The Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance: Factors You Shouldn't Ignore With Rich Diviney

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Scale Up Method, where we teach you to reach the next level in business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. Too many business owners are stuck trying to do everything themselves, and their businesses are suffering as a result. And I don't want you to be one of those people. I am Alison Maslin, and my company, Pinnacle Global Network, has helped thousands of business owners scale their business using my framework, the Scale It Method. And all business owners face similar challenges when it comes to growth. So on this podcast, we're delivering the tactics that you need to finally reach that next level in your business. Build your dream team and scale your business beyond eight figures. So today, super, super excited. I am talking to Rich Deveny, author and founder of the Attributes. Rich is a human performance expert who draws upon 20 years of military service. As a Navy SEAL, he was the commanding officer for the Navy SEALs, where he was involved in the infamous SEAL selection process. He learned the ins and outs about picking the top candidates for one of the world's most prestigious military groups in the world. And in 2021, he released his best selling book, the Attributes, which outlines how to take hold of your attributes to maximize your success. He has also founded an accompanying business that teaches companies how to discover and develop their attributes. And he's worked with several businesses and brands that you know of, including athletic organizations and military leaders like American Airlines, major Inc. The San Francisco 49ers, Pegasus, Zoom, and Deloitte. So I wanted to bring Rich on the show because his work as a Navy SEAL has taught him valuable lessons, as you can imagine, about maintaining control in unpredictable situations. And as business leaders who are trying to scale, we have to stay focused on our goals even when the plans go sideways like has happened over the last couple years for all of us. So Rich's book, the Attributes, discusses how to reach optimal performance by exercising our natural attributes. Getting in touch with your attributes can help you take control in stressful situations. So excited to have you on the show, Rich. Welcome to the Scale it method.

Yes, thank you, Alison. It's a pleasure to be here. So thanks for having me.

Yeah, I mean, you know, in. In preparing for this podcast today and learning all about you, I was just so excited to have you on and everything that you've been through, it's just, it's. It's so incredibly inspiring. Now, did you. When did you decide you wanted to become a Navy seal? Can you give us a little bit of the abbreviated version of how you went down this. This road?

Yes, it was back in the early 90s. I grew up wanting to be a Navy pilot. And I mean, Since I was 6 years old, my brother and I were bent on that. And that's where we. That's where our focus was. It was right after the first Gulf War that I read an article in Newsweek magazine about special operations, and the seals was highlighted. The seals were highlighted as one of those. And I. I said, man, it was the first thing, first time I found out about them. And I was like, man, these guys seem to pretty cool. And found my way to Purdue University in a Navy ROTC program. Still was kind of deciding, should I be a pilot, should I be a seal? Ultimately, I said to myself, I knew I could be a Navy pilot, but I didn't want to be a pilot and look over at the Navy seals and wonder if I could do that. So I decided to go Navy SEALs, and fortunately it worked out. I went to seal training in 1996 and made it through, which is good, and began a career that lasted just under 21 years. And I retired in 2017.

That's incredible. So besides the fact that you ended up becoming a Navy seal, how did that. Did that training change you as a person in any way? Just going through that. Because I hear it's growing.

Yeah, you know, it's a great question. I've been asked that before, and I'm not sure if the answer is that the training changes us. I think the answer is the training draws out things that were already in us, that we discovered. It makes us discover things about us versus changes us. I'm sure there could be an argument made about subtle changes here and there, but in terms of who we are as people and those attributes and qualities we bring to the beaches of Coronado on day one of SEAL training, you are who you are. And if you don't have those innate qualities in you, you're not going to make it. And so. So I think going through that, you come out of that saying, man, I. I now know I can do certain things that I didn't know I could do before.

Yeah, I love that. And that makes so much sense because, you know, oftentimes, you know, there's that saying, we don't know what we're capable of until we, you know, until life presents us with the opportunity where we can prove that to ourselves.

Right.

And so I would imagine it is part of you, but then it brings it out and you're like, oh, I can do this, you know, or how badly do I want it?

Yeah. And so it brings it out. The way I describe is it brings out these qualities and some of these attributes that I call in the book, they're dormant attributes. You don't know you have them until you're put into a position situation that draws them out. And I always say, if anybody has any story in their lives that ends with the statement, I didn't know I had it in me. That's probably a story of a dormant attribute coming to the. To the four that they didn't know they had. But training brings it out of you. And then. And then your. Your time in the SEAL teams just hyper develops those things because you're constantly drawing upon those. Those attributes in what you're doing, especially when you get to combat.

