1006: A Navy SEAL Shares the Hidden Attributes Enabling Optimal Performance with Rich Diviney

Pete Mockaitis
Rich, welcome.

Rich Diviney
Thank you, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about some of your wisdom associated with The Attributes, but I think I’m going to put you on the spot and ask that you kick us off with a thrilling, riveting tale related to your time in the Navy SEALs and/or training that’s also instructive and tees us up. So, no pressure, but I want you to check every box with your opening story.

Rich Diviney
All right. Well, so I went into the Navy SEALs. I joined the teams in 1996. I graduated at Purdue University, was commissioned as an officer, went straight to training, and then got through training, which is always a good thing because it’s about a 90% attrition rate at SEAL training, which is called BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training.

And so, I went through, got through in ’96. Beginning of the career was, you know, it was normal, but there was nothing going on. Of course, 9/11 happened and things got very busy and kinetic. But what happened between 2005-2010, is I went to one of our very specialized SEAL commands, and that selection process was unique and intense. And I actually took over that selection process in 2010. And in doing so, really had to figure out what we were kind of looking for performance-wise.

So, in other words, to get to this command, you had to have stellar performance reviews, you had to have recommendations, psychological exams, physical tests, all that stuff. And when you went, you went through a nine-month course, a selection course, and 50% of the guys who went through didn’t make it, right? So, 50% of the top Navy SEALs did not make it through, and that’s okay. Every selection course implies attrition, but I think what was not okay and what they asked me to do was that we weren’t able to effectively describe or understand why guys weren’t making it through.

We’d say something like, “Well, the guy couldn’t shoot very well.” Okay, well, you tell a Navy SEAL that caliber, he can’t shoot very well. That’s like, I mean, this guy’s probably shot more rounds than most people in the military. So, it’s disingenuous to him and disingenuous to us. And so, they asked me, they said, “Rich, we need you to look at performance and figure out what’s going on.” And so, I had to really deconstruct performance.

And the couple stories that I’ll kind of harken back to, that hammered this home for me in terms of what I needed to look at, were these. So, in basic SEAL training, in BUD/S, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big boats on your head, you spend hundreds of hours exercising with 300-pound telephone poles, running around with those things, freezing in the surf zone. I was doing this work in 2010 and I had already been on hundreds of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I can tell you with certainty, never on one of them did I carry a big heavy boat on my head or a 300-pound telephone pole, right?

So, what I recognized in that moment was that they weren’t training us in those moments to be Navy SEALs. They weren’t training us in the skills of being SEALs. They were actually teasing out these qualities. They were putting us in these environments to tease out these qualities to see if we had what it took to do the job.

So, then I kind of thought back and I remembered a story I’d heard from an older instructor, and he said, “Rich, you know, years ago, a kid showed up to SEAL training, and he walked into the instructor’s offices, and he said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And the instructor said, ‘Okay. Well, you have to do a swim test.’ And the kid said, ‘Fine.’”

So, they took him out to the pool, and it’s an easy test, like 50 meters, so 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. He gets all ready to go, and as soon as he jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. And at the bottom of the pool, he begins walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, he touches one end, he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end.

He comes up, he’s gasping for air, the instructor looks at him and says, “What the heck are you doing?” And the kid is still trying to catch his breath, looks at the instructor, and says, “I’m sorry, instructor, I don’t know how to swim.” And at that point, the instructor looks at him and pauses, and then he says, “That’s okay, we can teach you how to swim.”

And the idea is “Why did the instructors say that?” The instructor said that because he knew, if this kid had the attributes, the qualities to show up to Navy SEAL training, one of the most elite maritime units on the planet, and he didn’t know how to swim, he had everything inside of him to be a Navy SEAL. Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be easy.

So, that was really the big story, the big “aha” for me in terms of bifurcating the terms between skills and attributes, and the fact that if we look at just skill, we’re missing a huge percent of the performance picture because we have to look at these qualities that people bring to the table if we want to understand performance at very elemental levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yes, let’s dig in to some depth in a moment, the distinction between skills and attributes. I think that’s really thought-provoking and useful. But first, I’m curious, with your specific charge, in terms of, we’ve got to get to the bottom of why. Why are half of these super highly trained, experienced operators not getting through? What was the answer?

Rich Diviney
Well, the answer was, we were looking for some specific attributes, and the guys who weren’t making it through either didn’t…well, they just didn’t have enough of them. So, for example, a couple of the attributes I talk about in the book are the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.

