Are You Lazy or Just Burned Out? (Tips to Overcome Both) | Lewis Howes

We need more energy, we need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed. What happens is people are so over activated, they're in this alertness, hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress.

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Below and let's dive into this conversation.

All trauma, anxiety, fears, they all map back to stress in some way. Now, you can have stress without trauma, you can have anxiety without trauma, but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety. So even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear, I think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times. Right. It's sort of carrying over from an experience. It's making life uncomfortable or in some cases, exceedingly challenging. For example, so someone has a, you know, sexual assault, somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident. Veterans come back from overseas, there's kind of first person trauma where something happens to somebody, and then there's third person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen. There's grief. And so there are a lot of categories. And so we don't want to complicate the landscape and the answer, but I think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this. And when we talk about stress, I think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress. Fear, anxiety.

What are the two types of stress?

Okay, the two types of stress are we. The one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress, we think people, pupils dilating, hands shaking, heart beating. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, you're really upset. You're Stuck in traffic, Something is really bothering you. You're angry, you're having the fight or flight response that, you know, that phrase gets thrown around a lot. And in those circumstances, it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down to reduce the so called stress response. And we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and that are very reliable. There's another side of the stress response.

So what would that stress be called? What's that type of stress?

So unfortunately, there's no name for this. This is one of the important things. Maybe we'll figure it out today. Maybe your audience will figure it out. They're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too. Unfortunately, there isn't a word for this, but this is one type of stress. This is one type of stress, which is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated and you want to be less alert, less activated and less agitated.

The alert stress.

That's right. We could call it the alert stress hyper.

Alert hyper Alert stress hyper.

Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. Yeah, there's another side of stress, which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world. Pandemics. You can't work because they've shut, there's another shutdown, or there's strife in your life, or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough. And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people. That what I call the whole process is one of limbic friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain. Limbic literally means edge. They're near the edge of the brain. And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions. And then we got our forebrain, our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados. And when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner, when we can control our body and our mind, it's called top down processing. We're controlling ourselves, but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices soon. So when there's this friction, we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion. You can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. And in fact, as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive. When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing, they just. They just do that. And so there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say, calm down, don't. Don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you don't, you know you shouldn't do. And then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried, we're overwhelmed, and we need to get more activated.

We need more energy.

We need more energy. We need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed.

What's that called?

Well, we should come up with a name now. So that would be Exhaustion Stress. Exhaustion Stress.

Or Overwhelm Stress.

Or Overwhelm Stress. Now, a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes, which sometimes they are. But they'll say things like adrenal burnout, which actually doesn't exist.

Fatigue.

Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline. But most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes. So the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so over activated, they're in this alertness, hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress.

Okay, so one turns into the other one.

Right.

So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress, and then we'll talk about trauma, is to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up, or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down? Because the solutions to those are often quite different. So on the previous time we met, we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly, which is this double inhale, long exhale. Typically, the inhales are done through the nose, the exhale through the mouth. So the physiological sigh, which was discovered by scientists in the 30s, and then Jack Feldman's group at UCLA has really identified the underlying brain circuits. And then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting that Double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real time tool for taking one's state of alertness down.

The hyper alert stress.

You're not going to crash into sleep, but you're going from, you're not feeling good, you're too agitated, you want to calm down. And what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. So when you're stressed, just telling yourself, don't stress, don't stress, don't stress, calm down, calm down. Rarely works. It also rarely works to tell someone.

Else to calm down, to relax. Hey, relax.

Yeah, usually it has the opposite effect.

Don't tell me to relax.

And it can be damaging for relationships. If you've ever, you know, someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't support it.

What should they do in that moment?

They should look to the body. The nervous system includes the brain but also all the connections to the body and back again. And so when you can't control your mind, you want to do something purely mechanical like the physiological sigh. Because that, you know, once you take control of the body in that way then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again. Top down control is what children and puppies don't have. You know, if we had, yeah, I've got a 10 year old bulldog, his name's Costello. He barely does anything now because he's Costello. But he, but when he was a puppy, everything was a stimulus. He would walk over, pick up a cord and chew on it. Then he dropped it and he'd pivot to something else. And it's because they have, they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system. They don't have this suppression so there's no friction. The limbic system just does whatever it wants. And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia and in certain people who have frontotemporal brain damage, they become very impulsive.

My dad went through, I don't know if I talked about this the last time, but my dad had a traumatic car accident 15 years ago. It was 15 years ago, a couple months ago where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head, pretty much split open his head. His girlfriend at the time was holding his head together. Went to the hospital, airlifted in a helicopter, in a coma for three months. And it's been a 15 year journey where we had to teach him, reteach him how to write, how to talk, how to walk, everything where it was almost like he was my father in his body, but his mind was having to relearn like a child. And even today when I see him and visit him, he'll swear just compulsively, he'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the. I don't know, you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist, but what happens when someone has brain damage, especially in the frontal cortex? What happens to the brain?

Yeah, so these top, when I say top down control, there's literally a set of wires, we call them axons from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system. And when there's damage, it's essentially removing that brake. And in adults, older adults especially, because their behaviors aren't quite as, you know, because they're older, they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out explicatives and these kinds of things. Fortunately, although sometimes you see that, sometimes you see that sadly, but those circuits aren't functioning well. And in young children, if you ever go to a classroom, I guess now kids are home a lot. But in a typical kindergarten classroom, what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other kids are rocking back and forth and moving around a ton. And the teacher is constantly trying to. I was one of those kids trying to corral the children. And children mature at different rates. And what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex. When you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior, you're looking at a child that has a lot of top down control. The frontal cortex is really engaged now.

Is that genetic? Is that.

It's probably a mixture. It's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic, like most things. And I'm not trying to just hedge here.

Sure.

I think, you know, like for instance, I have a niece who is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm. And so we, you know, we wonder, you know, what, you know, is this genetic? Is it nature, nurture? You know, there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also a lot of environmental influences. I mean, a lot of what we're taught in school and at home, because a lot of kids are homeschooled now, is about what not to do.

Right.

You Know, sit still, don't say this, don't say that. You know, we get the say please and thank you, you know, sit up straight, you know, do your dishes kind of stuff. But a lot of the don't language is designed around these things of top down control. We set up a lot of important social constraints and we've all felt this as adults too in two ways. It becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system. One is when we're, when we're very fatigued, when we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain, physical pain, chances are when something bothers us, we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing.

That we wish we don't have.

Patience.

Exactly.

No patience.

That's right.

So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or, or overwhelming, exhausted stress?

Okay, so when we are hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting, but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side, it seems like the world is going very slowly. You're going to just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're going to feel impatient. And if the world is moving much too slow, sort of like if you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't.

