The Resilient Mind - Turning Pain into Power: Embracing Life After Trauma - David Goggins

Episode Date: January 6, 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.Download Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Special thanks to Lewis Howes, subscribe to his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/lewishowesWatch the full interview on Lewis's page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOIBztTDLfQ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, turning pain into power, embracing life after trauma with David Gagins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. God put me in a very interesting spot of life where he made hell my teacher. He made hell my teacher. A lot of people don't understand that. So I'm trying to give people a different thought process of life where failure, hell, disappointment, discomfort is a great learning tool.

And many people don't understand that. And a lot of people won't even understand this interview when we get done with it. But it's these few moments in life that you have. Like for me, I always talk about it. Rocky won round 14. that one two minute and 13 second clip of Rocky getting up when Apollo knocked him down. That one clip, when I was going through a very bad time in my life, I saw what I wanted to be. And it wasn't a guy that won.

It wasn't a guy that won everything he did. It was a guy that kept getting up after being knocked down. So I realized if that two minutes and 13 seconds changed my life, saw it was. I saw something that I needed to be in the world I was living in. Maybe my story will give someone the two minutes and 13 seconds they need to change their life. Means that people live in a very comfortable place, that's fine. Don't listen to me.

A lot of people are looking for that two minutes and 13 seconds, and I might be that person. That's why I start sharing it. What's the point, like we all have a story. And I believe that we're all teachers. We're all teachers. And if you don't learn something and give back, like what you learned. Yeah.

What's the point of living? You're wasting. You have all this knowledge of which you learn. Some people may think you're crazy. Some people may put a title on you. But it's, it is, you know, it's those few people who are, like, you know what, I need to hear that. So you have to put yourself out there.

There were a lot of emails that came in to me. And I didn't realize, you know, when you live your life, you don't know what it's doing to people because it's my life. I didn't know my life was as bad as it was because it's my life. It's what I went through. I think it's like the norm. It's the norm. Yeah.

That's why I did, man. But when I started getting these emails from people saying, hey, you know what? You changed my life. That part changed my life. That part of your story changed my life. And because I have so many different parts of my life that so many people resonate with different spots. Maybe it's the obese part. Maybe it's the bullying part.

Maybe it's the learning disability part. Maybe it's the abusive parent part, whatever it may be. So many people draw from my story and I started getting these emails. And I was like, God, man, you know, and I'm a big believer in something more powerful than me. I don't know what it is, but I'm not the end all. So I was like I got to start doing more. If I'm touching these people's lives

A few people here in there. Right, maybe I need to go out here and do some more. It's a crazy story, man. I mean, if you guys haven't gotten the book, you guys can pre-order the book. This is actually a galley copy here, printed out. Make sure you guys check this out. Can't hurt me.

Master your mind and defy the odds. And when I was reading the first part of the book about your childhood, I mean, your father just seemed like was just so abusive. I mean, it's one thing to be emotionally abusive and another thing to be physically. And when you have both, it's like the perfect storm of like the makings for chaos in your life. Right.

And it just sounded like he was just nasty. Nasty and everything was your fault and you were always wrong and you weren't living up to a standard. Both you and your brother and your mom. Right. And it was just constant physical abuse over and over. I mean, the story of you just being bent over and him just like whipping you over and over and you just gasping for error. I was just like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. How did you deal with that?

How did you like overcome the constant physical and emotional abuse? You know what? It's all I knew. So when you're born to that, it's all you know. I mean, you know something's not right because in my mind at a young kid, I could tell me, you know, the way I was processing things wasn't right. I mean, I suffer from severe toxic stress. And that was one of the big reasons why I started, you know,

I had to learn disability. My focus in life was way off. I was afraid. I was afraid of everything. And when you have that kind of foundation growing up, and that's where you start life at, is being abused and also working all nights at a skating rink, not going to school,

and you have a guy who's an alcoholic, and the second he got drunk, he got mad. And so our house lived in fear. Yeah. And the one thing that you can't ever get out of a kid's mind is your mom's, like your mom's face. The terror of your mom's face. So, you know, I didn't care about my brother. I didn't care about me.

