Mark Divine [00:02:00]:
So if you haven’t heard those podcasts, you can go scroll back and listen to those. Some really interesting insights there. Today I’m going to talk about the fourth commitment, which is growth. So thanks for joining me today. Let’s dig in. So when you hear the term growth, what do you think most people think of in terms of, you know, growing up? Right. That’s the first way you look at it. You get growing up, right? You get through your adolescent years into your early 20s, and you’re growing, you’re learning, you’re, you’re, you know, stepping out in the world.

Mark Divine [00:02:28]:
And, and growth happens automatically just because you have to confront different experiences, different challenges. You got challenges of school, you got the challenges of work, you know, finding your way in the world and whatnot. And so that’s. Everybody has to do that, right? Everybody does that. I mean, maybe not everybody. Some people kind of avoid that. You know, they get only so far and then they just stop. But the type of growth, you can also look at it as like, all that happened and still, you know, it’s not enough.

Mark Divine [00:03:01]:
And so you take responsibility to really tap into more. Right. You know that there’s more that you can give. There’s more creativity, there’s more potential inside of you. So something about your attitude or your spirit says, I want more. And we call that a growth mindset. Nod to Carol Dweck and her great work by that title. And again, it’s not a big percentage of the human population that has a growth mindset.

Mark Divine [00:03:31]:
Most People kind of take the status quo, they get into their comfort zone, they, you know, they become protectors of a particular way of life or being. And so they become fixed. They literally concretize their idea of who they are and they are what they are, and they’re not going to change. Right? This is back to the whole nature versus nurture discussion. And their nature is to be this way, and so they’re not going to change. And so they don’t grow, even though they go through those early stages of growth that I talked about, they get stuck, they plateau out and they become fixed and rigid and often lead, you know, these lives that are chaotic and full of suffering. And maybe they’re okay because they mask it over with these false ideas of what happiness truly is and a lot of addiction and, you know, coping mechanisms ultimately leading to a life of quiet desperation. So that’s not good, but that’s actually pretty common.

Mark Divine [00:04:32]:
So the fact that you’re listening to this podcast tells me that you’re not in that category. So good on you. So back to growth. Growth means that you have a growth mindset and you know, there’s more, and so you’re seeking more. That’s the reason you listen to podcasts and, you know, maybe you go and get the advanced degree and the certifications and, you know, you strive to challenge yourself a little bit more. And the problem is you still get stuck because the nature of the developmental industry and the way that we’ve learned to develop ourselves or others in the Western world has been what we call horizontal in nature up until basically now or recently. What that means is the training and development recognizes that there’s certain skills that you need to get by in this world, and that’s a constructed reality. The economy we have and the social constructs that we have, the hierarchical systems we have.

Mark Divine [00:05:25]:
And so they’re gonna teach you how to do those things more effectively and more efficiently, but they’re not gonna necessarily transform who you are, your identity. It’s not gonna reconstruct your identity, and they’re not going to transform how your mind works. Again, I’m not talking about what you think in terms of the concepts and the ideas and the beliefs, but how your mind actually works. So horizontal development can only get you so far, but it’s not going to change who you are. What does change who you are without the other type of development, which is called vertical, is a major life crisis or some sort of serious challenge which completely shatters your former paradigm of who you are, were and who you thought you were. And your view of the world, your perspective of the world, and those paradigm shattering events can be like a very serious health crisis, any type of other crisis. Covid was one of those for some people. And some people can get propelled forward to another stage of growth through experiences like that, or they can actually contract backwards and kind of slide back into an earlier stage of survival mechanism.

Mark Divine [00:06:30]:
Right, because they can get triggered into contracting to a lower level of experiencing. So the type of growth that we were looking for, and I want to talk about from this book, Staring down the Wolf, is vertical growth. And that means fully integrated vertical development that changes not just what you think, but changes who you are and how your mind works. And this type of growth really just catapults you to whole new levels of perspective and inclusiveness and compassion and all the creativity, all the kind of skills that we need in this age of AI and accelerating technological advancement. In the book, I tell the story about a friend of mine who was at Bud’s with me. Bud’s Class 170 Jim Hora. Hora was an interesting cat. You know, there was always all of us, at least in my class.