Yeah. Well, I think of just the business owners going through what we've gone through with COVID and I know with our. Our clients, we have a big community of CEOs, and there was that window when everything shut down in March of 2020 till about, let's say, the 15th of May, where we were just helping these business owners pivot, pivot, pivot. Like it was, either I'm shutting down my business or I'm gonna come up with new revenue streams or find a new way to reach their customer. And they, you know, at first were so resistant and so afraid, and then it was like, wow, I'm actually doing this. It is really interesting what we see that we don't think what we can do until we're faced with it. Now, during your time. Go ahead.

I just. I've remarked before that that Covid was like Navy SEAL training for all of us. It was like all of our Navy SEAL training because it threw us all into this deep uncertainty and challenge and stress that we had not anticipated. I guess the only difference is that in SEAL training, you volunteer to go, and none of us. None of us volunteered for Covid. And. And in SEAL training, you can also quit if you want to, whereas none of us could quit Covid. So it was actually. Even Covid was even harder in many cases.

Yeah, I know. I'm sure in decades to come, there's going to be so much that will be revealed, what we've all been through in the last couple of years. So. But, you know, during your time as this Navy SEAL commander, also, you were intimately involved with the SEAL selection process as well, and you helped to choose who became Navy seal. What did you learn when interviewing candidates for SEAL teams?

Well, it was. I learned a lot. And this specific. The team I was involved in was Naval WAS Development Group, which was one of our very specialized SEAL teams. And I was put in charge of the training and assessment selection for development group. At development group, we took some of the best seals from all the other commands and brought them to our own command and put them through our own nine month selection process. And there was about a 50% attrition rate, which is normal because any selection process implies attrition. But what was not good was that we weren't able to at the time effectively articulate why guys weren't making through. Why were these top guys 50% not making it through? We had excuses like we tell them, well, you couldn't shoot very well, you couldn't do this, couldn't do that. And it didn't seem honest because these were experienced guys. And so saying that didn't seem right. Didn't leave them with a good taste in their mouths, didn't leave us with a good taste in our mouths. And of course the leadership didn't, you know, leadership who's constantly scrutinizing the process. Especially after we became kind of famous when we didn't want to be, but it just happened, you know, the leadership looks down and says, hey, what's going on there? And so I began having to look into describing performance and this is where I really separated performance into attributes and skills and really began to illuminate what causes our performance in the high percentage of time, especially during challenge, uncertainty and stress. And that's these attributes.

Yeah, you know, well, there's just so much correlation here to when, you know, we're working with business owners. And it's interesting because we just had a meeting this morning with our mentoring team and sometimes you'll look at someone and you'll think, well, well, you know, their company's making a lot of revenue. You know, they're, they're really going to take it to the next level or they have access to capital or something like that. But that's definitely. We find that some of the people that end up really being the superstars are coming from a deficit and their back is against the wall and they really need to make it happen. You know, like it's that inner determination that you can't necessarily put on paper. You know, I wonder, did you see, does that make sense? What I'm like, it's one of those attributes.

Well, yeah, and so what we have to understand about these attributes is that they're, they're different from the visible skills. And so the real quick distinction for the audience is that skills are not inherent to our nature. In other Words. We're not. We're not born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. They were trained, we're taught to do those things. They direct our behavior in known, specific environments. So here's how and when to ride a bike or throw a ball. And then because they're very visible, they're very easy to assess, measure and test. And you can put scores around them and stats around them. This is why we're often seduced by skills when we're building teams. The problem with skills is they don't tell us how we're going to show up in stress, challenge and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, you can't. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. So this is what we lean on our attributes. Attributes, on the other hand, are innate. And we're all born with levels of perseverance, adaptability, resilience. Now, we can certainly develop those over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. So there's a nature, nurture element to attributes. And attributes don't direct our behavior. Attributes inform our behavior. So they tell us how we're going to show up to situations. So, for example, my son's levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning how to ride a bike and he was falling off a dozen times doing so. So they inform our behavior. And then because they're hidden in the background, they're very difficult to assess, measure and test. And the best way to see them, the most visible and visceral that they show up, is during times of challenge, stress, and uncertainty. And this is why my laboratory of SEAL training was such a great laboratory. Because everything about SEAL training, whether it's basic SEAL training in San Diego or the development group stuff I was running, is all about throwing guys into challenge, uncertainty and stress. But when we talk about just regular life and business, anytime we're put into environments of uncertainty, challenge and stress, where skills don't necessarily apply, these attributes are going to show up. And this is why when we, when we build our teams, we have to take attributes into consideration. Because the dream Team, in a book I call it the Dream Team Paradox, is the team that we put together based on all the best people, best graphics designer, best marketer, best best salesperson, all these best, best, best, right? But the problem is when these teams start to work, yes, they do great when things are going great, but when things go sideways, they start to become toxic. And that's because they Put the team together based on the wrong things. I like to quote a old behavioral psychologist, systems analyst, a guy named Russell a Coffee. He's deceased now, but he used to say, he used to do kind of quote, compare systems to business. And he used to say a system is never the sum of its parts. It's a product of their interaction. And the same goes with teams. A team is never just the sum of its parts. It's a product of their interaction. That interaction is based and founded upon attributes, not really just skills. So that's why we have to consider attributes in all of our performance.

