Peak Performance Leadership Fundamentals From A Navy SEAL Commander | Flow Research Collective Radio

It's one thing to just say to yourself, "Oh yeah, I read the book. I need to be more vulnerable." Great. Well, what does that mean? How are you going to practice that? Who's going to hold you accountable? How does that play out? If you come in with false humility and say, "Okay, I'm Mr. Vulnerable," then your team's going to be like, "Well, I just raised the bullshit flag," because that's in your head. Vulnerability comes from the heart. And this recognition that we are flawed and that we've got these biases and these mental models and these frameworks and stuff that we call background of obviousness in Unbeatable Mind because it's obvious to everyone else but you.

Hey there! If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level, while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, What do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball. Or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and welcome to today's episode with Mark Devine. So, Mark's an entrepreneur. He's a New York Times bestselling author, a philanthropist, and one of the world's top leadership experts. After a successful 20-year career as a Navy SEAL and a SEAL commander, Mark was hired by the Navy to create a nationwide leadership program for the SEALs. The goal of this program was to give the SEALs the best leadership and mental tools in the world to help them forge unbeatable teams that could achieve success in the most stressful, challenging environments on earth. Now, Mark is the author of 5 bestselling books, including his latest book, Staring Down the Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams. He hosts a number 1 ranked podcast on iTunes, Unbeatable Mind, which you've likely heard of. And he's also the founder of 5 successful companies, Unbeatable Mind, SEALFIT, NavySeals.com, US CrossFit, and the award-winning Coronado Brewing Company in California. Now, this was an amazing conversation. Mark truly is a leadership expert, and he's also engaged currently in a PhD in global leadership and change at Pepperdine University. So, in this conversation, we had a ton of fun going into depth on peak performance leadership. We talked about practical tactical things like breathwork and how to use breathwork in order to regulate your nervous system. We talked about the balance of practical, real-world learning that Mark had while in the SEALs and academic conceptual learning and how both are important. And we talked about how if you are a leader, your team is your primary mechanism for growth and some practical tools for implementing that. So you're going to really enjoy today's episode. Definitely recommend diving in, kicking back, and listening to the end. It's a blast. Mark Devine, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It is great to have you here.

Brian, it's great to see you, buddy. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure, my pleasure. So one of the quotes that I wanted to start with from your book, um, Staring Down the Wolf, was, your team is your primary mechanism for growth as a leader, which— it's a simple point, but it's an incredibly important and profound one, and one that I think leaders struggle to really integrate and live by. So I'm curious if you could expand on that and what the implications are for leaders.

Well, there are several ways that humans slash leaders, AKA leaders, kind of grow and develop. One is that cognitive development, and cognitive development you can do in isolation, right? You can do that solo. Another one is kind of spiritual development, right? And so that is also something you can kind of do alone or in combination with spiritual leader or path or or nature, but there's one that's impossible to do alone, and that's emotional development. And some people might push back on that, but I've never seen an individual think their way to emotional awareness and emotional help. They've always done it in the context of either a relationship, spouse relationship, family relationship, or therapist relationship, or all the above. And leaders find that, well, we got to have relationship with more than one person, right? Think about this, a leader— let's say a leader who is self-aware and has a relationship with an emotional coach. That's great, but the emotional coach isn't in the team. And so he or she is not aware of the different nuances and different developmental stages and different biases that the team is bringing to the table that the leader has to be aware of. So now, a leader is in this situation where he's dealing with, you know, 5 or 10 radically diverse and unique individuals, all of them at different stages of development. All of them with shadow and bias that they bring to the team meeting. And if the leader hasn't developed that social emotional awareness in the context of a team dealing with that kind of radical diversity, then they're limiting themselves because they're not going to be able to see from the perspective of all their teammates. They might sync up with one or two. That's why leaders are like, oh yeah, I really get Joe. Well, it's because he and Joe happen to have similar biases and similar kind of mental frameworks. But Sally Sue over there and Marge, he doesn't have a clue about, right? And so he tends to not really think, well, I don't really get along with them, or they're not my kind of people, or there's just no synchronicity there. And it's because he hasn't done enough of the work to be able to take their perspective. So when a leader can do the level of emotional development whereby they can step into the shoes of everybody on their team and take their perspective and appreciate that perspective, even if they may disagree with certain aspects of it, and do that with humility and respect, then their team is not going to open up to them fully, right? And so, you don't create that psychological safety without that vulnerability and without that authenticity, right? So, I think that this is kind of like where the research of Brené Brown and what we're doing with Unbeatable Mind takes it to the next level is that it's one thing to just say to yourself, "Oh, yeah. I read the book. I need to be more vulnerable." Great. Well, what does that mean? How are you going to practice that? Who's going to hold you accountable? How does that play out? If you come in with false humility and say, "Okay, I'm Mr. Vulnerable," then your team's going to be like, "Well, I just raised the bullshit flag," because that's in your head. Vulnerability comes from the heart and this recognition that we are flawed and that we've got these biases and these mental models and these frameworks. Stuff that we call background of obviousness in Unbeatable Mind because it's obvious to everyone else but you, right? And so you've got to really go deep in this one, and when you do, then everyone on the team suddenly has the freedom to be their authentic self and to bring their best creativity and intuitiveness and all those soft skills that get shut down when the heart is closed. Bring those to the table. In that regard, I have another saying that the team is the new leader. So what happens here is the leader merges kind of heart and mind with the team's heart-mind, and then that wholeness, that collective unity of the leader team's heart-mind becomes the new leader, right? That becomes the entity that's making the best decisions, and they're 20x decisions than any one individual could do themselves or bring up, come up with themselves.

