 I think it's better to, again, understand, be resolute in the outcome. I know this outcome, you know, I know where I'm headed so that when things don't go well, when things seem like I'm moving away from my goal, I still know I'm gonna get there. But if everybody in your audience right now, if I give them 10 seconds and say, think about someone in your life who you consider a leader, okay? Picture that person. Today, I'm joined by Rich Divini, who is a retired Navy SEAL commander, who spent 21 years in the Navy SEALs with 13 overseas deployments. And I'm excited to dive in and talk about his new book. It is Attributes, the 25 Drivers of Optimal Performance. And I'm excited to talk about human performance, optimal performance, and more than anything else, what I'm really excited to dive into is just the mindset behind everything that you've done and some of the peak people that you've seen, but also optimal people that you've seen that perform the best the most consistently. Welcome to the Minds and Mentor podcast. It's a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back in person with people. Yeah, I know, right? It's been a while. That's what we were saying is we're coming from Texas. So it's kind of normal. And then we came over here and we're both in LA and we're like, this is, it's a little bit different out here than it is back home. I agree. I'm from Virginia Beach. Virginia's been pretty good. Nothing's been too extreme. So LA has been certainly at one end of the response. Yeah, I would say LA is on one side and then Texas is on the other side. So, but we're getting back to normal. But I'd love to dive into, before we dive into the questions and everything, I'd love for everyone to know a little bit about you, your story and then also what made you decide to put this book out. Yeah, I grew up in Connecticut and I grew up with three other siblings, one twin brother, my dad was a private pilot who we'd take us flying on the weekends. And so my twin brother and I loved flying from very early ages and decided we wanted to be jet pilots. And of course the only place to do that was as far as we knew where the Air Force and the Navy. But the Navy guys landed on ships. So that's like really pretty badass, right? So the Navy it was, we kind of focused on, this was before Top Gun came out. We were really focused on that. And it was really the first Gulf War in the 90s, early 90s and I was still in high school and I came upon an article that was outlining all the Spec Ops forces in the military. So Marine Force recon, Army Rangers, Green Berets and SEALs and such. And noticed as I read about them that these SEAL guys did everything. They were like in the snow, in the desert, in the jungle and they were underwater, which was like, I was a water rat. I loved, grew up on the coast, so anything about the water I loved. And I was just like, man, that's really cool. And so when it came down to, we both went to Purdue and I was Navy RTC and when it came down to selecting pilot or SEALs, I kind of said to myself, well, I didn't want to be a pilot and look over and wonder if I could be a SEAL, so. So I picked SEALs, unfortunately I got selected. Unfortunately, I made it through training and then, yeah, spent just over, just under 21 years or over 20 years from 96 till the end of 16 in the teams. And obviously very kinetic period, did a lot of deployments overseas, ran training, which is really where I began to get very fascinated with defining and articulating human performance at a very elemental level, because again, we all know and we've all heard that the true us comes out in times of challenge, stress, and uncertainty. And I was like, okay, what's that true us? Well, I had this laboratory inside of, which I saw the true us all the time. And my job as running training was to effectively articulate that, which has really got me keyed in. And then, when I retired, I was speaking about leadership and high-performing teams and I'd get constantly from organizations these questions about dream teams and hey, we put together the team of the best this, the best that, and they were good for a little while, but as soon as things turned uncertain or crazy or unpredictable, the teams turned toxic and why was that? And for me, the answer was obvious. I said, you were looking at the wrong things. You were looking at skills versus attributes, which is why I said, I could probably write a book on this. I could probably write the book on attributes, which I figured I should and I did. So that's how it came to be. Yeah, it's kind of like the phrase, we've ever heard that, if you take an orange and you squeeze it, you get orange juice and that's what's inside. If you take a human, you put them under pressure and you find out what's inside. It's kind of like the coal and actually squeeze coal and put it under pressure, you get the diamond. So what is that diamond? Cause there's a diamond in all of us. The key is every diamond is unique, right? And so I'm really very fascinated with this idea that we are all, I like to use automobiles as the analogy. We're all automobiles, but some of us are Jeeps, some of us are Ferraris, some of us are SUVs and there's no judgment. Cause if the Jeep can do things Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can't do, but the key is, can you lift your own hood? Can you start to figure out your own engine a little bit because you may be a Jeep that's running on a Ferrari track or a Ferrari that's running on a Jeep track. And again, there's nothing wrong with that either if you choose to do it, but you can at least start to identify some pain points to make your experience, make your journey a little bit more successful. If you know that you're, if I choose, if I decide that I'm a Jeep engine running with Ferraris, then I can start to do things to my engine to help me run better with Ferraris. Or I can say, no, I don't like this track at all. That's why I'm unsatisfied. I can find the Jeep track and do that. So part of that discovery process, I think begins with this idea of attributes. Do you think it's better to, going with what you said, if you're a Jeep instead of going on a Ferrari track, is it, do you find that's better for the average person to know themself at a deep level and then just work on those attributes that they have versus trying to bring in skills or attributes that might not necessarily be their strongest points? Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't think I'd ever put myself in the position of telling people what was good or what was bad. I think we all have an incredible gift. I mean, human beings, in fact, I think we're the only species as far as we know that, and we're separated by this idea that we can, unlike any other species, again, as far as we know, imagine and visualize what does not exist, what is not there, what could be potential, basically. And so that gift allows us to choose things and go in directions that otherwise may not make sense at the time. And so I would say to anybody who has a goal, audacious or otherwise, first ask yourself why you want it because the why is gonna be very powerful in your ability to kind of persevere towards that goal. And it's gonna be instrumental in whether or not you're happy once you get there if the purpose is clear. But if it is clear, then go for it. If it means you're a jeep that has to tweak yourself so you can run with Ferraris, then do that. Or if it means you're a jeep that has to find the right jeep track, do that. You talked about visualization and I was gonna hold this for later, but now we're gonna go into it. So you talked about another podcast episode that your mom bought you a book when you were younger. And it was actually about visualization, law of attraction and all of that. And it's funny to hear somebody who is X Navy Seal talk about visualization, law of attraction, but I talk about it all the time. But I try to, I know what type of audience I have. So it's like some of them can be, will we and some of them can be very analytical because I can dance on both sides of that when I speak. I'm curious with you, what did that book do for you? And then as going into becoming a seal, what was that like? Did you use the stuff that you learned from that book when you were going through everything? I did 100%. And I'm someone who was enamored with the woo-woo when I first learned about it. But just because I'm a skeptic by nature and I really love understanding and breaking down why things logically happen, I was dissatisfied with it. Even though it was working, I was dissatisfied with just that, with the inability to explain it. And so as I started really getting into neurology and neuroscience and I say getting into it, I was just fascinated with it. Like you, I just read and listen as much as I can, hang out with neuroscientists as much as I can. I recognize, one of the things I did recognize is just our human systems. We take in about 11 million bits of information per second through our five senses. And so our brains are automatically doing a massive amount of deselections all the time. So things are happening to us that our brains are like, you don't even have to notice that. And for example, the bottom of your shoes right now, the bottom of your feet in your shoes right now, until I just mentioned that you weren't noticing it because our brains are like, you don't need to notice that right now. Our frontal lobes only process, our conscious minds only process about 2,500 bits out of that 11 million. And so what I realize in talking to neuroscientists and kind of reading about it and having discussions and thinking on it is that when we actively or proactively place an idea, whether it be a thought, a goal or even just something to focus on into that, into our brains, what we're doing or telling our conscious minds out of the 11 million bits, notice whatever, bring to my attention, throw into that pool of 2,500, something, anything that relates to that. And so the example of this is for any of us who've bought a car, okay? And as soon as we buy the car, we start seeing it everywhere. And it's not because the car suddenly increased in sales and everybody bought it when we bought it. It's because it's front, we basically told our brains, notice that. For sure. And so when we set a goal and we visualize something, what we're doing is we're tweaking our system and we're tweaking our brain to say, hey, notice things that have to do with that. And so this is where I think a lot of serendipity happens. So suddenly this person appeared, right? Well, these signals, I think these cues are all around us all the time. We don't