1058 How to Attract Success, Destroy Laziness & Achieve Optimal Performance w/Former Navy SEAL Officer Rich Diviney

This is episode number 1058 with former Navy SEAL officer Rich Devinnie. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. [Speaking of the crowd] Margaret Thatcher once said, Don't follow the crowd. Let the crowd follow you. And John Quincy Adams said, if your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. I'm so excited because my guest today is Rich DeVinnie, who has more than 20 years of experience as a Navy SEAL officer at the highest level. He completed more than 13 overseas deployments, achieved multiple leadership positions, and since retirement in early 2017, has worked as a speaker, facilitator, and consultant, and is now the author of his new book, the Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. And I love diving deep into the mindset of a Navy SEAL and all the techniques, lessons, and wisdom that comes from being a leader and a driver of success. And in this episode, we discuss How to train yourself to have more motivation and not be lazy. The difference between self-discipline and discipline. How to train your mind to be more calm during stress and chaos. The five main behaviors of a good leader. The difference between task switching and multitasking, and this part will be huge for so many of you. Whether it's better to make a bad decision or no decision at all. How to build up your self-confidence. The steps we can take to overcome the fear of rejection This was cool. We talked about the law of attraction and why it works for Navy SEALs and so much more. And before we dive in, I wanted to let you know that we just launched my Greatness Coaching Program. This is your high performance system for 2021 and beyond. It includes coaching, accountability, community, and my new Greatness Playbook where you'll reflect, plan, and create short term and long term visions for your life. But whether you join Greatness Coaching or not, Creating a high performance system will be the biggest thing you do to set yourself up for success in 2021. If you're already a successful entrepreneur, then make sure to go to lewishouse.com/mycoach to check out and see if this is the right program for you. It won't be for everyone, but make sure to check it out at lewishouse.com/mycoach if you're interested in taking your life and business to the next level. And also at any time during this episode, if you're enjoying it, make sure to share this with a friend who you think would be inspired by this and wants to learn from more of this information. Just send them the link, lewishouse.com/1058 or copy and paste it wherever you're listening to it and share it on social media, text it to a friend and let people know about this message. And also, if you want to spread the message of greatness, click the subscribe button over on Apple podcast right now and leave us a rating and review as that will help us impact and change more lives together. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Rich Davini. I want to talk about, first off, the difference between peak performance and optimal performance. 'Cause your whole thing is about optimal performance and that peak performance is not sustainable. But in kind of leadership world or personal growth world, a lot of people say, let's get to peak performance. So why more optimal performance we should be leaning on? What is it? and why do you feel like it's better than peak performance?

Yeah, peak performance is, in a word, awesome. I mean, it's very seductive. It's flow states. You're at your best. You're doing things that you never thought you could do. And ultimately, it's a very honorable and great goal. The reason why it doesn't interest me as much stems from the fact that people generally think of and would come up to me and say, well, you Navy SEALs are the top peak performers. I mean, the ultimate peak performers. And I said, actually, no, we're not. Peak is an apex, and an apex is from which you can only come down, right? And peak has to be prepared for, scheduled, conditioned, right? Planned for. The professional football player, for example, you know, spends his entire week preparing to peak for three hours on Sunday, right? And that's exactly what that football player should do, except Navy SEALs don't have that option, right? You know, and spec ops people don't have that option. Military people don't have that option. I don't think anybody in life has that option unless you're planning a specific event for a moment. You can peak, you can plan for a peak in a moment, but everyday life is really about optimal. Optimal is how can I do the very best in the moment with what I've got. All right, sometimes that looks like peak, sometimes it looks like flow states. Sometimes it's just like, hey, I'm just taking step by step. I have my head down and I'm trudging through and it sucks. and it's muddy and it's dirty and it's hard, right? This is, you know, what kind of keyed me into it was, you know, in SEAL training you do something called surf torture. So they take you out in the cold waters of Southern California and they march you into the surf zone, you lay down, the waves just crash over you for what seems like hours. Freezing. You get a lot of guys quitting during that evolution. And they do it at night, you know, and I remember, you know, that I remember being in the surf zone and there was nothing peak about my performance in the surf zone, right? I was doing the very best I could, which was not to quit, which was what the other guys around me were doing too. and some did and some didn't, you know. But this happens. I mean, the person fighting cancer, there's nothing peak about going through chemotherapy. The person striving for that goal and nugging it out, there's nothing peak about it. It's not peak all the time. Even, you know, you're talking about training for a marathon or these long distance runs, you know, you're not going to be peak the whole, you know, sprint to the finish. You're not sprinting to the finish every moment. Every moment, right? There's going to be points at which you're ebbing and flowing.

And so optimal is about the ebb and flow, and that's life, and that's.

Really understanding oneself and one's performance so that you achieve optimal versus peak.

How do we train ourselves to find motivation and not be lazy? Because I feel like there's a lot of laziness out there or there's moments of motivation but then it falls back into a laziness structured schedule. How do we train our minds and our body to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy?

Yeah. Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. So, one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline. What's the difference? Okay, well the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused. Self-discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements. So, you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, you know, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about managing the internal. Discipline, the way I talk about it in the book, is about achieving that long-term goal. These are those long-term goals that are going to take a while to achieve and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right? The external world has a say in whether or not you do that, and that's, and the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures, and continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was, because I'm a very unself-disciplined person, I don't have a lot, right? And so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I say, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly so those with very high self-discipline sometimes, this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble achieving long-term goals because the achievement of long-term goals often takes an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty. which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self-disciplined person, the very self-disciplined likes routine, likes certainty. That's how it's structure. I mean, that's what it is. And so moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure and say, well, I can't do that. I'd have to just go in, I have to go in unknowing. Now, the best, the most successful people are those who have both self-discipline and discipline, right? In terms of staying motivated for a goal, the way I would do it by knowing myself is I would, understanding I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces, right? So if I want to lose weight, you know, then I can say, well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me, right? Because I can say, I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way, but I think I think the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective, but it would, in my kind of through my thought process and my experience, involve.

One.

To actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

So, creating a reward system first for the goal in order to help you stay motivated.

Depending on how you show up.

Not just say like, okay, I'm going to My goal is to achieve this thing. It's going to take me three years to accomplish it. And that's the only reward I'm going to get in those three years. But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take every month, for a milestone every year, for getting closer? So focusing on the reward system.

And this is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many to ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be kind of inert, right? So if I want to run, if I want to run a marathon and I can barely run to my mailbox, right, then maybe buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs somewhat frequently, and you probably identify with this, just putting on our shoes one morning is probably not going to give us that dopamine hit. extend that, we're going to extend that task a little bit so that- you-'ve.

Already accomplished a lot of something, you have to push beyond that.

You- have to push beyond it to get that reward system, so it becomes subjective.

What would you say, 20 years as a Navy SEAL at different levels, and you were deployed how many different times? Are you allowed to talk about that?

Well, I mean, 13 and some change, yeah.

Deployments between what, six months and over a year?

Yeah, I never did year long, but anywhere between three months to six months usually.

This is Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the most part, yeah.

And other places maybe you're not allowed to talk about. What would you say of that 20-year experience was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within a mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you?

Yeah, the most challenging thing ironically wasn't the job because we were also prepared for the job and we were around just the best people in the world. so the trust and the camaraderie was to this day, I look back on it very fondly, right?

So not the day-to-day job, you mean even just like the missions you went out on?

Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say, the first and foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say goodbye to your family for a stint, whether it's three months or six months or some some folks are deploying for a year, right? That is a rough deal that not many people can capture. Not many people with families can capture that. When you have to say goodbye to your kids and your wife for that, you know, okay, well, see you in however. And then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she was staying. It was dangerous. Yeah, well, luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy. But we found, again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea because what happens is you establish a routine. You get comfortable.

You get comfortable.

So something happens, I'm working, I'm overseeing something, I have a mission that goes along or whatever, and I don't get to call her that day. Well, suddenly she's worried. And it also makes time actually seem slower. Interesting. Yeah, so we decided we were only going to talk Usually once a week, my son who had a real trouble, he was young. I mean, he was born in '05, so by the time he was two, he was having trouble with me deploying. And every time I went, it was rough on him. And we actually, for him, we actually almost had to, well, we literally had to just decide not to, I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically kind of forget me.

Oh my gosh. So he had to compartmentalize as a.

Child in order to- We had to help him compartmentalize.

Survive. and not go depressed or be stressed, because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization. How do you do that if you're an emotional human being that's, you have these deep connections to your family and friends, how do you just detach in a sense and become more machine-like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in other moments?

Well, it never goes away and I think the attributes, the way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more kind of surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information versus I'm going to block something out so I don't have to think about it. However, I think most team guys, SEALs, Spec Ops guys have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things, block out things that are painful. I know that about me and I know that about my buddies because you have to because war sucks. And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished. So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there, these movies that show these extended scenes of people mourning when their buddy goes down or whatever, like, oh my god, you don't have that, but no, you don't have that time. You have to win the gunfight, because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home. And I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense. and so kind of so effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that could be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic It just happens without us having control over it.

What was the moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed? Where you thought like, I may not make it. Or our team may not make it, or this is a really bad, I guess you're training for bad situations all the time. But was there ever a moment where you were like, I don't know if we're gonna get out of this.

No, I was fortunate not to have that moment. I say that with immense gratitude, because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that that can't say that. They had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position, and my team was always in a position, that we had prepared, planned, and executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete, or near complete, control, or we understood the pathways we needed to go throughout it. But I say that also, you know, this comes back to compartmentalization. You know, one of the things that you have to be able to do when goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up, right? The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get out of this. Focus is how do I get out of this? So the mental beauty attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability, right? So that's how information is coming in. how we're processing it and prioritizing, how we're switching between the necessary tasks and then how we're learning from our decisions. So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of that. But ultimately comes to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a forebrain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over until a fight-flight response and you're able to think through stress, challenge and uncertainty in the sense that say, okay, what what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in because now I have a team. I can say this with great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas when we were overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

Sketchy.

