Focus Your Mind So You Will Never Be Lazy [MASTERCLASS] EP 1370

You have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure. So the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's gonna be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. This podcast is sponsored by Northwestern Mutual. Everyone wants to feel good about their finances. Right? Well, that's why I've had life insurance with Northwestern Mutual for years. Their financial professionals ask the right questions, truly listen, and help uncover opportunities most people miss. I've seen it firsthand. Northwestern Mutual has been a part of my journey from the very beginning, providing the security and peace of mind I need as a human and an entrepreneur. Find a better way to money@nm.com the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, paid testimonial by a Northwestern Mutual policy owner.

As America's leading business lender, Bank of America is on your corner and in your corner.

With $215 billion in business loans and over 3,700 business specialists across the nation, we help businesses thrive so communities prosper.

What would you like the power to do?

Learn more at bankofamerica.com/localbusiness Bank of America, official Bank of FIFA Club World Cup 2025. Copyright 2025 Bank of America Corporation, all rights reserved.

Father's Day is coming up, and for lots of dads out there, dad doesn't quite cover it. They're groundskeepers, patio Whisperers and Rogue Leaf vigilantes, too. So this year, show dad some love with gifts from the Home Depot. They've got fast, free delivery on handy gear that helps dad do his thing. We're talking Ryobi cordless outdoor tools like the Ryobi 40 volt expanded string trimmer. Find the perfect Father's Day gift at the Home Depot. Shop in store and online at homedepot.com, free delivery subject to availability. Fuel your greatness with wonderful pistachios, no shells. Wonderful pistachios is a great source of protein with zero guilt. Each one ounce serving has six grams of protein, giving you over 10% of your daily value. Pistachios are known for their protein power, fiber, and better for you unsaturated fats for a combination that may help keep you feeling fuller longer. And now there's a new way to snack strong with unsalted no shells, holding the salt, not the flavor, for a snack that packs a protein punch. Visit wonderfulpistachios.com to learn more. You mentioned dopamine a little bit. Can you talk about dopamine focus and motivation and how to manage our dopamine hits because it seems like every 30 seconds we're getting dopamine now, whether it's drinking coffee, having candy, social media, email pings, dings on the watches, whatever it is, it's a dopamine overload it feels like. So how do we stay motivated and manage dopamine at the same time?

Yeah, great question. Dopamine is the molecule of motivation.

The molecule of motivation.

Absolutely. I mean, for years and years people thought dopamine was about pleasure, but dopamine is mainly about craving and motivation and drive. Okay. There's a simple experiment that illustrates that, but I would be remiss if I didn't first mention two excellent resources for people that want to learn a lot about dopamine. These would be perhaps interesting people for you to talk to directly. The first is a book called the Molecule of More, which is all about dopamine. The author is Lieberman. I don't know him personally, but I love the book. I wish I had written it. The second is Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And the author there is Anna Lembke, L-E-M-K-E. She's a medical doctor and psychiatrist and runs the Dual Diagnosis Addiction Clinic at Stanford School of Medicine. She's a colleague. I consider her a friend and she is world-class, second to none in all things dopamine as it relates to addiction. So wonderful reads. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about is kind of paraphrasing elements from their books. So I want to be clear. So here's the experiment. Take two rats, you give them a lever, they can press, and they can get food out of that lever, they can get heat if their cage is cold, they can get all sorts of things that are great for a rat, including a mate to mate with if they press this lever. Both rats press the lever just fine. Now you take away dopamine. from one of those rats. You can actually do that by using a toxin that can kill off all the dopamine neurons. There's an equivalent experiment that's been done in humans, but it was a naturally occurring death of these dopamine neurons, much in the same way that Parkinson's destroys dopamine neurons. What you find is that both rats or both people still experience pleasure from food, from sex, from warmth when they're cold, from cool when they're too warm, etc. However, if you take that rat, both rats, and you move them one rat length away from the lever, so they have to just do a little bit of work, a little bit of work in order to press the lever, or you take a human who has no dopamine neurons or very little dopamine, and you make the pleasureful thing a little bit more challenging to get to, the ones with no dopamine do not pursue pleasure at all. That's just one example of what now are hundreds of examples in the neuroscience literature showing that dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, craving, motivation, drive. Pick your favorite word.

Dopamine is a good thing in motivation.

Provided it's in proper levels.

Yes.

That's right. If your dopamine is depleted, you will feel not motivated. Now, there's a double-edged sword here because many things, as you mentioned, accurately trigger dopamine release. Seeing positive comment, a compliment, food, the more palatable a food, a really tasty chip compared to a slice of a potato that's baked but doesn't have anything on it, one truly releases more dopamine than the other. I could list off a number of things, but we have a baseline level of dopamine. Nicotine, for instance, increases that by about 50%.

Gives you more dopamine.

Dopamine is released. You have two major dopamine pathways in the brain. one related to movement, one related to reward. Broadly speaking, there are others, but broadly speaking, the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway. And then the other one, we don't have to throw out names, but then we'll just confuse people. But you have these reward pathways and dopamine is involved in movement. So nicotine, about a 50% increase. Cocaine, 100% increase, a doubling. Methamphetamine, 1,000 or even 1,000 fold increase.

Holy cow.

So huge increase in dopamine.

That's why it's so addictive.

So addictive, but what happens after that big dopamine increase is that the baseline levels of dopamine go below what they were before. How low that drop is below baseline is proportional to how big the increase was before.

That's why it's so addictive to stay on these things.

That's right. Well, and that's why if you're getting lots of little dopamine hits from things, as we call them, you're going to feel kind of depressed and those things don't feel as rewarding anymore. Now, eventually the system can reset if you don't indulge. Let me give an example. This is a true story example. Out of respect for the individual, I don't want to reveal his name, but in talking about dopamine, someone I know has a child. The kid is in his 20s. He was a decent student, excellent athlete, really charming, nice kid. I've known him since he was little. He reached a point where his friends had graduated high school, he went to community college, and he kind of fizzed out of that. He wasn't into that. This resonated with my earlier story. He was working a job, but then he wasn't feeling like working. And he was convinced he had ADHD, and he was depressed, and he started taking off down the path of medication, which, by the way, have helped many, many people. Most of the medications for ADHD, by the way, are drugs that increase dopamine. because dopamine increases focus, it increases motivation, and it increases drive, essentially. The willingness to get into action in pursuit of goals, just like the rats that have dopamine or the humans that have dopamine pursue, the ones that have depleted dopamine do not. So this guy who is a real story was struggling in a major way. So about three months ago, he was watching a lot of videos online. He was texting a lot. He's mainly playing video games. video games, video games, video games, video games. But he wasn't really enjoying them as much anymore. And one thing you see with people with ADHD is they actually can focus if they're really interested in something.

Why?

Because their dopamine levels are elevated and they're able to focus. He heard about the dopamine system and Anna's work and I talked to him and he decided to do what some people call dopamine fast, but for him that meant no video games and he did two weeks of no screens. which at first I think was agonizing for him.

