The Resilient Mind - Are You Breaking… or Having a Breakthrough? - David Goggins

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

An accomplished endurance athlete, Goggins has completed over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. He once held the Guinness World Record for pull-ups completing 4,030 in 17 hours, and he’s a sought after public speaker.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Are You Breaking or Having a Breakthrough with David Gagins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. When I was 20097 pounds and I was fat as hell trying to be a Navy SEAL, the scariest thing in the world to me even to this day was that that could have been the rest of my life. I thought then I was trying hard. That's the scariest thing in the world.

I thought then 297 pound working for eco-lapse, spraying for cockroaches, making $1,000 a month, I thought that was me at my 100% potential. Come to find out, I wasn't anywhere near that. 106 pounds less, graduate Navy still training, went on to do all these other things. Looking back on that, that was me trying hard. That's why people got to understand what is in us. We have no idea until we start trying hard. hard. And I mean really trying hard where you're obsessed with, hey, this is my new norm. My new norm is

that, wow, this isn't always fun. It's not always meant to be fun. And that's when you know you're trying hard. We all have two people. We have the easy voice, which is that 20% telling yourself that you're, I'm easy at 90% of my full potential, maybe 100% at that 20%. That's that voice that we all love. That's that very comfortable voice that that, that's that mommy holding you saying, it's going to be okay. Doesn't care how good you are, just loves you, just loves you, just loves you no matter how messed up you are in life. That's where you want to be at. So that's that one voice. This other voice that we walk very far away from is a voice saying, hey man, you ain't doing shit. So we tried to get this voice out of our head completely. And we live over here in this land.

So what you have to do first is turn up this voice over here, the voice saying things to you that aren't nice, that it's in our head saying, you know what, man, dude, you're not, you're not doing shit. And it's not putting yourself down. People take this the wrong way in this new society. I'm not saying to put yourself down. I'm saying listen to the truth. And the truth isn't in the 20%. The truth is in this other part of your brain saying, look, man, you're wasting a bunch of percentage here. We have 80 more percent that we're not tapping into

because in this other 80 percent is suffering, pain, failure, failure, failure, self-doubt, darkness. And then a whole bunch of light. But to get to this light, you got to go through all of this shit. So a lot of us know that. Yeah, I can get over here, but over here, man, this is much better because I got to go through this journey that is not fun. This from 20 to 100% this shit in between is not fun. So we decide to live over here. So everybody goes, how do you do that? You know exactly how to do that. It's not a magic trick. It's all back down to a very primitive mindset of we just have to do. It's like breathing. Breathing becomes normal. Like we don't know that we're doing it. That's how you have to to live your life. When that long clock goes off at four or five in the morning, your mind says,

no, you just say, it's just what we do. It's what we do now. Because to get to where you want to go, the amount of pain involved, the amount of mental pain of how many times you're going to have to do something that you don't want to do to get to where you want to go. There's going to be more times you do something that you don't want to do it. And that's your new norm. That's your new norm. So then it's like breathing. And then once you do this over and over and over again, it becomes like breathing. I don't want to live this lifestyle, but to get to the other side of this, I have to. If you really want it, you realize what trying is and what trying is not. Once again, I have to say very loud and clear, I'm not about being a masochist, but what I found when I was

297 pounds, so I'm not a guy that read a book and said, oh, there are the answers. All this came from here It came from me putting myself on the hot seat. And then saying, okay, wow. Okay, $297, this is where my mind was at. To get to 187, this is where my mind went to, to go through three hell weeks, to run towards and five miles, to do $4,030 plus. And I'm a natural-born fat guy.

You know, I was born 175, I gained 125 pounds. I was lazy. That's who I am. I'm a guy likes to sit back, watch TV, and eat pizza. All I crave is that mama voice. Please, love David, love David. That voice got me to 297 pounds. When I got out of the military, I started getting this weight a lot.

