364 - Mastering Mind, Body, and Spirit: How to Build a Revolutionary Training System with Mark Divine

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Mark Devine, welcome to Listening with Leaders. As I told you just a moment ago, I've been wanting to have this conversation for quite a while. We have a lot in common. But I would like to, the story of going from consultancy to the Navy, into the SEALs, and then out and into being an entrepreneur is an amazing story. So if you don't mind, take a few minutes and just sort of tell us how that journey unfolded.

Sure. Well, I grew up in a small town in upstate New York. When I say small, I mean small, like 375 people.

That's small.

And, uh, family was a business family with a 100— over 100-year-old manufacturing company, which is rare. I think there's only like a thousand of those left. And we were pretty much groomed, you know, to think we're gonna go run the business or be in the business. And of course, my siblings all are. I have 3 siblings, they're all back at that business called Divine Brothers. That was in Utica, which is, you know, the nearest city, 20, 30 minutes away. At any rate, um, I never questioned that, you know. I went to Colgate University, got— ended up with an econ degree. Um, through a series of fortuitous accidents, I was compelled to try to get a real job. Um, before I went back to do that, you know, I was like, oh, maybe there's something else, experience, if I could go down to New York City where all my Colgate super smart brainiac friends were getting jobs at Goldman Sachs and, you know, whatnot. So I got hired by Coopers Lybrand, you know, the one of the two that came together to form PricewaterhouseCoopers later on. And so I find myself upon graduation in 1985 down in Manhattan, and I'm going to NYU because part of the deal was you got to get your— initially they said you need to get your master's in accounting because, you know, the program was a cohort-based program. They hired from a number of other, you know, liberal arts, like, top schools.

Yeah, I went to Dartmouth, so I get it.

Yeah, was my first choice, by the way.

Okay, well, there you go.

Slam the door in my face. Yeah, so, so there were a bunch of people from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and then lower Ivy like Williams, Colgate, and Amherst. And, um, we— none of us had accounting degrees because we went to liberal arts schools that didn't necessarily have accounting. Like, Colgate didn't have any accounting. So it's weird, the Big Eight was trying to broaden their base of ultimately partner-level people who weren't necessarily just numbers, you know, left-brain oriented, but more liberal-minded. So I thought that was a great opportunity. I'm going to NYU Stern School of Business, like top 15 business school in the country. Ultimately was going to get my MBA in finance. I knew that, and I would get, you know, get all the qualification to become a CPA. And so Rock 'em, sock 'em robot, marching towards this book.

Living the life in New York City.

I'm wearing a suit with like pinstripe suspenders and my tie, and I didn't question any of it. Now, pin that part of it. I was just like charging ahead, gonna climb the corporate, gonna make a lot of money, and then probably go back and transform the family business and sell it for a lot of money or something like that. So you can see I was driving towards someone else's value set and ideas and story. It wasn't my story, it was a story I was fed. And I was doing a pretty good job at it. So what changed? Something that you will smile at. Well, so because I was an endurance athlete and I was a, you know, I've been a yogi probably for many lifetimes. I didn't know it, but I, at 21, I was like, this body can stay healthy and fit forever as long as, you know, I move it and treat it well. And so I'm not going to look like one of these pasty suits walking around here in New York City. So I would get up and run 6 miles in the morning, do my little stretching, and then I would go to the gym at lunch and bang out what I now know as a high-intensity interval workout. Basically would get a bunch of equipment and kind of like tea around us, and no one came near me. And then I just like do circuits as fast as I could.

I get it.

