Former Navy SEAL (Mark Divine) | How to Build an Elite Team with Average People and Importance of Mental Preparation

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
On today’s show, the former Navy seal and current business consultant and bestselling author Mark divine shares with you how to build an elite team without having elite players to start with, how to learn to become an action oriented person have learned to become a more self-disciplined person. My action kills doubt how he went from being a certified public accountant to becoming a Navy seal and a leadership expert and the importance of mentally preparing to face each and every day. If you are looking for practical tips, strategies, and techniques to win the mental battle you need to be a successful entrepreneur each and every day, then this is the show for you. If you’re trying to learn how to overcome fear, this is the show for you. If you want to become a more self-disciplined person that this is the show for you.

Speaker 2:
Some shows don’t need a celebrity in a writer to introduce a show, but this show dies to may eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 Moke tie, million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the thrive time show

Speaker 3:
boy.

Speaker 4:
Yes, yes, yes, yes, five nation. As you know, I am passionate about the men and women

Speaker 3:
serve our great country who create freedom because without you folks out there, uh, my first business DJ connection.com, I was a disc jockey, turns out to meet. It’s hard to be a disc jockey in North Korea. It turns out it’s hard to be a disc jockey who makes millions of dollars in the Soviet union. It turns out it’s hard to have a successful business when you’re worried about your safety. So on today’s show we have a man who wants served as a Navy seal. And so if you’re listening right now in your vehicle, I think a little clapping is an order there. Mike. Divine, welcome out of the thrive time show, sir. How are you?

Mark Divine:
Yeah, man, I’m doing well. Thanks so much to have me. I appreciate that man.

Speaker 3:
Um, I, I don’t know if you remember that time when you were in the seals, but was it hard?

Mark Divine:
Uh, you know, there, there were times that were really, really challenging, but overall it was, um, you know, an incredible, incredible time.

Speaker 3:
How, how old were you when you figured out that you wanted to be a seal? Like how old were you?

Mark Divine:
You know, I was a little bit of a late bloomer. I, um, didn’t even know about the seals until my early twenties. And I went through seal training, uh, 25 I turned 26 in field training. Now you gotta remember, you know, I, I was, this is 1980s and there wasn’t a whole lot of information. The seals truly were, you know, a secret organization back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. They didn’t really start opening up with the internet, that kind of crack them wide open network TV, but there wasn’t any shows. There are only a couple of books written by a couple of Vietnam bets. And so I didn’t really know about the fields and, um, you know, I had to kind of tear it out myself.

Speaker 3:
So you did, did you get, did you get recruited? Did you hear about it through a friend or did you remember the moment you thought, you know what, I want to become a seal?

Mark Divine:
Well, part of my story that I, um, you know, that I, that I write about actually in my, in this book I tell a little bit in the book that I just released called staring on the wall was that I was, um, my first career was in business. I was a certified public accountant and um, I was, I was hired to out of a small liberal arts school from Colgate university. I’m from upstate New York and I was an athlete and you know, I was hired at Colgate and this basically all swimming and triathlons and a little bit of academics and beer and women kind of thrown in, not all in that order necessarily. And then I got hired to go to NYU business school and become a certified public accountant by Coopers and Lybrand, which is not PricewaterhouseCoopers. So all of this, you know, it was in my college years and then in my first four years in the workforce there was, you know, it was all business for me and I came from a business family from upstate New York and they kind of, they thought this was just the best thing since sliced bread, but I was going to get an MBA from a top business school.

Mark Divine:
I was going to become a certified public cow and get some great work experience. Then I could come home and assume the mantle at the family business. That was my programming and what disruptive my programming and really got me thinking a different way and totally changed the paradigm, changed everything for me was then meditation. So I know it’s like it’s, it’s an unusual story, but what happened is I started in martial arts program shortly after going down to New York and it turns out that the martial arts master was also Zen master and he is actually preference was to teach Zen through through his martial arts. But he had a small cadre of us who really took to the Zen. And so we trained ’em every day for 20 minutes. We committed to 20 minutes every day, every morning. And then we did long hour long fits on Thursday nights.

Mark Divine:
And then we would go to the Zen mountain monastery in Woodstock, New York for long weekend fit with the Zen monks. And um, you know, we didn’t really know what was going to happen, right. We were just exploring. And it was a pretty cool thing for me as a warrior to be thinking I’m going to, I’m going to be like Zen master, you know, who’s sitting on his, Benjamin can explode into action like a samurai. And what happened to me was that it literally changed the way my brain worked. I started to have a lot more intuition, a lot more insight and a lot more, um, you know, I just slowed down a bit and I began to ask better questions and that’s when I started to get this sensation and this feeling and kind of this knowing this that you could say was coming from my, you know, maybe my spiritual center or whatever you want to call that, that basically said, Mark, you’re your misfit as a CPA.

Mark Divine:
You’re meant to be a warrior. You know, you need to go off and do warrior warrior early things and lead people in, you know, those gnarly situations in a suit and tie is not your, it’s not your world. And it wasn’t until that, until I started to get that, um, those insights, which happened literally after about a year and a half to two years of meditating that I learned that the seals, you know, when I was ready, they kind of revealed themselves to me. So no, that was a long winded answer way of saying I was not recruited. I literally discovered it or uncovered it through this process.

Speaker 3:
What was the most challenging? First thing that you ran into in the seals. What was like the one thing you ran into right away where you’re like, Oh, Oh, I’m not, maybe maybe I missed my calling, maybe I should go back and be a CVS, a CPA.

Mark Divine:
That’s funny. Ironically, I, I had a blast it field training. I hear a lot of guys saying that I went to feel class one seven zero, but we called buds basic underwater demolition. She’ll training 185 hardcore guys. Um, they didn’t let any women in back then, but they’ve since opened it up to women. So no, none have, um, completed the training yet. So, but then it was all men and um, you know, pretty hardcore. And so I showed up at 185. We graduated in 19 guys and I was the honor man or number one graduate in my class. Wow. And yes, I was physically fit for sure. You know, I did what I needed to do to be prepared physically, but I’m 100% convinced that it was the Zen training that made field training. Um, really easy and fun for me. I’m not saying it was, let me just say with easy compared to the challenge a lot of other peers were having, so I didn’t have one of those awesome moments or like I don’t think, you know, I’m in the right place.