This is sketchy and having complete and utter faith. Because I was around, because I was with my teammates. I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went went wrong, we'd be able to handle it. And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff.

When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong and how to get out of that situation, or is it planning for here's exactly how we would like it to go right, but let's also have an exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong?

It's the ladder. You plan the mission as you'd like it to go, and then inside of that planning, you put together, you build contingencies within each factor.

So when this doesn't go as planned, what are the three ways to go?

Yeah, so you know, just like any athlete would understand, so a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on, depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing, you know, this is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay, well, as we're coming in on insertion, you know, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that, if this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase, throughout the phase planning. But then there's what we call the 80-20 rule. And that is you get to 80% of certainty, and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out, we'll figure it out, because we're not going to figure out everything. And Murphy's Law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal?

Yeah, so I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I call Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. You know, at what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response, into fight-flight, where our system starts, you know, taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline? If you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average. There are those who start really freaking out at like 190. So 212 is the average at 190 degrees, they're starting to freak out. There are people who it takes till like 230.

To boil.

To boil, right? I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point, first of all. In other words, we tend to, when bad things start to happen, we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up. It's funny, it's funny, you know, I live in a neighborhood and in my neighborhood there's four other Navy SEALs in the neighborhood. There's, you know, one across the street, one down the road. Must be nice. Well, it is nice, you know, A, because they're great dudes and they're great neighbors. But I remember my wife once saying, you know, she said, hey, I'm so glad these guys are here and I, in the neighborhood. I was like, why? She said, because if something went wrong, I know I could go to them and they'd act like you act. And I said, well, tell me. I said, because if something happens, they would immediately calm down and they'd start working the problem. And so I think we show up predisposed. Training to it is difficult. And I think so here we are actually working on some stuff to help teach people to do that. But it comes down to understanding your own neurology and it comes down to understanding that here's how you have to think through situations under stress. And then it's going to be about putting yourself into deliberate stress to practice that. you can't practice this type of thinking if you're not in stress. You need to put yourself in that.

What are some things civilians could do to practice stressful moments on a daily basis where it doesn't hurt them, but it's actually preparing them? I talk about every day I think you should be experiencing some type of pain, something that's uncomfortable, seeking discomfort, whether it be through a 10-minute workout, whether it be through a longer run, it doesn't matter what it is, an uncomfortable conversation. We should be doing this every day in a structured environment that allows us to grow. What do you think are some ways we could do this that's not putting us in harm's way or physically hurting ourselves?

I can't answer that because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you just gave some. I mean, some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake, right? For me, that would be hard. Starting a conversation with a stranger would be hard. So that might be something I do. Giving a presentation, public speaking for people is tough. So volunteering to give that presentation is a great way for a lot of people because you know, you know, they, that makes them anxious, you know. So working out for some is like, for some people they've developed a system where that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy, right? So they're not practicing it, you know? So someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright... Well, in fear, again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear, right? So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be... I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's going... I'm nervous about it, right? But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's at 2 o'clock. I know what I'm going to do. I'm nervous about it. Uncertainty without anxiety, well that's every kid on Christmas Eve. Okay? I mean, so, but it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear, if you have uncertainty plus anxiety and it starts to manifest into fear, the key is to understanding which of those two factors can you buy down? Anxiety buy down? Buy down, which means decrease. Anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response, right? So things like, some of the tools Huberman talks about, visual tools, breathing tools. You can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic, come off of the autonomic response system. So that's how you could start buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external. That means something around you outside of you, you don't understand. There's unknown. The best way to do that and the way we do it in Spec Ops is we control what we can control. Some people refer to it as control your three-foot world, right? But it doesn't have to extend. It's not a three-foot thing. It's what in this moment can I control and then take control of that, right? Because then you are grabbing onto certainty. You're taking what is uncertain, you're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you move through that, then you have to make another decision. What's the next thing? This is basically kind of stepping through, right? Stepping through this challenge, right? So you can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding both of those pieces.

What do you think is the greatest lesson you learned throughout the 20 years for yourself that has helped you not only during that but also after being with the SEALs?

I think it's not fearing the unknown. It's the idea that when you go through something like that, you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though I don't know how I'm gonna do it, I know I can figure it out. If there's enough interest, if there's enough passion, right? I'm not gonna, I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, you know? Right. So that's off my list, right? But I was interested in writing a book, and that was a whole new process for me, you know? When I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all, right? I did not like it. But I knew it was an edge that I wanted to conquer. and say, okay, well let me work through the things to conquer this edge. Kind of like your philosophy, I think it's a really, it's not only a deep one, but it's profound because if we are consistently deciding what our edges are, moving towards our edge and then getting there, then we are growing. Because guess what we're doing at that point, we're looking at the next edge. And that's the growth process, is continuing to move to our edges and then.

Finding the next edge. I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to.

Speak to your teams and guys Yeah, but that's not public. That's like, you know, that's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different, yeah. It's different, there's a lot more. You know, when you're, you know, and when you're in the military, there's no expectation of, you know, kind of great articulation or humor or, you know. Just what's effective. Yeah, it's a speech. Here's the word.

That's what we gotta do, right?

And that's what you appreciate too. There's no one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like, hey guys, this is what's going on. So there's a directness that's appreciated and required, you know, so, but that's not, you know, folks being.

What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to learn through or 20 years? Something that you were struggling with or challenged with or you kept repeating until you finally learned the lesson?

Yeah, I think the hardest lessons, the hardest lesson, maybe not one, the hardest lessons were just around leadership. What it takes, what leadership take, what it takes to be a leader. Because again, being a leader and being in charge are often conflated. They're not the same thing.

What's the difference?

Well, anybody could be in charge. As an officer in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny or calling yourself handsome. Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader. And that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you are in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead. If we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we consider leaders in our lives, it's not because they were just in charge of us. In fact, we could probably think of people who we would follow into hell and back, and they have no place in the hierarchy of our lives. They are just someone who just they behaved that way in a way that's made us kind of endeared to them. So, the attributes I talk about in the book in terms of leadership attributes are all attributes that actually cause behaviors that typically cause people to look at others as leaders.

What are the behaviors that most human beings admire the most that we want to follow that person or be inspired to be led by something that they're sharing or involved in, a community, a movement, whatever it may be. What are the three or four main behaviors that they have and we should be developing if we want to be better leaders.

Yeah, well, I talk about five in the book in terms of these adverbs. The first is empathy, okay? And again, I would say this, there's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide because there are people who will live. It's subjective, right? It's a subjective thing. Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think. So empathy is one. Selflessness is another. And this is not just, you know, so let's just back up here. Empathy. Not just I know how you feel, I feel how you feel. I can put myself into your shoes and that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about it shows that you care about another human being.

What is the best way to show that? Give me an example. As opposed to saying I know how you feel, how do you empathize showing you feel how they feel?

Well, first deep listening. So listening to another person but but true, like deep, full-on listening. I am hanging on every word listening. Oftentimes we listen to people and we're two things, one of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're going to say next, or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're talking about football. I'm thinking, okay, wait a second, did I play football in eighth grade? Maybe I could talk about that. Yeah, but what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. you know, I'm making what you're saying about me, you know? So, what deep empathetic listening is, I have like a whiteboard in my mind, okay? And as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard, I erase it and I move on, I just keep on listening, you know? That is, if you do, if you empathetically listen, like look into someone's eyes, attentive behavior, facing each other, they are going to feel cared for because you're exchanging. Now there's an exchange going on, there's serotonin, being released. There's oxytocin being exchanged or at least released and all these kind of these bonding chemicals, right? So that type of listening shows someone you care about them. Empathy is a little bit tougher for some. Some people are just wired. We know some people are wired to be. My wife is extraordinarily empathetic. I mean, she really feels other people. I mean, I am not. I've had to really try to develop empathy. It's something that she's taught me in terms, she hasn't taught me how to do it because you can't teach someone attributes, but she's inspired me to kind of develop it myself. And that is, hey, I'm asking myself questions like, okay, given your background, can I really put myself, can I kind of take out all of my predispositions and biases and really put myself in your shoes? Sometimes the answer, admittedly, is no, you can't do it fully. And that's, we can probably admit that, right? But to even make an attempt, I think is a showing of caring.

What's the attempt then? You're explaining something to your wife about, I'm out in the field, this happened, this guy got injured, I was terrified, I thought, whatever. And a wife or your partner or a friend who's not in that experience is gonna say, well, I can't feel how you feel, but how would they try to feel how you feel if you're sharing something like that? that's unrelatable. Because they're not gonna say, well, you know, with me and my girlfriends, I went through something that was hard, but you're gonna be like, well, you're trying to be relatable, but it's missing the mark.

I don't know. I think I have some ideas. A person who, I think the best person to ask would be like a Oscar winning actress or actor. Because those people, the best actors, are not faking it. They are actually empathizing.

They go into that place.

They go into that place and they feel it. So I would be very curious. In fact, you know, Next time you have an actor, I'll listen to the podcast. We'll ask that question. Because how do they do that? How do they get into the person's shoes? For me, it's about asking some questions and saying, okay, what biases might I be coming in with that are not allowing me to feel this? And can I maybe imagine myself with conditions and circumstances such that this person might have might have been or is experiencing.

Is it better to share back what you're hearing someone saying to show that you're listening? Is it better to say nothing to show empathy? Is it better to say, well, here's my thoughts and solutions. What's the best way to respond to show empathy?

Yeah, it was certainly not to offer solutions because that means you've been thinking about solutions while you've been listening. Which means you haven't been listening. there's kind of a way you can respond that tells them that you've heard them, but you still want to hear more.

So.

It sounds to me like what you're saying is this, and just let it out there. But the key is when you're empathetically listening is to talk way less. And really a lot of our acknowledgments can come non-verbally. I mean, we do most of our Communicating nonverbally. If I'm listening to you, I'm nodding and my eyebrows are moving and I'm really emoting as you're speaking, you know I'm listening to you.

You know I'm hearing you without me saying it.

But if you're looking out around, you're not connecting to me. Or worse yet, you know, looking at.

My iPhone when I'm talking to you. Oh man. You know, that's the worst. Okay, so that's number one of the.

