This Mindfulness SECRET Will Change Your Life | Stephen Drum

When we do mindfulness training, right, A lot of people don't understand, well, why do we do mindfulness training? And the easiest thing I can say about that is it's like bodybuilding, right? It's like a bicep. My psychologist I worked with would say it's like doing a bicep curl for your brain. And what we want, though, one of the primary elements that I gain from mindfulness is my ability to put a little distance between my thoughts, right? Is to. When I'm mindful, I can identify thoughts that may be sabotaging my performance. And again, if that's. We feel pressure, we feel stress, we feel anxiety. If you were a cartoon character, what would be the bubble over top of your head, and what would it be telling you? And if it's not serving you, then we're mindful and present enough to replace those thoughts and reframe them with a statement that actually serves us.

I want to jump right in. You've had such. Not just a distinguished career in the Navy and in training SEALs and all this kind of stuff, but more importantly, you've positioned yourself in recent years as a master thought leader in many respects. And I know one of the things that you've been talking about recently is this concept of having a life on the X or having a life on the kind of edge.

What?

Like, talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's funny. I tell the story, you know, as I'm writing this book, right? I got the COVID design, and I'm kind of proud of the COVID design, and it's got gray with a red X on it. And of course, you know, I hand it over to mom, and who.

Who?

Mom. If nothing, she's not a, you know, gonna give me some honest feedback. She looks at me, she goes, x. What does that mean? Is anybody even gonna understand that? Like, well, mom, there's a subtitle, right? But, yeah, anyway, so, yeah, the X, it comes from. Its inspiration comes from the military. My experience is the military and the SEAL teams, right? The X, it's a military doctrine term. And so you can think of it as X marks the spot, right? So, like, when we assault a building, and if we land right near that building, right, we call that landing on the X. And it's also famously used when we're in the kill zone, right? The enemy ambushes us whether we're in vehicles or on foot, and we say, in that case, hey, we got to get off this X. We got to get out of that kill zone. But we Gear all of our training, right. To successfully executing in that moment. Right. And of course you add on contingencies and all those things like that that are part of it, but everything you, your focus is always to be bringing your A game, right. In the military sense, right. That's combat. But for every other situation and for me as a professional speaker, I walk out into a stage. It's exactly the same thing. Everything that I'm gearing my training and preparation to is that X. So really it's about.

Identifying the moments that you really need to be ready for and seize opportunity.

Now when it comes to, you know, a lot of the audience obviously is in the business sector. We've got a lot of audience obviously in the, in the just what I call the aspiring achiever sector.

Right.

So people that are just aspiring to be better than they are today. Right. What do you think some of those primary focuses need to be when trying to, you know, shake off maybe the life that you kind of have as you're kind of pursuing your next X or your big X or whatever you're going after?

Well, it's, you know, and this sounds kind of funny to say, right? But the whole premise of my book in terms of being ready, right, I kind of say, hey, if you really want to bring your A game. And I'll be the first to tell you, this book might not be for everyone, but it's really only for people that want to squeeze every ounce of performance into the moments and situations that are really that important to them. Right. And that can be personal, that can be business. But more specifically in the business sense, it's like, all right, if I look at this as a special operator, a SEAL team, army, whatever would prosecute, plan for a mission, what are all the facets that are involved? All right, well, first we have a gotta, we have to have a good concept. We, we have to really have the vision of where we want to go. And then we need to prepare, we need to marshal the skills, the team. We need to make sure that we can be poised, you know, when we face stress, when we face adversity, when we face contingencies. And then we need to make sure that we're agile in those moments that we are completely aware. We make decisions real time based on what's unfolding in front of us. And just like the military does, when we were all finished, we recognized, hey, there's value in our experience. We're most likely going to have to do the same thing or something like it again, how do we extract that Value intentionally and put it into our plans for next time.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, the SEAL team specifically, you know, there's all this extensive training, right? We, we all know the stats of how rare it is to even become a SEAL, let alone to become a SEAL team lead and then kind of start training SEALs. I think it's interesting to me because one of the things that I realized early on is seals train for adversity before it ever happens. Right? There's that, that's kind of that contingency process for me. It seems like the best time to train is before you need it. Would you, Would you agree?