Mark Divine:
I want to go back to field training. In fact, the very first day of training, you know, very first day, you know, we had like this four hour colossal beat down and this was on the beaches of Cornetto in San Diego and just total insanity, chaos. All the instructors are just really trying to get under everyone’s skin to see how many people they can get get to quit on the first evolution of the first day. And there was this guy that I had been training with for about six months for that, you know, four plus change at um, officer candidate school in preparation to go and become an officer and then to go to buzz after that. And this guy, like literally on a warm day, he could run circles around me and he could do more pushups, more sit-ups. The only thing I can really beat him in was a swim, cause I was a competitive swimmer.

Mark Divine:
And on this very first evolution, I can remember getting halfway through it and looking up and down the beach and the sun is out and it’s like, here I am in San Diego, California on the beach and I’m literally getting paid to work out. And I’ve got all these really ridiculously funny, this is my thinking, right? These ridiculously funny seal instructors who are all now my idols around me, you know, beat me up and I’m just absolutely having a ball. And at the same time people are quitting like flies. And my buddy, this guy bill that I had been training with for six months and he was like been wanting to be a field for years. As soon as you know, the instructor said, okay, class, hit the surf again. This was like the 20th time we’d been in and out of that cold ocean, he turns and hightails it toward the bell, which is basically, you know, if you want to quit, you go to ring the bell, ring the bell and he hightails it.

Mark Divine:
Yeah, you ring the bell and he’s, he’s heading toward this bell and I turn and I’m like, yeah, come back. And I started running after him and one of the monster instructors just literally put his body between me and bill and look to me in the eyes and Mark, this one’s on him, you get back to training. So I turned around and went back and training and I heard that bell ring a few moments later. And I remember that struck me. I was like, wow, like this is not about physics. This is like this field training has nothing to do with the physical once you get here. That’s just a prerequisite. It’s all about the mental and the emotional. And in this case it wasn’t even mental, as cheery, emotional. Like he literally forgot why he was there, what this pain was about. And he had an emotional reaction.

Mark Divine:
And in that moment he was like, I’m done. I quit. No. And I saw that time and again in that training and throughout the year, it’s like, you know, there’s a reason that 85% of people fail and it’s not the physical, it’s because there’s this mental and emotional pattern that they have that when the instructors or when the moment finds you and your exposes that weakness underneath, then you know, the reaction is to get to cower, is to run away from that. And so they quit or they get injured and we call it a Quinn injury. A lot of the injuries are actually quits that are disguised injuries. It’s really interesting actually.

Speaker 3:
I want somebody to, uh, we have so much ground you cover and I want to go back, kind of unpack some stuff. You said that these people are quit injury, Quinn, jury, um, you said what percentage of people quit seals?

Mark Divine:
85%. Don’t make it through training from the start a budge. It’s actually a much higher percentage if you consider the, you know, the first time they raise their hand, they’ve got a bootcamp and then some don’t make it through bootcamp. And then there’s a program called Bud’s preparation, and that’s another four months. Then I think only 40 or 50% make it through that. And then once you start at buds, 85% quit or get injured and 15% make it.

Speaker 3:
I want to make sure the listeners, I want to make sure the listeners hear this Mark, because we have, you know, close to 2000 shows we’ve, we’ve recorded in our long time. Listeners know this, know this, and Josh Wilson with living water, you, you know this too, but according to the SBA, the small business administration, approximately 85% of business owners quit. One could call it a quandary. Ah, inc magazine says 96% of people stop. They quit with their business within a decade. I have found that the people who are the most successful are the most able to sit down. You use the word meditate. Um, some might say thought, thinking, contemplation, pondering, maybe reflection, rumination, concentration. But I have found the most successful people on a daily basis sit still for about an hour a day. I call it my hour of power, but I sit down and you write, you think about, you know, what am I goals for my faith, my family, my finances, my fitness, and my friendship, my fun, what am I goals?

Speaker 3:
And was yesterday a good day? Wasn’t it doing a good job? What’s not? Where could I have improved? And we have all these thoughts and we think for me, I like to do this around three in the morning. I think before anybody calls me before the text messages before. And it’s certainly, it’s not war. It wasn’t battle. Nothing great like what you did. But I used to book 4,000 weddings a year. And so the mothers of the bride would start calling 80 of them every weekend call and want to change the songs, wanting to reschedule, wanting to move the timeline around. The bride would call wanting to change the colors of the wedding party or the lighting of the event, or wanting to expand the dance floor or contract it. Or if you’re a business owner, the war starts, and I hate to use the word war cause you actually, there’s a reverence for that term, but the battle starts or the drama starts as soon as you make contact with the, the office with the team.

Speaker 3:
But so many people in, they hear the word meditation because we have a lot of Christian listeners and I’m a Christian listener. I’m a Christian host. But a lot of them go, Oh, I can’t do it. I can’t, I can’t meditation. It’s a weird show show I’m out. So when you’re meditating, I want to take the religious aspects out of it. Cause I know Craig Rochelle, the pastor of life church biggest church in America, talks about taking time to contemplate, to marinade, to ruminate, um, w and to have a conversation with yourself. Nobody else. What does it mean to you to, to, to meditate?

Mark Divine:
I agree with your meditation as a word has been corrupted. It’s loaded. People bring all sorts of meaning to it. That is not accurate to me. It’s just if it’s a catch all phrase, almost like the word leadership, that could mean a lot of different things. And when I teach this, um, when I teach in my unreal mind program meditation, I actually break it down and, and don’t usually often use that word until I well into it. And then it’s okay. This is basically, these can be considered medicated practices, which really is a word that comes from Eastern traditions. And those Eastern traditions, our practices are not, they also are included in a religious and spiritual traditions where, which is where, you know, let’s say a Christian might think, Oh well that’s a Buddhist practice. So if I do that, it makes me a Buddhist or in conflict with my Christian beliefs.