When you are doing, for example, the level of operations that we’re doing, in this case, close quarter combat, where you’re going in and clearing rooms to rescue hostages, it’s a very rapid, a very fast, very dynamic environment, inside of which you have to do live fire, you have to take instruction, you have to learn, you have to upload it, you have to be very cognizant of your buddies, you have to move quickly, you have to hit your targets.

And I think what was happening, most of the guys would drop out during that phase, and I think what we found was that they were, again, they didn’t have none of these, none of us have no attributes or zero attributes, but, in this case, they didn’t have enough of an ability to run into environment, be situationally aware enough to pick a target, focus in on that target, address that target, and then switch to the next target rapidly.

So, it was, I think that the attributes that we didn’t see that were the most predominant in predicting failure, or at least attrition, were enough of those mental acuity attributes. And then another one would just be resilience. Resilience is defined as this ability to bounce back to baseline. It’s not really getting back up when you get hit, it’s to be able to bounce back to get back to baseline.

So, you think about that rubber band, you stretch, you let it go, it goes back to its original shape. Can you bounce back from hardship or even success? And the guys who would be screwing up and they’d get the spotlight on them and just get hammered, hammered, hammered, some guys would just be able to wash that off and bounce back. Other guys would just go into a spiral.

And so, that was, if we saw that, that was certainly an attribute that we needed to see a predominance of because we can’t have folks who can’t bounce back to baseline rapidly enough. So, those were probably some of the most predominant ones, and then there were others that we kind of identified too, but less predominant.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued, Rich, we talk about attributes versus skill, is this mental acuity stuff and the resilience bounce-backing stuff not a learnable, trainable, developable skill?

Rich Diviney
So, it’s developable. It’s not teachable. Let me just identify the terms here just really quick for the audience. A skill is not inherent to our nature. In other words, none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. We’re taught to do those things; we’re trained to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments, “Here’s how and when to throw a ball or ride a bike.”

And then skills are very visible. They’re very easy to see, which means they’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can put scores around them, statistics, and otherwise. You can put them on resumes, which is why we get seduced by skills often when we’re picking teams or performance evaluating.

But what skills don’t tell us is how we’re going to show up in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. So, this is when we lean on our attributes. So, attributes, on the other hand, are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of patience, situational awareness, adaptability.

Now, you can develop them over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. So, anybody who has small kids or has, you know, experienced small kids will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient, and there are one-and-a-half-year-olds who are impatient. So, there’s a nature/nurture element to attributes.

Attributes don’t direct our behavior; they inform our behavior. They tell us how we’re going to show up to an environment. So, my son’s levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and falling off a dozen times doing so. And then finally, because they’re difficult to see, they’re very difficult to assess, measure, and test, but they come up the most viscerally, and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty.

So, the idea is we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So, if we take adaptability, for example, and seven is high and one is low, I’d be a six on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it.

Someone else might be a level three. If the same thing happens to them, it’s difficult for them to go with the flow and roll with it, there’s friction there. They’re still adaptable because all human beings are. It’s just harder. So, if we’re trying to line these up like dimmer switches, we’d all have different dimmer switch settings.

So, the idea is, yes, you can take an attribute you’re low on and develop it, but you can’t do it the same way as a skill, because…and just one more thing for your audience, a way to distinguish between an attribute and a skill is to ask yourself a question, “Can I teach it or can it be taught?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably a skill. If the answer is no, it’s probably an attribute.

So, Pete, you could say to me, “Rich, I want to go to a range and learn how to shoot a pistol and hit a bullseye.” I could take you to the range and teach you how to do that in a couple hours. That’s a skill. Or you could say, “Rich, I want to learn how to be more patient.” I can’t teach you that, all right? That has to be self-developed.

So, to develop an attribute you’re low on takes three factors, three things. The first thing is you have to know you’re low on it. The second thing is you have to have a need, desire, or motivation to develop it. What do I mean by that? Well, we have to understand that just because you’re low on an attribute does not mean you need to develop it. In fact, developing that attribute may be detrimental to what you’re trying to do.

I always say the stand-up comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy stand-up comic, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t like that joke?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“Really, boy, I feel terrible. Let’s just call of the set.”

