WHOOP Podcast - Navy SEAL Rich Diviney details how to prepare yourself for optimal performance

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Rich Diviney spent 20 years in the Navy SEALs, including time as a commanding officer of the famed SEAL Team Six, the unit that killed Osama Bin Laden. He did 13 overseas deployments, 11 of those to Afghanistan and Iraq. Rich details how the right mental framework can prime you for success, no matter what challenges you might be facing in your life. He discusses becoming a Navy SEAL (2:43), SEAL training (5:13), leadership (9:07), confidence and perseverance (12:54), adaptability and resilience (14:43), controlling the controllables (15:58), antifragility and how to come back stronger after being pushed below your baseline (20:31), neuroplasticity (28:08), utilizing microrecoveries (29:45), peak performance vs. optimal performance (39:24), taking care of your body (42:49), the human engine and attributes (49:12), discovering which attributes you have (51:15). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We build wearable technology across hardware, software, analytics, and it's designed to help you improve. Biggest difference between WOOP and any other product on the market is that it changes behavior and improves health.

That's right. If you've been on WOOP for 12 months, you've got a lower resting hard. heart rate. You've got higher heart rate variability. You've got higher sleep quality. And you've probably changed two or three things about your behavior. So pretty amazing. If you are not on whoop and you want to get on whoop, you can use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-L-H-M-E-D to get 15% off a WOOP membership. We've got a great guest this week, Navy SEAL, Rich Devini. Rich spent 20 years in the Navy SEALs, including time as a commanding officer of the famed SEAL team. team six. That is the same SEAL team six that killed Osama bin Laden. He did 13 overseas deployments,

11 of those to Afghanistan and Iraq. One of his main objectives in his leadership role was to improve mental resolve and resilience within the SEALs. This is a theme that we've hit on on a lot of different podcasts, and I think Navy SEALs have some of the best perspective on it. Rich shares his thoughts on how the right mental framework can prime you for success. So we discuss what he learned in the seals about leadership, perseverance, and controlling the controllables, the importance of adaptability and resilience, anti-fragility, and how to come back stronger than ever before after you've been pushed below your baseline, how to utilize micro-recoversies throughout your day to improve your performance, and the difference

between peak performance and optimal performance. Rich is also the author of the new book, the attributes, 25 hidden drivers of optimal performance. Check that out now where books are sold. Okay, here is Rich. Rich, welcome to the book podcast. Thank you, Will. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, first of all, thank you for your service to this country. I was saying just before we jumped on that the steel community is one of my all-time favorite communities in the world, and I have a great admiration for what you all do. do for this country. Well, thank you. Thanks for the appreciation. It's one of my favorite communities, too. But yeah, it was nice to be part of them. It was nice to be part of the overall

military. And all of us appreciate all of your appreciation. You know, I want to start just by understanding for you whether becoming a Navy SEAL was always part of the plan. Did you always have a vision for that, or was it something that you stumbled into? A little bit of both. I I had always planned to be a Navy pilot. My brother, so my dad was a private pilot growing up. So he'd take my brothers and my sister and I flying on the weekends. And my twin brother and I were sold from the beginning. I mean, we just, we loved flying.

So both of us immediately wanted to be military jet pilots. The autobiography of Chuck Yeager, a book called Yeager, a phenomenal book, was like one of our favorite books of all time because it just talked about this guy breaking the sound barrier. And we figured, you know, obviously Chuck Yeager was an Air Force guy, but we figured, well, the Navy guys, they land on ships. What could be harder than that, right? So we kind of were bent towards that from the time we were like six or seven years old and ended up going to ROTC at Purdue University. But it was right before that, before I went to college after the first Gulf War in the 90s that I had learned about the Navy SEALs.

I got this article in Newsweek magazine and it had a camouflage face on it and kind of outlined all of the spec ops teams, Air Force Army, Navy. And out of a eight or so, eight or nine page article, there were like 20, 25 pictures and of guys in different environments. So some guy, it's in winter, jungle, desert, underwater. And all I noted was that out of the 20 pictures or so, like 15 or 18 of them were all Navy SEALs, they were just in different environments. And so I was like, man, these guys do everything. That's pretty cool. And so that's really what kind of keyed me in.

I began to read about them, take an interest. And it was ultimately when I was getting ready to select what I wanted to do, I said to myself, well, I know I can be a Navy pilot. I just didn't want to be a Navy pilot and wonder if I could ever be a seal. And so I decided to go SEAL and went to SEAL training. 1996 showed up at the beaches of Coronado, California. And fast forward almost 21 years later. and I retired in December 2016, but a great career and very kinetic.