Know where you're going.

I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning and we can't see each other in cars. You think what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn. So there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going really fast.

Okay.

And so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same, but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope. So we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological size. We are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there, or if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P H R E N I C that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm, that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to Use the sigh, the physiological side, to calm myself in a way. You're engaging top down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

You can't fix your mind with your mind.

Sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just going to keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or smoke, it just moves, it's vapors. You're never going to grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, this phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that, you literally have a wire, set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs and, and then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top down control of the cortex can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh on the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep, and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously, but getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life. We can talk about how to get better at sleeping. But in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system. Focus, focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well established medical fact. All medical students learn this, all MDs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming From. So when we inhale. When we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up. But actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay. So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger, which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time, a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up. And speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. This actually, there's a name for it in the medical community. But the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back and says, slow down the heart rate.

And so this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhales. So let's say you get up in.

The morning, our longer inhale, shorter exhale.

That's right. To speed up your heart rate and.

To be more alert, not longer exhale, double intake.

Right. So longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. And there's. This has a name which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know, that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate.

You think, all day long. Well, you're asleep there.

That's right. Well, Slow heart rate is better than high heart. Artificially, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

Why?

Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up, and then your brain is slowing it down, your heart rate is speeding it up, and your brain is slowing down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm, alert way. But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go. And all of a sudden your heart rate just goes. And you feel like you immediately want to respond, or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, or you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response. The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be. And then shorter inhales, longer exhales. Or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at.

Your phone in the news.

The world is overwhelming me. My life is overwhelming. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't even know what sequence I'm going to do things in. You're just discombobulated. And a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized, which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're gonna feel more alert. And then you can just go back to breathing normally so you don't have.

To do this for hours. You do this for a few moments or minutes.

That's right. And while I'm a fan of breathwork as its own thing, because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak, breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind, using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart rate, mind in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind, start with your breathing then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

So don't think your way out of a moment of stress. Breathe your way out of this moment of stress.

That's right.

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And one of the things, and I'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second. The yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? This is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree, I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known about this for many centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language. And the yoga community has known about this for long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just want to be clear that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively. But we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that once. And yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming and on yogis in different areas of the world when they say something they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But mechanism. If people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me and therefore I should go to this particular tool. You know, I, I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car. But you do need to know how the control panels work. This is why we send people to driving school and why we don't let 10 year olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some.

Yeah, yeah.

On a farm somewhere.

Yeah.

Well, actually there was this one news thing. I don't know if you've seen this where a state trooper pulls or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and I think the kid was 6 years old.

Oh my God.

He actually managed to get onto the freeway and he was driving the left hand lane and his driving was pretty bad but he was below the wheel. Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort.

Explore.

We are definitely not recommending that. But this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there. We have, we're all. Most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is what I'm hearing. You can't just steer thoughts. You need to also use the brakes or also use different levers which is the entire car.

That's right. It's very hard to control the mind. With the mind it can be done. There are people that get better at that.

Right. Maybe it's a practice over time, but.

Using I Say when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body, because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale, exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard, or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacs in their lungs. Now, inhale, emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold.

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. Well, it can be as small or as large as you want. It has to be meaningful to you. So if it is, you know, 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 writing 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.

The recent focus on burnout is really fascinating because you're right, like that, that is one stat. There are tons of other stats. Like everybody is talking about this and everyone's trying to figure out what's underneath it. And there's some kind of obvious things, right? There's the fact that when we kind of annihilated the separation between work and home in terms of like the actual physical, it's all happening.

It's work and home, right?

So people, you used to have a much easier time creating boundaries. They're sort of like, okay, so I'm leaving the place where I do that thing called work. Even though the boundaries had been blurred a lot more in the recent years through technology, there was still some level of boundary. And now when it all exists in one space, and most people, they never learned how to create that boundary within the same space. It's a whole different thing. And then you pile on an existential crisis, a global health crisis, extreme stress and anxiety about well being, and we don't have the cognitive bandwidth to actually figure out how to remake our work world in a way that actually allows us to breathe and so I think that's part of it. And I think that's what a lot of people are pointing to. They're like, basically it's the conflation of everything happening in one place, the demands of the workplace not going away and people not being structured and, and having the systems and process and boundaries to do it. But I think that's not the whole story because I think we're pointing to that. But what I think we're missing is the fact that this is not a new problem. It's been exacerbated for sure. But burnout has been on the rise on every survey, every bit of research that I've seen for the last 10 to 15 years. So this is just kind of bringing it to the surface because it was the perfect storm of circumstance. But it's been going on for a long time. And I think there's an underlying issue, and that is that the average person tends to wake up in the morning and go to do something that is not necessarily well aligned with a fundamental impulse for work that would nourish them in a deeper way. And over time, that level of misalignment turns into outright conflict. But we never really deal with it, we never address it. A lot of us just sort of look at work as the thing we do. Put money on the table, a roof over a head, and it does all those things, and those things matter to everybody. But this has caused a level of sort of existential crisis where people are saying not only am I working way more hours with no boundaries, with things that I'm doing. Right. But also the fact that I'm doing these things that really don't nourish me are making it that much worse. And everything is imploding. But there's an amazing opportunity at the same time.

Yes. And there was a day after 911 you opened up a yoga studio, is that right?

Yeah. So I signed the lease for. I signed a six year lease for a floor in a building in Hell's Kitchen, New York, to open what I hoped would become sort of like, you know, one of the premier yoga studios in the city. The day before 9 11.

The day before, yeah.

The day before 911 I was married, I had a three month old baby, a new home, lived in the city, and I woke up the next day. And like everybody else, my first thought is, who did I know? Because everybody who was a long time knew people in the towers. And then the next thing was, what am I doing here?

Was there a point in your career as a lawyer before Then where you were feeling burnout or there was a lot of integration of alignment in what you meant to do and your skill set.

And so.

So you're like, so you started to shift into asking yourself this question, like, what should I be doing with my life?

Yeah. I mean, it's funny because this is something that's become really front and center in my work over the last chunk of years. But the truth is the bigger question, the seeds really got planted. About two decades ago. I was working as a lawyer in a very past life, you know that. And I was working insane hours, just like non stop, basically 100 hour weeks with very little break, sometimes never going home for a couple days at a time. A huge amount of stress because I was a securities lawyer at a big firm. And the stakes were massively high. And you had to be perfect. That's what we got paid for. And I ended up doing that. I ended up basically, my immune system fell apart. Large infection kind of exploded in the center of my body, eating a hole through my intestine from the outside in, sending me into emergency surgery. Wow. So burnout? Yeah.