Mark Divine:
And that’s not true because it’s just a simply a practice for developing your mind. So, um, meditation is any internal practice that’s going to help develop the quality of your thinking and the quality of how you use your mind. Now there are a lot of different ways that we use our mind and you already mentioned a few. One is just flat out obsessive compulsive, reactionary behavior. And that’s what it’s called, the default mode. And every, most people you know who don’t, uh, sit down and begin to curate the quality and the quantity and the directionality of their thinking, it’s essentially improved their thinking or thinking about their thinking. Then they’re in default mode and they’re literally, you know, neuroscience will say that we have 60,000 thoughts a day and 85 there’s that number again. 85% of them are the same thoughts we had yesterday and we’re five times as likely to have negative mental processing.

Mark Divine:
There’s, we are positive. That’s just the way the brain is wired. They call that the negativity bias. So if you’re operating on a five times negativity bias with, you know, 45,000 thoughts that are obsessive compulsive, negative, and the same as yesterday, it’s no wonder, you know, you have these weak results or especially if the thoughts are like, I can’t do this or I’m not worthy, or I’m not good enough, or I’m not as good as that entrepreneur. Then eventually that’s just going to grind, you know, the ground. So, you know, meditation is basically putting a halt to all that. And then beginning a process of learning how to really control the quality of your thinking. So I’ll keep, I’ll keep it short cause I,

Speaker 6:
Oh, it was great, but this is great.

Mark Divine:
But here’s, here’s the thing. Way you gotta start somewhere. Most people jump into the deep end of the pool when it comes to meditation and they, they learn, this has happened to me when I started venturing, even learned that it’s really, really hard to override those 60,000 thoughts that have gotten really comfortable. Those, those loops and ruts are like rivers in your brain. They just, you know, they’re really hard to interrupt that. So what we do is we teach a practice of breath control and that we double that as a concentration. It’s like a stacked practice. So we say you’re going to focus just on breathing in this pattern. The pattern is a box where you’re going to inhale the four count, hold your breath for four count, exhale for four counts, hold your breath for four count and do nothing but focus on that.

Mark Divine:
And what that does is it stresses your body, it gets you get your brain really calm and not because you’re just focusing on that one thing. You’re able to deepen your powers of concentration. So that, that’s really the, the one, two, the first two steps of any type of meditative practice is to rebalance and distress your body and your brain is part of your body. Then to concentrate your mind, to have your mind become more able to focus on the right thing. One thing which is the right thing, hopefully for longer and longer periods of time. These two skills, right there are money for entrepreneurs and, and frankly they come naturally to a lot of entrepreneurs because we’ve learned to focus, you know, on our mission, you know, almost to the exclusion of a lot of other things, you know, sometimes not good, right? Because you can get really unbalanced that way.

Mark Divine:
And um, so box breathing, these stresses your body, it gets you into that parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest and digest, counteracting all the stress that’s been building up and all the stress you might take on in the day. And then concentrating that mind so you can focus like a laser beam on the right things at the right time and you know, you hopefully have chosen wisely there. So those are the first two steps to teach any type of meditative practices. And then you know, from there you’re going to open up more into the mindful awareness, which is to look in the patterns of your thinking. This is where we get into metacognition, thinking about the quality of our thinking. And that’s where root, you know when you talk about rumination and contemplation, it’s really effective to be able to contemplate when your mind can concentrate and it’s mindfully aware of its patterns that can pull you out so that you’re not ruminating or contemplating on things that you shouldn’t be or negative things or you know, obsessive compulsive things.

Speaker 3:
Know, I’m going to keep you long today because I want, I want to dive into your book. I want to keep you long, but we don’t have a lot of guests that will go here with me. So I’m going to go there. I’m just gonna keep going there. And I’m sure Josh has questions for you too. But again, what I do, I just make sure all the listeners know, I’m not saying this is what you need to do. I’m just telling you, this is what I do. I get up, I write out my list, I take out a pen and I write down my goals for my faith, my family, my finances, my fitness, my friendship, and my fun, my F six. And I ask myself, did I get better on that or worse? And what could I have done better? What do I need to do today to get closer to is I want to have traction, not distraction.

Speaker 3:
And then I began to make my, to do list after I’ve relaxed and call my brain. There’s no distractions and I’m going to read off to you and we’ll try not to get super panic attacks as we read off my to do list here. Is that sounds, that sounds fair. Mark. This is what I made this morning. Um, cause I knew we’d be talking about this at some point. So, um, one of my, uh, companies, it’s a real estate company. Recently, we had a person who wanted to buy a house and as you know, you have to have credit to buy a house. And at the 11th hour, the last hour, they said, we can’t close today, we don’t have funding. So then they rescheduled another time to close. Okay. And they said, we can’t close, we gotta reschedule. We don’t have funding. This happens four times over a period of four months.

Speaker 3:
So my seller says, you know what I need to do? I need to just tell him I’m not going to work with them anymore. I’m going to sell to somebody else. And because they felt like there was a bait and switch their Mark, they filed for mediation and I lost the mediation. So I lost $1,000. Oh, down arrow down. That right there was a down arrow. So I wrote on my list, wrote on my list, uh, write a check. So it’s on my list here. Then a guy by the name of Augustino, Andrew, a blast from my past. A coffee shop. Oh yeah. Send me an encouraging message and he wanted to know about what equipment he needs to make a radio show and a video show. So that was, I wrote that down. Then dr Whitlock, a great cosmetic surgeon, says, I’m booked out clay four plus weeks now. And I thought to myself,

Speaker 7:
hello lady cow.

Speaker 3:
And then Corey Minner says, I can’t find my podcast baby. I can’t hear my podcast baby. I can’t find it. So I’m trying to find his podcast and it’s not cool when you can’t find your friend’s podcast. What kind of friends lose their friend’s podcast? And then the elephant in the room, I’ve got a memo of understanding that I have to sign that’s going to cost me a minimum of 15 grand. I got to sign that thing and I, that’s a down arrow. But then Christina inbox says, I want to move forward as a client. And I said, cool. And I said, I got to find the Hummer title for my Hummer because my blew up. That’s a down arrow. Then boom, mobile bought some books and I got charged and that’s cool. And then I got to read and sign a letter of understanding. I don’t even know what that is yet.