But I saw this woman go from Mary Poppins, the sweetest person on the planet Earth. And when you see your mom start to transform to a shell to a person whose face. become stoic, a person who has no emotion. And that changes a kid. Yeah. And when you're young and you have to grow up so fast, so about eight years old, my mind was of a 40-year-old at eight. You know, my family, like, life came at me.

And it makes your brain, you know, you're not outside playing with kids. You know, you're trying to avoid getting beat. You know, you're avoiding all these things. Yeah. Yeah. When you go home, it's supposed to be safe. Right. And you're being beat again. Exactly. And what's funny about that, we lived on Paradise Road.

Yeah. We lived on Paradise Road. And it wasn't so paradise. It was anything but paradise, man. You know, once those doors shut, you know, my dad gave everybody a different view of him. He wore the nice Taylor suits. He smiled. That's right.

Your dad's amazing. Those doors shut, man. And the devil himself came out. So it was rough. And that's why my foundation was so beaten dad. down at a young age. The hardest obstacle was myself. I started realizing more and more and more

that all these people were gone. What was haunting me was me. I can't control my dad. I can't control the people calling me. I can't control all these things. But they were things that kept me down. It started to become my reality. My reality was what they made it out to be.

and I became the most important conversation you'll ever have in your life, in your life is when you have yourself. And my conversation was absolutely horrifying. What were you saying to yourself? I'm dumb. I'm nobody. My dad, I mean, my dad was great in mental warfare.

A drunk, insecure man will make everybody around him feel like hell. Yeah. Because he wants to give you no power. and that's why he was so mean and my mom and myself and my brother because he didn't want anybody to get above him

he wanted to keep you down low so when you're growing up with all this stuff all this hate and it wasn't the beatings I could get the beatings all day it was a mental torture so when at a young age

your parents put a dialogue in you of confidence or you're nobody so that voice in my head was I'm a loser And then it was confirmed when I got in school. And in third grade, I was falling behind. They didn't want to put me in a special school.

Yeah. You know, with kids who can't learn. Right. Then it was confirmed what, you know, what my dad was saying. So that confirmed it. Then I started cheating. So I started to realize, you know what? I'm taking the easy way out again.

Yeah. And it starts snowballing from there. Now the kids are calling me n-knit. But it wasn't all the kids. So what happens is you start to get this picture that everybody hates you because your reality becomes so, so big that you don't, I mean, you can't see the clear picture.

It might have been three or four kids. That's it. Doing it over and over. Right, but it was the whole town. Yeah. Everybody hated me. So, start out. The world hates me.

That's right. Yeah. And that's when it became toxic. And that is where I became my worst enemy. Wow. So those are the conversations. Those are the conversations. When did you start to realize

that those conversations weren't supporting your life? I was a, so my mom was getting ready to get married and this guy came into our lives, his name is Wilmuth. He came into our lives. And like I always say, whenever my life's getting better, God will put another challenge in front of me. He gets murdered. Oh, man. And we moved back to Brazil.

So we moved from this town, this small town in Brazil, and we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. a lot more blacks, a lot more different colors. Inapolis, Indiana, he got murdered when I was in Naples. We went back to Brazil. We went back to Brazil, this is when the racism started.

Really? Because now I'm 16. So when I was first in Brazil, I was 8 and 9. Kids don't care. Here's the kid. I look different, but kids don't care.

Kids don't know. But when I moved and I came back, I'm no longer a kid. So all the kids I grew up with, I'm now different. I'm different. So there's about five black kids in my school. And the reality came when I came out one day

and all my car was spray-painted, we're going to kill you. Oh, my gosh. In Brazil? In Brazil. In Portuguese. No, no, my fault. Brazil, Indiana. And about 10 minutes from Brazil, Indiana is a small town called Center Point, Indiana.

And Center Point, Indiana was at that time a huge hub of the KKK. Wow. In 1995, the Clan March on the 4th July parade. And I don't know if the picture is in. I don't know if any pictures are in there. But if not, there's a picture in the book in 1995, 10 minutes from my house of crosses being burnt. 10 minutes from your house. 10 minutes from my house.