Um, anyways, I had a few hour— like 2 and a half hours after in the evening, because Cooper— it was a night school program predominantly, so Cooper's would let us off at around 5, knowing that we had to get down to NYU's, uh, which was down the old World Trade Center at the time, business school, by 7:30. So of course any prudent, sane person would go home, eat, study, right? But Mark's thinking, man, that's a good block of training time right there. I don't want to waste that. I'm wondering, what can I, what can I do, right? And, um, I remembered my freshman roommate at Colgate University. He's a guy named Dave Bowman. Uh, he was kind of an arrogant little prick. You know, he used to like do everything he could to piss off the women who lived below us. And, you know, there was just— he was just interesting guy. Well, anyways, so he, he got into Shotokan karate at Colgate as a freshman. I didn't, you know, have a whole lot of interaction after that year, but what I did notice is him like slowly just transforming. And by the time we graduated, he was a black belt, and he was super, uh, confident and humble. Um, heading off to Japan to continue his studies and to teach English. And I was like, what did they feed him in that Shotokan? I was just 4 years older and I had drunk a lot of beer and chased a lot of girls, and you know what I mean? I swam a lot competitively and rode, but I didn't transform like that. And I felt, because I grew up in a family that was, you know, A lot of drama, a lot of alcohol, a lot of addiction, and a lot of, you know, chaos that I never really felt whole, or, you know, I was pretty closed off. Anyways, there was some transformation that's necessary, needed to happen in me, but I didn't know how to find it. And so I remember that, and I thought, you know, I bet you I could— if I could find a martial art, I could slot that into that 5 o'clock slot. And sure enough, you know, when the student's ready, the teacher appears. And I walk down the street on 23rd Street, heading back to my 22nd apartment, and I hear these shouts coming from the second floor. And I look up, and I'm standing under the sign for the world headquarters of Seido Karate, the art of sincerity. Tadashi Nakamura, who was a very famous Japanese karateka, he was Mas Oyama's head guy to come and set up kokanshai in the United States. He had a falling out with Mas Oyama, and they tried to kill him. They tried to shoot him, believe it or not. But anyways, he didn't do the job. He remedied that situation, so he's safe, and started Seido. And when I walked upstairs and I saw Mr. Nakamura and what was going on, I was just like transfixed. I was like, you know, he was a master. He carried himself and had an energy that was radically different than any human being I'd ever seen. And I was like, wow, whatever that is, I want to learn, you know. And it reminded me of Dave. And I said, okay, this— not— I mean, at a very different level, the belts reminded me of Dave, you know. Master Nakamura was a whole different thing. So I started studying with him, um, and at first I was just thinking, okay, yeah, this is just martial movements, moving the body, you know. It's— you're working in multiple planes and you got to control your breathing and you got to concentrate. And so all the work is just going to be done through this, you know, through the martial arts, through the movement. And, and most, 99% of the students, that's all they do. And they keep, and they have, you know, great effect. And it, there's an integrating growth, integration of body, mind, spirit, whatever. Well, I stayed to be inspired by the black belt class one night, several months into my journey there. And, um, after the class, it was inspiring to see these 6th degree, I mean, these This guy had 300,000 students worldwide already.

Wow.

10 years in. That's how good he was. Still going today strong. Um, so I watched the black belt class and it was, was wild. Like, you know, as a white belt, I'm like, I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that shit, but, you know, keep training. Maybe after the class was over, everyone's kind of been shuffled out and the small group of black belts go over and light a candle, and they grab these little wooden benches and line them up, like kneel down on these benches. And I'm like, what are they doing? And someone said, well, that's the Zen class. I was like, what the hell is Zen? It's like, smiled, and he said, there's this book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Suzuki. Go read it. I read it. I didn't understand a word of it, but it was very inspiring. It was the first time I'd been exposed to Eastern, um, philosophy around the training of the body and the mind and the spirit. I remember this one statement that I just like hung on for days. Like, Suzuki called the mind a swinging door, right? You breathe in and it swings one way, and to breathe out it swings another. I was like, it's interesting, I could kind of experience that. Anyway, so, um, I asked Nakamura if I could join the Zen class as a white belt, and he was like, sure. No problem. And so I started studying Zen first, just on the Thursday nights for their hour-long sit. And I really enjoyed it. Like, I, I felt good after each session, right? And I think because I was a competitive swimmer and, and, you know, grew up in upstate New York without all the distractions that we have today, and no TV and, you know, internet and phones, um, and I, I would spend a ton of time outside, you know, running up and down the trails of the Adirondacks. And so I got— I was really comfortable kind of like sitting, being alone and also being with my thoughts and also being able to push through to a place where I wasn't really thinking that much, which happens in endurance type. So I was successful. I mean, I, I work with a lot of people who really struggle with meditation because they're so distracted and so their body-mind is all, um, basically geared toward being extremely uncomfortable trying to sit in silence. Right. Well, I didn't have that experience, and I trusted Nakamura, so I had a credible teacher, which was really helpful. So anyways, um, I'll try to make this long story shorter.

