#160: Sealing The Deal For Life As A SEAL With Commander Rorke Denver

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I'm just— I'm loving life today. As I like to say in the morning, I love my life. Well, that's not a guarantee that every day is going to be simple or easy. In fact, most days are not. Most days are challenging. And so this time of the day, sort of middle of the afternoon, I'm, you know, if you asked me in a moment of weakness, I might say I'm not so happy right now. But most of the time, I am. I have this wonderful— well, this— my wife, Randi, who is just a wonderful mirror for me, she will come up to me and she'll say, so you loving your life right now? You loving it no matter what? All that kind of stuff. Well, I am absolutely full-on just thrilled to be here in this moment. And I know part of it is because I've got a great guest on the show today. So I'm gonna— I already know that his energy and mine will blend really well. He's a guy with a lot of— Good energy, you know, not just energy, but a lot of really good energy. He's done amazing things in his life, and I'm going to read a bit of his bio, and then we're going to dig right in and talk about some things that are going on in all of your lives right now. So Commander Rourke T. Denver has run every phase of training for the U.S. Navy SEALs and led special forces missions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other international hotspots. He starred in the hit film Act of Valor, which is based on true SEAL adventures. His New York Times bestseller Damn. Making the Modern SEAL Warrior takes you inside his personal story and the fascinating, demanding SEAL training program. In his second book, Worth Dying For: A Navy SEAL's Call to a Nation, Rourke tackles the questions that have emerged about America's past decade at war, from what makes a hero to why we fight and what it does for us. Rourke was most recently seen on Fox's American Grit. The series followed 16 of the country's toughest men and women as they faced a variety of military-grade and survival-themed challenges set in the wilderness. Commander Roark, it is a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for being with us.

No, thank you, brother. I appreciate it.

I just— so funny, just at that moment where I was finishing up your bio, Siri for some reason decided that something I said triggered her. Siri got triggered, decided to speak out loud. I wonder who else is listening, but that's a conversation for another day. What is your CV, your curriculum vitae, your bio is incredibly impressive and very diverse. What is not a part of that introduction that you would love for people to know?

I'm a big reader. Being a reader has been an unbelievable kind of gift from early in life. I did not like the confines of kind of the 4 walls of a classroom. It's not a place I thrived or flourished, but my dad is— might be the most well-read person I've ever met. I mean, I'm sure I've inadvertently met somebody that's read more than him, but not many. And if you have and committed as much of that to memory as he has, you're an impressive human being. But he instilled that in my brother and I. And so being a big reader, I think, has led to thinking. I think it's led to a framework of the way I looked at every adventure I kind of went into because I could connect it to historical readings and even the fictional characters that would motivate and inspire. And so, being a big reader is probably not something I highlighted as much in that, but that and being just a tremendously devoted husband, father, family, that's definitely the base of my pyramid. And yeah, those things are hugely important as well.

Yeah. It's interesting. These are back-to-back podcast sessions for me today. And right before you and I started, I was just— had just finished up a podcast with Jack Canfield, the author of The Success Principles and Chicken Soup for the Soul, etc. And he was telling me he's read about 1,000 books. And only reason he knows that, because somebody had asked him. So he had to do the research and figure out somehow how many books he's read. So I think he and your dad are like neck and neck when it comes to that. We got to get those guys introduced.

For sure.

Why don't we dig in and let's start with a bit of your history. So I'm here in San Diego. You were based in San Diego. And for folks that don't know, I think the SEALs, there are kind of 2 sets of teams. Now, if I get this, if I botch this, you just correct me right on the spot.

No problem.

Yep. Because I had met a Navy SEAL instructor whose name is— I'm just drawing a blank on it at the moment. Hopefully it'll come back. But he basically told me there's sort of 2 sets of teams. There's the odd and even. And I forget which, which, but let's call it 1, 3, 5, 7. I don't know if there's a 9 and then 2, 4, 6, 8. Yep. And we got one team that's based here in Coronado. Right, in San Diego. And you got another team based on the East Coast. I don't know if it's Virginia or something like

that. Yeah, exactly, Virginia Beach. And the teams— each number you quoted, 1, 3, 5, and 7— those are all individual teams. So all those teams are on the West Coast, odd numbers. Even are on the East Coast. And those are the 2 primary centers of gravity. And San Diego has a lot of extra, I guess, intensity based on our basic course. So BUD/S, the course that you would see if you're on the beach in Coronado or staying at the Hotel Del, uh, those crazy buggers running up and down the beach with boats on their head. That's where our basic course is, to include Our Admiral and our senior leadership are housed there as well. So the West Coast has a real power base. The East Coast, equal number of teams, then also has SEAL Team 6, which is like our all-star team that's made tremendous headlines. And then the rest of leadership is spread out through, as you can imagine, the Pentagon, DC area. Special Operations Command is down in Florida. So those are the, those are the major spots you're gonna find yourself if you're a SEAL.

