Developing an Exponential Mindset to Lead in a VUCA World – Mark Divine

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So we're talking about having the mindset and dealing with crazy stuff and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now. Things that are upsetting, disturbing. You know, we. Everything's kind of going along and then something happens. You know, we had a war in Ukraine. Now we've got a war in the Middle East. What does that mean? It affects all of us one way or another. Mm. We're talking about how to have the mindset to deal with that. Everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week and we do a couple shows every week to talk about how to scale your company, how to grow and how to develop as a leader, to manage through all of that. So it's a really great topic. We have a great guest today. Before we get into all that, I just want to say that we've got a coaching program for you at any level. So if you're trying to get to the first million, we got a thing that runs through the EO organization globally. If you're trying to go from a million to 20, that's our growth Navigator program. Weekly touches to help you grow and scale the company. Something, a little something every week and all the Scaling up framework and a whole bunch of other stuff. ScalingCoach.com Navigator is where you find that program. And then of course we have coaching programs and things up to an over a billion and to thousands of employees. So we can help you at whatever stage and we love to do it. So that is all there and more@scalingcoach.com Hey, I want to welcome to the show now Mark Divine. Mark is a former Navy SEAL commander and he is the CEO and founder of this SEAL Fit organization. Spent 20 years in the Navy SEALs, but he had a background in business before that was talk about all that and more. Mark, welcome to the show.

Bill, thanks so much for having me here. It's great to see you again.

It's good to see you again. Mark and I met. Actually, I think we met somewhere else before that, but we met recently at Harvard University. Yeah, on the East Coast. Boy, talk about change of brand value and world events, man. Suddenly in the crossfire, dealing with positions that you take. Like, you just never know. Like, you wake up, you walk out, and then you can get rocked by something.

Oh, sure. And it's gonna happen, right? It's gonna happen in your life anyways, because that's what it means to be human. But if you're gonna, you know, we're in this VUCA world, and so it's, it's accelerating and it's touching more and more people as we see what's happening in Ukraine and Israel and. And then the positionality that, you know, institutions take or don't take puts them in the firing line. It does require a, A, A whole new kind of recontextualization, and it's an opportunity for growth, I think, for everybody. Right. So you, you, you asked or you title this podcast, like, how do you learn how to stay calm and deal with vuca? Well, perspective is probably the number one thing, right? Being able to take a broader perspective and to be ready for anything.

Right.

There was our music.

Wow, that's funny. Like, a whole new thing has happened.

That's awesome. Someone's trying to come in and hack us. Gotta be ready, Bill. We gotta be ready.

You're watching the video. There's a, like a background screen behind me on camera. And it just did something weird that the thing sending went weird and it. Anyway, but like, totally on your point. Be ready for like any crazy thing to happen at any given moment. Right.

VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. You know, I've, I've been working with SEAL trainees and other special operators and also business leaders, like, for almost 15 years, teaching how to navigate that. Now it's all suddenly, you see Vuca showing up in academic papers and, you know, it's Kind of become more of a, a well understood term, but it was developed by the military long ago. And you know, as a special operator and leader in those environments, there's really are some, you know, some tactics, some, some developmental skills and, and kind of methodologies to really orient yourself to deal with vuca, which is rapid change, you know, complexity that is nonlinear. It's happening, you know, shit happens spontaneously and you can't really identify a cause. Like in the old, you know, complicated days of the industrial age where you could kind of like, you know, you could sleuth out a cause. Now we have Black Swan events. We have, you know, seemingly things that kind of show up just out of the blue. And it's because of this confluence of technological advancement and the connection, connectivity of the world and which has led to, you know, this capacity for, for great violence to happen quickly and spontaneously. And I don't mean just like terrorist violence or war violence, but violence to an entire industry. For instance, you or your business. Or like with COVID right, that was a serious VUCA event that, you know, if you weren't really adaptable, really flexible and really able to control your arousal response, you're toast.

Yes. You know, in the immediate days after the lockdown, I went into like non stop coaching mode and I was on the phone with people, our clients, but also anyone else, and I'm like, if you need to talk. And a big part of it was just letting people sort of settle their nervous system system so they could actually deal with what's happening. Right? Like just bring your. And you know, not everybody's good at that. I'm like, oh, I can handle a crisis. Like, I'm gonna be right in there and I can just, you know, I get capacity, I can take care of people.

It's a skill that needs to be trained. And as a coach, you're doing the right thing. The seals, we use the acronym pbta. Pause, breathe. Clear your head so you can think. That's the T. And only then do you act. Depending upon the severity of the crisis, the PBTA cycle, before you get to the act part, it could be days or weeks, right? Depending upon the battle rhythm or the level of, you know, hierarchy that we're talking of. If it's ground level ambush, it's like really quick, but you still don't act immediately in an ambush. You pause, you breathe, you assess the situation, you activate what we call the OODA loop. You observe, you orient yourself to what's going on, then you make a decision on what's the best and smallest course of action to move you toward an acceptable future. Because you can't really see what's going on. Like in Covid, you really don't know what's coming next week. But you got to get off the X. You got to get out of the ambush. But if you, you know, we see this, the seals that we train, who are really young, like the reactionary mind wants to just move. It's fight, flight, or freeze. And so they want to flee. They want to off the X and get out of the danger zone. But oftentimes they run in the wrong direction. Yeah, right. And they do something completely unproductive.