Yeah. In your book, you cover 25 of those attributes to contribute to optimal performance. Can you give us just a handful of what some of those are?

Yeah, I think the best thing to do is I'll just kind of go through the categories. There's five categories of attributes. The first category is grit. And it's funny because grit people think of as an attribute, but it's not. Grit is actually a combination of things. It's the result of a combination of things. Blended and student catalyzed. Grit, if we were to define it, is that your ability to kind of persevere and push through those short term challenges and endeavors. And so the attributes that make up grit are courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience. Those four attributes combined create grit. The next category is mental acuity. And that category speaks to how our brain processes the world around us. And so you have situational awareness, which is the amount of information we're taking in at any one time, compartmentalization, how we're taking that information in, and our ability to kind of focus and prioritize on what we need to focus on. Task switching, which is not multitasking the human brain that we know. Multitasking is a myth. The human brain can't focus on more than one thing at a time. And those. There might be some audience members who are disagreeing. They're saying, no, Rich, I'm driving and listening to this podcast. Well, unfortunately, it doesn't count if you've relegated that thing, that skill, to the unconscious. The reason why you can drive and listen to a podcast is because you don't have to think about driving. But I guarantee if you're driving and listening to this podcast, if at some point someone swerves in front of you and you have to take evasive maneuvers, you will have to rewind the last 15 seconds of the podcast because your brain will have switched. So that's task switching. Some people are better at task switching. Than others. And then learnability. How can you effectively learn and metabolize the information around you? So that's the mental acuity. Drive is the next category. So if grit speaks to the short term endeavors, drive speaks to the long term endeavors and goals. What are the attributes that make up the driven person? Those attributes are self, efficacy, discipline, open mindedness, cunning, and narcissism. Yes, narcissism. We can get into that if we want to, but it is a driver. Then there's the leadership attributes. Leadership. What we have to understand about leadership is that leadership is a noun, is a verb, not a noun. It's a behavior, not a position. Okay? And the thing about leadership is, and I kind of joke, you don't get to self designate. You don't get to call yourself a leader. That'd be like calling yourself good looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not you are someone they want to follow. And they decide that based on whether or not, based on the way you behave. And these behaviors stem from these attributes. These attributes are empathy, selflessness, decisiveness, authenticity, and accountability. When you behave that way, people say, that is someone I want to follow. And by the way, all of us have probably had this example in our lives with leaders. There's the person who has the hierarchical position above us, and we say to ourselves, I wouldn't follow that person anywhere. And then this person over at the water cooler who has no hierarchical position whatsoever. And we're like, I'd follow that person to hell and back. Okay? It's because of the way they behave. So these behaviors are what we use to say, this person is someone I follow. So difference between being in charge, which is a position, and being a leader, which is behavior. And then the team ability attributes, what are the attributes that cause someone to be designated a great teammate? Because again, you can't designate yourself a great teammate. Your teammates do that. Right? It's based on these behaviors which stem from these attributes. Those attributes are integrity, conscientiousness, humility, and humor. And so those are the. Those are the 22. There are three more. I talk about another chapter called the Others. We can get into those if we want to. They're a little bit more. More in depth. But those are the basic categories of attributes.

Wow. I love that. This is extremely powerful. And it's true. I do feel like a lot of times companies are looking just for the skills, which obviously are important, but this is more. This is on a deeper level, which is going to create company culture, connection, respect.

Well, I also add this so One of the things I discovered, skills. I mean, we were seduced by skills because they're so in our face. Skills tell us what is, attributes tell us what could be. So skills don't tell you about potential, attributes tell you about potential. And so here's the example I'll give from Navy SEAL training. This happened, this is a story. Someone told me this story years ago. It happened before I got to SEAL training. I went through again in 96, and the first thing you had to do when you showed up was jump in the pool and swim 50 meters. And so the story goes that this kid shows up, it's his turn to swim, he jumps into the pool, and when he jumps and he sinks right to the bottom, and he starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one side, and he walks across the bottom of the pool to the other side, back to the other side, and he comes up and he's gasping for air, nearly drowning. The instructor looks at him and says, what the hell are you doing? And the kid looks at the instructor and says, I'm sorry, instructor, I don't know how to swim. The instructor pauses for a second and looks at him and says, that's okay, we can teach you how to swim. And the reason why he said that is because the instructor knew if this kid had the attributes to show up to SEAL training or the balls, I guess, to show up to SEAL training without knowing how to swim. He had every attribute we needed. Teaching the skill was the easy part. We could always teach the skills, right? So attributes also underpin skills development. And so I don't want to, I don't want, you know, there's certain, there's obviously depending on the role and position, certain skills that are necessary. I don't want to downplay skills totally, but if we're talking about potential, we all know, we've all seen people, these dark horses, who, they may not be the best skill wise, but they are the person we want. And even when I was running training or going through training, there were guys who were the lowest ranking dudes in terms of their ability to shoot. Right? And those same guys ended up being the top dudes at the SEAL team because when it came to actually doing the job, they could learn fast. They knew what they had, they had the attributes. Had we gotten rid of them because of their ability to shoot, we'd have lost out on some of the top individuals. And that was, that's what we have to understand as, especially as business owners, business people building teams.

