Heroic Interview: Unbeatable Mind with Mark Divine

You're listening to Unbeatable Mind, an Optimal.

Living interview with Mark Devine and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Mark Devine, author of Unbeatable Mind and the Way of the seal. I read this book and I just was blown away by you, Mark, and just who you are and your strength and integrity and integration around the mystical and philosophical ideas and just a really, really practical application. And I've studied a lot of mental training books and this is just, if not the best, one of the best. Highly recommend it. Extraordinary book, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm excited to unpack some big ideas today.

Yeah. Thank you, Brian. My pleasure. And thanks for that warm welcome.

Yeah. Well, a little bit more on Mark. He started his career as a cpa. I did as well. He was on Wall Street, I was here in la. And neither one of us found that particularly fulfilling. He left to go train as a SEAL, graduated at the top of his class at 26, spent nine years as an active SEAL commander, left. So spent. How long did you spend in reserves?

Another 11 years. Yeah, enough to basically retire at 20 years in one day.

Wow. Amazing. And then, of course, created SEAL fit. Have done some extraordinary work with the seals. And again, just such amazing stuff. I'd love to start with your first premise, an unbeatable mind. You talk about forging resiliency, mental toughness, succeeding at an elite level, and you talk about the first premise, the idea that we need to win first in our mind. Can you tell us about that and why it's so important?

Sure. This is, you know, something that I kind of learned in the SEAL teams in that, you know, we don't, you know, SEALs are very mission focused, as you're aware, and we have an incredible track record of success. And one of the reasons is that we really, we have this mental construct of what the wind looks like firmly planted in our mind before we even, you know, step foot onto the battlefield. And so, you know, part of how we do that is, you know, what I get into in the book. So it's kind of a meta concept, is that, you know, and think about anything you do in life, if you're going to launch a business or a new venture or, you know, start a family to win it in your mind first by getting an extraordinarily clear vision of what victory looks like, and then you begin to practice that victory through mental training. And that's what I mean by that. And that's kind of the crux of the the book as to how to do that mental training, how to establish that win in your mind before you step out of the door into this dark night, so to speak.

Yep. So cool. We'll talk about some of the other ideas in terms of how to cultivate that ability. Let's move into self confidence. So when I think of an AV Seal, I think of self confidence, intense trust in ourselves. You talk about the combination of character and skill. Can you describe how you see self confidence and how you see and how you encourage us to cultivate it?

