The Sales Evangelist
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Continuing with our conversation about elite performances. The other day, we had Meredith on a podcast. Today, we're talking with Mark Devine. And the piece that Mark brings is not about the physicalness of what we want to do to physically look good and to perform well. It starts with some mental components. And some of these mental components go to some basic things that none of us consider, that all of us, every last one of us, do on a day-to-day basis. And if we master these little things, Mark believes you're going to be a top performer. Check it out and listen why.
Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, please subscribe. And if you've been listening for a minute, but I haven't done so, please subscribe. I want you to take that link. I want you to go tell somebody else about it and tell them that you found the Sales Evangelist Podcast and that it's been such a great help to you. I know many of you follow me on LinkedIn, and I appreciate that. Please go ahead and do so. And I'm going to be continuing to do some shout outs to some of you as you connect with me, send me some connection requests, or start following me. I appreciate that. I'm going to do that. I want you to know that I'm out here listening to you. As always, this show is designed to be to help you not only build pipeline, but to accelerate deals through the pipeline.
And today, we're going to be talking about something that not only helped you to do both of these. Now, this ties back not only to this idea of only a physical rejuvenation, but the idea of resiliency. And today, Mark Divine, I want to just tell you a little bit about him. He's a former, he's not a former, you, once you're a SEAL, you're always a SEAL, right? He is a Navy SEAL. He's trained hundreds of thousands of Navy SEALs. And some of the things that Mark has seen is that there's patterns. Some of the ones that are, have built strong resilience and was able to be elite, did certain things that were different. And he points out three things today. One, it's around your body. Two, the mindset. And then three, adaptability. I won't give you any more details on all of that, but listen to what he says.
When it comes to the very first one, you're not going to believe how you can help your body by doing something that we all do on a day to day basis. Let's dive in and listen to this.
Mark, welcome to the show.
Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks.
Really looking forward to this conversation.
Yeah, likewise.
I bragged about you a little bit in the teaser and I gave a little bit about your bio, a little bit of introduction to who you are and everyone is so excited to learn from you now. But there's one of the things that we had discussed is how important it is to, you know, when it comes to sales, building resilience is so important now. Resilience in our mind and our body and so forth. Because we're getting pulled in six million direction and as salespeople, we tend to just go at it hard 100% and then we end up falling apart, getting burned out and so forth.
Right.
Why are you so passionate about this topic when it comes to this, you know, the physically and mentally resilient?
Well, you know, I was in, I was a SEAL for 20 years and a good part of that time, I was training new SEALs, right? Training, I guess you'd call them recruits, people who wanted to be SEALs. And if there's any environment or any system or any place that you need to develop resilience, it's Navy SEAL training, right? And so when you think about the salespeople are kind of like the warriors of an organization. And so they may not have the physical strength and durability of a Navy SEAL, but you gotta have the similar mindset because you're out there, you're on the edge, you're the operator that's out there pushing hard every day, like you said. And so with the SEAL candidates, the way we train them is completely applicable to a salesperson, except we're not trying to make you into a hardcore Navy SEAL. We're trying to make you resilient.
And resilient essentially is just the ability to have sustainable, the highly positive and motivated output over long periods of time. And the way you do that is not just harder and harder and harder, but to find a true balance between the young and the young, between effort and recovery. And the first step, by the way, even for salespeople is to get your body freaking very, as healthy as possible, right? For your body type, your age, you know, your conditions. Cause a healthy body is essentially the foundation for any type of resilient mind.
So go deeper. So we'll go into that right now and then, you know, optimizing your body for mental resilience. You talk about, how do we do that though? How do I start getting, you know, physically by body and mind, my body ready before I get to my mind?
It's interesting. Like, most people would say, "Well, you know, you've got to eat better, and you've got to sleep better, and you've got to move your body." And that's absolutely true.
Sure.
