Secrets To Perform Like A Navy Seal w/ Rich Diviney

Learn how to ELEVATE YOUR LIFE from one of the toughest men on the planet! Rich Diviney is an author, leadership expert, and former Navy SEAL Commanding Officer serving over 20 years as a Navy SEAL with more than 13 overseas deployments – 11 of which were to Iraq and Afghanistan. If you want the secrets to strengthening your mental fortitude and becoming an overall badass, THIS is the interview to watch. Life comes at us a million miles a minute so being able to adapt and perform under pressure can be the difference between success and failure, or for a Navy SEAL, life and death. In this interview, Rich is sharing training tactics on how to go from ordinary to performing like a Navy SEAL. You’ll learn how to train your brain to build resilience, and how to embrace and conquer FEAR. These are the same techniques SEALS uses to keep moving forward in the most fearful scenarios! Straight from the mouth of the Mann who selected and led the biggest group of badasses on the planet, you’ll learn what it takes to become a peak performer, build a dream team, and the number one requirement to building a strong team culture. Don’t miss out on this exclusive interview with one of the TOUGHEST men on the planet! 👉 SUBSCRIBE TO ED'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW 👈 → → → CONNECT WITH ED MYLETT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: ← ← ← ▶︎ INSTAGRAM ▶︎ FACEBOOK ▶︎ LINKEDIN ▶︎ TWITTER ▶︎ WEBSITE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

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• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  Over 20 years in business, over $12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff. Borrow better.

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  This is The Ed Mylett Show.

• 1:48Ed Mylett?

  Hey, welcome back to Max Out, everybody. Today is a show that I call it a thick show. Meaning, you're gonna write a lot of notes. It's very granular, very tactical. You're gonna learn a bunch. The reason you're gonna learn a bunch is I have a very uniquely qualified man to. Visit with you. Rich Diviney was a Navy SEAL, but he was also, and I can't say what group he was a part of, but let's just call it a very elite group of SEALs without using the name. And Rich was in charge of selection process and also human performance. So you talk about an elite, elite group like that, and then, you know, understanding the attributes required to perform at that level and then the teachings. And so he's also got a book out right now, ironically called The Attributes,

• 2:32Ed Mylett?

  that cover these very, very things that we're going to get in depth with today. So Rich, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

• 2:37Rich Diviney?

  Thank you, Ed. It's a, it's an honor to be here. So thanks for having me.

• 2:40Ed Mylett?

  So I gotta tell you, it's an honor for me and I'm going to learn today too with you. And I told you, you know, off camera, I can endorse your work because many of the things I've taught, you've just been able to apply them in, in scenarios that I can't even imagine in your life. So first things first, I talk a lot about peak performance. You make a distinction in the book between optimal performance and peak performance. So any of you listening to this that are leaders of groups, or just, you know, want to perform at a high level consistently. I think this distinction is really powerful. So give us the difference.

• 3:10Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it really came to me as I left the military and people were asking me a lot about peak performance. And, and what I realized was I wasn't comfortable with the term in defining what Navy SEALs or spec operators do. And the reason is because peak, at least to me, peak is an apex. And it's an apex from which you can only come down. And it usually has to be planned for and prepared for and scheduled. So for example, the professional athlete, the NFL player, you know, uses the entire week to prepare and plan to peak for three hours on Sunday, right? And so it really didn't apply to what we were doing every day. Because when I thought about, for example, myself in some combat situations,

• 3:54Rich Diviney?

  or even SEAL training, when you're freezing in the surf zone, there was nothing peak about my performance, right? We were just kind of moving through. And so I really started thinking about it in terms of optimal performance. Optimal performance is really, what's the very best I can do in the moment, whatever that best looks like, right? So sometimes that best looks like peak and it looks like flow states and everything's clicking, right? Other times that's like, hey, I am head down and I'm just taking step by step. And that's all I got, right? And it's dirty and it's gritty and it's muddy. And it sucks. And that's really, in my opinion, what it's not only spec ops. I try to take all the stuff I learned in spec ops and apply it to life. But that's really what life is. I mean, life, it's unrealistic and probably unhealthy to try to peak

• 4:38Rich Diviney?

  at all times during life. It's just not going to happen, right? So optimal performance allows us to be comfortable with this modulation and be comfortable with the fact that sometimes if you're just head down, just taking step by step, just grinding it out, that's okay. You're actually performing the best you can, right? And I would say COVID, you know, 2020 for all of us. I would imagine that most of us in 2020 didn't say that we were at, we were performing at our peak for most of 2020, right? We were just, we were doing the best we could. And that's, it's really just a more realistic, more practical way to think about performance, I think.

• 5:09Ed Mylett?

  That's real world stuff. You know, as I reflect on it, I think about the, you know, the most successful people I know are the people that perform at a high level. Really, the key is they do it more consistently than other people. They do it under pressure, which we're going to talk about in a little while as well. Whether you're an athlete or a dad, you know, it's under pressure. How do you perform? How do you respond to certain conditions? So you were in charge of the selection process and you make a distinction in the book. By the way, when you're listening to this, everybody, it's, these are, these are attributes you wish to embody if you're going to be happier and a higher performer. It's also attributes you want to find in people you want to surround yourself with as friends, as associations, colleagues, business partners, et cetera.

• 5:51Ed Mylett?

