Leading in the Exponential Age with Mark Divine

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire. The only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down leading in the exponential age. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought to Mark Devine in the EO Fire Studios. Mark is a host of The Mark Devine Show and author of six bestselling books, including his latest, Uncommon. He's the founder of Unbeatable Mind and Seal Fit. And through his Courage Foundation, he's a fierce advocate for veterans with PTSD. D. And today, we'll talk about forging an unbeatable mind, what leadership needs to be like in an exponential age, the four skills of mental toughness, and oh, so much more.

0:44And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Mark and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Mark, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. JLD, it's good to speak with you again and hoo-yah, Fire Nation, hoo-yah. That's what we say in the seals for let's be awesome.

1:28Um, here, here's something hard work itself doesn't always pay off. Um, good decisions do, but how do you ensure good decisions? And this is the contrary thought here. You've got to spend time in silence every single day. Spending time in silence is the most important thing for you to do. So don't waste time not doing it. It's critical. I love this and fire nation, Mark, if I could have this guy on once a week, I would, I mean, I love his energy. I love his vibe. And today we're talking about leading in the exponential age. And man, Mark, I mean, your story of going from a CPA to a Navy SEAL, I mean, it's flipping incredible.

2:09So give us the short version now. Yeah, that's great. You're going to force me to do the short version. So yeah, so I was kind of like, you know, dancing to the, you got to go into business and make a ton of money drummer back in 1985. When I graduated from Colgate University, I found myself in New York City, getting my MBA, becoming a certified public accountant, working full time for what's now PricewaterhouseCoopers. But I met my first true mentor. And it was unusual in that it was a martial arts master who was also a Zen master, Mr. Tadashi Nakamura. And so I started studying Zen meditation at 21 years old.

2:50And I trusted this guy. He was different than anyone I'd ever seen in my life and the way he carried himself. He was a true master. And I now know, 40 years later, I know what that means. At the time, I didn't. But because I trusted him, I kept practicing. And I mean, showing up every day, bought my own little wooden zazen bench, and I practiced sitting silently for 20 minutes in the morning. And of course, every karate class, and then an hour on Thursday evenings. and I just stuck to it. Well, John, my brain completely transformed. I started to be able to concentrate better. My focus got much more clear.

3:33And I started to experience some really interesting things. The first was I had this kind of split from thinking of myself as my thoughts to where I became the witness of my thoughts. and that was a like a transformative moment especially for this 22 year old right then because I started to look at the thoughts I was having and asking are those really my thoughts and when I would ask those questions I could see that they were not my thoughts that these thoughts are like plants that I had been conditioned to think a certain way and I was conditioned to think that I was meant to be you know a successful wealthy business guy you know making a lot of money on Wall Street, maybe going home to take over the family business.

4:18And I realized that those weren't really things that I had originated, right, from my own mind. Wow, right? So that led me to ask better questions and to really contemplate, like, who am I? Why am I on this planet? What am I supposed to do about, you know, this instance that we call Mark Devine? And when I started to ask those questions, John, I started to get answers, right? In the stillness, I started to see and hear that I was meant to be a warrior. And that's when the SEALs were revealed to me. You know, it's like the synchronicity happens when you get really close to like your calling and the world gets excited and wants to line up to support you.

4:57And I was literally showing the SEALs walking past the recruiting office one day and there was a poster and the title of the poster was Be Someone Special. And there you have it. And I said, that's what I'm going to do. So that's the sort of short version of the story. There's a whole lot more I can tell. But, you know, 1989, November of 1989, I got my MBA from Stern School of Business, became a certified public accountant, got my first degree black belt. And I turned my back on it all and went to Officer Cannon School. And then I went to Navy SEAL training in March of 1990. Never looked back.

5:30Well, Mark, I can vouch you've become someone special. So thank you for that. I mean, you're the author of six bestselling books. I mean, your latest book, Uncommon, is just fantastic. And, you know, I love the fact that you're such a fierce advocate for veterans with PTSD. I mean, I'm one myself. You know, I was a tank commander in Iraq, and I definitely dealt with PTSD. Dude, I forgot about that. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for your service. I appreciate the appreciation, brother. You know, for me, I thought I came back unscathed, Mark. I really did. Like, you know, I was 23 years old, leading 16 men for M1A1 Abrams tanks in Iraq.