Wow. So when you have all this negativity growing up and now you're cheating and you're doing this and your dad beat you. And, you know, your mom's fiance gets murdered. And tragedy after tragedy, it's a tragedy. tragedy and then you come to this and your mom's working three jobs you know she's not home at all she never saw one report card of mine she didn't know how bad off i was in school she was hustling trying to make money and i was the man of the house lying sneaking around not going to school cheating right everything i could yeah and um so i i walked out of school one day and saw this

you're going to kill you on my car and i went in to get the principal there's several instances like this to happen. I went to get the principal, and the principal, he didn't have anything. He couldn't give me an advice. And I didn't want to tell my mom about it because my mom was already bothered by my dad beating her down and now her fiance got murdered. So I didn't want to bother her mind. She's like, I've dealt with this my whole life.

Right. I didn't want to bother with anything, man. So I kept everything away from her. So I'm in the crowd wash trying to scrub this stuff off and I got home and so happens two weeks later she gets a note from school. And the note says your son is going to fail. He's not going to graduate. And she's like, what is this?

And I had to come clean with my mom of all the years of me cheating, of all the bullying, of all this and all that. And she was such in a bad spot in her life that the best thing she could do was like, hey, you know, you're going to fail. You're going to fail school. Wow. And I was like, my God, man. like, you know, she was in a dark place, and I was in a dark place, and we were kind of on our own,

in the same house, but living different lives. And I realized at this time of my life, she was a great mom, but I was on my own. And that's when a real big change happened for me, so I said, I'm going to join the military. This is 6-17? 17, you know, I wanted to go into the delayed entry program.

And I went to take the ASVAB test, and I cheated. Because I walked into the recruiter's office, and recruiter says, Hey, you got to take this ASBAB test. The second I heard tests, I was like, man, oh, hang on a second. I can't test my life, man? I'm going to go. Can I come back tomorrow?

Yeah, yeah. So I come back and the recruiter starts handing these tests out. I'm like, great, I'm going to sit by my boy. I'm going to copy off my boy. He had a different test than I did. So I couldn't copy off him. And that's when the light bulb hit on. So I filled this test several times.

Did you felt twice? I felt it twice. I felt it twice. I felt it twice. And the third time, I said, Mom. I need help. Wow. And she said, we're going to have much money, but we can afford a tutor for one hour a week for six months.

Because this is my last time taking the test. And so I had to learn. So I had a third grade reading level. I'm a junior in high school. Yeah. So I had six months to learn all this stuff. And I only had a tutor for one hour a week. So basically what happened was she would come in for an hour and I wasn't picking it up, any of it.

I couldn't retain anything. And it was so much to learn It overwhelmed me So basically what happened was I realized I had to go by the store And buy Spiral Notebooks And I had to literally

Write down Every single thing Repeatedly So what may take you an hour to learn It took me Hours, 6, 8, 9, 10 hours I'd write the same thing down Simple stuff

I hear you man So I started memorand Yeah That's my life So I had to memorize Yeah. So I didn't really learn it. I could just recall it from writing it down so many times

that on page 71, I remember seeing that. Yeah. And that's how I did it. And I ended up passing that test. What was the greatest lesson your mom taught you growing up? Honestly, the greatest lesson she ever taught me is the lesson that she doesn't know how much she taught me because she wasn't much in the teaching mode.

My dad took her soul. But what I did as a young kid is I observed. everybody. I wasn't really smart in the books, but I was real smart when it came to life. And I was able to sit back and watch her mistakes. I was able to see how she struggled through life and how I don't want to struggle through life. And I was able to see, she never picked me up. The biggest thing she did for me, and this is honest to God truth, and she doesn't even know she did it. When I would bust my ass, when I would fail, when I was at the bottom of the sewer, she never picked me up. She never gave me that cookie He said, hey son, you know

It's going to be okay She didn't have time for that And sometimes she gets upset When I talk about my past Because it paints her out to be Not the best mom If I had any kind of mom And that kind of environment

I would have never made it Because she forced me For every reason She forced me To you better figure this out Or you're going to be a statistic Wow And this is something that she didn't sit down and tell me.