  You make a distinction, though, that's awesome between skills and attributes. Because this is something I think most people discount themselves. Well, I don't have the incredible natural talents or skills, so I'm discounted from performing at a high level. He makes the case, guys, in the book, SEALs are regular guys. And I have to say, I've got to know a few, and I don't know that I disagree with that necessarily. I think there are extraordinary things about a few of them. But I tend to agree with you as an outside observer. So what's the difference between skills and attributes?

• 6:24Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, it's a distinction that I had to make when I was running the assessment selection because we were, our particular program, we were bringing in very experienced seals. And we were putting them through our process and we were still getting about a 50% attrition rate, which is natural and okay. But the problem was we weren't able to effectively articulate why. And we weren't able to say why to ourselves to be comfortable with that. We weren't able to tell our senior leadership why. But most importantly, we weren't able to tell the candidates why they weren't making it. And these are guys who are coming in, they really, they were kind of all-stars and rock stars. And to be able to tell them something like, well, you couldn't shoot very well, or you couldn't do this very well. It just didn't seem to fit right. So I had to really break it down.

• 7:09Rich Diviney?

  You know, in a very general, basic sense, skills are not innate, they're not inherent to our nature, right? None of us are born with the ability to ride a bike, or throw a ball, or shoot a gun in the military sense.

• 7:22Rich Diviney?

  We can be taught them. We can sometimes sit down in a class and learn them. They direct our behavior in known situations. So here's how and when to ride a bike, throw a ball, shoot a gun. And because they're visible and because they're set up that way and kind of steps that you can learn and teach. They're very easy to assess, measure, and test. And this is why most teams, especially business teams who are kind of putting together dream teams. Make the mistake of focusing only on skills, the best salesperson, best graphic designer, best marketing, whatever it is. What the problem with skills is, is that it doesn't, skills don't tell us how we're going to operate when things go south and sideways. And the environment turns completely uncertain, right? Because you can't necessarily apply a known skill to an unknown environment. This is where attributes come in.

• 8:07Rich Diviney?

  Attributes are innate, right? All of us are born with levels of adaptability, of situational awareness, of.

• 8:15Rich Diviney?

  Discipline of resilience, right? They don't direct behavior, they inform our behavior. So they tell us how we're going to show up to a situation. So my level of adaptability and resilience, for example, informed the way I showed up when I was learning how to ride a bike and I was falling off a dozen times, okay? Because they're hidden though, because of their background, they're very difficult to assess, measure, and test. And the most visible and visceral environments that you can see these things are in environments of challenge, uncertainty, and stress, which is why the laboratory I had, which was SEAL training, and whether it's basic, whether it's BUDs or the SEAL training I was running, it's all about throwing guys into challenge, uncertainty, and stress. It was just showing these qualities. And I always joke, you know, when I take it back to BUDs, you know, which is basic underwater

• 9:00Rich Diviney?

  demolition SEAL training, the basic course for a guy to become a Navy SEAL. You spend hundreds of hours running with boats on your heads. You spend hundreds of hours PTing with 300-pound telephone poles and freezing in the surf zone. And, you know, over a 20-year career, I've been on hundreds of combat missions, and I've done thousands of training evolutions, and never on any one of them did I carry a boat on my head or a telephone pole on my shoulder, right? So what they were doing to us in BUDs wasn't training us to be a Navy SEAL, right? It wasn't teaching us the skills to be a Navy SEAL. What it was doing was just teasing out these attributes. It was seeing if we could do the job, right? And so this is where we have to start thinking about making distinctions when we're putting together teams, and even in our own performance. Our performance, especially in challenge, uncertainty, and stress, is driven by these

• 9:45Rich Diviney?

  attributes, and that's really important to know.

• 9:47Ed Mylett?

  Well, I think also when I hear that, I think of so many things. I think of even with our own children, you know, and we're always evaluating their skill set, but if they're really going to be flourishing their life, why not help them identify what their giftedness or attributes are, from what you call it? Then I'm thinking of all the people I've recruited into different businesses I've had, and I think, you know, you get these people with these perfect skills, perfect background, you're like, they're going to just crush this, they're such a great speaker, they're going to be great in sales, except you don't know how they're going to respond under pressure.

• 10:16Rich Diviney?

  That's right.

• 10:17Ed Mylett?

  Failure. And it's these attributes, and I have seen people with frankly far lower skill levels.

• 10:24Ed Mylett?

  With exemplary attributes, long-term have best optimal performance. I always use Tom Brady because people think I'm a whack job, but like, I think of Brady. Not tremendous skillset, but some of these attributes that you write in the book, I was actually thinking of him from an athlete standpoint.

• 10:41Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Ed Mylett?

  Give us a little bit of a gift. There's 25 of them in the book, guys.

• 10:46Ed Mylett?

  When you were selecting, and I'm sure all 25 were important, were there two or three that really were requisite or stood out that were, you know, you really looked for in people? Because I don't want to give away the entire book.

• 10:59Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Ed Mylett?

  But what are, what are a few of them that you could share with us that are attributes that are just, they're almost mandatory for optimal performance?

• 11:06Rich Diviney?