Well, that's 100, right? There's this old, you know, it's, it's an adage. I don't know who came up with it. We, we sometimes, I have no idea what, what's original to the SEAL teams and what's, you know, we stole, which we steal a lot of stuff from other people. But it's that, that whole adage, right? I'm sure you've heard it. You know, when the pressure's on, when the stakes are high, you will not magically, or you cannot count on magically rising to the occasion. Instead, you will fall to your level of training, you'll fall to your level of preparation.

Right?

And that's really what underpins the foundation of how we prepare, right? Because we say that our lessons are written in blood, which calls to attention the fact that we will never go out there and wing it. We have lessons, we have doctrine, but we make sure that we, we prepare and we spend. We don't cut any corners in our preparation. And so that's 100%. And it's not just us. If you look at the Stoic writings of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, they would talk about this concept of a premeditation of adversity is telling themselves. These are the things that I'm going to face this week, this day. Deceitful, duplicitous people, situations that don't go in my favor. And here is how I envision myself responding in the right way to, to those things.

Yeah. Well, I also know that, you know, some of the work you've been doing recently is obviously even in bringing in the, the, the work, kind of bringing into the game mindfulness training that, you know, a lot of the, the, the top operators are becoming even better operators as a result of that. I'm curious, do they go through a visualization process? Do you guys do any kind of visualization exercises as you're planning to Execute mentally and, and physically.

Well, it's funny, you know, we're coming up for those operators that ultimately were successful, that had successful careers. I think for many of us, especially the people that I always look up to that I think within the SEAL teams are actually my heroes, right?

Yeah, for sure.

They had an intuitive ability to do and master certain mental skills without it kind of being deliberately taught to them. Because nobody taught us those things when we were coming up. Right. And so we would learn that. You are going to have to visualize. I know the example that I use is, is before I would go on a combat operation, I'm riding a vehicle, I'm riding a helicopter in. Right. Especially as a leader, I'm going through in my head all the contingencies of what happens. What happens if a bird gets shot down? What happens if we take contact as soon as we hit the ground, what happens? We get engaged by the enemy midway to the target, and I have to go through all of those things. And nobody taught me how to do that. But that's just what you kind of learn on your own and even in, in training. Right. It's like I'm about to bust into this room, all right? If this guy in front of me goes left, I'm going to go right and I start to visualize, well, what happens when we go through this hallway. There's open doors on the left, closed doors on the right. We go through those things. And so what they do now is I can't speak to exactly what the SEAL teams are doing now, but what I can say is during the development of our Warrior of Toughness program, again for the entire Navy, we did go back to some of the special warfare commands, the SEAL commands, the different ones, and they're heavily invested in mindfulness training. They've got yoga rooms, they've got different, like, digital style mental skills exercises. So they definitely realize, hey, you're going to train the body, you got to train the brain as well.

Yeah, well, and the reality is the brain's always driving the body. Right. And some of the. Some of the most dedicated warriors, in some cases in combat, obviously, unfortunately, walk away with broken minds, you know, or minds that are at least struggling. And I've discovered that a lot of the mindfulness training, a lot of the warrior toughness training has been benefiting even a lot of those. Those warriors that had to go through a pretty hard time mentally. Let's talk about the warrior toughness training. What led you to create this program? Why was it important to you? Why was It a passion project for you to kind of get in there and make a difference that way.

