NAVY SEAL REVEALS How To NEVER BE LAZY AGAIN & Conquer Your Mind! | Rich Diviney

When something bad happens that you don't like, okay, take two minutes to kick the ground and wallow and do whatever you need to do more. And then after two minutes, after 120 seconds, just get back to work.

Well, look, I want to jump right in because I think, you know, the Navy SEALs, obviously, being part of an elite group and even leading an elite group like that, there's a lot we can glean and learn. And I think one of the defining Factors is Navy SEALs are not considered lazy by any stretch of the means.

Right.

But the average person, I think, can glean a lot from that. How does someone with your experience overcome laziness and kind of the desire not to move forward on a regular basis?

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say that the quick answer would be curiosity into one's potential. Okay. I mean, every Navy seal. And so what is potential? Potential is not what is. Potential is what could be. It's always in front of us. And so to engage one's curiosity as to what could be.

In any facet, in any venture, but especially about oneself, is probably, I would imagine, the way that most guys end up becoming Navy seals, because it is some of the toughest training on the planet. And you go into it wondering, to some extent, can I do this?

What can be? What can I be? And I remember just Learning about the SEALs and reading about this was in the mid-90s, right. Very few people knew what Navy SEALs were back in the mid-90s, but I was reading as much as I could and finding out, and I said, man, these guys, these teams seem incredible. They seem superhuman. And can I be one of those? And it was that curiosity that kept me driven. And I think any type of that curiosity is. And that's a proactive thing, right? To be curious as a proactive, it takes effort if one is not naturally curious. So it takes some effort, but be curious.

Well, and you didn't start off in the seals or at least craving the seals. You started out craving airfare, right? Not airfare, but being a pilot. So how did you make that from pilots and Navy seal? Obviously, you go from flying a plane to jumping out of planes, right?

Right. Well, it was interesting. Yeah. I grew up wanting to be a pilot. My twin brother and I. My dad was a private pilot, so we'd fly with him all the time. We said, hey, we want to fly jets. And, you know, it was between the Air Force and the Navy. And of course, we both. We. We lived on the. On the coast in Connecticut, so we loved the ocean, that was our. So, you know, flying was probably the first love. Ocean was probably a second love. And, and then Navy, you could do both. You could fly jets onto ships. Right. So it's like, wow, that's a cool thing. Plus, how hard could that be? That. That was really hard. Right. And so we, we. It was actually the Gulf War, the first Gulf war. In the 90s. I start, I learned about the Navy SEALs and I, I started reading about these guys and, and first of all, they were kind of born from the water, which was really cool to me. The, you know, the ocean is not, is not nice to humans. It's hostile to humans. Yeah. In almost every way possible. Right. It's cold, it's. There's no oxygen at bone crushing depths. I mean, there's a reason why we are land dwellers. And, and the fact that these guys made that environment their safe place. There was, there was, there was an audacity to that that I thought was really cool. And in fact, there's a saying in the teams. It's like, the enemy will never be brave or stupid, brave enough or, or stupid enough to follow you into the water. So when in doubt, go there. And so this really intrigued me. And then I saw that they were doing everything not only in the water, they were in the desert, they were in the jungle, they were in the snow, they were jumping out of airplanes. It was just a really cool concept. And as I went through the ROTC program at Purdue University.

I just started asking myself, I said to myself, I never wanted to be a pilot. I knew I could be a pilot. I mean, I didn't. I kind of knew I could do that. I never wanted to be a pilot and look over at the seals and wonder. Yeah, right. So it was that curiosity as to my potential. And I said, what, you know, what if. Let me, let me do this? And that's what, that's what drove me.

I love it, dude. I love it. You know, it's, you know, I was going through attributes, you know, which I'm enjoying a lot, by the way. It's, it's, it's becoming a fast highlighter and note taking book. Right.

I get that a lot, actually. People taking a lot of notes and they say, man, this is, this is really dense. I got, I got to do a lot of.

I don't think I'm gonna be able to read it all in one sitting and extrapolate everything that's inside of it. I'll probably have to do it a few times. But I mean, it's It's. It's been so long since I've had something that's challenged the way in which I look at things. And, you know, one of the takeaways in the book, you know, that I saw is, you know, I would refer to the word narcissism as being kind of like a derogatory word. But the way you explain it, it's like, well, no, we're all a little bit narcissistic. Narcissistic in nature, I guess it just comes at various levels. And I know that's how you kind of maybe kind of drill down into the first, basically, the five buckets of attributes. How did the Navy SEALs, and being part of that, because I know you throughout the book, you're talking a lot about how the training kind of shaped this mentality. How did you learn about it, and then how did you organize it? Because so many things need to be taken into frameworks in order to be properly digested and utilized. How did you discover all that?

Yeah, the discovery process was probably one of the most fun parts of that. And it was. And the first phase of that was to take some of the work I did while in the SEAL teams and ask myself how it applied outside. And so I actually reverse a question, kind of a question or statement that's been heard a lot. And the question or statement that I'm talking about is this.

What makes or why are Navy seals so different from everybody else? That's the normal question. What I wanted to do is reverse that and say, what? And why are Navy SEALS like everybody else? And I think it's all about the types of questions you asked. When I asked that question, I began to say, okay, these attributes at an elemental level are ubiquitous. They're human. They're not just Navy seal. And I was able to kind of say, okay, well, let's expand this out to what performance looks like just in human life, wherever you are, whether you're a SEAL or a doctor or a physician or a comedian or whatever genre you're in.