You know, it's interesting, like breathe is the first place. And you reviewed a box breathing technique with us in your talk at the CEO summit. And. And I'm, you know, never. I learned meditation as a kid and breathing and things like that from very early on. But when the first time I went to learn scuba diving, and you'll go down and everything's a little different. And then like, and I remember just. Okay, just. You're starting to freak out. Just stop and just focus on breathing. Oh, I can still breathe. Like this. Breathing works, right?

That's a great training environment to train that breath control. Yeah, yeah.

Just take your mask off. All right, now open your eyes. Now try to breathe.

Right. Well, when you start to work with, we call it controlling the arousal response. So there are several ways to control the arousal response, but the most direct way and immediate way is by controlling and slowing down your breathing and breathing through your nostrils. So that's why we teach box breathing. So you can do. You do it in a controlled pattern, you know, four count in, four count, hold, four count out, four count, hold. So that when a crisis strikes, you've got the capacity to just automatically click into this nice slow nostril, inhale and exhale. What that does is it massages your vagus nerve and which activates the parasympathetic rest and digest aspect of your nervous system. And it calms you down. And guess what? That calms the body down. And the brain is part of the body, of course, so suddenly it's calming the mind down. And you get a little bit of space between that stimulus response so that you can their decision. That's why we say pause intercepts the rack intercepts the reaction. Then the breathing calms the nervous system down, gets you into that arousal control so that you've got the space to kind of conceive of and to create a different outcome. And Then you take that action. And it can happen very quickly with. With training. Like, this whole process can happen in, you know, a second or so.

You know, one of the things that I learned about myself and I was sharing with you an event that happened to me when I was very young, but I think it actually started earlier. My parents were kind of loud and they'd fight and that kind of thing. And I was the oldest kid, and I just had to deal with my siblings, you know, and I think that's kind of where it began. There were things that were scary, and I learned to calm down and just deal and to just bring everyone's nerves down and that kind of thing. And then when I was about 13 years old, I got off a bus coming back from school, and. And at the next stop, the whole back end of the bus blew up, and a number of people were killed, and I rushed to the scene and rendered aid. And as. Not much. I mean, other people were already dealing with. With the aftermath, and people were being thrown in taxis and taken to the hospital, and ambulances were arriving and that kind of thing. And. And I was really calm, and it didn't affect me a whole lot, at least on the surface. And I'm like. I just remember being like, yeah, I can deal with things like this, and when I served the military, I'm. I could still be calm when things were shooting and blowing up and that kind of thing. And I could be calm and have perspective. But then a couple years ago, I don't know, however many years ago it was, I saw this movie, the Hurt Locker. And, you know, it's just a. Like a really vivid movie.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's an EOD movie. Explosive Ordinance Disposal, dealing with IED explosives on the side of the road, and then just all the stuff. But for whatever reason, at that moment, it all came back to me, that childhood trauma. And for about two weeks, I just was crying nonstop. And all I can think of, they tried to kill me.

And.

And I wasn't thinking about, like, you know, the adult me who's capable and has stuff. I was thinking about the little me that, by the childhood name, I was known as Kalani as a boy. And I'm like, they tried to kill that boy. And I like. And every time I think about it, I'm like. It's all like, there, the feeling. It took a long time, like 40 years for that to come out.

Yeah, well, the trauma gets trapped in your body, you know, and this is an important point for. For business leaders, right? There is a Lot of trauma. You, you know, you lose your business or, you know, tremendous fear of. Of going out of business or, you know, disruption or, you know, exposure to an incident like what you just went through, like this. It's a dangerous world out there. In business travel, you know, if you can't afford a security detail like Elon Musk, like, it's. It could be kind of dangerous. So it's one thing to be able to control your body and mind in a crisis, to get out of the crisis, but that does not mean that your body hasn't trapped a severe amount of trauma that needs to be dealt with. This is why, like, we have Navy seals who get out after certain number of years, and they're, like, still fit, and they're. They're peak performance guys, and then they have the same experience you had. I've had five SEALs commit suicide over the last five years because they. They didn't have a mechanism, because they didn't acknowledge or recognize that trapped energy in their body. So there are effective means to release that energy. It takes some courage to do that work, though. Bill. Yeah.