Oh my gosh.

It's now three months later. It's a little less than three months later. I actually talked to his parent today. Working full time off all ADHD meds.

Hmm.

Has a girlfriend. I don't know if that's related or not, probably because he's got his life together a little bit more, which is an attractive feature as opposed to someone who's, you know, spiraling out, doing nothing, living at home, which frankly is an unattractive regardless of, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. He's very focused on his work, he's excited by things, and he allows himself a short period of time each day where he plays video games and he enjoys them again like never before. There is a simple explanation for this, which is that his dopamine system is reset. When you're constantly pursuing things, eating highly palatable foods, engaging in very stimulating anything, any behavior, that's very stimulating. There's a drop below baseline and it takes an increasingly great stimulus, high threshold stimulus in order to excite you. So if people are feeling bored, unmotivated, unstimulated, most of the time it's because they are overindulging in things that keep pounding this dopamine system, but the baseline of dopamine is going down, down, down, down, down. Now there are a few hacks that can actually help, and Anna talks about some of these in her book, The main thing is too, if someone is engaging in any truly addictive behavior or substance, or a behavior that just doesn't feel like it's that great, but you're finding yourself doing it compulsively. Like what are some examples?

Texting, Instagram.

I limit my Instagram time to two hours per day, which itself just sounds like a lot. I'm a grown adult and I spend two hours on it. But I do a lot of work. I'm trying to put out content that's educational. But sometimes I think to myself, I'm a grown man, I'm spending two hours a day on Instagram. Well, that's a lot of where we spend our time. Now, but if you allow yourself four hours a day on social media, you'll probably find that it's you're scrolling, you're not even sure what you're looking for.

Like, what am I doing?

Exactly. I just wasted this time. Exactly. And what you're looking for is something to jolt that baseline. So you want to limit those behaviors or in some cases, if it gets really severe like it was for this individual, you want to eliminate completely for 30, 60 days. Ideally, it's 30 days. Now, this is the same prescriptive that they give alcoholics, heroin addicts, et cetera. But some of those drugs, of course, have actual withdrawal symptoms that can be problematic. You know, these days, I'm not a pot smoker. I've never liked drugs or alcohol. I kind of lucked out that way. But, you know, there's, and I'm not trying to demonize, I'm not passing judgment, but, you know, cannabis, for instance, is pretty prominent in prominent use and a lot of people, the idea of 30 days without that is, I think, they probably say they could do it, but it would be very challenging for them. And I'm not here to tell people what to do, right? Then there's about drugs, alcohol, or anything, but the idea is 30 days of no interaction with that thing, person, behavior, I mean, all sorts of things, so that you can enjoy other things. I like to say, you know, addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, and if I may, enlightenment is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. All of that hinges on this dopamine system. system. So you have to be very judicious in your interactions with things that deliver pleasure or else they will soon not deliver pleasure and they will diminish your pleasure for everything else that you interact with. So the way to think about this is just to set up constraints. And as I'm stealing Anna's words left and right, forgive me Anna, she has many more important things to say and she says them much more eloquently than I, but she says, you know, we don't give our kids chocolate cake breakfast. But we sort of understand that dessert comes at a certain time of day and after completing certain things. But we, for some reason, we just allow ourselves to just dive into this immense dopamine sensory landscape of social media. Because social media isn't just comments. You and me say, oh, like Lewis put something up. There's that. That stuff's great. But then there's also a lot of violent stuff, politically intense stuff, There's a lot of friction, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you're essentially going to the dopamine carnival. And so you need to restrict the amount of time. And especially if you're somebody who wants to get work done and your work is not the, you know, social media. And I'm pointing at social media, but this could be anything. Anything that you enjoy. Food, for instance. You don't want to overindulge in highly palatable foods. It's just bad for us. We know this for a number of reasons. So, the key is to take this dopamine system and set it up for you to be able to be motivated and focused. And the way to do that is to make the experiences around that thing that you want to be motivated to do a little less or a lot less exciting.

What do you mean?

This is why I don't listen to music these days or check text messages while I'm in the gym. And sometimes I'll listen to a book or a podcast, but I really try and just be just work out, including while I'm running. Why? Because these days we are layering in dopamine. We're getting dopamine from the energy drink we're drinking. Okay, big increase in dopamine. I forget the actual numbers, but I think it's 1.8 times increase. And some of them have L-tyrosine, which is a dopamine precursor. Some of them have caffeine, which also increases dopamine and upregulates dopamine receptors. So you're getting it from the energy drink. Plus, it's the video game you're playing. Plus, you're with your friends. It's just a dopamine soup, which sounds great, except that other things that you do afterwards are going to seem under stimulating. And you're gonna think, I can't focus on this. So I also kind of wonder whether or not you were having trouble focusing in your class, because the Canelo fight was that awesome. It was insane. It was amazing. Yeah, he's amazing.

He's amazing.

I am a boxing fan. It was crazy. And he, if you had to like build a boxer, you'd build him like that. Just his head, his shape, the right hook.

And it was just like the roar of the crowd and just the energy, it was amazing, man.

Yeah, yeah. That's great. There's a beautiful story unfolding there with him.

Yes.

So that could be it too. You know, there's a kind of a letdown. And so I think it may be helpful for people to understand that the postpartum depression that people feel after a big celebration It's real. That's real. And if you just wait a little while, that system will reset. You don't necessarily wait 30 days, but if you just had a great party, you should expect that there'll be a long tale of joy, but then you might feel a little low, a little underwhelmed.

So true, man.

And if you're going to sit down and try and do work, and you're finding yourself not that focused, you might want to think about some of the behaviors that led up to that work. So I really try to get into my work in a focused way by making the the period right before it's a little boring. Frankly, going outside, getting some sunlight, drinking my mate, it sounds like a pretty boring life, right? It's not like blasting a bunch of music and getting really amped up. But I'm able to get a nice peak of dopamine during that work out. And I think that's a functional dopamine increase. And then afterwards, yes, indeed, there's a drop. Now, there's some other hacks that Ana's talked about. And again, we can look to our friend Wim Hof. Other people have done this, although this was happening long before WIM, there's a beautiful study published in the European Journal of Physiology showing that getting into cold water, so this could be cold shower, could be ice bath, could be any number of different plunge type things or an ocean or whatever that people want to use for anywhere from three to six minutes creates a 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts many hours. So it's a unique stimulus because it's not like a spike and then it drops. It's like a long arc increasing your baseline dopamine, increases alertness, feelings of well-being. They did blood draws in this study, so these are real data. It wasn't conjecture. They really know this. And, there are some cases of people who were full-blown addicts or people who are struggling with ADHD who start doing regular cold water exposure three to six times a week, three to six minutes at a time. discover that, wow, they actually can focus because they're getting that dopamine increase. Wow.

Yeah.