Sure. Let me first start by saying there is the skills, which are the hard and kind of soft skills required to accomplish whatever it is the mission might be for the Navy SEAL that was we needed to know how to parachute jump at night with gear into the ocean. We needed to know how to dive, and we needed how to shoot straight, a variety of weapons to hit our target and all that kind of stuff. Those are hard skills. And then the soft skills might be the relational skills of being an excellent teammate, developing trust and trustworthiness, honor, respect, integrity, those types of things. Those are soft skills. And so I would say the soft skills become those skills that kind of define your character over time as you develop them. So you need both a combination of hard and soft skills that are relevant to your career, profession, or path, so to speak, in order to accomplish your mission success along the way. Now, total confidence can only be found when you have the intersection of hard and soft skills at a very high level, and you're also endeavoring to improve both on a daily basis. So this is kind of one of the core tenets of unbuild mind is that we elevate training of hard and soft skills to the same level of importance as eating and sleeping. It becomes that important to us. And one of the SEAL ethos statements is that we must earn our trident every day. The trident is the Navy SEAL insignia that has become a little bit more popular these days because you see it in the movies like Lone Survivor or Lone Survivor and American Sniper. You saw these guys basically practicing these skills and earning the trident. They had to basically earn it every day through their actions. And so we have this notion in unbuild mind that we must also earn. Our unbl mind focuses mostly on the character because the hard skills are going to be unique to your specific mission in life. Your hard skills, Brian, are kind of similar to mine now in business, but they're really different than the Navy SEALs, obviously. Right. You have to have hard skills in communication and interviewing and podcasting and writing and reading, analyzing information and distilling it and all that kind of stuff. So, anyways, now let me talk a little bit more about true confidence or total confidence. The first is an acknowledgement that we must develop our character, right? And then, of course, how to develop that character is really, you know, for most people is a total mystery, right? Because it's not something that's taught. You might find a good mentor or coach somewhere along the line that helps you or a parent, but for the most part, it's an obscure skill, and I try to ferret that out and try to break out what it means to be a man or a woman of character in unbiel mind. And how do you develop that character every day through training and through how you organize your life and thinking and whatnot. Now, total confidence first comes with commitment. Like if you're committed to a mission, let's use the example of you want to perform at your peak in your business, and you want. And through that, you want to develop wealth for you and your family. So that's kind of your mission, right? Maybe a little bit more refined than that. Well, in order to get there, you need the hard skills of your given career, and you need the soft skills of the character to be the type of person that's worthy, right, of achieving that level of success. And so the first step is to have total commitment to that mission once you're totally committed. You know this, Brian, A lot of people don't really commit. They. They dream, they desire, right? They talk a lot about wanting to have that level of success or wanting to have a 10 or $50 million business or whatever it is, but they don't really fully commit in the way that Navy seals commit, where they're really willing to risk a significant amount of their reputation, in the case of the Navy SEALs, even their life, for mission accomplishment. So total confidence can only come when you first commit with what I call a hair on fire commitment, like a burn your boats commitment, where there really is no going back. It's like Yoda says, do or do not. There is no try. And once you commit, and then, you know, that gives you the courage to really drive and to be honest with yourself about what your gaps are, what your weaknesses are, what you need to do to develop the character, to become the person who's worthy of that mission, of succeeding at the level that you've just committed to. And that courage propels you to get the skills, seek out the mentors and Develop the capacities for performance. So that's where people say, okay, now I'm fully committed and I've got the courage to step up and come to a SEAL FIT academy where we really dive into the integrated training and really take your character up a notch or two. Or I'm really going to finally commit to getting that degree or that certification. Or I'm really going to commit to getting a job at the competitor's firm where I can learn everything I can about how to do this. That's the third stage. And you still don't have total confidence until all three of those come into line. So you're committed. You, you've got the courage to really drive into it. You're developing the skills and the character, the hard and the soft, right? And then there's going to be a point in time where the skill level that you've developed and the character that you developed kind of intersect and you're going to suddenly feel like you've got this. And that's what seals feel like. They spend years developing both the hard and soft skills, then they practice their mission to win it in their mind. And when they go out the door, they just have this sense that it's manifest destiny, that this mission is in the bag, it's theirs. And anytime any of those steps are missed, you know, things can go wrong. And, you know, things do go wrong, especially in warfare with SEALs. But that's the general premise, you know, and you can go forward with that, that level of confidence. It's just an amazing feeling.

So much good stuff in there. A couple of phrases you used in the book that, that you didn't explicitly say right now, but you're saying in different ways. I just want to say out loud, extreme competence. I love that idea of extreme competence and love how you tied it to you. Earn your trident every day. You know, that's not a. Once you know, you're exonerated from future work. Right. Once you get to a certain level, it show up and get better. And then uncommon resolve, that's one of the coolest phrases I've heard, that uncommon resolve that you share, that it took for you. You wrote three books in one year, is that right? 11 month period.

Right, Right. It was kind of a, you know, just one of those things that I didn't intend, but when it was there, I had to commit fully. Right. And then I had to kind of follow that process that I just talked about. And then the net result with that kind of front side focus that I had was that I Wrote, you know, I wrote on Be Able Mind, at least the edition that you read, the full edition, the first one was like an ebook I had for an online course. And I wrote the Way of the Seal and I wrote eight Weeks to Seal Fit and they were all published within, know, months of each other.

Amazing. Awesome. Okay, so we talked about commitment and then we talked about courage. Let's move into courage. And you have some great wisdom on, you know, the COVID of your book has you staring down a wolf. Right? Right. And you share the story of which wolf are we feeding, the courage wolf or the fear wolf? Can you talk to us about the idea of starving fear and feeding courage? And I also want to highlight, like, why is negativity so bad? You say negativity destroys performance in the short term and precludes success and happiness in the long term. Can you talk to us about that?

