1137: How to Build an Unbeatable Mind with Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Divine
Hey, it’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear your wisdom when it comes to having an unbeatable mind and resilience and so much good stuff. Could you maybe kick us off with a thrilling story that tees up some of these great lessons about mental toughness? No pressure.

Mark Divine
Thrilling story. Okay, so I was at SEAL Team 3 doing some parachute training. I jumped out of a helicopter about 1200 feet in the air. I was a second jumper out and it’s a static line jump so it was pretty low. It was nighttime. So I’m popped out and my chute deploys, which is always a good sign, as you might imagine. And I’m thinking, “This is just beautiful evening and I’m doing a dream job,” like anyone would love to be, like jumping out of a helicopter in the middle of the night and the moon is bright and everything.

And I, suddenly, see another jumper coming toward me, which was unusual because, as a second one out, I should have been above this guy, but somehow he must have had an uplift and he was coming right toward me. And, of course, from our training, I knew that for a mid-air collision, you’re supposed to pull your right toggle.

And so I pulled my right toggle, and he’s supposed to pull his right toggle, and both jumpers would then veer away.

Pete Mockaitis
Makes sense. Good standard rule.

Mark Divine
Yeah, that’s the SOP, standard operating procedure. So I pull my right toggle, he pulls his left toggle, and he collides with my chute, and my chute just collapses. Now, mind you, I’m about 1,000 feet in the air then, and that is about one second per 100 feet, so I’ve got about 10 seconds to live.

And so I immediately went into the practices that I had been training, you know, not just in the SEALs, but for four years prior to, through my Zen and through my martial arts training. And that was the default mode for me, which was I obviously very grateful for because it saved my life. So I just started breathing really slowly, calmly, and reciting the mantra.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s not too many breaths with 10 seconds.

Mark Divine
Right. Exactly. I had about six or seven of those breaths on the way down. Probably a lot less than that, actually. And the key point is I didn’t react with fear. So my parachute absolutely collapses. So I go through the SOPs, I’m calming my mind, I’m breathing deeply, I’m remaining positive about this situation, and I start to yank on my risers, which is the first thing you’re supposed to do to try to get them to get air, and I got nothing, no response.

And so I think, “Okay, second order of business here is to deploy my reserve.” So I take a deep breath, calmly. Pulled out my reserve ripcord, punch it, throw it out, and my reserve doesn’t catch any air. Now I’m down to about 300 feet.

And at the same time, I’m just super calm, right? I’m not like freaking out, which allowed me to think, “Okay, maybe I can go back to the main and work that one again.” So I went back to that and started yanking on those risers again.

And about 100 feet above the ground, which is practically nothing, my main chute caught enough air so that when I landed, I landed hard, but I was super relaxed and I did a perfect parachute landing for a PLF, meaning I just rolled out of it and ended up actually standing.

The reason this was interesting is that had I not had the training that I had, I would undoubtedly have reacted with fear. And my heart would have been racing, my mind would have been racing out of control. I wouldn’t have been able to calmly and methodically think through how to solve the problem in the eight or 10 seconds that I had.

And so I walked away without a single broken bone, which is pretty incredible. That scenario, not necessarily like a parachute accident, but I had multiple scenarios like that in my SEAL experience, my SEAL days where, you know, shit hit the fan, everything went wrong. And instead of reacting negatively or reacting out of fear, I was able to calmly deal with the problem.

Now, you might think, “Well, all SEALs are trained this way.” And it is true, right? We are trained to be calm under pressure and whatnot. But to have these skills in the first year of my SEAL career was fully attributed to meditation. And I started a practice of Zen meditation when I was 21. And it’s a big part of really why I became a SEAL. And I could tell that story, too.

But it really had a profound effect on my nervous system and my ability to focus and to just develop clarity under extreme pressure, which I found to be pretty useful as a special operator. Anyway, so I think experiences like that led me to want to delve deeper into those practices, into the development of what I now call unbeatable mind, development of the mind and the body and the spirit, and really plumb the depths of what’s possible for a human being.

And so that’s why, later on, I ended up kind of really refocusing and really going deep into that territory of human performance and the what’s possible for humanity, which is what I do today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mission accomplished, sir, and a thrilling story delivered. So you’ve learned a lot about this stuff with regard to mental toughness and staying calm under difficult times. Can you share what’s perhaps the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned that when you share with people, they’re a little bit puzzled, like, “Really? Is that true?”