Now, in 96, did you know what you were about to walk into with that initial training? I've interviewed a number of Navy SEALs and gotten to know a number of Navy SEALs, and it sounds like there's different degrees of preparation for that moment in time, because it is quite intense. It is quite intense. And I would say I had read about all of the, as much as I could before going, but that never really prepares you for what it is because what it is is it takes you down to sub-zero and preparation you can prepare physically certainly and i did a moderate job with that

i remember getting to seal training i had never really run on soft sand so soft sand running was tough for me and the obstacle course was the first time i'd done that so there was some physical preparation that i was not prepared for but ultimately it was the it was just the idea that they took you down to this place of sub-zero of where you really feel like you can't you can't go on and then they ask you at that point you know can you and and that's what I loved so much about the training was it it was so um pure uh there's no other I don't think there are very few other experiences on the planet that that are that pure it didn't matter who you were it didn't matter what type of athlete it didn't matter if you were the the you know the star athletes in fact

some of those a lot of those star athletes who came they didn't make it right um and so it didn't matter what you star athlete with your guy you threw a guy from the farm throwing hay bales it didn't matter what grades you had uh all that mattered was you know can you can you push through and that's and then you end up with this core of people that did and that's really what i loved and that kind of was reflected for the whole career um as a seal it's just that purity of it so in a way the fitness level was an overrated characteristic of people showing up, but by the end, you might not have been the fittest people, the group of people that makes it through may not have been the fittest people, but certainly you are all the toughest mentally. Totally. Well, and that's really

the key, right? The fittest, those who, and when I say the, and Rich, give a sense, too, for how many people come in and how many people, you know, make the program. Yeah, it's a rough, it's roughly about an 85% attrition rate. So, for example, my class, we started about 160 or so candidates, and we graduated 38. And that's rough, that's kind of average. But what's interesting is that, yeah, I think it's really about, I mean, again, there were some really star athletes who did make it through. I don't want to, I don't want to make the impression that those weren't correlated.

I think what correlates is how much mental training have you had to get to that point. There are some athletes who really have some vast and deep mental grit that's involved in their process. And if you have those practices, that's going to prepare you better. We all came out of the training extremely fit. In fact, it was funny, you know, again, I have an identical twin brother. And when I came out of steel training, I was physically, like, totally different than him. You know, I was twice as big. I was bulked up.

And, you know, he became a pilot. But so you all come out. fit but you're absolutely right it's the it's the mental game that's that's the most important now you served as commanding officer of seal team six at what point did you become the commanding officer i served it as several commands the the that command is very specific and is designed in a way that has actually some sub commands in it so it's actually a very large place i was a commanding officer at one of the one of the squadrons there and so and so just inside of that And I can't get, unfortunately, I can't get into detail in terms of what that command is designed like,

but I was in charge of one of the specific squadrons at that command and served there for many years. And what for you was it like being in charge, so to speak, versus just another member of the team? Wow, that's a really great question. I think, you know, what's interesting about SEAL team and any, I think, high-performing team is that there's a distinct difference between being in charge, and being a leader. And yes, I was in charge, certainly because I was given a status that put me in charge. But the team doesn't operate in the way that people think. You know, it's a very dynamic, I call it dynamics of ordination because it's a very dynamic

environment inside of which you trust your team members so, so much. And every team member has a role. And in an environment like combat, sometimes the guy in charge is not necessarily the guy who's hierarchically in charge, right? I mean, I remember I was technically in charge of missions, right, because I was the senior guy. But, you know, there were points at which I was supporting the snipers. The snipers were the guys in the lead, right?

And we were in support of them or we were in support of the assaulters or we were in support of the explosives guys. So I thought it was really, for me, it was really both transformative, educational, and fun because the team, it was, the team worked like a, flock of birds. You know, we just, we always were constantly supporting each other. So, and that's really what leadership is. Leadership is really, you know, it's, it's pushing forth and supporting those people in your span of care. Oftentimes the best position for the leader is not even in front, right? Which is why the words get conflated a little bit. It's,

it's actually letting your people move to the front and perform. And I always used to say, you know, my job as a, I tell this my junior officers, our jobs as, as leaders is to eventually work ourselves out of a job because we need to create an environment where they might, they don't need us. You know, they can operate. And that's very much what the teams were like for me. Now, what in your opinion makes a Navy SEAL? You know, I had Mark Devine on the show. I don't know if you know, Mark. He talked a lot about how for him, the process of visualization, mindfulness, even meditation helped shape him to become a Navy SEAL. What was that like for you or what are some commonalities that you've seen for SEALs?

The commonalities are probably a lot more. And so, yeah, I like, I love Mark and I love, he's, he's been able to really effectively articulate and kind of bring into an understanding kind of the mental processes that allow people to do that type of work. I'm very much, I'm very interested in kind of going more elemental in it. And I think, I think this is where things like attributes come up because, you know, I think grit, the attributes that make up grit, for example, are, are what it takes to be Navy SEAL. I mean, you know, the doses, you know, preponderance of courage, of perseverance,

of adaptability, of resilience, those things that are that are kind of more innate to and inherent to our, to our nature, but we just have a preponderance of them. So we get in these really tough, tough environments, and we're able to persevere, we're able to kind of get through it. And I think, I think if I were to find a commonality, it's that ability of a Navy SEAL. and I guess we have this going at a buds too because that's where you really have to do most of it, ability to kind of look at it a very difficult, challenging, complex on certain environments

and immediately begin to slow down their processes in a way that allows them to start to absorb it and begin to attempt to understand it and in doing so then move through it and kind of chunk it in a way that allows you to kind of go step by step and understanding that it's not always going to be pretty or sexy or flowy, you know, it's going to, it's, it might be cold, gritty, dirty, and ugly, but you can, you can get through. So, so I think those, I think the, the actualization of