So true. This is where it might sound a little esoteric to the listener, because I have kind of a unique perspective on this. So first of all, the fear and the courage wolf, that comes from a Native American kind of parable, right? And that saying was that the fear wolf resides in your mind and the courage wolf resides in your heart. And both wolves are vying for attention. But as you know, most of the attention is really, especially in our modern Western society, is fed to the fear wolf. Because most Westerners and most people in general, I should say, are kind of caught or trapped in their minds right through, you know, obsessive thinking and, you know, what the Buddhists would call the monkey mind, you know, just flitting all over the place and just constantly hashing, you know, coulda, shoulda, woulda's and wishes and dreams and, you know, fantasies, right? And it's this non stop, you know, it's a non stop kind of cycle, mental cycle, mental chatter where the mind is either in the future or the past, but rarely, rarely is it really rooted in the present. And the mind is hardwired to look for fear, to detect it, to analyze it, and to protect against it. And so all information enters our mind and immediately goes through the amygdala. And then that basically analyzes it for threats or opportunities. And a lot of things that happen because of the way we're taught to think. And some of our mental biases are categorized as threats. I would say a good chunk of things being late for work. Time pressure, which is time is a total fabrication or construct of the modern world, the way we think of time. And so the time pressure creates a lot of kind of fear based negative thinking in most people. That's just one example. A lot of other threats, stress of stress of your social status and whether you're going to get the promotion or not or whether you're going to be perceived as a worthy person. So your reputation then becomes a threat to you anyways. This constant nature of thinking is predominantly fear based or negative. Another way to look at this is also the information we take in from the outside world news media. All fear, right? All fear. Very rarely do you see a positive story coming out of the network news or any type of news for that matter. And most TV programming even is has some negativity and fear. If you really analyze it down to the way they present, you know, different people, the way they present men in general, the way they tell jokes, you know, everything has got some element of fear. Fear kind of sells and it's really, it's just what the writers tend to kind of rely on to sell at any rate. So we tend to really feed fear all the time. And courage, right? Which kind of resides in our heart, which really, you know, metaphorically is more connected to the energy of acceptance and humility and loving your, you know, yourself and loving your fellow teammates and even your enemy ultimately at the highest levels. That doesn't get said very often. Some people will immediately say, well it does for me. And those people would be in a service profession or a non profit or women tend to feed the courage wolf a lot easier than men. So anyways, that's kind of, I just want to tie that to the old parable. It's like the two wolves are vying for attention. We tend to feed the fear wolf. And when you feed the fear wolf, the courage wolf isn't getting attention, which means you're not essentially developing your heart center, you're not developing your emotional intelligence, your eq and you're dominating in your cranial housing group. You're dominating obsessively, training and distorting the mental projections that tend to be negative, right? And so as you do that, you can't hope to win in your mind. If your mind is charged with negativity and if it's flitting all over the place and if you're just constantly taking in negative information from the news and from, you know, your friends and gossip and negative people and you're imprinting that, you know every single day, almost every moment of every day into your subconscious mind, into your whole body mind system. And that's why I say when you feed fear, you preclude success. From happening because you'll never find true success and happiness without starving that fear. Learning to get your mind into more of a present state and to be able to deliberately stay there. And in that present state, you're able to open up your heart and feed the courage Wolf, by really kind of connecting with people more at an intimate level. And this includes your family as well as your team teammates, including, if you're a CEO, right? And this is incredibly valuable training for all entrepreneurs and executives. And I know you, a lot of performers like that, business performers in your kind of tribe, Brian. But, you know, being able to get out of your head, out of that fear cycle and feed courage by connecting with your heart and kind of opening up. We have. I'll just kind of end this by saying we have a program at sealfit, you know, which is one of my businesses we call Kokoro Camp. You may have heard about this yourself, Brian. It's 50 hours of non stop grueling, physical mental training. And, you know, a lot of people look at that and say, oh, my God, you know, that's to really train you how to be a Navy seal, because it's basically designed after Hellwig. And the answer is, no, it's not. We do do that very well. We have an extremely high success rate in training Navy SEALs. But what the idea behind the camp is is this notion of kokoro, which is a Japanese word that means to merge your heart with your mind into your actions. And so we can use the, you know, we learn to use the wisdom of our heart by feeding the courage dog or courage wolf. And we learn to tamper and get away from fear and replace it with courage by training our minds in a new and unique way. So we starve fear and feed courage in that camp. And ultimately you become a much stronger leader and teammate collectively. Because your whole orientation toward life just takes a shift when you do that, right? It shifts to a higher state or stage of consciousness.

So good, sign me up.

