6 Principles Every NAVY SEAL Uses To BECOME UNSTOPPABLE! | Lewis Howes

I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, Man, I'm still missing something.

I think that we all need to come to the realization that we're all made of the same stuff.

I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit.

Navy SEALs have learned to push their minds and bodies to the limit. Watch this video if you want to learn how to maximize your mental and physical performance. I look at my life as like, you know, and here you talk about like really diving into pain and like embracing pain and finding, looking for the pain. Right. And I think there's like a, there's a, there's a safe pain and then there's probably an unsafe pain of just like jumping off a building and you know, whatever and trying to land on 20 floors or something. It's probably not the safe way to do things, but doing 200 miles of endurance running is like a different way of pain, looking at pain. And that's what I've been looking for my whole life is like finding the pain and I talk about like do something every day that's painful in a good structured environment. You've been doing that for the last couple of years now. It's like you work out every day, you haven't missed a day.

I've been doing it for the last 20 years.

20 years? Or they say two years.

No, 20 some years of my life.

Every day you work out.

So I used to take one day off a week. I used to take one day off a week.

For the body to recover, right? Makes sense.

But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours. Wow. But at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate, and I replaced the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate because therefore your blood's flowing through your body. Yeah. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients. Because then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body, all that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into, as human beings, we believe, like so many people, before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Work out first. Before you talk to me about recovery.

How to recover, yeah.

Work out first. We are always looking for, like whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they want to put you in a box. they want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this portion was not built. This portion was not made by God. This portion, sorry, this portion was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me. Because now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, because you are. But take that knowledge, putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be 300 pounds. We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real Authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem. That's right.

That's right.

You now know. I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something, it's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart and people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh, my God, you look happy, because half us aren't happy. We're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins. Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. People's gonna be like, you're just about working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend Learning this, when you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability, and you still want to be in the top of your class, I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does. You know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down, that guy, that valedictorian, studying for an hour, And you know, I caught you. I caught you, and I am dumb. But I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Goggins got really invented. Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty. And then three months later, they were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit, you go through these spiral notebooks of your life. And you realize, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say, for me to learn this one math problem, it's gonna take me 10 hours.

Wow.

And that's where it, and you realize through hard work, you can outwork anybody. No matter how badass they are. But that's the part people don't wanna dive into.

Yeah. When someone's lacking confidence in themselves, what's the answer you would give them if they're like, how do I gain more confidence?

It starts with yourself, man. You got to start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It's going to be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge, all you want to do is go back to what made you confidence or what gave you confidence. Is that happy spot? No. What gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own. Realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't, but I can learn. What gives you confidence not being afraid is overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people are going to watch this. You know what gives me confidence? It's knowing I no longer care if I sit here and start stuttering to you. That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them. And facing them and facing them pretty soon like this, you know what man? This is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone, is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer. There has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life. You cheated. I did.

You lied.

I lied.

I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, Man, I'm still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they have this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything in the world. On the outside looking in, like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with the backpack with all my stuff in it, no car. And I walk around, happiest person in the world. Have nothing, happy as hell. It's because I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that. you have to face yourself. So many people live to be 100 years old and they die miserable, having everything, because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this happiness, peace, Enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. And I start talking like this, people go, man, you know, I don't know, it's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You've got to be willing to go and face it.

When you go back to a confident place of being able to lead people, because you've got to have some confidence too. You can't just be, you know, concerned that something wrong is going to happen all the time, right? So how do you transition back into a confident place?

Number one, take ownership.

Yeah.

Of what went wrong.

Extreme ownership.

Take extreme ownership of it, right? 'Cause it's the same thing I just said. If that would have happened and I would have said, hey guys, that was my fault, it was his fault and his fault and his fault, people would have looked at me, they know the truth. The truth is I'm the guy in charge. So everyone's respect level for me would have gone down and their confidence in me would have gone down. But when I go in and say, hey guys, look, this is what went wrong. This is my fault 'cause I'm the guy in charge and this is what we're gonna do to fix it. Well, now everyone says, okay, well, he's taken ownership of the problem and he's actually got some good solutions to make sure this doesn't happen again. Their confidence and the respect for me goes up and we can move forward.

-Right. How often did you have to take extreme ownership? -Every single day. -Every day?

-Oh yeah. Of course. Wow. Of course. The minute that you're blaming anyone else for things that are going wrong, the moment that you do that, think about what it does to you. Think about what it does to you. If I'm walking, if we go on a mission, and something goes wrong and I go, that wasn't my fault. Well, what am I doing to fix it now?

What am I doing?

I'm not doing anything. Nothing. Just being a pain in the butt. Because I don't think it's my fault. So I'm not gonna change anything. Well, then we'll make that same mistake again. Then I'll say that wasn't my fault. And we'll never make any progress. Whereas if I say, hey, this was my fault. Here's what I'm gonna do to fix it. Then we fix the problem. And by the way, when I put my finger at you and I say, hey, You know, this was your fault. What's your reaction to that?

Defensive.

Yeah, you're gonna get defensive. Yeah, of course.

And then what are you gonna do?

No, it wasn't.

I'm blaming this person. That's putting your finger on the person. They dropped the ball here.

Jimmy did that.

Johnny did this.

And what are they all gonna do? Point it back to you. So now what do we end up with?

We end up with-- no solutions. No one taking ownership of any of the problems. The problems never get solved. We never progress.

So how many times did you take.

Extreme ownership of something that Technically wasn't your fault.

There is no thing.

There is no thing.

There is no thing.

So you'll take ownership of everything. Even if it wasn't directly.

This is a question, a comment that I get from my consulting business, right? You know, we work with business leaders and someone will say, yeah, I get it, you know? But what should I do when it's really not my fault?

But it is your fault.

It's like, oh yeah, I have yet to have somebody stump me with a question when I say, no, if you're in charge of something and something goes wrong, it's your fault. It's all your responsibility. It's all your responsibility. Because if I'm in charge of a platoon and one of the machine gunners that's four or five levels below me in the chain of command and is on a position that I'm not even at, and he shoots his machine gun in the wrong direction towards friendly forces, whose fault is that? It's your fault. Yes, it's my fault. I didn't train him well enough. I didn't make sure he understood his fields of fire, where he was allowed to shoot. I didn't make sure that he was being monitored correctly by his fire team leader to make sure that they all knew what was happening. And at the end of the line, if he's not competent and capable of doing his job, it's my fault that I let him be in that position. So no matter what happens, it's my fault.

So what do you tell CEOs are leaders of big companies that have multiple lines, you know, underneath them that don't have the time to train them personally, but they have someone underneath them to train who's training them, who's training them. How do you coach them?