  Well, so, so first, so I'll answer that question because I know people are curious. But the first thing I want to caveat is that the, the list of attributes to be a Navy SEAL is going to, going to be different than the list of attributes required to be an athlete or a salesperson or a teacher or whatever, right? So that, that, that list changes. So, so it's incumbent on you as a team leader or a leader, if you want to understand what attributes you need for your team to figure out what that list looks like. And this is how we also position ourselves properly in, in the environment, right? Sometimes, some people have a better makeup for being a nurse than they have for being a Navy SEAL, right? And that's because of the attributes they come to the table with. If we were to talk about BUDs, you know, SEAL training, I would say the most important attributes are the

• 11:51Rich Diviney?

  grit attributes. So you're talking about courage, perseverance, adaptability and resilience, and then probably the drive attributes, which, you know, there are five. There's self-efficacy, there's discipline, there's open-mindedness, there's cunning, there's narcissism, which we can get into that later if we want.

• 12:04Ed Mylett?

  Narcissism is an attribute?

• 12:06Rich Diviney?

  Narcissism is an attribute, yes.

• 12:08Ed Mylett?

  Okay. No, you're not doing that later. I gotta know this. I gotta, that's fascinating to me.

• 12:12Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Ed Mylett?

  Cunning and narcissism. Just give me a little flavor, then you go right back into that.

• 12:15Rich Diviney?

  Absolutely. Yeah. So, and it's, it's the most asked about one anyway, which is good. It was probably one of the most fun to write. Let, well, let's start with narcissism. Narcissism is obviously a pejorative word and narcissistic personality disorder is a bad thing, right? The DSM five, which is a psychology bible will state nine criteria, which will define it. I think if you have five or more, then you're, you have narcissistic personality disorder. However, when you read those nine, what, what happens is when I read, I was like, wait a second. Okay. I, I don't have that, but sometimes I kind of have a little of that, right? And it really kind of made me think about why I became a Navy SEAL in the first place. And and think about when my friends would talk about why they became Navy SEALs. Certainly, we were patriots. Certainly, we loved our country.

• 12:59Rich Diviney?

  But we really, we just kind of wanted to be badasses and we wanted to see if we could do something very few people could do. There's nothing wrong with that, and that's a little bit of narcissism talking. This is biological, right? When we are, when we're paid attention to by our parents as infants, we are getting hits of dopamine, which is a very powerful feel-good chemical, serotonin, which is kind of a bonding, trust, I'm protecting you chemical, and then oxytocin, which is another bonding chemical. So that that combination is powerful when we're getting paid attention to. This translates to adulthood, adulthood. All of us, to some extent, want to, at some point, feel special, feel loved. You want to be paid attention to, okay? That's a natural thing.

• 13:40Rich Diviney?

  And if you, if you have an audacious goal to be a, a rock star, a Navy SEAL, an entrepreneur, very successful, to stand out, to be special, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a little bit of narcissism speaking, and it can drive you. And that's why I put it in there.

• 13:55Ed Mylett?

  I love it. So I gotta, I gotta be honest with you. I'm thinking of all these friends of mine that are what I call peak performers, but to your point, optimal performers, because they don't just peak, they do it consistently. And there is a little bit of equality of that. And and even a little bit of self-thinking, meaning, you know, I want to get this attention, I want to do something significant, I want to prove something to myself.

• 14:17Rich Diviney?

  Yes.

• 14:18Ed Mylett?

  That's special. And so I, I really, I really want to acknowledge that I agree with you on that. And I kind of jumped in there. I think you were on a little bit of a roll before I did that. But you, inside that answer you were giving, you create this mind gym. You also talk about resilience. I'm surprised that wasn't what you went to first. But obviously, it's, you know, it's, it's where you went. But resilience is, was one of them across the board, is it not?

• 14:41Rich Diviney?

  It is, although we have to recognize resilience is just the ability to bounce back, right? You still have to get through it first.

• 14:46Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, but you make a distinction in the book, I'm not interrupting you, but you make a distinction. It's not just. You make a distinction about how you bounce back, when you bounce back. I'd love for you to go into that a little bit because this is huge. When you get rejected in sales, if you get knocked down, that's fine. It oftentimes it's the length of time you're looking, the length of time you lick your wounds.

• 15:06Rich Diviney?

  That's right.

• 15:07Ed Mylett?

  Could you talk about that? It's one of my favorite parts of the things you teach. I just believe it's so true and it's subtle. Almost nobody would make this distinction other than someone like yourself. So speak to that a little bit.

• 15:16Rich Diviney?

  Absolutely. So resilience, again, resilience is the ability to get knocked off baseline, right? And then get back to baseline, which is extraordinarily important in any factor of human development, whether it's weightlifting, whether it's, whether it's physical, whether it's mental, whether it's, whether it's environmental, right? Then there's, and then so just to give another distinction, we're, we're also really interested in what's called anti-virgility, which is a great book by Nassim Taleb, right? That's the ability to get knocked off baseline. When you come back, you're, you're stronger, right? You've moved, you've shifted your baseline. To be able to do either, all right? You need to be, you need to have the ability to reflect appropriately and for the, for the right amount of time. And so the example I give in the book, which you probably enjoyed,

• 15:58Rich Diviney?

  was a CEO, a former CEO of mine used to tell us what his grandfather told him, which was the two-minute rule. And basically, two-minute rule was this. Anytime that you have something bad happen, okay? Something, something negative, bad, it's awful, it's horrible. You have two minutes to wallow, to mourn, to do whatever you need to do. Okay, after that two minutes, you know, you stop and you get back on track. You're, you're back in it, okay? Same thing happens when anything good happens, right? Any big success or all that stuff, promotion, whatever, two minutes to rest on your laurels, pat yourself on the back, feel like you're the big man or woman, get back to normal and then get back to baseline. So it's a mental, it's a mental exercise to help get back on baseline.