Mark Divine
Well, when I teach SEALs, I have to, like, use stories for the young guys, right? Sometimes I’m training 18-year-old kids who want to be a Navy SEAL. And one of the stories I tell them, and they come in and think, “Okay I’m going to…” they’re going to learn mental toughness and how to be a badass Navy SEAL from Mark Divine and through my SEALFIT team and program.

And they think mental toughness is just about really learning how to be hard, like how to tough it out, how to get through, you know, like my teammate Goggin’s story, it’s like, “Okay, you can always do more, you know? When you hit the wall, you’re capable of 40 times more, I just got to be tougher. Suck it up, buttercup.”

And I say, “You know, that’s actually really flawed thinking,” right? It’s important to be hard when you need to be hard, but it’s also incredibly important to be soft when you need to be soft. And what I mean by soft, because SEALs don’t like that language, like, “I’m not soft.” I say, “What I mean by that is to be really flexible and pliable and relaxed and to learn how to to let go.” So you can interpret that a lot of ways.

So the story I would tell is, like, “If a tsunami is coming, and it was inevitable that it’s going to just knock everything down in this path, would you rather be the mighty oak and strong? Or would you rather be like the the lowly reed and super flexible?”

And they said, “Well, in that scenario, I’d rather be the reed because the reed is just going to get washed over and then it’s going to pop right back up and carry on with its life. Whereas, the oak is just going to get swept away and it’s going to get killed.” See, that’s right.

So mental toughness, the big aha is that mental toughness is actually a balance between the hard and the soft. And, also, if you want to use the Eastern concept, the balance between the yin, which is the hard, and the yang, which is soft. Yin represents forcefulness, you know, get-it-done mindset, pushing through the pain. And the yin, the soft side represents receptivity and creativity and flexibility and taking time to recover and relax.

So one of the reasons that the SEAL athletes that I train are so successful is this principle put into practice through their training regimen, through how they navigate their lives, through how they approach even a single day. You’ve got to balance the hard and the soft, otherwise, you’re going to break.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could we hear a story of someone who internalized some of these principles and saw cool transformation as a result?

Mark Divine
Every one of the SEALs that I’ve trained have internalized it. They commit. I’ll give you an example. So there’s a guy named Shane. Now Shane recently got out of the SEALs and went to Rutgers Med School. He’s now a doctor.

But he came to me as, like, an 18-year-old, like hardcore, you know, heavy weightlifter and just really kind of beast-mode guy. And most of the guys come, you know, if you want to be a Navy SEAL these days, like you’re already pretty fit.

And what I do through my training, or did, was round you out and give you all the skills of mental toughness, resiliency, emotional control, the softer side. And then I make sure that the physical is going to be sustainable for the year-long training that you’re going to be in.

And what I mean by that is most guys come to me and they’re just, what they lack is not, they’re great runners, they’re great, you know, in all around great shape, but they lack the durability to punish their body the way the SEALs will punish it every single day.

And so that durability is kind of a mixture of like physical stability, usually in your joints, and your spine, as well as the ability to hold your mind on the task over a long period of time, which brings in the concept of yin and yang, or hard and soft.

And so we train them. So I had to train Shane to basically get out of his own way and stop just pushing like everything was a competition. So we call it co-opetition. Everything was a competition in the sense you wanted to compete with yourself and put your best effort in. But if that best effort was going to lead to an injury or degradation of the team, the team’s capacity, then that was flawed thinking.

And so what I taught Shane was that, even in the course of a single evolution and also in a day, like we consider each day like a major evolution, like it was a performance sport just to get through the day. Because when we train for a special operation, you’re training like eight hours a day or longer just to get ready for it. And then when you go through training, you’re training for 12 to 16 hours a day.

So we would do hard things during that, but we would also spend time sitting and just doing what I call box breathing, just breathing for arousal control. And we would spend time meditating and concentration practice to deepen our attention control and our concentration. And I had them doing yoga.

In fact, at first, back in 2006, when I was doing these, teaching these skills, I learned very quickly that I shouldn’t call it yoga because the guys would cross their eyes and some guys are like, “Well, my religion forbids me from doing this.” I’m like, “What?” So I changed it to functional mobility, integrated development, those types of terms I used. And you see those throughout Unbeatable Mind.

But if someone who’s ever really approached development the way from a different perspective, you could say, “Well, that Unbeatable Mind is actually kind of a compendium or a combination or integration of Eastern practices, such as yoga and mindfulness and breath work, with Western practices of peak performance, sports psychology, Western therapeutic depth psychology, and a little bit of just Navy SEAL kickassery.”