Eat, sleep, and move. You don't need elaborate protocols for eating, sleeping, and moving. You just need to eat better and eat less, you need to sleep more, and you need to move your body every day. And I don't mean like, walk into the office or the car. You need to exercise and move. But what I always do is start with breathing. You say the very first thing to put yourself on a path to optimal health, physically and mentally, is to start a daily practice of breathing. And I introduced a practice called box breathing back in 2006, and I used it to train Navy SEALs. And just this practice of box breathing, which is nostril breathing, inhaling through the nose, five-count inhale, five-count exhale, and then you hold the breath after the inhale and the exhale for five counts. So it's, you know, it's a box pattern, right? Or square?
Yeah.
That is essentially 20 seconds for each breath cycle, which means you're breathing only three times per minute. And you're breathing, like I said, through your nostrils, your mouth is closed, and you're getting a full lung capacity, and you're using your diaphragm and your muscles of your belly and your chest to get that breath in and all the way out. By doing this, so many incredible benefits done. I'll go through them real quick.
Interesting. You got me at hello on this one.
Yeah, so, I mean, it's extraordinary. And they're just starting to study the positive benefits of a practice like this. First off, nostril breathing is, and taking that lung, that breath, deep down into your, through your diaphragm, with your diaphragm into your lungs, massages the vagus nerve. And by massaging the vagus nerve, you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest and digest. Here in the West, most people breathe 16 to 20 times per minute, most of the time through their mouths. When you breathe through your mouth in that rapid, shallow manner, you do not activate the parasympathetic nervous system. You're actually stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight. And so you end up, most people in this culture, especially fast-paced
salespeople, are in a state of hyperarousal, and yet they're unaware of it because it becomes the new normal. So this box breathing practice will then- Get you back into homeostatic balance, activate or reactivate your trophied parasympathetic nervous system activation channel and bleed off all that excess stress and get you in a state where every day, if you got up and did 20 minutes of this box breathing practice every morning, you're basically prepared to win the day in a state of calm, alert readiness without the stress. And you can also use it during the day to anytime you get triggered, or you've got, you've got an important sales call or meeting, you just do a few rounds of box breathing prior to, and you go in calm and alert.
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So how, you're saying do this at a wake up time period?
Yeah, so.
And then throughout the day at different times?
It's gotta be done as a practice, right? So my recommendation and prescription for my clients is first thing, when you wake up, use restroom, drink a fresh tall glass of water. You need to get hydrated as soon as you wake up, and then go back to your bed or go to, you know, if you've got a chair that you like to sit on, just sit and use this as your meditation practice. 20 minutes, eyes closed. Inhale five count, hold your breath for a five count, exhale five count, hold your breath for a five count. Three breaths, three rounds per minute. Do 20 minutes or you can do, you can do rounds. You can count maybe 10 rounds or 20 rounds. If the five count is too much for you, start with four, that's fine. Ultimately, we want to get to the five count and here's why.
When you practice this every day, it takes about, depending on the individual, six months to a year of practice. To where then you've rewired your automatic breathing process so that during the day, instead of breathing that 16 to 20 times per minute with your, through your mouth. You're naturally breathing nostrally through your nose, five count in, five count out, which is six breaths per minute. And research just came in like two years ago that that is the, actually the optimal breathing pattern for ideal health and longevity. I have seen clients literally lose weight simply through this box breathing practice.
Just breathing better.
Just breathing. Yeah. Cause you actually exhale, you slow everything down. This is part of the recovery. See. Effort and recovery don't have to be equal time. What I mean by that is you can have eight hours of sustained effort. And as long as you have 40 minutes of dedicated recovery to balance it out, you're going to be awesome, right? You're going to be, you're going to be great. You don't need eight hours of recovery. And box breathing is the foundation. Now here's what happens because your body's coming back into balance. You're bleeding off all this stress. Your mind is getting clear. You're starting to think better. You're starting to feel better. You've got more energy because you're, you're stimulating your energy body. You're bringing more energy, oxygen, life force in. Then suddenly you start sleeping better. And you're drawn toward eating healthier food and eating less food. By the way, a lot of times we overeat.
Simply because our body is out of balance and those cravings kick in or your moods are all out of whack. Your biome starts to come back into balance, which affects your mood and your diet and your attitude. And then you're going to have more energy to start moving the body and you can really kind of pick up your exercise routine from there. So I think box breathing is probably the, the master key to physical and mental stability and resilience.