Mark Divine [00:07:23]:
And I’m sure other team guys would say the same thing. There’s always like 10% of the guys who you’re like, what the heck are you doing here? Like, how did you even show up? Like, how did you even make it into the SEAL program? And Hora was that guy for me. Like, he just seemed like he was skipping a beat all the time. He just didn’t seem very smart. I’m trying to say this sensitively in case he’s listening, but Aura knows I’ve told this story before. He’s a phenomenal guy. But at Bud’s he was a little bit slow to get off the starting block. And Hell Week came along.

Mark Divine [00:07:56]:
I was surprised he even made it to Hell Week, but he did. So he was physically strong. I mean, I mean, he was kind of an ox. And he was persistent, right? So those are really good qualities. But he just didn’t seem that smart. So during Hell Week, of course, some of you know this training is around the clock training for six days, no sleep. But for my class on Thursday afternoon, they brought us in, or maybe it was morning, I don’t remember. And they had the heat turned up in the classroom.

Mark Divine [00:08:25]:
And this is after being up, you know, course for four days straight. And we’re exhausted. And then they had us write a letter home to our parents. And they had the heat, like I said, cranked up and it was super dry in there. And within like three to five minutes, everyone was conked out, just completely conked out, drooling all over the paper, which was their intention. So let us do that for about 45 minutes. Just completely go into deep, deep, you know, sleep, trying, you know, our bodies are tricked into thinking this, this ordeal is over and we’re going to start recovering. And suddenly they just.

Mark Divine [00:09:01]:
All chaos breaks loose. They break us out with the bullhorns and the fire hoses again and the smoke grenades and the yelling and the machine, you know, machine guns with the, you know, you know, just. Just chaos, like, you know, trying to simulate like a situation in wartime where you’re just woken out of a slumber and getting ambushed. So the entire class is, you know, fumbling around, getting up and, you know, heading outside. And I’m getting my boat crew together and heading him outside. And, and as I do that, I see Hora just standing there, like, completely dazed, checked out. And he. And he starts walking over and he like, literally bumps into the wall, kind of like a zombie and bounces off, kind of turns around and walks around, walks around to the other wall and bumps into that.

Mark Divine [00:09:44]:
And like he’s completely checked out, like, gone. Like his mind snapped. So I try to wake him up and get him out of it, and to no avail. And so the instructors kind of say, okay, Mark, get out with your class. And they, they take him in. The mock ambulance is the back of a pickup truck over to. Across the base, over to the clinic, right, to have him checked out. So on the way there, Hora kind of comes to, like, he wakes up from his little reverie wherever he was in la la land, and he recognizes that he’s not with his class and he’s in the back of the so called ambulance, and he’s like, oh, shit, this is not where I want to be.

Mark Divine [00:10:27]:
So he freaking. As this thing slows down in front of the clinic, he jumps out of the back and sprints back across the base and sprints down onto the beach where the rest of us were and into the ocean. And the instructors are looking at him like, what the heck? Like, we thought that guy was done. But the fact that he had literally, you know, leapt the captives and evaded them and made it back to the class, they just said, okay, whatever, let’s see what happens. He rejoined the class, and that was a turning point for Hora, right? Like, he had his come to Jesus moment right there. He was like, oh, holy cow. Like, I better get my shit Together. So after that, he started paying much more close attention to detail and he started to be a leader more instead of like laying back and just like taking orders.

Mark Divine [00:11:14]:
And he ended up making it through class 170. So class 170, we had 185 of us who started. 19 of us graduated, and hora was of those 19. Anyways, the reason I’m telling this story is to illustrate the power of vertical development in accelerating growth. So we have this kid named Hora who, like, is just, I don’t remember where, but he’s like off the farm from Minnesota High school graduate. And by the grace of God, he makes it through SEAL training. Bud’s training. And Bud’s training is nothing but a selection program, right? The SEALs and the instructors are selecting their next a set of teammates.