• 16:41Rich Diviney?

  Now, obviously, certain trauma, it's going to take more than two minutes, but, but I think the concept still remains. To be able to reflect enough about something that happened and ask the right questions. So frame it properly allows us to get back to that baseline and many times grow from it and then move on. And this is the, this is the crux of optimal performance and in fact, growth. Because we can't grow, we can't move on until we, or we can't, can't take those steps unless we, we shed that, that, that trauma.

• 17:11Ed Mylett?

  I think this should give people hope, you know, I think some people think they're weaker than they are sometimes like I get knocked down. And guys, this is a guy who led and selected the biggest group of badasses that walked the planet. We say and they get knocked down. The question mark is can you get back to baseline or an anti fragility? Can you get even better than baseline? And there is a time factor. So those of you that are knocked down or get knocked down, you need to begin to evaluate how quickly this two minute rule and whatever, however that manifests itself for you. Cause we all do, but I do feel like, and I would say, I don't have a lot of attributes, but one of mine has been. The pace at which I get back up to baseline or then eventually exceed it. And in mind gym, what you created, I guess in the seals.

• 17:56Ed Mylett?

  Are there, it sounds to me like you believe resilience can be developed and built that it's even though it's an attribute. It can be expanded, true or false, and how do we do that?

• 18:07Rich Diviney?

  Absolutely true. And so, so the, the idea is, is develop a working relationship with our brain. Which was really the, the, the kind of the. The goal of the mind gym was for, to help guys begin to figure out this gray matter. Between their ears and try to access that and, and more proactively use that, you know, gray matter. Because again, we're, we're just from a basic standpoint. I mean, we, you know, and, and our nervous system, which is, it's all connected, which we all know, but. You know, the sympathetic response versus the parasympathetic response. This is active doing something versus recovery. Recovery is one of the key. Elements required, in fact, probably the key element required in any type of resilience or anti fragility. You have to take time for recovery.

• 18:53Rich Diviney?

  This, we know this intuitively, when you lift weights, you tear the muscle, right? The only way you grow muscle is to rest. Okay. If you, if you lifted, if you lifted the same weight every day, you just keep on tearing, you'd, you'd go into entropy. So you have to tear it and then you have to allow it to grow back, which is what recovery is. Accessing our, our kind of understanding our neurology a little bit, a little bit better. Allows us to more actively and proactively shift into parasympathetic and, and initiate some recovery. More effectively, more often, and in some cases on demand. And that was really the, the key, uh, key kind of goal of the mind gym was to teach guys, begin to teach guys how to do that. More, more effectively.

• 19:37Rich Diviney?

  More efficiently and more quickly. So I used to call, you know, sometimes, you know, recover in between gunfights because honestly, resilience, we talk about the two-minute rule, and you know this, and I think a lot of your audience knows this, when you're really, when you're really kind of performing at a high level, whether it's optimally or peak, whatever that looks like, sometimes the situation, the environment doesn't allow for recovery in the moment. Okay. And so this is, you can watch every, any war movie, right, where the guy who's, the guy's next to his buddy, his buddy, his buddy gets shot and, and he, and you'd spend the next two minutes while the guy's, you know, in the movie is crying over his buddy and mourning, all that, that doesn't happen in the real world. You don't have time to mourn. You have to win

• 20:19Rich Diviney?

  the gunfight, right? Which means it's incumbent on us, and you obviously combat's an extreme case, but it's incumbent on us that if recovery is not available in the moment, you have to, have to, have to make it a priority later. All right. So, so if you're in the moment and something bad happens and you're just like, okay, I gotta block that out and I just gotta move forward and make this, I gotta, I gotta finish the mission. I gotta win the fight, finish the mission. Once that's all done, you need to go back and you define time to recover. This is very hard for, for, for top performers to do because we're so, we're so kind of seduced by the performance part of it. We love, we love breaking through, like getting through, but recovery is huge. Just think of it in the terms of if you don't recovery, if you don't

• 21:00Rich Diviney?

  recover effectively, it's like you're, you're, you're benching three times a day, every day, right?

• 21:07Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, I've seen this take out more people than most people realize. I've seen people have really good careers or whatever it is they do for a window of time, and they don't recover, they don't recover. Then what happens is they're fatigued and they make huge mistakes, or they fry. They just fry out. And so this is a huge thing. By the way, I don't know that we've done an interview that in 20 minutes has had this much stuff in it this quickly. I think everyone, this is like crap, like, you know, pulling over the side of the road and writing things, but on recovery. Is there anything other than sleep because sleep's the go to? Any other things you'd offer, say, hey, this is a recovery technique?

• 21:43Rich Diviney?

  Well, some of the quicker ones can be breathing. And I know you, you've had Dr. Andrew Huberman on.

• 21:49Ed Mylett?

  I was thinking of him when you've been talking.

• 21:51Rich Diviney?

  And, and he and I, he and I have been, well, and he's in the book. He and I have been friends now for, gosh, four years. And we've, we've been working on a lot of this together. And so, so a lot of my neuroscience comes from just geeking out with him and hanging out with him and his friends. But, but, you know, breathing techniques, so we can do, certain breathing techniques will help us shift into parasympathetic. There's vision techniques, which, which Huberman talks about, open gaze, for example, real fast way for your audience, open gaze is just, it's, it's different than focusing. Instead of focusing on something in front of you, just go soft and start noticing your peripheries, right? That open gaze has been proven to start shifting your nervous system into parasympathetic and start going that way.