And then, of course, as I wrote those attributes out, then they began to naturally bin and clump into these categories, which made it really cool as well, because I could start putting some structure around these categories. And so it was really an evolution of thought and an evolution of discovery to say that I am very interested in what I call elemental human performance. What. What is it? And who are we? Who do we show up as in the. In the rawest moments? Because we're all here. You know, it's during Challenge and stress and uncertainty when the real us shows up. And yeah, and I'm kind of like, okay, who's the real us? And can we, can we, can I help people discover the real us? Because then it'll help illuminate them as to their performance and why they show up and how they show up. And I think if you take some of these concepts and you just drill into them and get them down to the atomic level, they begin to very easily translate and cross contexts, you know. And so that was really the evolution of thought. And a lot of that discovery happened while writing. And I would just say anybody who's listening, who's interested in writing and doesn't feel like they have an idea fully fleshed out, my advice to them is start writing.

Yeah, right.

Because the process, yeah, it's amazing. The process helps flush the idea out. It's almost as if you're getting these ideas out on paper and that in that act, it's, it's, it's clearing your mind to think about it in different ways. And so, and that's what happened to me. It was really, really fun.

Yeah. I mean so much of it is self awareness. You know, I think, you know, it's easy for any of us to put on a 30 minute front or an hour front or even a week long or month long. You think about a dating relationship, right? Most people don't actually get to the who the real person is until at least six months in. Right. Because you know, you're in your best behavior, you know, you're not passing gas when you go to the movie theater, you know what I'm saying? Like all that kind of stuff. What do you think holds people back? Because you know, attributes at its core is just a whole nother level of ultimate self awareness to then kind of position yourself and advance yourself from what holds people back from even desiring that self awareness. Or maybe it's not even desire, maybe it's just in general holding them back from, from becoming ultimately self aware.

Well, I mean, you know, again, I would. All you and I can do is make is make assumptions whether or right or not. I think some people are afraid to figure out that to kind of go deep on themselves. I think some people are distracted enough such that the world.

Gives them environments and context inside which they know how to behave and they know how this, they know what to do and that is certain behaviors. And so they can just kind of roll with it and they'll be fine.

And I think some of it is comfort and certainty. If you find yourself in a position where, you know, hey, I'm doing what I like, or I'm where I need to be, I don't need to go any further. Or maybe I just, I'm not interested in kind of stretching myself. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you are interested in stretching yourself, if you are interested in growth, growth requires discomfort. I mean, that's a natural law. Right? And so that discomfort often means digging into who we are so we understand better how we'll show up when we step into the discomfort required for growth, whatever those edges we're seeking might be. And so I think those might be some ideas as to why people might not want to do it.

Yeah, well, I think it's such an important factor. You know, I wrote an ebook a while back that was the number one thing that holds you back. Because, you know, I, when I, when I wrote that, it was kind of like, you know, it's one of the situations. Well, if I, if I dig all the way down to the root cause of why somebody's not getting the ultimate results that they want in almost every single case, if you keep digging with a shovel, you get down to this level of self awareness. They're just not self aware. And you know, as I've been going through attributes, one of the things that I've discovered is there is a lot of conversation, a lot of transformation that happens really inside out and not outside in. I find a lot of people are kind of focused outside in and rather than being inside out kind of mentality, which is interesting because you talk a lot about how this, you know, the experience with the SEAL specifically teaches you about the emote, the kind of the emotional slash, mental intelligence side from the inside out, you know, and then you talk about the washout programs and how people are washing out. You know, they would wash out. And you guys had a, you know, kind of a, you know, one of the, one of the, one of my favorite stories is about the, the elite performer that was supposed to be. He was fantastic on paper, right?

He's right.

He's got all the check boxes. But you know, you within, you knew within a few days that within a nine month program he was going to wash out of that program because of that inside out mentality. How was that? How can we use attributes to create in us another level of drive, which I know is one of the buckets. How do we use that to create another level of drive and another level of competency to elevate even the most ordinary of Lives to an extraordinary level.

Yeah. You know, I think the first thing we have to understand is that the. That the environment and the world around us seduces us into thinking that it's a. It's an outside in relationship. In other words, you know, what, what goes on outside of us.

Then directs our internal behavior. And it's easy to think that and it's easy to make a mistake. But what we really actually need to understand is that everything starts inside all of our perceptions, all of our feelings, all of our emotions. Everything starts with our nervous system. And then what comes in from our nervous system and how our brain processes that. It's exactly why two people can look at the exact same thing and have a completely different perspective or perception of that thing. Well, that goes with the whole world. I mean, our experience is just that. It's our experience. It's what we are. It's how our nervous systems and our brains are processing that. So understanding that, I think.

Gives an element of certainty and control that I think is actually very valuable. For some people, it scares them when they start thinking, oh, wait, I'm responsible. You know, I'm responsible for my own emotions. I'm responsible for the way I perceive things. It's me, not them, or it.

That for some people can be scary, which is probably why some people don't want to do it. But for others, it can be very empowering because then you start to understand, wait a second, now I can control this. Now I can control what I do. And I think that's step number one. And I think part of that ability to control is understanding what some of those innate qualities are, what that kind of circuit board looks like that we show up with in the first place. Because we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us only is the levels to which we have each. Right. So I might be a level 8 on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me without my control, I roll with it. It's very easy for me to roll with it. Someone else might be level three, which means when the same thing happens to them, it's difficult for them to shut them down. Yeah, it shuts them down. Or at least they adapt with great difficulty and pain and struggle, there's nothing wrong with. And so if we line up all of the attributes on a wall, like I said, at dimmer switches, all of our levels are going to look different. Our line is going to look differently. Now there's no judgment in that. Be like judging our hair color. I mean, it's Useless. It's just how we show up. But to know that starts to illuminate why certain experiences and certain environments are tougher for me than someone else or for that reader than someone else. And I think that's a very empowering.