those types of attributes allow for guys to get through training. And then you come out of training with what I would call, I could only define as true confidence. And people ask me, what, what's the, what's the one biggest thing I took away from being a seal? And I would say that, it's true confidence because true confidence in my mind is the ability to understand and know that regardless of what the environment does around me, regardless of how uncertain or dirty or uncomfortable it is, I will make it through. I will perform. I will be able to figure it out and charge on. I think that's the confidence level you come out of training with. And then, of course, that just compounds as you actually do the job. Yeah. And I think that in a lot of ways is what's so fascinating and

inspiring about the Navy SEAL community from the outside in. It's why so many books are written about it. It's why there's such a fascination with individuals like yourself who have committed to it for so long and truly carry that confidence. If you're someone like me who, obviously has not gone through that community, how can you try to embody some of those learnings and bring them into your own life? I mean, said differently, our Navy SEALs, born or are they made, right? Yeah. Well, again, they're both. It's never as easy as

that, right? So here's the great news, is that is that, and this is what also fascinates me, the Navy Seals is just but one experience, and it's just one human experience that happens to be pretty challenging, happens to be

pretty intense, and happens to be out there in the public view, and how people see it. We as human beings go through some pretty gnarly things. You know, and it doesn't have to be the beaches of San Diego in seal training. It can be COVID. It can be a PhD or a master's program. It can be a death of a loved one.

It can be a divorce. You know, these types of things, we are designed as human beings to be resilient. We are designed to be adaptable. We are designed to persevere. I mean, that's what evolutionarily, that's what's allowed us to get to where we are today. It's allowed us to go from cave dwellers to space explorers. So really, my fascination is not so much how much different guys like seals are. It's really, hey, what are the aspects of my having been a seal and the experiences that I went through

that I can pull out and reframe and ubiquitize in a way to tell people that, hey, you also have this. Now, sure, maybe you're not going to go to seal training, but guess what? Not everybody should. And it's a specific job for a specific individual to do a specific thing, right? But there are some pretty badass people out there. And I would always say, you know, seals are tough, sure, but there's some tough people out there. You know, go to any cancer ward and you'll find some very, very tough people. And what's interesting is those processes that are used in that type of endeavor are some of the same that are used on the beaches of Coronado.

And then mental toughness gets into it, you know, comes into it. And this is the ability to kind of understand, okay, I need to, in this environment where there's so much I don't understand and so much I don't control, I need to control the controllables. I need to, the seals call it control your three foot world. And what that means is, out of all this uncertainty, you stop worrying about that which you can't control. And you ask yourself, okay, what can I control? And sometimes that chunk is like right in front of your face. I mean, it's not even, the step is like a half step. It's not even like, oh, I'm going to wait until like, you know, I'm going to finish the mission.

No, no, no, no. Sometimes it's like, hey, I'm going to take the next step forward. That's all I got. And then once I take that step, I'm going to relook and figure out what the next step is going to be. It can be that small, that incremental. And you see that in some of the, you know, you talk about, again, say, cancer survivors to say, listen, I was going through chemo. And I was just like, hey, I'm just going to make it through the next minute and then make it through this therapy and then make it to the end of the day.

that's the type of mental toughness and chunking that everybody has access to and can allow all of us to really excel in any environment that we choose, whatever racetrack we choose to be on, whether it be SEAL, surgeon, teacher, entrepreneur. And that's really what's fascinating to me. Well, it's so interesting. I love this idea of controlling the controllables. It's something I think about a lot in my life. You've developed the mind gym, if I'm saying that right. in the SEALs. Describe that because I think it ties to what we're talking about. Yeah. So we were, I was running training. And so I was running assessment selection and training at the aforementioned command. And we, one of the tasks I got from my commanding officer was to start looking at resilience overall. It was about, it was about 2010-ish. And, you know, so we already had guys, you know, we'd already been at war for a while. We had guys coming back. We had guys retiring, they were broken, and either physically or, you know, in some cases mentally.

And so we began to say, hey, how can we look at being a little bit more resilience? You know, how can we do better physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually? And so I and another guy ended up being kind of a team of us, but specifically I and another guy said, hey, let's take this opportunity to start exploring this idea of creating a relationship with our brains because because we we knew that seals holistically we were pretty darn good in the gym. I mean, physically we were fine and running the mile faster wasn't really going to help us or lifting more weight at the bench press wasn't really going to help us. What could help us though is starting to understand how we could affect more positively our physiology,

both in the in the conduct of combat, in the conduct of the act, but also in the recovery phases. And actually, by the way, introduced recovery, you know, as something that was actually a good thing because I think you know and you've experienced in everything you've done and all your research. So some of the roadblocks to most high performers is they just want to keep going because they love that idea of keep going. Right. So recovery becomes necessary. So the mind gym allowed us to start throwing things up against the wall that allowed people to start understanding their physiology. So, you know, we started getting like the isopods, the sensory deprivation float tanks, which were great, you know, see if experiment with those, started learning some, some HRV breathing, learned to how that, hey, how does your sympathetic work with your parasympathetic and how can you affect that? What does that mean for recovery?