Five behaviors great leaders have is empathy. Would you say that's the most important or are these all equally important? I would hesitate to put a level of importance, but I would say that one of the most important is, and I'm not saying this in order, but would be authenticity. Authenticity builds trust. When you are authentic, when you are yourself, and you are that way all the time, with whomever you're with, that shows others that this person is real and is being real, and this person is the same person at work as he or she is at home, as he or she is with the enlisted people in the military or the officers or the CEO or the line worker, right? I always say it doesn't mean you have to be nice. I remember when you take over command, there's a change of command ceremony in the military. And I remember I was attending one of these change of command ceremonies for a CEO that was coming into the command I was at. So he was going to be my new he was the command's new commanding officer, but my CO. And we were at the ceremony, I went to introduce myself to him and within about 30 seconds, I mean, he really kind of firm, kind of rough handshake with a very serious, and within about 15 or 30 seconds he's asking me like really tough questions about some gear that had been sitting on the shelf, right? And I was giving him some rote answers that some guys had told me that I didn't really know. And he was grilling me, I mean, it was like, well, why haven't you done this? Have you tried it? Have you done it yourself? Why would you believe? It was like rough and I was like, man, this is not fun. And I remember walking away from that conversation saying, yeah, this is gonna be a rough two years with this guy. This guy's grumpy, you know, and he seems mean. But what I realized over the next couple weeks is that he was like that with everybody. You know, it didn't matter if he was an officer, enlisted, didn't matter if he was at the chow hall, didn't matter if he was out in the, you know, PT-ing, you know, physical training. Wherever he was, he was always asking those tough questions. He was always kind of grumpy. He was always doing that stuff. he was actually a phenomenal leader. He was like that with all of it. I could trust his grumpiness. I could trust his tough questions. I knew exactly what to expect every time I went to this guy. And he was actually a phenomenal leader. He really was. Because I could trust him. I knew he was being authentic and he was just the same way. And that's important. So I think authenticity is another one of the five. Yeah.

Selflessness, you said?

Selflessness. So selflessness is different than just generosity or altruism. Selflessness involves a risk or cost. to the person who's being selfless, right? So are you doing something that is at risk or costing you in some way? That's selflessness. That shows someone that you are extending yourself for that person.

What would that look like?

Well, that could be as easy as giving someone some rope to go take a risk and knowing that they and them knowing you have their back. It could be spending time. A good friend of mine likes to say time is the currency of leadership. We all have the same amount. You know, when you give your time, you are giving something that we all have the same amount. There's no one who has more, right, or less. So when you give your time to another human being, you are being selfless with your time. So that's another way you can do it. It's showing that you are... I mean even...

Showing that it matters.

It's showing that it matters. Even as a teammate, you know, if your project teammate needs to win points with the boss, you give them credit. A project you work together, you give them more credit. That's selfless, right? I mean, there's different ways you can do it. But just doing something that is for another human being and- that is risking.

Or costing you something.

Yeah, it involves some sort of cost or risk. Interesting. Yeah.

Okay. What's the fourth one?

Decisiveness, which is different than making good decisions. Making decisions is obviously a very good thing to be able to do, but it's a you can learn how to make good decisions just by understanding how to analyze data and predictions and probabilities and outcomes and things like that.

Is it better to make a bad decision than no decision at all?

Depends.

You know what I mean? Is it better to be a decisive person?

Well, sometimes people conflate making no decision with doing nothing. But sometimes the decision is to do nothing. Sometimes the best decision, I give an example in the book of what's called recon by fire, sort of an old tactic where the enemy used to use this in Vietnam. They'd fire, they'd think that a patrol was out there and they'd fire into that area in order to elicit a response, because that patrol would think they were being fired on immediately fire back. Well, as soon as they do that, the enemy knows exactly where they are, recon by fire. We, as spec ops guys, you learn this because you learn, hey, sometimes you're a small unit, you don't want to get into a firefight. So just because you hear shots doesn't necessarily mean you pull the trigger. Sometimes the decision is to do nothing.

To be still.

To be still.

And wait.

As-- To keep firing every-- yeah, I mean, if the bullets start hitting the tree next to you, you may want.

To do something, right?

But, you know, but-- Just if it's a half a mile away. Right, it's to assess, right? So I think it really depends on the decision. Decisiveness is really about both the speed and the effectiveness of decision. How quickly are you able to make a decision and with what effectiveness? And that involves the ability to gather a reasonable amount of information about the situation such that you're hitting a percentage, it could be the 80/20, like, hey, I'm getting enough that we're going to do something, we're going to do. And then moving forward because we all know that those leaders who take long protracted amounts of time to make decisions are like, okay, It doesn't imbue a lot of trust and faith. But the leader who's responsibly decisive are those who say, okay, yeah, that's great. Now, the other thing that the decisive leader understands is that decisions while they are final, they are not permanent. Okay? So you make a decision, say we're going to move out. This is final. We're moving out. We're doing this thing. But as we kind of start to recognize the effects or the or the outcomes of that movement, we are free to adapt and change if we found that that decision was not working. Being flexible and adaptable. So that's decisiveness. And then the last one is, it has to be, decisiveness has to be buttressed by accountability. Accountability is also huge because if you are not able to be accountable for your decisions, then that is not going to view trust.

No one's going to trust you if you say, Ah, it wasn't my fault.

Yeah, I mean, leaders just don't do that. I mean, how many leaders do we know in our lives who we really, If we can honestly ask ourselves and say to ourselves, okay, if I could think of the greatest, if I can think of one of the people in my life who's the greatest leader and ask myself, are they accountable for their actions? The answer is unequivocally yes. It's not about blame. It's not about, well, it's not about excuses. It's about owning it.

Ownership is key.

Yeah, ownership is key. And I think those are the qualities. So I think those five attributes are attributes that lead to people deciding that you're a leader. You don't have to have all of them. Perfection is not the outcome here. And admittedly, sometimes even though I consider myself an accountable person, there are cases where I can, again, you can say I was guilty of not being as accountable as I should have, right? So we all slip a little bit, right? But I think those are the key ones.

Do you think people are, there are some people that are more born into being natural leaders? or is it something that all of us can be trained and learn how to do this?

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think the attributes, you know, I talk about the attributes in terms of they are inherent to our nature, right? So we are all born with these attributes and it's really the levels to which we have each and we can develop them over time if we choose to do so. Some people are very empathetic but not very decisive. Some people are highly accountable but maybe not you know, selfless, who knows? So I think there are people who are probably born and are predisposed with maybe more of these attributes than others and others who are born and they just develop them along the way. There are leadership skills that one can learn. Listening is a leadership skill, decision making is a leadership skill, delegating is a leadership skill. So these are skills that you can learn. So I think leadership is a mixture of attributes combinative skills. So I think the answer is both. You can be born with some advantages on the leadership front. But again, leadership is about someone deciding that. It's not about you.

Someone else deciding.

Yeah, it's not about you saying, I'm a born leader. This is not bad. It's like, do you behave in a way that people do you turn around or are people following you? If the answer is yes, then you're probably a leader. If the answer is no, then you're not. There's nothing wrong with that. There are some full professions that aren't, they're kind of self-directed, right? The comedian doesn't necessarily need to be a great leader. That's a self-directed profession. So it's not necessary, but I think we just have to understand that leadership is something that other people decide, not us. So if we want to be leaders, we need to behave like that and then see what happens.

Yeah, and you can't rush being a leader probably. You can't force it, you can't rush it.

No, that's dictatorship. That's being in charge aggressively. Right?

You can't say, oh, I'm doing all these attributes, I'm developing these skills, people should wanna follow me now.

Right. No. It's not, no. I mean, that's like saying you're handsome.

So, girls should be attracted to me now.

Girls should be falling over when they look at me. Come on, what's going on? I'm combing my hair, I'm brushing my.

Teeth, you know, I'm working out. It doesn't work that way. What's the skill that you have yet.

To develop that you wish you could develop? It's wind surfing, but with kite surfing.

That'S a skill I would like to learn.

That's a skill. What about attribute? Attribute, I'm still, I'm always actively working on my empathy. That's something I'm actively working on. I'm actively learning on my working on my learnability. If I were to rate all the mental acuity attributes, I'm pretty high on situation awareness, task switching and compartmentalization. Learnability is still tough for me. It takes me a while to learn things, you know? So I've always trying to develop that one. Humility, I think humility is one that you have to constantly keep in check. And then narcissism is one that we all have to manage. I talk about narcissism as a drive attribute and it's not something you want to work on as much as manage.

Is narcissism something that can be good?

Oh yeah, yeah. So I talk about narcissism as a drive attribute because Because narcissism is, so every human being wants to feel special in some way. Wants to stand out, wants to be paid attention to, wants to be, what's the attention? Wants some attention, right? This is biological. When we're infants being looked at and adored by our parents, we are getting hits of serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin as that's happening. So it feels good. And so it's natural for us to want to feel that way. When I talk about what people talk about, why'd you become a Navy SEAL? And I always joke, I'm a patriot, but it wasn't because I was a patriot. Most SEALs will tell you, I just want to be a bad-- I wanted to be a bad-- I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to see if I could do something very few people could do.

I wanted to be a badass.

There's nothing wrong with that if it's a driver. I want to be the best of the best.

Why does someone want to be a.

Singer, a famous singer? Professional athlete? Any one of those things. So I think nurses, Skepticism when managed appropriately is a tremendously powerful driver. And we have to recognize that. And the only, because again, we have to understand our own engines. And in the act of recognizing that, we also understand we need to manage it. The way you manage it is through your close, trusted, personal relationships. Friends and people who really love and trust you and will give you the hard truth.

Bringing you back to earth.