This stuff is fascinating, man.

It's really interesting, I think, to me because dopamine, you know, coming up in neuroscience, I've been in the game a long time now, almost, you know, gosh, almost 30 years. But dopamine was always thought of as pleasure. But it's confusing because it's associated with pleasure, but it's not the actual experience of pleasure. and immediately after sex, immediately after any powerful experience that's very pleasureful, dopamine system crashes down.

What happens in the body when dopamine crashes?

Well, there's an interesting thing that happens because there's a hormone called prolactin, which is actually involved in milk letdown for nursing, but is also increased in both men and women in anticipation of childbirth. This is actually responsible for the so-called dad bod. Prolactin lays down body fat stores, tends to make people a little more sedentary, and this has been shown in humans and in animals. It tends to reduce libido and sex drive. And so if you think about dopamine is a currency of motivation that biology has used for hundreds of thousands of years. So, you know, whether or not, you know, we think about currencies like dollars or euros or bitcoins or Ethereum, all of those actually relate to dopamine. Dopamine is the fundamental currency that we're all working for. And dopamine has this quality of making us focused on things outside our immediate experience. This is why people were on cocaine or methamphetamine, which is a really extreme version of dopamine increase. They tend to be all about plans and action. They're not sitting there thinking about how wonderful they feel in their own body, whereas drugs like cannabis, and psilocybin and drugs. These are not drugs that I recommend people use recreationally. I'm not passing judgment, but I just want to be clear about what I'm saying and not saying, that any drugs that increase serotonin tend to make people kind of still focused on their internal landscape, their thinking. It's kind of internal reflection thing. So the serotonin system and the dopamine system are kind of antagonistic to one another, and the prolactin system is associated. serotonin system. So prolactin is kind of about, it's a mellowing out.

Interesting.

And just to nail the point, there are many people in the world who suffer from schizophrenia, 1% of the world's population, a huge number, a very sad thing, psychosis, hearing things, et cetera. And most of the drugs designed to treat schizophrenic psychosis are drugs that reduce dopamine. And oftentimes, you'll see people on the street who are taking these drugs and they'll be writhing like this with their face. Sometimes men will have gynecomastia, they'll have breast development because these drugs block dopamine, increase prolactin and disrupt the motor pathways that are associated with movement. I say this for two reasons. One is it illustrates the relationship between prolactin, dopamine, movement, et cetera. But the other is to hopefully invoke a little bit of empathy for people that oftentimes we will see people who if they're shouting and acting crazy, that's probably an unmedicated person who's bipolar or has schizophrenia. But if you see someone in their catatonic or they are writhing and acting very strange, that's a person who's, we don't know for sure, but very likely is actively trying to treat their own psychosis to eliminate the voices and things of that sort. So I say that because I, you know, I, we have a big homeless population issue. in California and elsewhere too. And oftentimes we see people acting crazy and we think, oh, they're, you know, we make this disparaging judgment that everyone's prone to doing it, of course, but they're crazy. But oftentimes that those crazy movements and the things they're doing are the reflection of drugs that block the dopamine system. Gotcha.

Yeah.

Sorry, I don't mean to make it dark, but I think that there is a, you know, 1% of the world's population is a huge number.

That's a lot. And a lot of people suffering from these things. Is there a way to create effortlessness when you also need to work hard and be diligent in your practice and all these things? Or do we not have to work hard and it can be effortless in accomplishing what we want?

Yeah, well look, I mean, to me, essentialism was about rethinking prioritization, what really matters. and figuring out what is essential. Effortless is a cousin to that, and that's about rethinking simplification, which is that sometimes we just make getting great results, breaking through to the next level, harder than it needs to be. So it's not saying, hey, you should never work, and you should never work hard, and you should never put in effort. I believe that you're supposed to put in effort. The point is, if you can't work any harder, you've got to find an easier path.

A force inside and out, the Range Rover Sport is available with a choice of powerful engines, including a plug in hybrid with an estimated range of 53 miles. We all know that staying hydrated is so important, and we've heard it a million times, but let's be real, you can really feel the difference when you're hydrated properly, you're sharper, you're energized, and you're ready to go. And when you're not, well, you feel foggy, sluggish, just drained. And with the summer heat coming, staying on top of hydration isn't just a good idea, it's a must. And that's why I love Liquid IV. It's powered by LIV Hydrasience, which is clinically studied to maintain hydration better than water alone for up to four hours. And I've been loving the new sugar-free raspberry lemonade hydration multiplier. It's so refreshing. And I don't know about you, but if I'm not hydrated, it's hard to function. Whether I'm gearing up for a workout, recording a podcast, or pushing through a packed day, Liquid IV always keeps me hydrated. And if you've ever hit that mid-afternoon slump or struggled to keep up, trust me, this is a game changer. Maximize your hydration with Liquid IV and get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquidiv.com and use code LEWIS at checkout. That's 20% off your first order with code LEWIS@liquidiv.com this is an advertisement from Better Help. You know, one of the biggest stigmas we still need to break, especially for men, is the idea that asking for help is weakness. In reality, it's the most courageous thing you can do. Taking care of your mental health doesn't make you soft. It makes you strong, focused, and grounded. We live in a world that puts a lot of pressure on men to man up, stay silent, and just push through. But bottling it all up only leads to burnout, anxiety, or worse. And the truth? It's okay to struggle. It's okay to not have all the answers. And there is real power in opening up. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, helping over 5 million people get the support they need without the hassle of waiting rooms or long commutes. You can talk to a therapist from wherever you are and switch anytime if needed. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/Lewis. That's betterhelp.com/Lewis.

And yet, in a grind culture, sometimes people start to get burned out and their answer is push even harder. Rather than think different, think smarter, find an alternative route.

Rather than take pause, reflect, have a better strategy, it's more just go hard, hard, hard, spend more time, more hours on the thing, as opposed to reevaluate simplification.

Yeah.

How can we do it more effortlessly in a simplified version, not just hard push, push, push?

One of the things I think we can do is just, well, the book structure, the model is to have an effortless state, like three concentric circles, effortless state, effortless action, then effortless results. And that's sort of like three books in one. Each of them can make your life And the results you get easier to get. You want to first remove all the complexity in your mind, in your heart that makes life more frustrating than it ought to be. I was just talking with Tim Ferriss and I asked him a question about this. I said, Look, how much of your mental and emotional energy have you given on stuff that, you know, holding grudges, being angry, stuff that just got in the way of your success? And he said, Look, from age 15 to 30, he said probably 60 to 70% of my energy was spent on that.

On, more than a little bit. Angry?

Angry?

At what? Himself, other people, the world, anything.

And awful things that happened to him that he was angry about from when he was young. He's talked about this publicly now, of abuse that he'd been through and so on. But either way, he's making His life is more burdened than it needs to be because he's spending so much of his cycles on this stuff that isn't actually propelling him forward or helping him achieve.