Yeah. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now, we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Yeah. This show is about conscious pivots, and I wrote a book called Pivot on that topic. So, I would imagine as a SEAL, you know a little thing or two about pivoting. So, just for my own curiosity, I hope other people would, would feel the same way. I'd love it if you had a pivot story you're permitted to tell. Yeah, I hadn't talked about this beforehand, but if there is some great sort of delineation or an example of what pivoting looked like in the SEALs, or even what your definition of that is, and relate it back to a story from those days in your career.

Yeah, there's a couple pivots I can think of that relate to kind of the SEAL experience for me, and then I can think of one pretty major within my time in the SEAL Teams. I'd say the first pivot I'd tell you about, which is sort of A strange dotted line over to my kind of life experience, but I grew up in the Bay Area of California. This is right in the heart of Silicon Valley before it had exploded into a place where if you haven't sold a dot-com, you ain't living on the street I grew up in. I mean, the house I grew up in was like— my dad bought for like $100 grand, something like that, in the '70s. He thought it was the worst decision of life. It was on sale last year for $4.6 million. It's not— it has not changed. It's the same paint, same basketball goal. So when I was there, we thought it was a normal place to grow up. It was apricot orchards and good schools, good people, upper middle class, very, very upper class. in the hills above us. But being an athlete and being a successful athlete in high school, I probably had a good kind of easy entrance into the popular group of kids. That being said, the controlling power of the popular kids were wealthier kids and kids that, I don't know, just maybe could flash a little bit more and kind of ran the school. But sometime around middle school to high school is when I think most people start dabbling with drinking, drugs, and things like that. For whatever reason, I had some level of self-possession, and my brother's the same, where we just didn't start. I never touched a drop of it. I didn't drink. I've never done any drugs besides the occasional Motrin or something I needed from a doc. And that choice to not drink was just— I think it's one of the true game changers in my life. And I don't— I'm not an evangelical about this. Most people can drink just fine. I think it's a great thing to have with a steak, social lubricant. It seems like a healthy thing. End of the day, you have a dark bourbon or something like that. I got nothing against you. I just was aware that it was not the right thing for me. And so then I leave high school, I go to play college sports in a very, very kind of drinking-centric party type sport, did not drink. I go to the SEAL Teams, for sure you're gonna have to drink.

That's like— You're like a lax player, right? A lacrosse—

Exactly, lacrosse player, which is a big, big kind of aggressive guys party type sport. And then I end up at the SEAL Teams, whereas like back then pre-9/11, it was just the hairy-chested bar-drinking frog man, and you're gonna drink there. And I just never have. And there's something about that path, both the fact that I think I have a personality that can go to excess in a lot of things I like to pursue. It just really proved to be an unbelievable kind of choice in my life. And particularly as a leader, I found myself in a unique spot where I never really compromise myself. I mean, I saw other SEAL officers get carried out of the bar by their guys because they'd overdone it. You're like, look, man, those guys have you now from here on out. It's like you're gonna tell them tomorrow to show up on time and they're like, hey sir, we had to drag you home last night, so we'll be a little bit late if we want to. You know, there's that level of what you kind of give up as a leader. So I think that was kind of one of the first big pivots in my life. The second big pivot I think would be deciding to serve, just deciding to join the military and pursue much more a life path and a passion than a job. I mean, no, nobody Nobody does the Navy as— well, somebody probably does the Navy as a job. You don't in the SEAL Teams. You go into a program where there's 80%-some-odd attrition just to get in the front door. You have to be pretty committed. And you and I mentioned earlier, resiliency is something we'll talk about, but those things, it's far greater than any job. So, so those are 2 big pivots that kind of started probably your and my conversation right here. I'd say a pivot within the SEAL Teams is you have a career progression that most folks serving in the military are going to follow, whether you're enlisted, officer, whatever it is, there's a career path, a line that you're gonna basically follow or a course you're gonna chart through your career. You can control some part of it, a whole lot of it you can't control. What I figured out very, very early is just work your tail off to the point that no matter where you show up, you're gonna be of such high value that they're keeping you or gonna promote you to the next round. But in the SEAL Teams, you go there to be a warfighter. That's why you're joining that organization. Nobody's going to that organization to learn a particular skill craft or, oh, if I do this, I'll become a United pilot later. And I'm not saying that's why jet pilots do it, but you know, there's not a real, okay, we did this, now here's a Perfect one for one exchange in your next life, and you kind of want to go see the bear. You want to go put yourself in harm's way and put your hand up when it says, "Hey, here's the harshest mission, the worst dragon we got to go slay." You guys are going to go. And the funny thing is, my first three years in the SEAL teams, about two and a half three years, was pre nine eleven. And all the guys that were in the SEAL teams, even with full careers, thirty years career, had really not done anything for real on the battlefield. They had not gone to war because there wasn't a war. If you weren't Vietnam, couple little incursions, Grenada, Panama, maybe some of the events happening in. Bosnia and some of those spots, but there weren't open engagements. Folks that had really done this massive pursuit in their life never got to actually see the job they came to do. My peer group, my age class, was thrust into now the longest-standing war this country's ever seen, and that was just a tremendous pivot. It was going from the preparation for all the work you need to do to be ready to go do that job to doing that job. The lessons that come out of that, the heartbreak that comes out of that, the passion that goes into that, the commitment to it, and the peaks and valleys of that adventure are otherworldly. So I I'd say that the dividing line is when open kind of conflict on multiple fronts took place and what that meant to those of us that served in that window and those that continue to serve, that it's just a completely different world for a warrior when you're at war.