Rich Diviney
Or, I don’t even tell the joke. So, yeah, just because you’re low doesn’t mean, you know, in fact, you’re being low might be exactly why you’re so good at what you do. But assuming both are true, you’re low on and you feel like developing will actually help your niche, the third is the most important. To develop an attribute, you must go find environments and place yourself environments that tease and test that attribute.

So, if you want to develop your patience, you have to go find environments that test and tease and develop your patience, whatever that looks like for you. It could be, “I’m going to drive in traffic. I’m going to deliberately drive in traffic.” Or, “I’m going to pick the longest line in the grocery store to stand in.”

I always say “Have kids. That’ll develop patience.” But whatever that is, you can do that for any attribute. So, those dimmer switches are not, and our attributes aren’t immutable, but they certainly take more efforts and consideration in terms of developing them or increasing them.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you there in terms of, I think the two-hour shooting example is handy because it’s not like, “Hey, there’s just a few guidelines associated with lining up the sights, or your breathing, or whatever. The fundamentals are there, “Okay. Now I know those things and I’m going to do those things. And, oh, wow!”

Because I think maybe one thing that’s coming to mind is you’ll see transformational results from zero to just a few hours later. It has been my experience with learning skills, like, “Oh, I had no idea.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I kind of know the fundamental things. I’m just going to do those things, and now we know the results are way better.”

Versus patience. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not like, “Okay, in two hours, I’m going to teach you deep breathing and thinking about where they’re coming from, and now you’re done. Your patience has been tripled in quality.” I hear you. It doesn’t tend to work nearly that quickly in practice.

Rich Diviney
Yeah, does not work, I guess, linearly. And we have to think about attributes. The reason why attributes are so important is because it defines who we are at our most raw, our raw selves when you-know-what is hitting the fan, when the plan doesn’t go, the plan goes out the window, we’re steeped in uncertainty and chaos, these attributes are what rise to the fore. All the rest of it goes away.

I always kind of joke, and you and I talked before you hit record, about personality tests. I think most of them are fun and great. The only thing about personality we have to consider is that when the you-know-what hits the fan, personality goes out the window, and we, at our most raw, are running on these attributes.

And I think the gift I was given in SEAL training, and my teammates were given, is that we, from day one of SEAL training, started to understand who we are at our most raw and started to understand who each other were at our most raw, because then we knew, okay, when everything is dropping in chaos and uncertainty, we know exactly who’s going to show up and we know when to lean on each other and when to support each other and all that stuff. That’s the importance of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. Well, so I took the assessment, and it was impressive, 250 items, but it went by super quick. And I got a kick out of how I have taken a number of these as well, such as StrengthsFinder and more, and the results sort of have some confluence, you know. So, I mean, I guess, while we’re distinguishing, we got skills, we got attributes, we got personality, how about strengths? Where do we put that into this?

Rich Diviney
So, I’m glad you asked, because when we talk about attributes, we don’t talk about good or bad. What we talk about is your performance fingerprints, what’s your unique performance picture. And the reason why we don’t talk about strengths and weaknesses is because your top attributes, your top five attributes are just as meaningful and have done just as much for your success as your bottom five. In other words, you being low on your bottom five is also why you’re successful.

Now, when we look at it honestly, what we say is, let’s do some honest introspection and ask ourselves, “Okay, these are my top five, these are my bottom five, or these are my order ranked, whatever. What are ways that this has served me? But what are also ways that this can maybe not serve me?” because that’s when we have to understand some blind spots.

So, the attributes equation is not about strengths and weaknesses. It’s about where you show up performance-wise, and where you might want to either dial down or dial up certain attributes or even develop attributes if you so desire. But there’s no judgment, which is powerful because it takes judgment out of the picture, which makes teams run faster and better.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, so there’s 41 of them in the report. But as I read through the names, they all seem, like, good. Like, I’d like more discipline, charisma, confidence, courage, empathy, adaptability.

Rich Diviney
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds great. I’d love to have more of that.” But you’re saying like, well, having a whole lot of something is not always beneficial in a certain context, nor is having a very low score on something detrimental in a given context.

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah. Any one of the attributes, we could make an argument for pros and cons for that attribute, and we could also make an argument where at extremes, we could certainly have detriment. But the idea is the pros and cons are what you look at, and you start to say, “Okay, this is how and why I perform the way I do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking right now, so in my attributes, my highest, we’ve got creativity, cunning, innovativeness, open-mindedness, integrity. And it’s funny, because right now I’m going through a process of getting a mortgage, and from my perspective, it’s just kind of like, “Okay, guys, so you can see I got credit, I got assets, I’ve got income. So, like, we’re good to go here, right?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But the answer is no, like, “We have to comply with all of the things perfectly so that, in the United States the way it works, because we’re going to resell this to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who need to have their standards complied with to a T, and that’s why there’s a low cost of capital associated with this.”