You felt burnout?

Yeah. I mean, literally, like my body was eating a whole thing from the inside out. It was beyond burnout. It was sort of like I had nothing left inside of me. And that was a huge wake up. This was late 90s. Okay, so this is a couple years before 9, 11.

Or is it like.

Yeah, this is like 96, 97. That was a huge wake up call for me. Like, I went back to work after that. I recovered, I took a couple of weeks, I went back to the office. But from that moment on, I knew, like, I had this question which was like, how do we do this differently? How do we do this thing called work differently? Like, how can I show up and say, well, I'm doing something that's meaningful, where there's a sense of purpose behind it, where I feel like I'm alive when I'm doing this thing, where I'm excited and enthusiastic to do it. And there are a lot of things that contribute to that. But the seed, I think it's because I've been trying to trace it back recently. I think the real original seeds for this work were planted 20, 25 years ago. And I've never let go of that question.

Do you think if someone's feeling a physical sickness or pain or like skin rash or whatever, that they should be taking notice of those signs as part of like, burnout or out of alignment with your relationship or your career, like the physical manifestation of pain.

Right. Okay. So. So first let's preface this by saying I am not a doctor.

Yes.

But as a play one anywhere, as.

An intuitive spiritual human.

So let me talk to you about my experience. Yeah. Personally. Yeah, I. When I. And I'm under psychological, emotional, physiological, you might even call it spiritual stress, existential stress, my body takes the hit. What I've learned over time is that as a multi time entrepreneur and somebody who just works really hard, I've trained my mind to a point where my mind can actually take a lot. But even when my mind is kind of like the world is spinning, but my mind is relatively okay. The tell for me is my body, my physical body, it manifests in illness and pain and all the stuff you just laid out, inflammation. And I've learned over the years that if I don't listen, eventually it brings me to my knees, you know, because, and, and I, and I don't think I'm alone with that. I mean, does it, how does it show up for you? Do you think you a lot?

Yeah, it's just a. I feel it in my chest, I feel it in my throat. Like I feel like something's like strangling me. Depending if you know, that's usually like intimate relationships in the past where I feel like, okay, I felt trapped in like my heart and my throat. Then like I started to notice.

Yeah.

I started to have like this eczema that came out at one point in the last couple years when I felt like things were unaligned and literally the moments that I, that I eliminated those things from my life and to said, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not abandoning myself or whatever it is from what I'm supposed to do. It's like it cleared up within days after like months of it happening. And I was like, there's not a coincidence. I did all the blood work, I did all the allergy tests and they were like, no, you're fine.

Right.

I was like, well, what is this then? Like, why is this happening? But it was because I was out of integrity with my own. I was abandoning myself essentially with what I felt like I should be doing in my life that I felt like I'm supposed to be doing and I wasn't doing the thing I was supposed to do. And that would mean like my body was screaming at me, stop.

Yeah, course.

Correct.

Well, I mean it's so interesting that you bring it up, right? Because I know we both spend a lot of time seeing like a lot of different types of, like, medical specialists, wellness specialists, done every test you could do on the planet. And it's fascinating to me that when you go into somebody who takes a very holistic or functional medical point of view, very often the first session with them is hours long. And it's not just, let's look at all of your labs. Tell me where it hurts.

Tell me about relationship.

How are you feeling? Are you stressed out? Are you sleeping well? Yeah. Right. How many friends do you have in your life? How often do you. All this other stuff. Because there's definitely a growing acknowledgement, the fact that the way you live your life, that the, you know, the appearance of stress, the appearance of, you know, poor relationships, it affects you in a really powerful way.

Huge way.

Yeah.

I remember Dr. Lissa Rankin.

Yeah.

She talked about this, where she was on, I think, seven or eight medications, and. But she's a doctor treating people, but she was sick. And it's like. I think it was something with, like, her relationship or her marriage was out of, you know, wasn't working. And we. Once she addressed the root of the emotional pain, she was like, oh, I got off medication and I didn't need this for my body. I don't know if that's 100% the true story, but it's something like that. And I think it's this idea of burnout or the body gaining inflammation or feeling pain are signs. What's the analogy of the frog that goes into water and then it starts to boil?

If you. The story that I've heard is if you slowly turn up the heat. Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. It basically never leaves.

It doesn't jump out until it dies.

Right. By the way, I've been told recently that that's an urban legend. Yeah.

You put a frog in water, you jump it out.

It's an awesome story.

Right, right.

The story is, like, if you put a frog in water, like lukewarm water, it won't jump out. And if you turn up the heat and it starts to boil, it'll stay there because it's not feeling it.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's like, you know, we need to go through some type of extreme pain for us to feel it and kind of wake up and ask ourselves, what should I be doing right now?

And, man, I wish that was not the case. I have asked so many people. I know you've asked similar questions also. I've asked so many people over the years, you know, who have made these profound changes in life, you know, and went through. Literally, they were brought to their knees and they had nothing on so many different domains of life and then found their way back. And I've asked so many people, and I've asked great philosophers, great spiritual teachers, scientists. Do you think you can actually get to the place where they were without having gone through some big profound thing like that? And almost to the one, the answer has been no. Which really bugs me because I want to believe that you can have a profound and powerful moment of reckoning, realization, reawakening and reclamation without that. And I've probably spent a large part of my adult life trying to figure out what are the insights, what are the moments and experiences that we can create for people that would allow them a more easeful process of awakening. But it's hard.

Yeah, it's hard. And I have this theory that the scariest place to be as a human being is when things are really good. In my opinion, the scariest place to be is when maybe not really good, but when they're good, things are just good. What's underneath that I would rather take things are really bad than things are good. Because I meet so many people, they're like, you know what, Louis? I've got a good life. Like, I've got. I'm married. I've got like, my kids. I've got this, this job. It's a good. It's a good job. It pays me, like, you know, I've got a six figure salary. It's good, but, you know, there's just. It's not exactly what I want. It's not everything I want, but it's good. Just enough to not drive them to want to make a change or see growth in some area. It's almost like they're just, okay, it's good, but I want more, but I don't know how to do it. And I'd rather have, like, man, everything is breaking down right now. Because then I can wake up and go for something like what I'm supposed to be doing with my life and how I can really lean into that.

So.

So when things are good, and I know the whole thing's about the good life project, but it's like when things are good and you're not driven to do 100% of what you're supposed to do, you're like 70, 80% of what you're supposed to do, but not all the way there, it's hard to get.

That extra 20%, I think, personally.

Yeah, Scary for me. I know. And we've had this debate over years.

And it's like, hey, just be satisfied with where you're at, you'd be like.

And I think a lot of it actually is. I think we actually really agree, but we just use different language.

