who does

whatever job that no one thinks about, but everybody goes to when they have issues, right? That's leadership. And so the attributes I talk about in the book are the attributes that lead to the behaviors that cause people to designate leaders. And again, in the work I've done really around the world since I retired in the leadership space, we go around and we ask crowds, say, hey, describe what great leaders do. And we'd make lists and we'd write it on a whiteboard. And then we'd have lists of like 20, 30 things. And what's interesting is the same words always came up it was the same shit right the lists were always the same didn't matter where we were we were us we were europe we were africa if it was millennials it was baby boomers it was you know generation x who knows uh we did it didn't matter it was

always the same list and it's these behaviors and they're very elemental and and we know it it's just intuitive and same thing for being a good teammate. This is why the team, the team ability attributes are also behaviors because you don't get to call yourself a great teammate either. Yeah. So let's say I have a business, someone out there is listening and they have, you know, a position that they need to promote to. They have three people that they're considering for that. And they're trying to figure out who would be the best leader. What are some of the attributes that you're going to look for in somebody? And, and maybe even if you happen to know any of, uh, ways that they could put them through the,

the stress and the uncertainty and everything to, to find out who that person is. Yeah. Well, I mean, you could, you could create environments in that moment, but if you have three people who've been in the organization, then you already have a massive amount of information data staring at you in the face. And it's, it's the other people in the organization then you already have a massive amount of information data staring at you in the face and it's it's the other people in that organization yeah would you ask them oh of course of course this is this is the problem with most organizations to include the military in many cases is that the promotion systems are designed um that uh so that you promote based on um achievement right right how good are you at your job?

Or seniority. Or seniority, right? Yeah. And if you're good and you're senior, you promote, okay? Well, what does that translate into? You get into a position of leadership and suddenly you think as a leader, well, I was the best at my job and I was the most senior, which means I know the best, which means I guess my job is to tell other people how to do the job, right? This is the seeds of micromanagement, which is, in anybody's opinion the the antithetical to good leadership right so uh so what happens in

organizations is they obviously they oftentimes promote you you get you get put into a position leadership based on being great at your job and then when you're in that position of people having people in your span of care no one tells you that your job has fundamentally changed your job is now to help empower you know this is the other this is the other problem with the word leadership right and the word leader because leader by definition at least one of the definitions the noun is in front the person in front okay the leader of the of the race or whatever that's the person in front we all know that the best leaders are oftentimes in back, right? They're pushing people forward.

They're empowering. They're invisible in some cases. You don't even know they're there, right? They're just these presence that they're, you know. In fact, I used to tell my junior officers, I said, hey, you have to get, you have to understand what I call the irony of leadership, which is if you do your job correctly, you work yourself out of a job eventually. You know, you concede your own obsolescence because you've created an environment where

they don't need you anymore. That should be the goal of every leader, to be honest with you. There's a humility involved in that though. That was actually exactly what I was going to talk about is when I think of, you know, I know that's one of the attributes as well. When I think of the best leaders that I've always known, they're never somebody who just talks about how great they are. They always talk about, you know, somebody else's win. And so, you know, how important do you feel humility is for a leader? It's of utmost importance for a couple reasons. First of all, it shows that that person, that leader, the person in charge, doesn't know everything. And that shows an understanding that the journey is just as important as anything else.

Because we all know anybody, it shows a lack of arrogance and egotism and all that stuff. We've all seen those people who show up and they're like, I know it, I've arrived, right? None of us trust that person. It doesn't induce trust at all. Because again, trust and leadership

are almost the same. You can't think of someone as a leader if you don't trust them, right? You't so they're they're the behaviors are very simple the the the behaviors that that cause someone to be called a leader are very similar to the behaviors that cause someone to trust another person um and so so at first it shows hey this is a person who who knows who who is who is displaying the fact that they don't know it all, okay? And that's important because then you're showing yourself as someone who is always ready and willing to learn. What is that doing? That's modeling the behavior you want to see more of, right? With my kids, if I tell my kids, hey, I don't know that, let's look it up. What am I showcasing to them? I'm showcasing,

hey, sometimes dad doesn't know and here's how he goes about finding it out. He's curious enough. And so, Mike, you develop in your kids a process by which they can discover versus just giving them the answer. The other reason why it's really important is it displays a vulnerability that is critical in high-performing teams. High-performing teams' vulnerability, which is oftentimes stigmatized as just showing your weaknesses, but actually it's the idea of showing your weaknesses and your strengths. You know, wearing both of them on your sleeves.