“So, your creative ideas associated with how you might prove this or that is not what I want. I want you to go to your bank and ask them for this very specific document, and then include that along with 12 other very specific documents, and then we’re good to go.”

Rich Diviney
So, it’s funny you should say that. By the way, your results are great. I’ve never seen creativity, cunning, and innovativeness all in the top five. All three of those are attributes that involve imagination, but they’re different to an extent. And this is where we have to get precise with the language-ing. This is one of the things we find very powerful about the attributes content, because we’re very precise with the etymology of each word.

So, creativity is the ability to create something into existence that otherwise didn’t exist. This is the artist with the blank canvas, the writer with the blank sheet of paper, the sculptor with the lump of clay. You’re able to create new ideas that didn’t otherwise exist. Innovativeness, on the other hand, is the ability to take something currently in existence and use your imagination to iterate on it and make it better. And then cunning is the ability to use imagination to problem-solve in ways that are outside-the-box thinking.

So, you have a very powerful trio there of using imagination on all different fronts and facets. The other thing about this is you’re also high on integrity, which means, you know, cunning, people, a lot of times, view cunning as pejorative, but cunning is not pejorative. Cunning is just outside-the-box thinking.

But I always say the way we use cunning can be pejorative. In other words, you can use cunning malevolently, that’s Bernie Madoff, or you can use cunning benevolently, that’s Oscar Schindler. The fact that you’re high on integrity means you’re going to use all this stuff in a benevolent way, which is pretty cool.

And then, of course, your open-mindedness does not surprise me because, as someone with all three of those imaginative attributes on top, you’re someone who is constantly taking in and open to new ideas because it probably just informs your ability to use more imagination. So, I think it’s a fascinating top five. What are your thoughts when you see the top five?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does ring true in terms of StrengthsFinder, I think Ideation was my number one, and I do find that when I am in settings, like teamwork settings, that’s what lights me up the most, is that, “Let’s figure out the new, cool, creative way to do the thing.” And what is less exciting to me is, “Okay. Well now we know what that is, so just do that hundreds of times repeatedly for the next decade.” It’s, like, “Ooh, can someone else please execute that? Ugh.”

Rich Diviney
Right. By the way, let’s just talk about now your bottom five. What you just said there is also indicated by your bottom five because you’re low on patience, which means you don’t really like to…you won’t bang your head against the wall, and then persistence. Persistence is an interesting one. It’s defined as a kind of a firm steadfastness in understanding there’s a course of action and sticking to the same course of action over and over again because you know it’ll work.

So, I usually say it’s the stonecutter approach. The stonecutter basically taps that rock in the same place a hundred times and nothing happens because he knows that after the 101st or 107th tap, it’s going to break. That’s persistence.

You’re someone who’s constantly trying to ideate, which means you like new ideas, and you have little patience for sticking to the same course if it doesn’t make sense or if it’s boring. You will shift very rapidly. Where it could be a blind spot for you is you have to say to yourself, “Okay, well, there might be times where staying the course is, in fact, what needs to happen.” And that might be where you have to lean on someone else in your team who’s better at persistence, who can basically say, “Hey, Pete, we need to just stay the course.”

Your high imagination may find you in a position where you’re just constantly inundated with new ideas and it’s tough for you to take one and stick to one because you’re just constantly having new ideas. And again, this is not that these things do happen. These are just blind spots that may happen based on the way these attributes line up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s really true, and if I am not seeing some level of results when I’m doing a thing in my own world, I feel like I need some pretty robust evidence that this course is ultimately correct. It’s like, “I did the thing three times, I haven’t seen any good results or effects flow from it yet.” So, I’ve coaxed myself, and everyone says, “Well, Pete, take a look at these impressive results on the random control trial, you know, that lasted six weeks, so let’s give it the six weeks first.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, give it some time. Give it some time. And again, this is stuff you can do. Again, it’s not that you don’t have these attributes. They’re just prioritized in your behavior lower than the other ones, which means you have to do more, you have to have more deliberacy in when you have to dial them up. Like you said, you have to consciously make the effort to say, “You know what, I just need to stay to this.” It’s a conscious thing. Whereas, if you’re just acting without thinking, you’re likely going to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is fun for me. I’ve got a big report. So, what if people who don’t have that? What do they do?

