Mark Divine  0:02  

Coming up on the Mark Divine show.

Steve Magness  0:04  

To me perfecting whether that’s through practice or the mental skills is about, well, let’s see how close to my limit I can get. And if I can do things like that visualization or like, spend time practicing or spend time, you know, preparing in a specific way, then that’s going to allow me to get closer to my limit and no one knows where that is unless you go explore it.

Mark Divine  0:31  

Hi, I’m Mark Divine. And this is the Mark Divine show. On the show, I explore what it means to be fearless through the lens of the world’s most inspirational, compassionate, and resilient leaders. Guests include notable folks from all walks of life, meditation monks, Blockchain security wizards, survivors of extreme adversity, and top athletic coaches such as my guest today, Steve Magness, author of Do Hard Things, why we get resilience wrong, and the surprising science of real toughness. Steve is also the co-author of The Best Selling Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox. In his coaching practice, he worked with executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes on performance and mental skills. He served as a consultant and mental development for professional sports teams, some of the top teams in the world, and his writing has appeared in Outside, Runner’s World, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health,, and others. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and graduate degree from George Mason University. And notably, back in high school, he ran a 4.01 mile, which was the fastest in the country at the time, and the sixth fastest in US history.

Mark Divine  1:35  

Awesome, Steve, really nice to meet you. Thanks for joining me on the Mark Divine show. 

 

Steve Magness 1:38

Yeah, thanks for having me, Mark. I’m really looking forward to this. 

 

Mark Divine 1:41

Yeah. Likewise, likewise. We have a lot in common, I’m super stoked to, to get your take on how hard things develop resilience and, and mental toughness and all that. But um, you know, tell me a little bit about yourself where you’re from, and I know you’re in Houston now, but where you’re from and are some of the early influences in your life. 

 

Steve Magness 1:57

I actually grew up not too far from where I live in the suburbs, although I ventured off, I ended up you know, coming back. But you know, I think early on, my influence was all in sports and athletics is I loved all sorts of sports, I grew up kind of diehard baseball, soccer, football, whatever following and playing them. And for the longest time, I thought I was going to be like, you know, really good at soccer. And I was pretty good. But once I reached and got to high school, I realized that I was really good for the sole reason that I was faster than everybody and could outlast everybody. It wasn’t my skills. 

Mark Divine 2:34

I was kind of like that, too. Like I had incredible fitness. But when it came to the actual skill, 

 

Steve Magness 2:41

Exactly

 

Mark Divine 2:42

I was a little off, you didn’t need a lot, a lot, a lot of practice. 

 

Steve Magness 2:44

Exactly. And it’s interesting, because it’s, you know, you want to master the skill. But if the fitness is your forte, it’s just a little different. And I was fortunate early on to have a high school coach, who, you know, got me to come out for cross country and track for some reason. And I was really resistant and, you know, didn’t really like the idea of, you know, just running around in circles. But he convinced me that like, this is where my talent lied and convinced me that hey, like, you could be okay at soccer, but you could be really good at running. And his influence really kind of changed the trajectory of my, my kind of life at that moment where I joined the cross country and track team and then and then took off, and by the end of my senior year, I was a 4:01 miler and the fastest high schooler in the country.

 

Mark Divine 3:32

Let’s talk about that for just a second. What does it take? Because I know that you know, of course, the breaking the four-minute mile is like a big psychological barrier. And now many people have done it. I mean, I don’t you probably know how many people have done it. But what does it take to go from 4:01 to like a 3:58, or whatever the fastest runners are running. 

 

Steve Magness 3:49

So the world record now is 3:43, which is crazy. I’ll give you the long story short is so my I ended up writing 4:01 in high school and then never broke that barrier. Even though I tried for years. So maybe I’m not the best person to ask. But I have coached people to run faster. And I think here, here’s what it is. There’s such a kind of mystique around that four-minute barrier, even now, decades later. But there’s such a mystique that it gets kind of stuck in your head. And there’s a symmetry about it. Because it’s simple. You run four laps around the track. You run them in a minute or less, and you get the gold. In where I often would struggle is there’s not really much fitness difference between a 4:01 and or 3:59. But when you’re coming around, and you’re seeing, you know, less than one minute, less than two minutes, less than three minutes as you get through through laps is that tension kind of rises. And instead of relaxing into that moment and being like I’m on pace, I’m on track, just keep this thing going. What often throws people off is that tension rises you feel that Oh, I have a shot. I have a shot and you end up almost self-sabotaging yourself because you get tight, you use more energy, and then you just kind of crater over that last little bit and fall just short. 