Kind of set of information because now you can start to say, okay, now I know why this stuff is so easy for me and this other stuff is so hard. And if I feel like it's necessary, I can choose to then develop those attributes that I'm a little low on so that it can get a little easier. And I think it just, it pinpoints the areas that you want to work or in some cases pinpoints the areas that you don't need work because you don't need to develop an attribute low on. It really depends on the context inside of which you want to perform.

Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the, one of the things that kind of a epiphany of you. I had several so far reading, there's been several.

Well, good.

One of the primary ones is this what I would refer to as self sabotage. You know, we're overly critical of ourselves on a consistent basis if we underperform in comparison to someone else rather than kind of holding ourselves to our own accountability and developmental state. And when I, when I began looking at that and you mentioned that, hey, look, there's no judgment here. This is, this is kind of a, this is the discovery mechanism and exploration mechanism. You know, anything can be strengthened. There's, you know, there's, there's, there's different extremes. If you're too high on one thing, that's probably a problem. And if you're too low on one thing, it's probably a problem. So, you know, it's. So I think there's, there can easily be some developmental goals along the way that do make sense for the sheer fact of not actually getting to a place where you can give yourself some grace and mercy a little bit when you don't necessarily meet the expectations that, you know, maybe you pulled onto yourself because somebody else gave it to you or you're trying to compare yourself to someone else.

Right.

So one of the tools that I think attributes is so good for is that self sabotage thing. Have you had a chance to maybe walk through the importance of knowing an attributable awareness? I think I just made up a new word, attributable awareness.

As it relates to maybe overcoming self sabotage?

Well, so I think, I think it's, again, it's an acceptance and an illumination to oneself such that they know.

They'Re better informed as to what paths they're going to succeed on. Here's. So I would say this. We are all human, okay? That's. You know, and in today's environment, we should probably remember that, okay, we are all humans and we're all, you know, we're all kind of, you know, we're all equal but not the same. Because there's a difference in those two words, right? And the reason there's a difference is because if we relate it to automobiles, you know, some of us are Jeeps and some of us are Ferraris and some of us are SUVs. And again, there's no judgment there because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things that the Jeep can't do. It behooves us, however, to kind of look under our hood and figure out maybe what we are. Because we may in fact be a Jeep that's trying to run on a Ferrari track or a Ferrari that's trying to run on a Jeep track. Now, nothing wrong with that either. You can be that. You can choose to do that because that's the power and freedom and gifts that we're given. However, knowing that you're a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track is only going to help you pinpoint that which you need to improve to better run on the Ferrari track. Or it's going to tell you, actually, I'm a Jeep and I've been trying to run on this Ferrari track. That's why I'm so upset. That's why I'm so unfulfilled. Let me go find a Jeep track to run on. And I think, I think this type of self awareness is extraordinarily empowering. And in fact, usually I think deflates self sabotage because it's an acceptance, you know, I am who I am and I get to. And by knowing that, and by knowing more precisely who I am, I get to take better control and active control over those aspects of myself that I want to improve and those aspects of those selves that I. I'm just not good at. Listen, I mean, there's things I'm just decidedly not good at. I always get. So. One of my favorite quotes from Einstein is one that goes, and I hope I don't misquote it, but it goes something like, you know, everybody's a genius, but if you spend your entire life trying to teach a fish how to. No, if you try to teach a fish how to climb a tree, he's going to Spend his entire life feeling like he's an idiot. Okay. And that's really just to describe the fact that we all have certain contexts inside of which we're geniuses and other contexts inside of which we're idiots. Right. And that's. That goes for every one of us. And so understanding oneself can help better understand inside of which context one can really excel and maybe avoid or actively proactively decide to not engage in those contexts inside of which we're doofuses. Right.

Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, it's definitely going to decrease frustration and increase fulfillment over time.

Yeah.

Because you, you know, you're not aiming a bazooka just at anything. You're taking a sniper rifle and aiming specifically at a specific target.

And I think.

I think that's one of the things that's been so, so instrumental. Another one of my favorite aha's in the book is this concept of attributes are not skills.

Yeah.

And I think so many of us, when we feel like we're deficient in a certain area, we immediately go to increase a skill set or develop a skill set. And one of the things that I love is how you relate attributes to skills. Would you mind breaking that down for the audience? Because I think it's a very pivotal part of the book.

Absolutely. Well, and it comes from. It stems from this idea that when it comes to performance, we most often judge ourselves through skills. And the reason is because skills are very easy to score and judge and assess, and skills and attributes are different.