6:02And, you know, we were part of the siege of Fallujah, so I definitely saw a lot. And I thought I came back and I was good. And I was 26. I'm like, all right, man, lucky me. But, you know, man, things change the next few years. And it kind of caught me by surprise. And I had to deal with it. And luckily, there were people like you who are such fierce advocates for veterans with PTSD. And I was able to get through it. And, you know, I'm 45 now. But, you know, you never quite leave it all behind. It's always traces. So you always work with it. And that's why I love your whole mindset about, you know, being with yourself in silence every day.

6:33It's so important. It's so impactful. to just really be there and train your mind. And now you talk about forging an unbeatable mind. So Mark, how do we accomplish this? If you're not training your mind, then someone else is training it for you. And the results will speak for themselves. From the moment you open your eyes as a baby until this very moment, it's basically training and conditioning, right? Everything you see, everything you hear, everything you consume. And most people just have no clue that they're being trained. So what I suggest, you know, with my philosophy called Unbeatable Mind is to recognize this and then to take responsibility for retraining your mind.

7:14You know, similar to what I did on that meditation bench to take a look at the stories and the mental models and the concepts and the beliefs and even the emotional patterns that are driving your thoughts and your behaviors and creating the life that you live. and begin to curate the quality of those thoughts and beliefs and stories. And what that often means, John, is that you've got to share a bunch of stuff that isn't serving you. And that takes a little bit of courage. But then it's more than that. You've got to basically train your mind to be able to see and believe an incredibly positive, optimistic, and abundant future.

7:53And then what you do is you use these certain visualization skills that I teach to basically practice that future. And I'm not talking about a job or a doing, but a becoming. Like, who are you meant to be and what's trying to emerge, right, in this life of yours? Sitting silently and asking for that vision works, right? It just takes time. And suddenly you have this really powerful, incredible future vision. And you practice that. And what happens, John, when you practice that vision every day through your mental training is that becomes a memory. It's a memory of who you are in the future. And so when you are going through your day and you go back, you know, basically the way thoughts are generated is they're either like planted in you or you remember something.

8:41And then you go back and access that memory. And so you're constantly bringing past memories into your present moment, which basically dictates that your future will look exactly like your past. So when you train your mind to be calm, clear, and then have this positive, abundant, and optimistic future vision, and you practice that future vision, then your memory is one of forward movement, positive momentum, and this abundant, optimistic view of yourself. It's really quite simple, but not easy to do, like we said in the SEALs, right? This is a simple problem, but it's not going to be easy to solve.

9:16so one beat up a mind is essentially a path a process a bundle of tools and methodologies to to retrain your mind to eradicate the negative and thinking eradicate the the things that aren't serving you and to rebuild your entire mental models and structures and vision for the future and then to live into that mark you're dropping value bombs and i know you coming at us when we get back from thinking our sponsors. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. And they are also our featured partner, High Level. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, High Level is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack.

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10:39On top of it all, their support team is second to none and has your back every step of the way. Seriously, every question that pops up, they will have your answer waiting. And if you visit my special partnership link, you'll get a free trial. So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Mark, you're a tough guy. I mean, we talked pre-interview chat a little bit about an injury that you just encountered and you're just toughing it out.

11:14You're just a tough guy. And you've actually created four skills of not physical, but mental toughness. Share those now. Yeah, I call these the big four skills and they kind of overlap a little bit with what I was just saying. but the first one, and you'll appreciate this, is breath control. You've got to have your body in control. And so even before that, a prerequisite to having an unbeknown mind and using these skills for mental toughness, you've got to get your body healthy. So you need to exercise, sleep, and eat well. But that's pretty pedestrian. Again, it's not the knowledge that's important.

11:50It's in the doing it, right? It's part and parcel of getting healthy physically to begin a daily practice of breath control. I teach something called box breathing. We talked about it when we last spoke. You just inhale nostrally, deep diaphragmatically, five count in, hold your breath for five count, exhale for five count, hold your breath for five count. That's three breaths in a minute long cycle. And you're massaging your vagus nerve, which is activating the parasympathetic nervous system, rest and digest, which is bleeding off excess stress and anxiety, and bringing your body back into homeostatic balance.