Yeah. And I see that all of the time. I see that on my own team. We have over 50 employees on our team. And then also just within our community of business owners. You see that? And here, this, this guy that you're talking about, I mean, what did he, he exhibited? Drive, willingness to take a risk, right? Like, oh, I could die.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. Courage, self efficacy, perseverance, open minded. I mean, you name the attribute, he had all of them.

So, yeah, wow, that's, that's so impressive. But I totally get what you're talking about. And then creativity too, right? I just wanted to touch on that because it's amazing when we don't know how to do something that we feel. When you are willing, like if you think quickly and come up with a solution, that's.

And I didn't talk about creativity in the book. There's obviously more than 25 attributes. I only talked about 25. I used cunning as the one I talked about because cunning and creativity are a little bit different. And now both are applicable and might apply differently to different teams. Cunning really comes into play. Creativity is the ability to kind of really think up new things. It's a little bit more passive than cunning. Cunning is the ability to really solve problems in a creative way. Cunning involves problem solving in the cunning mind. And I would say, actually, if there's one attribute that almost that pretty much every Navy SEAL has, it's cunning. And that's apropos because as special operations you design, you're supposed to be thinking outside the box. But the cunning mind looks at a problem and says, okay, what are the rules and conditions that surround this problem? And are they real or are they imagined? Are they perceived? And if they're real, what happens if I break them? And then begins to start to think of ways around and really outside the box? And so cunning and creativity are a little bit different. And when we go, when we do work with companies, when we go into business and do this work, we help them distinguish, okay, what are the attributes you're actually looking for? Some businesses, some teams. And again, the attributes that make up a Navy SEAL team is going to look different than a list of attributes that make up a sales team or a, or a surgical team. So we help businesses go and find that list. And some teams might be like, no, no, creativity is what we're looking for. And other teams might be like, no, cunning is what we're looking for. Right. So you just have to do that analysis and make those distinctions and determinations based on the subjectivity of your team.

Well, I might be really dating myself. But when I think of cunning in that way that you've described, it's like the MacGyver, you know?

Yes.

Like, you know, coming up with this out of the box solution we call my husband. That's his role in our company too, because he, you know, it doesn't necessarily have a title, but he's always coming up with these, you know, out of the box solutions for things that you wouldn't normally think of. Now, how do you. And the work you do also, I just want to say, is so important helping teams, especially now, especially with what's going on in the world, you know, for having the right people in the seats for your company and that are going to want to stay.

Thank you. One of the things I define, I've always defined Navy Seals as, and this is, I will say this is all high performing teams. It's not about the shooting, it's not about the skydiving. It's not about all the sexy stuff you see on the TV and movies. What Navy Seals in fact are, are. We are masters of uncertainty. And that's what high performing teams are. They're masters of uncertainty. And what does that mean? That means that it's a team that not only does well when things are going well, but also can perform when things are going sideways, when things go off the wall. To be a team that are masters of uncertainty, you have to focus on some of these. There are certain things you have to do to create a team like that. A part of that. One of those things is you have to start looking at attributes. That's the way you do it.

Yeah. And there's so much change happening within companies. And so people have to be willing, you know, they have to have that flexibility to shift quickly, you know, as they're reinventing themselves. And some people, that's just really painful. Now you've had 13 overseas deployments, 11 which were to Iraq and Afghanistan. So you've obviously been in some very uncertain terrain. How do you maintain optimal performance in an unpredictable or even chaotic situation, scary situation like the missions you went on while you deployed?