And can you start thinking about techniques? We started looking at some mental acuity drills and things like that. And really was just very, we were very experimental in trying to help guys begin to understand. their brains a little bit better and ultimately start to hack their physiology in a more productive positive way. So it was really, the inception of it was really a bunch of experiments thrown against the wall. But that was really the idea is create a space where you weren't necessarily lifting weights. You were kind of trying to figure out your brain and your physiology and your nervous system. And you've got philosophies related to building resilience and building

anti-fragility, and tell me if I've got this right, but you define resilience as the ability to come back to baseline after being pushed below, and you define anti-fragility is coming back stronger. So it's coming back actually above your baseline after being pushed below. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that's exactly right. And anti-fragility, a great book, by the way, by Nassim Talib, and he talks about this concept. You know, again, resilience can Can I get knocked off baseline? Can I get back to baseline? That's really in, that's by definition what recovery is. Can I recover back to baseline? Sure. We were, we were also interested, okay, but wait a second, you know, can you, once you come back, can you actually have, can you have moved,

can you shift your baseline? Can you have grown stronger? This is exactly what we all do in the gym, right? When we go and lift weights, I mean, we're tearing our muscles. We're recovering to an extent where we're, the muscle fibers are growing and our muscles are growing, right? So, so can we, do with our systems in our whole systems what we do in the gym with just our biceps you know and so it involved a couple things first it involved a understanding of recovery because again recovery is sometimes the problem if we're not effectively recovering we all know we're going to slowly entropy we'll just get we'll get weaker and weaker and it'll be gradual over time but we will not we will not get back that baseline so we'll get weaker and weaker so first was recovery

what does that look like both mentally and physically? What are those time frames need to be? And then anti-fragility kind of take a beyond baseline, at least from a mental aspect, it kind of started to bridge into this idea of reflecting effectively. You know, the mental recovery and the anti-fragility that one can receive after going through a traumatic event or anything challenging comes from the ability to once recovered

then effectively reflect and ask the appropriate questions so that they can then say, okay, what did I learn from this? Because it's really a learning thing that happens. Okay, how did I learn? How did I grow? That takes reflection, and it also takes recovery beforehand. At a minimum, we should all be focused on achieving appropriate recovery and resilience. The next step is can we move to antifurigility? So as we're moving through this stuff, especially the mental stuff we're growing stronger because of it the other way it's been described is PTSDG you know post-traumatic growth right and you grow from these events and that's that's in essence the same thing so an example might be you lose a loved one right you're you're torn down

by that yeah and you find ways to get over it or to move move beyond it and then in the process of reflecting that whole process you grow some deeper appreciation for life or other loved ones in your life or even just the fact that you now know that you can deal with that incredibly painful event if it were to happen again. Is that sort of the right framework? It is. It is. And that's a really kind of poignant example. But I would totally agree with you. There's the recovery in sense that, okay, I can now think about this person with love in my heart and I'm, you know, sure, again, sad that, you know, you're always going to miss them and things like that,

but I can, I'm at, I've recovered to the extent that I can think in a, in a positive way. But then there's people who take it to the next level, say, I'm going to do something. And my next path in life is going to be this because of what happened, right? That's an example of, of someone growing from that. And again, you don't, this is, you know, every, every person has to make a decision for themselves as to what's,

what's appropriate for that event is is resilience and and recovery appropriate um and just that that's okay or is this something i can i can take to the next level um and and and grow stronger from become a different better person because of um death is certainly a huge huge uh one to to tackle it takes a long time but listen you could you could be people think the same thing about a breakup you know a breakup's a breakup's pretty tough for most people um there's a and so one of the key keys to effective recovery, you know, to kind of judge and gauge whether or not you're recovered enough is the emotion, the extent to which the emotions still affect you. Effective kind of true resilience or recovery gets you to a position where the emotions have become somewhat

neutralized again. So in other words, when you think back to that event, you're not, you don't get that same pain. You've been able to reconcile it mentally and emotionally so that you are fairly neutral. And then you are able to, at that point, effectively reflect, and then perhaps you get to a point where actually now you're happy, you're joyful when you think of it because you've become someone different. You've, in the case of a breakup, you've met someone new, you've moved, you've done whatever. And so these are, there are phases in the cycle that have to be recognized and accounted for

and can't be cheated. You can't try to, if you try to reflect, for example, too early before you're fully recovered and there's still emotion tied to it, you're not going to be able to ask the appropriate questions. You're not going to be able to answer the questions with the same logic and neutrality that you could once you're fully emotionally recovered, if that makes sense. It does, although let me push you on that.

Like, can this whole example of anti-fragility happen within seconds? You know, when I was reading about it, I was thinking about Michael Jordan, for example. Like younger players on opposing teams were told not to go after Michael Jordan psychologically or verbally because tearing him down would trigger him, in fact, to come back and go above where he otherwise might be. Like this idea that if you could actually try to get under his skin, it would make the final outcome worse than otherwise not saying anything. to me that was almost a fascinating little micro example of anti-fragility where him getting pulled down a little bit would make him come back that much stronger. Yeah, it's a great point. And I think the answer is probably yes to your question.

It probably can. However, I would just say, again, I get into, I'm someone who loves semantics. I love kind of going to the elements, right? And I think elementally, growth takes a little bit of time. And so I think with a guy like Michael Jordan, he had previously developed a system where antagonistic behavior from another triggered him, right? And we all have triggers, right? I mean, we'd listen to a song and suddenly we're fired up to work out, right?