Speaker 3:
Then, um, asked her, my good friend and, and hopefully future literary agent, the lady who represents Tim Tebows come into Tulsa and I got to give her the itinerary. And then Charles Cola wants to know how come I don’t have a five star schema on my website clean I want to get. And then patio galaxy wants me to read an agreement. And Dr. Edwards wants the Neo 40 document. You’re in the military, I sure you have a degree. You have a great affection for acronyms and abbreviations, but it’s the Neo 40. I don’t even know what that is. And then Bob Healey wants me to hear his podcast and Rob turnout. Turns out he’s not dead. And he wrote the book Titan, so I want to book them on the podcast. Then I wrote an article about lady Liberty and it turns out it sucks. I’ve got to edit it.

Speaker 3:
Um, but then I got to finish editing sales domination, you know? Um, and then I want to finish watching the sermon from pastor Chad and, and, and I’m just reading off my list and then I will go back to the top of my list. This is where I’d never looked, but it’s at the top and we have 155 clients that I support that do almost $3 billion of business. Mark. There’s a lot of pressure when you think about 155 businesses that on average employ a hundred employee on average employer or are responsible for a hundred people. So you start going one 55 times 100 and you start to get overwhelmed now. Right? Cause that’s a, that’s a bad thought. And then I start to wonder, I do it all the time. If I, if I think about my dad died of Lou Gehrig’s three years ago, why? And I could spend my whole day ruminating on that and over time it would become lamenting and then I get a little man tier and then I go, got to go to work.

Speaker 3:
So there’s a difference between, you know, lamenting and meditating. Correct. I mean there’s a difference between thinking cause my list is, I just shared it with you. There’s some really good things on this list today. Tim Tebows agent. If she represents us, that’s not bad. That’s good baby getting paid. That’s cool. Mediation not so good. That wasn’t good. My dad died. That wasn’t cool. Uh, you know, uh, dr Whitlock, you’d be in booked out. That’s cool. Can’t find Cory’s podcast. Not cool. I mean there’s all these things that are up and down. Can you, can you tell us the difference between the lamenting about a bad thing and marinating and, and maybe meditating about in a thoughtful way, planning out your day. Because if you do it right, you said it was almost funny to you watching these people yell at you while you were training for the seals. And that’s how my day is now. It’s always funny now. It’s almost funny. But tell us about the difference between lamenting and meditating.

Mark Divine:
Meditating is content less. What you just described is all about the content. Meditation, um, allows or prepares your mind to be able to examine the content and make much quicker and more precise and clarified decisions about what to do and what not to do, what to focus on, what not to focus on. So the way this works for me or has over, you know, and, and, and also by the way, it’s not a quick thing. It’s like, you know, you don’t just decide to meditate and then have like a, uh, you know, enlightened mind in 30 days, right. It takes a long time, but it doesn’t have to be hard. You know, it’s actually becomes quite joyful. So the process of meditation that I was describing earlier is content less. You’re actually trying to get away from the content and really razor focus your mind.

Mark Divine:
And then you begin to shift your perspective from being identified with your thoughts and being like, I am a thinker, I am Mark, and I’m thinking, and I’ve got to think about this and I got to think about that. And if this goes wrong, I’m bad, and the fat goes right, I’m good. Yup. Whereas the meditative process begins to shift you into this more metacognition, which is like separating your mental hard drive where now you’re able to think more clearly about the quality of your thinking and the content. And then, and this is where it gets a little bit even more, um, exciting, you begin to shift into more pure awareness where you’re aware of everything that’s going on around the side of you, but you’re not caught up in it. You’re not grabbed by it. Yes, he become really not attached to the outcomes.

Mark Divine:
This is where you know you can actually be a billionaire and not give a crap and give all your money away if you want to because you’re not attached to it. And so you want to have the ultimate and emotional development again to develop that level of detachment where you can be looking at moment to moment. Like everything slows down. This is the ultimate flow state. You can see your thoughts and emotions arising. You can make a near a real term, real time decision about whether you even want that in your conscious awareness. And you can literally nip it in the bud, so to speak, any kind of thought or emotion if not going to serve you. And so now when you, when you start to develop your mind like that, and now you want to come back and, and start the exam and content, the way I look at this in the morning, and you did this, you described it very well in the morning, you’re going to look at your day and I call this winning in your mind, before you step foot in the battlefield of your day, you’re going to look at what is my purpose on this planet?

Mark Divine:
What is my mission aligned with that purpose? What am I doing today that’s gonna move me closer to that mission? And that mission can have several components like you described, a family, faith, you know, business, et cetera. And then you’re going to get really clear about what’s the major lever that you can pull that’s going to move the dial in the positive direction so you can get your mission accomplished. And I’m still not talking about all the miscellaneous tasks that’s just stuck.

Speaker 3:
Can I ask you this to answer this real quick?

Mark Divine:
Take care of the big rocks first, then you can fill the room. Right.

Speaker 3:
I want to ask you this real quick here. Um, what you, when you’re clearing your cause this, this is what I do and I, and you and I, I’m not gonna argue about semantics. I think we have a lot of similarities. I listened to really positive things like TD Jakes is one of my favorite ministers. I listened to him before I plan my day and TDS talking about how he’s taught it recently. He’s really, I think, I think recently TD Jakes has figured out that he’s not young anymore. And so he’s doing a talk at pastor Steven Furtick church explaining that even when he dies he gains and he’s gotten to a place in his life where he’s resolved in his mind, he’s got less days ahead then, you know, at a certain point in your life you’re looking towards the future. Now you’re kind of looking towards how do I want to finish, how do I want to finish this thing?

Speaker 3:
And when I listen to something like that and it’s filled with a lot of stories that maybe aren’t the most positive and some are, but when I kind of retrained to my brain, because when I set my alarm for two 30 in the morning and it goes off, there are three, I gotta be honest with you, Mark, I’m pissed. I’m always thinking, okay, who set that thing? And then I Rose. I did and I hit TD Jakes and I listened to it while I’m taking a shower and then my mind is emptied for me. This is, that works for me. It’s emptied and I’m no longer feeling pissed because I get so much more rejection then yes, in that negative bias, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, you know what I mean? It’s like you get so many more rejections than yeses. I mean, how do you clear your cranium? I just want to know the step. Just give us one more little tip. I know there’s somebody out there that they’re getting rejected so much. They’re always pissed. Help somebody get on pissed.