• 22:32Rich Diviney?

  So those are some micro techniques, a little bit more macro techniques is really start to think about anything that produces relaxation and joy in your life. Think about doing more of, okay? This doesn't have to be meditation. Some people like meditation. I, meditation, I find difficult personally. And so, and so I had to find different ways. For me, my meditation is I go running. I go running in the woods here in Virginia. I, I, I don't wear headphones. I don't time myself and I just think, and I just let my mind wander, right? That is recovery for me.

• 23:07Rich Diviney?

  Visualizing, visualizing is a hugely powerful technique because the brain, if you visualize correctly and deeply, the brain doesn't recognize the difference between real experience and visualized experience. So you can create the same neurotransmitters and hormones that you would in the real experience, just through visualization. So for example, I, you know, I have two boys. They're, they're teenagers now, but you know, when they're, when they're babies, I used to, you know, they used to nap on my chest, right? Such a wonderful feeling as a parent, just to have your, your kid sleeping on you. And what I would do sometimes is I would just visualize that. And, and as I visualize that deeply, those, all those feelings would come back.

• 23:46Rich Diviney?

  All those chemicals would be flooding me. That's recovery as well. So, so think about, uh, think about some breathing, think about vision, think about visualization. Um, and then you could do things like, I mean, yoga, meditation, the float. I'm a big fan of float tanks. I don't know if you've ever tried the.

• 24:03Rich Diviney?

  Love those things. Um, and so, and then of course, sleep is the kind of the coup de grace.

• 24:07Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, I want to go back through that. So guys, we've talked about float tanks on the show before, and I've recommended it to friends of mine that even are struggling with some depression and mental, even minor mental illness. So float tanks are big. For me, the things that, that you've listed, Rich, you know, for me is float tanks. I do. Open gaze is something that I, I did as a child rather naturally. And so it's something I go back to. And the visualization stuff that he's talking about, guys, can also, you can almost call it like awake dreaming. And, and it's something that I do. And one of the things is I'll repeat the same ones over and over and that had given me a previous good feeling. So for me, it's a very random moment in my life that when my daughter was a little girl, we're on a boat and she asked me, Daddy, can I drive the boat?

• 24:50Ed Mylett?

  And she sits in my lap and just the way her, just my little girl felt, you know, I had my arms around her. It was a little bit windy and cold and it was like one of the, my favorite moments of my life. Well, I've played that video thousands and thousands of times, guys. And so that when I get into an anxiety or stress state or fatigue state, I go right to that video and it takes me back to that moment. I do it, guys, silly things like before I do my labs, my blood draws with 10 vials of blood. I'll look away and I go back to the boat with Bella and I, because it's become reflexive. Those neurotransmitters, those synapses have been so connected now that I can go there anytime I want. These are real things that you can be doing to, to recover, uh, and also to perform at an optimal level. I love that you talk about this because it's very rare.

• 25:34Ed Mylett?

  I'm listening to you. I'm thinking, were you a little bit, pun intended, fish out of a water in the seals, the way you talk and think around the other guys? Not every dude I know is like you.

• 25:45Rich Diviney?

  I was admittedly, I was a little bit fish out of water. Yes.

• 25:47Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, you had to be, man. You had to be. Let's talk about stress and fear. You just, you're so eloquent on this topic. It's one of the things that holds most people back. It steals dreams. It steals careers. It steals performance. How do you deal with that? And how do you look at it?

• 26:04Rich Diviney?

  Well, yeah, so two, so two things. First, stress, we, first, let's recognize stress for what it is physiologically and, and evolutionarily, right? Stress is designed to get us moving, okay? Our body senses agitation and stress when we're supposed to be doing something. So if we're hungry, for example, we'll get, our body will get stressed, we'll feel agitation, that's, that's designed to make us go look for food. Um, if we're lonely or depressed, uh, or we feel agitated, uh, that's designed to go, uh, encourage us to get out and look for companionship, okay? Stress starts to tip into fear, uh, because fear is a little bit different, well, again, we'd have to, we'd have to get Huberman on the line to really give us the technical details here, but it's a little bit different in the sense that, um, you need two things

• 26:49Rich Diviney?

  to, for fear to start showing up in ourselves, and the two things are anxiety and uncertainty. When you combine anxiety and uncertainty, uh, you begin to feel fear. Um, the way I'll explain this is you can have one without the other and fear doesn't exist, right? So, so I can be anxious, or you can be anxious about a presentation we're gonna give next week to the boss, um, and we're anxious about it, we know when it's supposed to be, we know what we're presenting, the presentation's done, we're just anxious, okay? We're not afraid, we're just anxious, that's anxiety, um, without uncertainty. We can be uncertain and not be anxious, okay? Well, that's every kid on Christmas Eve, all right? So that, that, and that doesn't, that's not fearful. When you begin to combine the two, when you have anxious, anxiety and uncertainty, in

• 27:31Rich Diviney?

  other words, we don't know the outcome, we just don't know what's gonna happen, that's when fear starts to, to, to kind of show up, that's when the amygdala starts to get kicked in, um, and when that happens, our brains start moving into this fight or flight, uh, choice, okay? Um, if it kicks in really fast, then it's an autonomic response, and we've heard of fight or flight without thinking, right? You're either running away or running towards, but most of the time, a lot of us have a, have a conscious, um, sense and a kind of a, a way to think through this. The neat thing, though, about fear is that if you, you know, if you choose either one, so there's fight or flight, there was, there's the freeze response, but the freeze response really ultimately is just a, it's an oscillation between the two, it's a, it's kind of, I'm gonna, I'm trying to decide what to do.