Mark Divine [00:12:01]:
It’s not really to train you any real skills. The skills are skills of survival, the skills of being a good teammate, the skills of, you know, being physically fit and mentally and emotionally in control in stressful situations. But they don’t really teach you how to fight as a seal. That comes afterwards. So all the technical skills are, you know, pretty mark one motto, you know, modest. Let’s just say in Bud’s training, all the fancy stuff comes later. But Bud’s training gave him a sense of confidence and it kind of woke him up. That was his crucible moment to wake him up, you know, snap him out of his whatever kind of state of mind that he was in when he showed up at Hell Week.

Mark Divine [00:12:42]:
But then what happens in the seals is what we’ll call vertical development. So there’s a lot that goes on in SEAL training. First of all, the training is absolutely relentless. It’s NonStop training is 12 months a year, even in combat, right? You’re training, you’re training for your missions and honing your skills and whatnot. So training is relentless. The training is realistic, meaning that it is challenging. It pushes the envelope. It tries to simulate the experiences and the conditions you’re going to find in combat or on these type of mission sets.

Mark Divine [00:13:16]:
It puts you in the environmental situations that you’re gonna, where you’re gonna be extremely uncomfortable and you’re gonna need to deal with cold, wet, nasty situations, very dangerous situations in, around and underneath the ocean, in high altitude training and, you know, parachute jumping and blowing things up and all that. So the training is relentless. The training is realistic, the training is challenging. And the training is simulates like the reality of the environments. So as a result of that, the individuals enduring this training really have to approach it multidimensionally, meaning a lot of the learning is happening completely unaware of the conscious mind or unbeknownst to the conscious mind. So yes, you do have some intellectual work that you have to do. You have to study and memorize things and learn all these different skills and these different weapon systems and you know, dive profiles and dive physics, you have to do all that. But that doesn’t lead to the growth.

Mark Divine [00:14:21]:
That’s the horizontal stuff. What leads to the growth is, you know, putting yourself into a stressful situation with a team, having to perform complex tasks and complex, solve complex problems under pressure. And so the learning that happens there is multi dimensional. It’s physical. There’s a lot of kinesthetic learning and, and interoception and proprioception that happens and just kind of absorbing kind of this like what happens in mastery. You’re just absorbing the learning. There’s emotional development that accrues here and a lot of people stop growing because they don’t know how to unlock the emotional development. And when you can bring positive emotions into your work or into your profession, then wow, that really, really supercharges it and you find a lot of joy in your work.

Mark Divine [00:15:08]:
And if you can’t do that, if you’re a negative nilly or you just don’t know how to tap into your emotional life, then you’re leaving most of what we come here as humans to learn and grow about around. You’re leaving that on the table. So there’s emotional development and there’s a lot of mental development because the training is so challenging and unique and there’s tons of variety. Like you’re always learning something new, you’re always doing something different, you’re always on the go. All that variety stimulates the neuroplasticity and opens up how your brain works. And furthermore, because a lot of the work that the military and the SEALs do, special ops and SEALs do, actually requires deep, quiet introspection, visualization, you know, controlling your breathing, all the skills we talk about in unbeatable mind. Then there’s the opening of the simultaneous mind, the contextual awareness, the situational awareness, both of external and internal conditions, where you begin to develop the capacity to be mindful of your thoughts and emotions while simultaneously aware of them, which is actually one of the most profound outcomes of a deep meditation practice. Happens naturally through this type of training.

Mark Divine [00:16:22]:
So you’ve got this vertical development where the individuals are developing themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally. Right? And they’re in alignment with their, you know, they’re Very clear about their mission and why they’re doing this work. And so they’re very dedicated. And that unlocks accelerated growth. Back to Hora. So Hora went on to have a solid career, right? He ended up finishing his college degree with the seals, ended up getting his master’s degree. I saw Hora at the Louvre about 10 years ago, just out of the blue. I was walking through the Louvre with my wife and.