You know, I think being able. Like, the one thing that I know is you. You don't want to get stuck with it, right? You have to let it move through at any time. And, you know, like, my dad died some years ago, tragically in 2008. And, you know, and at first it was really significant, and then. And then all of a sudden, like, out of the blue, I'd get a reminder or something, and then it'd be there again. I'd be like, oh, my God, I missed my dad. You know, And I think that, like, being able to not resist it, whatever it is, and then, like, let it pass because, like, there it's gone. And now I can also tell you about how cool he was, you know, like, and that kind of thing, like, learning how to deal with that. And it's. It's that body, mind connection. Like, we're all, you know, things are. You know, it's all connected.

It's all connected.

A couple weeks ago, we had the attacks in Israel, and I woke up, and I was stunned and shocked. And, And, And. And because my connection. My first thought was, I, I. I want to go fight. And then I'm like, okay, I'm way too old to go. I'm past that. I'm really good with a grenade launcher.

I'll go with you if you go.

I. Yeah, I.

My wife might have an issue with that.

She might. Mine, too. My. But it is a. You Know that we have different responses to stuff, right? The fight, flight free. But I was outraged and I wanted to do something about it. And that was my initial instinct, was like, I, this can't be. You know, we have to stop. But like, we have things like that happen in our business. We had a factory that got flooded in Thailand. There was a bunch of floods near Bangkok a few years ago. And, and I watched them, like, you know, some places were like, just whatever, we're shut down. And these guys are like, they put up br and planks and they figured out how to work on the second floor. And they like, they're like, hey, you know, there's a lot of water right now, right? Find a way to deal with it, right? And I, I just love that. And they sent me video of them, you know, walking to the factory on the planks and stuff. And I'm like, God, love these people. Like, yeah, I think there, there are.

Areas of the world, you know, and this is inclusive of Israel, although maybe they felt a little safer in the last few years because they hadn't had something like this happen recently. But generally, if you grow up with a lot of, you know, a lot more of this type of thing happening, then you get a little bit more resilient toward it. And I think this is the challenge that we're seeing in America. And kind of like what we consider the Western world is like, we've just come through one of the longest periods of prosperity and, and safety right now. This safety started to break down after 9, 11, but for the most part, most people haven't had the, the back of a bus blown up like you did. And so it's a shock when they start to see it coming.

People grow up in. If you talk to people convicted of felony serving time in a maximum security prison, they all have a story of childhood trauma, of, of extreme violence and things in their immediate family. And then you're like, why are you here? Well, it's obvious that that's the world.

You grew up in.

You know, that's what you are.

That's right. Yeah.

It plays out.

You know, I love to chat about development, right? Because, you know, it's, it's one thing to talk about Vuca and, and navigating extreme rapid change and, and trauma, right? And it's another thing to have some tools to develop so that you can, so that you can become a more holistic or complete leader, right. So that you're not the one who. Your team is looking at you saying, bill, what do we do? And you're like seized up, you know, with foam coming out of your mouth going, that doesn't look, that's not inspiring a lot of confidence.

Right.

So this is one of the things that we do at SEAL Fit. And. Yeah, we don't want that. It's not a pretty picture. And we call it vertical development. You might have heard that term before. It's like we want to develop ourselves as leaders so that we change who we are and our perspectives and our ability to navigate like any situation in life. And it's very different than the old leadership development. It's much more akin to how the seals develop their leaders. It's multidimensional, it's body, it's context, its strategy and tactics. It's extending your mind through the effective use of technologies. And it's through integration. Right. And what I mean by integration is like using these skills like, like breathing training and meditation and visualization and things that like open up. So what they do is they open up like that. Interior compassion is one of the outcomes. Right? So why should I study? Why should I practice mindfulness? Because guess what? Loving kindness is one of the aspects of mindfulness. Opens your heart, makes you a more compassionate leader. Well, guess what? You want to help your team through Vuca. Compassion is the way to do it. Right? Love is the way to do it. Like I talked about at Harvard, it's not by being the authoritarian, let's go team, follow me here. No, they need to first process and then, you know, you might not know where to take them. So just saying, follow me here. You might be like those young seals who just, you know, you're charging into the machine gun nest. No, the team needs to be the new leader. So the team comes together, you're breathing into it, you're, you're, you're communing, you're creating that psychological safety. And then the team will surface through, through effective communications and, and, and, and opening that space. The team will always come up with a better solution than any one individual leader will. And that's something that needs to be trained because leaders were taught kind of like a top down, industrial age leadership style. And that linearity isn't working anymore. Yeah, that command and control that I'm the one that's supposed to have the answers. And that leads to the isms, the perfectionisms, the authoritarianism. And we call those toxic leaders nowadays before they could be effective running big bureaucratic organizations. But they weren't fun to be around. Nowadays employees demand a much more heart centric approach to Leadership and an understanding and an inclusiveness.

Right. You know, one of our clients was talking to me, and he has a smallish team, like 75 people, and he's like, I. I'm. I just. I'm. I'm really overwhelmed with this Covid business, and, you know, in the middle of the whole thing, and I'm at home and I'm dealing with this, and I'm on Zoom all day and talking to people, and I'm just really stressed out by it. And I want to know how to, like, put on the, like, composed face for my team.

Mm.