His thought process is energy on those things, right? -Yeah, that's spending a lot of time.

-That'S right. Just your mind is what you're processing, how you're feeling is just burdened.

-Burn and energy.

-Burn and energy instead of getting you going forward.

-Yes.

-And so, simplifying your state, I think, is a huge return on investment. If you can let go of a grudge, if you can let go of something that you keep on draining you, then there's just more of you on offer. And that's not through grinding effort, that's through just removing burdens. You don't have to be hauling up the mountain at all. The number two area is effortless action.

That's effortless state, the first one.

Effortless state. So you're simplifying all of your, basically all of that clutter that's in your mind. So it makes it easier to focus on what matters.

Before we get to the second ring, how do people learn to let go of grudges? How do they let go of resentment, anger, frustration about others and about the things they've done? And that's really hard to do. You see my, that's a sip, I don't know, just get clear mind. but people have been trying to figure that out for a long time. So how did you learn how to do that?

Well, one of the things that I've learned is that specifically on grudges is that we need to learn, we have to ask an unusual question about grudges. That is, what did we hire the grudge to do? As Clayton Christensen says, with any product or service that you have, You don't, you don't, you don't, no one wants a six inch drill bit, what they want is a six inch hole, right?

Yes.

There's a reason that you're hiring that product or service. Well, you can do the same with grudges. Every grudge we hold, we hold for a reason. We've hired the grudge to do something for us. Maybe we hire the grudge to make us feel powerful. See, I am one up. I'm above that person. See, they did this bad thing. I'm holding on to that. See, I'll show that I'm superior. We hold on to it for a sense of superiority. Or maybe we hold on it because we like that we get to tell a story of being a victim. And people go, oh, yes, we get sympathy for doing it. Well, we hire grudges to do certain jobs. And what I think is that if we simply evaluate grudges like we say, How are you doing in your job performance for me? Are you actually protecting me? Are you actually making me powerful? Are you actually getting people to build a stronger relationship with me? Or if you evaluate them, and in the book, there's a section specifically, one by one, you can do this, where you say, well, you actually find, well, actually, it's not making me powerful. It makes me more vulnerable. It makes me vulnerable with everyone. because I'm carrying this wound still. I'm not letting it heal. Is it helping me to build relationships? No. If you pay attention, you notice that when you tell these stories, you kind of have to find new people to tell them to because people get bored of it.

Right.

And so, you're not building deeper trust relationships. You're actually kind of wearing them out along the way. And you can go one by one to suddenly discover that this is like a bad employee. We have grudges like, you've hired them to do this. They aren't doing any of those things. They're using you. Grudges use you. They burn you up. They waste you out. They make you weaker. And so just through this process, you start to find like, I'm ready to fire my grudges. Ready to be free of it so that I can actually recuperate whatever the percentage is, 60 to 70% with Jim, maybe it's different for other people. get all of that back, and we can start putting that into the stuff we really wanted to do in the first place.

Yeah. Can you imagine there's been different stages of my life where I felt like 10 out of 10 of positivity, of freedom of my thoughts from holding grudges or resentments or angers, and you feel like you're flying. And there have been many years of my life, many years, too many years, where I've held on to resentment, anger, frustration. a lack of forgiving other people, where you feel like you're at a six or a seven, maybe you get to an eight for a moment, but then something triggers you and you're back into anger frustration mode. And that really pulls me back into feeling tired, exhausted, drained and burnt out. Typically not from the effort I put into my craft, but in the effort I put into my mind thinking about the things I don't like.

Yeah, you've just, you have basically made the case for why effortless state is the first part of the effortless model. That's it exactly. You use, think of the language you used, you feel like you're flying. Is that not just another metaphor for effortless? I mean, what would be more effortless than I'm flying? That's the idea. That's why even though you would never think of forgiveness as a productivity hack, maybe no one's ever written that. The productivity hacks- you- know true. is to forgive people in your life. And yet, what else can you call it if you could get back that much energy, that much of your own light and ability and capability? It's the best rebate available. There's a story that I came across in the research that I love of a man who was productive in his community. And then one day he saw what he thought was a piece of string on the ground, and it was a piece of string.

He gets it.

He's like, oh, I can put that to use. He puts it in his pocket. On that same day in the marketplace, someone else had lost a wallet and lost some money. And they thought that they had seen him pick up the wallet and take it, accused him of it publicly. There was no way for him to prove his innocence. And so the word went out, this person has acted dishonestly, dishonorably, and so on. Now, at this point in the story, he has a choice. He can't prove his innocence, But he could have, in this moment, let go of the accusation, of the harsh judgment, and he would have suddenly had all that energy back to be able to get back onto, well, what can I do something about? How can I serve? How can I make a contribution? How can I be successful again? But he doesn't. He gets fixated on it. Everywhere he goes, he talks about it. He nurses the grudge. He explains it's a piece of string. Don't you see it was wrong? A piece of string, a piece of string. People started laughing about this guy. all he ever wants to talk about is a piece of string. And it makes him ill on his deathbed, final words of the story, you know, a little piece of string, a.

Little piece of string.

And this is how the story goes. Now, that is a fictionalized account, but it illustrates the point of where are you putting your mental energies? If we put him on grudges, if we put them on things that have happened, we wish they hadn't happened, or even on our own mistakes where we go, I wish I'd been different. We're beating ourselves up for past mistakes. We're just putting tons of effort onto things that will exhaust us and burn us out instead of moving forward to the things that really matter.

So would you say that the things in our minds will hold us back from an effortless state and getting the actions and the results we want is the things in our mind first?

Yes, definitely. There's a little story about that where I was staring at myself Dressed head to toe in a Stormtrooper costume. And I mean, I'm in a store of Halloween. This is like a, this is an expensive suit. It's like a movie quality Stormtrooper outfit. And as I'm staring back at myself in the mirror, like, should I buy this? I'm like, how am I even here? Like, what, why? For 30 years without realizing it, I'd had this goal of buying a Stormtrooper costume.

Yeah.

So when I reflect on it, it goes back to like when Return of the Jedi comes out and my older brother says, oh, wouldn't it be cool to have a movie quality suit? You know, wouldn't that be great? And I'm like this, you know, whatever, 10 year old kid just amazed by this. Like, yes, that would be cool. Forget about it entirely. But here we are 30 years later still pursuing that goal. It's still a part of me has been working on achieving this. Well, no part of me wanted that costume. I'm like, why am I even, what am I even doing here? Let's get out of this. I don't want this costume. and it became like a shorthand. My wife will say to me now, if I'm pursuing something that she's like, I don't know, it has a certain vibe about it, she'll be like, is this a stormtrooper? And I think you can use that for goals that no longer serve you, but also for grudges that no longer serve you. Could be relationships that no longer serve you. Could be any mental clutter, any assumptions that are simply like they were true to a point, but they don't serve you now. And one of those, One of those storm troopers, I think is the idea that any problem can be solved by working harder. That alone is a really limiting idea. It'll get you only to here. It won't get you to there. So it's a good principle as far as it goes, but then we need to invert that question. Instead of say, how can I work harder? We say, look, is there a more effortless way of doing this? And so as you read your mind of this old paradigm, You open yourself up to a new option, a new question, and suddenly, I mean, I almost think it's almost like magic. There's so many cool options once you're free of the idea that anything worth doing has to be exhaustingly difficult. Yeah.