So I brought all that together and I had to, like, simplify it and present it in a way that an 18-year-old kid would be like, “Yeah, this is awesome and it really works.” So I taught Shane and these other SEALs how to not just be hard, but to balance that out with these practices that really created a total warrior, right, a warrior that could be calmly sitting in a meditative posture or visualizing their mission, but they’re simultaneously just absolutely alert, and the explosive power that they have is like a coiled spring, right, but it’s locked and loaded. It’s not going to it’s not going to release until absolutely ready, right?

And those are the skills that I think are super valuable for everyone these days. We have a saying that, in the military, we prepared for VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. And back in my day, that was episodic. Like, you go to war and you’re going to VUCA, or, if you’re going to do a specific operation, maybe a clandestine op, the VUCA is basically time on target, or if something goes wrong.

But nowadays, they’re using that term pretty frequently in the business world because everything is changing so fast, and it’s so volatile, and so uncertain, and so complex and ambiguous that the entire business world now is VUCA and it’s persistent, it’s not episodic.

So the skills that I taught the SEALs and I taught through Unbeatable Mind are now looking more more useful, if not imperative, for business leaders and everyday leaders for that matter. This idea that you have to be calm and clear and focused and, basically, be able to declutter all the crap, discern what’s really important, what’s really true to be in control of your thoughts and your emotions at all times so you don’t get triggered into reactivity.

And to be an exceptional teammate because your ego has been honed, refined, polished, set aside, whatever term you want. And you really are recognizing that what’s in your interest is usually what’s in the team’s interest. So you put your eye on the team and help the team succeed. And through the team’s success, you find success and also more purpose and meaning.

So the transformation is multi-dimensional, in other words. We’re transforming an individual to be more capable from a skill perspective, but also more competent, confident, and conscious from kind of the internal awareness and sense of self and perspective lens.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Well, let’s talk about some of the secret sauce, the means by which one pulls off some of these cool things. So holding your mind onto a task for a long time is something you highlight. And that’s something that I hear from listeners that it’s hard in terms of there’s a lot of, you know, pings, beeps, distractions, emails, whatever, or there’s just a task that’s boring, it’s not interesting to them, or it just keeps going and going and going. What are some approaches that we could use to pull that off well?

Mark Divine
It’s a great question. And there’s a lot of simple tactical things, and then there’s the stuff, the training your mind. The tactical things are to really just commit to doing less things and doing them better. So stop multitasking. Multitasking degrades your output by about 40%. So you think you’re getting more done, but you’re actually getting 40% less done and you’re doing a worse job at it.

And multitasking trains distractibility. And people say, “Well, I only do one task at a time,” but if you’ve got your phone near you, and you’re prone to looking at the alerts when they pop in, because you think, “Oh, there’s an important text,” or, “There’s an important phone call,” that’s multitasking.

And that’s training distractibility. So you’re bleeding off your attention, bleeding off your ability, your energy, actually, right, which is going to lead to low-grade motivation, you know, like piercing a balloon and it’s just bleeding out. So things like that. Starting to turn off, like I have no alerts on my phone whatsoever.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, me, too.

Mark Divine
And that was fairly up, finally had to be like, “Get this thing out of my…” I wanted to throw my phone in the frickin ocean one day. I’m like, “I’m tired of this thing.” So I took off all the alerts. And take a vacation from the phone. Every day, you should have that phone out of your sight for a couple hours or longer. And, certainly, when you sleep.

But you also should take a vacation from it like once a week for the whole day, or most of the day. So I think it’s kind of like intermittent fasting with your digital device is a really smart thing because you’re getting your attention back and you’re rebuilding energy that was bled off through that device.

I don’t watch any news or any like network TV. Like, network TV, it’s built today for high-speed mind that is a very distracted mind. Even I heard Netflix, like, I can’t watch Netflix because most Netflix shows and movies are designed for split screeners.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard that, yeah, that’s why they keep repeating things now.

Mark Divine
Yeah, there’s no depth whatsoever. They basically expect that the viewer is not paying attention. And that’s why they’re skin deep and they skip all over the place, and they don’t leave any of the plot for you to figure out anymore, you know?

So if you think you need that playing in the background while you’re doing work, my son does that, and it’s because his mind is trained that it needs that kind of distraction. And it’s unfortunate because it’s bleeding off your attention.