Yeah, indeed. And you cover this in 2 books, is that right?

I do. I do.

What was the inspiration to write the books? And that in and of itself is a major pivot. I mean, you think about going from the work you were doing to authorship. Yeah,

go ahead. Yeah, no,

I was just gonna say, not the easiest thing in the world to transition from one to the other.

Yeah, you know, it was a pivot for sure. And I was early in the SEAL books. I mean, besides Marcus Luttrell's book, maybe Chris Kyle, who was a sniper on my team— not my specific assault team, but at the same team with me on the West Coast— and maybe one other in the modern era books. So I was in that first few rounds of books. I think all of us wrestle with a little bit the kind of dichotomy of one of our real monikers is the quiet professional, and then now we're out talking about some of those things we learned. My books if you read them, are very much more higher ideals as opposed to chest-thumping, this is what I did and look at this amazing event. It's much more these higher ideals that are important to me and those things I learned and gleaned from my time on the battlefield, off the battlefield, running training. But as I described earlier, I was a huge reader. And frankly, reading a book, an autobiography by Winston Churchill my senior year of college, is the reason I walked into a recruiter's office.

Right.

It was the catalyst. And I don't think you'd have a hard time finding a lot of people that read something that proved as a pivot or a spark into some other they're going to do in their life. And so there was a component where I've always been much more a literature and art guy as opposed to math and science. And I like to write that when I had an opportunity, a point where I felt like there was something to say, that committing it on paper would be a good thing. And I figured if it proved as a spark or a fire for somebody else to serve— and I've lost count of the number of young Lions that have reached out to me like, hey, I read your book, I'm going to the military, I want to serve. That's a gift. And I also think some of the things we learned on the battlefield are so unique to kind of our global experience that if we completely circle the wagons and don't talk about them, we're losing a tremendous amount of information that would be of value to our culture, our leadership, our country.

Yeah, indeed. So, let's talk about the time that we're in right now because we are certainly in pivot times. I mean, things really kind of caught a lot of people off guard and what I'd love is to the extent it's even possible for people to imagine this, I want them to imagine if their mission was as critical as many of the missions that were so critical to our country that you were involved in. And the mindset of somebody that's going into something that is mission-critical, you know, how would you, how would you take care of yourself? How would you show up? How would you create resilience in the face of threat? Because there are people who are under threat right now. I don't mean just physical in terms of their health, but financially, in terms of their business, in terms of their livelihood, in terms of taking care of their families.

For sure.

So

yeah, I think there's—

draw the parallel there. I'd be thrilled to help people get a little bit of a sort of a Navy SEAL recipe for resilience, if you will, in the kind of mission-critical times we're living in right this moment?

Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. I think it makes me think of 2 things. I think it makes me think of the work you do before things get hard and the work you'll do after. So in my mind, if you haven't in some ways prepped by testing yourself, pushing yourself, suffering, leaning into pain, and doing things that kind of inoculate you to hard times, you are not going to be as armed for those hard times as those of us that have. I mean, the fact of the matter is I haven't called too many SEAL teammates to ask them if they're They're okay, because I know the answer. They're okay. I mean, they might have had to adjust their job or hold tight a little more than they normally would, but I know— I mean, we could go down to the full zombie apocalypse, and our guys probably have some perverse desire to see how that would play out if it was just a gun on your back and some water and how long you'd survive the worst-case scenario. It's some part of, I think, probably our strange fantasies and the way we look at the world. But consequently, since we've gone through these very, very difficult times, when difficult times hit, I think we're really armed for that fight. So I'm an introvert. I mean, I do a lot of speaking, a lot of big stage events, and I love to interact with folks and talk. But at my core, I'm highly introverted, which I'm sure you've done a lot of research and you know these kind of personality traits well. And it's not so much that it makes me shy or anything, it just means when I, when I do a lot of talking, a lot of those things, then I need to shut down and be very quiet, insular, do some reading, go fishing, get out in the woods. So when you self-impose or nationally impose me just sitting in my house with my girls who I care about more than anybody else and a whole bunch of books I haven't read, it's almost like my own ideal social scenario. Other than I'm not sure when the next convention is going to come up, which is where I make my money, it kind of suits my personality well. So the first phase is kind of the preparation for tough times. And I'll tell a resilient story in there. The other thing I'll say to your listeners who maybe haven't done that work, or just have not had a crucible hit their life, and this is by far the greatest they'll ever see, what I would offer to them is it is also a gift. It's a gift to go through tough times, because it 100% will— we're going to come out of it. We know we have that as a country, as a race, as a species, we're going to come out of this. And unbelievable respect to those that won't and those whose family members that won't. I can't tell you how much I understand that. I stopped counting at 40 funerals, and I've seen double or triple that in my time in the military. So I know about loss and that hardship. But tough times are a gift because we get tremendous lessons out of them. You pull resilience and toughness moving forward from them. And I think in many ways, it's one of those when you come out the back end, if this was the first hard thing that hit you, particularly for young folks, it's going to be good for you because you're going to come out of this thing and When the next lump or the next hit comes, you're going to be more prepared for it. So I think there's always a gift in hardship when it comes to resilience in the SEAL teams. When I ran the course of instruction, one of the things I coined this phrase that I think was one of my one of my greatest understandings of how we build resilience, and it's this concept that I call random acts of instructor violence. Random acts of instructor violence. So your buddy that you talked to that was a SEAL instructor, these are some of the scariest Team One.