It's real easy. You know, the guy says to me, hey, you know, we failed this project. And I said, oh, why did we fail that project? Oh, because of Bill, the front line manager. Oh, okay, who's in charge of Bill? It's Mike. Okay, who's in charge of Mike? Fred. Who's in charge of Fred?

The leader of the CEO.

I am.

Yeah, that's right. You're in charge of Fred. So that means you need to.

Make.

Sure that your intent is felt all the way down through the chain of command.

How do we do that?

That's leadership. This is why I have a consulting business. Because this is what you have to do. Because the larger company gets, look, when I'm in charge of eight people, it's easier. Everybody knows what I'm thinking. I mean, I see them every day. I can sit in one room and talk to them all face to face. On the battlefield, you're in charge of a fire team. A fire team has four or five people in it. Even in combat, you can control four or five people. Eight people, you actually can't control anymore. In a firefight, you can't control eight people. That's why the Army, the Marine Corps, around the whole world, it's like four or five people in a fire team. That's what the base unit is. In the corporate world, you can handle a little bit more than that because there's no explosions happening, there's no gunfire. So you can control eight people, 10 people, something like that. That's kind of what the normal corporate structure breaks out as. But the bigger you get, the more you have to rely on those subordinate leaders to spread the word, to understand what the mission is, to understand what the end state is, to understand why they're doing what they're doing. That's what you have to do as a leader. And when you do that, there was plenty of missions that I went on where I was the ground force commander. in charge of 30 or 40 seals or 100 seals and Iraqi soldiers combined together, plenty of operations like that. You know how many people I talk to? I would talk to three. I would talk to the two platoon commanders and the mobility commander. And then they would talk to their two or three people and then their people would talk to their two or three people.

So how do you get that message across to 100 or thousands of if that's in your organization.

There's a bunch of different ways. So in a big organization, this is something that we come across. I mean, we work with companies, I think the biggest company we work with is 167,000 employees. 167,000 employees global, right? So they're all over the place. So how do you get the message? Well, there's a bunch of things that you have to do. Number one, you have to make sure that your message is simple, clear, and concise. You've got to communicate in a way that even that frontline trooper can understand what you're talking about. Now you have to translate that up and down the chain of command because if you're my chief operating officer, obviously the level of detail that I go into with you and the chief financial officer, that's going to be higher. We need to be in a deeper level of conversation and understanding, but I need to make sure that you know how to translate that down to your next level and then that person knows how to translate it down to their next level and all the way through the chain of command. There's companies where I'll go into the CEO and we'll be talking, I'll say, so how well does everyone understand what your mission is here? And they'll say, oh, absolutely. I'll go to a frontline person and say, what's the mission of this company? They have no idea. They have no idea. And this can be a real problem. This can be a real, I mean, obviously this can be a real problem, but it becomes a real problem when if you're a frontline troop and you don't understand what the mission is, you can make bad decisions on the front line. There are certain companies at certain stages where the most important thing they can do is be cost effective. Save money, right? And that's if a frontline troop needs to make a decision about, hey, should I redo this thing right now which is going to cost us a little bit more money or should I just let it go with a little bit lower standard? Well, if what you're focused on is saving money, that guy says, okay, you know what? I'm going to let this go even though the standard is a little bit lower. That's a decision that can get made. But what if your focus right now, maybe you got some bad reviews from consumers and so your focus is to make quality perfect even if you have to expend a little bit more money. If the frontline troop knows that he goes, wait a second, this isn't quite where we want it. So he redoes it, it costs a little bit more money, but we're now achieving the mission at that time. And guess what? As you can probably figure out, the mission changes because we will work with a company where what are they trying to do right now? They're trying to maximize profits for this quarter because they're going public and they need four quarters in a row or six quarters in a in a row where they see that increasing. So, okay, guess what kind of decisions they're making. Now, can you go too far with that? Absolutely. And now you get the front line truth that goes, hey, I don't care. I'll put out as many as I possibly can. It's going to be dirt cheap and I saved the company a bunch of money. But now we end up with bad quality out there and we will get a bad reputation and that'll hurt us strategically.

Right.

So how do you get that message out there?

You, you have to, number one, make.

Sure it's simple, and then you communicate it. What's a simple message for, like, I guess it depends on the company, but--.

It depends on the company.

Yeah. Should a simple message be like one sentence, you mean, or should it be simple to understand?

Simple to understand.

Yeah.

And what we'll do with companies is we'll do a drill, we'll work on their mission. It's kind of their mission statement, but then also their mantra, or maybe a couple mantras where, you know, in this case, hey, it's quality over quantity. And now a frontline person's making decisions based on that, right? And so there's a couple mantras, two, three mantras that the people can refer back back to that helps them guide their decision making process. And then on top of that, they have like a little bit more detailed mission statement where they can say, wait a second, I know the mantra says this, but it also says we're supposed to take care of our customers. And if I let this go, then my customers won't be taken care of. I need to adjust a little bit.

-Right.

What would you say is your mission and the mantras you use for your business brand?

-So, I have a bunch of different businesses. You know, for Echelon Front, our our consulting business, our mission is to be the premier organization for leadership consultancy in the world. That's what we're trying to do. And we're doing great at it. You know, we're doing great at it. How do we do that? What are the mantras? Well, number one, like you just like we just said, what do we want to do? We want to make our clients and customers happy. How do we do that? We provide them great service and we actually improve their game. We actually can look at their metrics and say, Hey, look, we're glad you brought us on board. Here's what we said we were going to do and here's how it worked. So that's, and one of the other things that we say is, look, we don't want to be a permanent crutch that people have to rely on. So a lot of consultant companies, consultancies, they want to go in and hook into a company for an extended period of time and we don't want to do that. We want to work with you for six months, 12 months, 18 months depending on the size of the company.

We let you go.

We do have some companies that are growing rapidly and so what we do is as they acquire new companies or as they bring in lots of new people, we are there to help train them and kind of onboard them. So that has turned into some longer term contracts but that's one of the mantras is we don't want to be embedded with you forever. if we were with you for too long, we failed.

So I remember after them showing that, we went straight from there to eat lunch. Yeah, imagine that, dude.

Crazy.

And we're standing in the chow line and like, guys just start falling out of the formation just like by the tens and dozens. Oh, yeah. And they're just all going to ring the bell.

And they already went through hell week.

This was prior to hell week. Yeah, this was prior to hell week.

So they didn't even go through any physically demanding stuff at this point.

No, man.

With no sleep. They just were psychologically out.

That's it. And that's the whole point, that's the whole thing with this training or really anything in life. Lewis, it could be running an ultra marathon, it could be starting a business, could be SEAL training. So other than that day, and that day was all mental, the biggest reason that people quit any of those things we just, I just talked about is because they look at the whole, they're looking at the big picture, man. So like with SEAL training, there's no single evolution that that's that difficult.

Yeah.