Rich Diviney
Well, yeah, they could always take the assessment, but I think one of the things folks can do is they can begin to interrogate their performance. And the way we do that is we look back at our performance, especially during times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, and only because that’s when these things are most visible and visceral, and start asking ourselves some honest questions about how we showed up.

So, if we went through a situation and we say to ourselves, “Well, as everything was changing around me, I was upset and it didn’t feel good and I couldn’t really flow. It was hard for me to flex and flow.” That might indicate you’re a little low on adaptability, and that’s okay. It just gives you an idea of where you stand on these.

And you can start to think about these attributes in terms of how you’ve performed. You could think about how you perform in every day, all day, but especially during stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Experiential knowledge is the most powerful in this case. And I would even encourage those who do take the assessment to look at their results and then begin to think about times in their lives where these attributes have served them or have not served them, and start to say to themselves, “Okay, I can see now, experientially, how and why these show up the way they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I guess I’m curious, if you find yourself in a context, maybe it’s a job, or role, project, where it kind of seems like the attributes you have are not a great match up, “Maybe I am a super empathetic stand-up comic.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Well, I always say, I mean, I like to think of human beings as cars, just like the movie. Some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us are Ferraris, and there’s no judgment because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do, and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do. But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what we’re running with because the friction in our lives, that we’re talking about, might be because we’ve been a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track this whole time, or a Ferrari trying to run on a Jeep track.

And so, I think what folks can do, if there is significant kind of friction in one’s life, they may, in fact, be in a position, in a role, in a job, in a niche that is not suited to their normal attribute profile. And what’s happening there is they’re going to the job and they’re having to consciously behave differently, consciously dial up or dial down their attributes so that they can actually conduct the job, which you can do, that’s okay, but it doesn’t feel as good.

So, the idea would be, ask yourself, “Okay, what are my attribute sets? How does that performance picture look? And what might be some niches inside of which I could use this to excel?” And then if you’re a leader of people, you have to start looking at performance differently. In other words, low performance might not be because that person doesn’t know what they’re doing. It might be because their attributes don’t line up properly.

And that happened to me when I was commanding officer of a SEAL command, and I had a supply department. I had eight people; four people in this future look kind of innovative type cell, and then four people in the logistics kind of admin bookkeeping cell. And I had one sailor in the innovative cell that was not performing, bringing down morale.

And I brought her in, I started talking to her, and within 10 minutes I recognized her unique attribute set was a complete misfit for what I had her doing, but it was perfect for this other thing. So, all I did was shift her. I shifted her roles, her performance skyrocketed. So, it is about helping people get in the right seat on the bus as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have 41 attributes, and if you don’t have a report in front of you, is there a bite-sized, manageable way you can think about these in a few categories so we can kind of map ourselves out a little bit?

Rich Diviney
The attributes themselves, I’ve broken into categories. Certainly, in the book, there’s five categories. The work we do now, we have nine. You can find those on the website, but those categories are like the grit category. So, what attributes make up grit? Mental acuity. What are the attributes that describe how our brain processes the world? Drive. What are the attributes that make up the driven person?

We have vision attributes, which have to do with creativity. We have service attributes, which have to do with our ability to serve other people. Social intelligence attributes, leadership attributes, and team ability attributes. And so, all those are grouped so that the attributes can clump kind of in a nice organized fashion.

It’s not to say that those attributes are strictly in those categories. I mean, even though courage is a great attribute, one could make an argument for courage also being a leadership attribute, but it helps them bin and organize the attributes in a little bit different way. I would say, though, if someone does, in fact, take the assessment and understand their rankings, I would offer and recommend people to look at their top five, bottom five.

This is one of the reasons why the assessment pulls those out because, the top five, bottom five starts to really describe and help one understand some unique aspects of their performance. The middle attributes, basically, are those attributes that you tend to easily shift in the polarities, between the polarities.