The background of obviousness is super interesting. Could you expand on that a little bit? And as soon as you said it, I was like, oh, everyone's going to definitely resonate with that. The things that everyone else kind of whispers about, but that they are not necessarily self-aware about. So I'm curious how you see that showing up.

Yeah, that's funny. I mean, you're right, because we all— it's so obvious to us whether we see someone's behavior, we hear their words, and we feel their energy. And yet the individual is completely unaware of how that energy or how their behavior or how those words are affecting either themselves or, I mean, me as an observer or someone else in the room. Everyone can see that and so it's very dynamic and rich, the information that is conveyed by a leader that he or she is unaware of, you know, how it's landing unless they've done some really, really deep work because they're inside the bottle. They can't read the label of how they show up in the world. So we have this kind of mantra that we have to take responsibility for how we show up, not just for what we think needs to happen or what our set of instructions or our strategy and tactics are. It's how we show up and how our energy and our emotional states and our words land with the team. So that's all framed by this background of obviousness that I talked about. It's that background noise. It's that, you know, of course it's baked into your subconscious. There's been a lot of talk about and research on subconscious, but it's more than, you know, it's more than most people would realize. Like, it literally starts before you're born. Your background obviously started in the womb. It might even include, uh, if we wanted to go there, epigenetics as well as karmic energy, right? So there's that. But then let's just say more materialistically, it's, it's going to start in genuine as you're forming your mental models as a child, right? What's safe? What's not safe? How to communicate? How not to communicate? What language? Even the language you use forms your background of obviousness, right? We know that, you know, English-speaking people go over to Japan and they're just like— they're— it's almost like they've stepped off the plane into Pluto, right? When they're doing business with the Japanese, because the background of obviousness of those two languages are so radically different. You know, you make assumptions that are completely wrong based upon a head nod or a silence of that culture, which means something completely different to them. So language is part of it. Trauma can form part of your background of— obviously, it's actually a big one that forms kind of these large wave patterns in your life that can lead to disruptions in how you treat or how you land with other people. right? And so that leads to projections, transferences, repression of information that comes out that then gets redirected, you know, we're into like anger or jealousy or rage or something like that. And you're just not aware that it was a childhood trauma that caused it. So that's part of the background of obviousness. Belief systems, you know, so let's say, you know, you're Irish and maybe you grew up as Irish Catholic or something like that. And so that's framed, and if your parents were staunchly that, then that framed a lot of childhood belief systems that even as you grow through your adult stages of development and you, even if you say, "Oh yeah, you know, I kind of move away from that. I'm not that, I'm something else. I identify with something else." Those structures are still kind of under there. They're softly in there and they can frame reactions to different people and situations. So, this type of work, like I said, this type of development, this comprehensive whole person development, there is a physical physiological aspect, there's a mental cognitive aspect, you know, learning how you think the way you think and why you think what you think, and then really going to town and clarifying those biases that are more cognitive and subconscious level. And then it's that emotional piece, which we talked about, which is the feeling states, which is really kind of the still part of your mind, but we like to separate it because it's a felt thought. That hasn't been verbalized. It's pre-verbal oftentimes, especially the trauma. And then you have the intuitive aspect of your background of obvious, which is mostly hidden from most people. And that is, what is my biome? What is my gut brain telling me right now? And what is my heart mind telling me right now? And you of course know that from your work with the Flow Research Collection that, you know, the gut and the heart are basically a part of our brain system. They have neurons and neurological processing capacity and neurochemicals and the whole enteric nervous system. And we like to say the body is the brain, right? So it's not just the biome and the heart, but it extends throughout your nervous system and even into the fascia and your skin. So all of that is part of your mind. And so most people are so stuck in their heads that they're shut off from that aspect of their background of obviousness, which has a positive quality. I'm not suggesting that BU or background of avoidance is all negative stuff or hold you back. It is just the sum totality of the way you operate in this world that you're largely unaware of.

And is the goal, I'm assuming, in part of this work to just heighten the awareness of your background of avoidance?