And yet they get conflated all the time. And so. So skills are not inherent to our nature. We're not born with the ability to throw a ball or ride a bike or drive a car. We're taught those things, and we learn how to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments. So here's how and when to throw a ball. Here's how and when to ride a bike. And because they're kind of didactic and tangible, they're very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can score these things. You can see how well anybody does any one of those. You can have scores, you can have stats, you can put them on resumes. You can. This is why during hiring processes and team building, usually they get seduced by skills because they build these dream teams based on the best this, the best that based on these scores. The problem with skills is skills don't tell us how we're going to show up when the environment turns uncertain and challenging and stressful because it's very difficult if not impossible to apply a known skill to an unknown environment. This is where we start to lean on these attributes. These attributes are inherent. All of us are born with levels of perseverance, of adaptability, of resilience. Now, certainly, they develop over time, but. But you can see these things in small children. I mean, and the other thing about attributes is they don't direct our behavior. They inform our behavior. They tell us how we're going to show up to a situation. So. So my son's levels of perseverance and adaptability and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and falling off a dozen times, doing so. Right. And then because they're kind of hidden in the background, you know, running in the background, they're very difficult to assess, measure, and test. It's hard to see how adaptable someone is. It's hard to sit across at an interview table with someone and assess their perseverance or their resilience. Right. They are the most visible and visceral during times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty. That's when they really come to the fore because the skills take a back seat. And so. So when it comes to human behavior and when it comes to performance, it's really incumbent and necessary for us to understand our attributes, oftentimes more than our skill. You know, certainly there's nothing wrong with skill. And I make a point of saying skills are required, but skills are contextual, skills are. Skills are conditional. And if we want to understand our performance holistically through life, it's best that we start looking at our attributes. Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting. I've got one of my agents that. That works with me a little bit.

He.

When he. When we first started talking, Gus has been probably in a couple of years ago, he said, he goes, I'm trying to figure out what your one thing is. I'm like, what do you mean by one thing? He goes, dude, how'd you go from homelessness to owning multiple business and employing, you know, hundreds of team members? I'm like. He goes, walk. Walk me through it. So we're talking through this thing. And he kept trying to convince me that I was somehow unique and special. I said, no, I'm not unique and special. I believe that anything that I have developed in my life is teachable. It may not be necessarily something that someone gravitates towards. Some people gravitate really easy. It's kind of like learning to swim. Right? Some people learn to swim, they dive in the water, they're good to go and they're off to the races. Other people will have a fear of water for 20 years. And it wasn't until I started reading attributes that I understood that many of the things that I utilized to overcome homelessness specifically was directly tied to the attributional, my new word side of things. Right. And not a skill set.

Right.

And so much of it was even mindset. It was, it was almost, it was almost an emotional knowing that led to mindset shift, action taking and then a change in results as it kind of, kind of, I guess, come from full circle.

Yeah.

How does someone maybe who has low attribute level awareness currently.

Go and discover the areas that maybe there that they maybe want to develop? How do they go over that? And then how would they imply that in a daily routine kind of thing?

Yeah. Well, first read the book.

That's a good way to start to indoctrinate yourself. But these attributes, again, they show up during times of challenge, uncertainty, stress, and as human beings, the commonality, one of the commonalities between every human being is that every single one of us in our lives has gone through some sort of challenge, uncertainty and stress. And it's those moments, and it's inside those moments that you can often look back and start asking yourself some direct questions about how you showed up in those moments. Right. If you, if you want to be direct and honest with yourself, that's the key. Now the book helps you define what those attributes are. We have an assessment tool that helps give you kind of a snapshot of where you fall. But even the assessment tool, it has to be, it has to be taken from a very self aware perspective, an introspective kind of mindset. Right. How am I going to kind of look deeply about, on my own, about my, or at my own behavior and answer honestly so that you can then start to get a clue as to where you fall on these things. And then, you know, the results you get from the assessment again are a comparison to a thousand plus other people, which means it's just a snapshot. Even those results, you're going to need to say, okay, does this make sense to me? And you're going to do that by indexing those results based on or against some of those challenges you've gone through. Now the good news is all of us, almost the entire planet, have just come off of a global pandemic and a year called 2020.

Yeah, I was just thinking, I was like, I think this is the first time everybody's faced adversity all at the same time.

That's right. We all in fact have a situation and environment that we can autopsy a little bit and see how we showed up. And so that's the way we do it. We start asking ourselves how we show up and then we start maybe if we can gauging our performance during stress challenge, uncertainty and asking ourselves some direct questions, then little bit more difficult to do it during the in the moment. But if he can, that also helps too. And you start getting awareness and an honesty and I think a comfort in saying, okay, all right, I see why this situation was so uncomfortable because it's hard for me to adapt. That's the way it is. I have to practice or I'm inherently impatient and that's why it didn't work out. Or my resilience needs some work. Whatever it might be, it begins to inform the individual.

Yeah, I want to make sure everybody really understands how important it is to pick up the book one. It's incredibly enlightening. I love the fact you meant introspection because even when I was, even when I was taking the quiz or the assessment myself, I'm used to going and taking quiz on and they're like five or six questions and gives you kind of like a surface level answer and kind of stuff like that. One of the things I love most about the attributes quiz that you have on your website is number one, it's, it's 100 plus questions.

Yeah. If you take all three at once. Yes. You can take them in pieces though. So I didn't know that.

But I loved it. I mean, but I love like I'm a self awareness junkie. I want to know myself to the depth of level that I can understand what my blind spots are, understand what my struggles are. So I can develop those and work on those. But for the audience, just specifically, can we give them a high level breakdown of the five attributes? We don't obviously have to deep dive they need because it would take us, it would take us like six shows to unpack everything for sure. But let's just break down the attributes for a quick second.

Yeah. So I write about 25 in the book and of course there are more than 25. I really just necked it down to what I felt like were applicable for everyday life and optimal performance. And again in doing so they started to bend in these, in these categories that made a lot of sense. And so the first category is grit. What are the attributes that make up grit? And again, people think of grit oftentimes as Its own attribute. It's one thing, but it's actually not. It's a combination of things that kind of meld together and bake and catalyze to make someone gritty.