I mean, so I think for him, that was more probably of a physiological and psychological trigger than maybe actual antifragilia, although the process to create that trigger was probably exactly that. It was probably anti-fragility at its best. And then he created a trigger, say, hey, next time this happens, it's going to make me fired up. And that's cool, too, because if you can get to that, that's like next level. Well, that's like Michael Jordan level. There you go. Right. And so what are the processes? Say you wanted to develop triggers like that in your own life. What are some of the processes that you would follow? Yeah. Well, so triggers, and it's funny, because I don't know if I've ever consciously,

forced myself to develop triggers. So I've had to deconstruct those triggers for myself. And I think any type of learning and plasticity in our brain has to do with, and I, you know, you and I have a mutual friend of Dr. Andrew Huberman, Stanford Dura Scientist, awesome, awesome. Yeah, great. Yeah, really smart. And so he and I talk about this a lot.

And I know he mentions it a lot, but plasticity, the ability for the brain to create neural connections and learn things. comes from both focus and attention, well, excuse me, focus and the intensity of that focus. Those two factors of you're focusing and it's intense that the acetycholine and the adrenaline is queued in to kind of to lash those connections and you're starting to talk to plasticity. And so I think triggers come from getting yourself or being in a highly intense state. And then again, intensity often comes from emotion, whether it's joy or anything. anger or fear or anything like that, but a very intense state. And of course, intensity drives

focus and then executing whatever that trigger is. And so I know some people will practice doing like physical moves that when they're really in a heightened state, they do a physical move. And then they do that over and over. And then no matter where they are, they can do that same move and they get that intensity. This happens unconsciously for us with songs. You know, certain songs get us get us, you know, it's one of the reasons why songs, for example, stick in our mind so much and we hear a song from say the 80s and we get taken right back to that point because there was something about that song at that time frame there was focus and intensity and it kind of drilled into our brain so i think anything anything involving or

surrounding creating triggers has to involve a focus and intensity and then of course a deliberate act uh whatever that is uh just like jordan's hey someone antagonizes me that's a trigger i'm going right now i'm fired up and that's that's cool now what are your tactics for micro recoveries, which is this idea of recharging your battery in a very short period of time? So micro recovery, so the first things we had to do when we started talking about micro recoveries was to understand the relationships between sympathetic and parasympathetic, which I know most of your listeners know. And so how can we start to physiologically transfer in between those things and more rapidly, right? So what we were,

interested in and I certainly when we were starting to put together the mind gym was interested in was can we can we think about and start to to train to some techniques that can be enacted a little bit more rapidly than say sitting down and meditating for 30 minutes or taking a nap or whatever and so this is where HRV breathing comes in really handy any type of breathing actually well any type of focused breathing whether it be open gaze which is kind of it kind of can take you out of, start shifting you from sympathetic to parasympathetic. It can be the, well, that's visual breathing, CO2 blowout breathing where you're actually you're blowing out CO2.

And again, Huberman will describe the idea that, you know, when we're actually feeling like we need air, it's actually not, it's not that we need oxygen. It's actually where our body's building up too, too much CO2. That's actually what's stressing us. Our bodies are getting stressed out because we have too much CO2 buildup, not necessarily too little oxygen. So breathing in a way that blows out that CO2 will also start to shift you. We start experimenting with, you know, visualization techniques. Now that becomes highly subjective, but you can, again, this is kind of like the trigger, gets back to these triggers,

right? If you have experiences that are highly charged with gratitude, with care, with positive swinging emotions, to visualize that for moments, we'll actually start to bring back into state, if possible. I used to do this, you know, my, well, my sons are 13 and 15 now, so they're big now, but when they're babies, they used to, you know, take naps sleeping on my chest. And it's just such a wonderful bonding experience for any parent to just have your kids sleeping on your chest. And so I, I would take that in while it was happening. And even today, when I think about that, I can, it immediately starts to induce feelings of love and warmth and gratitude, which is shifting us into this parasympathetic kind of positive response, which we know

chemically and biochemically is taking us out of the cortisol producing mode and shifting us more into like DHA producing mode, which is a restorative stuff. So those little micro recoveries were things that you could do and think about if you had like two minutes or three minutes, something like that. And then we started thinking about, okay, what are the kind of the mezzo recoveries? That's like 30-minute meditation or 20-minute nap. And then, of course, the macro, which is like the big daddy of them all, which is proper sleep. Right. Yeah, right. And your community, or the seal community, I should say, has mixed results when it comes to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but it's becoming more important because, totally. Because again, now you deprive sleep during training because,

because, again, sleep deprivation is going to get you down to those elemental things, right? So how does this person actually manage himself when you've only slept for two hours over the whole week, right? But it also breeds this kind of tough guy thing as well, I don't need it. And we do. We absolutely do. And if we don't do it properly, we all begin to entropy. On this topic of microrecovers, it's interesting to me to think about when you would choose to use them. Is that the kind of thing you'd want to do, you know, you're in a stealth helicopter right before an event is about to take place, or you're in a stressful situation in combat, or is that something that you would try to avoid doing in combat because, you know, you might lose, you might lose that adrenaline that you actually need to perform? Again, highly subjective choice for the individual. I try to use it whenever I felt like it was the moment to use it. Helicopter rise are the best. because going in or out,

it's a great time to just kind of reflect a little bit. In a gunfight, a little bit tougher. And I know I kind of say recovery between gun fights, but in a gun fight, a little bit tougher because those types of situations are constant actions. It's like a firefighter, you know, fighting a fire. It's like, okay, you're moving, you're actually moving through stress and challenge one step at a time.