Right. Expand your awareness. And as you expand your awareness, you become— these hidden aspects, sometimes repressed, they become part of your conscious awareness and then the ones, the aspects that are holding you back such as biases and trauma triggers and whatnot, then you can work on them. But if you're not aware of it, you can't work on it. And when I say work on it, that's when you go to town and you look at it as an object and you start to appreciate how that behavior is affecting relationships and affecting your life and then you work both behaviorally, cognitive, and emotionally to unwind that or override it with different types of behaviors. So it's very, very valuable and it's part of that growth process. One of my mentors and friends is Ken Wilber from Integral Theory, you're probably aware of him, and he has a really fun saying that kind of sums this up. It's like, as individuals and leaders, it's our duty to wake up, and that's kind of wake up to your essential nature as a human being and this Truth, capital T Truth that you can take control of your mind. You know, like that's the movement from fixed mindset to growth mindset and that you can expand your awareness. So, that's waking up! Growing up is the actual doing of that. Like, how do I actually take action to grow and develop into higher stages of conscious awareness as a human being? And these stages are mapped by developmental psychology, by Integral Theory, by Spiral Dynamics and all the maps and even by Eastern, you know, spiritual traditions, the maps all have really distinct thresholds where, you know, you think one way and then suddenly you think another way. The three dominant ones are egocentric, ethnocentric, and world-centric, and then there's nuances in between each of those. And those are stages of development. You can map where most of humanity is on those stages, and even cultures for that matter. And the gritty truth is that we can access highest stages of development if we choose to. If we choose to train and if our body, body-mind and the conditions allow us, we can access that. I'm not saying everyone will. In fact, very few people will because less than 5% of humanity actually actively tries to develop and grow themselves. Everyone else is just kind of complacent or they're stuck or they really don't have the time to think about it because they're in kind of in survival mode or in a war-torn region or wondering what their next meal will be. So what we want to do at Unveil Mind is get more people on this developmental path so they can both wake up and grow up. But then there's a third piece, and that is to essentially clear up. And clear up is the emotional development part. And Wilbur didn't add that one literally until a few years ago. He said, first wake up and then show up, or grow up and then show up. And show up is based— show up, taking responsibility for how you land, with your team and with your communities. So now he says, wake up, grow up, clean up your emotional development baggage so you can show up. And then we add a fourth one to that. And the fourth is open up. And open up is open up to that intuitiveness and that spontaneity and that creativity. And that's really the work of like what you guys do, you and Steve. That's flow, opening up the flow, allowing for that spontaneous creativity, or what the Japanese call shibumi, effortless perfection, to arise. That's not something that's taught mostly in like leadership development, and it's something that you guys do well and it's something that we do and something that I'm going to study in my doctorate program to figure out how do we bring more of that opening up to the corporate leadership world.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind kind of scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Yeah, I want to get into the doctorate program in a moment, but I just want to underscore the point that grow up as a stage in advance of open up and flow is, I think, critical for flow in particular because there's a whole new study of research on dark flow, which is flow in activities that are very counter to the individual's actual well-being and development. That might be video gaming, it might be gambling, it might be other destructive things.

So you could say dark flow is addiction, right?

Exactly. It's a driver and accelerant of addiction.

Yeah.

They've actually, in research, they've found that when they study For example, gambling addicts, those who experience the highest levels of flow have the most severe addictions. So, the grow-up piece I think is definitely important before getting—

Well, you wonder how someone can spend 24 hours straight at a gambling table. It's because they're in flow.

Exactly. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. Sipping on the free drinks and whatnot. So, before we go into the doctorate, Mark, I wanted to ask you about the leadership development program that you built for the Navy because I know that after you had your own very, very successful 20-year career as a SEAL and SEAL commander you were actually brought back into the Navy for leadership development. And I'm curious what the main things you focused on for the folks that went through that program was and what the, what the main outcome you were attempting to achieve there.