I got you enrolled. I just hit the button. You would love it. Trust me, you would love it. And a lot of people think, well, I can't do that. And my point is everyone can do that. You know, you just have to know how to train. And we help you. You train for it. You know, it's much easier for, you know, the uber athletes, obviously, like the endurance athletes, the spec ops guys, and the CrossFit Games athletes, but we have, you know, 55, 60 year old men and women who come through and they just prepare for it, you know, they train for it. And if it really is a bridge too far, we have a 12 hour program called 20X which has the same outcomes that we try to achieve. It's just much shorter, you know. Yeah, but you really should consider it.

I am. This is good. And you mentioned 20x too. One of the big themes of the book is to really help us 20x our lives. Right. That we're capable of so much more.

Correct.

Collective kind of numbing to our potential often limits our ability to see that potential. That's another big thing that I got reading the book was just that we can do whatever we want to do, really, that we're willing to put the energy behind.

Right? Absolutely, yeah. The 20x notion, you know, it's kind of metaphorical, but we've proven it time and time again. You are truly capable of 20 times more than you think you are. And what we teach you first is how to do it, you know, how to win in your mind, how to use your mind in a new way. And like some of the things we've been talking about already in this phone call, and that begins to unlock the 20x. But then what takes you all the way there is this ability to, to create the same conditions in your team. And that's really what we try to do with Kokoro Camp or Kokoro Camp when we create the conditions where an entire team is unlocking their potential and winning in their mind, and they're winning their mind for a collective vision. It creates this unbelievable kind of morphogenic field where the team's IQ and EQ is elevated beyond the sum of its parts. And all of a sudden you're accomplishing things which you just thought were literally impossible. And it's an unbelievable experience because when you experience that life is different. You know, there's like life before that moment in life after. And you realize, my gosh, you know, what could I, what could I accomplish, you know, what could have I accomplished had I known this earlier? That was one of my big things, you know, And I, you know, I just wondered like, oh my gosh, you know, if I had learned what I know now, you know, when I was 18 or 19, holy cow, I would have written 50 books by now.

Simultaneously. Inspiring and oh, man, no more time to waste.

It's like tears coming down. But, you know, it's all. Everything happens along its timeline. But I think for anyone, it doesn't matter how old you are, you're still capable of far more than you think you are. Regardless of what you accomplish. There's still something more for you. The question is, what is it, right? And how is it going to benefit humanity? Because I think ultimately that's another underlying theme in the book is that we, you know, the warrior's ways are kind of one of the things I articulate. The warrior is someone who strives to master themselves, right? And of course that's a journey. There's never a destination with self mastery. But they master themselves in service, so they can be in service and service to humanity. You know, that may start out as service to your family and then service to your team and company or organization. And then, you know, as you grow, you grow up the stages of consciousness and then it ultimately opens up to be a more world centric sense of service. You know, how can I help all of humanity? And when entrepreneurs start to think this way, they think, okay, my God, you know, how instead of me just having a small software company that can serve a niche, what about serving the entire globe, right? And we have like 7, 8 billion people, close to 8 billion people, projected to be 11 billion by 2050. Within very few years, everyone will be connected with a mobile phone with persistent WI fi. How can you serve a billion people right, in a really cool way that helps improve the world? And if you can figure that out, if you master yourself, if you develop the skills and the character to where you can pull that off honorably, and you do pull it off, then the rewards that accrue to you are significant, which means you can do more. Right? It's all good, right? So it's a virtuous cycle of success.

So good. I love that description. The phrase I use is using our greatest gifts and greatest service to the world and just again, tying it back to earning your trident every day. That path of the master of how do I get a little bit better today? And the soft and the hard skills you described and cultivate that extreme competence for something bigger than ourselves. I want to go to one more idea before we go to the one thing in the three Ps which what you just described is kind of a prelude to.

It was. Yeah.

But before we go there, I want to hear your thoughts on breath awareness and control. Because your description of breath awareness and control in the book, it changed my life just to get that clarity on how to dial it in and why we need to dial it in. So you say. To say that learning breath control is the most important component to forging mental toughness would not be an overstatement. And I mentioned to you when we were chatting a Little bit before that, I do your five by five box breathing. Every morning I start my meditation, I do some other deep breathing, then I do that just simply five times. And then when I do a little afternoon meditation, laying down, relaxation, I do it. And right before I go to sleep, I do it. So I'd love to hear you describe why breath control is so important. And then I'm going to ask you to describe that little training operation where you came up with 5x5. But can you just describe the why breath is so important?