What was the thought process that stuck in your mind the longest, that was the hardest to let go of? That when you let go of it, life became more effortless. Whether it be in your relationships or your career or whatever it might be.

Yeah, I mean, one answer to that question is, well, I'll give you one answer though, which is that the work at what's essential needs to kind of be hard, the trudgery, and then you've got separate to that play and fun. And those two things are just two different categories.

Yes.

They don't have to be, but we often divide them up. And so we just have the fun and the play separate. But what if the essential things can be the fun things? What if you can make the things that used to seem like drudgery into fun rituals?

Yeah. How do you make cleaning your laundry or mopping the floor or cleaning the toilet a fun and enjoyable experience?

Or which is a specific example in my family, cleaning up after dinner.

Yeah.

So we have pretty good rituals around the actual meal time. Like we actually eat together. I've got four kids and my wife and I, we will do like, you know, we'll do toasts for each other at the end of each day and like what's gone right today. And we have some good rituals around this, but as soon as the dinner is over, my kids are just like gone.

They're like, See you on the phone, other phone.

They disappeared. They're like ninjas, man. They are just gone. It's like so silent and like, where do they all go? Then I have the unenviable task of like, come back and pulling them all back. Where did you all go? Oh, no, I've got homework. It's hard to argue with that. Go to the bathroom. Okay, that's hard to argue. And it's just this cat and mouse game to get them back in. So I'm like, okay, how do we make it effortless? And so we divide up the chores so everyone's got a certain part of it, right? Many hands make light work and we trained them on each piece and I'm like, okay, we're gonna Set this up, we wrote it all down on a piece of paper where everyone can see it. Okay, ready to start, what happens?

Nothing.

Chaos, yeah. It is back to the same. They're gone. The next day they are gone like ninjas again. And it wasn't until my eldest daughter, Grace, added just a particular kind of music to the occasion that it became like karaoke. There was like classic Disney tracks. It was, I mean, she's a teenager, she's just turned 18 now, but it's just like sing along stuff that you can't not sing to. All kinds of music. and it turned it into just like a little party. And even now, we'll start to do it, we'll have the same problems as soon as someone puts on the right music, you all do it, you play, and it's like that now. In fact, I didn't think people would believe me, but the other day I wasn't even helping them, music got put on, everyone's doing it, I grabbed like five seconds of video and put it on Instagram just to prove, it really is like that now. So the idea is, one of the ideas that's hard to let go of is that is that essential stuff has to be the drudgery, the important stuff is just hard work. Some things are just hard. And then there's fun stuff and that's play over here. But what if you make it, what if you combine those? What if you make essential stuff enjoyable? Well, then it becomes relatively speaking, and.

I would add into that and say, if you don't make the essential stuff enjoyable, then you will be burnt out. Yeah. Even if it starts out as like fun, like practice and sports for me, there are many different sports that I played growing up. And some of them I burnt out on because it came, we started to become a job where it was only like, you've got to show up to practice, you've got to work hard. This is a business mentality now. And it kind of lost the idea of having fun.

Yeah.

When we're playing a game, but it's like the business of the game. Right.

And.

Right.

You almost have to. So what could start out as really fun, turn into drudgery.

Right.

And what could be like this thing that I don't like could be this incredibly fun experience based on the parameters you create for yourself. I was a truck driver for many months. I got paid $250 a week as a truck driver when I was about 22, 23 years old. And I remember being like, this is miserable. This was not fun. This was not, you know, it was essential to just pay like for food for the week. It not like the path of my life. But it was a season of my life. And I remember saying, okay, I have an opportunity here. This is going to be happening for many months. I can either be in misery and pain for six hours a day driving a truck, or I can make the most of it. And I downloaded CD with salsa songs and I started visualizing myself while watching the road, but visualizing myself salsa dancing because I was learning how to salsa dance at that time. So I would imagine myself doing the moves and the dance and the steps and everything, and it made the time fly and it made it more enjoyable. I would also sing songs as well and just see like, okay, how can I make this fun? Even if people are looking at me like I'm crazy, singing along to myself. But that made it more enjoyable where it wasn't like, I have to go to work and do this thing, but I had a great time and time flew.

I love what you're saying, and it really is sort of a lot of what I mean when I say effortless. is it like which is there's nothing so hard that complaining and whining about it won't make it harder. So some things in life, once you decide I'm going to do this thing, I'm dealing with this, this is a responsibility that's important to me, I'm taking on. Now you just have to decide do I want to do it the hard way or the easier way?

Yeah, exactly. What happens when we complain and why do we complain so much?

You know, I searched at one point when I was doing this research for like just what are the easiest things to do in the world? Like just off the cuff, like what are the answers? And I remember that one of the the first answers that people really agreed on was complaining is the easiest thing to do. Wow. So I thought that was very interesting and I took on a little exercise myself with this and I was like, okay, well that's not a great state to be in. A complaining state is going to limit my creativity. It's going to make it harder for me to achieve. It's going to be harder for me to attract good talent and all the rest of it. So I said, okay, every time I complain, I'm going to say something I'm grateful for.

I read this in the book. I like this strategy.

Well, here's the thing. It's a really good strategy. Well, I like that you like it. What I noticed about it was that- It didn't work. Well, what I noticed is not that.

It didn't work, I realized that I.

Complained a lot more than I realized.

Right, I read that too. How much were you complaining a day.

When you started that strategy? I don't know if it says a number for it, but I just found I would walk into a room and I'd be complaining. I'd see my wife and oh, how you doing? Well, you know, this thing was a bit of a drag. That meeting took longer than I thought. And I'm like, why are you saying this? It's not even how you feel about your life. There's so many good things happening, but for some reason, I was in a habit of just starting with a complaint. You see your kids, there's always someone to complain about. Well, why are you on that? Why aren't you doing this? Why haven't you cleared this thing up? There's an endless variety of complaints. And what I noticed was that the more I complained, the more there was to complain about. and as soon as I introduced this new habit, what I was surprised by is how fast the state changed. Because you can't be grateful and complaining in the same moment. You can't be fearful and grateful in the same moment. You can't be angry and grateful in the same moment. I mean, it is a dynamic, powerful, catalytic thing. It's not just, for too long, we think of gratitude as being like, well, that's a nice, mindful moment. Be mindful and grateful over there. But when you got to the real stuff, that's not the real stuff. Gratitude is the real stuff. This is the way to be able to accelerate success in any area of your life and it's instantly effective. So I found that as soon as I would say I was grateful, I could see people's eyes light up, just even my kids, my wife, it just brought a more positive feeling. So then we carry on with our kids and I'm like, okay, my son Jack one time, I'm like, he complained and I'm like, okay, Give me three things you're thankful for. He says this, I am so thankful that my dad wants to play this dumb game after I say something I'm complaining about. Right. Says it just like that. We all laugh. It works even though he did it with the worst attitude ever. And by the time he's doing two and three, he's laughing and he's saying stuff and it didn't matter. Gratitude is that powerful. And so I think it's like the the fastest way to get ourselves back into an effortless state. And I learned about it first in the extremity of a family crisis. I found that this thing would help even in the direst of circumstances.