And the other thing is, like, with those shows and also with commercials, they move so fast that they’re training your brain to have that kind of fast twitch reactivity, which is very challenging then when you try to shift focus and do any deep work. Your brain needs to actually slow down and you need to learn how to slow your brain down in order to do the deep work. So I recommend not even watching TV.

Forget about how negative this stuff is and the reality that even through the TV shows and the movies, not just the commercials, but your mind is being trained and conditioned to accept a reality that might not be true. Let’s not even talk about the news, right? That’s just pure mental conditioning and propaganda.

I have a saying that I like to say a lot, but if you’re not training your mind, then someone else is training it for you. Because, essentially, your mind is the sum total of all that you’ve consumed mentally through your experiences, through your reading, through your screens, and through the interactions that you have.

So if you want to change your mind, then you’ve got to change the input, and you’ve got to basically deconstruct all the false ideas and beliefs and ways that your brain works, such as being extremely distractible and operating at like a gamma level when you should be operating at a high alpha, low beta level. So those are the tactical things.

The training aspect of this piece, Pete, is like radically simple in its form but difficult in that it requires a lot of discipline to do. And it’s simply, like I use the box breathing, which I referenced earlier, as a container for a series of mental discipline practices that bring you that calm, focused, clarity and ability to really, really get shit done at a high level without the distractions.

So let me explain real briefly how that works. So box breathing, it’s a practice that I coined back in 2006 when I was training. Remember I said I couldn’t use like yoga terms and, you know? I had learned breath practices through my Zen training when I was 21.

And then later on, I really did get into, like, the traditional eight limbs Ashtanga yoga, which is mostly about meditation, concentration, self-awareness, introspection, and the stretchy bendy physical part is the least of it. It’s a process of transformation. And so I learned breath practices through there, and I knew it was called pranayama.

And pranayama means controlling the life force because breath is life. It’s not just oxygen. It’s life. It’s prana. It’s chi. It’s energy. So when you do breath practices, what you’re doing is taking control of the life force and you’re consciously using that life force to purify your mind, open your heart, and to train your mind to tap into greater powers that every human being has the capacity for.

So instead of calling it pranayama, because I tried to do that for a couple of my classes, and they’re like rolling their eyes and thinking I’m gone off the deep end. So I just said, “Okay, we’re to do a simple practice.” I called it box breathing.

And that is to all the principles that we now know to be so important for breath work, were kind of unknown back in the mid 2000s. But I knew what worked for me and I’ve been practicing and training and seeing the benefits on myself for years. And that is deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing, right?

Nostril breathing, mouth closed, eyes closed if you are in a practice setting. Eyes open if you’re like standing in line, or at the bank or something, you can do this practice. And that deep nostril breathing, we did it in a pattern of five count inhale, five count hold, five count exhale, and five count hold. So it had a pattern of a box or a square, hence, the box breathing.

So if each count is roughly one second, you’re talking about a 20-second interval for one full box breathing cycle, and that’s three breaths per minute. And, over time, when you practice it, if you turn this into a daily practice, and my recommendation or my prescription is 20 minutes in the morning when you first wake up, and 20 minutes in the late afternoon, over time, this has an extraordinary effect just on your physiology.

And here’s what it does. Number one, because you’re breathing through your nose in that slow, controlled, deep, diaphragmatic way, you’re massaging your vagus nerve, and that’s stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest.

That’s the yin function I was talking about. That’s the receptivity, the calming, the relaxation, which is getting your body and your brain into homeostatic balance. So you’re bleeding off all the excess stress that you built up over your lifetime until you get into this perfect state of homeostatic balance.

And the other thing that happens is, because you’re breathing in slowly, five count in, five count out, and holding for five count, when you’re operating throughout the day and you’re not doing box breathing, which you’re not going to be doing that most of the day, you’re going to be doing regular breathing, but your breathing, then, naturally begins to reshape itself into that form of five count in and five count out through the nose.

And we now teach that and we call it tactical breathing as a practice, but it becomes something you quite naturally do. And so that’s six breaths per minute, right? Five seconds in, five seconds out, that’s 10 seconds, times 60 seconds, that’s six breaths per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
So no holds in the other word, in that way. Okay.

Mark Divine
Yeah, right. So during the day, the practice will lead you to this natural nostril breathing, six breaths per minute, which, astoundingly, research has come in on this in the recent last two or three years, that that is the ideal breathing pattern for health and longevity. And we just kind of stumbled on this and we’ve been teaching it since the early 2000s. So what an incredible benefit.