Sure. This is information that has been around for thousands of years, but really completely unknown to the West. The breath, right? First of all, the breath. Without the breath you'd be dead. Okay, so there's point number one. So it's pretty important to us. But most people just assume that it's an unconscious thing, like your heart beats and you breathe and there you go. Well, that's common thinking. And you know, to have an unbual mind achieve 20x, we don't stick with common thinking because we're not common people. And so what we do is we look at the breath and say, oh, okay, maybe there's something more going on here than meets the eye. First of all, are we breathing adequately for optimal fueling? Well, that's one way to look at the breath. Okay, so are we getting a full lung, full measure of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen into our lungs every breath? Okay, there's some skill involved in doing that, right? Learning how to belly breathe, learning how to activate our diaphragm and the other muscles of our breathing, learning how to breathe through our nose, learning how to slow down our breathing. You know, the common person breathes like 16 to 20 cycles per minute, 16 to 20 times per minute, and the warrior breathes four to six. So my common breath pattern is about four or five breaths per minute. Much slower, much more controlled, much more methodical. And so the second piece of this is that first of all, let me just say when you breathe that way, you're getting a lot more oxygen into your system. You're fueling it, helps your performance. So that's good right there. Could stop there and get a ton of benefit. But where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the breath as energy. Okay, so the Japanese or the Chinese have the concept of chi and Japanese call it ki and the Indians call it prana. And so every breath you take, you're literally like you're ensuring that you're still plugged into the universal electrical, you know, system without that of Course, you die. So when we breathe in, we're breathing in energy along with the air. Interesting, right? You can't really separate the two, but, you know, maybe someday you will. Right. It's kind of like, you know, is it really a photon when we breathe in air? Are we breathing in something different during the day with the sunlight than during the evening when it's dark? Probably, you know, you are. It's got a different quality to it. And so we begin to learn how to connect with the energy that we breathe in. And so this is where box breathing starts to get interesting. The reason we do box breathing is now we're going to start controlling the flow of the breath. And so we have a deliberate process where we slow down the inhales and the exhales, and then we control the breath through holds, through an inhale hold and an exhale hold. We call the inhale hold a retention. We call the exhale hold a suspension. And we breathe through our nose. And when you breathe through your nose, right, it affects the energy system of your body. The yogis call that the energy body. And it's not unlike the acupressure, you know, acupuncture system of the Chinese medicine. It's actually very close, but slightly different. They're slightly different, you know, points and whatnot. But the two. There's three primary energy pathways, and they're called nadis. I think it's inga, the pingala, ida, the pindula, and then the sashuma. Sashuma is the central channel, goes right up and down your spine, and the ida and the pinula go up on the outside of your spine. One of them is connected to your right nostril, the other is connected to your left nostril. Interesting, huh? So this gets, you know, this is where, you know, you have to take a leap of faith with me until you practice it like you've been doing, and you feel the benefits. So when you breathe through your nose, you're stimulating this energy system and you're drawing energy in. And when we combine it with some visualization, you can actually energize your body and you move. And we had this saying that where your awareness flows, energy goes, or where awareness goes, energy flows. And so you can start directing this energy through your body for healing or for performance. Very interesting, right? And the other thing is, when you breathe through your nose, and this is also part intention, and you can use visualization as well for even more powerful effect, you stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, which shuts off all the Stress triggers, right? So you know, if you're late for work and you're feeling that stress, right, that kind of not real crisis, but this anxiety stress because you think you're going to be late for a meeting or something. Well, you know, in today's day and age that stress is, is kind of chronic and it's doing a lot of damage to your body and damage even to your mind and the way you think. And so when we take control of our breathing through a practice like box breathing, then we're able to basically shut off that stress and to counter it with a very relaxing and calming kind of counter stress action, which is to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system rather than sympathetic. So basically in layman's terms, what we're saying is we're shutting off the fight or flight which is constantly triggered by all these false negative stimuli that feed the fear wolf. Right. And what we end up doing is calming down our body and focusing our mind and allow us to feed the courage wolf through the process that I call the big four. So positivity. Right. So we begin to introduce, once we're in that calm state and we're breathing calmly, then we can introduce some positive courage rule statements, you know, such as, my favorite was I'm feeling good, I'm looking good, I ought to be in Hollywood.

I shared that with my wife the other day. That's so good.