Maine, where life the way it should be transforms all who encounter its spectacular landscapes, rugged coastlines, Pine-scented trails, sandy beaches, sparkling lakes, and tranquil forests inspire you to reflect and make meaningful moments. They offer endless opportunities for adventure and exploration. Whether peddling or paddling, hiking or biking, Maine has more than enough outdoor spaces to make the most of long summer days. Relish in exquisite flavors harvested from the ocean and the rich soils of orchards and fields. Maine's makers are rooted in its heritage while boldly branching into new ways of thinking, doing, and being. Connect with its people in warm and authentic towns, which beckon you to stroll art galleries and locally owned shops, where generations of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople see the world anew. It's tempting to do it all when you visit, but take a beat and a breath. Get a feel for the time and tempo of Maine. Simple pleasures, Scenic Adventures, where every route is the scenic one. Discover more at visitmaine.com the path to.

Retirement is different for everyone. And as life changes, so do priorities. Fidelity can help you get where you want to go. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking, and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement, whether you're saving for.

It or already living in it. Get started at fidelity.com/takeon.

Expenses charged by your investments and other.

Costs and fees associated with trading or.

Transacting in your account apply.

Fidelity Brokerage Services member, NYSC SIPC.

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

Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. So one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. and what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline. What's the difference? Okay, well the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused. Self-discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements. So you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about an 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 a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right? The external world has a say in whether or not you do that and that's, and the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures and continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was, because I'm a very unself-disciplined person, I don't have a lot, right? And so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I say, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly, so those with 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, right? 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, you know, and say, well, I can't do that. Like, I'm normal. I'd have to just go in. I have to go in unknowing right now. The best, the most successful people are those who have both self-discipline and discipline, right? In terms of staying motivated or 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, right? Because I can say, I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way. But I think 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 a an active or one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

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

Not just depending on how you show up.

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

And this is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is you get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many 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 if I want to run a marathon and I can barely run to my mailbox, 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've 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 reward system. So it becomes objective.

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

Well, I mean, 13 and some change.

Deployments between, what, six months and over a year?

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

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

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

So not the day-to-day job.

No.

Even just like the missions you went out on.

Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say, you know, 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, we'll 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 It was dangerous. It was contact. Yeah, well, luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy. But we found, again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea because what happens is you establish a routine.

You get comfortable.

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

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

In order to help them compartmentalize.

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's, you have these deep connections to your family and friends. How do you just detach in a sense?

Yeah.

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 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 and I know that about my buddies, because you have to, because war sucks, you know? And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished, you know? So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there, these movies that show these extended scenes of people, you know, mourning when their buddy goes down or whatever, like, oh my god, yeah. You don't have that, no, you don't have that time. You know, you have to, the, you have to win the gunfight, right? 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 effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that could be a detriment in a relationship. So I think those of us who were able to that, actively try not to do that with our families. And so it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing that just happens without us having control over it.

What was the moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed? Where you thought like, I may not make it. Or our team may not make it. Or this is a really bad I guess you're training for bad situations all the time.

Yeah.

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 with immense gratitude, because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that, that can't say that. They had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position, and my team was always in a position, that we had prepared, planned, executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete, you know, or near complete control, or we understood the pathways we needed to go throughout it. But I say that also, you know, this comes back to compartmentalization. You know, one of the things that you have to be able to do when shit goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up, right? The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm going to get out of this. Focus is how do I get out of this? So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and then 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 a forebrain 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 that 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, you know, when we were 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, right? I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went wrong, we'd be able to handle it, you know? And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff.

When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong on how to get out of that situation? Or is it planning for here's exactly how we would like it to go right?

Yeah.

But let's also have a exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong. What do you-- It's a ladder.

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

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

Yeah, so you know, just like, just like any athlete would understand. So a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall back on depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing. This is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay. Well, 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 80/20 rule. And that is you get to 80% of certainty and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out. We will figure it out. Because we're not going to figure out everything. And it's, you know, Murphy's law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

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

Yeah, so I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I call Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. At what point do we start flipping 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 230.

To boil.

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

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

I can't answer because it's so subjective. I can give some ideas and you just gave some. I mean, some people are very social people. So starting a conversation with a stranger is a piece of cake, right? For me, that would be hard, 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, you know, that makes them anxious. So working out for some is like, for some people they've developed a system where that that pain point of working out is something they highly enjoy. So they're not practicing it.

So.

Someone should look at their own makeup and ask themselves what fright, well, in fear, again, it doesn't have to go all the way to fear. Fear is interesting because it's actually a combination of two things. It's a combination of uncertainty and anxiety. You can have each one of those and not have fear. fear, right? So if you are anxious but not uncertain, that would be, I have to give this presentation on Monday. I hope it's going, I'm nervous about it, right? That's, you know, but there's nothing uncertain about it. It's Monday, it's a two o'clock, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm just, I'm nervous about it, okay? Uncertainty without anxiety, well that's every kid on Christmas Eve, okay? I mean, so, but it's when you combine the two that you start to generate fear. Well, the idea is if you have fear, if you have uncertainty plus anxiety, start to manifest in fear. The key is to understanding which of those two factors can you buy down? Anxiety. Buy down. Buy down, which means decrease. Anxiety can be decreased internally. It's an internal response. So things like some of the tools Huberman talks about, visual tools, breathing tools, you can begin to shift your physiology out of your sympathetic into your parasympathetic, come off of the autonomic response system. So that's how you you could start buying down anxiety. Uncertainty is largely external. That means something around you outside of you, you don't understand. There's unknown. The best way to do that and the way we do it in Spec Ops is we control what we can control. Some people refer to it as control your three-foot world. 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 certain certainty. You're taking what is uncertain, you're grabbing onto something certain. As soon as you've controlled that, as soon as you move through that, then you have to make another decision. What's the next thing? This is basically kind of stepping through, right? Stepping through this challenge, right? So you can start to practice coming off of fear or moving through fear by kind of understanding both of those pieces.

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

I think it's not fearing the unknown. It's the idea that when you go through something like that you understand that, hey, I could pretty much do whatever I'd like to do. And I know that even though I don't know how I'm gonna do it, I know I can figure it out. If there's enough interest, if there's enough passion, right, I'm not gonna I'm not interested in becoming a pro football player, you know?