Mark Divine [00:17:00]:
And actually wasn’t the Louvre. It was down in, I think it’s Ufizi Museum down in Florence. And I hear someone say cyborg and that was my nickname in the seals. And I turned around and it was Hora. And he was in a suit and tie, his beautiful wife with him. And this guy, you know, his eyes were just sparkling and he was just so polished. And he like, completely unrecognizable from that. You know, that, that clunky kid who came through BUDS and, and almost got rolled because he checked out during Hell Week.

Mark Divine [00:17:32]:
And that is the result of vertical development, of real growth. Now, I mentioned in my discussion of horror and how seals develop people three key elements to unlock this type of growth. First, one is to challenge yourself, right? To learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Recognize that comfort contracts you, conforms you to the status quo, and ultimately will lead to, ultimately will kill you, right? Because it’s uncomfortable to do the things that lead to a perfectly healthy life and having a long longevity and wellness well into the later years of your life until you pass away. That’s uncomfortable. It takes discipline. It takes enduring through the early phases of suffering to be able to develop the capacity to be able to move your body and to think with the type of high quality vibrational thoughts that are going to lead to that level of health, positivity and longevity. That takes work.

Mark Divine [00:18:41]:
It’s not comfortable in the early stages, but once you develop those skills, suddenly it becomes just who you are and the discomfort falls away and it becomes joyful, right? And that’s that kind of flow that we talk about. So you’ve got to learn to challenge yourself, to break out of the inertia like the status quo. Or else that inertia just concretizes around you and traps you. And any of you feel trapped and burned out right now, it’s because you haven’t pushed through the inertia of getting comfortable being uncomfortable in new areas, new territories of growth and learning, whether that’s in your career, personal life, with your health or relationships. So you need to challenge yourself. You need to learn to push to Find your edge, to always ride that edge and to move forward through the fire, right through the crucibles of the hero’s journeys that you kind of take on in your life. So it’s really important to learn how to challenge yourself to, you know, seals who go through SEAL training. Obviously we have a high degree of capacity to deal with stress and turn distress into eustress.

Mark Divine [00:19:48]:
Eustress is the type of stress that is beneficial for you and not damaging to you. And so the more you learn to lean into challenge by doing hard things. You do little hard things every day, you do a little more hard things every week. Do something even harder once a month, do something even harder once a quarter and do something really ass kicking once a year. So what does that look like on a daily basis for me? Well, I definitely, I train every morning, I do hardcore workout, I do my yoga, I do my breath work, I do my hot sauna and I do a cold plunge and it’s awesome. But most people would think every one of those that I do is hard, but it’s not anymore. I do hard things. When it comes to uncomfortable conversation, that was a hard one for me to really embrace.

Mark Divine [00:20:33]:
But to deal with the uncomfortable things right off the bat becomes a habit. And so learn to have those crucial conversations. Don’t avoid them, don’t sweep them under the rugs. Learn to be emotionally mature and deal with the shit that comes up as soon as possible so it doesn’t fester and cause breakdowns in your relationships. That’s doing hard things every day. There might be other things that fit in that category. So what about a week, every week, do you do something even harder and that might be like a longer workout, like a three or four hour we call monster mash or you know, some sort of little ass kicker with your friends. You might do on a Saturday morning, you might, you know, go on a retreat or do something that’s a little uncomfortable for a weekend, right? To learn something new.

Mark Divine [00:21:20]:
And then on a quarterly basis you, you just kind of quadruple that, right? Do something that’s going to be even harder, right? Maybe a 12 hour crucible, 12 hour ruck. You know, you get the picture here. And once a year you’re going to do something that’s like, okay, this is going to be my annual challenge. Think about what it is for you. It might be a silent retreat, might be, you know, a longer crucible like seal fit or Goruck or Spartan race. Doesn’t have to be physical. It could be an emotional couples retreat or Something like that. So you need to challenge yourself.

Mark Divine [00:21:55]:
The second thing I talked about was variety for integrated vertical development. Variety is really important. One of the reasons that the seals had all that neuroplasticity. And we’re constantly learning new things because they had to. We had to master so many different domains of expertise or get good at them, right? And so we’re always learning something new. And then when we also come back to the things that we had learned and refresh our, our skills, right in the crawl, walk, run manner. So we’re always doing something different, something new. You know, every two weeks we’re doing something different, something new.