I realized this. This is the world that is in front of me. And what most people do is they see this world and they look at it as an excuse to get out of it. Yeah. I started looking at it as this is the ultimate training ground for the rest of my life. I have all these valuable lessons because if you look out in the world right now today, it's not a nice place. But I'm very prepared for it. Yeah, you are.

I'm prepared for it. I'm prepared for all the failure coming my way. I'm prepared for everything my way. And that's the biggest lesson that she taught me by not teaching me. By never saying it's going to be okay. Matter of fact, she told me the exact opposite. Life sucks. That's what she knew.

I have a lot more failures, as you see in that book. But I started down the road of instead of the path of least resistance, I started choosing the path of most resistance. to prepare myself for the journey that was coming my way. I used to take one day off a week, but that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours. Wow.

But at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate, and I replace the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate because therefore your blood's flowing through your body. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it. with the nutrients because then your blood's flowing,

the nutrients is going through all your cells and your body. All that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it. It's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into, as human beings, we believe, like so many people, before I give them a workout plan,

they're talking about recovery. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. work out first work out first before you talk to me about recovery how to recovery work out first

we are always looking for like whenever I talk to people people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable this guy you know they want to put you in a box they want to put a title on you

no you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this person was not built. This person was not made by God. This person, sorry, this person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me. Because now they're yours.

They're yours to own. If you're not smart, car yourself dumb. It's okay because you are. But take that now as you put yourself down. If you're fat, cardi is so fat, I used to be 300 pounds. We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life.

Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life start to float away. I have to tell people lies.

so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Yep. Real authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem.

That's right. You now know. I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Gagans. that's something it's not on the wall it's not a trophy on the wall

it's not a medal around your neck it is actually a feeling in your heart and people why don't you ever smile I don't have to yeah

yeah I do have a look at my face I'm a very focused person but the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart that's why I don't need to smile

I don't need to smile I don't need you look at me and say oh my God you look happy because half of us aren't happy we're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Gagins.

Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was, I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. People are going to be, you're about working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hour. I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability.

And you still want to be in the top of your class? I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn, do hard work, and I can beat the valedictorian in school but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does, you know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down that guy that valedictorian studied for an hour

and you know I caught you. I caught you and I am dumb but I have the work ethic to catch you that's where David Gagas got really invented was at a kitchen table

with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty and then three months later they were full and when you can go through that I still have them in my storage unit you go through these spiral notebooks of your life

and you realize this is how I learned this is unbelievable there's no miles It's not about the miles. It's that. Having a discipline every day to say, for me to learn this one math problem, it's going to take me 10 hours.

Wow. And that's where it, and you realize through hard work, you can outwork anybody. Remember how bad ass they are? But that's the part people don't want to dive into. It starts with yourself, man.

You got to start diving into those things that you're afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the sports, that makes you feel good. It could be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge. All you want to do is go back to what makes you confidence or what gave you confidence.

Is that happy spot? No. What gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own. Realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't. but I can learn. What gives you confidence not being afraid

is overcoming the fear. I just stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people are going to watch this. You know what it gives me confidence? It's no longer care if I sit and start stuttering to you. That's what gives me confidence.

It's facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them. And facing them pretty soon like this, you know what, man, this is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone is where my confidence is getting built.

That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer. There has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for my entire life. You cheated.

You lied. I did everything. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, I'm still missing something.

It's because they did what they were good at. And they had this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything to work on the outside looking at it. Like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with the backpack with all my stuff in no car. Right. And I walk around, happiest person in the world. Have nothing.

Happy as hell. It's because I found out the, the whole key to life. It's not in all that. You have to face yourself. So many people live to be 100 years old and they die miserable, having everything,

because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this. Happiness, peace, enlightenment, it's all up here, man. It's all up here. And when I start talking like this, people go, man, you know,

I don't know. It's the truth, man. Yeah. It is true. It's all up here. He's got to be going to go and face it. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.