I love it.

Okay, so I started to experience some really interesting things. First of all, you know, the basic instruction was, you know, deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing. Inhale through your nose, And he didn't say 5 count, but it was like, that was a 5 count.

Mm-hmm.

Exhale through your nose for a 5 count. Count 1 and don't think of anything else. And inhale, exhale, count 2, don't think of anything else. Inhale, exhale, and try to get to 10. You know, this is pretty funny cuz the first few times you do it, like, I got to 10, no problem. But the reality was you were thinking the whole time. Yes, you were counting, but you were also thinking, so that doesn't count. So when I finally figured out that's the gig, like, you got to be honest, right? No other thoughts besides inhale, exhale, 1. And no other thoughts besides inhale, exhale, 2. And it literally took me about 6 months before I could get to 5 and honestly say, yeah, I was just focusing on the inhale and the exhale. So what he was introducing was concentration training, learning how— attention control and concentration— holding your attention on just the breath and in this case the count, and doing that with such intensity and over a period of time that you develop the powers of concentration. That was extremely beneficial for me, but it didn't transform me, but it provided the stabilization of my mind for the next kind of, um, the next experience, for the next level, right? So what happens is I was, I was able to get up to where like half the time, half of the meditation, I was deeply concentrated, and the other half my mind would be thinking about dinner or whatever, classwork. 50% was not bad. That's actually pretty dang good, right, in a 45-minute session. What I started to notice was that whenever my mind wandered, right, I was able to catch it quicker and quicker and be like, oh wait, my mind is wandering, bring it back to the breath. And at first that was just a cool trick. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm getting better at noticing And then, Doug, I had this epiphany that the noticer was different than the thinker. Right? If I'm having thoughts and noticing I'm having thoughts, then does that mean there's two of me? Right? Is there the thinker and the noticer?

Different perspective.

Or is it just a split mind, different perspective? And so then I started to pay attention to the noticer. It's like, hmm, let me notice something about the noticer. So I would turn my attention toward that. And, um, and what was cool about that is while I turned my attention to the noticer, I was able to kind of stay in that as a field of awareness. And as I was able to stay in the noticer, or the witness, as a field of awareness I could see the patterns in the thoughts, right? I could see that the thoughts were, um, recurring. And I could see, you know, on some days when certain things happened, certain thoughts would arise. And other days, you know, other things would happen in a different series. But they were always kind of repeating patterns. And I could see that there was certain energy around them, right? And so I started to look at the patterns and the energy of the thinking, and I saw a lot of negative thinking, a lot of fear-based thinking, and I saw a lot of conditioning. And like, I could almost hear my father in certain thoughts, or my mother in certain thoughts. And I started to look at all those thoughts and saying, what the hell? I don't know if these are my thoughts. I mean, these thoughts are happening in my brain or in my mind, but I don't know if like they were mine, like really mine. So that's— that was the beginning of the end, right? So I started to ask better questions, like, okay, whose thoughts are these? And I could see that they were really planted there by my family and by my culture and by my religion and, you know, all the conditioning, right? And, um, so I started to question them, and that was like the first warning sign of a looming existential crisis, right? It's like, I don't know if this story is my story. I'm not sure. Here I am, like, charging up the ladder of corporate success, and I'm not sure if it's the right ladder.

Who the heck am I?