Mark Divine:
So you know, you’re using kind of an external source for positive mental development to replace what naturally arises. You know, that negativity, you get shocked awake at three in the morning, you don’t want to get up and immediately your brain clicks into fight or flight mode even though it’s not really at risk, right? There’s no tiger going to eat you, but you just have to get up well before your, you know, your body mind wants you to get up. So listening to it as like, it’s like, you know, some people find, you know, a really good meditation tape or a, you know, or, or, um, app or you know, you listen to your pastor or some people listened to really nice music. I, um, have learned to develop an internal mantra and internal set of dialogue. So when I wake up, even if it’s super early, I immediately start that breathing practice that I talked about, which begins to get my body into balance.

Mark Divine:
And it, it kind of re organizes my brain after whatever, maybe dreams or whatever nights sleep I had. And then I, I insert in my own mind a set of dialogue, you know, some statements and some running a dialogue that I have, which I’ve curated, which also means something to me which have the same effect. And um, so the, the feeling is one of gratitude, uh, one of self love or self care, one of, um, dedic daily improvement. You know, my overarching themes in life are to master myself every day so I can serve others in my unique way, right? So that actually could be a mantra even though it’s not one of mine.

Speaker 3:
Can you share your matrass or you’re not allowed to share? Can you share a mantra? Are you allowed to or is it a secret thing? Private thing?

Mark Divine:
No, there’s no secret thing at all. Th the word monster just means like internal same, right. And I know there’s, there’s some people who follow this guy named Maharaji. What’s his name? Who has the founder of transcendental meditation. And TM is simply a concentration practice using a mantra in internal staying, an internal sound, which you know, is formed, formed in a word, but it might be a word that’s not familiar to let’s say an English speaking Western or it might be something in Sanskrit, but it can easily be an English word. And I’ve learned through all my, you know, it’s actually better to have a word or a series of words that you know what they mean and you can attach even more emotional power to them. So when I started doing this in preparation for the field and I got the field training, my mantra was, I’m feeling good, I’m looking good. I ought to be in Hollywood and I to this day that starts playing when I, you know, wake up in the morning.

Speaker 3:
Well, I’ll tell you that it’s true. It’s true. Nothing’s more true than that statement to be in Hollywood. You’re lucky. You’re all are looking good right there. Yeah. You, when you got out of the, well, you got out of the, the, the seals. Why did you decide not just, you know, take a military retirement and hang out? I mean, what inspired you to write this new book staring down the Wolf, the, the seven leadership commitments that forge elite teams?

Mark Divine:
Well, it’s a great question. I got off active duty in 1996 and my, my military career was half active duty and half reserves. So 20 years I retired as a commander, a Navy seal commander in 2011 but as a reserve officer, as you know, I was able to spend some time in the civilian world, more time than in the military. So about 60 days a year I was in uniform. And then for two of those 10 years, uh, my reserve time, I was called up for a full year and I went to combat and those types of things. So that was like no different than active duty. I didn’t have any time to do anything but that, but the rest of the time, for those eight years I could be an entrepreneur. And so I launched my first business, which had called the corn out of brewing company, a microbrewery restaurant in San Diego.

Speaker 3:
Cornetto

Mark Divine:
and um, yeah. And Cornetto

Speaker 3:
were you on the Cornetto Island? Were you on Cornetto Island?

Mark Divine:
I was. And that’s where the field’s training base is. Yeah,

Speaker 3:
brother brother. My wife in San Diego. I love that. My wife’s from San Diego. I love corn out of the, the, the, what is the, the Dell hotel. I have stayed there many times.

Mark Divine:
Yeah, the food hotel Del,

Speaker 3:
Oh, you’re getting me fired up. Well, you’re getting me fired up right now. So what was your first business again? Now you started on Coronado.

Mark Divine:
It was called the corn auto brewing company. A microbrewery restaurant. It’s still there. It’s thriving, you know, it’s like really, really successful. I launched that with my brother in law and then a three, you know, two years, two years later. Um, I ended up in this kind of like work, you know, wrestling match with he and his brother who he is, he had brought in and it didn’t turn out well. I tell that story in staring down the wall. That was my first business venture where I tried to use like Navy seal leadership tactics and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. And so then I went off and one of the major failures in that was I’d never really took the time to build the team the way that the seals built my team for me before I could take over. So I recognize that most organizations, you know, don’t have the benefit of a homogeneous workforce like the military where the two year selection and you know, a session training that is extremely arduous so that only the best people end up on your team. And I took a lot of that for granted. And a lot of people, you know, a lot of my teammates are right, these leadership books, they don’t get that in the civilian world. You don’t, you don’t have that

Speaker 3:
right

Mark Divine:
Keisha thing, it’s really, really hard to work in the world because you’ve got people coming from all different walks of life, all different sets of skills, different levels of development, different perspectives. And as a leader to come in and try to lead them with just like a Rob mystic or when one way is my, you know, my way or the highway, it just doesn’t work. You just leave all this energy on the table cause your team doesn’t trust or respect you. So it took me almost um, gosh, you know, I, I, I’ve started like six different businesses and finally in the last two I was able to pull it all together and build what I call an elite team in the civilian world that is really firing on all cylinders and, and we have just an incredible time and we’re all growing together and we love coming to work and we’re, we’re having a big impact.

Mark Divine:
And I wanted to share that story. Not necessarily saying this is how you do it because I was a Navy seal leader and we kicked ass and you know, we want every mission in the field, but more of, Hey, this is what didn’t work. This is where I fell on my face. And these are the what I call seven commitments that you can commit to, to train yourself as a leader and your team every day while at work and while you’re at home so that you guys can unlock massive potential. And the commitments are courage, commitment to courage of a daily practice, commitment to trust. That’s the second one. Commitment to respect, commitment to growth. So you’re all growing together, both vertically and horizontally. And I can explain that in a minute. The commitment to excellence in the small details, like when you have a practice, I can tell it excellence, where every day you’re asking, what did I learn?