I think that's Team One.

Yeah, it is. So he went to Team. Yeah, which is a West Coast team. So these are scary, scary humans as you're going through the training. I mean, if you're made for the training, you love it, but they're still sinister. They rule your life. They can, they can hang in the balance your fitness, your health, your well-being, and your future. So they're pretty much all-powerful. But SEAL training is hard no matter what you do. Every single day it's hard. But if you're performing at a high level, it won't be as hard. And if you screw up as a class, you can imagine it gets a whole lot harder. So as instructors, at the end of every day, one of our instructors would talk to a class. Let's say there's, you know, 100 guys there in the class. At this point we say, hey, you know, if I were talking to you, I'd be like, hey, tomorrow you're gonna be on the pool deck at 6:00 AM sharp. You're gonna be in perfect ranks, standing in perfect lines and ranks. You're gonna have your fins in front of you. You're gonna have your dive mask on top of your fins. You're gonna have a razor-sharp dive knife on your hip belt. Do you have any questions? No? Okay, beat it. And off they go for their night to prepare for the next day. If we, the instructors, show up at, let's say, 5:50, or let's say we show up late. Let's say we show up at like 6:05, and the class who we said should have been done we asked them to do at 6 is still fumbling around with their gear, trying to get in line, trying to get themselves squared away 5 minutes after we told them to be there, you can imagine what that day of training is gonna be like. You might as well just pack your bags. We're gonna beat you mercilessly until somebody quits or multiple people quit. It's gonna be Armageddon because you failed to meet the standard we set for you. But every once in a while, we'll show up as instructors at like 5:55, 5 minutes early, and they will already be in perfect Ranks. I mean, they were there clearly a half hour before that. They did what we asked them to do. Laser-like ranks, fins in front of them, dive mask on top, razor blades for knives. And they'll have a little bit of a grin on their face because we walk in and they'll be like, yeah, we did it right. And we'll beat them worse than the day they showed up late. And what'll happen is inevitably 2 or 3 will be like, this is unfair, this is total BS, I'm out of here. And they'll quit. And for those that stay, we'll be like, hey, the reason you're gonna do right by this job is what you're gonna recognize is the acts of violence in the— on the actual battlefield, they are random. And while they can feel personal, they're not. It's just the way that, that construct unfolds. So if you're not the type of person that can do everything right and have it go horrifically wrong and be fine with that and come back fighting the next day, you're not long for this job. It's not for you. So those random acts of instructor violence, I think, are one of the true secrets of our training compound, our training kind of methodology, that you could do everything perfectly right, and it can go catastrophically wrong. That's what you're going to see in the balance. It's what we're seeing right now. I don't think anybody did anything wrong for the current event. I think people will armchair quarterback that we could have been prepared, we didn't know it was coming. Nobody knows when it's coming and how much you do to prepare for things like this. You just got to take action and keep working the problem when it happens. But those are kind of a couple resilience concepts I have for the current events, I guess.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient.

In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient Yeah, just, just the idea— I'm taking that in myself because from the time that we're really, really young, a lot of people are programmed to see mistakes as the thing you have to avoid. And that somehow there's this even maybe an assumption, if you just avoid mistakes, that things will work out. You get a chance of, let's say, not having it go horribly wrong if you could just figure out how to make the fewest mistakes possible. And what I think is really sinister, diabolical But, but incredibly valuable about what you just described is the fact that you could plan your life to the nth degree, plan your business, plan everything out to the nth degree, and do everything according to the books and by the numbers, and the shit will still hit the fan at times. And what'll really—

Often at the worst time.

Yeah. Imagine the worst possible time. And for you to be able to be the eye of the storm, to be the calm in the middle of a storm, is incredibly valuable. So maybe, maybe let's talk about that for just a second, because the value of Being able to think clearly, be alert, and what it takes to be alert while other people are losing their freaking minds all around you is a very important skill in the work that you used to do, and it's a hugely important skill in business for sure right now.

Yeah.

Can you think of a time where that was tested more than normal, let's say?