Yeah, you know, it was. I didn't. I didn't set out to do it right. I was kind of voluntold. And this is so funny. It's like the prologue for this would be when the new. The head admiral of the Navy is called the Chief of Naval Operations. And so I think it's probably 2016. He's taken command, he's developed this doctrine that essentially says, these are the things we're gonna. We're gonna concentrate on these attributes. And among them were toughness. And so with the senior enlisted, we're all sitting in the chapel one day to do an all hands call like they have in the military. So it's kind of all E7 through E9 senior leaders in the Navy. And we're all sitting there, and me and my genius, I decided to stand up and ask the question, well, we want to build toughness. What does that even mean? How do we build toughness? And more importantly, how do we even measure toughness to know that we're getting where we need to go? Right. And he didn't have a great answer. Fast forward about eight months, and the head admiral in charge of process of bringing people into the Navy says, hey, we recognize that our sailors are not as tough as they need to be. Right. Because a lot of our sailors, they join the Navy throughout thinking that they're not going to be on the ground taking fire from the enemy. And they said, we got to get our sailors tougher. We may be at war against the Chinese and the Soviets, or I'm sorry, Soviets, the Russians. Right. And so we need to have that process. And so literally it was like, hey, you a chaplain and a clinical psychologist. We want to look at getting tougher in terms of our mind, our body and our soul from. So from those three areas, you get after it. And that was. That was basically how it started.

No, I love it. I think. I think it's funny that oftentimes the person that asked the question of the problem also gets to solve it. Yeah.

And I think that was purely coincidental, by the way.

Yeah. No. Well, the crazy part is I see it. It's almost like it's a yin and yang approach to life kind of thing. You know, when you talk about the Warrior toughness program, I know you have kind of like four pillars or four areas that really kind of like the entire thing circles around going back to the X that we talked about earlier. Maybe break those down for you for us a little bit to help us better understand kind of the importance. Obviously, they can get the book and dig in deeper. Yeah. But I wanted to maybe kind of hit on this at a high level.

Yeah. And so the inspiration from the model, the contextual model that my colleagues and I developed for the Warrior Toughness Program, I drew the inspiration from this thing developed by an Air Force colonel, and if anybody's in law enforcement, and they even use it in the business world now, to an extent, is it's called the OODA Loop. It was developed by an Air Force colonel, John Boyd, maybe you've heard of it, but it's the acronym is Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. And the reason this model was developed for aerial combat. And so at some point, you're orienting yourself, right? You're somewhere within this loop at any one period of time until the engagement is over, you orient yourself.

You observe. I'm sorry, you observe what's going on. You orient what that situation means to you, what the context is. You decide what you're going to do, the action steps you're going to take, and then you actually act. As soon as you go through that cycle, now there's a reaction to that. Now you have to start the cycle again. That was my inspiration for creating what I basically call. It's the warrior mindset is what we used in the Navy, but it's commit, prepare, execute, and reflect. You're always going to be somewhere in that loop in that reflective cycle, commitment, commit. It starts with. It has to start there. Because if we want to be tough, meaning if we want to be tough, if we want to be resilient, if we want to be the type of person that can be relied on when things are hard, when the challenge is real, then we have to really fundamentally know who we are and what we stand for and how we're going to fundamentally show up to the most important people, to us, to the most important situations. And so that's really about having our personal mission statements about identifying our values, our beliefs, and how we can live those through principled actions. Right. And how we can align those with the organizations that we serve. And then we move into prepare, which is really about, okay, beyond the skills, beyond the knowledge that I need for the specific task or event, how do I make sure that I can actually perform those things when the pressure is on? Because that's a whole different set of skills that involves the mindfulness. Right. That involves the mental skills training, and it involves a mastery of some of the most fundamental elements of whatever Craft or task you're talking about. From there, we move into execute. And that's really a much shorter piece because it's really considering. It's really where the rubber meets the road. All the things that we already have done in the first two steps we are now executing. So it's like, hey, you've got the tools you need to be successful. Let's just consider a few things. Let's consider self situational awareness, let's consider agility. Let's consider where our focus is, right? Because especially in sales, people have their agenda, right? They have. It's like, it's got to turn out this way. But they fail to say, okay, what's going on in the situation right now that may cause me. That may require me to adjust my plan to pivot or completely go in a different direction. And lastly, again, we reflect. We learn, but we're intentional. And it's not just about when things go wrong and we're embarrassed. It's also about when we're meeting with success. Because how do we continue to grow that success? How do we repeat that success? We only do it if we really take time to step out of the noise and traffic and develop our game plan for next time.

Yeah, no, that's good. I. One of my favorite parts of your process is the reflect process. I'm curious to know what types of questions are you asking yourself when you're going through that reflection process to get the most out of that reflection process?