Grounding. Like I call them our grounding partners, right? Who are our grounding partners? my wife is my grounding wire, she always has been, and thank God for her, and she uses me as her grounding wire, right? Because she'll always tell me the truth, she'll always tell me if I'm leaning too far out over my skis, and then you collect other people, my teammates, my brothers, just this group of people. If you've surrounded yourself with a circle of sycophants, you're probably guilty. Here's the problem with narcissism, it's like a vampire looking in the mirror, you can't see it in yourself. It's very, very, it's almost, it's impossible, right? Really easy to see in another person. You see it right away, like, man, that's sycophantic. And you see it in their groups, the groups they form as well, because the groups they form are largely sycophantic. They are temporary, right? So the loyalties are temporary because it's just tough to always be, you know, bending the knee to someone else, right? So you see people transitively come and go. And those people who usually go are usually demonized. when they do because the narcissist does not like that. And so the group is an indication. Tough to see in ourselves, we have to lean in our relationships.

Ask for feedback. Hey, am I being too narcissistic?

And ask yourself, I mean, if you're in a group, who is typically the one being paid attention to the most? And if you're able to answer that honestly, you might get a clue. It's funny, my wife and son, they listen to a podcast I did a wife several months ago and they had never heard me on a podcast and my son's 15 and I come home because I recorded in my office because it's quiet and I come home they're like who is this guy?

I mean you sound like a narcissist.

Who is this guy? Because we don't hear you talk like this at home because at home I don't talk a lot. You know if I do like joke, if you're at home you're talking about you know what you're gonna eat next or you know, whatever. Yeah, whatever, you know. But I recognize when I'm with my family, my family, we all live in the same area, so we all get together a weekend. And I don't talk much. I just listen and it's nice for me, you know? But I recognize that's healthy because I'm not, I don't need to, nor do I want to, be the center of attention, you know? And I have to keep that in check, right?

You know, it's interesting, sometimes I've always discovered this because I was always scared to talk publicly growing up. and after college, I was afraid of public speaking, so I took public speaking class every week for a year. And I always felt like I was just insecure around my words when I was even in small groups. So I'd always just kind of sit there and listen. And as I got older, I started to really listen by asking intentional questions and just always ask questions. And by the end of the night, I'd be like, everyone would be swarmed around me because I'd just be asking everyone questions. They'd be like, man, you're the most interesting person here. Yeah, so you have to kind of like make sure you're and check also that way because the quiet one is usually sometime can be sometimes someone that always wants to learn from too. Hey, they're not saying enough.

You're not saying, yeah, so what do they know that I don't know? It could be a secret, right? It could be a little bit of stealth going on there. Yeah, exactly. And I think you have a natural curiosity, which is a very healthy way to express, which your Dharm is, I think, a healthy way to express because what you're doing, the reason why people are surrounding themselves or surrounding, surrounding you is because they love, people love hearing about themselves, right? When you ask someone questions, You know, they love to answer. I mean, we all love to talk about success. Tell me about your success.

Yes.

Oh my gosh.

Tell me why you're so amazing.

I'd be happy to, right? I mean, so when someone, this is one of my wife's, you know, just qualities. She loves asking deliberate questions. She's very curious about human beings. Well, guess what? People just flock. Yeah, because she's just, there's a magnetism, just like, you know, there was a magnetism with you when you do that, you know? So curiosity and it's a genuine curiosity. It's not one with malicious intent.

Strategic.

It's a strategic curiosity. Yeah, that's right.

So there is some power in being narcissistic for periods of time, for moments. But you want to be checking yourself most of the time.

Yeah, it's a driver. I would say.

A driver to help you achieve something.

Sure. Yeah. Because again, how are you going to set and achieve audacious goals? unless there's a little bit of narcissism in there to think that, you know, I can, you know?

And what would you say is the difference between, you mentioned this task switching versus multitasking?

Yes. Well, multitasking neurologically is a myth. Because what happens is our forebrain, our conscious mind, can't really focus on anything more than one thing. Again, guys like you, would say that, hey, the brain does, there's a little facet of being able to pay attention to something else, maybe one other thing. But focus is really one thing. Now, people are like, what are we talking about? I can do something and I can listen to music, or I can do something and I can walk and drive. It doesn't count when the activity is being conducted unconsciously. So, when we're driving a car, a lot of that activity, that skill is being conducted unconsciously. Is that crazy? Yeah. But just think about it, if you're listening to a podcast, if I'm listening to you in my car, I listen to podcasts while I'm driving usually. If I'm listening to you in my car and I'm driving on the highway, I'm really engaged in what you and the guests are talking about until someone cuts me off and I have to slam on the brakes, right? And then I recover and I realize I just missed the last 30 seconds of what you both just said on the podcast because my brain switched. So task switching is the hopping between contexts of your brain. So we do this all the time. We do it automatically. So you can switch you can switch contexts in, or you can switch tasks inside of a context, right? So driving, for example, the context of driving inside of that we're switching all the time. One moment we're focused on the steering wheel, then the accelerator, then the brake, and now here the blinkers, hopefully not our phone, right? But we're doing that constantly. As soon as we park that car and we walk out into the parking lot, we've switched contexts, right? Now we're in parking lot context, okay? And now we're paying attention to other things, you know, cars that might hit us, and then we walk into the supermarket and we switched context again. So task switching is the hopping between and we just have to recognize that that's an energy expenditure every time our brain does it. It's very natural.

Every time it switches.

Every time it switches.

Costs energy.

Yes, now those who find task switching more difficult are those, this could be advantageous because there are those people who they get into something with deep focus and they find it very difficult to pull out. So this is the person who who's working on a project and everything else in their world could be burning down and they don't even notice. They're deeply focused. The other side of that is, what could probably be like ADHD, where you're constantly switching, you're never able to focus enough. You're like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. The balance there is are you able to focus in on something, maintain an awareness of other things that are going on, such that when priorities shift, you can switch, okay? And that can be practiced. And I practice this, you know, when I'm in the city, you know, at least pre-pandemic, you know, riding the subways in New York, I love that because it's an enormous mental acuity drill for me. So can you do that? The thing that we are guilty of most of us is that we task switch unnecessarily throughout the day.

Check the phone, check the phone.

It's largely because of our phones. Right? Because our phone is, you know what that is? It's a collection of contexts, right? It's that game, it's the Instagram, it's the email, it's the text.

It's like a different world in every app. Every app is a context, right?

And what does that do to our brains when we're constantly switching contexts? It uses a tremendous amount of energy, you know? And what it does is it shifts focus, right? So if I'm focused on a conversation with you and my text goes off and I choose to address it, right? I've completely shifted context. Neurologically, it's like going from a library to a soccer stadium, right? I mean, you're just, you're shifting context. I'm attending to that, and then now I'm trying to shift back. It's so hard. And they've done studies on that. A lot of times it takes 15 to 20 minutes to fully reengage. And the, the, the other thing about this is even, we could decide, like.

You and I said, let's keep our phones upside down.

Okay. Even if it bings or vibrates, right?

It's the idea of hearing it or seeing it is, is, is shifting a switch in our brain. Right. Because it's, because we're, even if we.

Don'T act on it, even if we don't act on it, it's still a stimulus that we to think about. Because we recognize it.

I wonder if I need to get that.

And I wonder. Yeah, and as a decision, right? It's like, okay, okay, I said vibrating, but I'm not gonna get it. I just hopped contexts, right? So we do this quite often and it takes a lot of energy, you know, and I think we can practice some of these mental acuity attributes by putting away those phones, noticing what's in our world, that situational awareness, starting to work with, okay, what do I want to focus on? how do I prioritize all this information, what do I want to focus on? And then as I'm focused on it, can I switch effectively in that and then learning from my lessons as I go?

How do you develop confidence within yourself personally and what have you seen that's worked within Navy SEALs on when they might doubt themselves in moments of uncertainty or fear or stress and there's a moment of doubt, how do we build up self-belief, self-confidence, self-worth so that when challenges arise, we don't doubt ourselves.

Yeah. So the processes and tools that so Huber and I are working on are meant to help articulate this better. But I'm going to give you kind of an overview. And that is confidence for me is the ability to handle uncertainty. And so I consider myself very confident because I've I've come from a lifestyle where we are quite literally masters of uncertainty. We've trained ourselves to deal with uncertainty very effectively. And I think if we can walk around the world and say, hey, regardless of what happens, I know I'm at least equipped to be able to handle it to a degree. Okay, I won't fall apart. I can manage it. It might be ugly, it might be painful, but I can manage it. That's confidence. The way we can practice that is to practice taking control of what we can control. It's actually, it's, well, it's taking control of the two things, the internal, the anxiety. Can we manage our physiology through our breathing, through our vision, you know, some of those tools? And then can we manage the external uncertainty through controlling what we can control? This idea of controlling what we can control is huge because what it does is it allows you to take action and take control of some sort and control an action builds confidence, right?

Right.

And it could be very small. It could be like, well, let me.

Give you an example.

Internal control and external control.

Internal control and external control.

I mean, so an example from SEAL training would be, you're running on the beach for hours and hours with these boats on your head, and you're doing, and especially Hell Week, you're just miserable. Miserable. Okay. And I remember being in running with, you know, it was, I can't remember what night of Hell Week it was, but it was middle of the night sometime, you know, and I had the boat on our we had the boats on our head and we were running. I was like, oh, I can't, it seemed like it had been going on forever, you know? And I said to myself, how long is this gonna last? And so immediately I said, you know what? I'm just gonna focus on the end of that berm, 'cause you're running on the beach and there's no berm. I'm gonna focus on the end of the berm, right? And so what did I do immediately? Without thinking about it, I immediately took control of what I could control, right? I said, end of berm, and that's where I moved to, you know? Then as soon as that happens, I actually, that was a reward, that's a dopamine reward that I just gave myself and I did it again. You know, so let's take it all to a situation we can all relate to, COVID and 2020.

When is this gonna end?

Think about when we first all got locked down. I mean, none of us in those first few moments had skills that we could lean upon. This is where attributes start to come for the fore.

Did you have the skills?

No, because we'd never been in the situation, right? And I would say, There's some caveats there because I might have developed skills in terms of how to deal with uncertainty, right? But it's really, I developed the ability to lean on my attributes and say, okay, what do we know? Let's solve the problem. Here's what we don't know. I can't worry about what I don't know, what I can't control. What do I know and what can I move towards? Okay, I know I have enough toilet paper. I know the family's healthy. I know we're okay.