Well, so first I want to, for your audience, define optimal performance. Because a lot of people are stuck and when they think of high performance teams, they think of peak performance and peak, peak, peak this, peak that you Navy SEALs are the peak, the most or the highest peaking performing teams or whatever. Optimal performance is something different because peak, again, peak is just an apex. And there's only one place you can go from an apex. And so what optimal performance is Is the ability to do your best even when things are, let me start over. It's basically I'm going to do my best in the moment, whatever the best looks like in that moment. Okay, so sometimes my best looks like peak and everything's cool and clicking and slow states and everything. But sometimes my best is I'm just head down and I'm nugging it out. I'm going step by step because that's all I have right now and that's all I can give. That is still performing optimally. So optimal performance allows us to do a couple things. First of all, it allows us to pat ourselves on the back when it is tough, when we are nugging it out. Because sometimes that's the way it is. Sometimes those missions, sometimes that sales meeting, sometimes that business venture is just ruthless and it is, it is backbreaking and it's just, you have to just go step by step. That is performing optimally. The other thing that that optimal performance or performing optimally allows you to do is think about proper energy management, which is something you have to do and something we did in these, in the arduous situations. Proper energy management means I don't need to be peak when I'm driving to the grocery store. Okay. I can be actually taking a break. Another myth that you'll see sometimes on Navy SEAL TV shows and programs is that before a mission, the guys will get together and they'll be hoo, yawing, hooping and high fiving and getting all fired up like a sports team getting ready to go out on an athletic field. Right. That's not how it is at all. Right. In fact, most of the time we'd be in the helicopter going into combat and the guys would be sleeping because the guys understood that we didn't know what was coming. We didn't know how long we were going to be out there. So we are resting, we are basically saving as much energy as possible so that when we get in there, we can peak on demand and we can recover on demand. And so the way we got through that first was we performed optimally, we managed our energy. And then what you had to do is you really had to just understand that uncertainty. When there's uncertainty, it's really about managing the environment in a very logical way. So the first thing you have to do is you have to manage your autonomic response. Okay, well, we're in uncertainty. So uncertainty and anxiety create fear. When we're fearful, our autonomic response goes up. We start getting that amygdala Tickled. Our frontal lobe begins to start to go offline. We start to reach amygdala hijack. Okay, this is bad because we can't make conscious decisions. So one of the things we have to do is we manage our physiology in a way that brings our frontal lobe back online, calms our system, so we can start making decisions in the uncertain environment. And those decisions stem from very specific questions we ask about our environment. What do I understand about this environment? That list might be like two things out of 100. Okay, that's okay. I'm going to focus on the two things. That's what I'm going to focus on. I'm going to take a step, I'm going to perform optimally, take a step towards that, and I'm going to reframe and ask the question again. So. So it's really quite a process of doing it. But I would say holistically, the answer to your question is we managed our energy. We had a trusted team, so we understood exactly what we all brought to the team. We could lean on each other. We wore our strengths and our weaknesses on our sleeves. And then we just entered into and approached every environment like, okay, we understand we've mastered the skills that we need to, in other words, shoot, move and communicate so we don't have to think about those. We've given space to our mind to deal with the problem and deal with the situation. So kind of a big, long, broad answer, but hopefully that makes sense.

Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. And I was also thinking how that kind of relates to. I'm always bringing it back to business with this idea of just hustle, hustle 24 7, which just leads to burnout. Which also, even with athletes that are too much of that earlier, early in their career, that really burns them out. Young, you're saying you're actually sleeping instead of the rah rah so that you are prepared to be able to handle when the focus is really needed.

Yeah. Well, and I'll give you one more concept here. The way that we define teams, I would say the way high performing teams seal teams or otherwise actually task organized. And it's a concept called dynamic subordination. Dynamic subordination is a task organization structure that throws away the pyramid, the hierarchical pyramid, it throws away the flat model and it throws away the upside down pyramid. All those task work structures that we see when we Google taskwork. What dynamics of ordination is. A team understands that problems and challenges and issues can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does the Person who is closest to that problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes charge and everybody follows. And then the environment shifts again and someone else steps up. It's a dynamic swap between leader and follower. I also call it alpha swapping. The alpha position swaps, right? This is, in fact, how you can effectively manage a team through uncertainty and chaos. Because what happens is as someone steps up, someone can then recede and take a break, take a breather. The great example is the flock of geese flying, flying south for the winter, right? That. That lead in the V formation, right? That lead goose in the V formation is taking about 70% of the wind resistance. They're taking the brunt of the wind resistance. But that lead goose doesn't stay in that position for the whole time. That lead goose stays in the position for maybe five or 10 minutes and then swaps out, goes to the back, someone else, another bird takes the position, and that bird rests in the back, right? Dynamic subordination, that type of task organization allows for recovery in the moment because you can step up, you can do your thing, you can sport, and then you can step back. This is how the best teams operate, through uncertainty and chaos on the long term, because they're constantly applying recovery and peak at the same moment. And you're trusting each other to go in and do their job.

And they're all on board together, right?

We're all on board together.

That common vision. Instead of saying, well, this is my role and this is. I'm not going to step outside of the lines.