12:25This is a foundational skill. You practice it every day, and then what happens is your body automatically begins to take on this pattern of deep nostril diaphragmatic breathing with five count in and five count out, which in the SEALs we now call tactical breathing, which is six breaths per minute, which now they know through some academic research is the optimal breathing pattern. Deep diaphragmatic breathing, six breaths per minute. It's optimal for performance, for longevity, and for health. So that's the first skill. I'll be quick. The second one is basically you've got to eradicate any kind of negative thinking, any negative conditioning and negative patterns.

13:06So that's akin to what I was talking about before by learning to look at your thoughts, learning to see the patterns and the loops that continually loop around. and there's 60 ,000 thoughts you have every day, you know, 80 % of the same ones you had yesterday. And a lot of them negative, if not 80 % of them are negative because the brain is much more inclined to be negative than it is positive. So you've got to feed positive thoughts and eradicate the negative. I call that feeding the courage wolf. That's a practice and that's a daily practice. The third skill is visualization. So part of that is visualizing the win.

13:40You know, let's say you've got an important thing to do like a speech. You practice it in your mind. just like a top elite athlete would practice a sport. But the second part of that is to practice your future. And I already described that. You come up with a very powerful image of your future, and you practice it every morning as part of your morning ritual. And that basically creates this massive gravitational pull toward that future instead of keeping you stuck in the past. And the final skill is the practical one, right? This is like us in Navy SEAL training or Hell Week. Six days, no sleep, no round-the-clock training.

14:13if we had thought about the totality of that, right, it would have crushed us. And the ones, guys who quit, it's because they couldn't imagine on Sunday afternoon getting to Friday. So what we said, just chunk it down, right? Chunk what you're working on down to the smallest achievable task. We call them micro goal. And then link those tasks so you're always kind of progressing toward that big goal. But then just focus on that one task, right? I mean, when we used to go out for runs, we had no idea. We're going to go out for eight miles, 14 miles, 22 miles in the seals. So we didn't focus on that.

14:50Those of us who were successful just said, I'm going to run one mile, and I'm going to do the best I can at that mile. And then when I get there, you know, I'm going to celebrate that in my head, and then I'm going to run another mile. And that way, you know, we're just running, you know, 14 one-mile runs instead of, oh, my God, how much farther are we going to go? So those skills, breath control, feeding positive thoughts and staying in positive territory, visualizing the win and visualizing your positive and abundant future, and then focusing on the smallest task or goal and daisy chaining those goals toward your major objective.

15:25Those skills, when you do them every day, will lead to tremendous success and tremendous mental toughness. Now, just to be very clear for our listeners, just go over very quickly the box breathing method. Box breathing, nostril breathing, right? Your nostrils, your nose is meant for breathing. Stop breathing through your mouth. It's very damaging to your whole body. So you breathe through your nose deep and diaphragmatically. That means as if you're breathing into your belly, activating your diaphragm, pulling the breath in. So you're going to inhale slowly, slowing the breath down to a count of five, right?

16:01You can count to yourself or just slow it down, you know, and just, you know, maybe time it so you know what it is. Then you're going to hold your breath after the inhale. and you're going to hold it with a lifting feeling like you're not going to clamp down and create back pressure. So as if you're inhaling, but you're not. So you hold your breath for five count and then you're going to exhale through your nose slowly, belly coming in toward your spine for five count. And then after that, with the belly tucked in, creating this vacuum, you're going to hold your breath for a five count. Now, if you can't do five, do four.

16:34And if you can't do four, do three each. It doesn't really matter. Five is a target to work toward. because you get the benefits of that six count or that six breaths per minute when you're not doing the whole box pattern. Mark, you're somebody who has tapped into your full potential and I want my listeners to be able to do the same. So how can Fire Nation tap into their full potential to achieve a more purpose-driven life? John, I mean, people who listen to your podcast probably take this at face value, But first, you've got to believe that you have far more potential than what you've been led to believe by, you know, your academic instruction or mainstream culture.

17:19Like human beings and the human mind is absolutely extraordinary, has almost unlimited potential. In our SEAL training, our SEAL fit training, we call it 20x. You have 20 times more the potential than you think you have at any one time. And the question is how? How do you unlock that? the way to unlock that is start to use your mind differently and to recognize that your body and your mind are not two separate things they're all one thing right just to your body is just an expression of the mind in the physical world so we take control of training our minds through this discipline practice i call the five mountains and that is physically mentally emotionally intuitionally and spiritually and they're just five different ways of looking at this experience of being a human.