We have internet, so the kids can.

Go to school right now.

We can get outside and walk around.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

We got a backyard. We can have a party.

Yeah, so we all actually practiced this in 2020. We all practiced to some degree, what about this? Do I understand? And what can I control? And at first there was very little. And for those who got too steeped in the news, they found it much more difficult because the news was Really all they were doing was reporting uncertainty. You know, you turn on the news and it was all about what we don't know.

Uncertainty, chaos.

That's right, and so my wife and I actually took a news diet. You know, we said, we're not watching this, you know, we're just gonna smart.

I never watch the news.

Yeah, it helps because that's, I mean.

Imagine, I think I was talking with Huberman last time, imagine watching a train crash actually hit into a car of people every 10 minutes in real life.

Yeah.

It'd be traumatic.

Yeah.

It's almost like we're doing that by watching TV of showing the worst moments of something over and over on repeat.

Right.

And I believe our brains are really being affected by that.

Yeah.

And watching more of it is not gonna help us.

It's not. And so, and we can't, in some cases, we could certainly blame the news organizations.

Right.

But they are simply putting forth a model that works.

They're getting more attention, they're making more money.

We are neurologically and evolutionarily designed to pay attention to threats. That's what we do, because we are designed to say, okay, what might harm me? And so that's why if we walk by the newsstand and we see two newspapers next to each other and one says, Genius eight-year-old wins world spelling bee, which is kind of a cool story, and the next to it says, dangerous weather storm approaching. We were going to focus on the weather storm, because we're designed to do that. This is biological. When we were in the caveman days, we had to pay attention to threats. So this is why bad news sells, right? So the threats, the fear is like, okay, how can I protect myself? The problem is when there are actually no answers, and all it is is just threats, which is really when the 24-hour news cycle, there aren't solutions coming that fast. So it's now incumbent on us to take a diet, you know, and hopefully if enough of us diet from the news like that, maybe the news will change.

Exactly. So it's the practicing taking control of our internal, which would be our breathing or our thoughts or what's inside of us, and then also controlling the external, turning off the news, going for a walk, what other external things can we be doing to build certainty in uncertainty.

Just asking yourself the question because it's going to be subjective. What can I control in this moment? And move towards that. It might be at that moment taking a walk, it might be turning off the news, it might be reading a book, it might be having some family time, whatever that might be. In a worst case, in a crisis scenario, this is exactly what kind of triaging is. In a triage situation where you're dealing with a bunch of you know, injuries, right? You're saying, hey, what do I need.

To focus on first?

What do you mean a treehouse situation? So in a treehouse situation, when you have mass casualty situation, so a lot of injuries, right? What happens is-- During a mission. Well, or first responders, right? In an accident, right? They will look at the casualty, let's say it's four or five people, and they will immediately start to prioritize who the most threatening injuries are, and they.

Will deal with them first, right?

So it's like, okay, I cut my leg, but this person's got-- this person has a cut, but It's gonna be fine, right? This person's arm is off and if we don't do something, they will bleed out. This person's neck is, you know, is severing. Severing, yeah. And it's bad, but as long as we don't move them right now, we're gonna be okay. So let's do this first, right? And then we'll move to the neck and then we'll move to... So this is called triage again. So we just need to mentally triage our situation a little bit better. Prioritize. Triage is a little bit more of a graphic word, so I'd rather say prioritize, but say, you know, what can I control? What in this moment can I control? And it might not be a lot. Again, you talk about the, I mentioned the person working through cancer. Anybody who you talk to who's gone through cancer treatment and chemotherapy will say, you know what? During those days of chemotherapy, I was going minute by minute, man. That was all I was doing. I was like, go through the minute by minute and then just get through the day and then get through tomorrow. That person was controlling what they could do. They were just chunking their environment in order to step through. and sometimes that's all it takes, you know, but that person took control, you know, those people who survived.

What would you say are the next steps to building belief and confidence in yourself after you've taken control of the internal, the external? What would you say is next?

I would say set goals and accomplish them. There's nothing that builds more confidence, I think, than setting a goal and making it happen. And that can be anything, you know, and it can be as, it can be. Well, It can be as small or as large as you want. It has to be meaningful to you. So if it is running around the block, that's great. Or if it is running the marathon, that's great. Or it could be doing the triathlon or whatever if we're in the physical sense. It could be right in the book. It could be getting the promotion. It could be changing jobs. Whatever it is, pick some goals, set your intent, and move towards it.

Yeah, I've always, I think that's super smart as an athlete. I've always had goals for every season of life and every season of sports. And as I stopped playing sports when I was 24 and was trying to figure out the rest of my life after the dreams were over of sports days, I realized I didn't have the same confidence. I had to get confidence from like what I'd done. And I was like, okay, I have achieved goals and I was a confident athlete, but now I'm trying something completely new.

Yeah.

And this is unknown. It's kind of scary. And I remember just thinking to myself, I'm living in a lot of fear and I need to go all in on these fears until they disappear. Otherwise I'll constantly be kind of masking confidence or living off of a constant confidence of the past and trying to apply it to something unknown. It's gonna be very inauthentic. And so that's when I was like, okay, I created a list of my biggest fears and I started doing them one at a time until I was at least comfortable with the fear until I mastered the fear, until I was like, okay, I can do this at any time without being prepared because I've already gone through it. And for me, that was something that was really powerful. And every year, I'm always thinking, how can I gain more confidence and humility by... You gain humility by doing hard things because you suck at them.

Right?

It's like, I'm doing Spanish right now, Spanish lessons, and it is challenging. I hate not being great at something within the first day, right? It's like, I want to be the best.

Don't fail.

I want it to be like, be able to master it and pick it up, but it's humbling me, like in one area while other areas are growing and thriving. So it's allowing me to keep that.

Balance of-- I don't know. So that's-- you- bring up a really great point where I think it has to be hyper emphasized, and that is the ability and the deliberacy of jumping out of the context that you're comfortable in. So you built up confidence inside the sporting context. As soon as the sporting context was out of there, you realize, oh wait a second, I'm not as confident as I thought. So to practice confidence, you have to deliberately continuously throw yourself into unknown, uncertain environments. In other words, you can practice it a little bit in the physical realm, but stand by because you're only going to gain confidence in the physical realm. So you need to say, okay, what's my next thing?

What do I fear? Maybe it's something.

Yeah, so it's like if I'm a CrossFit expert and I try to the.

Spartan race, it's very similar.

It's very similar. You start to build up, and this is what I call stress inoculation. You can actually stress inoculate because you are building up the tools and the means with which you know how to move through that specific challenge. So, I did this with my- what's stress inoculation? So, stress inoculation is the ability to inoculate yourself against the fear and stress of of a context.

What's inoculation mean?

You're basically building up an immunity to it. You're being immune to the stress.

Right, it's not happening anymore, right?

It's going away, right? So I'll give an example, because I don't like heights, I never did. So skydiving was always a challenge for me. When I... Did you have to do.

A lot of skydiving?

Yeah, a lot of it. A lot of it. So yeah. But like those trips, sometimes you do trips and you do like in a week you do like 50 or 60 jumps, right? No way. And by Tuesday or Wednesday, we've had like 10 or 12 or 15 jumps on our belt, and I feel like, okay, I'm good. I'm not really scared anymore. But I would do this, there's an obstacle course at every SEAL base, and you have a series of obstacles. One of the most popular ones, because it's almost on every obstacle course, is a cargo net. So it's about a 65-foot net. Really simple. You climb up one side, you throw your leg over at the top, and you climb down. Okay. But it's really high. I mean, and if you don't like heights, that leg hop over is actually-- Are you wearing a rope?

No.

No, it's all-- 65 feet up? Yeah.

So if you fell over, you're in sand.

Oh yeah, you're done. Yeah, or you're definitely injured, right? Really? Wow. So what I do, though, is every time I go for a run, I plan my run to go past that cargo net, and I climb up it. And when I got to the top, I'd sit on the top of it. and I just breathe in the fear. Wow. I just feel it. Okay? And then I go down the other side. And every time I did that, I felt great because what's happening is that you're getting a dopamine hit by stepping into that fear, right? And this is neurologically backed, right? So you're getting a reward. But what, you know, I do that every day and after, you know, a week or two of doing that, I'd get to the top of that net and I no longer felt afraid. You know, I was used to it, right? I no longer felt afraid and I no longer was getting that dopamine hit. So it didn't feel as good anymore.

But I was- You have to go.

Twice as high the next time to feel the same. Well, I don't have a net twice as high. But it's an example of inoculating yourself.

In a context, right? So- so something that makes you have fear, you do it over and over again until the fear goes away or until it minimizes a lot. Maybe you have a little bit of queasiness for a second, but you feel comfortable. But then you're not afraid anymore to do it. Yeah.

So you're not getting rewarded anymore, is that what you're hearing? Well, so yeah, so a good friend of mine once said, because he knew I was into the stress inoculation stuff, he's like, you know, I have this fear of flying at night. I just, it was one, I was on an airplane one time, there was an emergency, nothing happened, but now I just, it's just hard for me to fly at night.

I mean, how can I get over.

My fear of flying at night? Fly at night every time. Start flying more at night.

He's like, oh, I knew you said that.

It's true though.

It's the only way to overcome your fear is to go all in on it.

Can you think your way out of something that's scary?

You have to inoculate yourself, yes. You can't think your way out of something that's scary.

You have to be experiencing. You can think your way out of it when you're experiencing it. But you can't, I mean, I guess.

You can't be afraid of heights. I mean, they can do that.

And say, I'm not afraid of heights anymore. No, it'd be an interesting experiment to give to the neuroscientists. Visualization is a powerful tool, right? if you, in virtual reality, so if you're able to simulate enough of that threat, right, then perhaps you could do it without actually getting up high.

Interesting.

But I don't know, there's not questions for you on that.

That's challenging though. So, what I'm hearing you say is that when you're afraid of something, you need to create an environment of stress inoculation in order to overcome that fear or to be able to embrace that fear without it crippling you. Yeah, yeah.