Yeah, they're totally. They're totally. You know, really, I usually use a very simple civilian example to kind of bring home this concept. And we can kind of think of the commercial airliner, the. No. 1. None of us will debate that the captain of that airplane is in charge. That is the person in charge. No one debates that. However, if the captain is taxing out to takeoff and gets a call from the maintenance guy, the maintenance guy says, hey, I found a problem with your aircraft. You need to turn around. No captain worth their wings is going to ignore that. They're immediately to subordinate to that maintenance person and turn the plane around. So they turn the plane around, they go back to the gate. They recognize, okay, we have to get all the passengers off so we can fix this thing. Captain doesn't take charge of that either. Now the flight attendant steps up and takes charge and manages that. So this is a. It's a kind of a simple way to think about dynamic subordination where everybody comes in, it's not about your rank, it's about your role. It's about what you have to contribute to the team and then where you can support others who are contributing what they have to contribute. That's how the best teams operate. And to do that, you need trust. You need to wear your strengths and weaknesses on your sleeve. That is my attributes and my skills. What are the attributes I have? What are the skills I have? Everybody sees them and everybody knows them and we start leaning and flexing with each other in any environment. That is really what builds masters of uncertainty and the highest performing teams.

Wow. I love this. I love this. My head, my, my, my brain is going here thinking about how this applies so to our company and also to the clients that we work with now. You often speak on the importance of taking control during uncontrollable situations. You say that identifying what we can control helps us navigate these unpredictable situations. What's the danger in trying to control too many factors of your environment? And I'm specifically thinking of a CEO who can't let go of control and is trying to do everything themselves, which is so common by millions and millions of business owners out there and why they're so buried in their business. How do you know when they're exhibiting the right amount of control versus being overly controlling?

Yeah, so the answer to that second part is a tough one. It'll probably be a subjective one, but I'll answer the first part and hopefully the listeners can figure it out for themselves. One of the reasons why too much control is bad is simply because of the task switching attributes. We cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. And so if we have a thousand things on our plate, if we're trying to take control of a thousand things, we're going to do all of them poorly. And science has shown that we actually get worse in our performance as we go. So the longer we do that, the worse we get. So that should be incentive for any CEO or leader to say, I should probably clean my plate a little bit and delegate. That's why delegation is so important. The other thing about control is that because of the idea of us focusing and our ability to focus, it's in an unknown and uncertain environment. You have to basically map out depending on how dangerous the environment is, it could be rapidly. You could have time, but you have to map out what are those things you actually can control and what are the things you have no control over. Okay, that is a really, really important question to ask, especially as a leader in any environment, because a lot of times as leaders, we think we believe somehow that we have control of something that we actually in fact don't. And as soon as we can let go of those things, we have no control over, that list of things that we do that we can control gets a lot shorter, and we're able to prioritize that a lot faster. And so when it comes to taking control of an uncertain situation, uncertain environment, it's really about saying, okay, what about this environment? Can I control that list? If answered honestly again without a lot of fear, is going to be maybe one, two or three things and then say, okay, how do I prioritize that? What's the most important thing on that? And then you move to that and you get that done. Right. You move until completion. Now, the only exception to moving to completion is that if as you're moving to completion of that one thing, the environment shifts and that thing that you're moving to complete becomes a lower priority suddenly. And then you have to shift priorities. That's the only exception. But that's kind of the nuance of doing that. A CEO, a leader, can only do that with one, two or three things. So this is why to try to control too much, you're never going to be able to do it. You'll be overwhelmed. So you need to create a team around you. You need to seed control, delegate. Right. That's also, by the way, you're building trust with your team members when you do that by giving them control, seeding things to them and allowing them to take control. Allowing you to take control of certain things. And that's how you move much, much faster. Your speed will be vastly decreased if you try to control too much. Because again, we're only human.

Yeah.

So I guess the first thing you have to do is let go of your ego and decide you're only human. But I think those are some tips.

We feel like we're the only ones that can do this. Right. And that's why in, in our company, Pinnacle Global Network, where we mentor business owners to scale, is one of our. One of the two things that we focus on. One is shifting to a more scalable model, but the other is to have a team managed company that can run without you. And you know, that's so far from so many business owners like, oh my God, the business would fall apart if I'm not there. Well, then you don't have a team led company. And then when you go to sell the company, it's not valued at very much because it's all dependent on You.