You know, you never think about this when you start going into the mindset and when you start talking about a body, you must think about this idea of breathing, like something so basic. Like, the first part that you glossed over is, again, where everybody spend all the time. I mean, you gotta eat, you gotta work out a lot, you gotta, you know, do all of this stuff, buy this expensive protein shake and do all of these other things. But from what you say, you know, obviously you need to be moving, need to get sleep and you need to, you know, do some of those basic things. But the emphasis is on a fundamental piece that we all overlook and which is fascinating.
Right. And the cool thing is that practice doesn't just bring enormous benefits to your body, but your mind. So you're beginning the training of your mind. And I was saying, if you're not training your mind, the world's training it for you and the results will speak for itself. Especially, sales professionals have to be very positive. They can't fake it.
Right? That's why, you know, everyone in your industry is so into personal development and Tony Robbins and you've got to actually be positive and motivated. You can't fake it because customers will know that right away. So the breathing practice helps you train the monkey mind because it doubles as an attention control and concentration practice. So for that 10 or 20 minutes that you're doing it in the morning, and ideally you'd do 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, like bookends for your day. So you're getting the arousal control and stress management benefits that I've talked about. But you're also training your mind to be less distractible. That's we call that attention control, controlling your attention, because now you're just following that one thing.
You're just doing the box breathing and you're watching it closely and you're paying attention to it. And then you're noticing when your mind wanders and you bring it back. That sounds a lot like mindfulness practice, right? Or concentration training, traditional Zen. So you're deepening your powers of concentration, you're becoming less distractible. And all of this is training your mind to be stronger, to make better decisions, to have more clarity and more focus.
Well, let me understand number two now, going into the mind. So training the mind, you talked about something about that this has to be a lifetime practice. It can't be something that happens one time, but I'm breathing better now. Help me get a better understanding about the mind.
Sure. Well, I've already, I already delved into that. Yeah, I know. So, most people think, don't even think about training the mind. They think the mind is just who you are, right? But it's not. It's a tool. And the tool obviously is affected by the brain. That's why the brain, which is part of your body, has to be very healthy. If you don't have a healthy body, you don't have a healthy brain. If you don't have a healthy brain, you're not going to be thinking clearly. So that's why it's all built on this box breathing practice and having a healthy body. So you're already starting to train the mind there. Yeah. So, training the mind mostly think, well, I go to school or I go to, I went to sales training, right? Or I do this certification here, or I do that, you know, event over there. And they're really just packing some more content in their head. And they're not actually doing any training. So I'm talking about not training to learn more things,
but to literally transform how your mind works. Of course, I learned this before my SEAL training through concentration training in Zen. But in the SEAL training, the SEALs are all about training the mind to be able to take in more information, to be able to see things that other people don't see, to be able to be really calm and clear in the most chaotic and dangerous environments, and to be incredibly creative, right? So the training to mind is a practice, right? It can't be done episodically. It's not going to be done at what we call horizontally by just trying to pack more information in, right? This is like the first level of learning is just downloading content. And most people think they're done there, but then they don't really learn anything and they don't change themselves.
So, training the mind is a daily practice, is a practice of total transformation for how the mind works. Box breathing is your first tool, right? Like I said, because first you're getting the arousal control benefit. So you're calm and alert. And then with that calm and alert kind of posture, mental posture, then you're training your mind to be less distractible through attention control and to have more powers of concentration, literally more penetrating power of concentration, right? You can focus more, you can do more, you can get more done without fatigue. And then what the training will go into is what we'll call witnessing. So witnessing is essentially developing the capacity to be separate from your thoughts and emotions, to literally see them as they arise and to make
Real time choices about whether that thought or emotion is going to be supportive and useful, or whether it's just garbage and you should let it go. And you'll find when you, when you hit this stage of your training that most, right? Like 70 or 80% of thoughts that come to you or emotions are, are kind of garbage and they need to go. So you just let them go. But it shares your enormous control over your life, creative control.