This is what I do with public speaking. You know, as soon as I got out and I started public speaking, I was nervous every time, and I didn't like it. And I just started doing it. I kept doing it. And I was doing it everywhere. I was doing it for free. I was doing it everywhere, as much.

As I could, just to practice doing it and stepping into that fear. So you were afraid of heights, you conquered the 65-foot net, and then it.

Started to not be scary anymore.

So what do you do next?

Well, it depends on what direction you want to go, you know? And again, the 65-foot net is only in that context, right? The 120-foot roller coaster still... Scary, yeah, yeah, it's scary.

Going up there, you know?

And even skydiving, if you do... I haven't jumped out of an airplane in several years now, so I know if I do it again, which I plan to, because my son's want to try it, my wife wants to do it, I'll be nervous again. Really? So I'll have to step through it again. Yeah, because again, it's not, you know, If, you know, it's just some of us are just, you know, we just naturally don't like certain things, right? You know, put me underwater in pitch black with sea life teeming around me and I could fall asleep. Really? Oh my god. What? I'm as comfortable, I mean, I, Are you always that way? Oh yeah, I mean the water is, I mean, I love it.

Wow.

In the dark? In the dark, in the night, I, that would terrify me. Without even seeing, if I can't even.

See my hand in front of my face, I'm still okay. So you would go in the ocean? right now in Santa Monica at midnight.

Yeah.

And swim around and feel comfortable.

Willingly.

Without a mask or without oxygen or without a. Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. And just swim around.

Yeah.

You'd be like, I just trust there's.

No shark or eels or fish. Yeah, just for me, it's, you know, for me, it's comfortable. Yeah. You know, heights or not. That's crazy. But again, so it's subjective.

Right.

I mean, so, so, you know, some people, like a bunch of my friends, they love, I mean, every aspect of skydiving. you know, and you know, and some guys don't even like diving. Someone's like, I just dive because I have to do it, right? So it's really, I mean, I think the, one of the things I always loved about the community that I was in was that it was a bunch of guys who regularly tested themselves and they never let their, their fear detract from what they, from the job they needed to do and what they needed to do to support their teammates, right? If someone was afraid of jumping or didn't like jumping, I'm still gonna jump because everybody else is jumping, that's part of the job. I'm not gonna cry about it, I'm gonna do it. If I don't like diving, I'm gonna do it, right? That's just the way it is. And that practice allows and allowed us to go into some of the worst areas in the world in combat and not feel trepidation.

It's probably also nice to, like doing a fear on your own is probably way scarier than if you have a team of people that are doing it with you, wouldn't you say?

So yeah, so you get into, so in the book I talk about some attributes that I call the others. And I call them the others because on most of the attributes, to have more of each one is probably better. It's probably more effective in optimal performance other than say narcissism. The others are ones that as I thought about that the logic wasn't lining up the same way. So two of them were patients and inpatients. And what I realized was optimal performance and high performers, like super performers, some are very patient and some are inpatient. It didn't matter, right? So just because you're impatient doesn't mean you're not going to be a great performer. I happen to be patient. My wife happens to be impatient, right? It doesn't dictate whether or not you succeed as much as say not being adaptable, right? So I labeled that in the category. The other one was competitiveness and non-competitiveness, right? There are some hyper successful people who are very, very competitive. In fact, a lot of the A lot of the genre of performance and things like that really tout competitiveness as an attribute. But I've never been competitive. I can't stand it. I played lacrosse in high school. I liked lacrosse, I liked the game, I liked the stick work. If we won or lost, I was like, okay, you never really- Just having fun. Just having fun, right? And what I realized was that, first of all, happily, the Navy SEALs, they They neither touted or rejected that competitiveness. It wasn't like they-- Do this to win. Yeah, they actually honored both sides, both polarities. And you can tell because there's two awards you get. There's two awards that are given at the end of a SEAL training class. One is the Honor Man. The Honor Man is given to the person who has the highest scores in all of the swims, the runs, the obstacle course times, all those-- the competitive person. The competitive person, right? The other award is called the Honor Man. Okay, one's called the Honor Man and the other one's called the Fire in the Gut. Okay, Fire in the Gut is the award that's given to the person who's shown the most grit and kind of gumshoe.

Fire in the Gut.

Fire in the Gut award and usually that person has the lowest scores, right? And that can't be won, it has to be earned and it's voted upon.

Like the class votes on that. Wow.

Who has more respect? Well, it doesn't matter because the Honor Man has a lot of respect too because that guy really put out, right? So both awards hold the same same level of respect, which shows that both the competitive gene and the non-competitive gene are both highly... That's pretty interesting. But if you think about it, the dichotomy is actually quite beautiful because if you are in a team, most environments need both types of mindsets. The competitive mind looks at a situation and immediately begins to apply rules and boundaries and says, okay, how can I win inside of what I see? that is very, very powerful. The non-competitive mind, like myself, I said, what's going on over here? How can we go maybe do something different? What's a way we can go around? So some missions required going straight up the line. You needed the competitive mindset to do that. Some missions didn't require that. If we want to start the line, it would be disastrous. Some missions require, no, no, we need to think about it differently. We need to think about what's the pack doing and what can we do that's not in the pack? So, those are the two polarities. Long answer to the question you asked, the last one I talk about is the fear of rejection versus kind of insoucience to what people think. The fear of rejection is a powerful attribute, as long as it's not too much, right? Because it can be leading to peer pressure and all that stuff. But oftentimes, those of us with a little bit more of a fear of rejection will do things that we otherwise wouldn't do because the group is doing it. I jumped out of airplanes because my buddies were jumping out of airplanes. There was no way that I was not going to jump out of the airplane. There was no way because I needed to be with them. So the fear of rejection can be effectively used and be very powerful if balanced. You don't want to be pressured to do things that are unsafe, but it can be very effective because it'll cause that person who's generally not a traveler. to go with their friends and travel, try new things, explore different avenues, right? Because they don't want to be left out, okay? There's nothing wrong with that. Meanwhile, you have the person who doesn't care what anybody thinks, has no, I mean, no bearing whatsoever. I don't give a flying, you know what, what people think, right? That person is important too because that's where most of the iconoclasts come from. You know, they're like, I don't care. You know, I'm just gonna do this. You do what I want to do. And in fact, those people are pretty magnetic. You could see those people because they're just off doing their own thing. Other people are like, Hey, what's that person doing? Right?

Yeah. You know? And so both polarities can actually be powerful. It's interesting. When I've been talking to a lot of people, a lot of people are afraid of failing. A lot of people don't do something because they're afraid of failing. And I see a lot of people say that they're actually afraid of success. And what the pressure that comes with success, losing friends and family because you're higher than or whatever. and them trying to pull you back down into their circle of comfort. So the fear of failure, the fear of success, but then also the third thing is kind of the fear of being judged by other people by taking action. What's the difference between judgment and fear of rejection?

Fear of rejection is internally processed. It's what I think you are thinking about me. judgment is what I'm thinking about you, right? And so all of, so everything, even judgment, so we don't know if someone's, I mean unless someone says explicitly, I am judging you.

Yeah, or someone's critiquing you.

Critiquing you.

Then it's a judgment.

In a way, well, and it might be a healthy critique, by the way, but it's all about how you process that. And so fear of rejection is really about, more the internal processing and what I am feeling about what they're feeling, right? Whereas judgment is either what they're saying or what I think they're saying. And I think, I don't know, why.

Do you think a lot of people are afraid of being judged by others for calling out?

Well, because they don't want to be rejected. Because that's why they're connected in that way, because if someone feels like they're being judged, negatively, they feel like they're being actively excluded from the group.

They're not accepted.

They're not accepted.

And that's scary if we're not and.

Have close ties or certain-- We're a tribal species, right?

So how do we use the fear of rejection or the fear of being judged in our favor when we say, I'm gonna go after this career, I'm gonna launch this book, I'm gonna go be a pro athlete. Well, I would say, People say, well, you're not going to do it or...

Yeah, I think it's real simple. The fear of rejection is used effectively if it's proactively moving towards our goals. It's being used ineffectively if it's detracting from our goals. If we feel stuck and say, I'm not going to do this because I don't want to be rejected. If I'm doing this because I'm scared of what people will think, then that's my fear of rejection being used negatively. I'm allowing that to be used negatively. If I'm saying, you know what, I am going to go on that that roller coaster with my friends, even though it scares the crap out of me, because I want to try something new and they're gonna go. That's proactive, you know? So it's really about our own movement, you know? If that feeling in ourselves is causing us to recede for silly reasons, right? You know, not safety reasons.

How do we overcome that fear then, you think, of rejection and judgment? How do we self-impose movement forward as opposed to Pulling back on our dreams.

The way I do it is I try to remember that everything that I think they're thinking is what I think only. I have no clue. I mean, we don't have any clue what people are thinking. We really don't. So why try?

And the one you said who doesn't care what anyone thinks.

Automatic.

People are like drawn to them and they're... Yeah.

Now there are certain social norms, right? That we have to, if we want to interact effectively with our environment, we want to make sure we care what people think. You know, we want to shower and we want to you know, you know, be kind, be kind and not be, you know, an ass, you know, but, but other than that, you know, we don't know what people are thinking, nor really should we care unless it's going to socially impede us in a way that detracts.

Why do you think so many people obsess over the few critical comments they get versus the abundance of positive comments when they put something online or a post or a book or a piece of art. Why do you think it's in our nature to obsess over the criticism as opposed to obsess over the praise?