 

Mark Divine 5:06

Did you use visualization back then to run your race as a part of your practice? 

 

Steve Magness 5:11

Absolutely, this was a big part of actually, I’d call it my breakthrough. So when I was a junior in high school, I was a pretty good runner, but I’d only run like 4:17. So to put that in context, that’s like, maybe the top 100 or so in the nation. So to go from that to the first is a big jump. But what allowed me to do that is that entire summer and season before I kind of made that jump is almost every run every workout, I’m just visualizing in my head, what is it like to run this four-minute mile, what it is like to run significantly faster than I’ve ever been before. So when it came down to race day, I’d been in that spot, I’d gone through in my head, kind of what it was going to take what it was going to feel like when the pain and discomfort was going to rise, and how I was going to handle that. And it kind of allows you to kind of navigate that in a much better manner. 

 

Mark Divine 6:08

I love that I’ve had some powerful experience of visualization. And, you know, I think ultimately, given given the right conditions, enough time, you know, everything is first created in the mind, like everything, everything that happens in the world is first created in the mind. Problem is there are some other structural and external conditions that need to line up to support the particular goals that we select, right? You know, your body type might have been just like, one inch off from the optimal body type, to be able to, you know, be a world record holder, but you know, you had the body type, good enough, right? And then with your visualization skills, and etc. For me, you know, I was a competitive swimmer and a competitive rower. And I used visualization for my swimming and had a pretty extraordinary experience with that. But I didn’t do it with my rowing. And I rode only for a year and a half, but I was so fit. I ran a triathlon on a whim one day and just, you know, just destroyed everybody in it. And so my coach said, “you know, you’re really good rower”. And I was a stroke for the eight-man team heavyweight eight, “that I want you to test for the Olympic team”. And this is down at Cornell at the race camp. So I went down there and I just completely bombed it.

And it was because of what you just described, I got into the the ERG, and it was one of these, it was a new, you know, wooden kind of flywheel ERG and got it was different than the concept tools we were using. And then we got in a boat. And I’ve never done kind of one of these fake boats, you know, where you’re, you weren’t actually rowing. And I was all nervous. And I seized up. And you know, and I kind of bombed it, I didn’t get a second chance. Even though I was probably one of the fittest guys in the country, rowing crew at the time, I just did not have the time, the dirt time, or the water time. And also, you know, I’m 6 ‘1, but the guys at the Olympics rowing are like 6 ‘4- 6’5, you know. And so I think that structurally, I just wasn’t the right body type either. So, the goal was not the right goal, for me. 

 

Steve Magness 7:59

Exactly. And I think that’s one of the most important points is that, like, when you get to the upper echelon of performance, whether that’s in sport, or whatever you do is often those small things that you know you can’t control for, end up being the difference makers, right?

 

Mark Divine 8:15

And you can overcome a lot of that with time and practice. But then there’s just a point where you know, everything kind of has to line up to be the best at something.

 

Steve Magness 8:23

Exactly. So that’s why to me, and I’m sure you think similar is like, to me, perfecting, whether that’s through practice or the mental skills is about, well, let’s see how close to my limit I can get. And if I can do things like that visualization, or like spend time practicing or spend time preparing in a specific way, then that’s going to allow me to get closer to my limit, and no one knows where that is unless you go explore it.

 

Mark Divine 8:50

And I think the message is so important for athletes and physical strivers like us is like, it’s not healthy to think that your only end result is to be number one or to get that world record or be on the Olympic podium. It really isn’t healthy, because very few people do it. And I’m not saying you know, those who are qualified and fit and have the skills and great coaching shouldn’t go for that, right? Because, you know, with the stars are lining up, whether you got a chance, but if you define yourself by that, that’s not healthy, right? So define yourself by being the best that you can be within, you know, the construct of all the limitations and opportunities that you have, and be okay with that be satisfied with that.