The Navy is extremely good, especially in the special warfare community, at teaching the tactical skills. And when they teach tactical skills such as shooting and jumping and diving, and demolitions, there's obviously an element of mental development, right? There's memorization, there's some imagery work like you would find in sports performance. There's a lot of tools that the SEALs use that have— that crossover into, you know, realms that you would find in sports performance, like I said, and other developmental models, but they weren't really good at understanding how those things worked and could be put together into a more holistic, whole person training. And so, it's really important to do that especially in the warrior arts because you know, we're sending these men and women in the most dangerous and complex scenarios. They are essentially ambassadors for you know, in our case, the United States but you know, in other countries for their country and it's really important that they are online in all of their intelligences, emotionally, morally, intuitively, spiritually. So they make decisions that bring credit to humanity, let's just say, right? So they don't stoop to the level of the terrorists of the world or get caught in situations. We saw that with the Eddie Gallagher situation. You know, I know there's a lot of good information in defense of Eddie and some of my teammates will defend him to death. And if you don't know who he is, he was the guy that Trump basically had to step in and say, you know, you're, Your SEALs, you're not gonna take his Navy SEAL Trident away. You know, they were trying to convict him of war crimes. The point I'm trying to make is if he had some of this training that I'm talking about and had a— it was more morally mature and more spiritually mature, he would never would've gotten himself into those situations to begin with. He would've made better decisions. He would've had more respect for even his enemies. And I've been deeply inspired through Eastern traditions as well as Native traditions of training. And the Native training, the Apache training, you know, the warrior, is the last one to pick up the weapon. The warrior abhors war. The warrior is the one that tries to prevent bloodshed. That's my feeling and I wanted to teach this to SEALs and special operators like, you don't want to go downrange thinking, "This is great! We're going to go play whack-a-mole and just kill everyone we can!" That is the worst kind of— that's a thug! And so, I wanted to move away from teaching this thuggery and teach warriors true warrior principles. So the tools that I found were effective for my own development that were to take things that people know about but do them really for— they do them really for health benefits and use those tools to develop moral and spiritual strength or awareness or, you know, to develop up higher on these stages of consciousness. And so I started teaching SEALs a combination of breathwork Imagery, self-talk, you know, these are classic things. I got them to start to recontextualize their sense of self, like, who am I and why am I on this planet? If I'm going to be a SEAL, am I doing it just because I want to be the toughest bugger out there, or am I doing it for some different reason? You know, like, am I a warrior for humanity, or, you know, am I doing this to ensure the freedom of, you know, my country and my family. Or, you know, there's just— depends upon the age and the context, you know, the stage of development of the individual you're working on or with. But so get them to think about who they are and why they do what they do so they can always link their actions back to that, right? And then there's other skills, the emotional development skills. Get them to work at a team where they can be, you know, very brutally honest and authentic and and learn to receive feedback and always be improving themselves and not to be judgmental and not to be righteous and not to be, you know, play the victim ever. In a sense, you know, I love my teammate Jocko's term, you know, take extreme ownership of everything, of your growth, of your words, of your mission, right? Of your task, of your teammate. So that's what we started to teach them. And what was unique about it is I call it integrated. It integrated training from what I call 5 mountains or 5 domains: physical training, mental training, emotional training, intuitive training, and spiritual training. And it integrated it all into kind of a holistic approach that had things you do in the morning, things you do during your workout, things you might do during the day, and things you might do it in the evening, and then things you might do episodically. That became— that work was so effective with the SEAL trainees that 90% of the guys that we were training and back then it was all men, still is all men but women are allowed to try now. So, I only worked with men at that point. 90% of those that I trained were getting through SEAL training and the ones, you know, the 10% that didn't just had a freak accident usually, back blew out or something like that. So, the SEALs were like, "Whoa! Like, what are you feeding these guys, Devine? Not only are they sailing through training tough as nails but they're doing it with a smile on their face and they're great teammates and they're very humble." and they ended up being great leaders too. And so when they started looking at that, I was like, "Wow! We're onto something here!" And so the SEALs have begun to integrate this training into their SEAL training pipeline and then some other services have picked up on it as well, like the Air Force Pararescue. So that's really exciting! I'm now— they haven't partnered with me. They're kind of like just borrowing the techniques and you know, that's kind of the way the Navy works. You know, I'm a— you know, this is like open source You know, they've just like, okay, we got it now. We'll take this content, work with it.

Right, right. Yeah. If it's the Navy, I don't know how much you can do about it. Yeah, exactly. So I want to just quickly double-click on the, on the breathwork piece. I know that breathing is, you know, a big part of your approach. One of the things you said in Unbeatable Mind is that breathing is free medicine and the daily practice of breath control leads to optimal health. So I'm curious what kind of breathwork you had them do and what kind of breathwork you recommend now for peak performance.

Sure. So I teach a various number of techniques. First is just pure breath awareness, you know, using the breath as a focal point to keep them present, you know, to get them less distracted. So it's an anti-distractibility tool. And then we teach that also with the fit, you know, with proper physiology and teach them some of the basic, you know, block and tackling of how to breathe well and then why. So we get them breathing through their nostrils. We get them using all their muscles as well as most importantly, their diaphragm. We get them to understand that by breathing through your nostrils, using your diaphragm and slowing your breathing down to 5-count in and 5-count out, that you're retraining yourself to breathe in an optimal pattern for optimal physiology and flow, actually. And so what you're doing there is because of that pattern and the nostril breathing, as well as the diaphragmatic movement, you're massaging your vagus nerve and you're, You're stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. And most people listening know all this, but it's really, you know, be surprised at how people, many people don't know this. And certainly when I started teaching it, there were no podcasts. People didn't know this. And it's such, just that alone has a profound effect. And that's like boot camp. You start there. Then I teach them a process called box breathing. And this is just a controlled breathing where we do 5-count in, 5-count hold, 5-count out, 5-count hold. And the box breathing, it has a similar effect physiologically, although it's taking you down to 3 breaths per minute, which has a benefit that when you practice over a long time, when you release the hold, you go automatically back to the 6 breaths per minute. What I found is people who practice 6 breaths per minute, but their normal breathing pattern was 15. When they're not practicing, they go back to like 12 or 14. It takes a long time. But if you practice box breathing every day, which is 3 breaths per minute, they can get much quicker to the 6 breaths per minute steady state as their normal, you know, unconscious breathing pattern. So that's one of the reasons we do that. The other reason is that the box breathing is a concentration practice. And I learned from my, through my own training that in order to do some of the deeper work, mental work, becoming mindfully aware of the quality of your thoughts and emotions, for instance, using visualization you know, to eradicate regrets as well as to plan for the future in a positive way, to use those mental tools, not to mention to open yourself up to contextual awareness so that you have that situational awareness and spontaneity, you got to learn to concentrate your mind. You definitely have to! It's like a prerequisite. You got to tame and train your mind to narrow its focus to just that one thing that it hooks itself to and the breath is probably the— best tool for that because wherever you go, there it is. You know, you don't really— you can train anywhere. Like, there's no excuses training, right? Because you never leave the breath behind. If you do, you're dead. So the box breathing can be done as a seated kind of meditation type practice where you're just concentrating on the— on that box pattern, or you can do it like standing in line at the bank or while you're driving in the car. And when you do that, you're generally going to have more of a split attention. So, you get a lot of the physiological benefits but you're still narrowing your focus, right? You're constantly narrowing your focus so that you can develop the strength of your mind to be able to concentrate and to be able to hold the concentration for longer and longer periods of time. Imagine a sniper, you know, sitting in a hide site for 48 hours and he's looking at the target, you know, for 48 hours. Now, he might trade off with his spotter just to close his eyes for a few minutes but that That level of concentration is intense! So, that's Box Breathing. I also teach something that's sort of like Wim Hof except we breathe through the nostrils called Warrior Breathing and this is a very stimulative sympathetic nervous system arousal, you know, process to get you ready for something intense, right? The other thing that's great about the Warrior Breathing, this is just literally like 3 rounds, 20 reps, intense breathing through your nostrils with a soft exhale through your mouth. And what this does is kind of like an etch-a-sketch of your brain, right? You do this and we do a breath hold at the end of each round. So 20 rounds, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, hold your breath for as long as you can, then exhale slowly. You do that 3 rounds and your mind is completely cleared of whatever was in it before and your body is energized. And so it's like preparation for attack mode, you know? If you're a war, if you're an athlete or a warrior.