Yes, of course.

You know, like. Because what you just described to me is actually not a good life or the good life. Right. To me, that's the complacent life of sort of like baseline getting by. Right. But what I'm interested in is underneath that, whether we use the word great or good, like, underneath what I'm looking at the qualities of the life. Right. Absolutely. Do I have a strong sense of meaningfulness? Yeah.

Fulfillment?

Do I have a sense of immediate purpose and also a larger sense of purpose in life? Am I excited and enthusiastic about what I'm doing? Do I feel like I'm fully expressed on a personal level, on a potential level, and what I'm more focused on? And I think this has been an evolution just in my personal thought is, what are we actually talking about? And I think when you're talking about greatness and I'm talking about good, we're actually talking about the same underlying qualities.

Of course.

And I think the pursuit of those is amazing. And when you don't have any of that, then, yeah, you wake up every morning and the world is just not right. Yeah.

It's like the superficial. Like, things look good, but, you know, there's something more for you. You know, you're like. You're supposed to be doing something.

Yeah. See, I thought you were going to go to a different place, too. Really? Yeah. Because I thought what you were going to say was, when? For some people, when everything's going well, everything's going good, there's a different anxiety experience that very often crops up. Like what? And there's a different set of fears, which is all about loss, aversion.

This is all gonna go away.

Right. Which is like that Bill, when's the shoe gonna drop? The relationship, the money, the job, the security, the health, all of this. Like, things are so good that I think there is a pathology that I've seen in a lot of folks which says, either I'm not worthy, it's not gonna work, it's not sustainable. And I'm terrified about this all going away or pieces of it going away, and then that creates an anxiety spin.

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That actually leads to sort of like a contraction in all of the efforts and all of the outreach and all the conversation, the honesty and integrity that would let everything keep going. And then you inadvertently sabotage a genuinely good status quo without realizing that you're doing it. By contracting and no longer supporting or investing in it. Not realizing that it's actually that contraction and like the, you know, everything starting to go away is a direct result.

How do we not sabotage when we are finally aligned and we set up like we have the alignment with our mission or our career or our business, we have the alignment with like, wow, we're actually integrating the things we want into our relationship. We're aligned by not abandoning ourselves. Or how do we not sabotage ourselves when everything is going really, really good?

Yeah, I have no idea.

How do we not fall back into old patterns?

Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting. You know, a lot of it has to do with, I think it's a blend of wisdom. So like personal learning, a commitment to growth. Right. Inner practices. And those are the practices that keep you physically, emotionally, psychically spiritually healthy and focused and present and able to be resilient and respond rather than react. And also external scaffolding.

What does that mean?

The circumstances in your life. And that might include relationships, that might include your physical environment, that might include creating all sorts of default states that help you do the thing that you know you want to be doing to support the life that you're living without you having to every day consciously make the choice to do it. Katie Milkman talks a lot about this in her work and her research on behavior change. And that it's not just about self control, it's not just about willpower. You know, there's a whole bunch of inner and outer scaffolding that you can create that make it so you don't have to wake up every day and use all this cognitive bandwidth to make the decisions to make everything stay okay. Some of that you do want to be intentional, but there's also a lot of things that we can kind of put on autopilot that will help us basically take the decision or take the actions that we want to take by default. Without even having to think about them? Right, Right.

What about if we feel like we're in a rut? How can someone, do you think, get out of it through? Is it through a set of questions? Is it through a set of changes in their life? Is it through analyzing it? Is it through action?

Gina, I'm going to give you an answer you probably didn't expect, because I looked at almost every system that you could look at to try and figure things like this out, and there's a simple set of prompts that I've come back to over the years that I find really powerful, and that is Katie Byron's the Work.

She's great.

Right. I mean, it's like, what is it, four or five questions, Right. Like, really simple questions. Like, you know, you're in a moment where something's spinning in your head that's stopping you from taking action, and you make all sorts of assumptions about it that paralyzes. Then you ask these really simple questions like, is it true? Where's the evidence for. Where's the evidence against. So I think a really simple set of prompts can be incredibly powerful with that. If you're really in a rut where it's causing you mental illness or genuine emotional struggle, seek help, obviously, go and find professional help. But I think really basic processes and prompts, like the work, are really powerful. For me, one of the anchors in my life is a meditation practice, a daily meditation practice. I wake up every morning for over a decade now, and I have both a breathing and a meditation practice that changes my physiology, but it also changes my state of mind. So that as I move into my day, things may go south. There may be things that drop into my day that I don't want to happen, that I didn't see coming that really just knock me back. But what I found is that over the years, that practice creates a baseline level of equanimity that allows you to sort of, like, be more intentional about the way that you move through it and also relating back to being in a rut. Zoom the lens out a little bit, take a little bit more of a meta view into the thing that is causing you this feeling of stuckness and be able to kind of say, huh, what's really happening here? Because usually it's not the thing that you think it is. There's something bigger going on, and if you can address the bigger thing, then everything starts to free itself on its own. Yeah.

And I think a lot of things where you feel like you're in a rut Is you don't feel like you're implementing meaningful actions in your life or you don't have meaningful work. So what would you say are kind of the key factors to identifying meaningful work for yourself?

Yeah, you know, it's funny because I think a lot of people, like at work, and like we said, it's all about taking care of, like, the basic stuff, and it is. That all matters. We gotta sustain ourselves in the world and feel secure. I think the first way to actually really understand how to find meaningful work is to realize that meaningful work matters. Most people don't look at a job and be like, oh, is this meaningful to me?

Interesting.

Is this opportunity meaningful to me? Is this project, Will it actually give me the feeling that it matters? I matter that a sense of meaning. We're not actually using that as a criteria to judge what to say, yes or no.

What are we using? Like, is it pay well? Is it.

Will it advance my career? Will it give me power, prestige, status? Will it help build certain relationships? And again, it's not that any of those things are bad, right? But if all of those things are purely a proxy for meaningfulness and a sense of purpose and expression, potential and excitement and enthusiasm, then you may find yourself super accomplished and utterly empty inside.

That's true.

You know, you've climbed the ladder. Awesome. You've got the money, you've got the job, you got all the stuff that, like, you wanted to check off on your achievement box. And then you're sitting there and you're like, okay, so I don't feel the way I thought I would feel. And now I've gotten everything that I tried to get. I don't know what my next move is. And the answer is, because those things aren't actually the things that matter in life. They aren't the things that make you feel good. They alone will not give you the feeling that you're looking for. There's got to be something deeper. Whether you do that something deeper in the context of your job that you get paid for, or you do it as a role in your life or as a devotion or as a volunteer on the side. Like, if it doesn't get out, if it doesn't get expressed in some way, shape or form, that feeling of emptiness never goes away.