My standard breakfast was eight cinnamon rolls, six to eight scrambled eggs, half a pound of bacon, fruity pebbles. That was my standard breakfast. Whatever I wanted, I did. And that's where I started seeing myself get further and further away from my true self. and your true self is found, honestly, in that very uncomfortable zone. I have this haunting voice in the back of my head. A lot of us have it.

Yeah. We just ignore it. And it was there for years. So I knew in the back of my mind that I could pull off this whatever. Whatever I wanted, I knew I could. But I was afraid of the work because I wasn't gifted with brains. I wasn't gifted with God-given talent as far as like athleticism. So I knew to get to where I had to go, to be in the same playing field as these men,

to even try out for this program, I knew the work was going to be something that I didn't want to even attack. So I was just put it off. But yet you did it. Because it haunted me. The voice in my head said, you know what, man, you're going to die, never even trying to reach your full potential. And how's that going to feel?

So I'm going to live, even while I'm dead, I'm going to be, because I'm, I'm going to die. because I believe in a higher power. Whatever it may be, I don't know what it is. I believe that your mind lives forever. Some spirit, something lives forever. I'm going to be haunted by the mere fact that I literally just, that's what I was. So whatever heaven or hell is, you're in hell the rest of your life. The rest of your life.

And there is a God, which I hope to God there is, knowing what I put myself through now, whatever memories I have, if there's any at all, I'll be a happy man. Let me teach you the real life. how it really is. The reason why you're a loser and the reason why you're not fucking making it and the reason why you're trying to go to all these, I go to all these fucking conventions speak all the fucking time.

I look in the fucking audience and these people sign up, sign up, sign up, fucking every year to go to a convention thinking they're going to learn something fucking different. No, you're lazy, you know exactly what to do, exactly what to do. It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it. Everybody has the ability to do it. Everybody has the ability to do it, but they just don't want to. They're going to keep asking questions and keep going to seminars.

You can watch me, you can watch you, you can watch fucking Rogan and Cameron Haynes, all these motherfuckers. You can go to Tony Robbins and fucking bullshit, all this shit. You do all this shit. If you, you could keep going back and keep spending money and spending money and spending money with no results. You can wonder, wow, maybe let me go try out David Gagans. He ain't going to fucking help you. You have to explore, examine the insides of yourself. And what do you really want in life?

Maybe you're a piece of shit. Maybe you're, you want to be nobody. Maybe you're happy exactly where you are in life because obviously you are. Maybe you don't have the determination to be somebody better than who you are. And if you want to live with that, I'll support you in that. That makes you feel good. Nothing I can say to you. something in you has to wake up.

And usually the only person that can wake it up is you. But if you don't have a little flame, you know, just that, just barely, you're done. I can't, I can't light it for you. I want you to learn that the only way you grow is how to look at yourself and say, okay, like I did. Table longer than this. What the fuck I have to do to get somewhere?

I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this, I'm not this, I can't do this, I'm all these insecurities, your life finally started. When you sit in an ugly mirror and say, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, and this, you finally started your life. But most of all, your biggest fears, the biggest things that put you in the fuck the place you are today are in there. So we all like to keep them shut, even like to lock them up, act like they never happen. That's where you never grow. Never improve. You never have real conversations like we're having right now. Never.

Never. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not, no, no, no, no, let's not go there. You got to relit it. Every fucking detail of it. You can't say, oh, yeah, yeah, my dad beat me. And they, you know, you know, it is what it is. Hey, it is what it is, motherfucker.

It's killing you. It's taking over your whole fucking life. But that's the conversation. Yeah, my dad beat. I'm fine now, though. I'm good. Okay. All right.

You ain't fine. Human beings want to show you the best side and they want to hide the worst side. For me, I'm going to teach you how to be vulnerable because that's the only way you fix yourself. I didn't teach myself victory first. I taught myself failure.