Could you restate the sequence there, Mark, just to make sure people have that?

So 20 rounds, inhale sharply through your nose, exhale softly through your mouth, like a sigh. There's 2 ways I teach it, and either way is fine. You can inhale, exhale, hold, and then inhale, hold, or just hold. And you do that 3 times. And that was derivative of a training that we do still to this day at every single event I run, which is basically an hour of that. And each, instead of 3 20-minute or 20 repetition, we do 3 15-minute segments of breathing like that. It's extraordinary! That's not something that the long one, that hour one is not something you would do very often. You know, it'd be maybe once a month or once a quarter or even once, whereas the 3 rounds of 20 breaths is completely safe to do every day. The, the challenge with this is like the opposite of just breath awareness and box breathing because you're just jacking your system up, whereas box breathing through your nose and breath awareness through the nose slowly, you're not like forcing the air in. You're actually, you're actually trying to keep it slow and low and relaxed and silent. So that's very, very parasympathetic. Rest and digest, calming to your nervous system, relaxing. Whereas the warrior breath is gonna jack you up, right? It's gonna, it's gonna adrenaline, epinephrine, you know, cortisol, everything. It's like, I gotta get ready for this fight. So if you do that extended every day, like Wim Hof's training, my feeling is that there's certain individuals who aren't, they're physiologically and metabolically not conditioned for that. Elite athletes, yes. Warriors, SEALs, yes. I know guys that do Wim Hof every day, they love it. But there's other people who haven't put in that type of conditioning and also their mental state. They haven't learned to move that type of energy in their mind and it can lead to distortions, you know, mental imbalance. This is— we saw this, I started to feel this morning because I've been a yoga practitioner for so many years and I saw people literally lose their mind with improper intense breathing practices in the yoga community, both Kundalini and even one of my teachers who did this really intense hour-long breathing practice every single morning. And guess what? He's crazy right now, and he was advanced yogi in the Ashtanga tradition.

And is the—

in my opinion, it was the breathing.

Is the destabilization, you know, long-term or is it just within the period of breathing?

Long-term. Yeah. Wow.

What kind of changes?

The mind is— the breath— see, one of the things that a lot of people don't realize, when you breathe through your nostrils, you're affecting your mind because the breath comes in through each nostril and each nostril is attached somehow energetically to the nadis. Right? The pingala and the ida. Ida and pingala. And so these kind of wrap up into your brain and then go down the back of your spine. They wind around your spine, and where they cross is each one of our chakra systems or centers. And so when you breathe through your nostrils, you know, left nostril stimulates kind of that right side. The right side stimulates the left side. So when you breathe intensely through your nostrils like that, You're moving a lot of energy in your mind. Now, I will say Wim Hof does breathing through your mouth in that regard, and so you're probably a little bit safer from the mental changes, but you're still just jacking yourself up from an emotional— not an emotional, but a physiological standpoint, because that's a stress response. Anytime you breathe through your mouth, you're triggering the stress response. And so if you're really doing that intense breathing through your mouth, then you're just putting your state self in a state of hyper stress. And a lot of people don't need more stress, they need less stress. So breathing is intense. Those 3 are really valuable for us in our training. There are others, like we do alternate nostril breathing to get some bilateral stimulation. And this is exactly what I was just talking about, knowing that breathing through your nostrils will stimulate your brain. You can actually theoretically develop more integrity in how the brain works by having the information flow between— across the corpus callosum between left and right hemisphere of the brain. Now, I'm fully aware that some of this research on right and left hemisphere is being challenged right now in the neuroscience community, and I'm anxious to see where that goes because I think a lot of people are still using that kind of language that we have right and left hemispheres, which we do, but then which, like, left hemisphere is all rational and linear thinking, right hemisphere is kind of creative and spontaneous. That's starting to break down. So I think it's fascinating. I'd love to see research on the effect of alternate nostril breathing on cognitive capacity. And then is it really right and left hemisphere? You know, can we put someone in an MRI and study that? Or is it just changing overall structure of how the brain operates and allowing for new neuroplastic pathways to develop? I think it's probably the latter, but that's a really valuable skill to use it, you know, for a few minutes, let's say after your meditation, you know, just to do the alternate nostril breathing as well. Those are 4 primary ones. There are some other ones we do for fun as drills, you know, and again, they have different kind of rational aspects. And a lot of those came from my martial arts backgrounds. I mean, the martial arts and yoga are just ripe with different breathing techniques, and so is qigong, you know. So the Eastern traditions really understood that and they've been practicing those skills for thousands of years, they're still kind of new in the West. And so it's fun to bring them in, but it's also exciting to see some research finally to validate what we experience.