I'm like, what do you think it's like for them? And he's like. And they reflected. He's like, it's probably kind of similar. I'm like, so why compose yourself? Why don't you just acknowledge that it's stressful and that your kids are running into the middle of your Zoom, and. And they're making noise and that, distracted, and you're exhausted, and you're not used to working this way, and it's stressful, and you're not sleeping, and why don't you just acknowledge all that? And then they'll have permission. Then you all kind of rise above and, you know, like, have a little compassion for yourself and then them.

That's awesome. That's absolutely correct and spot on. You don't. You know, taking the mask off is where we're at now. We're not. We don't need to learn how to put a new mask on. Right. The employees see through the mask anyways. So take the mask off. You know, this is what Brene Brown's talking about with vulnerability. I don't like that term. I'm a Navy seal.

I don't.

I prefer authenticity. Right. So. So be authentic. Just be real. And that builds trust. And trust and respect are the glue that holds team together.

Yeah. I'll make a plug for vulnerability, even for an old name seal. And here's the deal. I think people misuse authenticity. And here's how they misuse it, in my view. They say, well, I'm just speaking my truth. And that substitutes for not revealing something vulnerable, but mouthing off, being an opinionated person who's now just getting all. And, like, it'd be much more useful to be authentic about where you're off. About what? About something deep about you, like a fear or whatever. Right. Which is the vulnerability. I went to my team once, and I had a bank trying to shut me down and close the company and take my house, and I went to them. And I said, I've been holding this in for a couple of weeks, and I'm terrified, and I don't know what to do. And that's why I've been hiding it, to try to figure out what to do. But I don't have the answer. And. But here's what I can tell you. I could really use your help.

Nice.

And I'm not going to quit. I'm going to fight to the very end. They might take my house, they might shut us down, but I'm not going to roll over. It's going to be a fight. And if you want to join me in that fight, I could use your help. And I understand if you have to go, like. But that actually turned out to be that vulnerability, like, I don't have the answer. Turned out to be super powerful, right?

Yeah, that's very powerful.

And. And, you know, the, the after people have heard me share it before, but a year later, we doubled the company and turned everything around and all that kind of thing, and. And we did it together. Right. It wasn't Bill's brilliant plant.

Right. Yeah. That just reinforced what I said. The team is the new leader, and leading with heart is so much more powerful than just leading with the brain. You know, in our SEAL FIT training, we use the term kokoro, which comes from the Japanese warrior tradition, and it means merge your heart and your mind into your actions. Yes, the heart, the heart energy is, is like so much more powerful. I mean, think they've done now research on it, like you can. The heart energy emanates right through the room like 20 or 30ft, whereas the brain energy, the, the, you know, the brain waves and the frequency literally gets trapped by the skull. And so linear, rational thinking is, is very, very weak energy compared to getting your heart involved. And that means being open. Like you said, we'll use the term vulnerable, you know, helping other people be safe. Yeah. It takes courage, though. That's why courage actually means heart in French. So core, the root of courage is core, which is heart. So courage is hard.

Yeah. Yeah. Great insight. Talk about how seals learn to deal with this and what you do and how you apply that with business leaders today. How do you learn to deal with that? What are the moves? We talked about breathing already.

Well, I mentioned, you know, that like, at SEAL training, they're not going to use this language. You know, I'm a, I'm a trainer and a coach, but I, I can see from a different perspective, you know, what's happening.

Right.

So. So SEAL Training. First off, it's all team, right? Then we don't call it SEAL individuals for a reason. It's SEAL teams.

Yeah.

So we learned early on that everyone on the team is a leader, and you got to check your ego at the door. Because even though. Even though, like, I was an officer and I had, you know, six or seven enlisted guys on my team in. In SEAL training, but then it was the same way. And at a SEAL team I had, there were two officers and 12 enlisted, even though I was technically legally responsible. So you would in one sense call it the leader. By no means was I leading most of the time because I didn't have the other types of leadership power. I didn't have the expertise power. Right. Someone else always had the expertise. I didn't have the, you know, the situational awareness power because maybe I was in the wrong position or, you know, someone else on the op, you know, was the one who had better information. I might not have had the energetic power because I was exhausted or I was, you know, I didn't sleep well enough. And so I had to be able to, you know, check my ego and say, you know what, Rob, you take this one. Right. So that's probably the most powerful thing, is that it goes along with the concept of the team as a new leader. But everyone on the team is a leader, and everyone needs to be fluid enough to be able to step into the leadership role when they're needed and not to. Not to hold back. And that means the leader, like the appointed leader or the CEO, needs to have the ability and the willingness to step aside, to allow space for all these other geniuses to kind of step in and fill that void. One of the things that that does is it, we call it 20x, is your capacity as a team to come up with better solutions, to move faster, to break things and move faster, and just to bring more, like, spontaneous solutions to the table, which you couldn't possibly come up with alone as an individual. Right. So that. That's trainable to me. Like, that's. The second point is we look at everything as practice, right? Except for the OP itself. So you could say, well, in business, everything is the op. Like, we're always executing. Yeah, that's true. But you could be practicing, too. Like, it's a simultaneous thing.

