Navy SEAL Reveals the Deadly Power of Negative Self-Talk | Chadd Wright EP 637

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

0:11What's the killer of getting through hard challenges in your mind? What's the thing that kills most individuals once it starts to get hard and they stop? Negativity, man. The thought process, the words. It's not necessarily the negative thought because we can't control our thoughts obviously all the time we're gonna have thoughts in our head that pop up that we don't want to be there but it's it's it's when you give those thoughts power through the things that you say so I give you an example one of my best friends going through SEAL training he came to me one morning and I could tell he had been in a bad place mentally but he was doing fine progressing through training but he came to me one morning and he said out loud for the first time I don't think I'm good enough to make it through this training anymore, which was a lie.

1:07He was completely physically capable of doing every single thing that we had to do that day and every other day. But when he came and said that, those thoughts that he was having that he wasn't good enough, they didn't have enough traction to stop him until he came and told me that out loud. Spoke it into existence. He spoke it out loud. Yeah, man. You might be thinking, am I good enough to do this? Can I make it through? Maybe I'm not as strong as these guys. These guys are more talented. But once you start saying it to someone else out loud, that's when your body starts to believe it even stronger.

1:43And it gets harder and harder to go back into a confident place, I'm assuming. That's it, brother. Yeah, so like when he told me that, it was just like seconds later he was going to ring the bell. Really? Yeah. And there was nothing that I could do to stop him. like it's like he finally believed it 100 and he was out yeah yeah just don't say it and you're half the half the way there right if you like just don't say it you're you have a chance i said bro that's it and and so your tongue i i compare it to a rudder a rudder is the main control surface that steers a ship steers the direction of a ship your tongue is your rudder it's going to steer the direction of your life and the outcomes of your situations 98 % of the time.

2:29What you say is pretty important. It's paramount to me bro. I take this to such an extreme that I don't curse. I'm a Christian but not cursing is not a Christian thing. It's because none of those words in and of themselves have a positive meaning so why am I going to use them so for me it is paramount dude the things that we say. Did you ever come to a place where you started saying negative things to yourself during Bud's training or as a SEAL where you had to catch yourself or have you always been clear with your words to yourself? I have not always been clear with my words to myself I became more conscious about the power of my words throughout life and doing really, really hard stuff.

3:24I put myself in enough situations with other people around me to see the power of the spoken word actually work, not only in my own situations, but in the men around me or women around me in racing. you know yeah so as every time I see it work I'm like holy smokes this is powerful this is powerful well then finally I started going on some podcasts and telling people that it works and then I now I get hundreds of messages a month of people saying oh my gosh this works what are the words we should never say to ourselves and what should we say to ourselves every day I think that's It's really individualized, man.

4:11I mean, as far as the words that you should never say to yourself, it's going to be dependent on the situation you're in, you know what I mean? And then the things that you're saying to yourself, you know, a big one for me is, I will not die in the chair. That's a huge mantra, you know, that I use. I won't die in the chair, and that has a whole meaning and story behind it. What's the brief meaning? So that was born out of that last man standing race that I did a few months. Well no, it was back in May. You know, we had to run 4.16 miles every hour on the hour. Each one of those hours I would dedicate to a fallen brother in the SEAL teams.

4:49Their actual names? Yeah, I had a wrist coach that I was wearing and I would have their index card with their face name, their family's names, their date of sacrifice. And so... Holy cow. That probably gave me a lot more power and strength. It did, man. But it gave me a lot more pressure too, dude, because each one of these laps was for this guy. And some of those guys were guys that I had spent a lot of time with. You know what I mean? The way that race worked, there was no definitive finish line. You just kept running until only one runner was left standing. So I could not promise my brothers that I would win.

5:30I couldn't promise them victory because I didn't know if my body would break or, you know, I didn't know. I didn't know where the race was going to end. But I could promise them that if I died, and death meaning death within a situation, not physical death, but death in this scenario would be of my race. if that time came I would die out on the race course battling for every step that I took so on the chair I won't die in the chair that's sitting around waiting yeah cuz so at the end of each one of these laps there was a chair so if I came in off the lap in 55 minutes I could sit down for five minutes and it was hard a lot of people died in the chair that day I'm done because it It was hard to rise back up, man, for sure.

6:23Did you win the race? No, I think I was the third man standing. I ran 116.5 miles. And my last lap, dude, was actually for a good friend of mine named Blake Marston. And we lost Blake in a skydiving accident not long ago. I went out on that lap, and so it was muddy. I had tied my shoes too tight, and so my shoelaces were sawing through that large tendon in the front of my ankles. That's painful. Yeah, so it got to the point that I could no longer flex my toes toward my shin anymore, so every step was like I was dragging my feet like lead weights. So I went out on that lap, and I pretty much, I was broken, dude.

7:09Yeah, your whole body. But I wasn't going to die in a chair, dude. You were out on the lap, though. I was out on the lap, dude. You fell on the lap, or you didn't make it back in time, and you're like, I got out there, dude, and I remember looking down at Blake, and, dude, I just started crying. Wow. Because I knew at a certain point that I could not make it back in time. Oh, my gosh. And I thought, you know, what does Blake think of me right now, you know? And then I just had this sense of peace come over me, dude, and I could see his face in my mind's eye laughing at my poor physical state. because we always find, I mean, team guys do, we always find humor in adversity.

7:49I mean, no matter how miserable that got, we would be joking and laughing at each other. So I saw him laughing at me, you know, and then I found a stick on the ground and hobbled my way back to the finish line.

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9:01Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.