And Angela Duckworth wrote a great book called Grit that kind of said the same thing in different ways. It's a bunch of different things. And so I kind of looked at, okay, what is grit from an attribute. Perspective. Perspective. What are the attributes that make up grit? And those are courage, perseverance, adaptability and resilience. You know, four of them. Then there's the mental acuity attributes. These attributes speak to how we process and absorb the world and the information in the world. Okay. Really it come to our, our brain attributes, like how our brains working. And so the first is situational awareness. How are we absorbing the information? Because we get 11 million bits of information per second into our nervous system through all five senses. Yeah. Our frontal lobe only processes about 2500, which means there's a massive amount of deselection. And our levels of situation really speak to situational awareness. Really speak to our vigilance levels. Right. The more vigilant someone is, the higher their situation awareness, they notice more things. I was always kind of a vigilant person. Obviously my career hyper developed vigilance. So I'm the guy who walks down the city streets and I notice other people's faces. I notice hands, I notice dark alleys, I notice cars going the other direction. I notice things like that. And some people we know just walk around. They're kind of like la la land. They don't notice anything. They're lower on situational learners. Again, no judgment. And then there's compartmentalization, how we're taking that and processing it and deciding what's relevant. Task switching, which is our ability to kind of hop between focus points different, that's actually what we're doing. Multitasking is in fact a myth. It's actually task switching that we're doing because we can only focus really on one thing at a time. And then learnability, our ability to absorb and process that information and, and make it part of.

Our system. Can we do that rapidly. Then there are the drive attributes. The drive attributes. Whereas grit speaks to the more acute challenges and struggles and pushing through those more acute ones. Drive speaks to those long term struggles or goals or challenges. The ability to set and pursue and achieve long term goals. And what are the attributes that combine to make someone driven? And those are self efficacy, discipline, open mindedness, cunning and narcissism. And I know there's some surprises there which we can get into if we wanted to. Then the leadership category, what are the attributes that make up great leadership? And again, leadership people often conflate being a leader with being in charge. Okay. It's not the same thing. One's a noun and one's a verb. Leadership is a behavior. And you don't get to call yourself a leader. You don't get to self designate. That's like calling yourself good looking or funny. Okay? Other people decide that, right? So other people decide whether or not you are someone they will follow. And they do that based on behaviors. And so these behaviors stem from these attributes. And those attributes are empathy, selflessness, authenticity, decisiveness, and accountability. And then finally, team ability. Because just like leadership, you don't get to call yourself a great teammate. Your teammates call yourself a great teammate, call you a great teammate based on your behaviors. Those behaviors are integrity, conscientiousness, humility, and humor. And then I have three others that I talk about and they didn't bin appropriately in those categories because they were.

They were attributes.

Whose opposites or polarities were just as powerful. So patience, for example. Well, there are hyper successful people who are also impatient. So patients and impatience, they be looked at. Okay. That you. They don't. Not one is not better than the other. Right. So that was one. Competitiveness. Competitiveness versus non competitiveness. Both are very advantageous, depending on how you're approaching a problem. And then fear of rejection versus insufficience to what other people think. You don't care about what other people think. Those. Also either one of those polarities can be very, very powerful. So I binned those into a chapter I called the others and talk about why those exist. But that's a kind of an Overview on the 25.

Yeah, I mean, like I said, everybody needs to grab the book. It's incredibly insightful. I will say that it will make you more aware than you are yesterday in a dramatic way. I mean, it really will.

Well, listen, I'm glad you said that because.

There'S a lot of seals out there writing books and some of them are my good friends. Right. And they do, they, they do some great work and there's some great stuff out there. I did not want to write a book about Navy seals. I did not want to write a book about high top performers or super performers. I wanted to write a book that was about the reader. And so I wanted. And the feedback I'm getting is. I'm grateful for you saying that. Is that when someone reads this book, they begin to think about themselves, not about Navy seals and not about anything else, which is cool. So I'm glad you said that.

Yeah. I mean, if you improve yourself and everything else around you improves. So, you know, I think as an American culture, we spend a lot of time looking outside.

We judge our. The quality of our relationship based on whether or not someone is directed at us, rather than how we feel about ourselves. We judge our performance or our job or profession in such a way based on what we kind of get from an admiration perspective from other people. One of the things I love about attributes is because it does put the focus back on yourself to make sure that, hey, basically bringing the subconscious to the conscious and saying, hey, look, this is something I want to work on. I want to do better in this area, or I want to amplify this area that I'm already doing really well in. And then like you mentioned earlier, you know, maybe you're. You don't. Maybe you put the big mud tires on a Ferrari. Not necessarily the most interesting look, but hey, and you. And you hit the dirt trail, you know, but you got to know you need to change your tires.

Right? Right. And.

Or, you know, you're. You're aiming yourself at the kind of the right area. You know, I want to maybe dive back into situational awareness, if that's okay for just a second, because I feel like most people are most often derailed by situation and. Or experiences inside of a situation that they can't. I won't say they can't. Can't is not a right word that they struggle to overcome or to kind of bounce back, so to speak. How can we help them better understand.

A process, if you will, to help them bounce back quicker? Because I know you guys dealt with a lot of situational awareness issues, both in the seals and out of the seals.

Well, and so, yeah, it's a great question. It gets into not only situational awareness, but also compartmentalization and also resilience, because resilience is that act of being able to bounce back. It starts with understanding. It starts with being a little bit more deliberate about your situational awareness. Someone who finds themselves low in that attribute can just choose to be more vigilant.