Mark Divine:
How can I do better? You know, where should I focus? Preponderance of my time? You know, those are practices of excellence. So a commitment to that, a commitment to resiliency. This is a biggie, right? No plan survives contact with any day, right? So expect things to fail. Develop an attitude where failure’s expected. Be ready for it and learn how to become a learning machine from falling on your face and blooding your nose day in and day out because it’s going to happen. And you know, it’s getting more and more. You know, we use the term VUCA, volatile, uncertain, certain complex and ambiguous in the military. Well business world I think is pretty darn Buka right now. So be ready for failure and get comfortable with it. That’s resiliency. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, put a smile on, learn from it and move forward. Doubt is eliminated by action alone.

Mark Divine:
And then the last commitment is alignment. This one’s money like having a communication strategy that almost over communicates your vision, your mission, the boundaries for behavior, those things that define the culture and just get radically, um, focused on improving every single day. And you do that through communication, asking together as a team what went well, what didn’t go well, how can we do it better next time? So you have a brief and a debrief and always striving for improvement and always staying in alignment. So everyone’s clear about what the mission is. And so you can have, you know, almost semi-autonomous operations where everyone can make a decision that they know is going to be in alignment with the team because you’re all, you understand what the implied and the explicit, um, you know, objectives are the team.

Speaker 3:
What is your new business do for the people out there? What are the people, what does your business do, uh, for the people out there who are curious what you do now, what, what does your company do?

Mark Divine:
So the company is called, I have one of my books and called unbeatable mind. And that was basically, you know, to teach these, you know, internal practices and teach this kind of lifestyle. So, um, I started to get a lot of leaders and teams who were asking me for, you know, to come out and train their, their, um, train them. And so we began to combine, let me back up and say I had a, my first, or the second business I had was called SEALFIT. She’ll fit is like hardcore physical, mental training for spec ops candidates and then a lot of elite athletes. So I started to take some of these things that were really effective with the field candidates in terms of training them to be good teammates and you know, better leaders under fire and bring them to the corporate world. And so that now unbeatable basically does leadership development and team training where we, you know, where we get people together to develop and commit to the seven commitments and we, and we test them under pressure using, you know, um, some of the techniques that I use in SEALFIT and others that we’ve evolved where it has a real, you know, kind of hard and soft, um, aspect to it.

Mark Divine:
It’s really an embodied leadership development. Everybody can do it. Some people look at it and say, I’m the God. It seems kinda hard. I see people out there in the ocean and I see people sitting in an ice bath. And I said, yeah, but also look over here. You see people sitting and learning how to do breath training and mindfulness and learning how to concentrate and all these work together so that you unlock more potential and then you can perform better under pressure. And look, Oh, by the way, there’s women, old, young, there’s men, all sorts of fitness levels. So, you know, in order to grow, you’ve got to basically challenge yourself. In order to challenge yourself. You’ve got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. So we’re going to take you a leader and team and we’re going to put you in scenarios and situations that are going to make you really uncomfortable and take you places that you hadn’t gone before.

Mark Divine:
Because most people, they don’t, they’re, they don’t do that on their own, right? They tend to stay in that comfort zone and kind of do the same thing day in and day out and expect different results. So we take people out of their comfort zones, teach them to think and a kitchen, Potter thinking emotionally and connect to their heart and to do it under pressure and in environments that are, you know, awkward for them. And then we, um, when they go back to the office, their paradigm is shifted, right? They have a whole new perspective on what heart is. They have a new perspective on what they’re capable of and as well as what their teammates are capable of. And everybody is much more aligned and connected as a teammate. And that’s when the, you know, the results really start to, to show up for them.

Speaker 3:
Mark. Oh, I totally want to respect your time, but I have three final questions here for you. The first though will be, will be thrown at you from Josh Wilson. Now, Josh Wilson started a company called living water irrigation and he’s grown the company from $300,000 of revenue now to 1.9 million. And just the past couple of years, he’s been a client of mine for a long time as a military background. And my right, Josh, you have a military background where, where did you serve the air force? The air force. Okay. So you can ask Mark any question you want and if he doesn’t like it, he’ll just hang up.

Speaker 8:
Well he was a Navy seal and I wasn’t, I was a chair force guy, so it was a little bit of a different service level. So, uh, first and foremost, thank you. And a commitment, your commitment to service first to our country and then what you’re doing now. Market’s absolutely awesome. So I want to go back, uh, obviously military guys, commitment to excellence and excellent is all we do and the integrity and all that stuff. It’s a lot simpler for us I think. But I want to go back to our, the, the start of your talk here about most people quit because of an emotional or mental reasons. Yes. So not our listeners, but other people’s listeners, listeners, I know that they lack discipline. I know that they lacked diligence. I know that they, they wake up and, and the sun’s not shining and it’s raining so they don’t want to go to work or, or they have the sniffles or they, they didn’t close the deal that they wanted.

Speaker 3:
Maybe having the Snapple, I don’t even have it. It’s Phantom stuff.

Speaker 8:
It could happen someday. It’s their birthday. Right, right. So what I want to talk about is how do you begin for those other people out there that don’t have discipline, that don’t have the diligence, that don’t have the commitment to excellence, how do you begin to teach those people to resolve regardless of how you feel or regardless of how your emotions are or whether or not it’s a win or a loss. I love how clay shared his to do list cause you got wins and losses all day every day. And I loved how you mentioned there and I think a lot of people didn’t see that, but everybody has a plan until you hit contact. And maybe you can unpack what that means for those people who don’t understand military stuff, but how do you go about resolving and having the discipline regardless of how you mentally feel that day or how you emotionally feel at any given point.

Mark Divine:
Yeah. Josh, good, great questions. And also thank you for your service as well. I love the air force ago. We’ve put a lot of people into the pararescue training and actually the per rescue pipeline, it’s using some of the unusual mind, uh, training protocols. You know, the mental training partner therapize it’s really cool to see that collaboration between the Navy and air force. The, um, first, you know, no plan survives contact that we wake up every and we have this perfect plan. Let me step aside and it’s almost immediately or we step in the office. I was immediately thrown out the window. So does that mean we don’t plan? No. We plan as best we can, but we don’t obsess on the plan. The plan is a suggestion. It’s a, it’s a, it’s an arrow that’s pointing in a particular direction. Now the better we get a planning, the more contingency plans we’ll have in our plan, which means that there’s a number of ways that we can get this done.