It's very interesting to me, the point about mental disturbance and destabilization. Yeah, I haven't actually heard many people mention that, so I find that very compelling. So I know we just got about 10 minutes left, Mark. I want to ask you about your PhD. First off, I wanted to ask why someone who's been in the US Navy SEALs for 20 years and has taught the Navy leadership decided to do a PhD. I admire it immensely, actually, the kind of commitment to lifelong learning, but I'm curious what the catalyst or prompt was in you doing a PhD in global leadership and change at Pepperdine and going kind of down the academic track.

There's several vectors to this. Probably the most personal is that I was in a PhD program at USD, University of San Diego, in leadership back in 2003. Yeah, I was about 70%, 80% through the coursework, not in the dissertation stage yet, when I got called up to go to war, to go to Iraq. And when I was in Iraq, you know, war has a certain way of really focusing you and, you know, helping you understand what your true priorities are. And I decided that, you know, I was spending too much time away from my family was one piece that I learned, and the other was that the professors, the academic world, actually, they know a lot about leadership theory, but they actually don't know much about leading. And so I wanted to actually teach leadership or develop— let me say it this way. I wanted to develop leaders. I didn't want to teach leadership in an academic setting. So I quit. The only thing I've ever quit in my life. You know, I could probably have a more positive, you know, way to say that. I chose not to go back to finish. And I started SEALFIT and started, you know, developing leaders. But as you can imagine, you know, as the years went on, I had some moments where I'm like, gosh, you know, why didn't I finish that? You know, if I could have just gutted it out for 2 more years and then finish that, and it would have brought new insights and maybe some credibility. And now I'm glad I didn't finish it at that program. "Right? Because the one I'm in right now is so much better suited for me and the world's changed so much that now it's way more relevant!" So, that was one vector. The other vector is, as you're aware, like I'm very much of a subjective experiential person and also trainer. Like we, our entire program was built upon, "Hey! This worked for me in the past, so we're gonna refine it and it'll work for you and if it doesn't work for you, then we'll adapt it even further!" So, it's a completely adaptive program. It's a living program! And I've drawn tools and inspiration from Tibetan Buddhism, from Zen, from, you know, various yoga practices, from the Navy SEALs, from neuroscience, from Integral Theory, from transpersonal psychology. And I guess that's kind of what Unbeatable Mind is. It's like bringing together all these different tools, contextualizing it, building a model that we can use to deliver this training, and then just doing it. We train it, but I've always wanted to study it. I had this fantasy that, you know, some neuroscientists would come in and say, hey, I've heard about your program, I want to do it, I want to have my students do a research project on this. It never happened. So finally I realized, and I, I'm so busy that I haven't like reached out to anybody to say, hey, you know, this would be a cool research project. I decided to do it myself, right? So I'm going to study our program and I'm going to bring some— not only extend the research into new areas like we were talking about before we started, to really understand like how do you develop what I'm calling the exponential mindset so we can deal with leading in a world that is exponentially changing. So I want to study that and advance the knowledge but also, you know, I'll use my program as the subject base because that's what we do. And so through this, I'll gain new distinctions, new— I'll come up with new content, I'll be able to evolve my own program and also— and you said this yourself to me and it's so true— A lot of times when we're creators, we're kind of inside our own bubble and we come across people who think like us and, you know, but when you do PhD level research, you have to study all of the other people who have done studying or done work that's even tangentially related to yours. And so suddenly you see this new universe opens up and you're like, oh my God, look at— there's someone who studied this aspect and it's sort of similar, and there's someone studied that aspect and sort of similar, and wow, there's someone who actually said something that's almost exactly like I'm saying, so maybe I should give them credit and not take all the credit, you know what I mean? Right? So you have to be very inclusive. You have to understand what the lay of the land is so that then you can actually build on it without recreating something that already exists and taking credit for it. And that happens all the time if you don't do that kind of research. So I wanted to do that. And then there's another piece of this too, is that, you know, you've got this podcast and I've got a podcast. About 80% of the people that I— I interview, it seems like they're— well, not 80%, about half the people I interview are academics and they've sold a huge number of books and people take them seriously because they're academics, right? Whereas, you know, if, Ryan, you come in and you have the exact same knowledge through your personal experience and you maybe even communicate it in a more direct and meaningful way because of your personal experience, if you're not a PhD and you haven't done the research, nobody's going to take you seriously. I wanted to be the Navy SEAL entrepreneur author who also is credible because he's got an academic background.