know what form they're in because oftentimes we're not noticing them. And so I think a reasonable explanation for me for the law of attraction is if you set a goal, if you set the intent, you're hacking into your human system and saying out of your 11 million bits out there, notice everything that has to do with this and bring it to my attention. Yeah, yeah, there's two sides of it. It's like, does the universe actually bring it into? And am I actually attracting this? Or for the analytical person, it's just like, I'm gonna tell my brain exactly what I want it to focus on and it's gonna find that. The car's a great example. I had an example that happened about six months ago. I had a friend from middle school that I hadn't seen in probably 18 years, passed away and I was looking through his photos on Facebook and I saw an old friend of mine that I haven't seen since middle school as well, Ryan. And this is back in Florida where I used to live. I live in Austin, Texas now. So I see him, I'm like, damn, I wonder what's going on with Ryan. I haven't seen him in so long. Next day I'm at the coffee shop and I'm working and literally I see a guy walk out with his dog and I was like, oh my God, that's Ryan. And then he walked in and walked back out and I was like, that's not Ryan. And it still blew me away because I know how the reticular active system works and I'm like, holy shit, it does actually work that way. So it's almost like setting your, I always say you get in your car if you wanna go somewhere you've never been before, you just set your GPS. So it's almost like you wake up every single morning, you just set your GPS for what it is that you want and tell your brain or the universe, whatever it is, or both of them together, this is what I want. But most people, they don't focus on what they want, they focus on what they don't want and then they can't figure out why they keep getting more of what they don't want. That's right. In other words, they're preloading into their system what to notice. Because I've had the opposite happen where I've thought of someone and then like a day later they show up, I see them, right? I mean, it's actually them, right? So again, I would love for there to be some science around those other instances where it seems like the universe is bringing us things because that's happened to be many times as well too. But ultimately, if we take a very broad view of this which I think you'll agree with, if you wake up in the morning and just set the intent to notice positivity, notice, you'll be grateful. So this is why gratitude is such a powerful feeling and emotion because A, well A, it's neurologically dosing you with just massively good neurochemicals and neurotransmitters and hormones. But B, it's causing you to focus on really, really good positive things. And we all know, we've all had these experiences where our day starts out shitty and the day just stays shitty. Right, for sure. And that's because we've primed ourselves. Or the day starts out great and it's a great day. It's because we've primed ourselves and we've set these conditions of what to notice because if you say 11 million bits per second and then do the math, there's a lot of shit coming in in one day of conscious activity. For sure. Hey, let me tell you about my favorite drink that I take first thing in the morning. 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That is a $75 credit at Indeed.com slash Rob. Indeed.com slash Rob. Once again, that is Indeed.com slash Rob. And I think it's some people think that they're just born pessimistic. Ah, this is just how I am. I feel like I was pessimistic for a lot of my life until I started realizing this stuff, watching The Secret, reading books and realizing that, oh man, if I just set myself up to look for the things that are positive in my life, I just find more stuff to be positive. Yes, I totally agree. And so I'm curious, when you become a Navy SEAL and you go through Buds and Hell Week, which has become super famous, everyone thinks, which is rightfully so, because people think, how can somebody do that? Like that's living on their edge for five days straight. Five days and you get like what, three or four hours of sleep. Do you find that when you were in that moment that you were visualizing the end of it or that you were telling yourself positive stuff? Like did you use this when you're going through what they call absolute Hell Week? Yeah, the bad news is absolutely not. None of it. You're trying to get through it? Yeah, you just get through it. So there's a difference between in the moment of challenge, stress and uncertainty, when things are really bad. This is why inspirational quotes are awesome, but they're not necessarily transferable to the moment. You need tools. There need to be things you can do in the moment because guys used to tell me, when guys wanted to be SEALs, I used to talk to guys about it. And I remember giving a, I was on a ship, I was on a Navy ship and some of the sailors were like really interested and so I had a gathering of like five or six or something, guys who wanted to go to Buds. And the first thing I told them was, I think you guys are gonna realize something is that when you're actually doing the job of a Navy SEAL, there's no cool soundtrack in the background going. I mean, it's not cool. There's nothing cool about it. It usually sucks. It's you're cold, you're wet, you're dirty. I mean, when you're diving, it's always at night. It's always in shitty conditions. It's usually in harbors, which are usually just dirty and murky anyway. So it's not as sexy as a commercial for recruiting? And when you're jumping out of airplanes, you've got so much gear that you're really, and you're at 22,000 feet, for example, it's three degrees per thousand feet. So the temperature drops three degrees per thousand feet. So at 22,000 feet, if you're getting in the bird at 60 degrees, it's a nice balmy LA 60 degrees, right? At 22,000, it's sub zero, right? So it's freezing. And oftentimes, and you're stacked with gear, you have oxygen, you have face shields, all that stuff. And because the temperature change is so drastic, a lot of times that your face mask frosts over, right? So you're going up. So it's just, you almost laugh at how shitty it is sometimes. So by the way, humor, we can talk about that, how humor is a hack to getting through that stuff, right? I love that hack. Yeah. But no, I think you have to preload yourself with vision, purpose, positive thinking, inspiration, whatever that is, that gets you into the moment. But once you're in the moment, it actually, there's something more that has to happen. You have to be able to, I mean, there's a process. You have to be able to take in the environment and ask yourself some questions about the environment that allow you to move through. For example, the first question is, what about this can I control? And then once you ask that and you can answer it, you say, okay, I'm going to move to that. And then you move to that. And then once that's done, and so when you do that, by the way, you get a dopamine reward, neurotransmitter. Once you hit that, you ask it again and you say, what can I control now? This is how you, by the way, so I talk often about moving through fear. I know you're gonna see Huberman, one of the things Huberman and I talk about is what makes up fear. Fear is the combination of anxiety plus uncertainty, right? And you can have one or the other without having fear. You know, you can have uncertainty without, or you can have anxiety without uncertainty. That might be I'm nervous for a presentation that's coming up. It's to the boss, he can be mercurial, you know, but I know this stuff. I know, you know, it's not a big deal. I'm just a little nervous, okay? There's uncertainty there without anxiety. You can be anxious, you can be, no, that's anxiety without uncertainty. You can be uncertain without being anxious, okay? That's every kid on Christmas Eve, right? There's no fear there. If you combine the two, you start to get fear. And this is where challenge, stress and kind of strife start to happen. You can buy those down by buying down either one or both, okay? You can buy down anxiety through physiological mean. Anxiety is largely internally focused. It's an internal response. So you can do that through breathing, visual tools that Hebrew will talk about. You can do it through visualization if you have time. So you can bring yourself out of, or bring yourself down from an autonomic hijack or an autonomic response of anxiety. Or you can buy down uncertainty, okay? To buy down uncertainty, you have to take your environment. You have to begin to do what I call chunk it, okay? And you have to ask yourself some questions and answer those questions. First thing is out of this environment, out of this thing, this whole thing, what do I understand, okay? Get those answers, okay? Out of that list, what can I control, all right? Once I get that, okay, I'm gonna control this, I'm gonna move to that. It's almost like setting your horizon, really. Move to that, get a reward, ask again. Move to that, get a reward, ask again. And you step through that. So there's a, for those of your audience who might not know the specifics of Helik, right? You start Helik on a Sunday afternoon. You break out for a Sunday afternoon. And you go until the following Friday, that's when they secure you. And you sleep maybe two or three hours, if you're lucky. When I was, by the way, a funny story about Helik, when they gave us our first sleep period, it was like, it's like Wednesday. And I remember them saying, okay, get in the tents, lay down, you know, you didn't know, you weren't, you didn't trust what was gonna happen, but you, so we all laid down. And you, after about 10 minutes, you realize, oh, they're going away for a while, right? And so everybody around me starts falling asleep. And I can't fall asleep. My legs are killing me. You know, because you know how when you're up and moving for a long time, your blood starts rushing back and it's like itchy. And, you know, my legs were hurting so bad, I couldn't fall asleep. I was like, gosh, what the hell? And so finally I'm like, okay, so I got up and I leave the tents and I go around to the cage area where there's the bathrooms and these two bronchers. So the bronchers are students who are just like keeping watch, you know, just make sure students, you know, aren't wandering off into the surf zone or whatever. And they run up to me and I was like, hey dude, what's going on? I don't know, I can't sleep. And they're like, don't quit. I was like, I didn't say I wanted to quit. I