They can start proactively noticing more things. Then you get into compartmentalization, which is literally our brain doing three things. First.

It'S assessing relevance of the information that we're absorbing. So based on my current goals and outcomes, what about all of this information is relevant? Okay. And that's a process okay, that's a list. And then prioritizing that list, that comes out of that question. Now this is going on usually in milliseconds in our brain, but prioritize that list. And based on that prioritization, what's that first thing that I'm going to focus on? So it's assessing relevance, it's prioritization, and it's focus. So that's the compartmentalization piece. And so in any situation, that's what's happening. And you can actually take, even though that, that happens in our brain in milliseconds without us thinking, we can actually take more active, conscious control of that process just by thinking about it more often and think about it more deliberately. So someone can actually, in fact practice this stuff in an environment that will help them in challenge and stress and situations where they may feel like they're a little bit more uncertain and wavy. I guess now once that situation hits, once that challenge hits us, that trauma is induced. Okay, now we've been knocked, we've been knocked back off of our baseline. Now we have to actually get back to baseline. That's resilience. Now, some people are more resilient than others.

And that's where the attribute comes into play. However, just like any of these attributes, you can take more proactive control over resilience just by asking yourself some more deliberate questions about that trauma, that challenge, that stress. It's really a lot of resilience has to do with appropriate reflection.

Well, I should say appropriate recovery and reflection. Okay, if we say, if we just take resilience as.

A raw thing and then transpose that into the physical realm, when we lift weights, we are literally tearing our muscles apart. That's what's happening.

To actually grow stronger, we know that we have to rest for a couple days before we tear again because. Because it's that recovery process that in fact is.

Regrowing those fibers and making that muscle stronger. And so that's why recovery is so important in the resilience process and the bouncing back process to rest and recover and in some cases to proactively ask some more empowering questions about that.

Invent and act. A way to practice resilience would be something that one of my favorite and best CEOs used to teach us. It was called the two minute rule. It was something his grandfather taught him. He said, hey, when something bad happens that you don't like, okay, take two minutes to kick the ground and wallow and do whatever you need to do more. And then after two minutes, after 120 seconds. Just get back to work. Decide to get back to work. Okay. Same thing when something great happens, okay? Take two minutes, rest on your laurels, pat yourself on the back, feel like you're king of the world, and then get back to it. Now, we can all say with true certainty that there is some trauma and challenge that people go through that takes a lot more than two minutes to get over. So I'm not talking about using this for that. I'm talking about using this for what I would call the little tragedies of life. The traffic jam, the bad day at work, the fight with a significant other. Those little things that we can actually use to practice resilience so that when the big things happen and more time is needed to recover, then we understand what the process is. We understand that there is a process. And we can say to ourselves more proactively, hey, I am in recovery, and it's going to be such and such a timeframe before I'm fully recovered. And that goes for both highs and lows. Because when great things happen, you know this as a serial entrepreneur and as a serial person who's successful, is that you can't get seduced by the highs either. If you want to. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to make sure you're not seduced by the highs and rest on your laurel. So even those, those great things that happen, take the time to celebrate, pat yourself on the back, reward yourself with that, feel good about it, but then get back to work. And there are some things that happen, you're going to want to celebrate for longer than two minutes.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, the reality is doing it, you know, following it, following a process like that, it's going to increase compassion on the areas that maybe, you know, you didn't get, you weren't super excited about. And it's going to increase competency on the other side. You're going to become more competent how you deal with things. You mentioned. The thing that popped in my head is we just got them building and moving into a new house. And I had to, you know, I was cleaning up the old house, getting ready for sale, which is sold very fast because this market's crazy, which is good for now.

But in doing so, I took a big piece of plywood, tossed it in the back of my F150, and it slid up and broke the back glass out of a. It's a newer truck. And so. And I did. I got mad for two or three minutes. Then I was like, you know what? It's late. I'm tired. I gotta get some rest. I went home, told my wife about it, and my wife and my kids were still talking about it three days later. I had already made the appointment, got it ready to get fixed up and all that kind of stuff for the little traumatic moments. So one of the things that kind of popped up in my head, it's.

Just a hang something else on that because it's important.

It's important for people to recognize in the resilience process that once something happens, there is no changing it. There's no going back. Right. Just that revelation and that realization can help, in fact, someone begin to figure out how to move on. This is what I think spec ops guys and Navy seals are really, really good at. Because there's some gnarly stuff that we go through. Yeah, but we. When, when. When the gnarly stuff hits.

And especially in the moment when we have to continually perform, right. It makes no sense. And it wastes time to look back and wonder why and wonder, what if? That's a waste of our time. Right. We have to say, how do we move on from this moment and get the job done. Now, once that's. Once that happens, there should be a period once everything's done to reflect and say, okay, what can I learn about that? So that if there were mistakes made, it doesn't happen again. Right. Because the learning process is important as well. But.

To spend time wallowing on that, in a sense, as oh, I wish, or what if, or whatever, it's a waste of time. It's almost, in fact, the same waste of time that one produces or conducts when they worry about something that hasn't happened yet. Either, you know, worrying about the past or the future is in fact a useless waste of energy. Right. Because all we have right now is the moment is the present, you know, and so I think that's an important concept to kind of think through.