I love that. And it works. And so that has meaning to me. And there's imagery associated with that. And so now I'm breathing calmly in my 5 by 5 PI, PI by 5 pattern, you know, box breathing. And I'm able to then talk to myself. And this is now keeping my mind in a very present state. Remember I said fear is fed. Fear Wolf is fed. When your mind is in a future or past state with unconsciousness, meaning you're not deliberately planning your one thing or you're thinking about your vision or mission in the future and you're not deliberately trying to learn from the past, but you're just obsessively placing your mind there because it's untrained, that's going to feed fear. So when you do this process of box breathing, it's a very sophisticated but simple multi leveled practice. That's why it's so powerful, is that you can then begin to charge yourself basically up positively feeding the courage wolf and then you act the imagery associated with that and your performance just goes through the roof. So you can use this practice for performance, you know, to prepare for workout or Combat or a board meeting or a speech. You can use it to calm yourself down for a nice night's sleep or, you know, the optimal rest period first. You know, the first four hours of sleep is critical. Or you can use it to prepare for the day. And so in the book, I introduce these as rituals. The morning ritual is to, you know, prepare for a day of just excellence. Right. And the evening ritual is to make sure that you can recapitulate your day so that you learn the right lessons and you don't go to bed with any regrets. And then you have kind of the pre sop and post sop for any type of big event, whether it's a workout or a speech or podcast even.

Yeah. So good. And we're barely scratching the surface, obviously, on all this. Get the book. Check it out. We're not even going to go into the story. I'll let people read it in the book. But I loved your little mini disaster underwater delivery vehicle.

Save that for the book.

Yeah, exactly. So check that out. And we also didn't, we didn't even really get into detail on your interdiction practice about just stopping the negativity and swapping in your positive mantra. I often have your mantra go through my head of looking good, feeling good, I should be in Hollywood. It just makes you smile and you're in it. You got what it takes to, to deal with whatever challenge you're facing.

Well, we could always do a follow up if you're.

Yeah, that'd be fun. And again, I'll let people kind of enjoy that. And then I would love to hear your thoughts on one thing in three P's because this is another one of those of your ideas in your book that just really crystallized some things for me as I was kind of getting clear on where my focus was going to be for the rest of my life, which is on my one thing of teaching. I was doing a lot of business stuff and entrepreneurial, and you really helped just drill that in. I journaled and journaled, which I do all the time, but your exercises in the book really helped with that. And again, everyone can read the book for the details, but can you give us a high level on why a one thing is so important and a little dance around those three P's?