Really, I mean, it's four mile runs and, you know, two mile swims and it's nothing that you couldn't get up from this table and go do right now. But guys, the guys that quit, they couldn't break it down, like, into digestible pieces.

One hour at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time.

Yeah.

One step at a time, one breath at a time. It seems so overwhelming. You're like, if I can't do this right now, if I'm struggling this moment, how am I going to take on all this? Six months, four months, three months. And so we become overwhelmed and in fear as opposed to just one step at a time.

That's it, bro. I remember in Evolution during Hell Week, all it was was a one-mile repeat. The instructors just got everybody together and said, All you gotta do is run one mile over and over again until we tell you to stop. There's no time standards, there's no- you-.

Could walk if you wanted to.

You could walk. I mean, you had to look like you were running, but you could walk. So I'm out here like, heck yeah, dude. All I gotta do is run one mile at my own pace on a sunny beach on Coronado Island. Like, this is amazing.

No sprinting, no talking. It's like vacation.

Yeah, yeah, man. But that was the single evolution during Hell Week where we lost the most guys. And it was because of what we just talked about. They could not, certain people just could not focus on that mile, dude. All they could think about was all the miles in front of them, which they didn't know if this was the last one or not. So they looked at it as a big picture and They just couldn't handle it. And really it was the easiest evolution that we did in all of Hell Week.

Do you remember how many miles you actually ran?

Dude, I have no clue. And what the instructors do, they just keep it going until enough people quit.

And then they go, okay.

And then they call it.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

And just to, they're like, okay, we're gonna do 10 miles, 15, 20 miles, whatever, until people quit.

That's right.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's the biggest thing, dude, about it. And I take that now into ultra running and even 3 of 7, the business model for 3 of 7 and all that we have going on with that. It's just like conquer what's right in front of you. And if you can stay in that mindset, on an ultra race, when I'm 95 miles deep into a race and I've got to climb a 2,000-foot mountain, How do you think I do it, bro?

One step at a time.

Yeah. I mean, I pick a tree 20 yards ahead of me and I get to that tree and then I pick another tree and then eventually I'm at the summit, you know?

How do you manage your mind and the thoughts of, man, I've got five more miles or however many more miles to go, how many more hours to go, days to go, and this is freaking hard. How do you manage the mind that wants to tell you to stop when it seems like there's so much ahead of you, but you're just going 10 feet at a time. How do you do that? When you're tired, when you're hurting, when you're exhausted, or you just don't get tired?

No, no. That's a mantra we use, right? And yeah, we can talk about that later. But for me, bro, it's like if you will push yourself if you will push yourself hard enough, you reach this place, I call it the steady state, and it's where it's not gonna hurt any worse. And it's not gonna get any harder. It's the steady state, man.

It's gonna stay hard.

It's gonna just stay just like that. That's exactly right. And it's almost like a For me, it's almost like a primal feeling. Like everything else is stripped away and all I have to deal with is this pain, physical pain that I'm feeling. And it's a beauty, for me it's a beautiful thing, man. So I don't- To feel the pain? Well, to reach that steady state to where everything's just boiled down and it's just so simple, dude.

You're not stressing about who's calling you, what's happening at home, friends, or... That's war.

Yeah.

You're not stressed about that stuff. You're focused on one thing. Yeah.

And so how... I guess one way that I manage that, I like getting to that point in the first place. But some way that I guess you could say that I manage that pain is I stop fighting against it. Wow.

I.

Literally just tell myself, I accept this.

-Wow.

-And I almost just like in my mind's eye, I see it passing through me.

-The pain.

-The pain. And you can use this with all different types of things that are uncomfortable like cold. If you stop, we'll stop fighting against it. It diminishes its power. But as long as you're fighting against the pain or you're using your energy to fight against the cold, it's gonna continue to gain traction and power over your mind. So it's just forcing yourself to let go and stop fighting against that discomfort and just rock and roll, man.

So for the everyday human being who does a five mile run or maybe there's someone going extreme into an ice tub for two minutes, and they feel pain after a few miles or that first minute in the ice tub, how would you process that mentally or in your mind's eye? When you're entering the ice, when you're going to that five mile run where it starts to hurt, you get the cramps, you get the heartaches, sweating, what would you do in that moment? Obviously for you that's like 50 to 100 miles, but for the everyday human, how would you approach that mentally? like a process we could understand. I understand of like surrendering and letting go through you, but what is it, what's a strategy we could implement you think?

Well, I mean, I think a strategy to implement that particular thing about not fighting against it, I think, is that you could speak it out loud. I talk to myself all the time and that's something I'm so adamant about is the spoken word. So, you know, if you, So it's.

Starting to feel painful. I'm on my third mile. I feel like I want to slow down. What would I say to myself?

Well, I mean you can counterpunch that with any number of statements or mantras, whatever works best for you. You know what I mean? Of course I have some that I use on my own, but that's for me, that would be the number one tool to kind of manage that pain.

A spoken mantra out loud.

Yeah, the spoken word.

Not an internal mantra or a whisper, but actually saying it, you think?

Yeah, totally, man. Yeah. Yeah, it has to be said out loud.

Okay. Were you gonna say someone else?

No, I'm good, brother.

What's the killer of getting through hard challenges in your mind? What's the thing that kills most individuals? once it starts to get hard and they stop.

Negativity, man.

Yeah.

The thought process, the words.

It's not necessarily the negative thought because we can't control our thoughts, obviously, all the time. We're gonna have thoughts in our head that pop up that we don't want to be there. But it's when you give those thoughts power through the things that you say. So, I give you an example. one of my best friends going through SEAL training. He came to me one morning and he said, I could tell he had been in a bad place mentally, but he was doing fine, progressing through training. But he came to me one morning and he said out loud for the first time, I don't think I'm good enough to make it through this training anymore. Which was a lie. He was completely physically capable of doing every single thing that we had to do that day and every other day. But when he came and said that, it gave those thoughts that he had, that what do you call it, like lack of confidence or, you know, those thoughts that he was having that he wasn't good enough, they didn't have enough traction to stop him until he came and told me that out loud.

Spoke it into existence.

They spoke it out loud, yeah.

So, you might be thinking, am I good enough to do this? Can I make it through? Maybe I'm not as strong as these guys. These guys are more talented. But once you start saying it to someone else out loud, that's when your body starts to believe it even stronger and it gets harder and harder to go back into a confident place, I'm assuming.

That's it, brother. Yeah, so like when he told me that, it was just like seconds later he was going to ring the bell.

Really? Yeah.

And there was nothing that I could do to stop him.

It's like he finally believed it 100% and he was out.

Yeah, yeah.

Just don't say it and you're half.

The way there, right?

If you like, just don't say it, you have a chance.

That's it, brother. That's it. And so your tongue is the thing. I compare it to a rudder. A rudder is the main control surface that steers a ship, steers the direction of a ship. Your tongue is your rudder. It's going to steer the direction of your life and the outcomes of your situations 98% of the time.