It's almost like you need to chase more power, fame, money, prestige to try to feel something, but then it's never enough.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. We're in this moment now. So everyone's heard the term midlife crisis, right? The classic. You hit your 40s, and all of a sudden you want to blow everything up and regain your hair and lose weight. But the thing about an existential crisis. An existential crisis is not a crisis of money. It's not a crisis of power. It's not a crisis of fame. It's not a crisis of. What is a crisis of? Is meaning. You're questioning the meaning of your existence because you show up at a certain point in your life and something inside of you says, I don't matter. And the thing that I wake up in the morning doing that consumes third of my life, most of my waking hours, doesn't matter to me, and it doesn't matter to the world. And when you cannot find something that gives you the feeling of meaningfulness, you experience profound sense of. Of loss. And that can lead to really dark places. So what we're seeing now, where people.

Just blow up their lives, like, I'm getting divorced. I'm going after this. I'm changing this.

So a lot of people will work for 20 years and then hit that point where they're kind of like, all right, it's just all built up, and they almost cause it themselves. What we're seeing now is that people aren't raising their hand and saying, okay, it's time for mice, or, like, existential change. The world has served this up at scale to everyone. So a lot of folks have looked at generations and sort of looked at their expectations for work. Yeah, I'm Gen X. We're the disaffected generation. In theory, we expected nothing and just like, put your head down and do the work. The generations behind me, I hate to use generational terms because it's like. But the interesting thing is that, like, millennials, even though millennials is not one generation, it's actually like a wide range of people. But so you fall into that group. Right.

Like an old millennial, I think.

Yeah. Right. So a lot of the corporate world for years has struggled because something happened in the generation behind me where the expectation for meaning, the expectation for purpose, beyond money, beyond status, has gone up dramatically since your corporations, organizations that were built without assuming that that had to be something that was part of what they provided. And then they have millions of new workers coming into the organizations expecting that. And if they don't get it, they're gone really fast. Corporations have been grappling with this in a way, and they haven't figured out how to actually deliver this. And now all of a sudden, the last 18 months happens it's not just millennials anymore.

How do we train our mind and our body to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy?

Yeah, well, first it's know thyself because we all, we're all different. And 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, okay. Self discipline is about, 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, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self discipline is about managing the internal discipline. The way I talk about 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, has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy Seal. The external world has started a podcast. The external world has a say in whether or not you do that. 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? So I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I said, 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 structured. 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 most successful people are those who have both self discipline, discipline 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, then I can say, well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me, 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 an active or one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that sort of creating.

A reward system first for the goal, in order to help you stay motivated.

Depending on how you show up.

Not to say like, okay, I'm gonna. 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 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 process.

This is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter is you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many 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. We got it. We got to extend that. We got 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, 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, Yeah, 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, you know, three months to six months, usually.

This is Iraq and Afghanistan for the most part. 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 all so 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 folks are deploying for a year, 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. 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. Yeah, Well, I mean, luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy. But we found was 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 overseas in 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 real trouble, he was young. I mean, he was, you know, he was born in 05, so he was. By the time he was 2, 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.

Yeah.

In order to.

We had to help them compartmentalize, survive. Yeah.

And not go depressed or be stressed. Because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization.

Yeah.

How do you do that if you're an emotional human being, that 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. 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 time. You have to win the gunfight, right? Because. Because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home, right? So you have to. 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 are able to recognize that have actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing. It just happens without us, 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 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. I say that with immense gratitude, because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that. Can't say that they had those moments where they, you know, 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 through out of. But I say that also, this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when shit goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up. The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm going to get out of this. The focus is, how do I get out of this? So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability. 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 brain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight flight response. And you're able to think through stress, challenge, and uncertainty in the sense of, say, okay, what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in. Because now I have a team. I mean, I can say this with great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

Sketchy.

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

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

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

Yeah, so, you know, just like, I mean, just like any athlete would understand, or 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. This is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. Okay, well, during. As we're coming in on Insertion. 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 8020 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, hey, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure out why. 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. What I call Huberman and I both have called this as the autonomic set point. You know, at what point do we start flipping into an automatic, into an autonomic response, into fight flight, where our system starts 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 2:30 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, I live in a neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, there's four other Navy SEALs in the neighborhood. There's one across the street, one down the road.

Must be nice.

Well, it is nice, a because they're great dudes. And it's great because they're great neighbors. But I remember my wife once saying, she said, hey, I'm so glad these guys are here 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. So I think we show up predisposed training to. It is difficult. So he actually working on some stuff to help train to Help teach people to, 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.

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, right? 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. I mean, some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake for me. That would be hard, right? 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 that makes them anxious. So working out for some, for some people, they've developed a system where that pitch pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy. Right. So they're not practicing it. So someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves, what fright? Well, 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. 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. 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. Okay, anxiety 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. You can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic come off of the autonomic response system. Right. So that's, so that's how you could start, you know, kind of buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external. Okay. 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 have referred to it kind of control your three foot world, 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? 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 stepping through, stepping through this challenge. You can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by 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 going to do it, I know I can figure it out if there's enough interest, if there's enough passion. I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, so that's off my list. 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 moving, 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 for 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. That's the guys. So it's not the same. It's different. Yeah, it's different. There's a lot more. And when you're in the military, there's no expectation of kind of great articulation or humor or.

What'S effective.

Here's the word. And that's what you appreciate, too. There's like, 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, but that's not public speaking.

What do you think was the hardest lesson you had to Learn through your 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.

Okay, 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. 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 the efforts. The first is empathy. And again, I would say this. There's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide because there are.

People who will look 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. So let's just back up here. Empathy, not just I know how you feel. I feel how you feel. Right. I can put myself into your shoes. And that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about. Shows that you care about another human being.

What is the best way to show that? I mean, give me an example as opposed to saying I know how you feel. How do you feel? Empathize, Showing you feel how they feel.

Well, first, deep listening. So listening to another person, but true 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 saying 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, I played football in eighth grade. Maybe I could talk about that, relate. But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you I anymore. I'm making what you're saying about me what deep empathetic listening is. I have a whiteboard in my mind. 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. If you empathetically listen, 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.

I used to take one day off.

A week for the body 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. At a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate. And I replace 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.

Yeah.

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. 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 person was not built. This person was not made by God. This person. Sorry. This person 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 not as you're putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be £300. 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. Yeah, real authentic confidence from hard work, everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people.

For your self esteem, for validation.

You now know. I walk in a room now and I know that 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, 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 are going to be 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, you have a disability and you still want to be at the top of your class. I didn't want to 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, that validatorial study 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 Gagas 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 do. You can outwork anybody, how badass they are, but that's the part people don't want to 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 could 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 going to 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 is knowing I no longer care if I sit here and start stuttering to you.