You practice for a product launch.

Practice the product line. Exactly. Practice, practice, practice.

Yeah.

100 and so if you're not practicing, then you're setting yourself up for mediocrity. You're always practicing. Navy seals are training around the clock. And even in combat, when you think, well, no, we're doing the work, yeah, we're practicing for the mission every night. Right. We're doing mental rehearsals and we're doing little, we take little pieces of it that might be our most like critical node, where we know if that fails, everything fails. We practice that and we try to develop alongside this kind of. Another tributary of this thought is we take anything that is repetitive and turn it into a standard operating procedure or sop, and we relentlessly drill those and refine those, always refining those sops so that they don't become the critical node that is that cascading failure. And that gives us the time and energy to focus on the new innovative things that you know that we need to stay relevant. Right. As a seal or in the marketplace. So those are certain things. And then we like to develop and I've already talked about this, but we like that.

Hold that one. I want to point out or speak to our listeners, viewers in across 10 years, working with thousands of company. The function that's most often unstaffed, unsupported, unofficial. In your companies, in our companies, is training and development. There is very seldom any concerted, overt, proactive training and development company. Sometimes you have a little bit of training for a few roles. But a comprehensive thing to develop people at every level is missing from the vast majority of our companies. And it doesn't like you could level it up, you could make it, you could actually have somebody volunteer to take it on. But if I wanted to, to fill one job, it is an ops manager, it's, it's developing our people. Right?

Yeah. And that development, as we talked about earlier, needs to be multi dimensional these days. Right. Individuals, you know, are expecting now, especially the younger generation, to come to work and to find growth at work. And that's why we use the term a community of practice. With our clients like you, you become a community of practice and within that you decide upon what are, you know, what are some of the things developmentally that we want to work on as a team and what are you going to do as an individual. So for instance, box breathing. We work with our clients on box breathing and we box breathe before every important meeting. It has an extraordinary effect. Clearing the mind, kind of opening everyone up, you know, leaving the stuff behind that they dragged into the room. That was going to be the next negative grenade. That's an example of a practice. So, so the seals are a community of practice. Like we show up, we expect to train and practice together. We expect Everyone to step up and work to become their best selves. And this creates an incredible ethos. Right? You've heard of the, you know, like an ethos or a stand. And so the seals have an ethos built on courage. Right. We courageously go toward the sound of gunfire. We expect that of everyone. Trust. Like we trust that you, Bill, are doing the work that I'm doing so that when, you know, when you get in trouble, like, you're going to have your wits about you and I'll be there to support you and when I get in trouble, you're going to be there to support me. And it's built upon your commitment to training and that builds trust. So you can't hide, right? In one of these, in elite culture environment like this, there's no hiding. There's no like, oh, you know, like quiet quitting or all. Yeah, I'm just going to like lay low today. Now there's an expectation that you're going to bring it every day, like bring it. And, and then that leads to great respect. And I told you, courage, trust, respect is the glue. That's like the ethos that holds the seals together. The best teams in the corporate world, same thing. Same exact thing, right? Everyone just brings their A game they expected of each other. If there's a slip up, fine, we deal with it. But then, you know, everyone get back on the bus and if you can't step, if you can't live this ethos, then you don't belong in the team. Yeah. The other thing that's really, you know, this is one of the foundational things because then it allows the team to do two critical things. One is to move really fast, right. We call it fail forward fast. This expectation that there's no such thing as failure, there's just a failure to learn. And the faster you can get to that point of learning, the better off you are. So, you know, this shows up in like minimal, vile products, you know, speeding up the execution cycle, that type of thing, really, really important. And that OODA loop I alluded to earlier, it's like the way we kind of orient our minds built upon the foundation of training and the SOPs, right. That we can get something out there quickly, observe how the market's responding, how the environment's responding, orient ourselves by changing the product, changing the offer, changing the speech, whatever, and then make a new decision and execute. And then we tried to speed up this cycle and get inside the OODA loop of our enemy or our competition. Because if we, or we sever the OODA loop of our competition, and then they're out of the game. So that's critical. And then the last thing is. And there's plenty more, but I can go all day talking about this stuff. Communication, right? This goes back to the vulnerability. Like, not many organizations are capable of communicating at the level that Navy SEALs communicate, right? It's brutally honest, extremely direct. It's never about the person. It's always about the mission. And it's done frequently and relentlessly. So we have communicate, we have briefs, and then we have debriefs. And then during an execution stage, right, we're constantly communicating, sharing information, complete transparency. Because everything affects everything in a vocal world, and you need to have situational awareness. So relentless communication. The leader relentlessly communicates the vision, even if the vision is unclear. He's communicating that. Like, I'm doing that right now with my company. Like I tell my team, I've said, yeah, I acquired this company and we're going to merge it together. And, you know, I, I have a sense, but it's a little murky still. So. So let's, you know, take it one day at a time. This will come together. It'll, you know, we gain clarity out of the VUCA by just failing forward fast, right? Doubt, doubt, eliminate is eliminated through action. So we're just going to keep executed and we're going to keep talking about it, and pretty soon that vision will clear up and then we're going to race toward that, that vision. So the communication is full body. Also, like, it's not always. It's not always words or emails or slack. We trust our gut and our intuition in the seals. And a lot of times our ops are high risk and in enemy territory and we have to be quiet. And so we learn to pay attention to what's going on in the inside. The internal communications, getting a sense for what our teammates are thinking and feeling and orienting to that. Right? This is a master skill that comes from that interior vertical development that I was talking about in those community practices, because you get really sensitive. And I don't mean that in kind of like a old world. Oh, you're a sensitive guy. I mean, you get sensitive to the signals of your gut telling you, hey, don't go there. There's danger or opportunity, the signals of the heart that say, you know what? Bill's kind of hurting, right? What's going on, Bill? And so you can pause and like, check in with your teammate. What's going on?