just, I can't sleep. I was like, well, don't quit. I said, I told you, I don't want to quit, right? So anyway, if you're lucky you get three hours of sleep. I think I got back and maybe was able to get half hour, but there's a saying when you are in Bud's training, it's kind of a truism too, is that if you think about Friday of Hell Week on Monday, you'll never make it. Yeah, and the guys who you do never do, because it's too much. It's kind of like if you have a really audacious goal and you're focused too much on that end thing in the moment and you realize how far it is and how much work it has to do, you may give up at that point, you know? So I think there's a real value in not focusing on the goal on the end state too much depending on where you are in the pathway. You know, one of the things I also say is that you have to be very resolute in your outcome but be flexible in the approach. And that means know where you're going but just be flexible. The rock climbers are great examples of this, right? They look at the face of a cliff and they say, okay, top, that's where I'm going. And they may even map out a kind of visualize a plan of how they think they're gonna get there based on what they see. As soon as they start climbing though, they all recognize and all admit that's gonna change, right? They're looking for the best handholds and footholds and what they might have thought they've seen as a good one might be a shadow. So they have to move so that the pathway will change and sometimes they'll find that they actually have to move like right and down to get to the next best handhold or foothold which means they're moving away from their goal to find a better way to the top which means sometimes when we're going towards our goals it'll feel like we're moving away and we have to be flexible. We have to be adaptably able to do that. Yes, you kind of talk about the dopamine reward systems which is important because I find it so often I've worked with tens of thousands of people is that they have these big lofty goals that are four, five, six years in the future but then they give up because it's too far away like you're saying from Sunday to Friday it's just too far away but when you chunk it up what you're saying, we can go deeper on it is the dopamine reward system as you might say, okay, we're in the water right now and this is terrible but I'm gonna get done with the water eventually and then you get done with the water and there's a little bit of dopamine that's released in your brain that's like, hey, you did it, congratulations and it makes you a little bit more driven to continue going, is that what you're saying? That's exactly right and just to relate it to something more every day, I mean, anybody who's losing weight, we all know that that process is extremely difficult and when you start it, you start on January 1st or whatever, right? By January 5th, you're gonna look in the mirror it's not gonna look like you lost much, right? Yeah, it's gonna be painful getting to January 5th in fact sometimes those are the most painful days those first few days and you will look no different on January 5th than you did on January 1st, most likely if you're doing it in a healthy way, right? So it's a, these are, so if you give up then because oh, it's not showing anything, it's not looking any different, you're lost. The person who has never run in their lives and they're overweight and they wanna run a marathon to think about a marathon at that moment is not a good idea, what you need to do is say, okay, well, what's a good goal? Well, maybe it's to buy some running shoes, okay? That's goal, right? I get those running shoes, now I'm gonna I'm gonna put the running shoes by the side of the bed and when I get up tomorrow morning, I'm gonna put them on. That's all I'm gonna do, right? And then the next morning, I'm gonna put a mom on a walk out to the mailbox and then maybe a week later, I'm gonna jog to out to the mailbox or whatever it is but these are, it's basically this whole adage of eating the elephant one bite at a time or chunking it up but it's neurologically actually true because you're setting a reward system for yourself, it has to be subjective because the goals have to have meaning to you, they can't be given to you necessarily, they have to have meaning to you so if you set something too small, it's not gonna work. I run, I try to run once or twice a week so if I tell myself, I need to get back into running, I'm gonna put the shoes by the door, it's not gonna, I need to do a little bit more than that. 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Like falling in love with the, not the end goal, but if you fall in love with the process of, okay, I'm just gonna put on these shoes and I'm gonna walk to the end of the street. And that process of just falling in love with those little teeny tiny things and doing them consistently will eventually get you the end goal. But I feel like most people, what they do is they try to focus on the end goal and go, I'm like you said, I'm never gonna make it to a marathon or they look at themselves and they say, oh, I've lost no weight in the past five days. I guess it's just my genes, it's my family. But in reality, what they should be doing is saying, well, at least I showed up for myself and I worked out today. At least I decided to eat something healthy when really what I wanted was just a pizza. And it's just about finding little things to celebrate yourself as often as possible to fall in love with the process of becoming who you wanna be versus just getting to the end goal. Yeah, and I would also recommend, because I've been guilty of not doing this, jotting down what you're doing because if you can go back, if you see where you've started, if you write down, hey, today one, day one, I put my shoes on and walk to the front door, right? And that's day one. And then you just do that over a day. Three months later, four months later, even if the goal you're looking to achieve is a year away, you'll still look back and be like, oh my gosh, look how far, look where I started and look where I am now, right? So to see what you've done also. So some people could do that through journaling. It's funny, journaling is the one thing that I highly recommend that I don't do, because I don't do it. I always say, oh, I should do it. And I just never, maybe that's why I wrote a book just to get some of my ideas done on paper finally. But yeah, journaling is actually a great process, I think, if you just take some time at the end of the day and just jot down, hey, what did I accomplish today? What happened? What did I learn? What can I be grateful for? I think that's a really powerful process. It's a cool tool that I should probably start doing, but I definitely recommend it. So I'm curious, because you were talking about Feardus a minute ago. And I have a friend who, he went down and lived with the native Brazilian tribe in Brazil like five days into the jungle. Like they don't have cars, they don't have any of that stuff, right? And he had to walk around, he was down there for 40 days, did a whole spiritual journey with them. And he had to walk around the machete at all points in time, because he's like, if you see a jaguar, it's too late. It's already been seen for a really long time. The one thing that he said is he said, at that point in time, I realized the difference between what he calls a primal fear, which means there's some sort of death attached to it, and intellectual fear, which is like judgment. Worry about enough money that's in a bank account, all that different type of stuff. Do you notice that when you're in those situations, that that's true, where you can tell the difference of when you're in situations, you're really cold and buds, or maybe you have something that's going on in mission, there is no thought of like any of the intellectual fears popping up in your head, is there? No, you're right. I think it's very basic, you get to add a very basic stuff. But what's interesting is a lot of the guys you talk to, because I'm one of them who get through seal training will say at some point, for example, when you're freezing in the service zone, said to themselves during training, I mean, they can't kill me, so it's not like they're allowed to kill me, so they gotta end this at some point. And I literally remember saying that to myself, it was so miserable, I was like, well, I mean, they're not gonna kill us, they're not allowed to, right? So you almost try to make intellectual what might feel primal, at least in that moment, because you know it's real, or you know it's not necessarily real, which is interesting, because it's a great distinction that I had not considered, so I'm actually glad you brought it up, because when you get into combat, you then have to make a little bit of a transition, but not overly so, because I think if you get, I think if you get too focused on the primal part, that's when your amygdala starts to kick in. Because we wanna survive, that's all we wanna do. And so I think one of the things seals are very, very good at, and spec operators, or anybody who first responders who run into danger, are very good at is compartmentalizing away some of that primal fear, so that you may move, not considering, and listen, you jump out of an airplane at 22,000 feet, there's many, many things that go wrong. And other than understanding my parachute malfunction procedures, if something happens, I didn't think about any of them, because it wasn't really the time to do it. To go down that spiral was not productive. I needed to focus on the job, getting it done. Certainly I was prepared, but so I think there's a level of compartmentalization that actually is very effective in being able to set aside even a little bit of the primal fear. In day-to-day life, however, we have to recognize that most of us, and I count myself in this category, now that I'm not in this, I'm retired, I'm just living day-to-day life, very, very few of our fears are even approaching primal. It's almost all intellectual for sure. And so that's what we have to recognize, is that it really is, what is it false of us, all false evidence appearing real, which is an acronym. It really is kind of that, because you're placing things and perspectives and judgments around it that I think it'd be healthy to interrogate once in a while. So let's go back to Buds, because isn't it like 90% of people drop out? Yeah, some of them. What's, what do you feel is the difference between someone who stays in and someone who drops out in the middle of the five days? Yeah, if I had that answer, we would patent it