The Resilient Mind - Change Your Normal - David Goggins

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

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 Change Your Normal with David Gagins. Enjoy. Your brain is the most powerful weapon in the world. Once you put away your phones and your computers and all that we have nowadays, that's great. We're up to date. But your brain is the only thing you have when you're going through depression, when you're going through hard times, you're going through death.

Real life, you can't Google that, man. You're alone. You're alone. You may have a shrink you're going to. You may have a best friend you're going to. But there's 24 hours in the day where you're alone in this brain. And your brain is talking to you in all kind of ways. And it wants to control you and pull you in these different pockets.

If you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you, your, you got to tell your brain where you want to go and how you want to get there. You got to control it. If not, it's over. What existed for me was, okay, man, how am I going to make this work? And all I knew back then was hard work. The only way anything gets accomplished. That's all I heard back in those days.

You got to work hard. You got to work hard. I'm not getting how to, I can't get this paragraph. I can't remember what the fucks in this paragraph to pass this test to get in the military. Read again. Still not getting it.

it, read it again. But if not getting it, write it out. And that's how I started learning. Okay, well, I can't, I got to write out everything I do. And then write it out again and write it out again. And guess what happened? I got it. I got it. I can't swim. I'm negative buoyant. Go back again. Go back again. Go back again. I got it. I realize if I keep going back and going back and going back and going back until this just becomes your mind was safe. Okay, we're going to figure it out because he is not going to stop. It's not like I'm going to try one more time.

No, it's just like long clock goes off, boop. We're going back. I can't read right, we're going back. I gave myself no way out. In my mind, realize that. They said, okay, we're going to adapt and overcome now. Like a lot of people say, trying hard.

You mind knows, man. You know, this guy's bull me, man. This guy's lying. There's no truth behind it. When I was in Navy still training, people go, how are you there for 18 months? The program was only six months long. You were in three hell weeks in one year.

No one's ever done that. How did you do that? I talk about the new norm. When I lived in a $7 a month place when I was growing up for a short period of time, I loved it. I didn't know any different. That was my norm.

Once we moved out of that place, we moved to a $236 month place. I was like, I never want to go back to that little piece of shit. But if you go back to that $7 month place, and you realize this is where I live, this is all I got. Your mind says, Roger that. This is home. So when I was going through Navy Seal training for 18 months and going back through all the hard parts over and over again. I told myself, after the first time,

I knew it was going to be a long journey there. My body was breaking down. It was just how it was going on. I said, you know what? This is my new norm. So my mindset, it's like going to work. Like you go to work, you put your suit and tie on, I go into suffering every day.

Every day, suffering, being broken, duct-taping my feet up, stress fractures, shin splints, being broken. This is my new norm. And your mind says, if we're not broken, this ain't normal we got to be broken so then your mind starts to get tougher and tougher and more cows

people how did you want on broken feet broken shins my mind knew this is how we operate we're in Navy still training this is what we are I became hell and that became my new norm I gave myself no way out

there was nothing outside these walls of hell nothing I became I love God but for a short period time I became the devil because that was hell. I became the boss, the owner, the CEO of Navy SEAL training. That was my mindset. And that's how you get through things. You put yourself, you immerse yourself wherever it is, and you become that.

You become that and give yourself no way out. When I was 297 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-labs, spraying for cockroaches, making $1,000 a month, I thought that was me at my 100% potential.

Come to find out, a few years later, 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. 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. People hear my story and think this guy is sadistic. I realized how the how the brain works. I figured out how the brain works. I'm a scared kid, and that's what gives me so much power. I had no foundation, and I built this off of just research in the mind. The feeling you get is basically invincibility. You realize that you can't do it all the time.

when you need to do it, I know I can go to a place that I can live in. And when you know that you can run on broken legs and you can do certain things that a lot of people can do, but they're not willing to do this power, this sympathetic nervous system of fight or flight and you're fighting, it gives you this charge of energy of when you're sitting there at 3.30, 4 o'clock in the morning and you're duct tape and your feet and you're, feet up because they're broken and you're doing it by yourself and you're going through arguably one of the hardest training in the world and these guys most of them are healthy and you're going through it broken and you already at a disadvantage but you're still there you can feed into that and tap into that for a lot of power but if you look at it well i'm broken man like i'm not going to

make it. But if you look at it as man, I'm broken and I'm still here and I'm fighting and I'm going to find a way to get through this because I have no other place to go. It gives you a lot of power. When things start to suck really, really bad, my brain in a lot of people's brain, they don't go to your dad beating you up. Your brain says, we get to fucking out of here. This is miserable. So anger goes away a lot of times when you're suffering because your brain that says, we got to run, we got to go. So that anger is not popping up saying, oh, I want to show them. I want to show those people. No, there has to be a much deeper. If I say deeper, it has to be down to mineral, mineral soil. It has to be down to that nice mineral soil where nothing can burn.

you can't burn dirt so it has to be down that low that literally is something in you that's at the core of your soul but you don't find it unless you spend a lot of time with what you want to be in life

I can't give that to you you can't get it to somebody when you find your true passion in life and my passion for me when like I want to be and I give Navy Seals Army Army I don't give a I want to serve my country. I cared about I want to be someone that I'm proud of. I want to look at myself in the mirror because I was so disappointed.

That accountability mirror I talk about, I was so disappointed in what I saw every day. I wanted everybody to love David Goggins. And a lot of people did. I didn't love myself. But I knew a lot of us want to find peace first. So people say, man, you always talk about this suffering and pain. I'm at peace right now because I went through that. You don't find peace first.

If you do, Merry Christmas. More power to you. More power to you. I found peace on the opposite end of finding myself. And no one really finds himself without going through trials, tribulations, suffering, accountability. and accountability is suffering. Being accountable every day for doing right for yourself, for the people next to you.

It's miserable. It's hard. Thank you for tuning into this episode. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.