Because you need to create an environment where you know exactly when you can lean on someone else and they know exactly when they can lean on you. All right. And then the team starts to operate in that way. As a leader, what that shows, humility, what humility shows is it tells it showcases if not says explicitly to all the members of the team i need you right and that's important it really is i mean when i you know as a seal troop commander i didn't know what my snipers knew i didn't know what my i mean i knew i had background in it right but to the level to the granularity that they knew it my breachers you know the the door kickers these all these all these experts um i needed them you know i absolutely needed them

and they needed me for what i knew you know because i knew stuff that they didn't know and didn't have time to know right so so as a leader who is humble it displays this kind of implicit message sometimes explicit i need you you are important you have purpose people just want to know that they have value they have purpose they are valued in an organization in a team and if the leader shows them that by saying i need you you are important here you're you're someone we need i need it's it's huge and by the way this doesn't happen just with with business teams this happens a great marriage is a high performing team right what do a great marriage what does a great couple do right they need each other right, right? And they're explicit

about when they need each other, and they're there to support and lean, you know, and that's important too, so. Yeah, and I could also see that from parenting as well. Totally. Yeah. So, when you're looking at a company, you walk into a company, do you find that a lot of times that, let me ask you in a different way, what's the difference when you walk into a lot of times that let me ask you in a different way what's the difference when you walk into a company that looks like it's a complete shit show and you walk into a company where like they're actually doing really well we're just going to add some fuel to the fire yeah um you can you can you can often tell by the the level of safety and vulnerability that is displayed you know the more the more safe and vulnerable an environment it is, the more transparency you have.

And so there's different environments, there's different situations where you can see this play out. One of the situations you can see this play out is in debriefs. So in the military, you have what's called the AAR, the After Action Review, or the Critical Event Debrief. And most of the military does this i know certainly in spec ops after everything we did whether it was a mission or a training evolution before you cleaned your gear before you cleaned yourself before you did anything you all got around and you basically asked yourself three questions what went right what went wrong and what could we do better next time okay and you had this you had this debrief and some of these sometimes these

debriefs were brutal right because it was like okay that got screwed up that cost and it's like it's you know it's it's hard it's harsh but it was always from the context of making us better so so the person who screwed up wasn't the target learning was the target and in that environment what happened because it was a because the the culture was imbued with that that philosophy the person who screwed up was oftentimes the very person who stood up and said hey i screwed this up let me tell you what we what i did wrong and how we learned you know because because that the person knew it was a safe environment any environment you go into any business environment where people are afraid to to show their mistakes there's gonna be issues you know right now again i know there's there's people out there who'll say well no businesses can succeed i i will i will concede that some businesses can do very well and have a

pretty toxic environment but what you're not going to have are long-term players you know and people who stick around and people who feel fulfilled you might have some people who who own the the business or at the top levels who are making consistent money but the environment underneath is not going to be it's going to be pretty transactional you know no one's going to feel very a lot of pride uh being there and it's not going to it's not going to be a durational thing so so if you are a leader who endeavors to create an organization a team that is long lasting that uh that people feel proud to be a part of, that the turnover rate is low, and that operates pretty damn effectively when things go south and sideways,

when pandemics hit or the world changes or whatever, you're going to want to create an environment of safety and trust, because that's the foundational element of any high-performing team is this foundation of trust. So I'm going to take a complete turn, because we're're talking about humility but i want to talk about the opposite of that which is also an attribute which you know is is narcissism as well so let's talk about narcissism in the you know the attribute but also the importance of it that you found as well yeah so narcissism um the definition of narcissism at least the way i define it in the book is the

desire to stand out to be recognized to be adored and noticed. Okay. Now, when I explored this as an attribute, what I had to do was some deep inner work because I had to ask myself. Well, first thing I did is I went to the DSM-5, which is the psychological Bible, basically. It outlines all the different psychological diseases and things like that. And so I looked up narcissistic personality disorder, which is a codified bad thing, okay? And in the DSM-5, it outlines nine criteria. They're basically sentences that describe, you know, narcissistic people. And I think it says if you have five or more, then you qualify as having the disease, okay? And I read those and I didn't have five or more,

which is good. But what I did realize is that a lot of the stuff in the sentences wasn't that foreign to me. It wasn't like I was reading that and saying, oh, I never do that or I never do that. So I was like, okay, that's clue number one, right? That I'm not necessarily clean on this one. But then I asked myself, okay,