18:05But what happens, John, is when you begin to train them together in an integrated fashion. And what I mean by that is like the traditional horizontal development model said, okay, you go to the gym and your coach gets you healthy and that's your physical, you know, that's the physical. And then maybe when things break in your relationship or something's not happening, you're depressed, then you go see a therapist to get fixed and that's your emotional. and uh and guys most guys don't even do that and then maybe you go to church on sunday and that's your spiritual intuition you don't even know about you don't even not even sure you believe it and mental well that's uh maybe that's just listen to a podcast for a lot of people and these things are done separately what i'm suggesting and what the work i've done with the seals and with thousands of clients is that when you train these when you look at these all as just different aspects of you as a person, and it's kind of like Aristotle's whole person, whole mind idea, then you train these things together, what happens is you begin to experience a much more rich and rarefied mental game or mental processing, right?

19:16You begin to perceive way more, both internally and externally. You begin to receive information from your gut mind and your heart mind. And, you know, that's another kind of new area of science saying, wow, we actually have neurons, neuropeptides, neurochemicals in our gut and in our hearts. So these are actually brains. And yet when you're untrained, you have no ability to really connect to your heart brain and your gut brain. And so you don't receive the intelligence and the information that's really important coming from those sub brains, let's call them. ultimately you experience your whole body as part of your mind and um it greatly expands your like i said your ability to perceive things um to you know cut through the clutter to see what's true and false and to tap into a deep um sense of peace and competence and confidence right which give you this this tremendous um access to greater potential and also then the other part about that is to, it opens up this ability to see a much more powerful future filled with your purpose.

20:26Like the only, you have a unique purpose for being here. And most people aren't aware of that, and they're not living it. And so their life is going to be contracted. And they will live that life of quiet desperation that Thoreau talks about. So by learning to train your mind and sit in silence and ask better questions, and to be able to visualize and envision this powerful future which becomes emergent as you do this process um suddenly right it begins to open up and unfold for you and everything starts to come in line and we experience like this life flow where everything is effortless spontaneous uh the ego is completely in check and you're living kind of like the humble servant but with everything and anything you need you're just not attached to it so it's really powerful philosophy and um yeah i mean the only hard part is just doing the work right disciplining yourself to do the work mark every time i talk to you i get inspired and i also make a recommitment to myself to do better because we can all do better but man when i listen to you i'm like i can definitely do better in these few areas that i really would love to just achieve more purpose in so i'm not gonna lie i don't blow smoke You know that.

21:42I just downloaded your book, Uncommon, as you were talking right there on Audible. I will be listening to it today on my hike with my 75-pound golden doodle, Gus. It's happening. I'm looking forward to it. You know, you need to get a weight vest for your hikes. That's something that's really powerful for developing mental toughness and strength, core strength. How many pounds? You know, 40 for you would be ideal. Okay. If you're in good shape, you're in good shape. I am in good shape. You don't need any more than 40. Okay. But, you know, the first, you burn about two and a half times the calories from a normal walk.

22:16But it really is great for your bones and your core and your mental strength. You know, just like an ice bath is, right? Just the repetitive walking with that weight two, three times a week is really powerful. You see what I mean, Fire Nation? Mark just makes me a better person. And I'm ordering that on Amazon as soon as we're done talking here. And Fire Nation, I challenge you to surround yourself with the right people like Mark. And Mark, by the way, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, of course, your book, Uncommon, you have many other books. You're a New York Times bestselling author.

22:45They can check them all out. There's six total now. What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? If anyone listening, by the way, you're all awesome people, right? And thanks for supporting JLD. He is a freaking pioneer. I love you, brother. Love you, too. We have this incredible teaser program called the Unbeatable Mind 30 Day Challenge. It's 30 days, like 20 minutes a day. You get a video from me teaching you one of these skills, you know, definitely the big four skills I talked about here. I was in there. Box breathing's in there. Integrated five mountain development. Everything. So it gives you kind of a real, not super deep because that's our other program, right?

23:24But an overview of all these skills. And it's only$39. Unbeatlemind.com is where, I tell everyone that's the best place to go. Start there. I've had many, many people just say just that program transformed their lives. Man, I love that. And Fire Nation, you will too, because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MD and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, including Mark's course, just type Mark in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. Mark, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation.

23:59For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Mark for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. And I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there. or on the flip side.

25:01Thank you.