 

Steve Magness 9:29

I couldn’t agree more. And I think that’s actually, you know, I’ve worked with a lot of high-level elite athletes and variety of sports. And that’s often something that they have to like come to terms with, and often struggle with, because if you solely define yourself by the results on the field, or the track or whatever it is, well, that you can get away with that kind of early in your career and as you’re developing, but at some point you’re going to, most likely unless you happen to have those stars align where you are the best in the world, most likely you’re going to come up to a point of failure.

Or, a point where you realize like, if everything’s aligned, and everything’s clicking, maybe I’m I’m 10th best in the world. And that’s fantastic. 

 

Mark Divine 10:08

It’s Pretty cool. Yeah, right. 

 

Steve Magness 10:09

Yeah. But if you’re solely like defined by like, it’s gold metal or bust, like that can put you in a really bad spot. And that’s where I think a lot of times elite athletes, often you see this after the Olympics, is they struggle that.

 

Mark Divine 10:22

Yeah, it’s like they have like, post-Olympic depression.

 

Steve Magness 10:25

Exactly.

 

Mark Divine 10:26

Well, here’s the other, the other kind of uncanny side effect of non-attachment to the outcome is that you relax more, you can literally get that podium moment because you don’t care about getting that podium moment, because you’re relaxed. 

 

Steve Magness 10:39

Exactly. You know, that’s one of the hard things, it’s really, you know, in sport, I think we do a very poor job of is we often tell people like keep pushing, pushing, pushing, which it makes sense, like, we want to, you know, be able to push through adversity, but that pushing often has to come from like a relaxed space.

 

Mark Divine 10:57

You never get in the flow state. If you’re all tensed up, or you’re freaking out about, you know, whether the person next to you… I remember when I swim to enter breaststroke, you know, it’s kind of like running if your neck and neck with somebody, you can both see and feel their presence. And it kind of freaks you out. So you, so you get a little seized up, right, and you try to swim faster, which actually slows you down, you’re not relaxing, you’re not, you know, slow is smooth, smooth is fast kind of thing. You don’t do that. 

 

Steve Magness 11:22

Bingo. That’s it. That’s what I always love to point people to, you know, like Usain Bolt and the 100. I loved watching him because here’s the guy who’s about to run, I don’t know, 27-28 miles per hour, just crazy fast. But you watch him on the starting line. And then when he’s racing, and he is so relaxed while doing it, even though he’s putting massive amounts of force into the ground. And I guarantee you can feel the tension of someone like on his shoulder, but he’s able to like relax and let his body do the work instead of like, tensing up and fighting himself.

 

Mark Divine 11:55

How do you coach people to do that? That’s a master skill. 

 

Steve Magness 11:58

It is, it’s a lot similar to, you know, I imagine what you kind of went through in your career, which is the stress, anxiety pressure causes you to kind of narrow, intense and you have to spend time in that crucible, where you’re teaching your body to essentially do the opposite relax into it, often is teaching your body that, hey, you don’t need to sound the alarm, you don’t need to put me in this freak out this hyper stress mode, I am okay in this space. So it’s kind of the same as like keeping your your head on straight or, or steady when you’re, I don’t know, what I would imagine or what I’ve talked to other military professionals is when you get stuck in a sticky situation and in the field, is it’s really keeping your mind calm enough, where you can see clearly. It’s the same in athletic performances, you need to spend enough time doing the difficult thing, but not trying to tense up fight it, but learning how to stay smooth calm in, and relax. We’re doing it. 

 

Mark Divine 12:59

Yeah, totally. For us. It’s like reality-based training, where the training is as intense as what you’re gonna experience in combat as intense as you can without the danger of someone actually trying to shoot you in the head. Because that probably wouldn’t go so well. The government, you know?

 

Steve Magness 13:16

It’s a simple concept, but you know, in psychology is just call it stress inoculation. 

 

Mark Divine 13:20

That’s right.

 

Steve Magness 13:21

Right, you experience more of that stress. And this is where I think it’s really important is, in an environment that simulates what you’re going to face. Is it something that puts you in that similar situation, so that you can kind of train your body to turn that alarm down. Another thing that I think is important that is sometimes missed here is you’ve got to teach people the skills to be able to do this, you can’t just, you know, throw them into the difficult situation and, and hope they survive. Because that’s a little bit like taking someone’s who’s unfit and being like, you know, go lift some heavy weights or run an all-out mile. Well, they don’t know what to do. Their minds just gonna freak out because they maybe haven’t experienced that discomfort. And for some years or decades.