Yeah. Well, the real beauty of SEAL training, as I'm kind of mentioning with that random acts of instructor violence, is the unbelievable level of preparation we put in and how intense intense and visceral we make that training. So there's, there's almost nothing I saw on the battlefield— well, we certainly had curveballs and challenges and things that I didn't expect in the moment— I don't remember many times where I was like, holy shit, I never thought about that unfolding. Like, we had kind of done the work to be prepared to what we would bring to bear in any given fight. And then it just comes down to creativity and confidence and your ability to kind of keep your head, as you said. If people haven't read Rudyard Kipling's If, you know, that poem, they should read that if they want to talk about keeping their heads when others are losing theirs around them. One of the great, great stories I'm forever about that concept. People ask me a lot, what's the number one thing I ever learned in SEAL training? And this is often like a young man that wants to learn some fighting tactic or a way to kill somebody with a spoon or something like that, which I, which I can actually talk to, but it's not, not the number one thing I learned. The number one thing I learned was from a Master Chief right before we graduated from the basic course of instruction. So a SEAL Master Chief is the senior ranking enlisted person in the United States Navy. You can go no further. And at a basic training command, they are like all powerful. And I remember we were planning for a mission, practice mission, and the We're behind in our timeline. The instructors know that. So like I was saying on that pool deck with the random acts of instructor violence, we know we're going to get beaten horribly for being behind. And the senior officer in the class is running around knowing we're behind, just screaming like the Tasmanian Devil trying to get us caught up the timeline. And this Master Chief walked out. He could kind of see the panic and chaos unfolding. He called all the officers over and he— I'll truncate the story so we can talk about more things. But he basically in the end gave us all this advice. He's like, let me tell you one of the best things I ever learned from a Master Chief from Vietnam that shared this with me. He said, calm is contagious. Calm is contagious. And I mean, he told me that in that moment, you know, this is 23 years ago now, 22 years ago now, and I don't think anything ever served me better my entire time in the military. I mean, I never saw a mission or a gunfight going so perfectly that if a senior leader or the officer in charge or the senior enlisted in charge lost their head, that everybody— it didn't fall apart or go off the tracks. And I never saw anything going off the tracks so bad, if the folks in charge kept their head, that it didn't at least stay the same or get better.

Yeah.

And it really is true. Calm is contagious, particularly as a leader. If you keep it together, others will keep it together. If you lose it, they will lose it for sure.

Indeed. Yeah, you and I, right before we turn on the record here, we were just chatting about Jones Beach, and you know that beach. And I— there's just as a, I guess, a disclaimer here, I'm not comparing our service at Jones Beach to your service, sir. And thank you for your service and everyone else who's out there doing the work that they're doing. I'll say this, however, about The work we did, it was— we were outmanned every— pretty much every day, unless the ocean was like a lake, and we had those days for sure, and we could just look at girls that day. I mean, we could just be lifeguards in the best sense of what that was like. But most days, there were rip currents, and the ocean was— can be a really cruel taskmaster. I mean, without— there's no controlling Mother Nature.

Oh, yeah.

And that can be a beast. And when you got 100,000 people on a half-a-mile-square piece of sand, and there's 20 lifeguards, To, to, at 10 at a time protecting the people who are in the water. It's— the odds are not exactly in our favor. But we— when I was 19 years old, we had somebody go down and had to do a full-on search and rescue to find this person. You know, dark, cold Atlantic water. You're in the water 90 minutes and you're, you know, you're blue, you're shivering, you know, there's no— you know, we got no gear. We're just diving down 10 feet into the dark trying to find something, kind of hoping you find and hoping you don't, really. Scary as shit at 19. But when we were when that whole thing happened unfolded, it was devastating to sit with a captain of our field and and find that you know this guy was gone. They found him days later on the jetty at Field One, and and he said, "Look, we've got to we've got to learn. We've got to be able to come back from this. Everybody's got to get up in the stand because the the people that are on this beach are going to be here tomorrow again.

Yes,

and we've got to be impeccable." So he said, "Look, we got to learn our lesson." from this first, and secondly, well, we've got to commit to a higher standard for sure. And that standard for us became— it was actually something I talked about in my TED Talk, that we committed that no one would ever go down on our watch again. He actually made it pretty clear when he said, look, you either make the save or you die trying. So, it was just— that was the mantra. You didn't go in the water and not come out with somebody. Yeah. And he said, we've got to have each other's backs to do this, to be so So outnumbered as we were and Mother Nature being such— so completely oblivious to us. Yeah. You know, we're just so insignificant, but we had to have each other's backs. And actually, for those of you watching on YouTube, I'm wearing a shirt right now that says, Got Your Back. So I want to get a sense of how important that principle has been for you in your career as a SEAL and then leaving the SEALs, getting— coming out of the military. What's— how important is it that you are maintaining some of those same— those same philosophies and bringing them to life in the work that you do as an author, as a speaker, etc.?

Yeah, I mean, the premium on trust and taking care of one another is, you know, I think it'd be hard to put any stakes higher than in combat. One of the reasons we push training to that such far, far limit and extreme, and frankly to the breaking point, is that we make sure the one thing that's a guarantee is that the person on the right and left of you, in front of you, behind you, are at a minimum gonna never give up. And we drill that in from day one. I mean, you drill that in from boot camp, and then at SEAL training, even the most simple tasks, like if you, if you have to run, like if you're running the chow hall, you're going to the bathroom, you need to go get a piece of gear that you forgot or you needed, you do not run alone. You will never see a singular person, candidate, student running through training. At a minimum, you will be in what we call a swim pair or a swim buddy. So it's like, look, hey, I just got in trouble, I'm gonna go get beat mercilessly. Like, a buddy will just jump up and start running with you, be like, it's probably gonna happen to me too. But you cannot go anywhere without a buddy. On a swim, if you're further than 6 feet apart, you can fail the swim because you left your swim buddy. You did not keep that 2-person integrity. Then it builds up to 4 guys, 8 guys, a squad, a platoon, an assault force, whatever that might be.