Right.

So that's off my list, right? But I was interested in writing a book and that was a whole new process for me, you know? When I left the Navy, I started public speaking. I did not like public speaking at all, right? I did not like it. But I knew it was an edge that I wanted to conquer, you know? 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 at the next edge. And that's the growth process, is continuing to move to our edges and then finding the next edge.

I mean, you say you don't like public speaking, but don't you have to.

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

Yeah, it's a, what's effective? Here's the word.

All right. And that's what you appreciate, too. There's, I know one wants you to sit there and pontificate. It's like, hey, guys, this is, this is what's going on.

So there's, there's a, there's a Directness that's appreciated and, and, and required, you know, so.

But that's not, you know, folks.

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. Maine, where life the way it should be transforms all who encounter its spectacular landscapes. Rugged coastlines, pine scented trails, sandy beaches, sparkling lakes. and tranquil forests inspire you to reflect and make meaningful moments. They offer endless opportunities for adventure and exploration, whether peddling or paddling, hiking or biking. Maine has more than enough outdoor spaces to make the most of long summer days, relish and exquisite flavors harvested from the ocean and the rich soils of orchards and fields. Maine's makers are rooted in its heritage while boldly branching into new ways of thinking, doing and being. Connect with its people in warm and authentic towns, which beckon you to stroll art galleries and locally owned shops where generations of artists, writers, entrepreneurs and craftspeople see the world anew. It's tempting to do it all when you visit, but take a beat and a breath. Get a feel for the time and tempo of Maine. Simple pleasures, scenic adventures, where every route is the scenic one. Discover more at visitmaine.com Should it stay or should it go?

What if I mess it up? What if I have to pay taxes now?

If you're unsure about an old 401, it's okay. Fidelity can help you understand your options.

Avoid mistakes and taxes, and feel good.

About your decisions for your retirement savings.

To learn more, visit fidelity.com/rollover. Be sure to consider all your available.

Options and the applicable fees and features.

Of each before moving your retirement Retirement.

Assets, Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSE/SIPC.

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, you know, in the military, I was pretty much in charge of something all the time. It didn't make me a leader. You don't get to call yourself a leader. It's like calling yourself funny or calling yourself handsome. Someone else makes that decision. You can't designate yourself that way. Someone else decides whether or not you are a leader. And that's done through the way you behave in that position. So if you are in charge and you're behaving in a way that causes someone to make a decision, okay, this is the person I would lead, I mean, if we think about the leaders in our lives, the people who we can 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, right? 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 adverbs. The first is empathy, okay? And again, I would say this, there's not an exclusivity in terms of what someone will decide because there are people.

Who will live- It's subjective, right?

It's a subjective thing. Again, it's someone's choice as to whether or not they think. So empathy is one. Selflessness is another. And this is not just, you know, so let's just back up here. Empathy, not just I know how you feel, I feel how you feel, right? I can put myself into your shoes and that reflects in the way I communicate with you and I care about, it shows that you care about another.

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? -Emathize showing you feel how they feel.

-Well, first deep listening. And so listening to another person but true, like deep, full-on listening. I am hanging on every word listening. Oftentimes we listen to people and we're two things, one of two things is happening. Either we're thinking about what we're going to say next, right? Or we're thinking about how what that person is saying relates to our lives. And it's not from a malicious standpoint. It's really because we're trying to relate. So we're trying to say, okay, you're talking about football. I'm thinking, okay, wait a second. Did I play football in eighth grade? Maybe I could talk about that. I relate. But what I'm doing is I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm making what you're saying about me. So what deep, empathetic listening is, I have a whiteboard in my mind, okay? and as I'm listening to you speak, if something pops onto the whiteboard, I erase it and I move on. I just keep on listening. You know, that is, if you do, if you empathetically listen, like look into someone's eyes, attentive behavior, facing each other, you are going, 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.

Information was the thing that stimulated thought, stimulated new ideas. and as we learn new things, we make new connections in our brains. So as we begin to add new stitches into that three-dimensional tapestry in our mind, we're beginning to cause our mind to function in new ways. But the key then is to apply it, to personalize it, to do something with it. And 10 years ago, when I went and got in front of an audience and talked about the application, nobody wanted to step outside that philosophical, theoretical, intellectual realm, right? Because when doing something means you're gonna have to change something about yourself. Yeah, you're gonna get uncomfortable, right? And I think we're in an age of information and in an age of information ignorance is a choice. And because of technology we have access to so much content and information creates awareness and awareness is consciousness and you can't have consciousness without energy. They work together.

Together.

So there's an energetic change, I think, that's taking place in the world right now where people are so informed that old models, old paradigms are beginning to break down. Whether it's the medical model, the religious model, the education model, journalism, the economy, you know, politics, it's all beginning to come to the surface because something else has to come out. And I think that one of the things that people are realizing is that you don't have to be a Buddhist monk to do this or a nun with 40 years of devotion. You just got to understand the formula. And just like any skill or anything you learn, you got to go from thinking to doing to being. You got to take knowledge, you create the experience, and if you keep doing it over and over again, you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it. And you know that you know how to do it. Well, In the last 10 years, we have assembled a scientific team. And let's see if you can really make significant brain changes. I don't want those changes to just be in your mind. I want them to be in your brain. I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury or anxiety or depression or a cyclic mood disorder or stroke. We want to see that there's been significant change. At the same time, let's measure your brain in real time and let's look to see what that transformation process looks like. And in the discovery, Louis, of that process, we gained so much knowledge about what that transformational process looks like. In other words, I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life right now with within some disturbing emotion that 100% of the time you're going to make your brain worse.

If you think about your life, if.

You'Re stuck in an emotion, like you're frustrated, you're angry, you're fearful, resentful, and you're thinking within that emotional state, in other words, you can't think greater than how you feel. That means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record or residue of the past. So we see people people in the process of change that are analyzing.

In.

Duality or polarity, that kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and further away from true change.

So.

We'Ve done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans and we now know that there's a formula to create greater brain coherence, greater brain efficiency to make your brain work better. And when your brain works better, you work better. At the same time, it requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life. And nobody changes until they change their energy. Right? So then how do you get a person out of resentment, frustration into joy and freedom? If why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience has happen. So most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness or pain or the resentment in here. Well, if they're waiting their whole life in separation or lack, then and we create reality, then the lack is driving certain thoughts which is creating more separation and more lack. So teaching people then to begin to condition their body emotionally before before the evidence takes place in their life is breaking a significant habit. So instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause and effect. So the moment you start feeling whole and grateful, we now know your healing will begin at that moment. The moment you start feeling worthy and abundant, your wealth is coming. You're generating a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of wealth.

How does someone feel worthy though if they've always been told they're not worth it.

Yeah.

Well, so... -Or that's the story they tell themselves.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not worth it because she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date. Because he broke up with me because I got fired because my parents left me. How am I worth it when there's so much evidence or story around a negative thing?