This is where this idea of chunking your environment really, really comes into play. and one of the reasons why I think SEAL training had this unconscious genius element to it because it trains you to just to deeply focus on what you needed to in the moment. And then as soon as that was done, you switch your focus to the next thing and you just start stepping through, right? That's what something like a gunfight or combat would be just like a firefight. But yeah, I think, you know, again, let's take this out of SEAL life and just say,

okay, this is the business person going between meetings. Like I have five minutes between two meetings, right? and I want to just quickly recover a little bit, you know, because that last one was tense. I don't know what this next one's going to be. This is a student in between exams or in between studying. And this is really very much, I think, has to be looked at as, hey, you are, it's like, you have your mobile phone and you're running, you have like five minutes before you're going to get on the airplane and your phone's at 10%. And you're just going to plug your phone in for two minutes to get it up to 15% before you get on the airplane.

Right. That's what it is. But if you start to think about times in your day where you can actually plug in your mobile phone, you know, your internal, your physiological mobile phone once in a while, then what happens is that energy bank begins to refill a little bit throughout the day. And so instead of at the end of the day being left with zero in your bank account, you can actually begin to kind of charge throughout the day. So maybe you're left with, I don't know, 30 or 40 percent because you've charged it throughout the day. And that may translate into coming home from work. And now you're not as short with the kids, you know, as you were. You're not, your temper is a little bit more even keel. Do you feel a little bit better, right? So I think the micro recovery concept is something we should all think about. And we can all kind of enact just throughout normal day. Traffic is another thing.

And you're sitting in traffic. It's a great and easy time to get pissed off, right? But it's also a great and easy time to just cool down, you know, and think about things and just plug in your physiological iPhone. And I think that that analogy is good, but for some people, it may not even truly emphasize the degree to which these small moments can amplify your day or your life.

I mean, we've seen enormous research on the benefits of mindfulness. And you're talking about doing something new, three minutes a day, maybe three times a day. That's nine minutes of your life. But instead of going into that next meeting completely frazzled and maybe, you know, timing out essentially or battery bust, you're actually all of a sudden very present and thriving during it. So to me, it's amazing how much little things that you tweak can have this profound impact on your life. We've even seen this with sleep where something that you do in the morning, say meditating for 20 minutes in the morning, may actually end up affecting how you sleep.

sleep 15 hours later, right, which is such a bizarre, fascinating concept. Yeah, we had the same thing. And it's, so we had the same thing with the float tanks. We found that the float tanks were helping guys sleep better who couldn't sleep very well. Just 20, 30 minutes, 45 minutes of float tank, which you think is like, you know, okay, what the heck is that? But it was helping certain, you know, certain guys sleep better. But the other thing it does, well, I think that needs to be stated, is it starts to build

habits. You know, you do these little things. And you do it. And you, again, they're little, right? They're little steps. And so they're not hard. They're easy. You do it two, three, four times a day.

You know, a minute or two here and there, you're building habits. It's becoming habitual. So it'll grow over time. And then what's really cool is that after a while, you'll do it without thinking about it, right? You'll be walking in between two tense meetings. And without even thinking, you'll shift into a recovery mode. And your body will be right there. And that's really powerful if you can begin to build habit.

that way. It's amazing. And it's why I'm excited that Woop is doing more and more work just broadly kind of within the Department of Defense because I think there's a lot of a lot of data too that we can show to support just how these simple little shifts and actually end up making a big difference physiologically. Yeah. And I want to say that I want to emphasize and thank you for the work you're doing because again it kind of teases out this concept that I talk about, the difference between peak and optimal performance. And, you know, people would always talk to me and they say, hey, Rich, you, you seals, you guys are the best peak performers in the world, right? You guys are great. And I kind of disagreed with that a little. I knew we were good when we needed

to be. And this is actually where Huberman and I actually met at this conference where we were kind of designing, we were trying to design this peak performance thing for some C-suite executives. And he and I first gelled on this concept of not agreeing with peak performance. And the reason is because, because peak is an apex. And it's an apex from which you can only come down. And it often has to be prepared for and plan for in schedule, right? So the pro football player spends his entire week preparing and planning to peak for three hours on Sunday. Okay. Now, there's nothing wrong with that because, you know, if you can do that as a business person when you give the presentation or an athlete or whatever, or even a seal, maybe, right? But really what we were focused on was, I thought was more realistic, was off. optimal performance. Optimal performance is, hey, how can I do the very best I can in the moment, whatever the best might look like. And the best sometimes looks like peak.