What's happening?

Yeah, what's happening? And then the signals from the, the ins. The middle of your brain is a wisdom center. Insight. So you've heard the term insight and people like, oh, that's very insightful. But it is a real thing. When you practice meditation and visualization, you begin to get signals and a sense of knowingness about, yeah, this is the right way, or you know, here's where I need to go. The vision, that's what clears up the vision. It's insight that is an actual skill. These are all skills that can be developed. And I think that's kind of like the next frontier of leadership development.

Personally, you're, you're studied and trained in some things that we would think of as more Eastern oriented, some Zen related practice practices. And you reference some of these mindfulness and breathing and that kind of thing. Is that well integrated with SEAL training today or when you were there?

When I was there, they gave us one PowerPoint presentation about what they called four skills of mental toughness. And the first skill was breath control. The second skill was positive internal dialogue. The third skill was visualization. And the fourth skill was micro goals. If you just accept that and turn those into practices, it's transformative. They didn't talk about these skills as practices. There was no meditation. So. But that was when I went through training. 1990. Now fast forward. I developed Seal Fit in 2006 and we began turning those things into practices. We began bringing things that I learned through my Zen training and through, you know, yoga. A lot more breathing and a lot of more imagery work. And when I started teaching these to SEAL trainees, and at first I was teaching it in the context that I learned it, and they were rolling their eyes back and like, you know, some of the more senior guys were like, this is against my religion. I'm like, it has nothing to do with religion. But then I had this insight myself. I said, man, Mark, you gotta strip the fu out of the kung fu and you got to turn this into like simple drills and skills in the language of these guys.

Yeah, put it in.

And that's what I did. And that then that became what I call unbeatable mind. And I wrote a book about that. So now, full circle to your question. SEAL Buds training and Air Force special Operations use Unbeatable mind training. They don't call it that, but they've all been trained in it. And a lot of the guys who I trained have cycled up to instructors. So now they're teaching these kind of Eastern total body, total whole mind practices as a practice. And they're and they're drilling them with the seals so they'll do visualization and breath work before, you know, like a hard underwater, you know, training session where, you know, it could be dangerous and stuff like that. That's pretty cool.

There's one you mentioned in there that I think is worth touching on because I, it comes up a lot and I see people try to do it in not a thoughtful practice and that is try to just think positive and like. And I think it goes bad when it's like icing on a mud pod.

Absolutely.

They're still. But, but if you have a mindfulness about it, it's like, okay, I've got all this. What else? And I expand. But I, I don't try to suppress or cover something. I acknowledge that I've got a swirl of stuff and then I look outside for what else? Or some other way of viewing or holding an idea, then there's power in it. But if you just try to like positive talk yourself over something when you're like freaking out or, or feeling negative, I, I don't think it goes very well.

Context matters, right? So first off, negative energy destroys performance, destroys your own performance. Like we are energy. If you're thinking negatively and you got negative emotions, then you will weaken yourself. We know that from kinesiology. And so positive energy will strengthen yourselves. So if you're doing something hard, let's say a workout or doing, you know, a long days preparing for some product launch, being negative about it is only going to hurt you and it's going to hurt your team. Right? So the negative millage, you know, that just everyone drops vibrationally, the lowest common denominator. So, so at that level, at a team level and a productivity level, positive internal dialogue and positive, you know, maintaining a positive mindset is extremely important. Now in the context of, you know, emotional development and trauma work, which is, I think what you're talking about, it's really important that we don't just suppress by glossing over with a happy glad rapper and that. Exactly. Or the leader doing that, you know, who, who, you know, who you know is judging you. But it's got a big smile and we called that the smiling screw. You're like, no, that's not working for me. So in that scenario, you know, you've got to be able to like pause enough and develop the self awareness to see where you've got those, those negative ruts or that, that stuck energy, that emotional energy, most of which, if not all of it, which comes from some sort of trauma Generally a childhood trauma. And I think emotional development is, is extraordinarily important for leaders, right? And I've been promoting therapy and all sorts of emotional development techniques and tools for, for my clients for years because. And I've been doing it. I'm married, a therapist, by the way, so I didn't have a choice. I'm sure glad I did.