Well, probably because we focus on our weaknesses because we think it's going to exclude us. We think our weaknesses might exclude us. But I think there's a, again, the inoculation against this one is kind of a neurological one. It's what I talk about in some of the facets of what I speak. I actually mentioned in the book, too, this idea of asking better questions. We are as human beings wired to make sense of our environment by asking questions. You know, that's what we do unconsciously all the time. Our brain is asking questions about what's going on. Oftentimes bouncing that off of previous things we have stored in our hippocampus and saying, okay, I recognize that that's a cup, that's a camera, that's a wall. That's hot, that's cold. That's right. But we can do this consciously. So whenever we consciously lodge a question into our forebrain, our brain immediately begins to come up with answers. So I do this experiment with people in classes I teach and I say, okay, just take a moment. I'll give you 30 seconds to answer this question. How could I double my income in the next 30 days? All right? I'm gonna give you 30 seconds. Anything that pops into your head, write down on a piece of paper. So I start writing down, okay? Give them 30 seconds, okay? They generate a little list. And I say, okay, I don't care what the answers are. I don't care how ridiculous the answers are. How many answers did you come up with? And usually I get answers like, I don't know, 5, 4, 3, sometimes 8, 7 or 8. The reason why that happens, because they lodged a question to their forebrain, okay? Whatever question we lodged into our forebrain, our brains will begin to answer. Now, oftentimes we do this the wrong way. We say, why am I so bad at this? Why does this stuff always happen to me? You know, why are these people out to get me? Our brains begin to answer that question, you know? And some of those answers are as ridiculous as the answers that someone writes down in doubling their income, okay? But our brains will answer them. But if we shift that question, that context, and we ask ourselves better questions and we flip it and we say, what are some of the things I'm great at? What are some of the things I can learn? What are the mistakes I can learn from and how can I get better later? How can I more effectively be part of this group of people or how can I help this person? Our brains will answer that one too. So this is a, I think there's a really powerful concept. I learned this when I was in high school. and I began to use it and it's drastically changed the quality of my life. And I would submit to you just through experience this, I would say that the quality of our lives are directly proportional to the quality of questions we ask ourselves on a consistent basis. If we ask ourselves consistently negative questions, our quality of life is probably going to suffer. In fact, I would guarantee it is, versus if we ask ourselves better questions. And so, and we do this all the time.

What are the better questions we should.

Be asking Well, I mean, again, this becomes so subjective. I mean, so the first question is what's the better question? You know, and then funny because my wife and I, you know, during this pandemic, we, we, you know, we have a German Shepherd, so we just take walks around the neighborhood with the dog. Because it was a way for us to release and just be together and the dog got exercise. We were at this point and as most people were at many points and the kids were having trouble in school. We were just in a, we were just upset. We were all upset. and we were kind of lamenting this. And we did, we do two laps around our neighborhood. That's usually standard. And we had done one lap and we had, the first lap had been largely lamenting on this, the negativity. And at one point we're both like, you know what? Let's stop here. What's the better question right now? And we literally began to start thinking about what the better question is. And it took us a while, but we came up with a better question. And that question led us down a pathway of getting out the funk we were in and actually moving forward. So I think without being able to tell you what that exact question is, the first question you should ask is what's the better question here when you find yourself in that situation?

Yeah, that's important. We were talking about this beforehand a little bit about the law of attraction. And you mentioned you have an interesting story about the law of attraction and that you believe in the law of attraction for yourself and that it's worked for your life. What is your relationship with the law of attraction?

So when I was in High school, my mom gave me a book called the Key to Yourself. It was by Vennece Bloodworth. And I still have a couple copies of this book. It was written in the 50s. And this book was all about the law of attraction. She basically was talking about it. There was a religious tone to it. So there was a religious slant to it as well. But ultimately it was about this idea that if you intend and if you set your mind frame and if you think positively and all this stuff, you will start heading down. You reap what you sow, basically. And I began to get fascinated with this stuff. I really began to go, I wouldn't say obsessed because that's a strong word, but I started reading books on positive thinking, psychology, things like that, everything I could get my hands on. And began to really try to implement this. I tried to do visualization and start to really think. And it started working. you know, and one of the first things that kind of I was able to quote manifest was, you know, my brother and I always wanted a Jeep, you know, as a car when we were in high school. And so we just began to visualize a Jeep and, you know, senior year we got a Jeep in 84, 1984 Jeep CJ7. And I still have that car today. It's parked at the airport right now. I still have that car because it's a very first thing. And it just, every time I had a goal, I would basically set my intent and move towards it. I'm not here to either prove or promote the efficacy of metaphysics, right? But I do think, so you are as interested in the neuroscience behind this as I am, and I don't know if we've figured that out yet. I know it works. One of the things that I, one of the aspects that I think, one of the reasons why I think it works is because of this idea of just attention in general, right? and I talk about this in the situation awareness chapter. We have about 11 million bits of information coming into our systems at every second, right, from all of our five senses. And the thing is we do massive amount of de-selection. There's things happening to us that we don't know, like, you know, the bottom of your shoes, right? You just started noticing that because I told you about it, right? But this is happening constantly. So we are inputting 11 million bits. Our frontal lobe is only processing about 2500 or so. from what I understand. So when we actively lodge something into our frontal lobe. Intentionally saying this is something I'm going to remember.

Hey, out of that 11 million bits, I want you to notice everything.

Everything on this. I want you to notice everything that has to do with this. Okay, so we all of us have had this experience. Anytime we buy a car or we want a car, okay, suddenly we see that car everywhere. Everywhere. And it's not because that car suddenly upped in sales and it's on the streets more. It's because we lodged that into our frontal lobe and now we're noticing it. It was always there, right? And so I think part of the neurological reason why the law of attraction works is because we are, when you set an intent, especially when you write down a goal, I think I'm a big believer in writing it down. You set an intent, you write down a goal. You are literally lodging into your frontal lobe an intent to say anything that happens in that 11 million bits per second that has anything to do with this or accomplishing this, I want to notice. And so we start to notice things. And it seems like things are just happening magically. But what's really happening is we're noticing things that we're noticing opportunities, we're noticing conversations, we're noticing people that we have. Serendipity is actually explained. So I think there's, that admittedly is maybe a small facet of the neurological reason why I think it works. But I'm a believer in it, especially by setting intent, writing down goals, and moving forward.

Was there anything that happened while you were a Navy SEAL that you used a law of attraction for that happened?

I mean, even training, you know, I remember just in training, I was constantly saying to myself, hey, I'm supposed to be here. I see myself as a Navy SEAL. I see myself as this. This is what I'm supposed to be. You know, I go to the extent of saying I am a Navy SEAL, I'd say it to myself, you know, but-- Internally. Internally, yeah.

But I think that's, yeah, so, yeah, I used it constantly, you know. What's the greatest mantra you used when you were under the most stress or fear or uncertainty or sketchy situations that a civilian could use today when they're facing stress? What's the mantra you said to yourself?

What can I control? What is it going to control right now? Because you're taking control. You're taking yourself out of an uncontrollable, a seemingly uncontrollable situation, and you're grasping the steering wheel, and you're grasping the, you're putting your foot on the brake or the accelerator, and you're saying, I have control over this, at least this small part. That's right. That's my, that is my, if there's something I do the most, and now probably unconsciously, is I'm always saying, what kind of control right now? Especially if the situation begins to deteriorate.

You know, that's what I do. Did they teach you guys about mantras or self-talk?

No.

Or focusing on the next step as.

Opposed to the end result? No. Nothing implicit, excuse me, nothing explicit. It was probably implicit in just the, but this is where challenge and struggle, this is where these environments, especially physical ones, can teach us so much about ourselves. And most of us can think of a situation in our lives where we can say to ourselves, you know what? That was horrible. I'd never want to relive that. But I'm glad it happened.

Isn't that interesting?

'Cause this is what I learned, this is who I met, this is what I became. This is what I became. And so just take those, so I would offer, take those experiences and start deconstructing them. Do some autopsy on that, because there's lessons in there. There are things that you did probably unconsciously that walked you through that, that you can take and you can extrapolate and say, Hey, I can do the same thing next time or now, because I've done it before, I can do it again. you know. Right, yeah.

And going through adversity builds confidence and getting out the other side and being alive and thriving builds confidence. And it's growth.

I mean, that's the key to growth. I mean, this is what we, we all know this in the gym, right? You go in, you lift weights, you tear muscles. You are tearing the muscles, you rip your muscles apart, okay? That's what you're doing. And then you rest and the muscles grow and they become smaller.

So you cannot grow muscle unless you rip them first.

This is the, unless you apply pressure. Yeah, yeah. So that is growth, you know? And that's why it's important, I think, just in anybody's pathway or their evolution to continually test themselves. And I'm not, I mean, some people are like, hey, I'm fine where I am. I respect that. In fact, in some cases, I'm envious of it. It's hard for me to say that because I'm always like, okay, I always say to myself, I'm someone who's always extraordinarily grateful, but never satisfied. 'Cause I think you could be both, you know. I'm so grateful for where I am, everything I've done. But I'm always kind of saying, okay, what's next? You know, what's next? There are some people who are like, hey, I'm good with where I am. There's nothing wrong with that. But active growth for me has been to actively walk to my edges and then look at the next one.

I wanted to ask you about this. One of the attributes is cunning. And you talk about the princess and the dragon. I was curious, what does that actually mean to be cunning? And what is this story about the princess and the dragon?

Yeah, I relate it to the Navy SEALs in terms of one of the most predominant traits in Navy SEALs is the cunning. So cunning is the ability to really think outside the box, if I were to put it very simply, is to understand that in any problem, so any problem has two conditions or two elements, right? Element one is that there's a solution. There's some sort of outcome that needs to happen. The other element is that it has variables or conditions that in some ways outline the problem. Because if you have one without the other, you don't have a problem, right? If you're given a group, a set of materials, of clay molding materials and say, hey, build something, then okay, that's good. If I say, okay, make a bust of Beethoven, But I didn't give you no materials. I said, okay, I'm just gonna make a bust. If I give you a bunch of materials, I could be like scissors and noodles and things like that. It's like, now make a bust of Beethoven, now you have a problem. Okay? Because you have an outcome that you have to achieve and you have a set of variables.

Right?