And people are, that's so depressing. Is it? When you're 300 pounds and you can't read and write and you're fucked up, you know how many times you're going to fucking fail on that process? So if you don't know how to fail There is no victory

When you have buried yourself in such a deep fucking hole You better teach yourself how to fail first Because if you sit in failure For too long You will never come out of it So I taught myself how to fail properly No one teaches you how to fucking fail And then eventually

I started getting a few victories If you put yourself in the fire and you come out every fucking day like this, brush it off, not scared to go back in there again? Come on, man. Your truth is real, because human beings need to hear this. Then he stop hearing these hacks. There's no fucking hack, bro.

Do it and do it and do it and do it and do it. That's the hack. The hack is going to fucking suck. And that's what I realized. It sucks to wake up every morning of your life and do it again. Do it again. Do it again. It's not just there. It's not just there permanently for me. I lived, I woke up, like every human being does and goes, fuck, man, I'm a fucking piece of

shit today. How the hell is this going to work out for me? And you fight that. And you fight that. You don't override it. There's no override button. It's the conversation in your fucking, in your head. So how do you do that? We don't have enough of these conversations about the real conversation that every human being is having, and they have no idea how to get out of it, but they do. It's you against you. You against you. And if you misunderstand that, you have a real problem.

If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now today, the problem is you, and you don't want to fix it. Why most people don't want to do that is because it is scary. It unlocks a whole bunch of things about who you are and who you're not. It's scary. to wake up every day and say, I'm stupid, but I want to figure out a way to be smarter. Versus saying, man, I just can't do that. So you limit this box.

So your box becomes so small of things you can do. My box wasn't even a box. It was a fucking little like little pinhole. And then through examining myself, getting some willpower, some courage, it became bigger than this tape. There's no fucking passion. There's no fucking motivation. And there's no, oh my God, man, I fucking, this is, no, it's every day of your life just doing. I just fucking did.

I just did. This is why I cussed. This is what is in me. This is what it took for me to be me. Sorry. It didn't take, hey, okay, we're going to do this today. No, this fucking really sucks. This is real, dude.

This is real. Just do your living. How do you want to live? How do you want to die? How do you want to fucking be remembered? That's, that's it. That's it. Period.

For you to constantly win, win, when, when this voice over here, the real you is saying, get the fuck out of here. Go, you're nobody. You've always been nobody. People don't hear that.

That's a true voice. Because whenever I take these tests that are real hard, in the back of my brain, It's like, the good chance you're not going to make it, Gagans. This ain't you, bro. This ain't you. You weren't born like this. This ain't you.

The real you, bro. Study all you want to. But the second that fucking computer comes on with 150 questions, this ain't you, man. And somehow, comes back, I passed. Passed again. Passed again. But that ruled me back here every fucking time.

It's saying, that is you grow that is you and I have to outwork that voice and then you had to create another voice over here that is saying

you're better than that other voice what happens is you have all these voices that are telling you you're fucked up and this is going to be hard but for some reason you put so much practice into you that you can ignore every

one of them that are telling you you're not going to fucking make it and still be able to fucking make it. But when you put that practice in every day you lace them up, and I mean Ron, it's just a metaphor for life. When you

lace the motherfuckers up every day, pretty soon you win. Pretty soon you'll fucking win. You have the courage and the heart and the dedication and the mind and the mind says, everybody can go fuck themselves. I know what I know. I've listened to myself enough to know I know. I know what I know.

None of you can hear what I'm hearing. And that's what people don't do enough of. They don't listen to their journey. They listen to everybody else is shit, but everybody needs that pound on the back. They need that training partner. They need that accountability coach. I don't hear that shit.

And neither do they. I must run away from our fears. And we box ourselves in to a lifestyle of this is all we can use. I'm afraid of everything outside this box. so I'm comfortable inside this box. I jumped the box. Everything I didn't want to do is what got me to where I'm at today.

It's about what you're saying to yourself, but it also comes at work. So whenever I'm getting beat down, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever I was going through, just saying, you can't hurt me. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind

by listening to our other episodes.