Yeah. I used to tell this to my junior offers, by the way, my junior officers, I used to say, hey, you all have to accept what I call the irony of leadership. And the irony of leadership is if you do your job correctly, you work yourself out of a job, you create a team that can run without you, and they run faster than you. And that should be the goal of any great leader, is to create a team that actually outpaces them. I mean, how great is that? And if you're not someone who feels that you may want to recheck your position. Because the best leaders get excited when they think about creating a team that outpaces them. They get excited when they see people. I used to get so excited when I'd see these junior officers or even younger team guys, and I'd look at them and I'd think, man, these guys are so much better than me. I mean, they are like 10, 20, 100 times better than me. And I'd get so excited to get them out there moving because I knew they'd outpace me. And that was so exciting to me. If you're not excited about creating a team that will eventually outrun you, you may want to think twice.

Yeah. Because it is like you have this vision and now you have people taking it and running with it. Plus, plus you as a leader, helping them to step into their own leadership. That's legacy. That's legacy.

It really is.

That's powerful. So now shifting gears a little bit, when we are unsatisfied with where we are in our lives, personally or professionally, we can have a tendency to focus on what we don't like about our current situation. Right. The is like just how our brain operates and maybe less on what we, what it is that we do want. And I know for myself, since I really, you know, for decades now, I'm 40 years in business. When I started shifting to really putting the energy on where we're going and what I wanted to create, it was life changing for me. How do you recommend we shift our focus to, to those desired things in our life and pay less attention to the current shortcomings?

Absolutely. So usually when I'm with a group, I'm doing a workshop or something, I do an exercise with them and I put a question in front of them. And the question is, how could I double my income in the next six months? And I tell them, I said, I'm going to give you 30 seconds and I want you to write down anything that pops into your head when you ask yourself that. Question. How could I double my income in the next six months? And I give them 30 seconds and say, just don't, you know, no holds barred, write down anything. And so we do that. And about 30 seconds, it's okay. Now, I don't. Although I'm curious about the answers. I don't care about the answers. Count up how many answers you wrote. And typically the average in 30 seconds is between five and seven. So five and seven things. The reason why I do that is because I want to make a point about our brain, okay? Our brain basically understands the world by asking questions. It interrogates the world constantly. You know, a lot of times it's done without us knowing, but we're interrogating the world. Have I seen this before? What have I seen? Compare that to other experiences. When we deliberately place a question into our frontal lobe, into our conscious mind, our brain has no choice but to begin to answer it. Okay? Now, the problem is a lot of us do this without thinking about it, but we do it the wrong way. We say things like, why am I so bad at this? Why does this always happen to me? Why are these people out to get me? As soon as you place that question into your conscious mind, you will begin to come up with answers, and I guarantee the answers aren't going to be empowering. So the secret to changing focus is asking better questions. Change the quality of your questions and ask better ones. How can I do better? What am I good at? Who's out there that can help me? I am a true believer, both philosophically and experientially, because I learned this trick in high school, that the quality of our lives is directly proportional to the quality of questions we ask ourselves on a consistent basis. If we ask ourselves quality questions, better questions, we change our focus. This is also neurologically true. One of the things I got to do when I was a Seal was go to a lot of driving schools. Now, that was great for me because I love driving. In fact, if I hadn't been an AV Seal, I'd probably want to be a race car driver. I love it that much. So I try to get to all these racing schools as much as I could. One of the first things they teach you at a racing school is how to get out of a spin. You know, if your car starts spinning out a controller heading towards the wall, how do you get out of that? And the very first thing they say is, as soon as that starts to happen, don't look at the wall, look at the track. Look at where you want to go, because your body will naturally begin to go where you want to go. Now, we've all seen examples of this where there's that roadway and there's like, the one telephone pole in, like, 10 miles. And the car hits the telephone pole, right? There's a car that hit it because the person, when they were spinning out of control, they looked at the telephone pole. Wherever you look is where your body will take you. Wherever your focus is, where your physiology, your brain will take you. So the way we focus on better things is we ask better questions. And the last thing I'll say to that, because I always get the question, hey, Rich, what are some example questions? Unfortunately, that's a subjective one. It has to be based on your situation. But I would say if you can't think of any questions to ask, then the one question you should ask is, what's a better question right now? Because then you'll come up with better questions. And my wife and I did this all. We still do it all the time. But I remember even Covid when we were all locked down and we were walking. Walking our dog around the neighborhood, we'd be frustrated about certain things, and we'd use the first lap to vent, and then the second lap, we'd say, okay, stop. What's a better question we need to ask ourselves right now? And we'd start coming up with better questions, and then we'd ask those questions to come up with better answers. So the way you shift your focus is you ask better questions.