Mark Divine:
We acknowledge it. We have our primary, we are secondary, we’ve got our tertiary. And even then if all three of those fail or inaccessible to us, we’ll find a Mayer way or make away. So that’s part skill of actual planning really rapidly knowing what to, you know, what to focus your time on, which are those critical nodes that you know, things go South there. Then the whole thing is versus the things that are more standard operating procedure where you train the standard operating procedures. So you can do it in your sleep. You focus your planning on the critical nodes and you have contingency plans for this critical mosaic. And your parlance would be like, you know, the insertion and extraction of the aircraft, like getting the guys in the field, not in the field. Well if the aircraft goes down, bad things happen, right? You know, um, if you, if you put the operators in the wrong place, bad things happens.

Mark Divine:
You put the bombs on the wrong building, bad things happen. So you have to have contingency plans for all that. So part of the thinking is to learn how to think well can make better rapid plans so that your plans meet the real world, you know, with more fidelity. Meaning meaning like you have fewer and fewer failures as you move forward. So the best teams are really good rapid planners and it’s because they have multiple plans couched within their overarching plan. And then they visualize those plans and they practice those plans. We call them dirt dyes and the seals so that you’ve done them before, multiple times before you ever step foot on the battlefield. Now back to your original question, that is one way to eliminate doubt, but in the, in the military, you know, that’s kinda handed to us on a platter. You remember that Joshua, you showed up and someone said, Hey Josh, go, go build, build our operational plan for this next mission.

Mark Divine:
You would’ve been like deer in the headlights, but you didn’t have to do that. And you had, you know, a whole team there and they knew how to do it and you were taken under someone’s wing as the whatever Intel guy or, or the junior officer and you learn slowly how to do that until, you know, several years later you were running the planning and then conducting the missions. So you had this crawl, walk, run approach to how you learn things. And this is what we teach our, our leaders. Like you’re not going to suddenly become a master meditator, a master planner. You got to basically take the crawl, walk, run approach. So start with one action that is going to improve the way you think every day. And I mentioned earlier this practice we call box breathing. That’s the action that ultimately will build the foundation upon which you’ll be able to think better.

Mark Divine:
You’ll be able to manage your emotions better and you’ll be able to rapid plan better because it’s slowing everything down. It’s basically a flow activator. You slow down your mind, you get it into that off uh, you know, high alpha, low beta state, which is your very creative kind of spontaneous, intuitive state. And then you layer on top of that, you layer some other mental models that are going to be able to avoid bias and distraction and negative reactionary conditioning. And so you then you introduce that and you train those one at a time until suddenly what’s happened is you’ve got this set, a tool that you’ve been training with that have completely and radically altered the way that you think and the way you approach a problem and you become really good at solving problems really quickly because you can declutter the battlefield, you can focus in on the right things for the right time.

Mark Divine:
You’ve got contingency plans for when things go wrong and you made like uncommon thinking, standard operating procedure. Now for all of that to work, you know, the lists are saying, wow, that sounds really cool. Where do I start? Well, everything. Everything is, you know, Josh and clay starts with a commitment, right? A commitment not necessarily to learn something but to grow. And so this is kind of like the difference between learning new skills and tactics and learning how to grow and the more growth that you can unlock in yourself, the more effective all those strategies and tactics that you learn as a leader will ma, you’ll be, you’ll be at delivering those or bringing those to bear. Those are just tools or arrows in your quiver, right? So leaders to me, I think the next frontier for leadership development is what I call vertical development.

Mark Divine:
I used that term earlier. Vertical development is the type of development that changes your character in growth. You grow from it, meaning you grow greater perspective, greater compassion, greater ability to connect and to be in tune with your teammates. Um, you know, grow that growth has a physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual component to it. And I use this spiritual word in a nonreligious sense. When I use the term spiritual. What I mean is a great knowing that it’s about why you’re on this planet and what you’re meant to do about it. And a firm commitment to stay in alignment with that and never get pushed off. And take bold action, you know, around those things that are really important to you. And, and that is different for every human being. Right? What makes you, Josh is different than what makes me as different. What makes clay clay that’s your spiritual center or your kind of like your uniqueness as a human being.

Mark Divine:
So all of those, when we grow, all of those get more refined, the physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, spiritual, and they begin to integrate. So they’re experienced as one whole thing and a bunch as opposed to a bunch of separate things. And that’s what we call whole mind when you begin to access whole mind, now you’re getting to a much more rarefied state of decision making and thinking where there’s a lot of spontaneity. And I think that’s like when people say, I want to learn how to be more intuitive or, or intuitive leadership is really important. Yes. But how do you train it? You train it through accessing whole mind thinking. It’s a big part of what we try to teach our leaders. So that was a long winded answer to your question, but first comes to the commitment to grow and then you learn the skills that are going to make you more effective day in and day out.

Speaker 3:
That’s awesome. Mark. Mark the, the title of your book is called staring down the Wolf seven leadership commitments that forge elite teams. So Mark, I’m gonna, I’m gonna stare down the Wolf before Josh went up to me with the final question. I’m gonna stare down the Wolf. I’m, I’m staring at you over the, over the audio here, just over the audio waves over the great ether. I’m staring you down and I have, I have seven leadership commitments that I was going to make for the, for the thrive nation here because rumor has it, you know, Gabby Reece, you’ve interviewed Gabby Reece. And so this is what I’m, these are my seven commitments. Here’s my seven commitments. One ask Mark to tell Gabby Reese we’re not an idiot and he should be on our show. A commitment to ask Mark to tell Gabby to be on our show. Commitment. Three asks. So anyway, you get to post. So at some point if you run into Gabby, you know, just kind of say, Hey, this DriveTime nation wants to have you on the show because she is a great a fitness expert, a championship volleyball player, and she’s been on your show. Tell us about your show.