Well, the big thing is, and here's an example, right? Let's say something doesn't go exactly according to plan. I have to really understand.

Was it the fault of my execution? Meaning was it a sound plan that I failed to execute properly, or did I do exactly what I intended to do but did not meet with the result that I wanted? Because that seems very, very dirt stupid simple. But it is key that we identify which of those two things it is. Because otherwise, if we're not clear that the plan was flawed, we're not clear the execution was flawed. We are not adjusting in the right way. Right? Because if it's a matter of like, hey, I just fell short. I wasn't prepared for this one element. Well, that's an easy tweak, right? We just go back to the preparation, but it's like, hey, man, I. We just blew it completely. We just completely missed the mark. All right, well, now we got to go back to the commit part and really look at the concept and the vision of what we're trying to accomplish.

Well, look if you're. I mean, if you're going to that place where. Okay, you're. I guess the tricky part is not getting into a judgment place, but getting into, like, a curious place.

That's right.

How does. How does one avoid judgment and stay in curiosity?

Well, it's easy, right? And I always say, like, one of the. Probably the biggest gifts of wisdom, if we're intentional about it, is being able to start to shed some of the baggage of our past mistakes. And one. And this is kind of an area in performance psychology, sports psychology. I remember reading the anecdote, and it's relatively famous. It's a college baseball team that used to have this mini toilet they would have in their clubhouse. And you've heard of it. Right. But for the listeners after every game and they're assessing their performance, their mistakes, they address. They get it out there. Right. They get out the mistake for accountability. What have I learned? Okay, I've learned this. Everything else associated with that mistake does not serve me. Let's flush it down the toilet. And that's how we have to be. Right. We have to be very critical of ourselves. We got to hold ourselves accountable, but we have to forgive ourselves.

Yeah.

Even when nobody else might. Even when it's hard, because otherwise we are not going to be able to move forward at the pace in which we need to.

No, I like that. I think it's a great filtering tool because I find that people don't ask the question, does XYZ really serve me? Does it help me move forward? Does it help me great understanding? Does it help me learn? Does it help me grow? Does it help me get that wisdom or experience so I don't have to repeat that mistake twice, you know, that kind of thing. You know, the last time I had you on the show, we were able to do a kind of a deep dive in the concept of attributes and something that you're then pretty passionate. And when I was going through the materials again in the book and whatnot, I was like, okay, well, cool. I see chapter three again, like in the attributes category. But then you kind of start. Begin to position it a little bit differently, even though it's kind of a buildup of kind of what we already talked about, which is going back to that place where we're talking about, you know, taking the hits and keeping on going kind of moving forward. Talk to me about how the attributes play into perseverance, because I find that people who aren't getting ultimately, whether it's business or life or whatever, who are not Getting where they want is because they're quitting right before they're not supposed to.

Well, and you're right, and this is a very. This can be very complex, right? But I think you look at an attribute.

You.

Or you look at an attribute such as perseverance, right? Or ability to stick with something when things get hard. And there's two different approaches, right? There is the. The level and what I. That's why I call commitment. It's our willingness. It's how bad we want it. And I look at, like, the people fundamentally. There's a whole. There's a slew of reasons why people don't make it through hard military training or even, I would say, like, let's say medical school. Yeah, there's a slew of reasons. But if you look at, probably, at least for SEAL training, the dominant reason for failure is the lack of commitment, is the lack of will. Now, if you have that, then. And you still have that gap, if you're still not able to face it, right? Because some people have all the will in the world, but they lack kind of the mental capacity to actually respond. And so instead they react when they face that adversity. And so that's kind of a different skill set, right? So we have to identify that this is important. I absolutely want this goal. It's a valid goal, and I know it because I'm free of stress and I'm clear of thought. Thought 100%. It's what I want. Okay, now when you face that obstacle. All right, now we start to build in the mental skills piece. Okay, what are the thoughts like when we do mindfulness training? Right. A lot of people don't understand, well, why do we do mindfulness training? And the easiest thing I can say about that is it's like bodybuilding, right? It's like a bicep. My psychologist I work with would say it's like doing a bicep curl for your brain. And what we want, though, one of the primary elements that I gain from mindfulness is my ability to put a little distance between my thoughts, right? Is to. When I'm mindful, I can identify thoughts that may be sabotaging my performance. And again, if that's. We feel pressure, we feel stress, we feel anxiety. If you were a cartoon character, what would be the bubble over top of your head, and what would it be telling you? And if it's not serving you, then we're mindful and present enough to replace those thoughts and reframe them with a statement that actually serves us man, that's so good.