And, again, we’re just talking about physiological at this point. The term we use is arousal control. You’re controlling your arousal response. And your out arousal response is simply your left hemisphere brain is wired to detect threats. And it’s five times as negative as it is positive as a result of that.

So you’ve got this mechanism built for survival that is through the amygdala, constantly sniffing everything that’s happening in your environment, every stimulus, external and internal, and saying, “Is this safe or is this unsafe?” And at least five times more than positive, it’s saying, “It’s not safe. It’s negative.” And when that happens, it activates your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight or freeze.

And that’s dumping adrenaline and epinephrine and cortisol into your system to get your body ready to fight. Well, the problem is 99% of the time, it’s really not a threat, right? It’s really not a threat, right? So that alert comes in, you think it’s your boss, the phone rings and you see that it’s a creditor, you know, you’re in traffic and someone cuts you off, then that could be a threat, but most of the time it’s not.

But you’re reacting negatively and it’s jacking you up into this sympathetic arousal response. And the problem is that, when your sympathetic nervous system keeps getting triggered like that, then your parasympathetic response atrophies. It quite, literally, goes offline because it says, “Well, you don’t need me.” It’s not getting, you’re just like other channels in your brain. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

So what I found is, even with these young guys that I work with, and every one of the older clients I work with, they’re stuck in hyper arousal. So this simple practice of box breathing will reset their nervous system so that the parasympathetic nervous system comes back online. And then it slowly and, with certainty, bleeds off all that excess stress, and brings the hormones back into balance, and then you’re sleeping better, you’re feeling better, you got more energy, so you’re exercising better everything comes back into balance.

And people, just through this practice, have literally lost excess weight they were carrying just by breathing effectively. It’s pretty extraordinary. So that arousal control has a pronounced and profound physiological and physical effect to bring your body back into balance.

And guess what? Your brain also, because it’s part of your body, comes back into balance as well, and your brain starts to operate more effectively instead of that high gamma distracted state, which is reinforced by your environment, in this culture that we live in, with this fast pace and constant distractions.

It begins to actually function at a slower level, in a mid-beta range, and even when you’re doing the box breathing practices, it’ll drop into a high alpha or mid-range alpha. This has extraordinary benefits now in the mental realm because the subjective experience of that is of more calmness and more clarity because your mind isn’t racing. You get less of the monkey mind popping around, popcorn mind.

So, already, it’s having an effect on training the quality of your mental experience. So the physiology then spills over into the psychology. Well, the second part of this, Pete, is that I asked the students to focus keenly on that box pattern like they’re Inspector Clouseau, and they’re watching every little nuance of it, every little nuance of the inhale with internal eyes like they’re watching it and they’re experiencing it with their internal senses.

You have five external senses and a number of, I’ve read, five internal senses. I mean, internal sight, internal auditory, internal sensations. And so you turn those directly toward the breathing pattern itself.

And we say, “You watch it closely. You can even visualize it if you want.” We have an app called Unbeatable Mind Box Breathing where we it shows a box being filled in as you do the breath, so you can watch that for a while and then visualize it.

Now what that is doing is holding your attention on one thing and one thing only, and that’s this box pattern. So this is like classic Zen training. All Zen training starts out with concentration. In fact, Zen is primarily a concentration path. It’s one of the two primary paths of meditation, are concentration or mindfulness.

What most people don’t realize is that concentration is a prerequisite for mindfulness. And this is why people jump into mindfulness and they fail, because they just simply can’t do it, because they can’t control their mind. They can’t control their attention.

So by holding your attention on the box pattern, what you’re not doing is paying attention to all the other thoughts that come. They’ll still come and go. You’re not like, you can’t not have those other thoughts, because thoughts happen to you.

And you can generate thoughts, but most thoughts, you know, the default mode is thoughts happen to you, 60,000 thoughts a day and 59,500 are the same thoughts that came to you yesterday. They just happen to you. And when you think you’re thinking, it’s when you’re taking a thought that happens to you and you’re grabbing onto it. And then you’re generating secondary-level thought, like rumination or pondering or like planning, that type of thing.

So when you’re doing the box breathing practice, you’re holding your attention simply on the box pattern. You’re ignoring the rest of the default mode network thoughts. But what will happen is your mind, because it’s especially in the early stages, will kind of wander over there and start ruminating or start grabbing on because it gets bored. And so then the practice is to notice that and to bring it back to the box.