So.

What you say is pretty important.

Yeah.

It's paramount to me, bro. I mean, that's like, I take this to such an extreme that I don't curse. I'm a Christian, but I don't, not cursing is not a Christian thing. It's because none of those words in and of themselves have a positive meaning. So why am I going to use them? So for me, it is paramount, dude. The things that we say, yes.

Did you ever come to a place where you started saying negative things to yourself during Bud's training or as a where you had to catch yourself or have you always been clear with your words to yourself?

I have not always been clear with my words to myself. I became more conscious about the power of my words throughout life and doing really, really hard stuff to where, you know, I've put myself in enough situations with other people around me to see the power of the spoken word actually work not only in my own situations, but in the men around me or women around me in racing, you know?

Yeah.

So as every time I see it work, I'm like, Holy smokes, this is powerful. This is powerful. Well then finally I started going on some podcasts and telling people that it and then I now get hundreds of messages a month of people saying, oh my gosh, this works.

What are the words we should never say to ourselves and what should we say to ourselves every day?

You know, I think that's really individualized, man. I mean, as far as the words that you should never say to yourself, it's gonna be dependent on the situation you're in, you know what I mean? And then the things that you're saying to yourself, you know, a big one for me is I will not die in the chair. That's a huge mantra, you know, that I use. I won't die in the chair and that has a whole meaning and story behind it.

What's the brief meaning?

So that was born out of that last man standing race that I did a few months, well, that was back in May where I was running you know, we had to run 4.16 miles every hour on the hour. Each one of those hours, I would dedicate to a fallen brother.

Wow.

In the SEAL teams.

And their actual names?

Yeah, I had a wrist coach that I was wearing, and I would have their, you know, index card with their face name, their family's names, their date of sacrifice.

And so, holy cow, that probably gave me a lot more power and strength.

It did, man. But it gave me a lot more pressure too, dude, because each one of these laps was for this guy and some of those guys were guys that I had spent a lot of time with, you know what I mean? So the way that race worked, there was no definitive finish line. You just kept running until only one runner was left standing. So I could not promise my brothers that I would win. I couldn't promise them victory because I didn't know if my body would break or, you know, I was, I didn't know. I didn't know where the race was going to end. So, but, but I could promise them that if I died and death meaning death within a situation, not physical death, but death in this scenario would be of my race, if that time came, I would die out on the race course battling for every step that I took.

Not on the chair.

I won't die in the chair. That's exactly right.

Sit around waiting.

Yep. So at the end of each one of these laps, there was a chair. So if I came in off the lap in 55 minutes, I could sit down for five minutes. And it was hard. A lot of people died in the chair that day.

They were like, I'm done. I'm done.

Because it was hard to rise back up, man. For sure.

Did you win the race?

No, I was the I think I was the third man standing around 116.5 miles. And my last lap, dude, was actually for my last lap was for a good friend of mine named Blake Marston. And we lost Blake in a skydiving accident not long ago. And, dude, I remember looking down at, I went out on that lap, and so, It was muddy. I had tied my shoes too tight and so my shoelaces were sawing through that large tendon in the front of my ankles. That's painful. Yeah, so it got to the point that I could no longer flex my toes toward my shin anymore. So every step was like I was dragging my feet like lead weights. So I went out on that lap and I pretty much, I was broken, dude. Yeah, your whole body. But I wasn't gonna die in a chair, dude. You were on the lap, though.

I was out on the lap. You fell on the lap or you didn't make it back in time and.

You'Re, yeah, I got out there, dude, and I remember looking down at Blake and dude, I just started crying because I knew at a certain point that I could not make it back in time.

Oh my gosh.

And I thought, you know, what does Blake think of me right now? And then I just had the sense of peace come over me, dude, and I could see his face in my mind's eye laughing at my poor physical state because we always find, I mean, team guys, dude, we always find humor in adversity. I mean, no matter how miserable it got, we would be joking and laughing at each other. So I saw him laughing at me, you know, and I. And then I found a stick on the ground and hobbled my way back to the Finish Line.

Yeah.

So you made it through. It wasn't in the time allotted. It was after the time.

It was after the time. That's right. So 116 miles.

Wow. Yeah.

But, you know, you can apply. I apply that now that don't die in the chair to all aspects. of my life, man, whether it's business or personal relationships or marriages or you name it, dude.

So, you have a mantra and you'll say this mantra out loud or internally every day when you feel it gets tough.

Yeah, it's used as a counter punch to those negative thoughts.

You know what's funny? Mantras are talked about a lot in kind of the spiritual meditation communities. but you're this hard core Navy SEAL guy who's saying the power of the spoken word, the power of a mantra, a positive mantra is what gets you through adversity.

That's it, bro.

And that's the secret.

That's your rudder, man.

So it doesn't have to be some woo-woo spirituality, meditation only type of thought process. This is tactical real life strategies that get you through war, actual war.

That's it, bro.

What's your biggest insecurity today?

Not to be arrogant, I don't have one.

What was the last one you had and when was that?

The last one I had was probably still me. me still living because I, I always talk about, I, I pay rent. So we, we used to live in a seven dollar a month place when I was growing up.

And that's in Buffalo or is this.

This is in Indiana.

Yeah.

So, like, we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet. Right. And that seven dollar a month place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom went there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I've gone through Ranger School. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records, everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick, and I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick and I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why is that?

In that moment where my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training.

Now you didn't have that.

I didn't have anything.

Now you just had to sit alone.

Alone.

And not train.

And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I had done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect.

I was just going.

I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I go on.

You're like, on to the next.

I get in the car and I go.

You won't even take the medal?

Gone.

Don't care about it. I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting.

Around for this ceremony. Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something.

Validation.

I haven't done anything. Let's go.

Let's go.

Let's go. I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. What's right? When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I caught my 40% rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm a 180-pound person who lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL PEP prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

That's right.

Yeah.

And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids. Wow.

To get ready for the 18, 19, 20 year olds.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were hybrids. Wow. But they get the buds, and the same amount of people would quit.

Why is that?

This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

Hmm. It's not about, Not the mind.

That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine.

Yeah.

Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm gonna talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure and they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me. But you go back to your insecurities, and then when you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently. in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.

Why weren't you training them?

I wasn't training myself to that. Because at that time, I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.

Physical standard.

A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in the $7 a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, and I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived, because I was for the first time in my life happy.

Wow.

And at peace.

Wow.

Because I reflected back on where it started.

You said, well, I have come a long way.

That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have, that's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else.

Yeah.

You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life, until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved in my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father, but she hasn't done that one step. Really?

She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect on it.

She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life.

And live in that space.

And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on my God, this is what I've done with my life.