I was just thinking, too. I'm curious, from your perspective, obviously, you've been around elite performers for a long, long time. You've been one yourself. You still are one man. But I'm curious, do you feel like this perseverance attribute, if you will, is innate or it's teachable or trainable?

I think there's a couple of different ways I always look at it. I remember I was on a podcast recently, and they asked, well, you made it through SEAL training. You must have been some great athlete. You must be super driven. And I'm like, I wasn't any of those things. I was a mediocre athlete. I was a terrible student. I wasn't super disciplined. But I found that one thing. And when I found that one thing, I wanted it bad enough, and I was smart enough to realize that I have to build the architecture for my success in terms of my training, you know, And I think that's the big thing, right? And I fundamentally choose to believe, right? I think it's, you know, because you get that. Are great leaders made, or are they born? Well, I think there are things that enable you to find ease in terms of facing challenges, right? In terms of being cool under pressure, in terms of leading people, okay, that's fine. But that can also be a barrier, right? Because you can take your foot off the gas if you have talent, whereas if, you know, you're like, hey, I don't have these things, but I endeavor to be really good at this, and I'm going to put the work in. And that's. I choose to believe that you can absolutely do that, right? I mean, if you're 5 foot 2, you're not playing in the NBA, probably, so there are limits to that. But, you know, I. I choose to believe that we can determine the skills and the ability that we have to the large, most extent.

Yeah. I mean, it's so good. I think another thing that's. I find interesting or I find really cool is.

Everything about the book is it comes down to fundamentals. And I'm always telling my team, hey, your fortune, your foundation is all in the fundamentals. And then I go to chapter eight, and I'm like, be brilliant on the basics, right? And I'm like, all right, I think I know where this is going right here. Like, because I feel like, so we're all chasing a squirrel. We're all chasing. Okay, we what? What's the new ninja secret? What's the new tactic? What's this? But yet every successful person I know has an element of consistently building on those basics and those fundamentals. Talk to us a little bit about that because I think that that is so pivotal to success.

You know, it's, it's funny, it actually, I don't know why, but it is one of my favorite concepts of the book. I think probably because it's so fundamental with how we prepare, succeed, how we execute in the military. And what was really interesting, I think, and I always say, I tell people this, if I'm being completely honest, I'm not a huge fan of writing a book. And probably the only part that I actually really enjoyed were the people that I got to interview and I interviewed business folks. But the people that I found most interesting for this reason were the athletes. Like the high level athletes. You're talking about Olympians, you're talking about baseball players, football players, because the one thing they all had in common was their pursuit and mastery of the basics. And it started at the most fundamental level and they took it so seriously. Like one of the MLB players I interviewed, he said that when he showed up to play, he showed up in the minors. Like the coaching staff said, you will pack your locker exactly how we tell you to pack it, and you're going to do it the exact same way every time because you never have to worry about where your stuff is, how it gets packed, packed, when it gets packed, because I need your folks to be on the ball field, right? And one of the NFL players said, hey, you cannot. You're. The human brain is only capable of so many high level, high pressure decisions under pressure in a given period of time. And he was like, well, since knowing that, he goes, I could not afford to waste my brain power on a bunch of micro decisions about things that I could have taken care of in advance. And so as an example, he said every night before a game, I knew exactly what I was going to eat the next day. He said, when I took to the field for pregame warmups, I didn't want to think about anything. I don't have to wait, waste any energy. I'm just going to do what they tell me to do. And then in the locker room or, or before the game, he knew exactly where he could sit in silence, be quiet, not get sucked into conversations. And how could he get his head right for that pregame mindset?