Yeah.

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 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. 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. Still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they had 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. If I start talking like this, people go, man, you know? No, no, it's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You just got to go and face it. That's the hard part.

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 always talk about. I. I pay rent. So we live. We used to live in a $7 a month place when I was growing up.

This is in Buffalo, or is this.

This is in Indiana. 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 $7 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 wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I achieved so much. I was a Navy seal. I'd gone through Ranger school, I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I'd done so much. I run 200 miles, pull up records, everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick and I talk 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 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.

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'd done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

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

Like, I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony.

Most people sit around and that's what they like. They, they need the ceremony.

If I accomplished something, validation.

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

Just getting started.

I'm just getting started. That's right. When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I called my 40% rule. Yeah, I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was just dumb fat kid being bullied. Bullied. And now I'm 180 pound person. Lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learned 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 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, 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 want to 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 your 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?

I wasn't training myself yet 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 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.

Wow.

I wasn't. I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that you, 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 and at peace. Because I reflected back on where I started.

You said, wow, 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. And 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.

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 all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go to not, not surface. I don't, I don't live on the surface of anything. Yeah, surface of what got me where I was at. It got me from £175 to £300 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, is real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds and 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. Yeah, 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. 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 or Cracker Barrel. Yeah, it's the easy route. Very few 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.

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? I was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. 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 Hurt Me these 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. 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 so much more peace.

It's 100 in 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 4020 pull ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.

4024 hours or was this.

Yeah, it's 4020 pull ups in 24 hour period. The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pennant and.

Say 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 reshackle 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 I could be named Seal.

Wow.

So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book, right? There'd be no book, right? There'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. It will haunts me the most. People ask me, what haunts you the most? What haunts me the 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. But let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm £300, 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 name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was going to change the world. I was going to. I was going to set records. I was going to be a Navy seal. I was going to be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're going to get the VFW award. You get to be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, this isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy. I sprayed for cockroaches, and I'm 300 pounds. He said, here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. 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? 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, I don't believe so. Because one thing I found out was I didn't. For several years, I gave myself a way out.

When you were £300 or no, £300.

When I was all the way up Till I was 24 years old, I would climb a mountain. I 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. Up. He says, hey, this is your last time you're going to go through buds. 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. He 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 fix.

Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training hard. The hardest thing in the world was 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, 4:00 in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me. I get duct tape and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the middle of my calf. And I would put two black socks on. And so I ran. You not using the pivot.

Oh, my gosh.

Now 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 through that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world broken, 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 when things are really going haywire, like, how do you center yourself? And I learned very early in my business career that the thing that because I looked back, there was a bunch of us at awareness technologies that were given the same spiel. Don't think of yourself as an employee, think of yourself as a person partner. If you act like a partner and achieve certain results, we'll actually make you a partner. And nobody did it. I was just like, why am I the only one that's doing this? I realized that my ability to self soothe was a huge part of that. So other people would get upset, they would derail, they would take their eye off what they wanted to achieve because they were frustrated or whatever. And I could just bring myself back to center. Now those are pretty small tests. And obviously as things have gone on, you start dealing with big numbers, you start to realize, is this real? Can I actually center myself? When, say, hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake? Then it's like, okay, this still works. That was very encouraging, very encouraging. Because when you get a test that's way beyond where you've been tested before, you're like, how's this going to work? So that was pretty extraordinary.

How do you soothe under chaos?

It is a.

For yourself.

The big thing for me was recognizing that I'm having a biological experience and that I need to understand the brain. Like the brain, not just the mind, which is incredibly important, but the brain. What is the brain doing? How does it hijack me? What is neurochemistry? What triggers it? Like, what are all the things, things that evolution has sort of primed me to do? It's what I call the physics of being human. So if you are a human, sort of regardless of intellect or experience or upbringing, there are a certain number of things that are true. They're as universal as universal is going to get. And look, nothing is perfectly universal. But some things are really close, like an internal dialogue. And an internal dialogue that skews negative, right? Which is where most people start. You get people like Kanye on one end who just cannot see themselves doing anything but the best ever, the greatest and all that. And then you get people who actually don't have an internal dialogue. Like there are no words going on in their head, which is crazy, but nonetheless true. But the vast majority of us live in a place where you have an internal dialogue. And that internal dialogue is largely negative. And so once you know, okay, cool. This is a trick of evolution and my brain. A guy named David Eagleman gave me this insight. He's a neuroscientist. This is so powerful, Louis.

I hope it hits you the way it hit me.

And he goes, think about this. Your brain is enclosed in a dark box. Light never touches your brain. Sound never reaches your brain. And everything you experience as being in the world out there beyond you is all happening in your brain. It is a virtual reality that your brain creates for you. And so I was like, I'm my obsession with the Matrix. And I'm like, oh, my God. Even though I don't think we're actually living in a simulation, your brain is creating a simulation of the real world. And I forget there's a. I had a physicist on the show, and he said, tom, objective reality is the number of photons reflecting off of any object. That's reality. But you don't perceive it like that. You look at something, it's like, this is gray, that's white. Your shirt is sort of green.

Sort of green. Yeah.

And, like, you just perceive it like that. And so your brain is not making any attempt to represent reality. Your brain is making an attempt to keep you alive and help you navigate the world. And I just thought, oh, that's so interesting. So knowing the heuristics that my brain is using, the rules of thumb, the shorthand, it's not true, but it has this massive influence on my life. So something bad happens and you take it on as negative.

It makes you feel.

Feel badly about yourself. I just put in all these rules of, like, well, that's not objectively true. So if I'm not worried about objective truth, what should be sort of the North Star. And for me, the North Star became utility. What's useful? And so once I shifted away from trying to be objectively true about myself, realizing I'm probably not going to ever nail that, but I can get to something that's very, very useful. And so then I wrote my beliefs down and sort of started thinking about value system. And I will end this rant with one thing, which is recognizing that brain plasticity is real. And so much of who we are, let's say it's roughly. Science says it's roughly 50%. It's not me making it up that 50% is hardwired and you're not going to be able to do anything about it. But 50% is insanely malleable. And I love this quote, so great that you can't make a racehorse out of a pig, but you can make a really fast pig. And I thought, okay, cool, so maybe I'll never be A racehorse. But I can be a really fast pig. And so whenever I'm feeling badly about myself or something knocks me off center, I just come back to that idea of what's useful. How do you move forward even if you're not going to be the greatest of all time? Does it benefit you to act as if you could become the greatest of all, all time if you pour yourself into it? And so I don't know that I'll ever end up being the greatest anything but.