 

Mark Divine 14:06

Yeah, there’s a whole host of crawl, walk, run body, mind, and emotional skills that are layered on over the years. Do you think that virtual reality can do that? Do you think we’ll be able to, like, throw people into a virtual environment, and accelerate their learning or shorten the time to that kind of greatness moment?

 

Steve Magness 14:25

I think that there will be some good applications for this. I’ve actually talked to some sports teams dabbling in this area because as the technology gets better, it can create a more realistic view of it.

 

Mark Divine 14:37

Right, immersive

 

Steve Magness 14:38

…immersive, and as I’m sure you’re aware, even with things like visualization, the data is pretty clear where it says like, the more you can make it feel real where you see the environment you’re in and almost like smell and experience it and utilize all those senses, the more your brain kind of latches on to it and says, oh okay, like we actually are training this and I think that’s going to be a helpful spot. Because it it literally can become brain training. And I think with some of the technology actually to look at kind of brainwaves and stuff like that, we’re going to be able to almost take that to th degree where we can see, you know, is your kind of fear center going through the roof, how do we turn that down and get you to get back in control in this, you know, simulated situation.

 

Mark Divine 15:23

You can personalize the virtual reality simulation so that each operator in the military setting or each athlete is getting customized input.

 

Steve Magness 15:32

Exactly. Because the way I kind of like to think of it is like stress can send us a number of different ways, like some of us get super narrow, right, and we don’t see anything in the periphery, others of us kind of get dissociated. And it’s almost like we’re in that fog, where everything is a little chaotic. And again, I think the research is in its infancy. But if you can tailor like how they deal with that stress and get them back in that kind of flow, that zone, then you’re going to be in a better spot. So I think there’s a lot of cool applications that are maybe not too far down the pipeline. 

 

Mark Divine 16:06

Okay, so you did this high school with college running and athletics. And then how did you get into what you do now? What was the path like for you? 

 

Steve Magness 16:16

Absolutely. So you know, I was an athlete who was all I cared about was sport, all I cared about was running. So I went to school graduated from college, because like that kept me eligible to keep running. 

 

Mark Divine 16:26

Right

 

Steve Magness 16:27

Once I got done, though, I was like, Okay, well, what do I do? Ok, well my running, I got to a pretty high level, but not a high enough to keep doing that.

 

Mark Divine 16:35

There’s not a whole lot of people paying people to just run around the track. 

 

Steve Magness 16:38

Exactly. It’s a very, very small number of people. So it’s not a very lucrative career, except for a handful of people in the world. So reality kind of smacks you in the face, what ended up happening is I got into, you know, doing the thing that I knew how to do at that moment, which was just helping coach people to perform better. At first, for the first several years of my career that was in track and field, you know, since then it’s kind of taken off into the world of, well, performance is performance. Which is like the same kind of inner battle or struggle or struggle with anxiety or doing difficult things that a track athlete might go through is the same struggle that any athlete will go through or an executive who’s trying to figure out how to make difficult decisions in high-pressure situations. It’s the same kind of psychology and mental side of it. So in the last couple of years, I’ve really expanded off of that and kind of taken a broader view of performance. 

 

Mark Divine 17:35

I’m curious, how have you bridged you know, the game or the process of coaching an athlete to coaching a CEO? Right? So I agree with you, some of the principles are the same, but the context is completely different.

 

Steve Magness 17:47

Context is completely different. And what I would say there is, I’m all about the basics and the foundation. So what you see or what I’ve seen as that athletes are, are often pretty good about the foundation, because it’s they have to develop the skills of their sport. And executives, what you see is often they don’t have that foundation. And what I mean by that is 

 

Mark Divine 18:08

They don’t have the health and the physical structure and the practice and the discipline, yeah. 

 

Steve Magness 18:11

Exactly. Those things are lacking. It’s often people think, Oh, it must be like the final couple percent you met, that you focus on. And it’s no, it’s creating that structure in that discipline, the physical practice that health, the sleep, the well-being, so that they can actually have the freedom to perform. Because right now they’re performing at, I don’t know, 60% capacity, because they’re kind of getting in their own way. 