Yeah, that's so right. That led me to the dangerous question: Who am I? And so I sat with that. I said, who— if this story is my story, then who— what is my story? Who am I? This is like 20 years before I ever heard of Ramana Maharshi and his, his famous inquiry to inquire, who am I, right? So by this time, now we're about a year and a half to 2 years into my Zen training, um, I was able to kind of drop off, right, unintentionally, or just kind of like spontaneously go into that kind of timeless unitive space. And I would come out of it like getting jerked out by a thought or a noise. But every time I, um, came out of that kind of unitive space, the timeless experiences— you can't even call it experience because beyond time, all experience has a beginning and end. This is just is, right?

Is right. It's just being.

Just beingness. Yeah. I would come out with the sense of being something, and that something was a warrior. Wow. Yeah. And so, so are you pulling—

do you think you're pulling down information from past lives?

It's possible, or it's just my current, you know, soul's journey.

Interesting.

And so I was like, wow, that's weird, you know. My— is it because of my martial arts training? I mean, that could have been, right?

Yeah, it's going to be a warrior, right?

To be a warrior as a martial artist. Um, But then I started to ask, okay, so if I'm meant to be a warrior, how? Like, how would that show up in this world? Because I didn't feel like a warrior as a, you know, budding CPA. So this is where I learned about synchronicity, right? Because I, you know, I was very left linear when I grew up. Even being a CPA, even though it wasn't right for me, I could do it, right? I really activated that part of my brain. But the meditation was kind of cracking open the nonlinear, you know, right hemispheric and a whole mind, um, thinking, which is really, um, where you begin to recognize synchronicity and the magic and the energy of the world, right? And how it's all working to, you know, either support or thwart you depending upon your energy. And so, um, while I was asking this question, how am I supposed to show up as a warrior, I, um, meandered by a Navy recruiting office one day and I saw a poster facing the street, and it said, 'Be someone special,' and it had pictures of Navy SEALs doing Navy SEAL shit. And it's just— first of all, to be someone special was, you know, appealing, right?

To the ego. Appeals to the ego for sure.

My ego grabbed on to that. Yeah, that's right. But my spirit was like, 'That's it.' My soul was, 'That's it. That's how you're supposed to be aware.' So anyways, um, I pursued it, and against all odds, right? I mean, the story is pretty fascinating too, the different aspects of how I got in. But, um, you know, they tried to deter me from being an officer. I said, well, I'm gonna have a freaking MBA, you know, I should be an officer probably, you know. And, uh, and then they tried to deter me altogether because they said, you know, they don't take people very often from the civilian world straight to OCS, straight to SEAL training, which is what I wanted to do. But they do have one or two billets that they will consider every year. And I said, well, let's put a package in. And I found recruiter was okay, we'll put a package in. And, um, so I turned all my training, my mind, my training attention toward like, okay, now I'm going to go for this. I didn't have to do too much different with regard to my physical training because I was already really fit, competitive swimmer, rower, now martial artist, triathlete.

Um, I, I just as an aside, I was a competitive swimmer and rower too. You really? Yeah, at Dartmouth. Similar paths.

Yeah, that's cool. So I said, but what I can do is work with my mind. And so this is where I, by the way, I'm going to tie 4 points together that really kind of learned through Nakamura and, and also through my competitive swim coach. Benson, Bob Benson, taught me how to visualize. This is 1983. He's a real pioneer in sports psychology, and he had me with a stopwatch visualize my race. It took me probably 2 or 3 months before I could swim the entire race in my head with my eyes closed. And every time I did it and closed the watch, um, my time was like roughly 3 seconds faster than my fastest time ever in the water. And I'm like, that's weird. And you know, 3 seconds is a long time.

It's a lot.