And so you’re training now three things. Arousal control, which we already talked about, that’s the physiological. Now we’re getting into the mind, attention control, which is to hold my attention on just one thing. All I’m asking you to do is this one thing, just hold your attention on that box pattern.

But notice when your attention either gets split and you’re focusing on the box pattern and thinking about something, or if you’ve completely wandered off the reservation, notice that and notice it earlier and earlier and come back to the box pattern and hold your attention on the pattern for longer and longer. And we’re shooting for 50% of a 20-minute session.

If you can hold your attention on the box pattern for 10 minutes, you’re actually doing really well. And you’re deepening your powers of concentration. It’s like gathering up all your mental energy, which was being thrown out there like a floodlight, and you’re focusing it like a laser beam, and you get really, really sharp and penetrating mind. That’s extremely valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Mark, when you say 50%, now you’ve got my optimizing, point-scoring, loving self going. I’m curious because, I mean, I’ve done a number of mindfulness-y things. I even have the Muse headband. And so it’ll give you some numbers about how much I was relaxed or whatever. But I’m curious, since I do find that quite motivating, is there a means by which you can see, “Oh, I was 41% last week, and now I’m 43%”? Or  is that unknowable?

Mark Divine
If you want to collaborate on creating a wearable that can track that, I’d be all ears. No, it’s clearly subjective. I’ll give you an example of why, or the reason why I know this to be true. I mentioned that this second part is very similar to Zen training. And I spent four years training Zen, before I went into the SEALs, under the watchful eye of a guy named Tadashi Nakamura, who’s still alive. He’s in his eighties in New York.

He’s a very famous grandmaster martial artist, runs a martial art program that he created called Seido, which means the way of sincerity, and headquartered in Manhattan. So I was in Manhattan after college for four years, got my MBA at Stern School of Business, NYU, and, believe it or not, became a certified public accountant in New York.

But during that time, probably the most momentous thing that happened is I trained under this guy, starting as soon as I got to New York, I just stumbled into it. Since I was 21, I trained with him for four years. And, of course, did all the karate stuff, got my black belt.

But what really transformed me was he was a Zen teacher, had a Zen class every Thursday night, which I joined with about 10 other black belts. And we would then go to the Zen Mountain Monastery up in Woodstock, New York several times a year for these long four- to five-day sits with the Zen monks.

And the basic practice, and he never deviated from this, and you’re sitting on your bench, was simply eyes closed, inhale, exhale through the nose, and count one, but don’t think of anything else. Inhale, exhale, count two. Don’t think of anything else.

And the goal was to get to 10. And, of course, the first few times I did it, I got to 10 no problem, but when I was honest with myself, I was thinking the whole time, and I realize, “Oh, shoot, now this is really serious.” If you think, you have to go back to zero.

So inhale, exhale, “I’m doing great. Oh, shoot, I just had a thought. Back to zero. Inhale, exhale, one. Inhale, exhale, two. How am I doing? Oh, I’m doing good. Oh, I’m thinking. Back to zero.” Or, if you start thinking, your mind is just wandering off the reservation, which is going to do until you train it.

So it, literally, took me, Pete, about a year before I could, with integrity, say that I got to five without any thought, without any other competing thought in my head. And I once asked him about it, and he said that that actually is really good, for students of Zen to be able to have that.

Now we’re talking about roughly a five-count inhale, five count. Back then he didn’t specify. That was my add later on. But we’re roughly talking about just one minute. You know what I mean? Five rounds is only about a minute. Wow, that’s how busy your mind is.

So if you can sit and still your mind for a minute and have no thoughts whatsoever, that is profound. You know, the Buddha said once that you could find enlightenment in a single breath if you’re paying close enough attention.

So I think that’s really, it’s a great mark or target to shoot for. And anyone listening who tries it or has tried this will agree with that, it’s not easy. It’s really not easy because, again, the brain has just not been trained this way. I think there will be a time in the future where we teach these skills to young kids, kind of like they would do for the Panchen Lama or the Tibetan monks for the kids, they start them young.

It’s extraordinarily valuable to do this type of training at a younger age when your brain is still developing. In fact, one of the reasons I think I had such extraordinary benefit with my meditation practice is because I was 21 when I started. And now the male brain doesn’t fully develop until it’s mid to late 20s.