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One of my friends shared that with me, he shared something similar to that where you're saying the, there was a study done and I'm like, who's counting them, but majority of the thoughts that we have on a day-to-day basis, like you said, you call it garbage or not necessarily good. He said they were negative thoughts, like things that we're thinking about ourself, like I don't look good, or my, you know, I don't stand right, or whatever, like things that we're diminishing ourself about. And like, when you said that number, I was like, 80%? Like, that's crazy.
You have, you know, the average person has between 60,000 and 100,000 thoughts every day, and 80% of them are the same thoughts that they had yesterday, because the thinking mind works based on memory retrieval. So it's either pulling something from memory that gets triggered, either an emotion triggers it, or an incident triggers it, or a person triggers it, and then suddenly, you know, what was there yesterday pops back into your mind, and then you start ruminating on what was there yesterday, which contaminates the present moment and makes it almost guaranteed that the future is going to look exactly like the past. So people get just stuck, repeating the same patterns over and over. So we've got to get out of that brain living only on memory, you know, kind of rut. That's called the default mode network.
And the way to do that is through this meditative practice built on box breathing, where you develop the capacity, and this takes, again, these are not quick fixes, that's why it has to be a daily practice, but it's still done in that same 20-minute period. That 20-minute period I talked about in the morning and evening, is training both the body and the mind, using the box breathing as the vehicle for getting to this place that I'm talking about right now, where you're able to witness your thoughts and emotions in real time. And then you have the creative capacity to curate them and say, no, not that, how about this instead? And one of the, and you nailed it, one of the most powerful things you can notice right away, and this is practically for everybody, because it's just, it's trained in us from a
very young age, is that the negative programming, right? It can be subtle, you find it in sarcasm, in humor. Anytime you turn on the TV, you're going to have negative programming, right? And then a lot of times it comes wrapped in a Nice rapper, the way different races are treated, you know, the way people talk to each other, the violence. If you turn in the news, forget it, you're just getting a massive dump of negativity, right? So you gotta, you start to see all that as input and input is training. So you start turning that off. Like I bet you a ton of sales professionals listen to this and figure this out a long ago, but you cannot watch network news or listen to the news or consume the news and have a good day. You know, you can't be positive because it's infecting you. So you turn
all that stuff off. You make sure that the inputs are only positive. And then you look at your own quality of your own inner dialogue and you make sure that your inner dialogue is positive. Now you say, well, what if, you know, I can't control the negative stuff. You don't have to control it and you don't want to fight it. What you want to do is just develop the skill to override it with positive internal dialogue, positive self-talk and even positive external talk, and also a positive mantra that you can just play in the background when you're not, you know, if you're just driving your car. You know, when I was at SEAL training, anytime I was running or swimming, my mantra was, I'm feeling good. I'm looking good. I ought to be in Hollywood. I'm feeling good. I'm looking good. And it made me, it made me positive, right? Cause I, I had a really
negative upbringing, meaning my, my father was kind of negative person, lot of sarcasm and anger and rage. And, you know, I had to train that out of me. And when you, when you grow up like that, you have to like fake it till you make it. You know, you just keep doing, keep saying positive things to yourself until eventually you start believing it. And because you're feeding, where, where attention goes and energy flows, that grows. So because your attention is going to positive self-talk, over time, that positive self-talk develops a positive self-image and you, then you start believing it. And the negative stuff dries up and blows away. So.
You know, yeah. And I think this all, this, this is, we can go on for days on all of this here, but I want to tie that back into the adaptability concept. I know you started doing that a little bit, but you have a concept that you teach us, talk about O O D A loop. Can you tie that into? How now that I have optimized my body.