Mark Divine [00:22:27]:
So if you could think about how to design your life like this. You know, over the years in my civilian life, I tried to keep this idea going. And so I ended up with over a thousand hours of yoga teacher trainings. You know, I’ve got three different black belts from different martial arts styles, and I was a hand to hand combat instructor with the SCARS system, which was what we used in the seals back in my day. You know, lots of other trainings and certifications and meditation retreats and silent retreats. So this is my way of, you know, doing different developmental things and then also trying different things with business, right? Writing, you know, challenging myself to write books and challenging myself to do this podcast and challenging myself to start different businesses, many of which didn’t work out. But, you know, always trying something new. Getting tons of variety in your life is another way to really kind of get unstuck and to accelerate your development.

Mark Divine [00:23:15]:
If you can combine variety and challenge and right, right there, in fact, those two kind of dovetails. Because leaning into something new from the variety perspective can be a challenge. And then keeping that challenge, going through a disciplined approach to learning more and growing really takes you to the next level. And then finally is don’t try to do it alone, right? If I had tried to do everything that I do alone, it would have been a disaster. I wouldn’t, you know, wouldn’t have gotten a third of the way here. So find mentors and or coaches who can support you on your journey. My first coach mentor was Tadashi Nakamura. He was my martial arts grandmaster and Zen teacher.

Mark Divine [00:23:56]:
And without him, I wouldn’t be here today. So I looked up to him, I trusted him, especially when it came to meditation. And that trust in a coach or mentor and using them as an example to follow, studying how they behave, studying, learning to ask great questions. And you might have three or four different types of coaches and mentors in your life. For physical development, you need your physical coach. For emotional development, you need your emotional coach, AKA therapist. For your business professional development, you need your executive coach or coach forum, like YPO or EO or something like that, or Longship out of Canada, which we’re working with. So you need to have multi dimensional coaches, right? Or you might even have a spiritual coach, teacher, guide, guru, even if it’s not in the physical form, like alive, like Jesus or Paramahansa Yogananda or like I have a relationship, at least in my mind, with a guy named Maharaj Nizar Gaddatta Maharaj, who is a famous yogi in India, passed away in the last century, but I read his words every morning and just kind of sit with the thinking and it’s just, you know, very, very helpful.

Mark Divine [00:25:17]:
It’s an amazing work. So to summarize, growth is if you’re a growth mindset of person, then you’re compelled to want to grow. Many people that I work with find it frustrating because the personal development, leadership development and growth Mechanisms of the 21st century are all horizontal in nature and fragmented. They’re not integrated. So this is where one of the great kind of innovations that I brought to seal fit and unbill mind was to create an integrated vertical development program where you combine physical, mental, emotional and intuition and spiritual development into a single training regimen. Add challenge, add, add variety, add mentorship and coaching and you suddenly have the conditions for radical transformation, accelerated development. That’s the type of growth we’re looking for and that’s the type of growth that we’re gonna need to tap into our full power and potential as humans in this age of AI, when AI, automation and robots are gonna do pretty much most of what we used to think of as a human skill or task in the 21st century. So now we got to tap into and use other skills which we thought were left to kind of fringe individuals who had these spectacular skills such as super creative skills, intuition, spontaneous knowingness, those are all, you know, those are all your birthright.

Mark Divine [00:26:37]:
But they’re found through the vertical development, right? You’re not going to find them any other way. So let’s get busy doing that work and being uncommon and stared on, the wolf, stared on the fear of being uncomfortable. Right. And develop some challenge, variety and mentors around the things that you’re passionate about in your life. Thanks for joining me. If you found this podcast useful and helpful, please share it with your friends. Please rate and review it wherever you listen. It’s very helpful.

Mark Divine [00:27:07]:
Right? So we maintain relevance and other people can find us. Thanks again for your support. Go do the work and challenge yourself and be unbeatable. Till next time. This is your host, Mark Devine. Hooya out here. Alrighty.