why did I become a Navy SEAL? Because my friends and I have talked about this too, you know, and I was a 22 year old kid clean on this one right but then i asked myself okay why did i become a navy seal because i because my friends and i have talked about this too you know and i was a 22 year old kid and sure i was patriotic and sure i wanted to serve my country but i also wanted to be a badass you know i wanted to see if i could do something that very few people could do you know um there's a there's seeds of narcissism in that thinking because as human beings we all at some point in our lives want to stand out we all at some point in our lives want to stand out we all at some point want to be adored we want to be recognized we want to be noticed um this goes

back to infancy and this is this is where you get burst with three chemicals so i got it wrong for humor the three chemicals you get you get uh burst with when you're when you're getting paid attention to by your parents as a as a as an infant or by anybody you're getting a burst of dopamine serotonin and oxytocin so so in humor it's endorphins in in uh in when you're getting paid attention to it's serotonin and uh that feels great doesn't doesn't change when we're adults right when you're getting the standing ovation you know the or the actors are getting their awards right they're getting burst with that it feels great so i think what we have to recognize is that narcissistic personality disorder as a disorder is bad. It's also rare. I think they say it's about only 1% of the

population have the actual disorder. Obviously, there are people on the edges, you know, but anyway, you know, the ability to, the desire to set sometimes audacious and even narcissistic goals can be an incredible driver. It's why it's one of the drive attributes, right? Because that desire to be special can be a driver to work harder than you've ever worked before, to push longer better you know just to be something to take to take your life to places where they hadn't been before so so we have to use our human narcissistic um elements to our advantage and then we have to be very careful because the big caution label that comes with this is that if we get over the edge right if we if we are too narcissistic it's like a vampire staring in the mirror.

It's impossible to see in ourselves, right? So the inoculation to that is you surround yourself with people who you know, love, and trust, and love and trust you enough that pull you in and slap you down when you're getting a little bit too out over your skis, right? The grounding wires in your lives. This is my wife of 20 years. This is my teammates, right? You can tell narcissists right so narcissists are really easy to see on the you know from the outside and what's the first thing you see you see the group they're hanging around right you know if you are if you're

if you're curious if you're not sure whether you're not a narcissist narcissist look at the people you're surrounding yourself with if you're surrounding yourself with sycophants yeah you're in trouble okay um if you're surrounding yourself with people who always put you at the center of attention you're in trouble all right um If you're surrounding yourself with people who always put you at the center of attention, you're in trouble, all right? If you're surrounding yourself with people who always are laughing, they're telling the truth, you're not always the center. In fact, you're oftentimes not, right? If you do get out over your skis, you get slapped down either with humor or otherwise, right? You have a good group of people.

There's candor there. There's candor with care that's going on that people are telling you the truth and keeping you reined in that's how we that's how we use narcissism to our advantage but not get it uh to overblown love that well i could do this forever this is great we've only covered like three of the 25 attributes so clearly people are going to have to go out and uh and buy this book but um i want to ask you a question i asked people at the end, and I'm really curious for you. So, there's a phrase that says, you die twice. Once is the moment you stop breathing. The second time is the last time someone says your name. For you, what would you want people to say about you before that second death? What do you hope they say? The legacy that you leave?

Great husband and father. Yeah. I think, you know, it's funny, you know, we were just having this discussion prior to this about identity. I'm really fascinated with identity. And I think whatever identity we place on ourselves, whatever we put after the two words I am, right? I think I am are the two most powerful words in the human language.

So whatever we place after those two words is where we drive ourselves right um but um but but whatever we do whatever identity we do place we serve that identity the most okay and i think oftentimes we get confused or even subconscious sometimes unconsciously biased towards identities that don't necessarily serve us as well as we do. So I'm always really, really cognizant of what my premier identity is and will always be. And at the end of my life, if I've done nothing, I want my wife to say he was a great husband. I want my kids to say he was a great dad. You know, if there's nothing else, I'm good, right? Now, if I can do some other stuff, that's cool too. Right. Great author. Yeah. Good teammate. You know, some other things help to help the plan

a little bit. Right. But, but those are the two basic things. Yeah. Love it. Rich Devaney, I appreciate it. For anybody who wants to go out and buy the book, I recommend it. The book is The Attributes to 25 Drivers for Optimal Performance. Appreciate you for being here. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me. It's been great. While every other pizza company out there is trying new things on top of their pizza, Papa John's just flipped pizza night on its head by doing something completely new on the bottom. Introducing the new crispy parm pizza with a layer of buttery toasted parmesan cheese baked on the underside of our signature thin crust that's because we know the first thing

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