-Well, let's stop telling the story of your past and let's start telling the story of your future. And people who who aren't defined by a vision of the future, for the most part are left with memories of the past. Your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. So most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems. And those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated to certain people and things at certain times and places. So the moment the person wakes up, clean slate, they start thinking about the problems they're thinking in the past. If you believe your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, well, there's a possibility that your past is going to be your future. Every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it. So then the moment you start recalling the problem, you start feeling unhappy. Now your body's in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So people reaffirm their identity based on the past, right? And it turns out that the redundancy of doing that, conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. Most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. So now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're going to crave the predictable future, right? That's the known as well and there's only one place where the unknown exists, and that's the eternal present moment. That's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. So you've got to labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past. And yes, it takes an effort to do that, but if you keep working with the formula, you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy. And now your body, as the unconscious mind, the objective mind is not believing it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state. So you ask the person, why are you so unhappy? Why are you so frustrated? Why are you so resentful? The moment you ask that, their brain is going to associate that emotion to a past event.

To a memory.

To a memory. That's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future. So if you're not being the defined by a vision of the future. It just means to me that you're more in love with your past than you are with the future. So how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet, but they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain is literally changed to look like the event has already occurred. The latest research in neuroscience says that's absolutely possible. We know that. And how do you teach person to select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body is their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes and new ways ahead of the environment. Now, to their body begins to change to look like the event has already occurred. We've proven that that's possible. Now think about this.

So the more you think about your desired future, the joy, the gratitude.

The.

Feelings you want to have that are more positive, the more you think about it as a future thing happening, the more your body shifts now.

Exactly. So your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment. Now think about this. Some condition in your life, the more altered you feel inside of you, the more you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot and that memory now is embossed in the brain. It's branded in there. So then people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions and the stronger the betrayal, the stronger the trauma, the more the body's living in the past, right? So how do you reverse that? So now if you truly got passionate about a future, we've all done this, you get a wild idea in your mind and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it, all of a sudden the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the energy of the future. Now, the stronger the emotion you feel from that vision, the more you're going to pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future.

And vice versa, the stronger you pay attention to the of the past pain, you're going to create the pain in this moment.

Exactly. So then, so it requires a coherent brain and we now know that there's a formula for that and we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it. They just have to practice and it requires a coherent heart because resentment, frustration, impatience creates a very incoherent heart and when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy, you stop trusting in your future. So then if there's physical evidence in your brain and body, physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred, it's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future and you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future and how you think and how you feel is your state of being. And now your state of being is living in the future. instead of the past. Now, the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future because of traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come up with, now you're back to the energy of your past and now you're going to start looking for it, analyzing why hasn't it happened. Well, if you're feeling the emotion of your future, why would you look for it? Because you would feel like it already happened and that is the place where the magic happens. So then you can't just do this, get up and then return back to your old state of being. You got to maintain that modified state of being. -I don't mind it. -When practice happens.

-Well, let me finish.

-If I punch you in the face.

Right now, how do you maintain?

-Well, of course. Of course. I mean, we all take blows in our lives. And we all react emotionally. But the question is, how long are you gonna react? -Right, right. -So then if you you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions and those emotions linger for days. That's a mood.

For some people.

Mood and then months, temperament, years, personality trait. So then the person's personality is literally based on the past. But they don't know that because they're doing it over and over again. It becomes a subconscious program. So now, if it requires a coherent brain and here in heart, then we have to train people how to self-regulate. So, we've done thousands and thousands of measurements. We've partnered with the HeartMath Institute to teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence.

How do we do it? Well, besides going to your workshop, what's a simplified version? I'm sure it takes more time than...

Well, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. It just requires getting still, closing your eyes, putting your attention on your heart, changing your breath so that you move into the present moment. And when you slow your breathing down, you slow your brain waves down. When you slow your brain waves down, now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system. So then you train a person how to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion. And it takes a little practice. And just like a flower that takes time to bloom, it takes a little bit of time. But if you work and trading the resentment, the frustration or the impatience for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness and you keep at it, there'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all. That's not a bad thing because gratitude, the emotional signature of gratitude means something's happening to you, something has happened to you, you're receiving something or you just receive something. So your your body then when you're feeling gratitude is in the perfect state of receiving. So then that means then you'll accept, believe and surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude. If you're living in resentment, you're living in fear, you're living in impatience, you could say I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm with all you want and that thought's going to stop right at the brainstem and.

Never make its way to the body. because the body is not feeling or because why?

Because you're feeling resentment. And that thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment. Resentment has a different set of thoughts, right? In other words, once you start opening your heart, it begins to move into coherence. It begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide. Now, that's frequency, that's energy and all that energy, that frequency carries information, carries an intent. So then when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open, you're broadcasting energy into the field.

-A frequency.

-A frequency. You lay the intent of the thought of your health or your wealth. That frequency can carry the thought of your wealth. It can carry the thought of your health. If you're suffering, suffering, you can't... the suffering does not carry... that energy does not carry the thought of your wealth. It carries a different set of thoughts. So then we're teaching people how to self-regulate. Because if you're going to believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart, it better be open and activated. And you better know how to self-regulate. And you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance, in your life and you lose that feeling, if you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed, then the next level is to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future. Now, that requires great awareness and great effort, but if you have a community of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and they're connected to their future because that's where their mind is. They begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past. So we've done enough measurements now, Louis, to know that we can teach people how to do that and we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour. It's a skill now. They know that they know how to do it. So now they have brain coherence and heart coherence. Well, once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent, it acts as an amplifier and it drives energy to the brain. So now the brain is getting more energy once the heart is open and then you're thinking a different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that. And here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your.

Heart literally starts to swell. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness Newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I wanna remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

This is Comedy Bang Bang, the podcast, the promo. And in 30 seconds, I'm going to.

Tell you why you should check out the show.

I, the host, Scott Aukerman, have a light-hearted conversation with famous celebrities like John.

Hamm, Allison Williams, Phoebe Bridgers, Jason Alexander.

Natasha Leon, Bob Oden Kirk, just to name A few.

Things go a little off the rails.

When different eccentric characters and oddballs drop by to be interviewed as well. Each week is a blend of conversations and character work from your favorite comedians.

As well as some new hilarious voices.

Comedy Bang!

Bang!

The Podcast.

Listen every Monday wherever you get your podcasts.

Going up.

Prices keep going up these days.

It feels like being on an elevator that only goes up.

Going up.

But not at Metro. We're pushing the down button. We've lowered prices. Get one line of 5G data for forty dollars, period. That's 20 lower. And you get a free Samsung 5G.

Phone when you bring your number only at Metro.

Five-year guarantee on eligible plans.

Exclusions Apply.

See website for details. Not available at Metro with T-Mobile in.

The past six months. Tax supplies.