Yeah. So that, that all happened sophomore year. I got into an overseas study program junior fall, so I didn't swim, uh, at all from sophomore, you know, the final event down to like, um, the spring of my junior year when I got back to Colgate or senior year. It was, yeah. Um, spring of my junior year.. But I ran into Benson and he's like, hey Mark, good to see you. Blah, blah, blah. Pleasantries. Hey, we have our championship meeting next weekend. Do you want to get in the water? And of course every bone in my body's saying, no effing way do I want to get in the water. I haven't been in it in a year, but my head is nodding yes. So there I find myself on the blocks, all suited up. The gun goes off, I jump in and I'm, I'm doing my 200-meter breaststroke and I I have the sensation that I've swum this race before. I'm actually feeling pretty damn good. I touched the pad and I got the time.

Wow.

That I visualized. Anyways, I tell that story because now I'm in New York, 2 years or 2 and a half years into my journey. I've decided I'm going to shift from, you know, being a budding corporate chieftain to wanting to be a Navy SEAL. And I said, wonder if visualization will help me. So This wasn't going to be like practicing a singular event like swimming 200 meters. But what if I practiced— what if I looked at BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training, like an event that needed to be conquered, you know, and dominated, and that I needed to be— go through it with a certain level of awareness, with a certain level of health and durability and energy and poise. And in other words, if I visualize who I needed to be to be worthy to be a Navy SEAL and practice that in my mind every day, that maybe would have some effect. So the only video I had back then, because, you know, the SEALs were a pretty secret organization, and, you know, back then there were only like 700 people in the whole organization, but they had this recruiting video also called Be Someone Special, and it showed really cool images of BUD/S training. And so I played that, I watched that video like 20 times, but then I inserted myself into it. And so there I was in my mind, you know, going through the different phases of BUD/S and, you know, crushing it and staying alert and focused and healthy in it. And then all the way to graduation. And I added this to my repertoire after my morning runs. I would run, come back, stretch, sit on my bench, do my meditation, and then I would do this visualization. Um, this is not a short-term thing to try to get into the SEALs, right? And nor is a short-term thing to transform yourself with these skills of, you know, breathwork, meditation, mindfulness.

Years, years of work.

It was right. So with visualization, I did this every day for 9 months, actually for a lot longer. Actually, I kept doing it, but 9 months seemed to be the magic moment because I had this— it's almost like I felt like a ripple in the universe, in the matrix, right? Like a breeze blew over me, and, and before the breeze, there was Mark hoping and wanting to be a Navy SEAL, and after the breeze, there was Mark knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to be a Navy SEAL. I call that now winning in your mind before you step foot in the battle. Sun Tzu.

And that was from the visualization work and your Zen work.

Yeah, but it was visualization, I think, that did it, because what you do is, you know, you're, you're energetically creating a future reality and a memory in your mind is going to store that as a memory. So I was creating a future memory of something that hadn't had happened yet, but it was a desired end state. And if I'd done it once, it wouldn't have had any impact. If I'd done it once a week, it wouldn't have had any impact. But I did it every single day with a lot of intensity and desire. And, um, you know, similar to like any kind of manifestation, it, it created the energetic imprint of that event happening. And so I think it actually turned it into destiny, right? And sure enough, I got a call from the recruiter like a week after that feeling came over me. And he's like, hey Mark, I got some news for you. And I was like, I kind of smiled to myself cuz I knew what it was gonna be. He's like, you got the billet, right? One of two they're gonna issue this year. And I was just kind of quiet, and, uh, he's like, you don't sound very excited. I said, oh, I'm excited, but I knew this was going to happen. He's like, you SEAL guys are weird, you know. Anyway, so I went to— I— November of '89, I got my MBA, I got my CPA, I got my first degree black belt, and then I tucked them all on a shelf and got on a bus to OCS. And then, um, April of 1990, I started in Class 170 at BUD/S. 185 hardcore guys standing there with me, and I'm looking up and down the line going, wow, I don't see how any of these guys are going to quit, right? By the end of Hell Week, there are about 40 of us, and by the end of training, there were 19 of us. Wow. I was number one graduate in my class. So that's kind of the story from, from CPA to SEAL. But the whole process of what I learned with Nakamura and what I learned through my own visualization and, and all the training, and then I started to like use it and then layer on the stuff that the SEALs were teaching me, because there's a lot of really advanced warrior training. Um, I just started to have like more and more profound experiences, um, you know, intuitive experiences, you know, stuff that just saved my life multiple times, right? And one, one morning I'm walking toward the firing range and I just have this, this sense that someone put their hand on my shoulder and said, stop. And I stopped. And as soon as I stopped, a friend of mine, a peer of mine behind me, had— was messing with his Sig Sauer and he had an accidental discharge and the bullet just went feel the air on my ear. Whoa. And I'd taken that next step, it would have gone right in the back of my head, right? So stuff like that, I'm like, wow, this world is not what it appears to be, right?