Cunning is the ability to look beyond those variables and shake off what's called functional fixedness. And this is this idea that when you see something, you immediately begin to imply biases and imply rules that are surrounding this. So one of the examples I use is the nine-dot problem. I know you've heard this, but nine dots in a grid, and this was like the whole think outside the box in the '80s, right? Draw a line, draw four lines that connect without ever leaving the page in that, you know, that has to hit every dot, right? And most people couldn't do it until they realized that they had to go outside the box to do it, right? Think outside the box. So cunning is the ability to do that. The reason why I talk about the Princess of Dragons is I say, hey, listen, the way I describe this in the Seal Teams is this. If we were to think about a medieval kingdom, and there's a princess in a tower guarded by a dragon, and the king who wants to save the princess has sent his best knights to go slay the dragons to save this princess, and every night, night after night, has been burned to death by this dragon, right? Drop a special operator in there, whether it be a seal or a green beret or whatever. And the first question they say is, what's the mission? So they save the princess, and they say, well, who gives a crap about the dragon? Right?

I'm gonna find a way to get.

To the princess without going through the dragon. Don't slay the dragon. I don't need to slay the dragon. I need to save the princess, right? So the functional fixness is, I need to slay the dragon to save the princess. But what Cunning says is, what's the mission? Save the princess.

I don't need to-- Just get in the tower and bring it down. This is Shrek, right?

So that's why I call it the.

Princess and the, the Princess of the Dragon. Yeah.

Chapter.

So it's thinking outside of the, the functional elements that are available for you. Yeah. Thinking outside of that.

It's interesting.

What's the, what's the thing you feel like you need the most work on to improve to get to the next level with all your years of training?

Self-discipline yeah.

I'm constantly working on my self-discipline and there's a difference between discipline and self-discipline yeah.

So self-discipline again is Is not drinking beer at night.

Is not picking up the candy bar. It's not eating ice cream.

It's internal control. Again, I'm, I had, you know, most of us, most human beings can say, we don't like to be told what to do, okay? So most of us are guilty of not liking to be told what to do. Some of us are extreme about not being like-- Tell me what to do.

I'm gonna do the opposite.

Yeah, and some of us don't even like to be told by ourselves what to do, right? You know, that's kind of-- We're pell against ourselves. rebel against ourselves. So I think self-discipline is something I'll continue to work on. And empathy, I think we're, I think especially in today's world, empathy is something we all could do well with trying to gain more, develop more of.

With the time this comes out, 2020 will be behind us. What do you think could be a game plan for someone for moving forward in their life on how to gain control of what they can control, on how to set goals that are manageable, if they still feel overwhelmed and stressed, what would a Navy SEAL do after 2020 to have a more joyful, happy, fulfilled life?

Yeah, well, it's interesting how things happen and they become congruent with the time frame. You know, I wrote this book because I was interested in helping people understand their own engines. because like you, I'm also fascinated with how to better ourselves and all these tools and techniques. People are out there saying, Hey, do this, do that. But what I realized is much like any car engine, if you start slapping stuff onto a car engine and you don't understand the actual engine, you're going to break something or blow something up. So the key to self-improvement is to first know thyself. So the reason why I wanted to write this book was because the reader will help to understand themselves. What are they showing up to the game with? in terms of their own palette of attributes and where they stand. Couple things. So reading the book will help someone learn that and then they can start to look at 2020 and recognize that 2020 taught them a lot about their own attributes because we were all thrown into challenge, stress, and uncertainty. So with the context of the stuff you read in the book, you'll be able to look back in 2020 and say, oh, you know what? I can see actually I'm more adaptable than I thought. I'm less resilient than I actually want to be. I need to develop that. I need to be a little bit more disciplined or I need to be a little bit more open-minded. Or maybe because of the political landscape, I need to be more empathetic, who knows. So someone should be able to read the book and start to understand more about these internal hidden drivers. Look back at 2020 and index that. And then on the website, we have a free assessment tool. So you can actually take an assessment for both for Grit, for Mental Acuity, and for Drive. That's good. And you can see where you stand on these attributes. Now, it's going to be a snapshot as to where you stand, because it's really as compared to a survey set of about 1,000 people we got around the globe, data we got from. So it's kind of like, okay, as compared to these 1,000 people, here's where I stand on adaptability. So it's really, okay, it's a snapshot, and then you have to kind of say to yourself, in looking at the snapshot and looking at how I've dealt with 2020 and how I've dealt with other, environments, where do I think I stand? And then I'm also offering on the website there'll be some workbooks that you can get to help guide you in developing any attribute you want to develop. You can develop any attribute you want. It just has to be self-directed, has to be self-motivated. You can't learn it like you learn a skill. Because I can't, if you're naturally impatient, I can't sit down and teach you a class on patience. It doesn't work that way. I can teach you typing or shooting, which is a skill. I can't teach you patience. So you can't teach an attribute that way. you can develop an attribute, it has to be self-directed. So I've put together some guides on how to develop each attribute that you want to. Where do we go for the website? Theattributes.com, pretty simple.

Theattributes.com, and I only found you on LinkedIn. Is that true? Do you have social media?

No, I have LinkedIn, I have Instagram, I have Facebook, and the attributes has Facebook as well. So if you go to theattributes.com, all.

My stuff is up there, but I am on LinkedIn and Instagram as well.

What's your Instagram?

Rich Davini. Okay, cool. Yeah. Awesome. There you go. This is powerful, man. Theattributes.com and the book. Make sure you guys check this out. 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. I like the idea of optimal performance as opposed to peak performance. I think it's good to be able to get to peak performance in moments, but it's hard to sustain that, obviously. So getting an optimal performance would be great. I'm a big fan of Assessments and reflecting back, you know, as an athlete, we watch game films, so we would always get scored and assess how we did on every play. And the whole game, what was our performance? What was the skill you need to develop to get a higher score in the next game? So for me, it's important to look at and assess your life or assess the year of what worked, what didn't work, so you know where you want to move into. So I think it's really powerful. Go to theattributes.com for the assessment. And the book is out January 26th. January 26th. So you can either pre-order this before then or get it right now. A couple final questions for you. This is called the Three Truths. So I'd like you to imagine hypothetically it's your last day on earth. And you've accomplished every dream you have set out. Every mission, you've written more books, you've lived the exact life that you could imagine. But for whatever reason, you have to take all of your work with you. So your content, this interview, any interview you've done, any book, video, the assessments, they all go with you to the next place, wherever that is. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true, three lessons you would share with the world that if anyone wanted to understand who you are and the lessons that you would leave them, this is what they would have and that's it. What would you say are those lessons or those three truths?

Well, we'll see. Let me tell you what I probably tell my kids. Yes. The first is you are entitled to nothing. And I say that in a kind way. It's really more of a mindset versus a judgment. It's this idea that if you approach the world with a sense of doing the work to earn, you know, versus you show up and you're entitled to something, you are going to understand and be willing to do the hard stuff. You're not going to worry about getting your hands and feet muddy and dirty. You're going to be okay, you're going to be humble enough to go and do the hard stuff. So I think that's number one. Number two is that knowledge is not power. Knowledge is potential power. Because we can all know exactly what has to be done and what we need to do to do something, but unless we act, nothing happens. You know, you know, you and I can, you and I can have the perfect plan to, you know, bench 300 pounds at the end of the, you know, three months training cycle, whatever. It's gonna take us three months to bench whatever. If we don't do it, it's not gonna happen. So, so knowledge, just knowledge on its own is not power. You have to, you have to apply, you know, if you apply it. And the third one is, is the idea that first of all set goals, but divorce yourself from the pathway that you need to take to reach it. Yeah. Because you don't know what the best pathway is. You have to start moving towards that goal and then just figure it out as we go. So rock climbers could teach us a lot in this venue. because the rock climber that's climbing a face for the very first time, certainly the goal is the top, right? But that no rock climber is going to say, I'm going there, there, there, there the whole way up. That rock climber is going to start climbing and that rock climber is going to climb and find the knothole that he or she likes and move to that one. Sometimes, and this is tricky, okay? Sometimes the best knothole is going to be down, right? So sometimes you have to move away from your goal to actually get closer to it.

Wow.

To find the right knothole, right? So oftentimes people get, I think, tied up and discouraged because the pathway that they thought would lead them to the goal that they've written down or the one they're trying to achieve, it's not working out for them. It's like, this is not, well, sometimes it doesn't. If you stay steadfast, you'll get there and just understand the pathway. Don't dictate the pathway, dictate the outcome.

Those are good. I like those a lot. Again, the attributes. Make sure you guys get this. I want to acknowledge you, Rich, for constantly showing up after your service for the country. You're constantly showing up in service to share lessons for us to understand them in a way that works for us so that we can have practical tools and ideas to really move forward in our lives. So I really acknowledge you for using your service in 20 plus years to then say, how can I serve in a different way for human beings on self-improvement and optimal performance? So I appreciate and acknowledge your efforts, your work, and your constant desire to grow and learn to share this with all of us. I think this book is going to be helpful for a lot of people. Final question for you is, what's your definition of greatness?

Yes, what my definition of greatness. My definition of greatness is the ability to recognize the power of two words that I think actually are the most powerful words in the human language. And that those two words are I am. Because whatever we put after those two words is what we define ourselves as and the pathway we begin to move towards both consciously and unconsciously. And I think we have to be very, very careful about what we put after those two words because there's a power.

So.

So greatness is being able to understand that and use it.

My man, Rich, thank you, sir. My friend, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you found it powerful and inspiring, make sure to share this with a friend, lewishouse.com/1058. You can text people that link, you can post it on social media, or just copy and paste the link where you're listening to this podcast right now. Share with a friend, post it on your Instagram stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, all those places online. If this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button over on Apple podcast right now and leave us a rating and review. Every time a new person subscribes or people leave ratings and reviews, it allows us to reach more people in that ecosystem. So each time you do that, you're actually helping change more lives. So let's impact more people together and spread the message of greatness to the world. If you want inspirational messages from me, every single week, then make sure to text the word podcast right now to my number 614-350-3960 so you can get up-to-date messages to keep you inspired and motivated throughout the week. Also, if you are a successful entrepreneur already and you want a coach to take you to the next level, you want a mastermind group, you want a year-long experience to support you on getting clear and staying on track on your vision and your goals, check LouisHowes.com/mycoach right now. Check out the page and see if you think you're the right fit for this program. Again, check it out at LouisHowes.com/mycoach to see if you're the right fit and apply to Greatness Coaching. And I want to leave you with a quote from Ernest Hemingway who said, When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you Laylee, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you, and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.