Yeah, no, that's so good. And I'm glad we talked about that because I feel like again, every person that I know has been crazy successful and it doesn't matter what industry what career? Whether they're just trying to be a great parent. Like, they put a lot of emphasis on the fundamentals and the basics. You know, it's almost like that thing I know we agree on, where you're driven by principle, because principles kind of, you know, give you the answer before you need it. Right?

That's right.

You know, so I've always loved that. And I also love the fact that while we were talking about the fundamentals and the basics, that you actually brought up the intensity of focus and energy. How does focus and energy get created or like it? You know, how do you. How do you harness it for your own benefit?

Well, if I'm being completely candid, I had a cup of coffee before we came on.

But. And also I've been. I've been doing like these. I've been doing these long fasts and it. It really spikes my. My energy, too, which is counterintuitive anyway. But I go to. I digress. I think energy is it definitely. You have to be very intentional with how you manage that energy. And so think about it like this, right? An athlete, right? When you go out and you're feeling really tired, let's just say you're going to go out, you want to go out for a run, you want to go out and you want to hit the weight room, you know, okay, I need to lift that energy up, right? I need to lift that energy up. I'm going to have a play risk. I'm going to heavy metal, whatever that's going to be. It's going to pump me up, right? And so if you want. If you look at. In the context of a football game, right, There's a couple different types of athletes. Last play of a game, right? The game's going to be determined by a field goal kick, right? So you have potentially the lineman, right? And their energy may be smacking each other on the helmet. They're getting jacked up because they know that they need max power. That's all they care about is max energy for a handful of seconds. Now, let's look at the kicker. They're not going to want that. They want to lower that energy. They're feeling the pressure, they're feeling the stress. Their heart's racing, their hands are sweating. Maybe they're lightheaded. They got to lower that energy down. Down. They. Okay, so that's gonna look completely different. And so what is the energy we want to bring to a situation, right? Is it intensity? Is it more measured? Right? It's okay if our hands are Sweating, and our heart's racing, but can we be functional? And so that's the big thing that we need to be mindful of that energy. And so there's breathing techniques, right. If we're. And in most cases, frankly, in a business, we want to lower that energy. And so it's. It's doing breathing to lower that energy. It's really feeling, getting, giving ourselves a performance statement to remind ourselves that we are prepared. And we do have this. So that's. That's really. Is managing that energy.

Yeah, man, that's so good. You know, when it comes down to it, I was just thinking, even the, you know, I. You know, as a person of faith, I pray. I also. I've also become a person who also believes in energy and also meditate in the. In that same zone. And it's funny, I. I can get myself into a. From a peak, peak, peak hyperactive state or full energy state, whether it's, you know, some would call it anxiousness or whatever. We call it, like, energy. Right. Depending on what direction I'm aiming that tool at. But when I go to meditate, I can get myself into a really, really good situational awareness space while my. My eyes are closed and my ears are open, and. And I'm kind of sensing those moments. And one of the things that I loved about the book specifically recently is you actually give a framework specifically around the breathing techniques and the importance around breathing techniques. And I got to be honest with you, I used to be one of the guys that would laugh that stuff off. Me too, until I started doing it. And I'm like, wow, I feel amazing afterwards.

You know, it's. I would be that person, too. I would be that person with that. With mental skills training. You're gonna try to tell me this? Yeah, it's all that wouldn't have resonated with me probably 15 years ago.

So it's interesting that the breathing. I learned that from my psychotic. And the greatest thing, the greatest gift that I got from helping to develop that warrior toughness were the things that I learned from my chaplain and psychologist colleagues. And the psychologist specifically talked about the breathing. Right. And you see it. It's written as box breathing. And there's all kinds of different things, different methods and prescriptions. The prescription that we offered, we called the thing recalibrate, because it was. They were trained on it earlier, the recruits in the Navy, they were trained on it, and then whenever they kind of became overwhelmed, we would stop them and tell them to recalibrate because we want to help Them the coping skills. And so.