So I'm curious, now you've been— since you've gotten out of the military, you've been teaching a lot of these principles to leaders. How do you distill all this down to a digestible form for people that probably have never heard of it and don't get it. That's a great— I understand. I totally get it.

I mean, you know, it all started when I, um, so after I got off active duty, I stayed in the reserves, right? And, um, I got into business. So my first business was a microbrewery called Cornobrain Company that was very successful today, but it was kind of a disaster from the partnership standpoint. Got out of that launched NavySEAL.com, and that led to a nationwide contract to mentor Navy SEAL trainees. I had that contract one year. We did an incredible job. It's supposed to be a 10-year contract or something like that, but it got stolen from me by Blackwater, which is a billion-dollar— I know who they are. Yeah. Um, and so I, I kind of licking my wounds. People wanted me to fight it. I said, no, that's like a minnow fighting a shark. And so I went back to my meditation bench and I had the insight to create a program that integrated a lot of the stuff that I wanted to teach into hard physical training and to teach special operators these skills, and especially, um, recruits, you know, people who wanted to go to BUD/S or Green Beret training or whatever. So I launched a company called SEALFIT, and if you imagine the beginning program of SEALFIT, it's like an American Shaolin Academy. Like, I had students come live with me for 30 days straight in my Encinitas location. We had a 5,000-square-foot training location. It looked like a mini Bud's compound, is ringed with pull-up bars. And we had the functional fitness gym, we had the martial arts gym, and we had the yoga slash meditation breathwork gym. So during the 30 days, I had to, you know, come up with some— the curriculum, right? So I came up with all the physical training curriculum. I created a program called SEALFIT, and that was codified into a book called 8 Weeks to SEALFIT. Hardcore program, just absolutely brutal and effective. But I also came up with a curriculum for all the inner domain stuff, like how do you teach and develop mindfulness, awareness, intuition, spontaneity, creativity, arousal control, attention control, that kind of things. Um, in other words, how do you develop mental toughness and resiliency beyond just beating people up. So I developed a curriculum that I drew heavily and extensively from my martial arts and Zen experience. And by then, this is now 2006, I had gone really deep into yoga. I had over 1,000 hours of yoga teacher training.

Wow.

Um, Tai Chi, Qigong, you know, just tons and tons of things. Tibetan Buddhism. Um, and obviously the field of sports psychology and, and, and perform— elite human performance was like burgeoning at the time. So I consumed everything I could. And so I started to teach these things in a practical way to the SEAL candidates, and I quickly learned that I had to simplify it. And I had to— I call it taking the foo out of the kung fu. I had to strip all the cultural baggage, dare I say, and language or words, you know. Like, I couldn't call breathwork pranayama, right? You know, the guys would be like, we can't— I couldn't even call yoga yoga, right? Right? I just had to call it integrated movement, right? But we were doing asana, and I said, no, this isn't yoga, this is integrated movement. You know, this is— I call it my one that had all sorts of, you know, standing and hip opening poses. I called it the hip mobility drill. I had the shoulder mobility drill and the spinal, you know, opening drills. It was all just yoga asana. And then what I did was I integrated breathwork, integrated movement, and meditation and visualization into the physical training sessions. So it became the first truly integrated development program. The results were extraordinary. So 90% of the SEAL trainees that I trained, the guys who were going to BUD/S, right, and they wanted, you know, to come train with me, 90% made it through BUD/S.