Sure. I guess this has to do. This is my kind of philosophy. And people might have different orientations on this, but I believe that we all have a purpose in life now. Many of us, that purpose is kind of revealed to us. Some of us are lucky to have it revealed in an early age like I was, where my purpose kind of unfolded to me through a series of meditations when I was in my twenties and practicing Zen and through my martial arts training while I was a CPA or working toward my CPA stuff in New York. And that basically that that purpose kind of unfolded as a vision that I was meant to be a warrior and a leader. And then of course, I had to go through a process trying to figure out how to align with that vision. And that was not an easy process I described in my book. There was a lot of thinking that I had to unwind, a lot of belief systems that I had to unwind about who I was and what I was meant for. A lot of those came from my family, which is a business family in upstate New York and society and my school, where it was really considered to be good to be in the business world, especially going after the big money down on Wall. And nowhere, anywhere in my family or school or upbringing was the military ever an option or even mentioned. It was kind of something that was for people who couldn't figure out their life anyways. So that experience was profound for me that I had this kind of unfolding of this vision. And it was so powerful that I literally couldn't turn away from it. And also, it probably bears mentioning right here that one terrific way to uncover your vision, if you're not clear, is through silent practice such as box breathing or meditation. I use Zen in the early days. It's very similar to box breathing, actually, and journaling, which you do obviously quite well. And when you do that, it's just kind of. You're chipping away. It's an iterative process. You're breaking down the barriers and you're settling your mind and you're feeding the courage wolf enough so that you're kind of spirit can speak to you a little bit more. And I think that's really one of the things that happens. And then people do ask me sometimes, Brian, because what if, what if that never happens? And my answer there is, well, then, then you should find something that's that you. You care enough about. And then just, you know, make it your passion, right? Fake it till you make it. There's plenty of people who just really developed a passion for something because they become an expert at it. They didn't initially start out thinking, oh yeah, I'm going to be warrior. But, you know, they got into the military, then they all of a sudden they're like, wait, there's this thing called the SEALs, and then they go through SEAL training. They're like, man, this is unbelievable. Then they become a professional, you know, professional special operator, and then just become very passionate about it until that becomes their overriding purpose in life. So the three P's, I'll start there. The one of the first P is, what's your purpose? And trying to articulate that and revisit that every day through the morning ritual process is an incredibly powerful. It's just saying it's incredibly powerful, right? To know literally why you're getting up every morning and putting on your pants is super powerful, right? You're not just going through the motions. And then the second P is, what are you passionate about? Now, you can have a purpose, but if you're not passionate about how you fulfill that purpose, then it's going to fall flat and you may lose interest. For instance, if I decided or kind of uncovered early on that my purpose was to be a warrior and a leader, well, there's a lot of ways I could fulfill that. If I had said, well, you know, I think I could be a warrior and a leader back in the family business, but I wasn't passionate about it. It wouldn't have worked out. But what I learned was I was passionate about adventure, I was passionate about travel, I was passionate about leadership, right? And I was passionate about kind of being a warrior where I could be, you know, kind of at risk. I know it sounds weird, but warriors are really drawn toward being sheepdogs so they can protect others. And so this kind of led me in the military setting and because I was a really good athlete and, you know, a risk taker, you know, I get closer and closer to things and ultimately the seals, you know, became the one thing, right? And so the purpose, alignment of purpose and passion can help identify what's that one thing that you're driving toward, right, at any point in your life. And then the third P is your principles. This is your personal ethos, like why, you know, the purpose is the why. The passion is what fuels it. That gives you the drive and the determination to stay the course. And the principles are what keep you on track. You know what I mean? That's your, like your handrail. When it's dark and raining and stormy and people are trying to push and pull you in all different directions, you keep coming back to those principles, such as, earn your trident of respect every day, right? Be ready to lead and ready to follow. A lot of leaders aren't good followers, right? One of my principles, you got to be ready to lead and follow at all times because, you know, we're all leaders, we're all followers. And you know, you might be asked to step up and lead when you're not ready. Well, you know, suck it up, go do it. Right. And you might need to step back and set your ego at the door, right. When you're the leader because someone else has the right answer or someone else has the health or, you know, isn't injured or they've got, or they're, you know, they're the expert, the subject matter expert, stuff like that. Anyway, so those are examples of the principles that guide me. And so then these three P's become kind of your foundation for excellence. And so the passion, the purpose and passion and principles give you a vision for who you are on this planet and why you're here. And then the one thing gives you the directionality. So what's, that's, what am I going to do about it right now? What's the one major thing, you know, for. So when I was, when I figured all this stuff out in my mid-20s, my one thing was to become a Navy SEAL. Then when I became a Navy SEAL, right. And these one things typically are, you know, one to five year kind of missions, I would say. And then once I became a seal, my one thing became to be the most successful leader that I could be. Right. And of course, along the way, you know, I was following my principles of earning my trident through the developing the character and the skills. Right where we talked, we started the beginning of the call, developing the character and the skills, trying to get 1% better at both every day. And then developing the character of the warrior, of things like humility and that uncommon resolve and ready to lead, ready to follow and honorable integrity and all those things. And so then you go through life and your purpose usually won't change. Your vision of how that's going to play out will change. And so your one thing will change as your vision shifts, but your purpose and your passion should stay fairly consistent. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes complete sense. And I think there's the David Data describes it as you're penetrating concentric circles, getting closer and closer to that kind of next iteration of who you are. Yeah, yeah. And that's for me, it was very much that case of my purpose has been the same, which is to inspire and empower people to optimize their lives. But what I did was I kind of got behind the scenes and became an administrator and a CEO, helping other teachers get out there. And for Me, it became clear that, oh, okay. The next mission I need to run is not administering other people, getting out, but doing the teaching.

From the front.

Yeah. And really getting clarity on your three Ps and committing to that one thing. Which brings us all the way back to the true source of total confidence and starting with commitment. Right. So I got a ton out of it. Again, if anyone's listening to this, I can't imagine anyone who would be listening to this, who wouldn't be looking to get your mind stronger, to really get deeper clarity on what you're here to do in service to the world. You're going to love the entire book and that section in particular. And I just want to thank you, Mark. You're really a beautiful demonstration and embodiment of the warrior philosopher. And I had that feeling so clearly reading both of your books I've read so far. And just to be in your presence is inspiring. And I just want to thank you for that and really appreciate you taking the time to connect.