So, in other words, I just have to look at yours, but we take something like charisma. Charisma is something that you’re someone who can at times be charismatic and at times you’re not charismatic. You can kind of shift between those polarities, versus when you start seeing where they’ve been top and bottom, those are the ones you’re most often like or most often not like, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, there are times when people, they say, “Pete, I want you to be the master of ceremonies for this event.” It’s like, “Well, okay. Let’s put on the tuxedo, and let’s, you know, the big smile, and away we go.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there are other times where it’s like, “That’s fine. I don’t need to be the center of attention. I’d be happy to arrange the items at the event as well, if that’s what you need to do.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you shift in the polarities, which is what the middle ones indicate which is good. So, they’re all useful in terms of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say this is how we are under stress when it all hits the fan, maybe we could zoom out a little bit and share, are there general best practices, no matter what your attributes are, that are ideal for when we find ourselves in these intense situations?

Rich Diviney
The answer is yes. In fact, you’re throwing out a nice preview for my second book, which is coming out in a few months called Masters of Uncertainty, where I give some tools and techniques for, in fact, what we can do in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. So, there are ways we can actually use our brain and our physiology to step through stress, challenge, and uncertainty better.

One of those ways is just a way we can actually interrogate an environment and manage our autonomic arousal. One of the biggest things that happens to us in stress, challenge, and uncertainty is we get autonomically aroused, i.e. our amygdala gets tickled and our arousal goes up. This happens to a degree that can, eventually, if unchecked, reach what we call amygdala hijack or autonomic overload, where we’re acting without thinking.

That type of amygdala hijack is very handy when we are getting out of the way of a moving train. We won’t have to think about what we’re doing. We just want to move and act, right? Not as handy in most other everyday stress and anxiety because we want to put conscious thought into our decision-making process.

What happens as our autonomic arousal goes up is our frontal lobe begins to take a back seat to our limbic, and when we reach the point of amygdala hijack, or autonomic overload, the frontal lobe has now gone back and we’re operating on our limbic without thinking. So, the key in challenge, stress, and uncertainty is to keep that frontal lobe engaged, and one of the ways we can do that is to ask conscious questions about our environment constantly.

So, in other words, “What can I focus on right now at this moment?” Even something like, “How am I feeling right now?” This is why “name it to tame it” is a very useful emotional technique, an emotional tool, because it’s pushing your limbic back a little bit, bring your frontal lobe online.

So, I think the idea is, as long as we’re managing our arousal by keeping our frontal lobe engaged, and we can do that with better questions, it’s a way to step through our environments of uncertainty, challenge, and stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you walk us through an example of some “naming it, taming it,” great questions?

Rich Diviney
Yes. One of the best questions you can ask in an environment of stress, challenge, and uncertainty is, “What could I control in this moment?” And what’s cool about the brain is the brain is designed to answer questions. It’s constantly doing it. And so, if we deliberately put a question into our frontal lobe, our brain will immediately begin to come up with answers. And so, if you put that question to your frontal lobe, you’re going to start to get answers that allow you to say, “You know what? Okay, I’m going to focus on this.”

Here’s a real-world example. It’s a SEAL training example, but it can be relatable. In SEAL training, like I said, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head. And I remember, it was the middle of the night, we’ve been running with these boats on our head for hours and hours, and it was miserable, and we were on the beach and we were running next to the sand berm.

And I remember being miserable under the boat, and I said to myself, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to focus until I get to the end of the sand berm. That’s what I’m focused on. I’m just going to get to the end of the sand berm.” What I did in that moment, unbeknownst to me, but I deconstructed later, was I immediately took control of an uncontrollable situation. I gave myself a focus point and I basically said, “Okay, end of sand berm.”

And as soon as I did that, as soon as I gave myself a goal, once I hit that goal, my brain gave me a dopamine reward for that. It’s inevitable. When we set goals and accomplish a goal, we’re going to get dopamine reward, which allows then for us to do it again and ask another question. So, we can actually start setting these horizons in any environment, and asking better questions about our environments so we can step through.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool one. And I find that that’s true with regard to any number of unpleasant tasks, “If I could break this down into, I’ve got one page and I’ve got it into a dozen pieces and I’ve got my green is my pen color of completion. I don’t know, it just is. Green means done, money, victory. Then, yeah, it feels good.” It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one piece,” as opposed to if you didn’t have the segmentation, you’re just like, “Oh, I just got one big mess that I’m dealing with.”

And I’ve also found that handy for exercise, even in indoor sterile environments, I don’t know, like a StairMaster or a treadmill or a bike or an elliptical, I find myself doing that just with numbers, like, “Hey, it’s a 30-minute workout.” It’s like, “Hey, if we get past 15, that means we got the majorities behind me. That’s awesome.” And so, I’m just making it up, and yet it helps.