You leave nobody behind.

Leave no one behind. And we made— we've made a very conscious decision also on the battlefield though, that there's a— there was, I think, a pre-9/11 romance of we mean so much leave no man behind that, you know, 20 of us would ...just to pull a dead teammate out of the fight. You also recognize in real war, and that was, you know, kind of a pre-war convention, that yes, we're never gonna leave somebody behind. We're never gonna not keep go searching for them or go find them. There are times when we had teammates die on the battlefield, and more people are gonna die if we try and throw you on our shoulder or do something to get out of there. And every one of us would be like, hey, if I've turned into a piece of meat, you better go. I don't need a— you can have a headstone at Arlington. You don't need to have my body in it. I'd much rather see you guys see the end of the day. But that is— we're talking the most extreme possible Case in our line of work, if somebody is in the fight and still fighting, nobody's leaving that person's side until we get everybody out of there. And so it's um it's a remarkable thing when your foundation is knowing that the people you're around at a minimum will never fail you or never quit you. And it's very hard to replicate, as you mentioned, or it's much harder I guess to replicate post my time in the military. I know those guys would do the exact same thing in our post military life when I'm around them, and I can feel that. And it's a it's a special special thing to be around. I come from a family that my brother, my dad, my mom all. those people, I think, are very much the same way. We have that kind of commitment to each other, and so that's real special. But those are bonds that, like I said, are exceptionally hard to replicate in your next life. And I think it's why a lot of guys and gals that come out of elite units in the military do, do struggle sometimes in their next life, because they just don't feel the same level of purpose and commitment of those around them than the whole block of time they spent doing what we did. It's special.

Yeah, that's one of those enigmas, I suppose. And maybe it's, I don't know, not an enigma But the, the idea that somebody that's given so much of themselves on behalf of their country and put in that service, that they could be lost at the alarming rate that we see military service people are kind of lost when they, when they leave. I mean, then the suicide rates and other issues are pretty— they're, they're unacceptable. I don't even know what to say. It breaks, breaks anybody's heart to just see that.

It's one thing that we do exceptionally well in the military is build everybody up to the point of performance. We don't have an excellent on-ramp. I heard one of my buddies talking about it's like you're going over a bridge. The military builds you up to this bridge. The bridge doesn't go down the other side to land you back into your next life. I mean, we're much more cognizant of it now.

The off-ramp.

Tremendous programs. Yeah, the off-ramp, you know, both within the military and then amazing post-military civilian or nonprofit veteran service organizations that are trying to figure out how to get in employment, enjoyable activities, and connective activities for veterans so they don't feel lost, they don't feel rudderless when they leave. I was very lucky in my departure. I mean, I don't think I've ever defined myself by any one chapter in my life. I feel real lucky that I love history, but I don't live in the past. I live in the present and as how I'm moving forward. And so I'm just as excited about what's coming next as what I've done up to this point. So I think my personality was made to kind of do that transition, but I'd be lying if I said I don't miss being around those guys. And I mean, I'm real purposeful every year to pick, pick a surf trip out, out your window and hunting trip with buddies and spots where we can get together and really reconnect and, you know, have those unbelievable kind of campfires of catching up on our times and tell a bunch of lies and spend time together.

I think reinvention is one of those skills that if you— we've got 4 kids and we always wanted them to be independent thinking of stuff. That, that was That was like our early parenting.

Yeah.

That was the only thing we really had to go on, which we wanted. Not a whole lot of blueprint for what to do as a new parent, but we wanted our kids to be independent thinking. And now I would add to that, that I want our kids from our example to be able to pivot in a way that is not seamless, but just doesn't involve suffering. I mean, reinvention is something that I think is a thing we And that's what we do sometimes because we're forced to do it. And other times it's simply because we're able to recognize that we're not— there's seasons, there's seasons to everything. Like you had a season as a SEAL. Now you have a season as an author and a speaker and other things. So yeah. And it also sounds to me like resilience, as you were defining it, is something that you create before you need it. That's part of that preparation, right? You got prepared to be resilient before the shit would hit the fan. Yes. hit the fan.

For sure.

Yeah,

I mean, there's no team, no high-functioning, high-performing team that doesn't play and kind of rise to the occasion. I have this idea that— and it's not— I didn't coin this phrase, but that people don't usually rise to the occasion. We certainly don't see it on the battlefield, people rising to the occasion. What we see is them degrading to their level of training. So if your level of training was exceptional, then you're probably gonna have exceptional performance even if it's going south. If you had piss-poor training, you're probably gonna have piss-poor training or performance. You're not gonna be able to like fake it. And I would imagine when you look at any of the great dynasties in sports— I mean, you look at the current or most recent Patriots, you look at the Bulls with Jordan and Pippen and all those guys— I would bet if you went in there— well, we know it from the reading of knowing how they did things— but you go into their practices and their practices are different. They prepare harder, more focused, more driven, more dialed into what the culture and the commitment to the goal is. And so the Their performance matches that. They perform based on the way they prepare for the event. I was at, I was at that Super Bowl a few years ago in Houston when it was the Pats against the Falcons, Atlanta.