It looks like flow states and everything's cool. Sometimes it's like, you know, kind of like I mentioned before, it's, I'm gutting this out. I'm going step by step, moment by moment. It's dirty. It's ugly. And I kind of thought about myself in my own hell week when I was freezing in the surf zone. There was nothing peak about my performance, right? I was just doing the best I could in the moment. and so yeah totally and I would imagine even COVID we look at 2020 most people when we got slapped with a

quarantine overnight most of us couldn't probably say that we were peaking at that moment there was nothing peak about our poor we were doing the best we could and so what optimal performance allows us to do and I think what the work you all are doing allows us to do is understand our physiology and understand that there's power in modulation you know and understanding that as you move through your day sometimes it's not i mean i don't need to peak when i'm driving to the grocery store i just don't you know i can actually i can actually i can actually use that as recovery time so that i'm at my my energy system is at a level where when i need to peak i can because i'm not sure when that's going to be you know the athletes uh oftentimes have an advantage of knowing when they

need to peak uh and they can plan for it but take that athlete into everyday life you know or all of us in everyday life we're not exactly sure when we're going to need to peak right so it's it's actually best if we perform optimally and modulate throughout the day. It's healthier. It's more restorative. And this is exactly what the military needs and that the research and the technology you guys work on helps kind of put that in our brains and make that forefront and say, okay, cool. I am, I'm good just sitting here for a moment and recovering. I'm good.

You know, you're not kind of thinking you have to be, you know, 100% all the time. Yeah. I mean, optimal to me is an emphasis on balance, right? which is a lot of ways the way whoop is structured, which is this notion of strain and recovery and the higher your recover, the more strain, the lower you're recovered. Ideally, the less strain would be optimal. I completely agree with your analysis of peak, which is much like the Olympian who wants to get the gold medal in four years from now, right? Which is the ultimate example, right? So you've now been on whoop for a little while. What are some things that you've

identified in looking at the data and thinking about it. Yeah, so I'm loving it because I love the data, I'm a data guy. So, so sleep is number one, right? And so I've been experimenting a little bit. If I've had a really hard training day and I, and how does that sleep look afterwards? What if I've had a day off, you know, and I've had a couple beers before bed? How does that look when I wake up? And so that's been very helpful.

The strain has been very helpful. And I've tried to, you know, Ben, I've tried to say, okay, when this says I'm at this level of strain, how does that feel, you know, physiologically? One of the things that I would say that is a disadvantage to SEAL team is that you are, you get used to beating yourself up, right, physically. And so that, so you almost, you almost begin to turn off your relationship with your physiology, almost because you have to, you know. Yeah, yeah.

And it's, it's very advantageous when you're in Iraq or Afghanistan and you're, you know, you're doing the deed for days upon days and you don't, you're, you're tired and hungry and all that stuff, very advantageous because you just don't worry about yourself, but it becomes disadvantageous when you're trying to figure out what certain things mean for you. I've really loved, I've been wearing it for about three weeks now, and I've really enjoyed experimenting a little bit and seeing, okay, where does my strain lie, how does this work, what were my habits going to bed, and how did that reflect in how I slept?

And so I'm going to do a little bit more exploration along those lines for a few more weeks, and then I'll call that data kind of by myself and say, okay, all right, what are the habits I want to create from this? You know, what are the realistic habits for all that stuff? So, yeah, I've really enjoyed it, and I'm continuing to explore. Well, good. Anything specifically you've identified as being particularly good for your sleep? Yeah, well, certainly not drinking, but I think we all know that, right?

Yeah. Trying to space out, obviously, eating and drinking prior to. The routines of reading, you know, reading before bed versus blue screen, I've seen results positive and negative. So positive, obviously, for reading and negative if I'm working on the iPad or computer. And then bedtimes. Bedtimes definitely have an effect for me in terms of there seems to be, I'm still collecting data, but there seems to be for me a sweet spot of bedtime for. for me that if I can hit it, I really, I enter into a really good rhythm. And then by the time

I'm waking up in the morning, everything seems to be clicking. So that's been, that's been cool for me to kind of explore. Well, sleep consistency is a big theme within Woop where we found that people who go to bed and wake up at a very similar time, independent from how much time they spend in bed, every to bed and waking up at the same time will give you sort of an enhanced benefit to your physiology. So, you know, we see people to have lower resting heart rates, higher heart rate variabilities, faster recoveries when they sleep more consistently. So it's a bit of a hack for people who, you know, say they can't spend more time in bed. Well, okay, if you can't spend more time in bed, what are things that you can do to get the most benefit from your sleep?

Right. That's one of them, which kind of ties to what you were just saying. Yeah, yeah, I definitely found that. And it's an advantage I have now being out of the military that I can actually explore that stuff. Well, it's funny how often strengths and weaknesses can be on the same side of the coin, but if there is even possibly a weakness within this specific community, it's the fact that you all are so good at times disassociating from the status of your body that you can push your body to potentially a bad place, right, or a place that's going to affect performance in the long run. And I think that's where WOOP can act as an independent review system. Yeah.

You know, because often the people who are best at pushing themselves that far, at times can even lose perspective on how far they've pushed. Yes. Right. And so that's where Woop can show in just very simple, transparent terms. What you choose to do with the data is up to you, but at least in transparent terms can say, okay, you've been redlining for. a week and a half, or whatever it may be, to help people almost give themselves, not an excuse, but allow themselves to take a step back and recognize that moment that they're in.