Wow, that is so, so true. I love that. And I love the example of the race car driver. I'm actually, I'm a trapeze artist. I'm not a lot of people know this, but I've been a trapeze artist for 20 years. And I just, in fact, performed in a show a couple weeks ago. And it's interesting how gravity works when you are. Our tendency is to want to look down when we're. We're doing our tricks or we're taking off because we want to make sure the net is there. There's something psychological where you think, oh, my God, the net just moved, right? But it hasn't. And so you look down, which then takes you down. And so you have to constantly. You're, like, working against what you naturally are wanting to do. You actually have to look up. And when you look up, you go up, which is what you want to happen. I think that's, you know, similar to what you're. You're saying here. What you focus on is Going to expand. And so how do you bring visualization into all of this? I'm a huge, huge proponent of visualization. I do it every single day. And I would love to know, how do you feel that visualization impacts us and how do you use it in the work that you do?

Yeah, I think visualization I'm a huge proponent of as well. And it's because, again, our brains, if we visualize properly, our brains can't tell the difference between the real experience and the visualized experience, which means we can practice and we can get repetition through visualization. I think visualization also can be enhanced by. By intensity of experience. So in other words, if we have a real intense experience and we can later on visualize that in a positive way, we can actually get that. We can myelinate those neural networks even faster. And so we have to think, whenever we create a skill or do something, we connect a neural network, and then that connection begins to get myelinated. And that's how we get better and better. That process is usually through repetition, but that process can be vastly truncated if you have three factors involved. Those are novelty, intensity, and focus. So novelty, intensity, focus. In any experience. This, by the way, is the difference between being being told a stove is hot and touching a hot stove. Right. Touching a hot stove, you have novelty, intensity, and focus. Right. So in anything that we're visualizing, if we can add in some novelty, intensity and focus, it'll actually, in fact, accelerate that myelination process. The key is to pay attention, to really visualize to the best of one's ability, try to really feel and get into that visualization. So it's not just a daydream. It's really a visualization where you're feeling things. You're generating the neurobiology. But I absolutely believe in it as a tool. It's actually. I mean, it's not even just you and I believing it. It's scientifically proven that it actually works. So to the extent that you can visualize techniques, a lot of training of skills can be done through visualization. Uncertainty is a little bit tougher to visualize because you don't have. Because uncertainty, by its nature, it's unexpected. And so it's hard to visualize the unexpected. That might be even impossible to do. But what you can do is you can visualize techniques in calming yourself and asking better questions and being present. I think you could visualize those or feel those, or even if you do a visualizing process or visualization process where you are bringing yourself to A calmer state. That's something you can then implement during stress, challenge and uncertainty. So one of your techniques could be when you enter into an environment that's really uncertain, call back those feelings of what you practiced in your visualization. Those tools can affect your physiology and help you think faster.

Yeah. Gosh, I love it. It's true. Because I think sometimes very serious business owners feel like, ah, this is, you know, woo, woo, and all that kind of stuff. And it's not. It's actually science. And so thank you for sharing that. This has been really extremely enlightening and powerful. Rich. And so a couple things. First of all, how do people learn more about you and, you know, learn more about the work that you do?

Yeah. Thank you. So the best place is our website, theattributes.com you can go there, you can see that, you can see the book. But you can also work with us. You can fill out a form and see if you want to work with us. We do a lot of work with businesses to help them discover attributes. We do workshops to dive into the content. So there's forms you can fill out and we'll get back to you if you fill out one of those forms pretty rapidly. And then there you can also find some blog posts you can find. We have a free assessment tool on the website where you can take, you can figure out where you stand on some of these attributes, the grit ones, the mental acuity ones and the drive ones. And then social media, I'm on social media, so the handles are there on the website too. But Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you can connect with us or me on any of those platforms and we'd be happy to have a conversation.

And so you said theattributes.com is that correct?

Theattributes.com yes. All one word. Yeah, no spaces.

All one word. Awesome. And so as we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners today that we haven't covered?

Well, we covered so much. So thank you for the great conversation. I would just encourage all of the listeners to explore their attributes. And one of the specific attributes is the first one I talk about. In fact, on the website, you can read that chapter in the book is courage is the courage attribute. Because courage is probably the single most important one, I think, for human beings. I don't try to rank them out, but if you don't have courage, you're not going to do very well as a human, but certainly as a business person, as an entrepreneur in the, in the uncertain where we're in the uncertain world we're in. Explore your courage because it's, it's. We all need it. And, and we get rewarded when we step into our fear. And that, that neurology is all in that first chapter. I won't go into it right now. So.

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here with me, Rich, today on the Scale It Method. And thank you for those listening to another episode of the Scale It Method and a quick reminder about our free masterclass. If you want to be build a scale scalable company that can thrive without you and you're ready to support to get the support you need to do it, sign up for our masterclass it is free. And during that time I will teach you the five critical phases you must know in order to scale to eight figures and beyond. So you just head over to scalemasterclass.com forward/podcast to secure your seat and I will see you there. Looking forward to seeing seeing you on the next episode of the Scale Up Method. Thanks Rich and bye everybody.