So, have you talked to her about this?

We talk about it all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go to not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't give a damn, I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance so we go a different route. I'm afraid of something is telling me.

You must Do this thing.

You must do that. You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I talk in life like a lot of us in life want to take the four-lane highway. that has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up, you're gonna see a McDonald's, a Cracker Barrel.

Yeah.

It's the easy route.

Very few of us want to go to the right side.

That Cracker Barrel is that Midwest life. That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

From Ohio. It's all about it, man. Indiana. Cracker Barrel everywhere. Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful because I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things. Right. And it was just like I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. Right. So I need to do the things that scare me the most. That's right. You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I want to do this. I'm going to give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away. -That's right. -And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's what you, how you live your life. -That's all it is, man. -And it helps me feel so much more confident when you overcome that fear.

Of saying, this doesn't have control over me anymore. It's like you can be at such more peace. -It's 100% in your life. -Most of like, for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy SEAL. It's until you opened your mind, open-mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like for instance, when I broke the pull-up record, everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was 4,020 pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.

4,024 hours or was it?

Yeah, it's 4,020 pull-ups in 24 hour period. The first thing I did versus closing my mind to like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pinning.

How many is that every minute?

Exactly.

Every hour, every second.

Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box. And we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. But we do, we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we take away the possibilities of you could be this, you could be that, you could be all these things. And I never thought at 300 pounds I could be next to you. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book. There'd be no book. It'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. And what haunts me the most, you ask me, what haunts you the most? What hampers me most is that if I were to die at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all. Let's say that. I don't care what you believe in. Doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. Let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm 300 pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach terminator my whole life, and we're sitting down just like this. You're God and I'm David. and he gives me that chart and he says, look at this. Now, look at this chart. And on the chart, it has all these different things, but my names on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna. I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're gonna get the VFW award. You could be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, I was. this isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins, I was an Ecolab guy. I sprayed for cockroaches and I'm 300 pounds. It said here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a. A bachelor's and a Masters. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

Wow.

My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world. and there's a final judgment, and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you,'re in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now, or are you in hell? Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall, and over the next wall, and over the next wall. so in my mind, I believe that. And God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now, as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, my God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.

Wow. Is there a cap on the human body?

That's right.

Is there one?

I don't believe so. Because one thing I found out was, for several years I gave myself a way out.

When you were 300 pounds or- When.

I was 300 pounds, when I was all the way up till I was 24 years old, I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I start climbing, I fall back down. For the first 24 years of my life. I went to my first hell week, my second hell week, and then my third hell week came in SEAL training. And the CEO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, Hey, this is your last time you're going to go through BUD/S. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up, and he gave me a few months to heal. They said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through. Wow. I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures, not shin splints.

That's hard to finish.

Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world, with stress fractures. And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body if the mind is there. Every morning I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me, I'd get duct tape, and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the mid of my calf, and I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot.

Oh my gosh.

And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first 45 minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me Through that whole.

Process.

Was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs?

Wow.

All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions. They're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy. Most of them, they're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going to that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest train in the world, broken and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now, from the weakest man, you are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game. Yeah. And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care. It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken. Where most people quit, I just started.

Wow.

And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, that's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.

It's calcifying it, just like.

I never had them since. I'm 43 years old. Wow. I ran 7,000 miles in 2007. Haven't had a stress fracture since. And I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying that when the mind and the body connect and you don't give yourself a way out, the only way out for me at that time was death.

Wow.

I'm going to be a Navy SEAL.

Or I'm gonna die.

Or I'm gonna die trying.

Yeah.

Period. And my body said, Roger that. We're gonna get you through this.

So when the mind gives it no way out, no way out, your body says, okay, okay. I believe you now.

I have to heal.

I'm gonna figure this out with you. We're gonna do this. It's gonna be the worst part of your life, but you're gonna survive.

We're gonna survive.

Wow.

And as you hear in that 100 mile race I did, I started figuring out more and more and more and more about at the other end of suffering is a life that no one, and I'm not talking about go out there and kill yourself. Don't take these words and flip them and say, oh my God, no. It just be uncomfortable. I call it suffering.

Don't physically injure yourself.

Yes. Not saying that.

And then be out for six months.

That's right. That's no good. That's no good. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying do what I did. I was in a spot that life forced me. I had a choice. I had a choice to be this guy or the guy that's in front of you. I had choices.

I chose this path. And you're still choosing it. I'm still choosing it.

You could go back to that guy any moment. Because I found out, I found out something with those stress fractures. I found out something. through facing all these things. I found out a whole other world, which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack.

Wow.

I found it a whole another way. A whole another way of, no matter how far you get in life, you have to be able to go back to scratch in your mind at a moment's notice. You can never get so far beyond scratch. what that means is when you accomplish something in life, if you want to go back to scratch and go back to that seven dollar a month place where I once lived and visit that place for a long period of time, if you were here when you went back to scratch, you would now be here. Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch friction. Obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game anymore. you think there is.

The real cheese.

That's right. When you cheat so much, the friction is minor. Because why? I'm sore. I'm gonna get a massage today. I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat today. The refrigerator is always full. So your comforts are now. So your discomfort is now very minuscule to your discomfort back here in the seven dollar a month place. So you have to go back to the total discomfort. to then raise your level of where you're at now. I'm not saying stay there and stay there. Visit.

Visit it.

And then you raise your level.

Take a day trip.

That's right.

Yeah.

Always take day trips. Yeah.

Don't stay there.

That's right.

But take a day trip.

Take a day trip.

So when you complete some massive obstacle and challenge, whatever the adversity that you force upon yourself, because these are all curated experiences for yourself, you're scratching constantly. What happens now, since this was five years ago, you would just leave, you want to take the medal, you would just go on to the next. What happens now? Do you take a day to reflect, a moment, 10 minutes, how does the process work? And then how do you get back to visiting the $7 place you lived in?

Now, I don't have to go back and visit it. I don't have to think about it. It lives with me now. Every day of my damn life, that feeling that I had to go back and think about, I found a way to just have it. How did you... It's constantly there. I've been self-talk. I've been self-talk. It's called my cookie jar. It's a constant reminder of David Guzik. Every day of my life, I believe in quiet. There's no growth outside of quiet. The world's too noisy. Your mind needs quiet for you to find who you are. People ask, what's my purpose? Why am I here? You're not gonna find it nowadays unless you lock yourself in a quiet room in your mind and find it. It's too noisy. For me, I could be in a busy street in New York City, horns honking, and I'm walking around with like nothing. It's me and myself in a quiet spot. And when you are constantly reflecting on who you are, where you've been, the journey you've gone through, the journey you can continue going through, the feeling is always there. You don't allow the world to pull you so fast that you forget. You don't allow yourself to pull you so fast that you forget. It's not about staying in that moment. It's about you want to get to the point where that feeling follows you like breathing. It becomes a part of your life, part of your DNA. But it's made like these calluses on my hands right now. They're made. They are now on my brain. This is now a part of me. It's a daily process, a part of me. And how I go back to a seven dollar a month place all the time is now I go out and I dig fire line. I'm a wildland firefighter. I don't need to do it. I'm a 43 year old man. I work with 27 year old kids.