Let me, yeah, let me tie this into a bow. Resiliency, like I said, is the ability to have sustained positive motivation over long periods of times to include through all the challenges that you're going to face. And there's going to be many. So when you get a challenge, when you get knocked down, you don't look at it as a failure. You don't even look at it as a disruption or a setback. You just get back up and say, that was really interesting. What did I learn? Right in the seals, we said failure is not an option. It wasn't because we couldn't fail. We just took the word out of our lexicon. And so there was just new ways to learn things, how to do things. Some were better than other. And one of the things we learned is that when you can move faster, become more adaptable and agile,
then you always got better results because doubt is eliminated through action. And it's through action that you activate what we call the OODA loop, which was developed by a guy named Colonel John Boyd in the Air Force. And he developed it for aerial combat. The OODA stands for you observe, you orient yourself to what you observe. Based upon what you see in your new orientation, you make a decision and that decision is going to be, think about this in aerial combat. You might just flick your, you know, your joystick to the right to just slightly change the attitude of your aircraft in relation to your enemy. Right? It's not like you're deciding on an entire plan of attack. In that moment, you're taking the smallest action that then you take that action. So you decide on the smallest action that's going to lead to positive results.
You take that action and then you immediately observe. How does that affect the situation with my enemy or my, you know, my situation, my client? And then you orient yourself to that. And then you make the, you know, decide what the next smallest action is. And then you act on that. So by embracing this idea and starting to practice it, you want to basically take your OODA loop and make it very, very fast. Right? And so if you can move much faster than your competition, because your OODA loop is much tighter, then you're going to win, you're going to, and you're going to win much more effortlessly because you're always taking the time to pause, breathe, observe what's happening, orient yourself to the new reality, make that decision, which is the.
Smallest good decision you can make, act on it and then immediately pause, orient and observe again. So you're doing this effort surrender, effort surrender, and you're doing it really fast and your body is staying nice and calm. Your mind is calm. And if you put the, you know, all these principles together, like your body is healthy and resilient because your daily box breathing practice, which is then leading you to sleep better, eat better and move better. While simultaneously, you're training your mind to be less distractible. You've cut out all the negative influences, network news, negative people. And then you've learned to train your mind to be creative instead of reactive, to be positive instead of negative. And then you put all of that mind,
body, positive momentum, resilient energy toward being seriously agile and adaptable with the OODA loop.
Oh, man.
It's a powerful combination.
And the great thing about this is not like you're telling us something that's going to take like, you know, six thousand, you know, all of our day.
Ten thousand hours of work.
Yeah, this is just little things that you could do over and over.
It's just a daily practice. Everything I've just talked about, you can build into your 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening. The difference being the OODA loop really is something you want to bring into your, you know, the basically whatever the battle rhythm is for a sales professional, right? Planning your day, making outbound calls, sales meetings. You want to deploy the OODA loop, observe what's happening, orient yourself to it, make the smallest best decision you can, act on it. And just try to continue to practice that and you'll find that your speed of decisions go up and the quality of your decisions goes up.
Love it. I want to respect your time. Thanks, Mark, for coming on the show today. If folks want to get in touch with you, want to learn from you to get a better understanding how they can help themselves or their team, what's the best way they can go about doing so?
I appreciate that. So markdivine.com, D I V I N E dot com is my personal website. You can send an email to me at [email protected]. And I've got coaching, all my books are there, my podcast, Mark Divine Show. The training I'm talking about, you can access it through that website, but we call it unbeatable mind and unbeatablemind.com is where we offer the mental toughness coach certification and some incredible training in a community around this type of work.
I love it. Yeah, we're going to put this in our show notes. It's very valuable. Mark, thanks for taking the time to come on the show today.
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it very much.
We are.
That was Mark Divine, and that stuff was good. I'm telling you, if you haven't done so already, connect with Mark, tell him you found him here on the Sales Evangelist Podcast, and I would be so excited. I know he would be so excited. We're all going to be excited, because the things that Mark shared, he brought are amazing insights, and the breathing, I'm telling you, I need to practice that. You saw me in the episode practicing it, right? But it takes a habit, but it's a consistency day in, day out. But all of this gives you mastery of your body, and also gives you this adaptability and this resiliency that we all need, especially in this career that we call, this beloved career called sales. Listen, I want you to thrive. I absolutely want you to succeed. I want you to raise your level of thinking, but most importantly, I want you to go out,
dominate, and do big things. Take this episode link, share it with one other person, tag me in it on LinkedIn. See you on the next one.
The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSC Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is Dusan Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristy Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.
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