No, absolutely. You know, it's funny the. It's not funny. It's interesting to me. It's interesting how attributes can. Is actually what I would refer to as a healthier way of filtering some of those call them little tragic moments or large tragic moments. So I do a lot of work with the USO travel and speak at the Warrior Reset programs. And they're, you know, sometimes we'll have private programs for Special Forces folks across, you know, across all the branches of service. And two things that are typically discussed at length ad nauseam are PTSD and then moral injury. So those two items are something that are worked on. And I used to get so frustrated because one of the speakers that would go before me, you know, a clinical psychologist, clinical psychiatrist. Psychiatrist, you know, had more, more degrees in a thermometer.

Creds. Yeah, exactly.

We stand up in front of these, these men and women of service who have been so amazing on behalf of our country and basically say, there's no hope for you. PTSD is like, it's, it's permanent. My experience has been, because I have my own things that I've obviously dealt with over, you know, kind of where I've been to where I'm at now. And so, you know, the quote, PTSD comes from a variety of different places as far as the symptom of it and kind of the how it kind of fleshes it out. But I've always kind of looked at it as pts. Struggle. Right. It's, it's something that if you have a natural way, not even a coping mechanism, but a filtering mechanism. I've seen people, including a friend of mine who was a POW in one of the other countries.

Almost slipped up and like gave information I'm not allowed to share.

So.

But you know, he was, he was trapped for a while and you know, he came back, I mean, broken.

Yeah.

I mean mentally, emotionally. And then, you know, proceeded to lose a lot of his family, you know, his immediate family, wife and kids and stuff as part of that. And I've watched him go from that to becoming incredibly healthy. And he's done so in many respects by using some of the things that you've defined as attributes as a filtering tool to begin to filter out, rethink and rewire many of the areas of his brain essentially that were kind of traumatized. How have you seen the attributes in your experience increase or help with things like moral injury or even ptsd?

Yeah, well, it comes down to resilience is probably the, the most important. But even in the act of resilience, it's going to require some of the other attributes, things like courage, things like perseverance, things like open mindedness. Because.

What resilience I often talk about, not just resilience, I always talk about antifragility, which is if resilience is you come back to baseline, antifragility is when you come back, you've grown stronger. Nassim Talib wrote a great book about antifragility called Antifragile. And this is where we start talking about what's called post traumatic growth. And I don't know who coined the phrase. It might have Been Martin Seligman, author and professor. Wrote a book, I think called Happiness, I can't remember, but great guy. Anyway, post traumatic growth is the ability to use this trauma to grow from and become stronger and better. Now that is going to require reflection. Active, proactive and empowering reflection. And really the, the problem with pts is that.

It'S, people with it are basically getting triggered by these past events. So these past events are, when they think about them, are inducing the same triggers and emotions that they did prior to. The only way around that, and I'm saying this as a layperson, I'm not a psychologist, but certainly in talking to psychologists and neurosciences about it, the only way around that is to, is to reframe and rewire someone's response to that event, to that incident, and take it from one of emotion to one of at least at a minimum passive kind of objectivity. Because from that space one can then ask some very objective questions about the event and what happened and how to grow from it. We'll just take a very simple example. If you have a, a fight with your significant other, right, and you're just pissed off about it, you feel angry. We all know that any of us who've done this several times all know that no progress can happen until that emotion is dissipated. You know, if you try to engage with that emotion still kind of high and strong, you're not going to engage proactively. It's going to affect the way you engage and ask questions about that. But as soon as you're able to dissipate that emotion, you are then able to ask some, some pretty reflective questions, not only about the event, but about your culpability in the event. I mean, you can, you can actually, you can more effectively place blame on yourself and in some cases on others. But, but, but that, that type of reflection allows you to, to really get to the core of it and solve that issue. And this is why laughter is so important in relationships. You know, my wife and I, sometimes when we're, we have an argument, the sooner we can be kind of joking or make a joke that gets us laughing, it takes us out of that emotional state and we can kind of address what the issue is and in some cases solve it. In some cases just say, hey, we agree to disagree on that, right? Because that happens too. But that type of emotional detachment, emotional recovery needs to happen before someone can actually proactively reflect and.

And grow from it. And I would say we can certainly practice on our own. If you are someone who is, really has some Trauma, get help. There's so many people out there that will help you do this because unlike the person who preceded you speaking those times, there's been a lot of advancements made in helping people with ptsd. And a lot of it has to do with these techniques, these modalities, these procedures that help people reframe that activity.

Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to try to bring it up and talk about it. Because there is, because there is ways to get help. There has been advancements and there is hope to be found for the open mind and the open heart. So many times I see with folks who have, or elite, at whatever level they're elite in, if they can be elite soccer coach for their, you know, for their, for their kids, all the way down to being in a, you know, elite level, maybe in the SEALS or one of the other special forces programs. A lot of times the greatest hindrance to personal growth is this element of pride and ego. And one of the things I love about attributes is you can use attributes. And this is outside looking in. Again, I'm a lay person with your content. I'm just. Right now I'm still digesting most of it. But you can use attributes as a way to not only reflect, but become self aware, to maybe break down the walls of pride, break down the walls of ego. Really kind of let yourself loose in the fact of, hey, you've been holding yourself back in many respects. Yeah, right. Let's take the brakes off of this thing. Let's let the Ferrari go down the street for the first time in a while.

Yeah, no, it's such a good point. And I think what people have to understand that there's nothing wrong with pride and there's nothing wrong with ego. I think ego gets a bad rap because it's usually used to describe as someone who's egotistical. Right. But ego is just the sense of I am right, and, and pride is fine too. But I think, I think where people have to understand is to, to be vulnerable enough to begin to explore, discover and admit your weaknesses actually and take accountability for your weaknesses actually gives you control. Accountability is just another way of taking control. You know, as soon as you say, as soon as you stop saying, as soon as you stop blaming outside and saying they were, it's them, it's not and say, hey, it's me, you immediately gain control. You immediately gain a position that allows you to begin taking care of the problem. Right. Because as long as you're blaming someone else, you have no Control, you can't do anything about it. And so for some people, that's a.