And so, neuroplastically, my brain was just on fire developing all these new pathways, all these new skills through my meditation practice in my early 20s. And it’s completely changed my life. So it’s a valuable, I think, that’s just, you know, I use that 50% just partly to motivate people, but also to help them understand that, you know, just be easy on yourself. This is not easy work. So be kind to yourself, in other words.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And so we talked about being able to persist, hold our mind onto a task. I’d also like your take on how to start something. If we’re dragging our feet, we’re procrastinating, we’re, “Ugh, I don’t feel like it,” have some avoidance, do you have any pro tips there?

Mark Divine
Well, probably the biggest pro tip is, whatever you’re going to do, whatever you want to do, make sure that you should do it. And so you say, “What do you mean, Mark?” Well, remember earlier I said we should all be doing less things better. And then the question is, “Okay, good, I agree with that. But what things should I be doing that go in that bucket of less things? What makes it through that wicker?”

Well, it’s the things that you should be doing. And the things that you should be doing are always going to be related to who you are, not what other people think you should be, or should be doing, or what society thinks you should be doing, or what your parents think you should be doing.

And so the most effective way to develop extreme motivation and personal accountability is to get clear on who you are and why you’re on this planet and what you’re going to do about it, your mission. So this is like one of the most fundamental things I teach. In fact, it also is probably the ultimate secret to resiliency and mental toughness is when you’re doing what you know you’re supposed to be doing, there is no quit.

No matter what also comes up to you, you just navigate it with grace because you know it’s there to help you learn, and it’s just something you have to go through. It’s going to make you stronger. It’s going to help you fulfill that mission.

Now my feeling is, unless you’re blessed with this insight at a young age, is that the best way to really get clear about who you are and why you’re here, and then what you can do about it, is through a practice of stillness. Well, guess what box breathing is? It’s a practice of stillness. So we can build that into the practice.

I mentioned earlier, box breathing is a stacked practice. We’ve already talked about arousal control, attention control, concentration. It naturally opens up to mindfulness. And as I mentioned earlier, concentration is a prerequisite of mindfulness.

The part of you that is focusing on the box pattern and that notices, the part of you that notices that your mind has wandered becomes your primary seat of awareness. In other words, instead of identifying with the thoughts, you become identified with the witness of those thoughts, which is the ultimate aim of mindfulness, is to see yourself in the perspective of the witnessing, non reactive, aware human being that is seeing thoughts and emotions happening to you and through you, but you’re not caught up in them. You’re just watching them as if you’re watching a play.

So when you develop that skill, then you’re in a state of receptivity. Every other skill that I’ve talked about is the yang, it’s an active process. But when you get into that witnessing awareness, then you shift it into your contextual mind, your right brain, which is beyond space and time. It doesn’t have the same construct. It doesn’t create sense of separation in space and time. That’s all the function of your left hemisphere, your left brain.

So you’re in your right brain and you’re in that witnessing awareness, and in that space, you become connected to the rest of your mind, your heart, and your gut. And we now know that the heart and the gut are brains. They have neurons, neurological processing, neurochemicals, neurons itself. And so in that receptive space, the right hemisphere is what connects to your heart, mind, and your biome, your gut mind, and your entire enteric nervous system, your entire body becomes a mind and an antenna.

And so in that very calm and receptive state, witnessing state, you begin to get messages from your heart. I mentioned earlier, my meditation led me into the SEALs. I knew nothing about the SEALs when I went down to New York. I was planning on being a CPA and making a lot of money and going into investment banking.

But the longer I sat on that meditation bench, now two years or three years into it, I started to get messages that I was meant to be a warrior and that I was misaligned, that I was heading down the wrong path fast. And it really kind of created like this existential crisis in me.

Like, I thought I had a midlife crisis at 23 years old because I’m like, “Well, how is it that I’m sitting here in a suit and tie and racing toward this MBA, CPA, and to make a lot of money? How is it that I’m supposed to be a warrior? Why am I getting all these signals that I’m 100% misaligned and going down the wrong path, and I’m going to live that life of quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau talked about?”

Well, it’s because my heart was telling me that I’m a warrior, I’m meant to be a warrior. And so I started to take it seriously. And I started to ask better questions, “Well, if I’m meant to be a warrior, then how? How am I supposed to serve as a warrior?”

And that’s when the world, you when you start getting close to your own truth, then synchronicity happens. So, for me, the synchronicity showed up in the fact that I walked home one night, kind of pondering this existential crisis I was having, and I walked right by a Navy recruiting office, and there was this poster there, and it didn’t say SEALs on it.