Yes.

And I was with Getty Images, so I'm with the guys taking the photographs. I mean, the only people that are in front of Getty Images is NFL Films, and they're half inch in front. I mean, you're right on the, on the field, and I'm running their little SD cards because they're posting pictures. So I'm just like a little gopher out there, but I get to watch this game standing on the sidelines. And in the pregame, Brady is throwing little out routes, little slant routes to Edelman and all his receivers. And I remember one where Edelman kind of just went straight out and went to the side like a post or a slant, and he's feet from me, and Brady throws this pass that I'm telling you, Edelman could have had his eyes closed and had his hands out and that ball was there. But I saw him reach a little bit to grab the ball, but it was right there. And I saw Brady like snap his fingers, like, get back here, run it again. I mean, He was off by inches with that pass, and he's like, we're running it again. I'm not going to have that be the pass I'm practicing throwing. I mean, you're just like, these folks are playing a different game right now. It's really something. It's really something.

Sports is always a great analogy for those kinds of things as well, because the performance is so— you can judge the performance on the day clearly.

That's

right. And, you know, somebody like Jerry Rice, I heard stories of how with, I guess, what was it, Joe Montana? You're a Bay Area kid, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, he would run these routes. And every time, you know, like you say, like 10-yard little button hook or something, and he'd take the ball, catch it, and then run into the end zone. Every time he would catch a pass, he would run the 80 yards, the 90 yards into the end zone because that's what he was literally—

That's where he was meant to be.

That's all I'm going to be is in the end zone after every single one. And he just like— I mean, the guys that were on, you know, that he was mentoring by his example as well, he's like, that's the standard. So

that's that like infectious, like where you say calm is contagious, excellence is contagious, intensity Instinct is contagious. Like, all these things feed off each other. So, I mean, you imagine— I don't know what the NFL season is gonna be next year based on the state of the world, but I wouldn't be betting against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with Tom Brady showing up. I mean, that guy's gonna show up and that locker room is going to be instantly transformed. If you think people are gonna show up and be like, ah, let's just blow this one off, that ain't gonna be the case.

Ain't happening.

Yeah. Nope. Nope.

All right. So, as we wrap up, I would love if you could share one thing that you do currently on a daily What do you do on a daily basis, a ritual, to help you to build your continued resilience? Because now part of your performance has to do with the skill with which you communicate, both in writing and verbally and in other scenarios as well. So, what's it look like for you right now to build resilience?

Yeah. There's a couple things I do. One thing I'll say which I know will resonate with you because I watched a few of your videos and looked at some of the things you talk about is I do think a lot of people have separated physical, mental, and spiritual as if those are all not interrelated and connected to everything we do. Your physical fitness doesn't directly relate to your mental and kind of spiritual and emotional health. These are all ecosystems that I don't think— they're like a tripod. You're not going to stay up if you don't have one of them. So, the massive amount of physical fitness we had in the SEAL Teams was one of our pillars. I mean, it just was, we are going to be physically harder and more prepared for the challenges we'll face than anybody else. So, consequently, we were. I'm in nowhere near the same shape I was when I was a 26-year-old snake eater in the SEAL Teams. But like, some workout, some athletic push every day, maybe one day off a week, I think is vitally important. And I can tell if I'm not getting cardio exercise, picking heavy things up off the ground and putting them over my head or some type of workout in, I'm much worse for it. So, I think the physical connecting your mental is hugely, hugely important. The third part of that tripod is the spiritual. If that's religion, if that's yoga, if that's meditation, you pick it. I'm not gonna trouble anybody about that choice. But those 3 things, you know, mental study and preparing yourself, physical working out and pushing yourself, and then that spiritual side. I think those 3 things keeping omnipresent in your mind are what make the highest performing people for sure. And I've got a buddy, you should, if you'd be willing to interview him at some point, a guy by the name of Warren Rustad. He's a phenomenal, phenomenal thinker, very successful businessman. He does a lot of work with entrepreneurs. Warren Rustad, and I'll send you his contact info. He's one of those guys that he's a real mentor of mine, but he's very much about morning routines. So, he's very big into, he's got, I will not ever take anything from Warren and not give him credit, but it's kind of this 10-10-10. He does, you know, like 10 minutes of basically breathing or prayer or meditation. He does 10 minutes of kind of just thinking, just centering yourselves and thinking on things, and 10 minutes of reading. So, there's not a day in the calendar year that Warren doesn't start with those 3 things. And talk about just a discipline that takes place every time in the morning to set yourself on a course of excellence and focus and and drive. So, I've been trying very much to kind of implement a variant of his with workout and kind of breathing and thinking, and it's pretty good. The first thing you do when you get out of bed is have a discipline system to kick the day. Warren knows what he's talking about on that one.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals Tools and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Agreed. Yeah. I will say that the morning ritual for me is everything. It's been the one thing for the better part of 10 years that has just— it's so Dependable, so reliable. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get a fruit that looks very much like the seeds that I plant at the start of the day.