Dude.

Acting like I can and like, really practicing and moving through the world like I can become the greatest has propelled me forward.

Yeah. Because acting like you can't won't get you there. Yeah. Won't make you good, probably. Or great if you're constantly obsessing over why I'm not good enough or why I'll never become great. So acting like you can at least gives you a much better chance of getting somewhere than nowhere.

100%. It's what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that if I put time and energy into getting a new skill, I actually will get better at that thing. And if you then extrapolate that and say, and skills actually have utility, they matter. So knowing how to build a business that doesn't fall, or build a business, build a building that doesn't fall down is very, very useful.

Or a business that doesn't fall.

That too.

Right.

So those skills actually let you do things. And so that's become sort of my obsession is getting people to understand. You don't read a book to check a box. You don't go to school to impress your parents. You do it because the skill that you will acquire lets you do something in the world that other people can't do or you wouldn't be able to do. And that has a material impact on your life.

Yeah. I feel like you and I are very similar in the fact that we talk about skills a lot and acquiring new skills. And I think when you have a down phase or a breakdown phase, that's when you should think about what are the skills I'm lacking that could benefit me so this doesn't happen again. I remember my early 20s. I had a lot of free time because I was broken on my sister's couch. I just obsessed over skills. And when you learn a skill that is hard, that you don't think you can accomplish and you actually master it, for me, I feel unstoppable. I feel like I can accomplish anything. I feel like even in a sense, setting where I feel uncomfortable. As long as I know in the back of my head, I've got these other skills that maybe they don't know about, that I can pull out at any time. They just make me more confident. I don't know if you feel the same way about acquiring skills 100%.

And it's interesting, and I know you talk about it, so some people in your audience, I'm sure, have a sense, but I think of you very differently than they think of you. So I don't think of you as on air talent, though you were obviously very gifted at that. Because I've spent so much time with you, I. Outside of that, talking strategy around how do you grow a podcast, how do you get good at YouTube, how do you build a business, whatever, and seeing how adept you are at those skills, that's where it gets interesting so that people understand that all the things you talk about, all the training that you do and stuff, it isn't the part that they see. The school of greatness is sort of the tip of this very large iceberg of skills that you're building. And that. That, to me, is the fascination. When you're not focused on the tip, but you're focused on actually building that foundational set of skills, what you can do with your life and what you can make as the tip of the iceberg that other people will recognize becomes really, really interesting.

It's interesting. My skill was never, I'm a good interviewer or a host or anything. I never would learn that skill. My skill was actually my fear was connecting with people. And as a teenager, I learned that in order to become successful in my life, I had to learn how to connect with people and build relationships. So I turned a fear into a superpower of building relationships, then translating that into, okay, let me interview people, was another thing I had to learn. But it was never my gift from birth. It was a skill I had to acquire and overcome. What was the greatest fear in the last five years that you had to overcome that has now become a skill, skill or a superpower for you?

I think the only thing that I've sort of thought through like that is I feel like Kobe Bryant when he split from Shaq. And it was like he wanted to. He obviously had won a championship with Shaq, but could he win a championship on his own? And so my last company was so successful, but I did it with two partners. And so now to have a new partner in Lisa, it's like, okay, can I also lead this team to a championship? And so that drives me in a way that I find so fun of, like, okay, cool, hey, as a part of that group, smashed it. But can I do it over here? So that like, reinvention, you know, trying things and letting myself feel the weight of like, hey, you gotta prove it, buddy. Like, you know, you had a big success once, can you do it again? And so doing that under new circumstances to me, like, I love that. Like, I love the excitement of can I, will he, won't he? So that's a lot of fun. But that's something that I think if I thought about the world differently. So I don't value myself for achieving it. So whether I achieve it or not is irrelevant. But showing up every day and sincerely pursuing it is what I value myself for. And I like to feel that sort of weight of like, hey, maybe you won't, maybe you're gonna fail. Maybe like, it was only you as a part of this collective, hey, you did a great job there. Or maybe it was just that moment in time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like you rode a wave. But like over here, can you create something from scratch? Can you repeat it? So, yeah, that it's not, it's not. I don't live in a space of letting that be a fear, but it's like that is. It's a cousin of that, like a.

Step sister or something. Yeah. Where do you think all success starts with?

Well, the fast answer is mindset, going back to the only belief that matters. You said it. The way you act is ultimately all that matters. And the way you act follows what you allow yourself to believe. Or maybe a better way to say it is what you choose to believe. So if you choose to believe that your energy and efforts will result in more skillset, then you will actually put energy and effort into to getting that, which means you actually will get the skill set. But if you think, well, my talent and intelligence are fixed, so no matter how much I work, I'm never going to get better.

Right.

I can't be a fast pig. And if you don't think that putting time and energy into it will yield anything, then you won't put time and energy into it and you thusly won't get the skills. If you don't have the skills, then you can't do the things other people can do. And so people just get stuck because they don't have the only belief that matters. So they don't put the time and energy. And so that's like where everything starts is, are you putting the time and energy into Getting better. Yes or no?

Yeah.

And when do you get the most angry and reactive are the things that make you reactive?

Yes, very much.

Maybe not angry, but like, well, no, this frustrates me. Don't do that.

I think the same, and I think you're right. I'm not somebody who's quick to anger. In 99.9 of my life, you might.

Not scream with anger.

I don't want to. Louis, that 0.1% really does get from me exactly where you're going, which is. When I see somebody accept excuses, make excuses, do less than they can, and it impacts me. So if I'm honest, if it's just impacting them, I don't get angry. Right. I feel compassionate.

Yeah.

But when it's like, and now you're dragging me down, now you're slowing me down. Now you're trying to talk me out of something. Now you're telling me I dream too big. Now you're hurling stones at me or whatever because of something that you've got on you, and I'm freaking you out because of how I'm moving or what I'm going for or whatever. That actually does make me angry.

So how often does your team make you frustrated if they're not taking responsibility? 100% of the time?

Because we have, like. So one thing I learned back at Quest, we grew so fast, and I just wasn't smart enough at the time. You're only as good as what you write down. And you can be small and sort of communicate everything in these interpersonal relationships. As you get bigger, it goes away.

Yeah.

And hope people have her memorized or something interesting. You're only as good as what you write down.

Correct. When you're running a company.

Yeah.

In terms of, like, having a process documented that someone could implement, not just a simple conversation that you hope they memorize.