• 28:17Rich Diviney?

  Either one that we choose is going to fire off a different circuit in the brain. If we choose to step into our fear, if we choose to fight, which is really step into our fear. It's not put up our dukes and punch, right? But it's step into our fear that flips the circuit in our brain and we get a dopamine reward for doing it. All right, which means it feels good, which means keep going. This is good. Now this again, this is by design. Human beings are exploratory endurance creatures. We were meant to go out and find new food, new shelter, new discoveries, right? And so we were meant to step into the unknown and do that. Our bodies were designed to encourage us to do that as we, as every step. That dopamine response, that dopamine hit is really powerful because it helps us say, hey, this is good. Keep going.

• 28:59Rich Diviney?

  People often make the mistake of thinking the dopamine comes at the end of the task, at the, when you get the outcome. When you finally get there, that's not true. We actually get it every step of the way. So what people have to recognize is, is as we feel this fear coming, we can, we can, first of all, we can try to

• 29:20Rich Diviney?

  stay out of the autonomic overload and stay in our kind of conscious thinking by just doing some, some internal techniques. So these same breathing techniques to get, to shift, shift us from sympathetic to parasympathetic work in taking us down a little bit off that autonomic and get us into a conscious thinking mode. Right? So, so now we're, we're able to look at what we're, what we fear and make a choice. Okay. So breathing helps, visualization helps, even open gaze helps, helps us buy down that anxiety. Yep. And then, and then buying down the uncertainty is a matter of, again, uncertain anxiety is more, I define it as internal. It's an internal response. Uncertainty is the external environment. In other words, things are happening we don't understand.

• 30:02Rich Diviney?

  One of the ways that you can help buy down external uncertainty is to ask yourself a very, very basic question. And that is what can I control right now? All right. This is actually what, what seals do habitually. You do it without thinking. In the SEAL teams, you call it control your three foot world. But it's basically. What can I, out of all of this, what can I control? And then you say, okay, I'm gonna pick that, I'm gonna move towards it. Well, guess what? As soon as you move towards it, you get a dopamine reward.

• 30:28Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 30:29Rich Diviney?

  And then you get to ask the question again. All right. This is exactly how we step through moment by moment, the real tough stuff. And it's neurologically backed, which is really cool.

• 30:39Ed Mylett?

  I love this. I think that the average person does the complete opposite of what you just finished with. Rather than find the thing they can control, they stack their anxiety and fear and their weakness by literally finding the very many things they cannot control and feeding that stimulus to themselves.

• 30:58Rich Diviney?

  Yes.

• 30:58Ed Mylett?

  Thereby feeling far more ill-prepared than they really are, incapable of changing their conditions, incapable of changing their circumstances. Guys, of a lot of things we're gonna cover on the show, that last piece, as I've really watched the last many years of the people that I coach and just in, just in general in life, that last thing is, what he's talking about what seals intuitively, finding the thing they can control and going there. Most people have the tendency to discard that and find the things they can't control. It rules you in your relationships, it rules you, it ruins you in business, ruins you with your money, ruins your happiness. And so, a huge thing that you just said right there.

• 31:40Ed Mylett?

  I'm gonna step out of the things just for a minute, just asking, so I'm thinking about this particular team you were a part of, not just the SEALs, but this very unique, very special group that you were a part of. Rhymes with picks. You, what's that operate like? I haven't asked the other guys this. So like, is everyone getting along? I mean, is there, is what are the dynamics like? Does that not matter? So if I'm a leader here and I'm building a company or a team, for example, you know, what are the interworkings? There's a lot of narcissism, you said, I assume egos, yet everyone's gotta come together to work together when there's a common mission. What are the dynamics like? Would it surprise us? Is it, is it just like any other team? Some are real unified, some are not?

• 32:23Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, I, I think it's more of the latter. Again, I, I wouldn't say there's the, there's ego, but I, there's, there's not a lot of narcissism. I think narcissism is kept in check. So here's a quick, the quick. Risk of narcissism, which I need to cover so people understand the the the risk of narcissism is that it's like a vampire staring in the staring in the mirror when it's inside you. You can't see it inside you. Okay, you can't see when you're when you're narcissistic. Only people on the outside can see that. So so what? Yeah. So when you when you have so that the teams you've generated this environment and this group of guys and of course, there's lots of SEALs. So you have your certain teams and your platoons and your troops and stuff. So there's there's smaller groups within the larger group. But when you have this group

• 33:07Rich Diviney?

  of guys who you trust so well and and count on you and you count on them, it's real, it's a very open and honest exchange, so that it keeps that narcissism in check, you know. So that's one thing that you you the trust helps you keep each other in check. But one thing that happens in the SEAL teams, I would I would say any any spec ops team or even any military team that actually goes out and and and, you know, does combat is that environment and the job keep you humble. Okay, you know, one of the things I loved about being a Navy SEAL was the ocean. I love water. I love being underwater. I love everything about water. However, the water is a very hostile environment to human beings. I mean, it's cold, the bone

• 33:49Rich Diviney?