You're welcome. I really appreciate that. Brian. It is my honor. I really great stuff. And I'd love to help you out in any way I can.

I appreciate that. And it looks like I'm going to be signing up at some point soon for that 50 hours of kokoro.

Look forward to that moment.

That'll be amazing. And then I'd like to wrap up with one final question. So if you could share one piece of wisdom with our community again, people passionate about optimizing their lives, what would the one thing be that you would share with them? Yeah.

I think I've already said it, but I think it bears repeating that if we want to perform at our peak and live optimally, we can't leave it to chance. We can't hope that we're going to be the type of person that's worthy of that success. We have to take the bull by the horns and take responsibility for developing ourselves to be that person. And that the corollary to this is the way to develop yourself is to do it in an integrated fashion. This is probably ultimately the hidden genius of unbeatable mind, is that we're talking about training the individual in an integrated fashion, because that's how we learned. I learned that in the seals, that when we trained, we trained physically, mentally, emotionally, we trained our intuition, awareness, and we even trained ourselves spiritually, even though those words were never used in the seals. I call those the five mountains now. And that if you can train yourself, do something every day that's physical, physically, Good for you. And that can be both the way you feel yourself and the way you move your body and learning how to functionally move and get fit, that develops a lot of confidence, but it also begins to develop your mind in new ways. And then we take it a step further and we use tools such as box breathing and visualization and feeding the courage wolf to train our mind. So there's mental development, that's the second mountain. And the third is when you start to connect with that heart and you're feeding the courage wolf and you begin to develop emotional awareness. Now all of a sudden a lot of things start opening up. And you know, there's been a lot of leadership, great leadership leaders and people have written books that have said, you know, hey, emotional intelligence. And you know, developing your character in that manner is like the next frontier for business leaders. I completely agree. Right. So developing your emotional intelligence is super important. That's the third mountain. And of course Navy SEALs know this. But you know, you can also develop your belly's intelligence, right? So as you work on your heart now, you can start to also work on your belly. And your belly is your seat of intuition. And you know, warriors do this. Any martial art who's listening to this will know what I'm talking about. When you develop your hara or dantian beneath the navel region and you begin to connect with that and then, you know, deepening awareness through exercises like mindfulness and aware presence, you know, just practicing presence and those, some of the silent practices I allude to in the book and beyond this now develops our intuition. That's the fourth mountain. And then as your intuition develops, you're able to avoid danger, you're able to sense opportunities, you're able to intuit what people are thinking a little bit more easily. Then all of a sudden, again, all of these are starting to unlock that 20x performance. And the fifth is that Warrior spirit. Just being able to really cultivate that non quitting spirit, that willpower that just will never, never give in. Right. And it will stay committed and stay determined and driven and drive and be able to literally achieve mission success after mission success because you just have such, you know, depth of character, such spiritual strength. So that was a long answer to your short, you know, one kind of piece of advice. But you know, to summarize, elevate training to the same level of importance as eating and sleeping and train in an integrated manner.

It's brilliant. One of my positive mantra jingles is let's do this. That's what I feel. Yeah. Let's do this. That is so good. Right on. Well again, appreciate you. Thank you. Tell us where people can. Where should we have people visit so they can learn more about you?

Sure. Well, the books can be found anywhere like Amazon. Barnes and Noble online is the easiest way to get it. If you want to learn about sealfit. Sealfit.com that's all one word. S E A L F I T.com we have a ton of cool, cool videos. I have a blog, free blog that goes out every week and all sorts of cool stuff. We even have our own little reality show coming up. Brian that will be fun to share with people. And then if you're interested in the UnBuildMind online training then you can find info@unbuildmind.com and. Yeah, that's it now. Cool. One last thing. The way of the Seal would be fun to do this again regarding that kind of topic. I've got an online course coming out in September or early October to support the book and I'd be happy to provide you with a free copy and I'd be happy to provide your listeners with a trial or great deals on some of this stuff.

If you want to talk about later on, that's fantastic. Well, let's do that. And yeah, thanks again and appreciate you.

Yeah Brian, appreciate you doing this and I appreciate your work too. I look forward to getting my philosopher's notes every month or whenever they come out.

Right on.

Alright, bye.

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