Yes.

Yeah. So Emmet Fox is one of my, my favorite metaphysical teachers. And again, you know, as you said, whether it's meditation or it's stillness or it's just being quiet with yourself, I'm a big prayer guy, but not everybody is, and that's totally cool too. But I love Emmet Fox, and this one book, Around the Year with Emmet Fox, is a great way for me to begin my day. And my typical waking ritual, which I think is also really powerful, I'll remind myself of it as often as possible. I'll do it right now for everybody as well, which is that we get to— if we're really, really lucky, we get to wake up again tomorrow. If you're listening to this, watching this, clearly that happened for you today. And when you went to sleep last night, there was no guarantee that that was going to happen. In fact, we know right now in the middle of this crisis we're all seeing unfold that there are people who are not going to wake up tomorrow. And that's a— as you say, it's It's both a tragedy and an opportunity at the same time. And so, for us, when we realize we have been given another day, there's a significant charge to that. There's a responsibility. What are we going to do with that? What's the creative opportunity in that new day we get? So, to me, step 1, wake up. Let's all agree to do that. I hope everybody's willing to agree to that, right?

Yeah.

Step 2, what kind of gratitude can you cultivate in that moment if for nothing else than the opportunity of the day that you've been given, whereas other people not been given that. And lastly, what's the first thing you say in the morning? You know, what are the first words you say either to yourself inside, you know, your mind in that cavern or the things you actually come out of your mouth? So, mine are these 4 simple words, I love my life. Those are the words. I don't even have to think hard about asking you this. Do you love your life?

Oh, man. It's just, I can't believe it's happening. I mean, it's just been, every turn has been a gift. The hardest parts have been the best parts. The easiest parts have probably been the only boring windows of time, but I still pulled something out of this. It's just an adventure. It's all a gift. I agree totally. And yeah, you're talking about reinvention early. I think it is so key. I think my dad and I were talking about this recently and he had a case as a— he was a trial attorney for many, many years, but he had a case that was about this guy that made ice skates. He was basically the best. He's an Italian ice skate maker, but he was the best ice skate maker in the world. The lawsuit, it was funny. It was about somebody's feet hurt and he was getting sued literally for not making the right ice skates. And I gotta share this because my dad would love it. I guess he's on the stand at some point and opposing counsel, the opposing attorneys grilling him about, now how do you measure the foot and how do you do this? And he just shows, I just trace the foot on a piece of paper and then I look at the foot and I can make it. I guess the guy's giving him a egregious time about like, well, is that the proper way to measure a foot? And I guess he says, well, I'm a Noah Jesus Christ, but I'm pretty good. And so, you know, he's just one of those guys that knew it. I guess his grandfather was like a bootmaker, his father was a bootmaker, he's this bootmaker. I think those people that have that singular desire in their life, there's some part of me that's a little jealous. Like, if you just knew this is the one thing—

One thing, exactly.

The one thing. I'm like, man, if I could just bake bread, that'd be cool. But I don't think most of us are that. I know I'm not that. So

So your dad was a trial attorney for a lot of years. Was that his one thing?

I would say so. I would say so. I mean, it's perfect for the personality described. He's very disciplined. He's very fit. He's very focused. His brain retains information like nobody I've almost ever seen. So I mean, going through documents and finding those key points and critical nodes of ideas was probably like reading a Dick and Jane book for him. And then he's just a beautiful, beautiful speaker and a powerful present guy. So I think the trial room was truly his His arena. His arena. And then I got the benefit of it as the doting son and understanding and learning from him. Pretty good.

Pretty good. It's good to be able to speak so highly of your dad, of a parent. And I'm blessed that my dad is still around, my mom and dad both. Just talked to him last night. He was a participant. He was on our Resilience-a-thon over the weekend. He was telling me he loved the guy, this guy Dawson Church, who was talking, you know, leading through meditation. And we had some other folks But really, you know, when you're— when you grow up in a household where learning, lifelong learning is valued, then I think you get even a greater shot at the kind of, like you say, the pivots, the reinventions along the way. They take humility and we've got to be students. If we can do that, I think there's nothing that we're not capable of. And I really appreciate your time today. This is a great talk.

Oh, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you.

Wonderful. So folks, please go ahead. We love your feedback, and feedback— we know how important feedback is in the military, and it's so important to all of us in business. And this show survives and thrives really on the comments that we get from all of you. So adammarkel.com/podcast, you can leave a comment there. You can subscribe, of course, or leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher, any of that stuff. And I would love it if I'd love it if you'd all just think about how it is you're gonna, you're gonna create the first moment of the day when you wake up tomorrow. What's that one thing that you want to cultivate in your mind? What's that one thing you might even say? But for now anyway, I'll just say ciao, and this has been wonderful. Commander, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. I appreciate it, brother.

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