  crushing pressures at depth. I mean, it'll it'll kill you like that if you're not thinking. I mean, you the the ocean, we always joke, the ocean will humble any man, any woman in a second. Right? That's a way to keep humble, you know, a bullet. I don't care. I don't care if you know, and this is something I used to talk to my guys about. I mean, it could be a nine year old Somali kid with an AK-47. One bullet can take out a 36 year old experienced Navy SEAL, top operator on the planet, one bullet, right? That's humbling, right? So so I think it behooves us as individuals and in any team to understand that environment

• 34:30Rich Diviney?

  can always have a say, and we have to say, by the way, if anybody, if any of us doubt this, just look at 2020. Right? 2020 humbled all of us, though. Who would have seen that coming? Right? So so I think that That the the teams now, of course, in any team, there are guys you like, there are guys you don't like. You know, you always, there's always a commonality, though, in the mission. There's always a commonality in the purpose. And there's a trust and respect for what people do and what you bring to the table. So I think that's really what congealed everything. And one of the things I miss, there's a camaraderie. You know, people ask me if I miss the job. I don't miss the job because obviously I'm 47 years old. You kind of age out of that stuff, you know? And I don't, I was tired of deploying away from my family.

• 35:13Rich Diviney?

  I miss the, I miss the times where we were like laughing hysterically, you know, together. Whether it was like in the middle of a combat zone or on a training mission or whatever. Those bonding moments is something very, very unique. That is probably one of the number one things I loved about those teams.

• 35:30Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, thank you for your service, by the way, and for doing that. We're all grateful for that, and that should be said. One thing I did here and there was open and honest exchange. I think one of the things that happens that erodes a culture in a company or in a family is not open and honest exchange. Not candor, there's whispering in the corner, there's conversations that aren't open.

• 35:50Rich Diviney?

  Yep.

• 35:51Ed Mylett?

  And people aren't exchanging honest opinions about where things stand and what needs to change. It's a huge thing. If you run a company or you're leading a family, you ought to ask yourself, how open and honest are the exchanges that we're having? Because I think that has an awful lot to do. Obviously, the mission, all these other things are critical as well. But I would say most people don't have as open or honest exchanges what you guys were used to dealing with out of necessity. Then, and I think some people don't understand how necessary it is in their business life.

• 36:20Rich Diviney?

  Add on one thing, Ed, because I think it's important, because this is going to surprise people when I tell, when I say this.

• 36:26Rich Diviney?

  Navy SEALs, with the way we do this is we're vulnerable. And people are like, what, wait, Navy SEALs vulnerable? But the way the SEAL teams would define vulnerability is I'm open and honest about my strengths and my weaknesses. So that you know exactly when you can lean on me and you know exactly when I'm going to be leaning on you. Okay, I mean, it was so apparent at times, right? You'd, and so there's a concept I talk about in the book called, it's kind of throws the whole task organization of a team on its head. And it's called dynamic subordination. This is a concept that says, hey, Every high performing team in a dynamics of ordination environment understands that any problem or challenge can come from any direction at any moment, right?

• 37:08Rich Diviney?

  And whenever it does, the person who is the closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up and lead and everybody follows, right? And we just, and that shifts like a flock of birds. But so often, it was like, on a team, it's like if a guy stepped into an environment or a situation where if he was like, oh wait, I can't have, he'd be like, I can't handle this, who's up, right? And the person who was up, came up, right? Vulnerability was on demand, right? And that's how you have to be. So that's why ego goes away, right? I'm only, I'm confident, but not egotistical, right? And I'm confident in my abilities and I'm confident in my inabilities, so that I can share that with you and dynamically subordinates in these environments.

• 37:48Ed Mylett?

  Dynamically subordinate, what an ironic distinction, that one of the keys to seals cooperating together is vulnerability with all these badasses, but I certainly understand it now that you said it. One more thing I want to ask you, by the way, I just can't get over that we've gone almost 40 minutes now, I feel like we've gone 15 minutes. And thank you for being so willing, you know, sometimes someone's on a show like, well, you gotta get the book, you gotta get the book. The more you share, the more people want the book. And there's, there's really one question left and then we'll finish with something, because I don't think enough people do it and you talk about it in the book. I think the quality of our life and our performance is often linked to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. And a lot of times, the repetitive questions you ask yourself were installed in the software

• 38:30Ed Mylett?

  program of your brain by your parents when you were very young, or by some traumatic event in your life. And it's causing you to ask questions potentially, some of which you may not even be conscious of, that don't serve you. So you talk in the book about this as an optimal performance and a recovery technique too. So talk to a little bit about quality questions that we ask ourselves, or each other.

• 38:51Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, I mean, I say that, I say that almost verbatim, because I believe it so much. What everybody has to understand is our brains are question answering machines. That's how our brains make sense of the world, okay? It's constantly, it's usually unconscious, constantly asking questions about our environment, bouncing it off our hippocampus, seeing if we've seen it before, can we relate it to something? That's what our brains do. When we lodge a question consciously into our frontal lobe, our brain has no choice but to begin to answer it. So I do this experiment with classes I teach sometimes. I say, okay, take out a piece of paper, write down this question. How could I double my income in the next six months? I say, you have 30 seconds. Write down as anything that pops into your head, write it down. Right. And I give them 30 seconds. Usually, everybody will come up with two, three, four, or five answers. Okay. And I say, okay.

• 39:36Rich Diviney?