It said, “Be someone special,” and it had pictures of Navy SEALs doing what I thought was pretty cool shit, like jumping out of airplanes. And I was like, “That’s how. That’s it. Thank you, universe. That’s how I’m supposed to be a warrior.”

So back to your question. If you lack motivation, it’s probably because what you’re doing is not the right thing and you’re misaligned. Now that, you know, what do you do then is another, you know, that’s a whole different discussion.

Because if you’re misaligned, it’s not going to go away. It’s just going to keep getting worse and worse. Your motivation is going to keep declining. You’re going to get more and more burned out. You’re going to feel more and more disconnected.

And I think a lot of people in our culture suffer from that because they’ve been taught that, “You know, I’m supposed to be a lawyer,” or, “I’m supposed to be a doctor,” or something. And it may be completely off from what they really are meant to be doing in this life. And when I say meant to be doing it, it’s not a job or a career. It’s who you are. But it can be encapsulated in a career.

Like, being a Navy SEAL was a job, but it certainly sparked and allowed me to express the warrior in me. But I always said that my purpose was to be a warrior, not a Navy SEAL Admiral. Because if I had said, “I’m going to be a Navy SEAL Admiral. Well, that’s my purpose,” we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. I’d be still in the Navy probably.

But, no, my purpose was to be a warrior, and that transcends the structure of what you do. It’s really about who you are, what your beingness is. So if you’re doing something that isn’t in alignment with your beingness, then you will experience a little bit of crisis. And crisis literally means opportunity for transformation. That’s what crisis means. So it’s an opportunity for you.

So to face that opportunity and say, “Okay, I hear what Mark is saying and I think I’m in that boat. The reason I’m burning out, lacking motivation, it’s not because I just have a shitty job, it’s because I’m misaligned. So what I need to do is go learn to sit in silence and to open up my mind so that I can hear my heart’s calling, and get a greater understanding and some clarity about who I really am and why I am on this planet at this time so that I can align with that.”

And aligning with that might not be leaving your job. Like, if you’ve invested 20 years or you’re waiting for a pension or something like that and you got a family to feed and a mortgage to pay, I’m not suggesting you just blow it all up, but you could find meaning through some service.

Maybe it’s like you were meant to really work with the earth. You just love it, and so you start a garden or you go develop a community garden somewhere. And it’s going to be different for every single person. And some people, I’ve worked with tons of clients who, like, literally have left their jobs to start their own business.

Or, I think there’s probably like 15 or 20 clients I’ve worked with who have gone off and written books because they really had that urge, they felt that need to really say something, put something out in the world, creatively like that.

So that’s the fastest path to motivation, really, is to discover who you are and what you’re meant to do about it, but that’s a slow path. It can be a slow path. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes contemplation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, we’re having fun here. It’s time to hear about a few of your favorite things. Can you kick us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Divine
What a man can think and believe, he can achieve. That was Napoleon Hill. The first book I read that ever really kind of touched on a greater human potential than what most of us are taught. So Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t read Think and Grow Rich, that’s a must read. I think I’ve read it about 10 times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned Think and Grow Rich, do you have any other favorite books?

Mark Divine
One of the books that really blew my mind and got me down the rabbit hole of what’s possible for human beings, and it’s the only book that Steve Jobs carried on his iPad, by the way. It’s called the Autobiography of a Yogi by a guy named Paramahansa Yogananda. That’s doozy. I highly recommend that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Divine
Box breathing.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with people, they quote it back to you often?

Mark Divine
If you want to move fast and break things and do great things in the world, then you’ve got to slow down and spend time in silence every day, spend time cultivating these qualities that we’ve talked about in the show, and get really clear around who you are and why you do what you do, so then you can go out and bring it to the world.

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

Mark Divine
MarkDivine.com, and Divine is spelled D-I-V-I-N-E, that’s my personal website. Pretty much anything you need is there, or would find interesting. UnbeatableMind.com is my training program, and so we’ve got great programs, great courses, and a community, and even a mental toughness certification that teaches all these principles, and you can go teach it to others or help others.

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

Mark Divine
Yeah, I would challenge you, you, Pete and your listeners, to take up a practice of box breathing and try it out for 30 days. If you don’t think you can afford 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in afternoon, just do 10 minutes and 10 minutes, or just do 10 minutes in the morning. But do it every day for 30 days. And prove that I’m right. Don’t take my word for it. Be that study of N equals one. Prove that I’m right. Even 30 days of daily practice can be utterly transformative. So do that. I challenge you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you.

Mark Divine
Yeah, hooyah! It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate you, Pete.