and then go sell it to SEAL training. Did you notice anything as you're with those people though of like, oh, this guy's about to drop? Well, there's some time that I noticed. And so this is where we could talk about humor. So first of all, compartmentalization, if you can compartmentalize, the guys who make it through can all compartmentalize. That's an absolute. So give me an example of what that would look like. In the moment where you're going through Hell Week, what is compartmentalizing that look like? That's like, okay, I'm running for hour or whatever with this boat on my head and every part of my body is aching and I'm miserably hot, right? And I say to myself, okay, well, pretty soon I'll be in the cold water and I'll feel better. And then I'm in the cold water freezing my ass off and I'm like, oh my God, I can't move. Well, soon I'll be drowning in that boat. That's compartmentalization. That's basically, or like, hey, I'm just gonna make it to the next meal. That's my next, I'll just get there. It's almost that ability to move the horizon. It's the ability to, I mean, in the book I describe it very kind of precisely and that is from a mental, from a brain aspect, what it is, it's the ability to assess the information that's coming in, okay, assess its relevance. So out of all this information, what is relevant to me in this moment? Then from that list, prioritize, okay, from this list of what's relevant, what order do I need to put on it, put it in? And then from that order, focus on the top thing and forget about everything else for a moment. That's compartmentalization, you know? So in a, like a environment like Hell Week, which is kind of extreme where the idea is you don't necessarily want to focus on what you're doing in the moment. You wanna focus on maybe one other thing beyond that. You're saying, okay, what's relevant? Well, you know, what's all this information? Well, yeah, I'm running, blah, blah, blah, it's hot, all that stuff, but let me prioritize the way I focus. I'm gonna focus on the cold water over there that I'm probably gonna be in. You know, I don't wanna just focus on that, right? That's, so the compartmentalization, from a psychologist standpoint, we've often heard compartmentalization negatively described as this act where people kind of put away things that they shouldn't, that they don't wanna focus on at the detriment of their own psyche. Which happens, by the way. And it happens, especially when you're really good at compartmentalization. But ultimately, the effective use of compartmentalization is the ability to focus on exactly what you need in the moment. And ignore everything else you have to ignore. And to the extent that you're not even emotional about it. This is like, you see the Hollywood movies of people in gunfights and the buddy next to the star gets killed or dropped and he spends the next five minutes kneeling over the body crying in mourning during the gunfight, right? That doesn't happen, right? You don't have time to do that. You basically have to win the fight before. So that's effective compartmentalization. Whatever happens, whatever happened, whatever happened, I need to focus on what's important in the now. And then once that's complete, I move on. That's what compartmentalization is. So let's go back, because now I got a question on that. There's so many things I got questions on, but let's go back to watching someone who you think is gonna be dropping out soon. So the difference between someone who is, and this is the humor story which I love, between someone who you can tell, they're probably gonna make it versus someone you're like, this guy's on his way out. What did you notice the difference between them? Well, okay, so from a compartmentalization standpoint, if you saw someone just in the way they were moving or the way they were looking, not focusing on the moment, they were kind of like, but it's very hard to see because that's usually a really mental exercise, right? So you don't, guys just quit, you know? Humor becomes a much more visual way to see this because one of the things that every high performing team and human has is the ability to laugh when things get tough because, well, let me give you this story. When I was in Hell Week, you know, I was in the surf zone and freezing there for a long time during surf torture and surf torture is you link arms with your classmates, you march out into the surf zone till about knee high, turn around, you lay back. The water crashes over you and recedes and it's the coldest thing. I mean, anybody here in Southern California knows that the water out here is not really that warm, especially in November when we were going through Hell Week. So it's really cool. A lot of people quit and during my Hell Week, as most Hell Weeks, this happens, the instructors pulled up a van on the beach and got out with a megaphone and said, okay, anybody who quits, we have hot chocolate blankets and donuts for anybody who quits right now, right? And of course, it's like the survivor thing. So a lot of people like, ooh, that's a, and I remember the guy next to me, it's funny that this guy next to me, he was just at my house this weekend. We hadn't seen him in a few years and we were remembering this story. The guy next to me yells at the top of his lungs, hey, do you have any chocolate glazed donuts? Because if you don't have any chocolate glazed, I'm not quitting, okay? And I remember him laughing and I burst out laughing. And at that moment, I was like, okay, this is fine. And I, but I looked over my left, right? And the guy to my left was stone faced. I mean, he hadn't even heard the joke. And he was just, he was lost in his pain. And I said to myself, I remember saying to myself, this guy's not gonna make it. Sure enough, within a minute or two, he quit. But what happened there, what humor does is when we laugh, it releases three chemicals. Two neurotransmitters, one hormone. Dopamine, which is obviously, we know, feel good chemical. This is good, keep going. Serotonin, which is kind of feeling of safety, bonding, humor will be able to elaborate all, it does a lot of things, but generally feels good. And then oxytocin, which is known as the love hormone, okay? Oxytocin is actually a hormone, but it actually moves in many cases, not as fast, but faster than normal hormones. Usually neurotransmitters are, well, they are, they're very rapid in our system. They get released rapidly and they dissipate rapidly. Hormones take longer to enter our system, but they also last longer. Oxytocin is actually in between, you know? It moves fairly rapidly, so you kind of feel it. And you get it when you acts of love and affection and gratitude, hugging, shaking hands. When people look at their babies a lot of times. That's all oxytocin. So you get all three of those chemicals just by laughing. Actually, did I say serotonin? I'm wrong about serotonin. It's dopamine, it's endorphins, and it's oxytocin, okay? Serotonin's for something else. And endorphins are painkillers. Endorphins are painkillers, right? They're the human beings' natural opiates, right? So dopamine, you get flooded with dopamine. So when my buddy made his joke, right? I laugh, I get flooded with dopamine. This is good, keep going, you're fine. Endorphins, it doesn't actually feel that bad. I'm masking my pain, I'm getting some opiate hits. And then oxytocin, we're bonded, we're in this together. All three of those things. And so it's a hack, laughing is a hack into kind of keeping going. It can help push us through these bad times because we're flooding our body with these rebuilding good chemicals. This is why you hear cancer patients who say, when I was going through my treatments, I decided I was just gonna watch funny movies, and just laugh a lot. And they say, and it worked, I began to recover. It's a, the phrase laughter is the best medicine is not actually just a phrase, right? And it's actually a truzum because it releases these chemicals. So yeah, in the cases where guys couldn't laugh, you would say, yeah, this guy's not gonna, if you can't laugh, this guy's not gonna do well. And then you see that translate. It's actually, it's a brilliant strategy because it translates as you move through your career because I can remember the things I miss the most about the teams were those times of where we were, I mean, laughing so hard, we were in tears and the environment might have been miserable around us, but we were just, yeah, we were joking around. Is there any moments you can remember where it was just, you shouldn't have been laughing because it was that scary, but something popped up? Was there, is there always like a kind of a class clown that's in each of the groups? And did you know about this before or is this after you got out? You're like, oh, this now makes sense with the chemicals and stuff or is it, when you were in a group, you realized like, and you're, you know, commanding over these people that if somebody's cracking a joke, it's not like, hey, shut up, be serious. It's like, hey, this is probably actually good for everybody at this moment. Yeah, no, I mean, you recognize how good it feels because you, I mean, buds is where this all begins. I mean, no one makes it through buds without laughing. No one, you know, so that's where it starts. And even the instructors will crack jokes. So you realize it's a culture, but I think there's a difference between cracking a joke so everybody feels better versus cracking a joke and this is not, there was never any time I say, this is not the time to crack jokes because no one cracked jokes at those times because that would mean, well, I'm like, we're talking about the way we're supposed to do the operation or, you know, hey, we need to understand this step. So that's, you don't crack a joke. That's like serious stuff. But no, I mean, when things are bad, you always wanted and appreciated someone cracking a joke, you really did. I think that was, that was largely recognized, but I don't think this is something, I think this is a human thing to be honest with you. I think this has happened since, you know, since we could all begin to communicate as we were cracking jokes with each other, making each other laugh. So there's a story that reminds me of just going back to how, you know, humans in Helen, they've been using this is there was a guy who went over and he was, he lived with some tribe in Africa and he's like, man, I'll tell you what, they were the funniest people I've ever been around. Like they would be in the middle of an intense hunt and just one guy would just rip a fart and everybody would just laugh because of the fact