  The point of this is not to get your answers, although I'd love to hear your ideas. But the point of this is not to get your answers. The point of this is to explain that anytime you lodge a question, any question into your frontal lobe, your brain's going to begin to answer it. So like you said, oftentimes, we unconsciously ask the wrong questions. We say, why am I so bad at this? Why does this always happen to me? What about this sucks, right? This is what you're talking about. You're focusing on what you can't control. If we shift that, if we consciously shift that and say, how can I grow from this? What are some of the things I learned? One of the things I fall back is what can I control now? Our brains will answer those questions too. And we will begin to come up with better answers and solutions faster.

• 40:21Rich Diviney?

  This is what I think high performers do habitually because they don't focus on those things that are disempowering and don't mean anything in their progression. Take conscious control. And I would say this, people always ask me, hey, can you, could you give me a list of questions, right? It's obviously, as you know, it's a subjective task. But I'd say if you are absent anything, okay? And you can't think of any question, here's the question you should ask. What's the better question right now? Ask that question and you will come up with questions.

• 40:49Ed Mylett?

  I love that. And by the way, to your point, your brain is going to answer whatever question you ask it. And so ask the quality. I love that, by the way. Ask, because we do say it very similarly, but I've never said it that way before. And I've never really thought about it that way. Your brain's going to go to work on answering this question. So you better control what it is.

• 41:06Rich Diviney?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 41:07Ed Mylett?

  If you don't know what the question is, ask yourself what the better question should be. That is so freaking good. All right, last thing, man. I've enjoyed this so much. We're going to do it again. And just because there's literally not been a wasted second of this conversation. Like I said that in the beginning, it would be a thick interview, but I don't know that I knew it would be this thick. And so thank you in advance. Everybody follow Rich, by the way, on Instagram. Go get, uh, please, by the way, go get the attributes. Um, what do you say, it's 25 unique drivers of optimal performance.

• 41:38Rich Diviney?

  25 hidden drivers. Yeah, because, because they're not visible, but, but they're all in us. Yeah.

• 41:44Ed Mylett?

  Well, guys, get the book too. And, um, but you talk about milestones. A lot of achievers listen to my show. Not everybody that does, but I think everyone on the show wants to be an achiever. And I robbed myself most of my life from even acknowledging milestones.

• 42:01Ed Mylett?

  So I know I'm robbing myself of dopamine. I'm robbing myself of all kinds of different things. But I was sort of surprised, just from a guy that's been in your background, that they'd be one of the things you'd mention, you know, that is a really important criteria. And it seems like a small thing. You go, wow, of all the things in the book, you want to finish with milestones. I just kind of know my audience a little bit. And I think when your reticular activating system goes to see milestones and look for them, you probably have more of them than you realize.

• 42:28Rich Diviney?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Ed Mylett?

  And, and that's the thing. I think some of us are like, the only milestone is when I hit my big goal. The only milestone is when I, you know, crush the million dollar income. There's lots of other milestones that you have at any given day that I think just we're oblivious to, and then we're not stacking them. So would you speak to that last?

• 42:44Rich Diviney?

  Yeah. Well, I think, first of all, like you said, uh, to recognize milestones gives us an automatic physiological reward. So why not take it, right? Why not, why not capitalize on that physiology? Um, the other thing I think milestones does, especially in, in the achievement of longer term goals, uh, is that it allows you to be flexible. Okay? So, so I always say kind of, uh, be, be resolute in the outcome you're looking for, but be adaptable and flexible in the pathway you get to get there. Right? If you, as you're going through the process of achieving a goal, it's going to be uncertain. It's going to be unknown. And so rock climbers have a lot to teach us about this, right? Because a rock climber looks at the face of a, of a cliff that he or she wants to climb and says, okay, I, the top is the outcome, right? But, but no rock climber is going to say at

• 43:29Rich Diviney?

  the bottom, I'm going to do that, that, that, that, that, that. All, they're going to start climbing, right? And they're going to adjust as they go. And they're going to recognize the knot holes and the, and the, the, the footholds that they need to get. And oh, by the way, sometimes the foothold, the best foothold that they need is actually going to be down, right? Which means sometimes when we're looking to achieve our goals, it's going to feel like we might be moving away from them because we're just getting another, we're just going to get getting to a better knot hole. All right. So, so, um, But that's a milestone. We have to, we have to figure out these, every knot hole that you make, whether it's up, down, sideways, or whatever, is a milestone that should be celebrated because what it does it do? It gives you a different view, gives you a different view of the, of the rock of that, the face of that rock and gives you a different view of the potential knot holes

• 44:13Rich Diviney?

  and, and footholds. And I'm getting terminology wrong because I'm not a climber, but you get it.

• 44:18Ed Mylett?

  Very good, brother. Wow. That's the perfect analogy. And I have permission to steal that from you when I speak, right?

• 44:24Rich Diviney?

  Sure, absolutely, absolutely.

• 44:25Ed Mylett?

  That was so good. I'm stealing most of what we did today. I'll try to credit you sometimes. I enjoyed this thoroughly. Guys, you've, you cannot have listened to something that had more content than you did today. So Rich Devini, thank you. Everybody in the Max Out universe, please share this program. I cannot even imagine the multitude of applications for the content we covered today, for leaders, for family members, for people that want to perform at an optimal level, people looking for more happiness, people looking for more control in their life, like people looking for more mental health, mental wellbeing, the applications and who you could share this with is so vast. And that's thanks to Rich Devini. So thank you today, brother. Everybody else, God bless you and max out.