100%. So coming into Impact theory, you have to sign. It's not a pledge, but it's about as close to a pledge as you're going to get. And it's our culture code document. And it says things like, you will take 100% responsibility for your job. You will be expected to look beyond your role. I mean, just like all these things, I love this. And one of them is, I only want to play with hardcore mothers. And it says, this is not a safe space, so do not come here expecting people to be kind. Like, look, we. Here's the thing. I also expect you to elevate your team and to lift them up and to celebrate them and Want them to win and, like, cheer them on and never worry about whether it was your idea. The only relationship worth being in, because all relationships are sacrifice. The only relationship worth being in is where you feel like, whoa, like, this person really cares about me. And I want people to retire at impact Theory. At a time where millennials stay at a company for 18 months, I'm asking them to stay for 40 years.

Wow.

Now, to do that, I've got to give you emotional stability. I've got to give you somewhere where you can build trust, where people are honest with you. But in being honest, people are going to be direct. They're going to say hard things in the spirit of, I want to lift you up. I want to see you get better. Because, remember, we believe that you can get better. And if you put your time and energy into improvement, that you actually will improve. And therefore you. You get more out of your life. The company gets more out of your involvement. But I really had to be hardcore about that because you'll hear a lot people say, don't hire for skills, hire for culture. Or John Wooden, sort of the best explainer of this, the famous basketball coach. I don't look for the best player. I look for the best fit. That really is true, man. When you get somebody who you can really relate to and you can say hard things and they're receptive and they say hard things and you know they're coming from. From a good place, it elevates you and it's fun to be around.

Right.

As a social animal, we just love that stuff. So that's huge. But I'm really hardcore on the way in so that once you're in, we can give you grace. Like, imagine if you were on my team. And I don't. I try never to refer to people as employees. I slip up from time to time, but I really think of them as teammates. So if you're my teammate and you're like, hey, look, man, I'm really having a hard time. My girlfriend and I are. We're just in a dark place place right now, and I'm going to need a couple weeks just to go sort it out. Don't even explain. I got it.

Cool.

I got you. Tell me what I need to know to be able to pick up the slack for you. We refer to vacations as being sacred. So we don't have. The only vacation policy we have is that it's unlimited. So do whatever you want, get your work done. You need to be a high performer, yada, yada, yada. But like, if you need the time to deal with your girlfriend, the death and the family, whatever, take that time, be an adult. Autonomy is huge for me. I assume it's huge for most people, so. But to do that, you've got to say, this is the criteria we expect you to meet.

You need to be high performing the rest of the time you're here.

And if any of this turns you.

Off, then it's not.

And it says that in the document. Like if, if this does not, if you're not prepared to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, then this is not the place for you.

Wow.

So is it literally saying a line, this is not a safe place?

Yes, this is not a safe space.

What does that mean, not a safe space?

It means that I'm going to make absolutely no effort to protect your feelings. I'm going to never, ever, ever sacrifice clarity for kindness. Now, I will be as kind. I want to be kind, dude, I want you to be kind to me. I want to be kind to you. My wife is my partner. I would never want an environment that was tearing her down.

So.

So it's like in the spirit of trying to elevate people. I'm not a Machiavellian kind of guy. That's gross to me. That is such a turn off. I want to like you would treat a friend. Dude, if you're in a dark time, you're going to underperform and I'm down. I'm with it. I will do your work for you, to create the space for you to have that moment. Because I know at some time it's going to be my moment. But that only works if I'm not parasitic. You're not parasitic. It's going to be hard enough if you don't have ill intent. Now if you are lazy, if you have ill intent, if you are trying to milk the system or whatever, then it's never going to work. But if it's just legitimately you're going through a period we will all go through, which is a very hard time for whatever the hundreds of reasons throughout our lives that we will underperform, be in a dark place, whatever. If at that moment people lift you back up, they brush you off, remind you of who you are and who you can be and they love you and they're there with you.

Cool.

We all get it.

Yeah.

But to do that, you really have to have a code of behavior on the way in. You just have to like the everyday of it all. What do we expect? And I want to be around hardcore people for their own reasons.

Right.

I don't want to have to sweat you. I don't even want to think about you. Like, I want you to go. I want you to go do your thing. I want to do my thing. I. I want to be able to count on you to crush it. And you could definitely count on me to crush it. And then if I need you, I will ask and hopefully you will aid me. And if you need me, I'm going to run to your side to help you. But I don't want to micromanage. So I want you to be good at what you do, to be getting better every day for your own reasons. And there is a certain subset of humanity that is like that. If you get them in your company and you set them free, they won't all get in the groove. But 80% is pretty magical.

What's the best hire you ever made?

My wife. Besides your wife, there have been a lot. Dude, I'm super stoked. In my team, how about instead of saying a person, I will give you types of personality that I find intoxicating. Number one, somebody who is so convinced that they're not yet good enough to achieve their dreams, but so believe they can get there and are what I call a relentless problem solver. A relentless problem solver is worth their weight in gold. I don't need them to be highly educated. They will educate themselves over time. Somebody who's not afraid to speak to power. That is a big deal. I have a very strong personality, and unintentionally, I shut some personality types down. And a quote that popped into my mind one day when a person who shall remain nameless didn't use these exact words, but basically said, slow down so I can lead. And I was like, yeah, no, that does not matter.

Someone on your team said that?

Yes. Not an impact theory. At a point in my life, somebody once effectively said, slow down so I can lead. And I remember being sensed that the. That this person would allow themselves to say those words. Like, that's so anathema to who I am. Like, I could see myself saying, I can't keep up with you. You need to lead. And then I would follow and be the greatest follower that I could be. So that notion of, like, I want people that make me sweat. I want people that are like, they're trying to be so good for their own reasons that I'm like, yo, like, keeping up with this person is intense. That's intoxicating to me.

So the times that most frustrate you. You have a code of ethics when people come in. So hopefully you're not frustrated because they understand their accountability, their actions, their behaviors, everything. But what are the times that frustrates you the most outside of your company?

Oh, just in my personal life.

Yeah. Just in life in general.

Inefficiency is the only thing that winds me up. It's the only thing that I will say I'm irrational about, reactive to. You see something you're like, nobody in the outside world would know because that's just ridiculous. I recognize that it's an offshoot of something that's very powerful in my life, my obsession with always doing things as efficiently as possible. But I also recognize that life isn't. On my deathbed, I will never say, wow, I was efficient. Efficiency is useful towards getting to a goal. And so I. I prize it and I love it and all that. But my wife has tempered me and shown me that sometimes just the connecting, just being with somebody, just sitting and being is joyful is enough. Yeah. Not even just enough like, it is precisely what the doctor ordered. And I'm not great at that, to not think about stuff as much as feel things.

So I really come into this kind of.

Of experience now with a feeling rather than a. Rather than a list of questions or a road map or try to take.

It out of the brain and put.

It back in the heart.

Absolutely.

As corny as that sounds, it's sort.

Of really where I say.