that it was just, they'd be in this intense thing. There'd be a line that was off to the corner, one guy would rip one and then they'd all just start laughing about it. But I could see how 10,000, 20,000 years ago, that could actually be part of the thing or even if they didn't have communication that's the same way we do. Yeah, it bonds you. I mean, again, yeah, this is one of the reasons why we as human beings look for a sense of humor as one of the qualities, it's one of the top qualities. Either sex looks for in a partner is can this person make me laugh, can this person laugh? Because we know what that signals to us is that when the times get rough, they will be there and they will lift us up or they will help or they will, or I'll be able to help lift them up. It's why it's such an important quality for human beings in just the getting together process too. It's, I think it's, yeah, it's largely a species thing. Interesting. Talk to me about any self-talk that you used to have when things like this was going, were going on and you were in something intense. Is this something that you would, you know, consciously try to have some self-talk of like, this is gonna go well, this is the way that I want it, this is gonna go the way I want it to? Like, did you have strong internal self-talk when stuff was going on? I did, but I never, I never, I tried not to specify the moment because I knew the moment was sometimes me climbing sideways and down. What I would often do if I had the time, if it were a more, a longer duration challenge, such as all of Bud's, right? And I'm just like, again, I mean, I'm only halfway through, right? I would remind myself what my goal was. I do self-talking. This is, I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be in ABC. I do that type of stuff, right? But I would never, I would really, I'd never, I guess a couple of times I tried to, this is going to go well and that doesn't work very well, because sometimes it doesn't go well. And the key is not to back yourself into a corner where immediate success is necessary. Because if it doesn't come, then, gosh, you're worse off than you were. I think it's better to, again, understand, be resolute in the outcome. I know this outcome. I know where I'm headed so that when things don't go well, when things seem like I'm moving away from my goal, I still know I'm going to get there. I might not know how. It might not feel like that, but I still, I'm going to go there. Was there ever a moment where you're like, I don't know if I'm going to get out of this? No, I can't recall a moment where I thought that because I think, well, it's certainly in the seal world and the combat world, that type of thought, I think can start a negative spiral in the wrong direction. Because that means you're focusing on the wrong thing. It's, you always have to say, hey, I will find a way. I mean, this is, let's just solve the problem. Let's work through this. I don't ever remember doing that and I've tried not to do that throughout my life. Now, that's not to say there were times I didn't just feel shitty and miserable and feel like, man, this just feels bad. There were times I could say, gosh, I don't know. I don't know what the way ahead is. I just don't, I feel like I'm not, I don't know. But I never relinquished my outcome. I always said, I'll get there. But man, it doesn't feel like I'm getting there. You know, so, I think that's important too. Yeah. When we're going back to the original question I had with compartmentalization before we dove back into fear, it's obviously extremely important to be able to do that when you're in those moments. But when you're coming back to civilian life and you can realize that there's some aspects of that that are probably not good for being a civilian or relationships that you have. Do you find that there's any tools that you use to be able to, I mean, it's gotta be so trained into you after 21 years to be able to kind of untrain that from yourself? Man, what a great question. That is difficult. It really is too, because it's a, so this gets into attributes and it gets into this idea that we can develop attributes. So in other words, if you're low on something you can make a choice to say, I want to develop that. You can't train it like a skill because you can't be taught and you can't teach it, right? But you can say, hey, I want to be more patient. So I'm going to proactively work on my patients and I'm going to proactively throw myself into environments that test and tease out my patients, right? So I'm gonna go drive on the highway at rush hour, right? Or I'm gonna pick the longest line of the grocery store. I'm gonna do that deliberately. The same thing is required if you're trying to come down off an attribute. So coming back from, I was always vigilant but I was certainly been hyper-vigilant. Now, I don't think I'll ever not be hyper-vigilant. That's the thing. But what I can do is I can deliberately tell myself when I'm walking through the streets in New York City, you don't have to worry about the people right behind you. You can relax a little bit. Maybe a New York City money might. I took a glance, I did a scan and I'm fine, right? One scan, but I don't need to keep on scanning. So I think there's a deliberacy in your ability to relax. And that's very difficult. This is where a lot of the seeds of PTSD happen with most service members is they can't turn it off and they're hyped up and they're amped up in areas that they shouldn't be. And that's very, very stressful to the nervous system. In fact, even sleep, my own sleep issues have come from hyper-vigilance. I slept so lightly and I kept on waking up and I'd wake up at three in the morning and I couldn't fall back to sleep. And when I finally got checked out, your brain is not turning off properly. You're just too hyper-vigilant. It comes from directly from all my time overseas when my brain didn't turn off. So it's difficult, it takes work and it may even require professional help. So if you're having trouble with that, doing it on your own, go seek help because there are people who can help you. So yeah. I'm curious if you and Andrew Heberman ever talk about PTSD. And if you guys, with how many people come back and have the issues that come back, I mean, rightfully so from the way that stuff they've gone through, stuff that they've seen and they come back and it's, they can't turn it off. Like I have a friend who didn't sleep for more than like an hour for a year and a half. And he ended up just having a, he had mold in his place, he didn't realize and it set off a certain part of his brain, but he would walk down the streets and he thought that the buildings were gonna fall on him and he just couldn't fall asleep. And every time he'd start to fall asleep, his brain would wake him back up, which I could imagine could be a part of PTSD. Do you guys ever talk about that or is there research going on, do you know, around that and how maybe they can be helped through figuring out what's going on inside of their brains and the chemicals that are going on? Yeah, well, I know Andrew would be able to talk very effectively about the chemical reactions. We are both reticent to get into the psychology of it. I guess he's into neuroscience and I'm not even in the medical field, right? So however, I think what we have talked about and I think what we can say in general purpose, you know, is that a lot of growth, personal growth, ability to move beyond and grow from a challenge and stress requires an ability to effectively reflect back on that experience and ask yourself some very empowering questions about it. What did I learn? How can I grow? What can I, how can I use those things to move forward and persevere, right? Now, the only way you can ask those questions effectively and get effective answers is to do so from an objective emotional state, which means you have to cleanse yourself as much as possible from the emotions of an event, recover enough so that the emotions event aren't triggered when you actually do the reflection. This is the problem. This is where a lot of folks need psychological help because they have to reframe the event so that it doesn't trigger those emotions. Because as soon as you trigger, you get yourself into a brain state where you can't effectively reflect and you start reliving it again. And so I am certainly not in a position to be able to help anybody do that. What I am in a position to do is help most of us who experienced little tragedies and spin on them for no reason. And you can actually ask yourself, you can actually more deliberately get over the emotions of them because you can actually say, well, I probably overreacted. You can kind of think through it a little bit and say that if you want to look at those and I call it honoring your antagonists, if you want to look at those antagonists in your life effectively and grow from them, then do some recovery so that you distill the emotions around it as much as possible and then effectively ask some questions about it. Now that distilling process may take a few hours, it may take a few days, it may take a few years. In the serious traumatic events, whether it be war or otherwise, when humans go through, go get help to do that. Seriously, I'm not joking. If you feel like you can't do it, you need to get help because there's so many people out there who can help you reframe that. But if you're just feeling like you can do a little bit better in life and so you feel like you've been through some lows that you want to learn a little bit more from, then you can actually be a little bit more proactive in the process. And in fact, you can probably reflect one of the first exercises you can do for yourself is you can say, okay, let me think back to an experience in my life that was painful and I got through it. And then ask yourself, okay, what did I do back then? What were the steps that I took in that? Because that is an example of you growing from challenge and trauma and certainty. So if you have an example, we all do. I mean, we all have antagonists. It's funny, the theatrical definition of protagonist is a person, place, or thing that is for the main idea. And an antagonist is person, place, or thing that is against the main idea, right? So it doesn't have to be a person. It doesn't have to be, it can be a weather event. It can be a layoff. It can be, oh, a global pandemic, right? But it doesn't even have to be evil. It can be like something that just happened. And it's like, oh my God, that was a challenge. So the idea of honoring one's antagonist is to be able to do the appropriate recovery. And the answer to am I recovered enough is can you look back on it with a degree of objectivity? If the answer is yes, then it's time to effectively reflect and then effectively reflect. But some people, they don't take enough time with that recovery. So it's important that you take enough time for that recovery to get to that objective place. And if you're finding trouble doing that, go get help. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, especially when you see the numbers of what could be happening with PTSD just over this past year that we had. But with the attributes, you make a clear distinction the difference between attributes and skills. And for anybody who hasn't read the book yet, I do recommend that everybody goes out, gets it. But give us a little bit of an idea of the difference between the attributes and the skills and what can be built upon between the two of them? Yeah, so again, I had, when I'm talking about, I'm really fascinated with elemental human behavior, like I said, so what are those things? And so in doing that and looking at even the seal training, I had to say, okay, I had to separate skills from these attributes thing. Those skills are things, they're things that we learn, right? None of us are born with the ability to throw a ball or ride a biker or shoot a gun in the seal case. All right, we learn those things, we're taught those things. Okay, skills also direct our behavior in known certain environments, right? So here's how and when to throw a ball or here's how and when to shoot a gun or ride a biker, whatever. And because they are tangible and visible, they're very easy to assess, measure and test. You can see how well anybody does any one of those things, you know? And so oftentimes we get seduced when we're selecting teams or businesses are hiring or even judging ourselves with those tangible results, right? You know, because it can be put on a resume, it can be put on a stat board, you can see how well someone's sales numbers. We often judge ourselves sometimes on our skills, but what skills don't tell us is how we show up in challenge and stress and uncertainty. When the environment becomes uncertain, it's very difficult if not impossible to apply a known skill to an unknown environment, right? So this is where we lean on our attributes. Our attributes are innate, okay? We're all born with levels of adaptability and patience and situation awareness and resilience, okay? Certainly they develop over time and environment, but we can see levels of these things in very small children, right? Anybody who has small kids or hangs around with them, we'll say, well, yeah, that two-year-old is really patient and that two-year-old is really impatient, right? They're there, right? So we're born with them. They inform our behavior rather than direct it, so they tell us how we're going to show up to a situation. So my son's levels of resiliency and perseverance, for example, informed the way he showed up when he was learning how to ride his bike and falling off a dozen times, okay? And then because they're hidden, they're not necessarily kind of in front, they're hidden in the background, they're very difficult to assess, measure and test, right? It's very difficult to sit across from someone, say, in an interview process and see and assess how adaptable they are or how resilient they are, right? So they get missed on a lot of assessment and hiring procedures or practices. The best, most visceral, visible ways you can see these things are in environments of stress challenge and uncertainty, which made the SEAL training that I was running and then even basic SEAL training, perfect laboratories because they're just like, that's all, it's all about throwing guys into stress. But we as just regular people in regular life can actually start to look at our behavior and our performance during times of challenge and stress and say, and to start to ask ourselves, okay, how did I show up? COVID 2020 is actually a great example for all of us. We all went through this period of really deep stress challenge and uncertainty and we can start asking ourselves, hey, where did I fall on these attributes? So the thing about attributes also, the good news is that we all have all of the attributes. We're actually born with all of them. The difference in every one of us are the levels to which we have each. So if we take adaptability, and 10 is high and one is low, I would be, say, a level eight on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside my control, okay? It's fairly easy for me to go with the flow. I just roll with it. Someone else might be a level three, which means the environment changes around them outside their control. It's very difficult for them to show the flow. They're still adaptable. I mean, they still adapt eventually, but it's tough. They have to drag themselves, kicking and screaming. It just means they're low. And again, there's no judging on. So if we line all the attributes up on the side of a wall and they're all dimmer switches, all of the dimmer switch positions are different. So all of our lines would be different. And there's no judgment there because we like judging our hair color. It's just how we show up. We can develop attributes that we're a little lower on, but you have to do the process which I described. It has to be self-motivated. It has to be self-directed. And you have to make a deliberate step into those environments. And in some cases, it's somewhat contextual, right? Because again, because we're not, so my sense is you can probably achieve conscious competence in an attribute that you're a little lower on. I don't think you can achieve unconscious competence. So for example, a person who's inherently impatient and then has kids, okay? And says, okay, I need to develop my patience. That person may develop their patience with their kids, right? But when it comes to other kids, they're still very impatient, right? So I mean, so sometimes it's contextual, but the good news is you don't have to develop all the attributes lower on. You just have to look at your path, look at your own engine, look at where you wanna go and ask yourself, okay, in the context of what I wanna do and my goals, which are the ones I'm strong at and which are the ones I actually need to develop a little bit. Like me and say courage in jumping out of airplanes, right? I don't like heights, I never did. And so I had to say, okay, well, I need to actively and proactively develop my courage about jumping out of airplanes. And so that's what I did. My business partner and I, who's off camera, we were talking about this earlier where how can somebody, when you're in the seals, like you said, it's just stress, challenge, uncertainty. You can put people through that and you can see what's inside. But if someone's listening to this and they're in a business and they're like, well, I wanna hire somebody and they seem like they're the right person. The skill sets look like they're right. Is there a way to take that and actually put it into a business setting of stress, challenges, and uncertainty? Yes, there is. But it's a little bit more difficult because it's subjective, right? You have to, well, first thing as a business as a team, you have to do is outline the attributes that you're looking for, okay? Because the list of attributes that, say, are required to be a good Navy SEAL is gonna be different so the list of attributes required to be a great nurse or a teacher or whatever. So, first you have to come up with that list and then you have to then say, okay, what are some environments that I can create to test and tease those? And they're gonna have to be a little bit more uncertain and a little bit uncomfortable. It doesn't have to be masochistic, right? I mean, you certainly don't have to throw... With your employees? Yeah, you don't have to take your employees down to the surfstone and Coronado and throw them in there. Because it's not contextual, it's not gonna teach you anything anyway about what you need, it's gonna, you know. So, but like for example... It'd be a fun team outing to do that. Well, not that fun. And it might be a little bit illegal, who knows? But I would say, you know, an example would be if you and I wanted to hire someone who's great at sales. Well, we know that sales, there's a skill level. There are certain skills that could be applied to the job of sales. All right, but a lot of sales is attributes, right? It's adaptability, it's flexibility, it's emotional intelligence, things like that. You and I could say, all right, as a hiring process, we're gonna bring this person in and we're gonna have them give us a sales pitch on this coffee mug, okay? And we tell the person, hey, when you come in, you're gonna give us a sales pitch on the coffee mug, okay? That person comes in, sits in front of you and I and begins to pitch, right? Or is about to start. Now, if we let them go, okay, that person most likely will have rehearsed and done everything and they will do a fantastic job and you and I would be like, man, that guy or gal was really good, right? We would have learned almost nothing about what we need to know. Or right before they start, we can say, hey, you're no longer, something's changed, you're no longer pitching this coffee mug, you're gonna sell this pencil, okay? And there's an AV problem, so there's no slides. Let's see what happens. Now, at that point, we're gonna see something different and this point, you and I would have to proactively disengage from judging skill, because what we were gonna see in that moment might look pretty ugly. But now we're not looking at skills anymore, we're looking at how they're adapting. And what I would be looking for particularly is like, okay, how frustrated, how flustered are they getting when we just said that? Or like, okay, let me try this and then they start. And it might be ugly, but they're really humorous about it, they're laughing, they're funny. I'd be like, okay, that's someone who has some of the attributes I'm looking for, right? Versus someone who's getting frustrated, flustered, angry, you know, starting to, it may be ugly, but we're starting to look at attributes instead of skills. And so you can begin to, and this is some of the work I do with businesses, is A, helping them identify the attributes they're looking for, and then B, helping them come up with some environments that inside of which they can start seeing this stuff. So they can, A, they can hire properly, but they can also start developing their current team members, because they need to look at their own team and say, okay, what are we as a team? How do we show up? Are