Yeah.

I'm a rookie. Every day I'm a rookie. It feels like.

And why do you do it?

That's why I do it, man. There's a story I'm gonna tell you about why I do it. So I make, I have a good living now for me, where I'm at in my life. I was out on a fire in Colorado, and we were digging fire line on this like 50% like it was like on the side of a dad going up mountain. Yeah. And we're trying to keep the fire from moving and we're digging this fire line 14 inches or my fault 18 inches wide, three miles long, 12 of us digging. And it is the hardest work. You make $12 an hour. Okay? Nothing.

You set up your shop, like when.

You'Re done digging, you just pretty much lay down, you go to sleep and you get up and you dig some more. Really? This happens for two weeks long. What are you digging?

It's like a hole, you're digging a line.

So you're trying to get down to, to a mineral source. So you try to get down to the earth. So that if that fire is moving, it can't burn dirt. Really? So you're moving fuels.

Got it.

So not only are you digging, you're cutting down trees. It's hard work. But the moral story is I'm 43. Don't need to do it at all.

This is why I do it.

You're making money. I'm making money. I have a good life. I don't need to do it. Everybody asks me why I do it. this is why this 21 year old kid was out there and he wanted a pair of running shoes. That's all he wanted. A pair of running shoes. 60, 70, 100 bucks to whatever, you know, easy for us. Yeah, 100 shoes. He looked up at the mountain that we had been on for days digging this fire line, and he said, that'll take me five or six hours of work to buy those shoes. say I'm not gonna buy them. It's the perspective of life. That perspective of life right there, that is the value that we lose. When things start to come so easy in life, it's the perspective that 21 year old had, he looked about that mountain and thought, he looked at his hands, he looked at the amount of hours of pulling that Pulaski, that tool, and raking that ground, And they cutting those trees and moving them. And that hours of work, he looked at his feet and said, these old shoes would do. It's that perspective in life that we lose. And that story that most people may not mean anything. It's that story I always want to have in my life. You cannot lose perspective of where you've come in life.

If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with and the contract doesn't really matter, I'd be like, Hey, hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple, I might give you a couple adjustments and give you some coaching on it and then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, oh no, we didn't land it. and I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it. I said, you, know, you said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, Hey, here's some other things that might have worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was going to add value to our company, I'm going to either- Step in, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction going to be? And by the way, that's when they're not going to say, no, don't do it that way. I'm gonna say, tell me that again and let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with the solution. So then you're kind of going in there like you got this dialed.

And then you're gonna feel like you won, which you did. That's great. Which is great. It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, competence, belief. How important is feedback for leaders? getting feedback from peers, coaches or employees, team members.

Feedback is how you get better. No feedback, no improvement. And if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it. So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're definitely not asking for it. Even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble.

What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you think you need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have?

I mean, the weird thing about me is even though you might think, look at me and think, oh, who's gonna tell this guy anything? Right? The reality is if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, hey, I don't know if that's a good plan. So even, you know, when I was a task unit commander, So I'm in charge and I'm the head seal for this 40 seals. I'm the main guy. Anyone in that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, Hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it? My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that.

So.

My friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long.

They're not intimidated or scared of you.

No.

That's good.

No.

So how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team in order to welcome the feedback of the information?

Yeah, what you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like, you know, just the other day we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year, but the thing that I was telling this group of people was as a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. So, every time you come to me and you say, Hey, Jocko, I don't like this plan. I don't say, Shut up and do it my way.

No.

I say, How would you want to do it? Tell me what you don't like about it and then tell me how you want to do it. So, therefore, the next time you have an objection, you're like, you, know the door is open, you know that I'm going to be open-minded and listen to you and that's how you build it. Every time you shut someone down from speaking their mind, you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback. And if there's no feedback, as we just said, you're not going to improve.

What are two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills right off the bat? Two things you can think of. And what are two things that wannabe leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders? So what are the two things they could add? Yeah, to a list.

Two things that you have. Number one is listen, which we just talked about. So that's fresh on my mind. And you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time. Wrong answer. Wrong answer. I'll sit through a meeting with a client or with one of my companies and I'll listen for 38 minutes.

And at the end of those 38.

Minutes, I'll have already thought through every.

Discussion that's been had.

You know, you want to argue with him and he's arguing with her. And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. Meanwhile, you're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's given up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments and I do that for 38 minutes and in the 39th minute, I say, Hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually going to be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter. It wasn't because I had better tactical understanding. It's because I actually shut my mouth, listened to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew, and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was. So listen, and the other one is the word that I just used, which is detach, which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're gonna see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds, staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high port, take a step back and actually look around, I can see infinitely more. So apply that to this is the meeting that we just talked about, a 38 minute meeting. All this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm the boss. I could jump in there and start arguing and giving my opinion, but what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is in the weeds and I'm not able to assess what is actually happening. So there you apply it there to your personal life. If you and I are arguing, you're my friend and you did something and now we're starting to escalate an argument and I'm starting to get emotional, Am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on? If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction?

No.

No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying, and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without without saying you need to calm down or you're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no. Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me, whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say, the dang supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed. If I say, hey, calm down, right? If that's my reaction, Then you realize that I'm against you.

Right?

I don't get it.

And so now it's me and the supply department against you.

No one understands.

No one understands. So I do a little technique.

What is that?

Yeah.

I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit so that we're not escalating the situation.

How would you do this with your wife?

So if you, well, if you come to me and you go, the supply department's been Late, they're two weeks late on this stuff. I don't say, Calm down, I say, you gotta be kidding me, two weeks? And you go, yeah, can you believe it? Ah, that's horrible. We gotta put a solution, we gotta get that figured out. In the meantime, what do we need to do right now to get the problem solved? So we already, now we're on the.

Same team so we can work together to find a solution. We bonded on the pain.

Yes.

You felt the pain. Yes. We're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's gonna make my wife mad? The ice machine's not working.

Right?

The ice machine's not working.

It's your fault.

Whether it's my fault, but we don't know. The ice machine's not working. By the way, this is a real story. This is happening today. The ice machine's not working. I mean, she didn't get mad about it, but the ice machine's not working.

If I go, Hey, chill out.

You have a refrigerator and a house and you can just calm down, right? How's that gonna go? It's not gonna go good. Now she's gonna get mad, now it's me against her. So instead, the ice machine's not working. Ah man, that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden we're.