It's somewhat relaxing or it can.

It's a security blanket in some places.

Exactly. That's a great way to put it. It's a security blanket. But. But in reality, your seeding control versus taking control. And so accountability of oneself and accountability of one's own weaknesses allows you to take control. Here's an example for me on the mental acuity attributes. Out of the three, out of the four, I'm lowest on learnability. What does that mean? That means that it usually takes me a lot of time to learn something, and I often make the same mistakes a couple times before I learn it. Right. It takes me a while. Whereas, whereas we know people, there are some people who you, you show them how to do something, I mean, one time, and they got it. I mean, they're on it, right. They're high on learnability. I've always been lower. Well, knowing that about myself allowed me. Even during some intense SEAL training when I was trying to learn things, I knew what I had to do. I had to stay late, I had to study harder. I had to basically work a little bit harder than the guys who picked it up right away. Right. And again, there's no judgment. I don't sit there and say, well, f that guy or whatever, or feeling angry about that. There's nothing I can do about it. All I can do is take control, take accountability and, and use that to my advantage to actually excel in what I need to excel. And it allowed me to learn some very complex things and be part of some really cool, complex elite organizations.

Well, and I think that's why the self awareness side is so important, which is why, for me, I think it's the number one thing that holds most people back. Right. Because in that moment, you know where you're learning, when you're having to go back through the clearing the room two or three, 10 times or whatever that is for you specifically. In that event, you're creating emotional and mental leverage.

Yes.

Right. So when, so when you guys are doing the drill or doing the thing right, you already kind of know where you're sweeping, what you're going to, and whose shoulder you're tapping and all that kind of stuff. And I think that self awareness, at the end of the day, you can never have too much of it. That's my personal. You can never really have too much of it because the more and more you search for it, the more you increase your overall wisdom and experience, which Then gives you a gift to give somebody else.

Yes.

I've always been a big believer that the greatest purpose in life you'll ever have is serving the person you used to be and. Right. And that's what Attributes is going to be doing in a lot of ways for all of us, based on the experiences that you put on paper and all the learning lessons to take the complexity out of. Why do I feel this way? Why am I continuing to struggle? Why am I frustrated all the time? Why am I not, why do I not have the relationship or the advancement of the profession or the career that I want? You know, when you, when you use a tool like Attributes, the book and the assessment, especially in conjunction like I've chosen to do you, do you become much more self aware and from that standpoint, now you have more leverage. Just like you were just talking about clearing the room. Yeah.

It'S a must from my perspective. And I'm, and again, I'm a self awareness junkie. Like I, for me, I could never have too much self awareness. I want to continue to become better and better and better and better and better. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for even taking the time to spend as much time because we both know how difficult it is to just write, sit down and write the book and then the process of refining the book and that kind of stuff. And you know, from me to you and the audience, thank you for taking the time to create attributes and write Attributes. I think it's going to be an amazing help to so many people. It's definitely somebody, it's definitely a book that everybody's got to get. I've got two copies, I've got an ebook copy and I got an audio version.

Right.

Because that's how I best consume books. Since realized now I've got to buy a physical copy because I can't really highlight the way I want to highlight. But when it's all said and done, thank you so much for writing the book. Where can everybody find the book?

Well, first of all, thank you for saying that it felt selfish because I love doing it. But it's really nice that other people are really enjoying and benefiting from it. One of the best places is theattributes.com, the website and there you can find the book. You can buy the book there. Any place books are sold you'll find it. But at the website you can also take the assessment tools. I also put some workbooks on there that people can grab because I was getting a lot of Questions, hey, how do I develop this attribute or that attribute? So I said, well, let me design some workbooks, some guides so people can actually develop an attribute so you can get the ones on grit, drive and mental acuity. I'm still working on the leadership and team ability ones as well as leadership and team ability assessment tools. We're working on those currently to get those out there. So it's all on the website. Also my Instagram handle is there LinkedIn handle and there's a Facebook page and all that stuff. So yeah, would love for people to come and take a look.

Rock on. Now, one final question, if you'll indulge me. Sure. Is what legacy do you hope this particular book leaves behind?

What legacy?

I would love for this book to help and allow others to explore their potential. I'm someone who believes that there are hidden Einsteins everywhere.

And the more people we can get, the more resources to start understanding their own systems, their own engines so they can explore their own potential, the better off we're going to be as a species, you know, because. Because you know the next Einstein's out there somewhere, you know, the person who's going to solve the next universal mystery and so. And so. And I'm not that person. Right. But perhaps I can, I could give. Give people some tools and some thoughts to, to help them engage on the process of self discovery and, and kind of exploring their own potential. So that would be my hope.

Rock on. Well, I can't wait to do this again. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did, so.

I certainly did. See, it has been great. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Let's keep in touch and it's been fun. So.

Sounds good. If you haven't already done so, make sure you pick up your own copy of Attributes or even go to Rich's site and make sure you take that personality assessment. I know what's really going to help you and help me for sure. In the meantime, if you love that interview, I know you're gonna love this one right here, so go ahead and check it out.

I don't like to pretend that pain isn't a strong motivator. It really, really can be. Right. Some people lose someone in their life and it motivates.