Navy Seal On Discipline, Adversity & Achieving Your Goals | EP 881

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:11If you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called The Greatness Mindset, and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, The Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link in the description to get your copy today. The SEAL teams are incredibly effective at what we do for a lot of reasons.

0:46One of the reasons is selection. And that selection, there's a lot of things you have to do to qualify just to get SEAL training. A lot of people don't realize how smart SEALs have to be. So there's a level of intelligence. There's a level of physical ability. There's a level of, obviously, resiliency that has to come into this. and then we put everybody through this meat grinder called SEAL training that eliminates anybody that doesn't have that ability. Once you get to the SEAL team, it's how we train and build teams and it's forged through tremendous adversity because our training, even once you get to a team, is designed to be very hard.

1:22I mean, some people would say almost sadistic in the way we would train. We would look for what is the absolute worst case scenario we can think of and then how do we amplify that just a little more? To make it even worse. To make it even worse. And then train from that. And then train from that. And it was grueling and painful. And sometimes we got guys killed in training. I mean, you try to reduce the level of risk, but we also recognize that in order to be ready for combat, we have to train at the highest level. And in order to do that, it was a lot of repetition. And crawl, walk, run was the mentality.

1:57And it was not these big goals of, hey, I'm going to take down this entire town. you know right off the bat because that's really complicated that starts to get into all kinds of very complicated things it was how do I take down a single room and we walk as we flow through it and then it became well how do I take two rooms how do I take three rooms how do I take a house how do I take a compound of three houses how do I take a village so it was a qual rock crawl walk run mentality all the time and and then structure and discipline and the way we trained. Everything was built up that way from shooting.

2:33You know, oftentimes I was a marksmanship instructor and I've trained some other people to shoot. And they're always, they're a little funny because the very first thing I do when I train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the, you know, at the three yard line, little black dot. And we're shooting at the three yard line and they're like, Hey man, this is stupid. I'm like, no, you're not. You're learning the repetition that you need to effectively pull your weapon out and get a positive sight picture, trigger squeeze, release that round, and second sight picture and follow through so that we can do that over and over and over again until at whatever point you're shooting from 50, 100 yards or more.

3:08Yeah. So all of that comes together to create small victories and repetition, structure and discipline that all come together to be successful. When I got out of the military, I missed that structure and discipline. You know, a lot of people don't understand that the military is sometimes a really simple existence. especially when you're deployed. Like when you're in the combat zone, it's a very simple existence. You eat, sleep, you work out, and then you train and conduct missions. And you worry about the guys around you. And the real world's really complicated. There's all these distractions.

3:46There's no one that gives you the guidance. No one hands you a mission and says, hey man, this is what you're doing today. You got to figure out your own mission. Exactly. As I got out, I realized that I had to figure out my own mission. and all these things were not there. So, okay, how was I successful coming out of these injuries? Because that's what everybody wanted to see. How were you so positive? How'd you write that sign on the door? How'd you, you know, lessen a year and a half after your injuries launch a nonprofit? How did you, you know, later create your own speaking company and all these things?

4:18And I realized that I was super balanced as a leader when I was wounded. I wasn't prior to being wounded. Really? Not when I had the leadership failure. And at other points in crisis in my life, I realized I wasn't as balanced. But balance is a misnomer too, because it's not like, well, I put 20 % in this bucket, in this bucket, in this bucket. I teach something called the Pentagon and Peak Performance. So five key areas that a leader should be balanced in. The foundational level is physical leadership. And it's something that I've come to find that all of us, as we get older, have a tendency to let slide.

4:55we do the opposite of probably what we should be doing it's being like harder and yeah because as we get older we're breaking down we need to take care of ourselves better than we do when we're younger where your body's so much more resilient and that's why i tell people as a leader you need a lot of energy you need to be able to think clearly you need you know sound mind and everything that you're doing so that foundational level of physical leadership is critical to what you're doing. And that consists of sleep, nutrition, and fitness. When I became a junior officer, and I was super arrogant, I really thought I knew everything.

5:33And I didn't challenge my beliefs. I didn't question my own capabilities, you know, do as I say, not as I do. I didn't do things to get out of my comfort zone. And those are the things that make up mental leadership, constantly educating ourselves, constantly challenging our beliefs. We're in a day and age where it's dangerous, in my opinion, because social media feeds you the information that you like to see. And so many people don't go seek out. They don't challenge that belief system of what they're being fed. So it only furthers their belief in things that may or may not be true. But because you keep clicking on that line of thought, you're being fed all that information.

6:12The news is no different. The media, people watch what they like to see. And it's very biased in this day and age. So mental leadership is constantly challenging your beliefs. It's doing your due diligence to find out what's really true and how does it play into who I am and what I'm trying to do. It's getting outside of your comfort zone. It's finding the individuals who are where you want to be and identifying them as mentors so you can be better, so that you're not surrounding yourself with individuals who are pulling you away from where you want to go. As a leader, it's critical to be even keeled.

6:49We're not too hot. We're not too cold. We're not too excited. We're not too angry because people can count on you with that consistency. They know as a leader, I can come to you and tell you bad news and you're going to take it well, but I can come in and tell you amazing news and you're not going to burn it down drinking and be an idiot. You got to ride that balance. And I really struggle with that because I was an emotional rollercoaster when I was younger. And I came to realize that that that really damaged my credibility as a leader. And it's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity.

7:21Nobody wants that leader that is just an emotional train wreck, you know, or a negative Nelly. They want that leader who they can count on, that's positive, that's going to push you forward. They also don't want that leader that's something I call a leadership wrecking ball. They're all about the result, but they leave a path of destruction behind them. They'll crush you in their path to get things done. And that, in my opinion, is weak emotional leadership also. As a leader, we got to think about the others.

7:58Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. that will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on the School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you wanna get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

8:48Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.