On the same team.

And she's like, well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. As opposed to the ice machine's not working. Well, okay, you want me to have.

Ice shipped in from Alaska there, princess?

Right?

That's not gonna go over well. So what would you call it?

Reflect, reflect, reflect.

Diminish. Reflectively. What if someone's coming after you and attacking you, not like the supply chain or the ice machine, but it's like.

You didn't do this. Oh yeah, this is your fault.

I want you to guess what I'm gonna do. What's that?

What do you guess I'm gonna do? Like if you come and attack me and tell me something's my fault, what.

Do you think I'm gonna do? You personally? Yes. You would listen?

Yes.

Reflect and diminish. I would actually... Detach.

Detach, yes.

How do you detach your emotions from someone coming after you emotionally? Even if it was or wasn't your fault.

Well, there's a couple things that you've asked me now. So, ask a couple more. It's all good, 'cause it's all...

It's sexy.

'Cause I can see like your mind is spinning here. You're absorbing and you're like, oh, this makes sense. If you're attacking my ego, immediately, as soon as I feel frustrated, angry, Defensive. All three of those things are red flags to me that that's my ego. Okay. I immediately know, I go, when I feel my bristling. Yeah, when I feel that, I know it's a hard, I guarantee it's 99% it's just my ego that I'm mad.

So what do you do in that moment?

Immediately go, oh, that's your ego, you idiot. Listen to what he's got to say. Let's win.

Let's win.

So how do I win?

Do I win by attacking you?

No.

No, I don't win my attack. If you're the only winner, You both lose. Yes. So when you attack me, you both need to win. And you say, whatever your attack is, you say, this is your fault. I go, you know what? Absolutely. This is my fault. Here's the mistake that I made and I know it affected you in a negative way. Here's the things that I'm working on right now to remedy it. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna yell at me more? Are you gonna say, are you gonna.

Tell me it's my fault again?

Like I just, a crazy person might say a couple more times. And a crazy person, I'll be like, yeah, I know. You know, I get this, this is another question I get when it's sort of like similar to what you said earlier when you said, yeah, but what if it's not really your fault?

Right?

The other one I get a lot is if you say, Hey, listen, Louis, this is my fault that this happened. You go, you,'re right, it is your fault. And then people say, what do I do then? What do I do then? If the person's blaming me, how do I take ownership then? And I'm like, that's the whole point. That's the whole point. The whole point of taking ownership is when you Look at me and you point your finger and you say, this is all your fault. I say, Yes, I know. That's what I just said. This is absolutely my fault. I'm the one that's in charge and these are the things that I'm gonna do to fix it. That's where we're gonna start. So when someone blames you, yes, take ownership. Now, if you have in the back of your mind like you did earlier, like, hey, maybe this isn't really my fault. Like, if you have that in the back of your mind, you're actually wrong. You're actually wrong. You're in charge. And that applies to your life as well. That applies to your life as well. How you, you know, you got to take ownership of what's going on in your life. When you're not where you want to be and you say it's because the boss doesn't like you or it's because the girl treated you this way or the guy did this. Like all those things, you got to take ownership of them.

Yeah.

And if you're blaming all these other external things, you're not going to make any changes. And that's going to be a problem.

What is a Navy SEAL's guide to eliminating self-doubt? What are the things that you saw other guys do really well or that you did to learn how to overcome being insecure, lacking the confidence of something, and just overall doubting yourself? That everyday human beings could apply on a daily basis.

Bro, I think that we all need to come to the realization that we're all made of the same stuff, man. Freaking dirt. That's all. We are all made of the same stuff. So, Lewis, you are a awesome dude. You have accomplished so much, man. But you know why you have done, you have used your tools properly. You don't have anything that I don't, and I hope you don't mind me using us as a direct example. You don't have anything you that I don't have from a physical, I have a strong healthy body and a strong healthy mind. We're made of the exact same stuff. You have utilized your tools, your time, the people around you, your speech, your relationships, all these universal tools that we all have access to.

To.

We all have access to time. We all have access to people around us.

Resources at some level.

Yeah, those are, and you can't use the argument that, oh, well, take time, for example. Say time is a tool that helps you accomplish your mission. Well, yeah, you may have more time than me. But take and look at it in the natural world as say we both had a hammer. The hammer represents time. We need to drive a nail through this table right here. Your hammer is bigger than mine. So obviously you're going to drive the nail faster than me. But I have a hammer too, even though it's smaller. I can still drive that nail flush with this table right here. So it's not an excuse to say, well, Lewis has so much more resources than I have. It doesn't matter, dude. We're made of the same stuff.

Yeah, you can still get the job done.

We can still get the job done. So for me, that's essential, is to stop looking at each other like, you know, somebody, you know, and look at me, for example, bro. I'm some old country dude from North Georgia. How could I have ever dreamed to go and serve at the tip of the spear with the best men America has to offer in the, you know, United States fighting forces. How could I have ever dreamed of going to do that? It makes no logical sense. But even back in those days, I had the same viewpoint. We're all made of the same stuff, bro.

How do we what can we do on a daily basis besides having that understanding of the tools and time to again, overcome that doubt that we have, overcome the insecurity or the fear or the judgment we put on ourselves in order to have more belief in ourselves to accomplish our mission. Is it you should have a set of routines and habits that you honor your word to every day and you are your word to yourself of what you say you're to do Is it doing hard things every day that builds more belief? Is it the words you use as well? Like what's the ingredients?

That's an excellent combination, Louis.

I like those.

It sounds like you answered that question, bro.

But is there anything else that you can?

I can, I mean, and so I'm very hesitant, you know, to give advice. I never give advice. I can tell you what I do based around those things that you just said. I have a routine. I get up every morning at about 6:00 in the morning. The first part of my day, I dedicate to my God. So I give him the first fruits of my day. I honor him in that way because I feel like he expects that of me. Through prayer, through prayer or reading. For me it's the Bible. So that's what I do. It could be for five minutes, it could be for 45 minutes, but that's how I start my day every single day. if I don't do that, I'm screwed up, dude.

Really? Yeah.

Okay. So, you know, I do that, then I spend four hours a day training. That may sound crazy, but I train for four hours a day. And that right there, that's where all my perspective comes from. That's where my outlook on life comes from. During that four hour block, I am honing my body and my soul, my mind, will and emotions. That's where the battle is, is in the soul. What do you want to do? What do you think you want to do? How do you feel about something? Those are the things that we need to get a hold of, right? But when you're out doing something hard, self-inflicted adversity, it hones that soul portion of us down at the same time that it's training our body. So the two are very intertwined.

Giving you energy, keeping you healthy, keeping you lean, sharp. It provides that for the body.

It provides that for the body and.

The soul and the mind.

The soul being the mind, will and emotions. It makes you force your mind, your will, what do you want to do and your emotions, how do you feel about this activity and this pain?