That part, honestly, I find fascinating and confusing, if I'm honest. It seems like the credibility from 20 years in the Navy would be far more significant. So it's super interesting to hear that that side of it is a driver as well. Have you found that people weigh academia as far as credibility even higher than real-world experience?

Well, I think there's always people who are going to like be fascinated with kind of the Navy SEAL experience or leadership. But you know, those books have been written and I've written those books. And so part of this is I don't want to be pigeonholed as Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine. I mean, I don't really buy into any labels. I don't want to be called Dr. Divine. I don't want to be called Commander Divine. I'm Mark. But there's so much more to the story of leadership and team development and human development that goes way beyond the military special ops model and so I don't want that to constrain me or to, you know, to put me in a straitjacket or to be identified with that for the rest of my life. I want to basically open up, you know, do my own opening up and continue my own yogic journey, you know, to the highest stages of development accessible to me in my lifetime so that I can teach more effectively and so that I can continue to lead more effectively. And communicate more effectively. And if I can do all those things more effectively as a result of opening up and expanding my knowledge, then I can meet my mission more effectively. My mission is to train and inspire 100 million people into this kind of integrated awareness, world-centric awareness, which includes flow, right? And so what I love about what we're doing and what you and Steve are doing and others are doing is that we're all kind of— we have these big mission purposes to help the world be a better place and we're collaborating. This is a team of teams approach to bring the world into, you know, more harmonious and positive vibration and with a global mindset to get away from the ethnocentrism and the egocentrism and the warmongering, right? Because it's violent and it's dangerous and it's negative and it's— a lot of people are suffering because of it and it's going to be consciousness itself that changes it. We expand consciousness at scale, we can change the world.

Fair play to you doing it. It's inspiring. And honestly, I've been looking at it myself. I've got one last question, Mark, before we wrap here, which is just practically, how are you doing it? Because you were describing to me before just the demands of the program itself, and you got, what, 5 businesses or multiple at least that are active right now. Podcast, everything else. So what changes have you made to your habits, your routines, your own approach to performance to be able to load the PhD in on top of everything you're currently doing?

This is kind of like a lesson in just Productivity 101. And I, I say no to most things now, right? Unless it's radically in alignment with my mission and it's going to be— it's something that's urgent and important. And then secondarily is I've learned to really just stay in my lane. I don't need to be at every meeting for my corporate team. Let them run with things. And I don't need, you know, so I've really, really streamlined my interaction with my, my company teams to let them do their job. Of course, this requires that you hire really well, and that's taken me a long time to figure out. But let them do their job, and I'll do my job. My job is vision, strategy, and holding them accountable to the KPIs, you know, so developing the KPIs and then holding them accountable. And I can do that in 1 hour a week, right, with my teams. So I have 1 day a week where I do kind of like corporate team stuff, and then I do, uh, I bracket my podcasts so I'm not doing them every week, right, so I can, you know, control my mental energy. And I bracket work time for just my PhD during business hours. So it's funny, I'm the first one to turn in all assignments, you know, and some of these students are full-time students because, you know, they don't have good habits and they all wait until the last minute. I can't stand waiting the last minute, you know? So I'm trying to stay ahead. And also I've learned that it's kind of like the only thing to fear is fear itself. For me, the only thing to fear is the magnitude of the workload because it is enormous, right? I was saying, you know, This program is designed for working professionals, so therefore we only have 3 classes. Most PhD programs will have 4 or even 5. So 3, but within each class we have easily 4 assignments each class. That's 12 that are papers of anywhere from 10 to 12 pages and up to 40 pages. And then we have an, you know, seems like an innumerable number of other, you know, read this article and put a PowerPoint presentation and give it to, you know, give it the next class, right? That's just happening nonstop. And blog posts and reading assignments and Zoom classes. It's extraordinary. And then we have two 4-day weekends each semester, which are 13-hour days in the classroom. We talked about that. That's the immersive part. It's a lot of time and a lot of work, but if you just take it one day at a time and just focus on what you're going to do today and you really safeguard your time and energy so you're focusing on the right things and you delegate everything else and you really trust your team, What I've found is with that approach, which by the way is kind of what we teach our leaders from a time management standpoint, so I'm just eating my own dog food here, you have all the time in the world. Getting through this first semester has been really good for me because I'm like, "Okay, I can do this." I actually really look forward to the next semester.

Are you finding that it's making you think differently with respect to moves in the business where you have to get more leverage?

Unquestionably.

Yes.