we hitting everything we need to hit? Do we need to develop this? You know, one of the great experiences out there is these escape rooms, you know, taking these, you know, business teams that go to escape rooms, that's a great way to start seeing attributes. You have to be, you have to do some work and say, okay, what attributes am I looking for? But I mean, you can start to, you know, you're throwing people into uncertainty and challenge and stress, you know, and you can start seeing how people show up. So the person who seemed like the rockstar who's now suddenly, you know, or you thought, hey, maybe this is, this person might be a leader because this person's telling me that they, who starts barking orders and yelling at people and, you know, and dictating. It's like, ooh, actually that's not what we're looking for in leadership, right? Whereas the quiet person who said nothing is now like, hey, let's solve the problem. How about this? And it's calm and you can start to see stuff, which is cool. So I don't own any stock in an escape room, so I'm not plugging it for any reason. Sure, that sounds like a lot more fun hiring process than anything else. It's just like, let's do a group interview and then we're all gonna go to the escape room and see who can be the best leader. The key is knowing what you're looking for because if you do it without knowing what you're looking for, it's a waste of time, right? And you have to, and you can't be looking, you can't be looking for the wrong things. A lot of people say, oh, I wanna take my team out to do some offsite physical activity, okay? And they do some sort of competition, okay? Well, all you're doing is seeing who's the most competitive people. I mean, and you're not necessarily, because guess what? Competitive people are great in some scenarios, non-competitive people are great in other scenarios, right? So you want both, right? So you have to make sure you understand what you're looking for before you either create the environment or throw people into the environment. Yeah, I love that. And so when you're talking about, you know, that the person's stepping up and being a leader in different ways, I love the way that you talk about leadership. So before we dive in and talk about it, how do you frame leadership so people can kinda get an idea of the way that you see it? Yeah, leadership is a confusing word because we often conflate it with being in charge. And they're not the same thing, one's a noun and one's a verb. Leadership is a behavior, it's not a position. And we don't get to self-designate as leaders. We don't get to say, I'm a leader, right? To do so would be saying, like you're good looking or funny, right? You don't get to make that decision. Other people decide, other people decide whether or not they look at you as someone they want to follow. And it's done and they do that because of the way you behave. And so leadership becomes a series of behaviors. And this is a very basic concept that most people miss but know intuitively. If we think about, if everybody in your audience right now, if I give them 10 seconds and say, think about someone in your life who you consider a leader, okay? Picture that person, all right? Once you have that person in your brain, you're on your head, ask yourself, what did they do? Why do you consider that person a leader? And immediately that the people in your audience and you and I are gonna start thinking about behaviors. Well, they were humble, they were accountable. They took a risk on me, but they had my back. They pushed me forward and they showed me who I was. They pushed me to be a better person, right? All these behaviors, it's not that no one, I guarantee no one's sitting in the audience saying, they told me what to do. They gave me a good list of jobs to do every day. They gave me a raise when I deserved a raise. They wrote some nice things. That's not what great leaders do. And this is why when you're in organizations or teams, it's often, sometimes too often, where the person in the hierarchical position of leadership is not in fact seen as a leader. It's like the guy over there or the gal over there who does whatever job that no one thinks about, but everybody goes to when they have issues, right? That's leadership. And so the attributes I talk about in the book are the attributes that lead to the behaviors that cause people to designate leaders. And again, we've, in the work I did, I've done really around the world since I retired in the leadership space, we go around and we ask crowds, say, hey, describe what great leaders do. And we'd make lists and we'd write on our whiteboard. And then we'd have lists of like 20, 30 things. And what's interesting is the same words always came up. It was the same shit, right? The lists were always the same. It didn't matter where we were. We were US, we were Europe, we were Africa. If it was millennials, it was baby boomers, it was, you know, Generation X, who knows? It didn't matter. It was always the same list and it's these behaviors and they're very elemental and we know it. It's just intuitive. And the same thing for being a good teammate. This is why the team, the teamability attributes are also behaviors because you don't get to call yourself a great teammate either. Yeah. So let's say you have a business, someone out there is listening, they have, you know, a position that they need to promote to. They have three people that they're considering for that and they're trying to figure out who would be the best leader, what are some of the attributes that you're gonna look for in somebody. And maybe even if you happen to know any of ways that they could put them through the stress and the uncertainty and everything to find out who that person is. Yeah, well, I mean, you could create environments in that moment, but if you have three people who've been in the organization, then you already have a massive amount of information data staring at you in the face and it's the other people in that organization. Yeah, would you ask the other people about it? Oh, of course. This is the problem with most organizations. To include the military in many cases is that the promotion systems are designed so that you promote based on achievement, right? How good are you at your job? Yeah, or seniority. Or seniority, right, yeah. And if you're good and you're senior, you promote. Well, what does that translate into? You get into a position of leadership and suddenly you think as a leader, well, I was the best at my job and I was the most senior, which means I know the best, which means I guess my job is to tell other people how to do the job, right? This is the seeds of micromanagement, which is in Eddie's opinion, the antithetical to good leadership, right? So what happens in organizations is they oftentimes promote, you get put into a position of leadership based on being great at your job. And then when you're in that position of people having people in your spend of care, no one tells you that your job has fundamentally changed. Your job is now to help empower. This is the other problem with the word leadership, right? And the word leader, because leader by definition, at least one of the definitions, the noun is in front, the person in front, okay? The leader of the race or whatever, that's the person in front. We all know that the best leaders are oftentimes in back, right? They're pushing people forward, they're empowering. They're invisible in some cases. You don't even know they're there, right? They're just these presence that they're, in fact, I used to tell my junior officers today, you have to understand what I call the irony of leadership, which is if you do your job correctly, you work yourself out of a job eventually. You concede your own obsolescence because you've created an environment where they don't need you anymore. That should be the goal of every leader, to be honest with you. There's a humility involved in that though. That was actually exactly what I was gonna talk about is when I think of, I know that's one of the attributes as well. When I think of the best leaders that I've always known, they're never somebody who just talks about how great they are. They always talk about somebody else's win. And so, how important do you feel humility is for a leader? It's of utmost importance for a couple reasons. First of all, it shows that that person, that leader, the person in charge, doesn't know everything. And that shows an understanding that the journey is just as important as anything else. Because we all know anybody and shows a lack of arrogance and egotism and all that stuff. We've all seen those people who show up and they're like, I know it, I've arrived, right? None of us trust that person. It doesn't induce trust at all. Because again, trust and leadership are almost the same. You can't think of someone as a leader if you don't trust them, right? You really can't. So the behaviors are very simple. The behaviors that cause someone to be called a leader are very similar to the behaviors that cause someone to trust another person. And so, at first it shows, hey, this is a person who is displaying the fact that they don't know it all. And that's important. Because then you're showing yourself as someone who is always ready and willing to learn. What is that doing? That's modeling the behavior you wanna see more of, right? With my kids, if I tell my kids, hey, I don't know that, let's look it up. What am I showcasing to them? I'm showcasing, hey, sometimes dad doesn't know and here's how he goes about finding it out. He's curious enough. And so, you develop in your kids a process by which they can discover versus just giving them the answer. The other reason why it's really important is it displays a vulnerability that is critical in high-performing teams. High-performing teams, vulnerability, which is oftentimes stigmatized as just showing your weaknesses. But actually, it's the idea of showing your weaknesses and your strengths. Wearing both of them on your sleeves, because you need to create an environment where you know exactly when you can lean on someone else and they know exactly when they can lean on you. And then the team starts to operate in that way. As a leader, what that shows, what humility shows is it tells, it showcases, if not says explicitly to all the members of the team, I need you. And that's important, it really is. I mean, as a SEAL troop commander, I didn't know what my snipers knew. I didn't know what my, I mean, I knew I had background in it, right? But to the level, to the granularity that they knew it, my breachers, the door kickers, all these experts, I