Mark Divine:
Yeah, Gabby has been on my show. She was a blast. In fact, I went up to see her and Laird Hamilton at their place in Malibu and I got to do some training with them in their pool doing like, you know, like it was fun for me taking the dumbbells underwater and you know, hand over hand crawling like an alligator from winning of the pool back again. And I loved it. They were looking at me going like, wow, this, you’re a natural. That’s stuff. Well I am a Navy seal, right. We’re supposed to be able to do this stuff.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, that’s right. Can’t do that stuff. They’re fun.

Mark Divine:
But Gabby is great. And can we have, you know, my show is called the unbeatable mind podcast. As you know, mentioned earlier. That’s the name of my second book, my self published book. I’m bout ready. I’m actually working on another update and I love that about self publishing and book and you can play with it, right? You’re never done with it and they keep on changing if you want. So I’ve been updating this one. This was my list, essentially the fourth edition. It’s kind of like my philosophy for living and I go into the training that we talked about here. Now the podcast is where I then I get to stop being the expert and I get to interview other experts. So I have experts from the field of sports psychology and mindfulness and Zen meditation. I have, you know, great thought leaders coming on from all different, you know, spiritual traditions because that’s interesting to me.

Mark Divine:
Physical studs from like CrossFit games champions and martial arts masters. It’s really interesting. I just can go broad because I really focus on experts in those areas that I call those five mountains of physical, physical mastery, mental mastery, emotional mastery, intuitive mastery, and then this know spiritual mastery as I defined it earlier, which is not really your, you know, from a religious point of view, although that’s not off the table at all. But you know, I think that can go hand in glove, but as you guys know that can get a little bit tricky sometimes and navigate that one.

Speaker 3:
Well, you’ve interviewed a Rob Wolf to one of my clients is obsessed with with Rob Wolf, the food and nutrition expert there. You’ve had some great guests. Are a lot of these folks from San Diego. Do you find you interview, do you interview a lot of the folks from the area? [inaudible]

Mark Divine:
no, international in scope. I mean most of the U S but I’ve had all sorts of international, most of my shows are all remote like this. We use Zencaster or Skype. I love to do them in person. You know, one of my aspirations is someday to have a, you know, a show where all the shows are in person. I like I did with Gabby Reece, I get to train or do whatever they do and get to know their world a little bit better. But that takes, you know, I’m running two businesses and I’m always writing and speaking, so it’s really hard. Podcasting is a lot of work. It is. If you’re going to take it seriously, it’s a lot of work as you know. So you know, to do them in person as almost like a full time thing.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean there’s big gaps though for the folks out there that are, for the folks out there who are curious, I mean, do you have, it’s a big guests, I mean, Ryan holiday has been on your show. A guy Kawasaki has been on your show. I mean you’ve really been at it. How many episodes do you think you have out at this point? Seven or 70 or 7,000. How many?

Mark Divine:
We’re at like two 50 but we have a good following and we’re hidden. We’re close to 20 million downloads. We get about 300,000 people a month listening. And so it started, we have, you know, 1,505 star reviews. So you know, we definitely have some momentum, let’s put it that way. So it’s taking more and more of my energy because it’s actually having an impact. A lot of people are finding our work through the podcast and it’s funny cause they literally started on a challenge. My team challenge him, he said, Mark, you need a podcast and like what else do you want to layer on to my life? You know? And I was kinda for the first year or two I didn’t really take it seriously. And then it started taking off. I’m like, Oh this is interesting. You know, I’m going to pay attention to this little thing I got over here.

Speaker 3:
David Goggins has been on your show. So many great guests. I encourage everybody to check out your podcast by going to unbeatable mind.com. It’s unbeatable mind.com and you click on the podcast button and there you can hear the podcast, Josh Wilson. We have time for one more rapid fire question. This will be a hot one, a quick 32nd. Like, see if you can really trick him

Speaker 8:
with a tough question. Okay, so Mark, so how would you, uh, and, and for anybody out in their safe space out there, whatever, I don’t hope we don’t lose a whole bunch of listeners that we don’t need anyway, but um, how do you, in a civilian world, how do you tell somebody to suck it up and press on? How do, how do you say that without saying it that way? What would you advise to that military leader out there?

Mark Divine:
Yeah, I literally use this term and embrace the suck and it’s not said in a derogatory way, but you know, Hey, it, especially if you’re going to train with me, if you’re going to strive to improve yourself every day, standby, it’s not going to be easy. You’re going to have to embrace the suck of that work. That’s why we call it work. But guess what? On the other side of that comes great enjoyment at the progress. You’re making great peace of mind knowing that you’re getting stronger, better, faster, smarter, more clear, making better decisions every day. The, the opposite of that is to do nothing. And if you do nothing, then the law of entropy says that you’re going to slide backwards and you’re going to end up getting weaker every day and you’re going to make worse decisions and you’re going to get unhealthier. And guess what? That’s not necessary, right? We don’t want to go there. So embrace the suck. Make the hard easy, you know, do the uncommon things until there until you can do them uncommonly well and uh, you know, show up every day and be different. Be special.

Speaker 3:
Mark, I appreciate you so much for taking the time out of, out of your schedule to be here with us. I thank you for serving our country. I thank you for rounding up some really great folks and putting them on your podcast, and I really do appreciate you for writing this new book because I think everybody out there, if you’ve ever struggled to lead a team, a crack squad of American employees that are not Navy seals. You know what I mean? If you’ve ever tracked, sometimes you might have on your team Batman, you might have Beavis, you might have Butthead. You might have a whole cast of characters because it’s the average American employee. If you want to take a team of people and forge it into an elite team without the military might and in having an elite team of seals, you’re leading. This book is a practical, tactical, strategic guide to help you forge an elite team. Uh, check it out today by the book today. Again, the book is called steering down the Wolf seven leadership commitments that forge elite teams. Again, that’s staring down the Wolf. Seven leadership commitments that forge elite teams.

Mark Divine:
Thanks so much. Probably the book is staring, staring down the wool, subtitle, seven leadership commitments that boards you, eight teams staring down the wolf.com by the way, we have a free several hour leadership training for anybody who wants to participate in that. Go to the, find out more about that. I’m staring on [inaudible] dot com

Speaker 3:
staring down the wall, staring down the wolf.com right, so steering down the wall.com check it out. Hope you have a great rest of your day, sir.

Speaker 9:
During the all right, you as well take care of that and now without any further ed,