Wow.

As opposed to a 90% fail rate for everybody else, right? And at a— for, for the heyday of SEALFIT, fully one-third of the SEAL Force had used or trained with SEALFIT or attended one of our Crucible events. We had a 50-hour non-stop physical training event, which was the graduation ceremony for that 30-day graduation event for that 30-day program. We spun it out into a separate event. We ran it all the way until last year. 50 hours, no sleep, around the clock. People from all over the world come to that. We call— we called it Kokoro, which means merging your heart and mind into your actions. So we had extraordinary success there. And then we had civilians, entrepreneurs, you know, weekend warrior types and CrossFitters, you know, hardcore people come and say, hey, can I do this training? You know, either— and by then we— the 30-day thing was a little bit too hard for me to manage, and so I broke it down into 3-week academies, 2-week academies, 1-week academies, and they spun out these crucibles. And so I had a bunch of civilians starting to show up, and we didn't water down the training at all. And so that happened. And then I had people coming to me and say, you know what, I've got this injury, or I've got, um, I, I want to share this with my mom, sort of a way to do this work without the hard physical training. And I said, absolutely, that's, that's prescriptive on one side, but it doesn't have to be prescriptive. It could be self-choice. Yoga could be your physical training, or qigong, or tai chi. As long as you're moving, as long as your body's engaged in the developmental process, you can't leave your body behind. That was the insights from the martial arts, right? So many people in the West want to go right into meditation, but their body isn't healthy, they're overweight.

That's right. Whatever.

Then they're going to be agitated and they're going to be distracted because the body is the mind, the mind is the body. They're not two separate things. So that's where Unbeatable Mind came from, is I created a 12-month course called Unbeatable Mind which codified the whole developmental, uh, program, the op— what I call the unbeatable operating system. And, um, if you can imagine like Integral Theory with Ken Wilber's four quadrants, um, of the individual self and other, interior and exterior, overlaid with all the different tools and practices that fit into either just self-awareness or body and performance or other awareness, deepening connection, relational, like emotional development, or structural, right, systemic, um, mission-focused, that type of thing. And, um, and, and then also the model for developing in an integrative fashion, and we call that Five Mountains. And the 5 monads are physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. And I use the term kokoro instead of spiritual just because of all the baggage people have with that term. And, um, and then I described the different stages that humans could go through, and I call those the 5 plateaus, right? Survivor, protector, achiever, equalizer, and integrator. And that our, you know, our goal, development goal, is to, is to train in this integrated fashion so that we can evolve our self-awareness, our our self-concept, our open-heartedness, or, you know, it's going to be expressed or experienced in different ways. But the point is you're evolving vertically so that you are ultimately going to be a different person, like Dave Bowman was, and like you were through your martial arts training, and I was through my transformation work. It's like Mark 2.0, then Mark 3.0. But those stages of development have been mapped from different lenses in developmental psychology and. And my 5 lenses, again, once in an attempt to simplify and to relate to, to leader/team development, we had those 5 plateaus. And so all of that became kind of this holistic integrated development, vertical development system called Unbeatable. And I had a lot of clients who said, can you bring this into my company? That's kind of where we are now. Like, I'm trying to figure out— I've got, you know, I've done a lot of events with companies, but I want Figure out—

and now it's full circle. You're back into the corporate world.

Back in the corporate world, trying to bring the Unbeatable Vertical Development Self-Awareness and Team Awareness Operating System into—

that's awesome.

That's a long story, so thanks.

It's a beautiful story. I mean, you don't know me, um, I was born with many, many disabilities, and my challenge was not going through BUD/S. My challenge was survival.. And that's how— that was my struggle. But yeah, Tai Chi, I'm a Tai Chi master. Done Kung Fu, I mean Qigong, energy work. I'm an energy healer. That led me into Ahadic Yoga and that kind of practice out of the Philippines. And so it's very interesting to hear all of this and it resonates a lot with my journey. So I mean, to do this work, even when you're changing the nomenclature to make it more acceptable to people, who are the people that are attracted to this?