Well it is. But we want them to be able to start to do it on the fly. We teach them how to do it right. You with the training wheels on still. Like for example, if they go into a stressful firefighting training scenario and all of a sudden they get yelled at because they're making mistakes and those snowball and then they just get into that, that red zone as psychologists call it, that fight, flight or freeze. And so what we do now, and some people would say, oh, you're coddling. But we pull them out of that situation because training value is lost at the start point. We tell that recruit to recalibrate. They do this breathing technique, which is diaphragmatic breathing. They inhale through their nose. They inhale for six seconds, they hold and pause for two and then they exhale for seven, hold and pause for two. And then when they start to lower that arousal, that energy, then we start talking about, okay, these are your, these are your points of performance in terms of the sequences you need for success. We push that recruit back in there and nine times out of 10 they're gonna be successful or at least a lot.

But when we teach breathing, when I teach breathing, it kind of is like that counting out. And I do it a little differently. I do an inhalation for 5x, hold for 2, exhalation for 6, repeat. I make it a little slower. But it really does depend on your energy state. Right. If you're super, super amped up, inhaling for six seconds is going to be really difficult. Whereas if it's at, at night and you're in bed and you're breathing, it's going to be so super easy. So really it's more about right, you hear, take a deep breath that only floods your brain with more oxygen. It can compound the, the energy that you're feeling. And so what we want to do is basically just slow the breathing down. That's the most important piece is that we slow the breathing down and that's, we can lower that arousal and that energy.

No, that's good. I, you know, I, I think that's, you know, it's, it's spot on. Given that the fact that the reality is, is what you want to do is get yourself in a place where you can make good decisions. 100 super amped up and you're super emotional, you're super pumped and angry and all these, I think it's almost like the higher the emotional level, the lower the decision making ability.

Well, that's exactly right. And One of the big things, one of my favorite classes that we would teach in where toughest program was emotions, like why we have emotions, what they're for. And fundamentally emotions simply are warning, right? There are our internal warning system to say or not warning necessarily. But if we feel happiness, it's basically information, right? It's information that, that, that drives a behavior and that's what we want. And so we want to recognize the utility of that emotion because once we're cognizant of that and again, just like the thoughts in our head, we can start to shape the thoughts in our head, we can shape the decisions, the actions that we take, which will also affect our feelings and will affect our emotions at the same time. And so.

Yeah, no, that's awesome, dude. Well, I know we're, we're wrapping up on time, but I, I, you know, and I know where the, the book is either just on the verge of being out. So we may not be like send everybody to right the right place at the right time in just a second. But you know, I want to encourage everybody to go ahead and check out a lot of the free resources you already have. Where can everybody else find more about you at?

Yeah, I mean feel free to follow me. I, I keep my, my names pretty easy for social media. I'm mostly on LinkedIn and Instagram. Stephen Drum Stick E P H E N D R U M and my website, if you want to go to my website. The book again, as we were talking about before is, is still being reviewed by Department of Defense and when it's.

Done, it'll be ready.

Yeah, no, nothing. It's crazy. I just, you know, I feel good about what I put in there, but I just want to be on the safe side of the government and they can go to my website and they'll get the latest updates. You get some free training and that's stephendrum.com S T E P H E N D r u m.com Dude, I love it.

I love it. Well, final question for you. I've been asking this recently of all my guests and I find that everybody says it differently, which I think is pretty cool. But what does it take to truly become unstoppable?

A build backwards approach to understanding really what success looks like. That vision, that desired end state and really being intentional and deliberate with how you set up that architecture for success, how you set up that path.

Dude, so good, so good man, as always. Dude, I always enjoy having you on, man. And we'll keep, keep doing that because you bring so much value every time we sit down with the audience and, you know, everybody's always, you know, trying to figure out, okay, what does it really mean to be an elite performer? How do I really get there? All they got to do is replay this episode over and over again, I think.

Well, thank you. It's been a. It's been a lot of fun, and thanks for having me on. I always enjoy this.

All right, brother, take care. See you. Bye.

All right, you, too. Take care.

Bye. I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here. Love yourself where you are, and love yourself not to stay where you are. Do the work, because I'm telling you, there is hope. Your past doesn't have to equal your future unless you choose it to be.