You know, I think about that, like, reframing. So I, I, for like 11 years, I did a lot of triathlons and, and I remember when I went first out to do it. So I, I had grown up near the ocean, I had swam, I'd surfed, I. Things like that. So I felt like I was cool. But I was in Hawaii in warm waters for a lot of that time and daylight, in a beautiful place and feeling safe. But now I'm going to go do triathlons and I need to learn to swim properly and fast, not just to paddle out for surfing. And I'm a mediocre swimmer and I'm out to swim in the San Francisco Bay, which is pretty chilly, especially at the wrong time of the year, right? It gets particularly chilly. So there I am out, and it's late now. The sun's gone down, a little bit of fogs come in, and it's late, it's dark, it's cold. I'm not yet comfortable in it and I'm alone, right? So I'm now going to swim in this place where things might bump me and do out there by myself. And I just wanted to quit, right? But this is the beginning, and I'm just going to start doing these triathlons. And I've said I'm doing this, I've told a lot of people, and I'm like, okay, well. And I was cold and uncomfortable and definitely a little scared and feeling alone. And why did I get into to. And I'm like, okay, well, I have two choices right now. I could quit and then I could just not bring it up. I could avoid the fact that I was scheduled and come back on a better day and we could start. Or I could go swimming right now in this environment, which is all that. And then what would that be like? Well, actually, that would be kind of cool because tomorrow I could talk about what I did and how difficult it was, and I realized, oh, I like that idea. I love bragging. So if I do this uncomfortable thing now, I can brag about it tomorrow, and that works for me. So I'm like, I reframe this uncomfortable thing as bragging rights and and so I was miserable. Like, I'm cold and all that. And I'm trying to control my breathing and swim a mile and, you know, circle around this aquatic park. It's not actually that exposed there, but. And so I did. And then, of course, I've talked about it now for the last 15 years.

That's awesome. When I was at, at SEAL Team 3, we went to free fall training out in Hopeville, California, of all places, you know, in the middle of the desert. And we were. We had just finished our third jump, like, period, like our third free fall jump out of like 50 that we're going to do. And the plan had landed. We were, you know, basically getting ready, getting our shoots ready. And we saw another plane come across over the horizon. And we're like, oh. And someone said, oh, we got a. We gotta pause for a moment. Cause that's the British sbs. They just flew in from England. They just stopped over in Dover. Now they're coming out here and they're gonna jump in. We're like, cool, right? And so the plane comes by, you know, C130, jumpers out. And we see a jumper head out and have a malfunction. And his, you know, he had a streamer, right? And so then he deploys his reserve and unfortunately it wraps around the main.

Oh, he didn't cut the man away.

No, his main didn't cut all the way away, which is a problem. You know, it happens on a rare occasion when you deploy your reserve. It's supposed to cut the main away. And it didn't happen. So we watched him burn in. And we were all just going like, oh. And then we waited and you know, like 15 minutes later, this old, like, ambulance from Hopeville, you know, it looked like, looked like the ambulance and Ghostbusters comes in and then pulls the guy out. And the instructors looked at us then they said, get back on the plane. We're going up for number four. And I remember my mind saying, holy. Yeah, okay. And then immediately, right, that dialogue kicks in. And I had. Because I had been training and, you know, and I had a black belt martial art, and I'd been training. I just went through. And I started to curate my thinking just like you were talking about. I began to reframe and I said, hey, there's like zero chance of that happening to me. I have, I have chosen to be a Navy seal. So I, I have to learn how to free fall. Parachute jump.

Yeah.

If I don't, I'll be off the team. That will be a bad Outcome. I've already invested a lot of time in this. And oh, by the way, those first three jumps were pretty darn fun. So what do I got to lose? Let's go. I got this easy day. And so it's kind of like starting an engine. It's like if you, if you have a negative, serious crisis or, or something that happens, your mind is immediate because fight or flight, you know, dumps a lot of cortisol and, and you know, your vision narrows and your heart rate goes and your mind is immediately going to go to catastrophization.

Yeah.

So you've got to fight. The worst case scenario, you got to fight against that. And so you have to like, just constantly talk your to yourself, reframe positive to override all that. And that's a, that's different than what you were talking. We were talking about earlier about some sort of like, long term emotional thing where you're just like, happy. Glad rapper. This is a critical tool to use as a leader to stay in control of all that you are ever really in control in which is your mind and your emotions. You have the opportunity to control them and then later on process the trauma from it, which we had to do. And that night, actually we processed the trauma by going out and partying with the British guys and, and mourning, you know, their loss with them. Yeah, yeah.

I, I had a friend who was jumping and he. He broke his back. Not badly, but, you know, any back break is something. He just took a hard fall right on a partial malfunction shoot. And. And then I had to go jump later that day.