Yeah. And then effectively, because they'll have data that shows that, reflect back and say, oh, look at this. I was redlining for a week, and I felt this way, and I had this level of activity. And now I'm greenlining for this week and notice how much different I feel and how much more productive I am. And so those types of, because, you know, I mean, after you do a week, if it's not written down, if it's not like logged somewhere, you lose that lesson. You say, okay, well, I can't compare how I'm feeling now to how I was feeling last week. But the data helps create those comparisons as well. So I think you're absolutely right. Now, you've got an amazing book, The Attributes, 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance.

Describe that and, of course, where people can find it. Yeah, so this was really a project when I was running training and assessment. We were trying to figure out and explain why guys were making it and why guys weren't. And it could be related to regular steel trading as well. But what I really had to deconstruct was the difference between skills, and attributes. And attributes, skills are things that are taught. They're, they're things like driving a car, shooting a gun, riding a bike, right? And you can teach them, you can be taught them. They're very visible. You can see how well someone does those things. Attributes are

more inherent. They're things like patient, situation awareness, resiliency, adaptability. And those are the types of things that we lean on in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. When we are in an environment that is, that we're trying to understand, it's unknown and uncertain, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill to that environment. So we lean on these attributes. So what I did, and we did this in the teams, we kind of collected the attributes that were required to be a seal. But then when I wrote the book coming out, I basically said, okay, what are the attributes holistically of optimal performance? You know, what are the kind of the top attributes of optimal performance? Try to ubiquitize those. And the book is really an

exploration of those attributes and how the reader can kind of see which ones they have a lot of and which ones they have less of, right? And so we all have all of them. It's just the difference between, say, you and I, the levels to which we have each, you know, so the idea is, okay, what does your unique kind of mix look like? And that way you can kind of start defining, okay, am I a, you know, we're all, right, we're all humans. So, so we're like, we're all automobiles, okay, but some of us are jeeps, some of us are Ferraris, some of us are SUVs. Sure. No judgment, right? The Jeep can do things the Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things that jeep can't do. The question is, hey, can you look under the hood and figure out

what automobile you are? Because if you're a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track, it's probably not going very well. Or if you're Ferrari trying to run on Jeep track. So the attributes are kind of the first indication of your own human engine. And then you can start making choices, because you can develop attributes. It just takes a little bit more difficulty. So is the best way to identify your attributes through self-reflection, or is it also through some kind of, you know, We would call it a 360-degree performance review. But maybe I think I'm a five out of ten for patients, but someone who works with me thinks I'm a two out of ten.

You know, that sort of thing. Is that how much is this introspection? Yeah. Well, neither are the best ways. The best ways are experiential, right? This is why seal training was such a great laboratory inside of which I could see this. because we all, because we all heard it, the true us shows up when things are tough, right? In fact, but then introspection is required, right?

So everybody, in fact, here's the good news of 2020. Everybody has an experience that we can all look back to collectively and begin to be introspective about some of the attributes that showed up, right? Again, when we were all slapped with quarantine, we can say, hey, that we were all uncertain in challenge and we were kind of stressed out, right? And so which were the attributes that I seemed like I had more of, right? So adaptability, you know, those of us who are higher on adaptability scale, for example, are pretty much kind of go with the flow people.

You know, okay, the environment is changing around me that I can't control. Now, I'm just going to go with the flow. If you're lower on adaptability, that's a lot harder to do, you know, and oftentimes it takes some real fortitude, and sometimes you go kicking and streaming. Again, so it's really an experience that teases these out, and then for those who want to kind of figure out their own, First of all, I have a free assessment on their website. So if you go to the Attributes.com,

created an assessment tool for the grid attributes, the drive attributes, and the mental acuity attributes, so that someone can take that, they can get a snapshot as to where they stand as compared to a thousand people from the planet that we pulled, right? So you say, okay, based on these thousand people, comparing to a thousand people, I'm a level six on adaptability.

But then it's going to require the person to say, okay, does that make sense for me? When I look back at these experiences, am I adaptable? Am I pretty much a go with a flow type of person or am I, you know, situational aware or whatever. So now the other thing you brought up is

360 reviews. The leadership and teamability attributes, those, I'm still working on that. We're hoping to have those done in a month or so. That will be a 360 because, again, you don't get to call yourself a leader, all right? That's like calling yourself funny or good looking, okay?

You don't get to talk. Other people call you leader. I like that. They decide whether or not you're a leader, okay? because leadership is a behavior, not a position. And same thing with a teammate. You would get to call yourself a great teammate. And so the leadership attributes and the teamability attributes will be a 360.

And that way we can go, okay, does, it is Will empathetic? Is he selfless? Is he, you know, humble, right? Those types of things that other people then reflect back to you and give you some feedback on. It's amazing, man. Well, I could talk to you for hours and I look forward to meeting you in person soon. This has been a real pleasure.

where can people find you or your book or more information awesome yeah the attributes dot com go the website there you can get the book you can do the assessment tool i've thrown up some some workbooks that people can actually if they want to develop attributes they can get the workbooks and develop an attribute i'm on instagram both rich divini rich underscore viny and then the attributes and also on lincoln and yeah i really it's a better pleasure meeting you i love what you're doing so thank you for what you're doing and yeah i look forward to to shaking your hands and once we get the chance to thank you to rich for coming on the podcast check out his book the attributes 25 hidden drivers of optimal performance use the code will

omit to get 15% off a membership and follow us on social at woup at will omit okay stay healthy folks stay in the green Thank you.