Not just my personal practices, but also what we were talking about earlier, the review of literature and the landscape. And this program, Global Leadership and Change, is focused on the future. So we're looking at future technologies and the confluences of those technologies and what it means for business and how to avoid being disrupted and what leadership strategies are going to work for the 21st century that aren't working right now. So it's a lot of stuff that I was already starting to teach from my own experience, but it's nice to get out there and just be like, really open my mind and see the whole landscape What are the major consulting firms saying like McKinsey and Porsche Performance and these others and Accenture and what are the futurists saying and the visionaries and different, you know, looking at it from many different dimensions or different fields, neuroscience and sports performance and corporate performance and leadership development and so, you know, you get to do all that and you see that there's kind of this many, many strands of people thinking in the same way. But, you know, because of our, our culture and our news cycle, you just don't, you know, unless you're really interested in these things as a podcaster, a host, right, and, and researching and finding out who's on this cutting edge of this stuff and inviting them onto your show, you don't hear about their work. You know, it's like they're, they're being published in journals that, you know, maybe 100 people read, right? Stuff like that.

Right.

It's really interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

Already changed. So I've, I've had some major distinctions regarding what I'm going to do with the future of SEALFIT. Also my own role with the organization, it's really helped me kind of clarify my role and what, you know, what I should be doing as the founder and visionary, what type of people I need to bring in, you know, in order to take us and not be disrupted ourselves. So it's been very helpful. I recommend, you know, it's part of the kind of the Mental Mountain PhD program. We, I've always said, you know, When it comes to your mental development, you need to kind of create your own personal PhD. So, you know, what podcasts you're listening to? Where do you want to go deep? Where do you want to go broad? And then, you know, what courses and certifications do you want to take? And then you set up a plan and you go do that because we always have to be learning because if you're not learning and growing, you're stagnating and the world is moving so fast. Like literally the pace of change is becoming exponential and obviously you can't learn and grow everything. In everything, but we've got to figure out what we're going to be masterful at and just work at that every single day. Now, just chip away at mastering a domain of knowledge and mastering your body and mind. And then, you know, over time what happens is you master that art of accelerated learning so that you can absorb a shite ton of information— there's that Irish brogue again— a shite ton of information very, very quickly.

A little bit of bad influence on you already.

This is kind of the learning model of the future, is this. It's like you have to learn like a Zen monk, right? You have to learn, open your mind and let the information flood into your contextual awareness, not try to memorize, you know, everything. Memorization is so 20th century.

Right, right, right. Thanks so much, Mark. This has been phenomenal, and I appreciate you going into depth on all of those pieces along the way, from the leadership to your own work and research currently. Finally, before we wrap, I want to ask you what you're most excited about that you're working on right now besides the PhD. What work of yours people can support and where they can go deeper and find out more?

Oh, man. Thanks for doing that. We're spending a lot of time at Unbeatable to launch our answer to Zero to Dangerous called Unbeatable Leader, develop the exponential mindset. Uh, that's coming up soon, the next month or so. People can learn more about our work at unbeatablemind.com. We also have a really cool 30-day kind of starter kit that I developed and launched last January. And that's it. It's very, very cool because we go into a lot of, you know, we go into box breathing, we went to, you know, how do you tag, how do you do a whole planning process to go from purpose, vision, mission, goal, and then micro goal. That's really helpful. And a lot of other things. And that's unbeatablemind.com/challenge. That's a great like starter kit. It's like only $100. We're launching our coach certification program right now. So that's our actual become a certified Unbeatable Mind coach. And of course there are prerequisites for that, but if anyone's interested in that, and we've discounted it because we unbolted it from an event that we used to run. So it's like $3,500, which is very, very reasonable, as you know, for a certification program. And it's world class. We have— it's one of the few integrated leadership development programs in the world, and I think it's the only one in the United States. And you can learn more by sending us an email at info@unbeatablemind.com. So that cohort will launch probably January, I think. So that's kind of the main thing. I'm working on entire rebranding. I'm rebranding Unbeatable Mind, SEALFIT, and I'm launching Divine Inspiration to house kind of the personal stuff like the podcast, books, and whatnot. And I'll be launching a personal email newsletter out of that. A lot of things we talked about last time we met, you know, we're putting those pieces into place, and I'm excited about that. And I'm working on a book also called Uncommon, which has a lot of some of these, um, strategies, but it's really geared toward Gen Z, kind of get them on track and thinking about the future and how to overcome fear and regrets and communicate well and, you know, open up their kind of kokoro heart, mind, and action.

Is that coming out before the end of the PhD, or is that part of the PhD?

No, that's coming out. I was working on that before I started, so that'll be done next year. It's in the edit phases. If I didn't have it at the edit phase, I probably would have had to table the project because of the PhD, but now it's in the editor's hands and we'll launch that, you know, sometime in the first quarter, probably when we do the rebranding, I think.

Nice.

A lot of, a lot going on.

Nice. Yeah, lots, lots cooking.

We're living interesting times, right?

Yeah, exactly. Definitely recommend folks check out all of those resources. And yeah, thank you so much for your time and expertise, Mark.

Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you very much, Ryan. Take care, everybody.

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