Same thing. Right.

I didn't think I was gonna die, but I do know, like, okay, the next time I stepped out onto the wheel and I grabbed onto the strut and I'm just kind of hanging there, ready to drop away. And I'm like, oh, yeah, this is beautiful. But it could be bad. Like my buddy, you know. Yeah. Earlier today, like one.

One of the best ways that seals develop resiliency and kind of a positive mindset is humor. Yeah. It's like, it's a brilliant tool when teams can. Can laugh about stupid things that they've done or that happened to them and in a respectful way, you know, coke and joke about things. Yeah, I remember, you know, since we're on the parachute themes, I mean, this is. These are not uncommon, by the way. You know, listeners like, man, that sounds really dangerous. But Bill and Mark are talking about. It's like, it is. That's why it's. The military is A very, very dangerous place to be. Beast. No quitting. I'm really blessed to have survived that. But we were on a static line jump out of a helicopter one night and I was the second guy out. So I'm jumping out and it was just beautiful. Like, it's just. There's the moon and the stars and I'm. I'm having my. My euphoric moment. Yeah. Because the shoot actually opened and I'm like, yay, this is great. And being the second person out, I thought it was pretty safe. You know, the first guy out should be below me, but. So I kind of like orienting myself, you know, scanning, and all of a sudden I see this shoot above me, which was the first jumper. So he somehow must have caught an updraft and he was coming right toward me and I was like, oh, shoot. Okay, so our standard operating procedure is, right, if we're going to have a mid air collision, is both jumpers pull their right toggle and they kind of like veer away from each other. So I pull my right toggle, he pulls his left, he goes right into me. And we were only about 700ft at that moment. So my shoot just goes down. I go like a rock, right. Immediately my training kicks in. I start breathing slowly. I go, you know, my head is flooded with the sop, is like, grab the riser, shake the risers.

Boom, boom.

Didn't, you know, check to see if it worked. Didn't work. Grab the risers again, shake the risers. Check my altimeter. I'm down to like 400ft. No more time to do that. You know, grab my reserve, pulled it, punched it, threw it out. The reserve goes out there, kind of bobbles around. I'm like, okay, you know, 200ft, I'm breathing, I'm still calm. Reach up and like, with more energy, you know, it's kind of like the woman lifting the car off the baby with more energy that I had any right to have. I grabbed the risers again. I just go, bam. Pull it down. And it pops open and I hit the ground. Like the instant it pops open, I hit the ground.

So I was.

I was going way faster than I needed to be, but I was relaxed. And I immediately did, you know, the. The pl. Landing fall. And not a single broken bone. I get up, I'm like, I check everything in my body. I'm like, wow, that was a close one. And then I go find. I find the guy who did this to me.

I. I'd have done this to him.

I went to him. And I just like, chris, Chris. Yeah, Chris, I should punch you right in the freaking nose right now looking for what you did. He's like, I'm really sorry, Cyborg. Oh my God. I just started laughing, you know. But I was grateful to be alive. That's the whole point. Like that what was going on. That, that training gives you the capacity to, to kind of slow time down. Right. If you, you know, when you do a lot of meditation and breath and imagery work, working with that interior domain, suddenly, like, space opens up.

And I think lefty. From then on, he'd have been lefty.

Exactly. He tried to kill me again. I mean, not purposely, but he had an accidental discharge once that almost shot me in the back of the head.

You know, one of my best friends growing up served in the Israeli army and he, he was up leading a unit in Lebanon and there was an accidental discharge and hit him in the leg and, and then some, some septic, whatever set in and they had to take his leg.

Oh, my goodness. That's unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's not uncommon. Accidental discharge. People like, oh, no, that should never happen. And it happens all the time because you're just firing so many rounds, you know.

Yep.

Dangerous environment.

Honest. Tough. Well, we've talked about a lot of things. It's time to wrap our show. Let me remind folks that we've got coaching programs for every level. The one I think is probably for most folks is our Growth Navigator program. You'll find that@scalingcoach.com GrowthNavigator. There you go. There it is. It's on the screen. It'll be in the show notes as well. And then if you want to talk about, learn about SEAL Fit, Mark's programs. And he's got all kinds of cool stuff. And one of these times, in concert with one of our live events, we're going to do a Seal Fit experience next time we're down in San Diego and they've got an add on for our, for our CEOs and execs. So markdevine.com is the place to go check out, get on his mailing list, fair about his programs. Everyone that I know that it's done it has dug it. Bunch of friends in YPO and EO down in the Southern California have done the programs, that kind of thing. So I highly recommend that you check out markdevine.com shout out to my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish, who created the whole Scaling up framework and the Rockefeller habits that came before it and without whom none of this would have been necessary. And and then Wanda Mitchell who gets our show ready and out the door every week, and folks at podfly Productions who produce, edit and distribute the show for us. And like that. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Until then, keep Scaling. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.