Rich Diviney
And even that process, so neuro-scientifically, this is what we call DPO, duration pathway outcome, something that a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman, who has a popular podcast called the Huberman Lab, he and I put together a few years ago, but the brain is constantly looking for these three factors in our environment to define it.

One is duration, “How long is this is going to take?” Two is pathway, “What’s the route in or out?” And then, three, is outcome, “What happens at the end?” And so, in the absence of one or more of those three things, that’s when we find ourselves in uncertainty, challenge, stress, anxiety. So, what’s happening there is we are literally creating our own DPOs, whether it’s you in the gym, me on the beaches of BUD/S, we are creating a duration pathway outcome, and we’re taking charge of this focus point, and we’re creating something to focus on and then strive toward.

I call this process moving horizons because these horizons are constantly shifting, and the distance or the size of each horizon has to be subjective to the individual and subjective to the intensity of the task. So, in other words, a more intense task, it’s probably going to be a shorter horizon. If I’m In SEAL training, in the surf zone, just freezing my butt off, and they’re keeping us there for hours, which happens, I remember saying to myself, “Okay, I’m just going to count 10 waves.” My horizon was short.

There were other times where I remember saying, “You know what? I’m going to just make it to the next meal,” the horizon shifts. The key, in terms of the dopamine reward system, is that you have to pick a horizon that’s meaningful for you. In other words, not too hard, so you run out of steam on the way, but not too easy, so when you accomplish it, you don’t get a doping reward. That’s highly subjective.

And so, as you do that in the gym, in life, on the beaches of BUD/S, you’re shifting those horizons constantly and asking yourself, “Okay, what’s the next meaningful horizon?” subjective to your own experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. And I’m thinking about just daily work in which you have to focus, because it seems unlimited. It’s, like, there’s an unlimited pile of things that you could do, and then the day could be long. So, then what do you do with that? I actually have a timer that I use, it’s set to an hour or whatever, and then I find that very helpful in terms of, “Okay, I’m just going to crank on this for an hour.”

And sometimes it’s like, “No, I’m tired. 45 minutes is all that’s going to happen this time.” And then it feels very satisfying, it’s like, “I did the thing. That hour is complete and now I’m having a break and it’s all good.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you’re creating your own horizons and the timer’s helping for that. What you’re doing also is you’re practicing compartmentalization, which is one of your bottom fives, but the fact that you use a timer means you’re actively practicing, which is a good tool to use because that’s handy and it helps you kind of set those DPOs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Rich, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Rich Diviney
No, I just encourage people to just start exploring their attributes. If they want to visit us on our website, it’s TheAttributes.com, and we’re going to give your audience a discount code for the assessment as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rich Diviney
The one that pops to mind is one from Einstein, because he has so many good ones, and it goes something, I don’t want to murder it here, but it goes something like, “Everybody is a genius, but if you try to teach a fish to climb a tree, it’ll look like an idiot.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rich Diviney
Recently, I heard of some folks in the AI space who have been starting to deconstruct the language of animals. How about that? They started to understand the language of elephants, whales, and different animal species, which I think is utterly phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! And a favorite book?

Rich Diviney
One of my favorite books is probably Sapiens by Harari. I go back to that quite a bit. That’s a great one.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Rich Diviney
I honestly try to put together and arrange habits or times, periods where I can just be in my own head, whether it be if I’m jogging in the woods or even on an airplane, I can look out the window. But times I can really just be in my own head and think about and process ideas, I think that’s a gift that we should give ourselves, we should all give ourselves more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that people really resonate with and quote back to you often?

Rich Diviney
When it comes to leadership, the one I hear the most is that being in charge and being a leader are two separate things. Being in charge is a position. Being a leader is a behavior. And the one I hear the most is I tell people you don’t get to self-designate. You don’t get to call yourself a leader. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not you’re someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. So, if you want to be a leader, behave like one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rich Diviney
TheAttributes.com. So www.theattributes.com has everything there, the book, the assessment, a bunch of stuff we do with companies and things like that. So, yeah, feel free to go check it out.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Rich Diviney
Yes. Growth is found outside of our comfort zone, so always make it a project to step outside the comfort zone often because that’s where you’ll grow and that’s where you’ll learn, and it’s a great place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rich, this is so much fun. Thank you. I wish you all the luck.

Rich Diviney
Cool. Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.