Do you see?

Well, not for everybody.

No, no. I mean, I was saying that if you're not training your mind, the world's training it for you, and the results will speak for itself.

That's right.

And until you get really serious about your own development, right? You're, you're probably not a candidate.

Yeah.

For Unbeatable Mind, for what I do. So, said another way, if you, if you have a growth mindset and you've been tired of like chasing the shiny ball and not getting results, there you go. Find your way here, right? And most people, especially in the West, we're so easily distracted and seduced to—

oh yeah.

Things that, you know, it's like that saying about, you know, there's, there's a thousand paths up the hill, but, you know, us Westerners are running around the base of the hill trying, tasting every path, or, you know, picking a pile of dirt up off every path and looking at it and be like, I did that one, let me try the next one. And they're not getting anywhere, or they take paths that are one-dimensional or, or not taught with skillful means.

That's right.

Or just incomplete, you know, like downloading Headspace right? And just doing a different meditation or guided visualization every day, it's going to relax you, but it's not going to develop you because there's no focus to it. There's no directionality. There's no focus.

Exactly.

So people who are like tired of just trying different things, or who have, um, know what they sort of know what they need to do, but they're doing it in a disintegrated fashion. Like, I've had a lot of people say, you know, your program transformed me because of what I used to do. I've done a lot of these things, but I used to like go to yoga over here. And of course I would go to church on Sundays. There's my spiritual. And I would go to the gym. There's my physical. But, and I've tried meditation, right? But none of it really kind of connected. It didn't bring them back together. It kept them disintegrated and feeling separate and feeling like they're running around like a chicken with their head cut off.

Yeah.

And so my program, you know, taught them that all those things happen together. They're all just different aspects of yourself. So if you train them together and look at them as like different expressions of you, then you can bring that energy back in on itself to develop integration and wholeness. So in a sense, it's very similar to the aim of, you know, the Eastern yogic tradition, which is yoking, right?

That's right, yoga yoke.

Um, Integration, right? Back to yourself, self-realization. You can't realize the self if the self is disintegrated and you're throwing your energy all over the place.

One more question and I'll let you go. What's the biggest— if you think about all these years of this work you've been doing, I'm really curious about what's the biggest transformation you've ever seen? Not in yourself, but in somebody who worked with you.

I've seen so much.

I know you do. I'm just curious. I have, I have my stories too, but, but I'm just curious about yours.

I, I'm so inspired by people who've like literally healed themselves from cancer.

Mm-hmm.

It's a debilitating issue. Of course, healing relationships, children, spouses, And most important, because a big part of the work of the Kokoro Mountain, right, is similar to me sitting on that bench and asking, who am I? Right. And getting some, you know, subtle answers, like archetypal answers, beingness answers. So, so people will ultimately— and that's the most important job of your life, is to discover who you are and then how you're supposed to show up in service, right? And the Bhagavad Gita is all about that, right?

It took me a long time to figure that one out.

Yeah. Most people, it does take a long time and some, most people, a lot of people don't ever do it. And so they live that life, you know, the lives of quiet desperation because they don't understand that they're not following their path. They're not serving in the way that they're supposed to. That's right.

That's right.

So that's the transformation that is the most important is when people discover that or uncover that because it's in you. It's part of you.

That's right.

You just need to be still enough. You need to train your mind. That's right.

Quiet enough. And be patient.

And be patient, right. Well, right. Mingyin Sage said, "Sitting in stillness is the most important thing to do. Don't waste time not doing it." Right.

Mark, we're out of time. I could talk to you for hours. I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of this. I mean, there's such incredible wisdom, and it's not your wisdom, it's the universal wisdom that you've been able to pull in and distill and teach it in a way that makes it accessible to other people. And I think that that's your service work, and so thank you for doing that.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or and post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.