Because you don't want to do it.

Exactly. But when you when you go out and do it, you're honing that portion of you as a human and then moving forward from there.

So that's every day, seven days a week, because at five days a week, training four hours a day is it's...

Yeah, I train every day. I set that block. Now, the intensity may vary. It may just be a four hour hike in the woods, you know what I mean?

It's not a ultra marathon every day.

No, no, totally. I mean, I may only cover 10 miles in that four hours, I may cover 30 miles.

It's always a run, is it something else, a swim?

It could be a combination. It could be weight training. I do weight training, you know, strength training twice a week at least.

Why four hours? Why not one, three, five? Is there a number with four?

Because there's no number. I feel like that's what I need personally. to perform on the level that I want to perform and to maintain the perspective that I have on life. Powerful. Okay.

So after that.

After that is my work time. So from noon to the rest of the day up until 5:00, 6:00, sometimes 7:00, that's my work time. And so I take all that perspective and all that energy and all that good stuff that I get out there on that run or that weight lifting or whatever and then I transfer that over into my work time.

That's probably powerful. You have so much clarity.

-That'S it, brother.

-And you get all your best ideas from those four hours. You probably let go of all the pain or frustration or anger or whatever you've got in your head that's festering from the day before. If you have anything, that clears out. Purge that stuff. You get back to a peaceful place.

Yep, so I took care of my spirit in that first 30 minutes, take care of my body, soul, and that next four hours the rest of the day, man, I can hammer some stuff out. I can put down some... So that's the one thing, you know, that's my biggest fear as things grow. My biggest fear is that this telephone and this phone, text messages, and social media My biggest fear is that that stuff is one day going to maybe tarnish the clarity of my perspective. It's going to take away from that four hour block of time. Because if I don't put the time in to myself, all that Instagram, all that stuff, none of that matters. Because if I don't put that four hours into my myself, the stuff that I put out on the back half of the day is not going to be as pure as it should be. So my biggest fear is losing that purity, man. And I shouldn't say I fear it. I'm very conscious of it, man.

So you finish around 5:67 and then what's the evening look like?

That's my wife's time, man. Yeah, see, I love her more than anything else in the world.

Yeah.

How long have you been together?

Brooke and I have been together for seven years now.

She got married while you were in the Navy.

Yeah.

And was that challenging for her to be with someone who's off in war every day?

I wish you could ask her that question. I mean, I feel like it was more challenging for her than it was for me. For me, you know, and as a SEAL you're gone on average I'd say 300 days out of the year. I mean you're not at war that whole time. It's training, but you know, it's a mix of both and yeah, it's extremely difficult man. Yeah, for sure and she you know, she suffered from it, you know, and but luckily we're still together and Again, because of the adversity we went through in our marriage, it's the same theme, brother. The adversity we went through in our marriage, my wife had a very dangerous disease called addiction.

She.

Got wrapped up in that for a while and we had to go through the process, I shouldn't say wrapped up, she was in it. and it was bad, dude. And that's a whole nother story, man. But we had to go through that adversity together, and now we have the best freaking marriage on Earth, man.

You know, so what's the greatest lesson she's taught you while you were an active Navy SEAL and since your retirement?

Humility. Humility for 100.

She's.

She.

She.

She's. She keeps me grounded, man. Yeah, she did that all, you know, because as a team guy, man, you're hanging out with active duty, you know, pipe-hitting alpha males all day long. And you need somebody to pull you back down to earth sometimes. And even with ultra running, you know, I'm really competitive there. And I'm not a cocky person, dude, but if I start to get a little lofty, with, you know, my speech or something like that, man, she'd snatch me right back down to where I need to be.

Okay. So, so humility has been the biggest lesson. What's something she that you've learned about her since you've left the Navy that has surprised you? That's different than when you were together in the Navy. Because you've had more time with her, I'm assuming.

I would say, I would say how talented that she is. Like, I didn't get to pay enough attention to her talents when I was active duty. And now that I get to spend more time with her and she's getting to pursue some of her passions, it just has blown me away with how talented she is. So she loves photography. She's an awesome cook and just her people skills, man. So, that's the biggest thing.

What's the, do you have any regrets from anything in the 12 years? Or wish you could have gone longer? Because you had to retire essentially because of the hearing loss from all the.

Bombs and... Yeah, it was a whole combination of stuff.

Bunch of different things, they pretty much.

Said, so I was medically retired.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

Would you have stayed in it had you been perfectly healthy, 100%?

Oh yeah, man. Yeah, I would have definitely, I mean, I would have stayed in the teams as long as they would have let me. I mean, you get to go to work with heroes every single day, bro. Why would you ever want to leave that, you know? Do I have any regrets? Nothing that really stands out, man. I really wouldn't change a thing.

You wish you would have found a few more walls to get behind. A couple more rocks.

No, no, man. It's all brought me to where I am now. Yeah, I'm sitting here talking to Lewis Howes, man. I mean, in my opinion, I don't deserve to be here, bro. Yeah. But the whole chain of events have brought me to where I am now. Yeah, and I'm not trying to put you on a pedestal. I'm just using you as an example because we're sitting right here.

Sure, sure.

Face to face, you know?

What were some of the coolest moments that you got to experience where you're actually in the moment thinking, man, I'm just a kid from this town in Georgia and now I'm, I don't want to speak out of line for you of what you've told me in the past, but now I'm doing this and now I'm doing this and this is crazy. Did you ever have any of those moments or were you just?

The coolest moments that I've had in my life have been since I retired this past January.

Really?

They have totally man. So much stuff has happened dude. Just like the vision I told you about and being able to let go and move forward into this awesome future. I mean not holding on to the identity of the past.

-Exactly.

-This is who I was.

This is my dream. This is my whole life. Now it's over. -I'm holding on to like the glory days.

-Yeah. So, the coolest moments have definitely been in this last 8-10 months. The coolest moments of my life Really? Yeah, man. And not to take away from what we did in the teams, but that was a job. It got to the point, and I think all guys get that, it's no different than you going to do what you do with your group every day. It was a job, dude. We had a mission. We went and did it. Skydiving, diving, that was all a job, man. But now it's fun. and it's like all these exciting things are have happened and just the network getting to know people like you, like, like, like Jesse, you know, Scott Worthington out in New Zealand, getting to know, create this network of just awesome individuals. And it's been amazing, bro.

Wow.

So I would say those are, those are, I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but, yeah, yeah, it's all good.

Make sure to subscribe and leave a comment below. And if you want to watch an incredible interview I did with Kobe Bryant, check out this video right here. It's exciting when you win, it's exciting when you lose because the process should.

Be exactly the same. Whether you win or you lose, as.

You go back and you look and you find things that you could have.

Done better, you find things that you've done well that worked.