needed them. I absolutely needed them. And they needed me for what I knew, because I knew stuff that they didn't know. And they didn't have time to know, right? So as a leader who is humble, it displays this kind of implicit message, sometimes explicit, I need you, you're important, you have purpose. People just want to know that they have value, they have purpose. They are valued in an organization and a team. And if the leader shows them that by saying, I need you, you are important here, you are someone we need, I need, it's huge. By the way, this doesn't happen just with business teams. This happens, a great marriage is a high performing team, what does a great couple do? They need each other, right? And they're explicit about when they need each other and they're there to support and lean. And that's important too. Yeah, and I could also see that from parenting as well. Totally, yeah. So when you're looking at a company, you walk into a company, do you find that a lot of times that, let me ask you in a different way, what's the difference when you walk into a company that looks like it's a complete shit show? And you walk into a company where like, they're actually doing really well, we're just gonna add some fuel to the fire. Yeah, you can often tell by the level of safety and vulnerability that is displayed. The more safe and vulnerable an environment it is, the more transparency you have. One of the, here's a, and so there's different environments, the different situations where you can see this play out. One of the situations you can see this play out is in debriefs, okay? So in the military you have what's called the AAR, the after action review, or the critical event debrief. After every, and most of the military does this, I know certainly in spec ops, after everything we did, whether it was a mission or a training evolution, before you cleaned your gear, before you cleaned yourself, before you did anything, you all got around and you basically asked yourself three questions, what went right, what went wrong, and what could we do better next time, okay? And you had this debrief. And sometimes these debriefs were brutal, right? Because it was like, okay, that got screwed up, that got screwed up and it was like, it's hard, it's harsh, but it was always from the context of making us better. So the person who screwed up wasn't the target, learning was the target. And in that environment, what happened, because the culture was imbued with that philosophy, the person who screwed up was oftentimes the very first person who stood up and said, hey, I screwed this up, let me tell you what I did wrong and how we learned. Because the person knew it was a safe environment. Any environment you go into, any business environment where people are afraid to show their mistakes, there's gonna be issues. Now again, I know there's people out there who'll say, well, now all businesses can succeed. I will concede that some businesses can do very well and have a pretty toxic environment. But what you're not gonna have are long-term players and people who stick around and people who feel fulfilled. You might have some people who own the business or who are at the top levels who are making consistent money, but the environment underneath is not gonna be, it's gonna be pretty transactional. No one's gonna feel a lot of pride being there. And it's not gonna be a durational thing. So if you are a leader who endeavors to create an organization or team that is long-lasting, that people feel proud to be a part of, that the turnover rate is low, and that operates pretty damn effectively when things go south and sideways, when pandemics hit or the world changes or whatever, you're gonna wanna create an environment of safety and trust because that's the foundational element of any high-performing team is this foundation of trust. So I'm gonna take a complete turn because we're talking about humility, but I wanna talk about the opposite of that, which is also an attribute, which is narcissism as well. So let's talk about narcissism and the, the attribute, but also the importance of it that you found as well. Yeah, so narcissism, the definition of narcissism, at least the way I define it in the book, is the desire to stand out, to be recognized, to be adored and noticed, okay? Now, when I explored this as an attribute, what I had to do was some deep inner work because I had to ask my, well, first thing I did is I went to the DSM-5, which is the psychological Bible, basically outlines all the different psychological diseases and things like that. And so I looked up narcissistic personality disorder, which is a codified bad thing, okay? And in the DSM-5, it outlines nine criteria. They're basically sentences that describe, you know, narcissistic people. And the, I think it says if you have five or more, then you are, you qualify as having the disease, okay? And I read those and I didn't have, I didn't have five or more, which is good. But what I did realize is that a lot of the stuff in the sentences wasn't that foreign to me. It wasn't like I was reading that and saying, oh, I never do that, or I never do that. So it's okay, that's- Sometimes. That's clue number one, right? That I'm not necessarily clean on this one. But then I asked myself, okay, why did I become a Navy SEAL? Because my friends and I have talked about this too, you know? And I was a 22 year old kid, and sure I was patriotic, and sure I wanted to serve my country, but I also wanted to be a badass, you know? I wanted to see if I could do something that very few people could do, you know? There's seeds of narcissism in that thinking, because as human beings, we all at some point in our lives, want you to stand out. We all at some point want to be adored. We want to be recognized. We want to be noticed. This goes back to infancy. And this is where you get burst with three chemicals. So I got it wrong for humor. The three chemicals you get burst with when you're getting paid attention to by your parents as an infant or by anybody. You're getting a burst of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. So in humor, it's endorphins in when you're getting paid attention to, it's serotonin. And that feels great. It doesn't change when we're adults, right? When you're getting the standing ovation, you know, or the actors are getting their awards, right? They're getting burst with that. It feels great. So I think what we have to recognize is that narcissistic personality disorder as a disorder is bad. It's also rare. I think they say it's about only 1% of the population have the actual disorder. Obviously there are people on the edges, you know? But anyway, you know, the ability to, the desire to set sometimes audacious and even narcissistic goals can be an incredible driver. It's why it's one of the drive attributes, right? Because that desire to be special can be a driver to work harder than you've ever worked before, to push longer, faster, better, you know, just to be something, to take your life to places where they hadn't been before. So we have to use our human narcissistic elements to our advantage. And then we have to be very careful because the big caution label that comes with this is that if we get over the edge, right? If we are too narcissistic, it's like a vampire staring in the mirror. It's impossible to see in ourselves, right? So the inoculation to that is you surround yourself with people who you know, love and trust and love and trust you enough that pull you in and slap you down when you're getting a little bit too out over your skis, right? The grounding wires in your lives. This is my wife of 20 years. This is my teammates, right? You can tell narcissists, right? So narcissists are really easy to see from the outside. And what's the first thing you see? You see the group they're hanging around, right? You know, if you're curious, if you're not sure whether you're not a narcissist, narcissists look at the people you're surrounding yourself with. If you're surrounding yourself with a sycophants, you're in trouble, okay? If you're surrounding yourself with people who always put you at the center of attention, you're in trouble, all right? If you're surrounding yourself with people who always are telling the truth, you're not always a center. In fact, you're oftentimes not, right? If you do get out over your skis, you get slapped down, either with humor or otherwise, right? You have a good group of people. There's candor there. There's candor with care that's going on that people are telling you the truth and keeping you reined in. That's how we use narcissism to our advantage, but not get it to overblown. Love that. Well, I could do this forever. This is great. We've only covered like three of the 25 attributes. So clearly people are gonna have to go out and buy this book, but I wanna ask you a question I ask people at the end, and I'm really curious for you. So there's a phrase that says, you die twice. Once is the moment you stop breathing. The second time is the last time someone says your name. For you, what would you want people to say about you before that second death? What do you hope they say? The legacy that you leave? Great husband and father, yeah. I think it's funny, we just have a discussion prior to this about identity. I'm really fascinated with identity. And I think whatever identity we place on ourselves, whatever we put after the two words, I am. I think I am are the two most powerful words in the human life. So whatever we place after those two words is where we drive ourselves, right? But whatever we do, whatever identity we do place, we serve that identity the most. And I think oftentimes we get confused or even sometimes unconsciously biased towards identities that don't necessarily serve us as well as we do. So I'm always really cognizant of what my premier identity is and will always be. And at the end of my life, if I've done nothing, I want my wife to say he was a great husband and I want my kids to say he was a great dad. If there's nothing else, I'm good, right? Now, if I can do some other stuff, that's cool too, right? Great author, good teammate, some other things help the plan a little bit, but those are the two basic things. Love it. Rich DeVinie, I appreciate it. For anybody who wants to go out and buy the book, I recommend it. The book is The Attributes to 25 Drivers for Optimal Performance. Appreciate it for being here. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me, it's been great. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you love this video, I've got another one you're gonna love. Just click right here and watch it.