 

Mark Divine 18:35

I think that’s awesome. Because, you know, we used to say in the SEALS, you got to always come back to the basics, because even though we had a solid foundation, the other part of that is if you only work on the most advanced techniques, tactics, procedures, whatever, then the basics, get rusty, which then kind of put some kinks into the foundation, you always came back and every time we did a training package, whether it’s shooting, diving, jumping, whatever, we would always come back and start at the beginning. Now we would go through it a lot faster, and move up beyond it quickly, compared to you know, when we just got out of BUDs or whatever, we found that repetition of the basics was profoundly valuable because it allowed us to operate at an optimal level of performance and then peak for whatever particular OP that we needed to go on, or more special skill that we needed to like pull out of our kitbag and like, Okay, now we’re going to polish this up, but we didn’t have to go back to the basics at that point. 

 

Steve Magness 19:24

Exactly. I love that. Well, I’ve found something similar in sport, especially but it’s, you know, the best of the best never get bored of the basics. Because they know just like you said, you have to return to them. And that’s why, you know, I’ve been fortunate to you know, watch and observe and work with, you know, some team sport athletes and professional sport and, you know, I remember watching some NBA guys where I’m like, seeing drills that they’re doing to maybe just start there practice that are the same drills that you know, some high school kid who’s just learning how to shoot and play or doing and, you know, they don’t spend a lot of time on it, but they return to it enough where it’s like okay, here’s the foundation. Remember what it’s like before I moved to the advanced stuff.

 

Mark Divine 20:04

I love this remote reminded of martial arts or martial kind of warrior quote or concept from your Miyamoto Musashi, author of the Book of Five Rings, you know, famous Japanese swordsman. And he said, It’s better to do one sword cut 100,000 times, then 100,000 sword cuts once each. And so what’s happening, I think it’s important to practice those fancy things that get you to from 98% to 100% efficiency. But when it comes to doing the basics, what you’re doing is you’re training your mind through that repetition, to be able to let go of all the processing power that you would normally give to that so that you have all that power, all the mental focus and acuity for that 2% refinement, right. And so you’re able to operate at a much higher level because those fundamentals are just so drilled in that they’re just happening spontaneously. There’s like zero mental, neurocognitive power going to them.

 

Steve Magness 20:56

You’re spot on, it frees you up to do the things that that kind of matter. And in those moments, and I think this is one of the things where I can modern society kind of backfires is that the basic things don’t look great on Instagram, or tick-tock. 

 

Mark Divine 21:10

Yeah, they’re not very shiny and fancy or sexy, right? It’s like, haha

 

Steve Magness 21:15  

Exactly, it’s kind of like the boring stuff consistently over the long haul gets you, as you said, 98% of the way, but it’s boring. It’s not the fancy shiny stuff. So what happens is, a lot of people don’t spend enough time doing them. So they never reached their kind of, you know, performance ceiling because they they didn’t ever establish that foundation. And they spent, they instead tried to skip steps and jumped to the final 2%, where it doesn’t have as big of an impact unless you’ve got that big foundation. 

 

Mark Divine 21:46

The other benefit is there’s a um, it affects the emotional development of the athlete or the warrior in my example. Another example that is like in a karate kid, right? So the kid goes to Miyagi San, and wants to get right into doing, you know, roundhouse kicks, and, you know, whatever, fancy stuff. And Miyagi says, Okay, well, no, we’re not even actually going to start training karate, you just go paint this fence or wax this fence, you know, wax on wax off, wax on wax up. And so what he’s doing is forging his character and developing humility, and actually preparing his emotional controls so that he’s ready to do the actual training, you know, the technique training, I think that that’s basically what BUDs, or Special Ops pipeline training that’s wax on wax off, people think, oh, yeah, you learn to be a Navy SEAL in BUDs. I’m like, No, I didn’t. That was pure humility, training, and how to be a good teammate and making sure I wasn’t going to kill myself and everybody else. And then I started to learn some fundamental skills. You know, when I got to the SEAL team.

 

Steve Magness 22:45

I’m so glad you said that. In writing and researching the book, I talked to a couple of former Navy SEALs, and they kind of echoed the same thing, which is, people, see, you know, BUDs, and they get all excited, and rightfully so. I mean, from everything I’ve heard from others, it’s, you know, a very hard, obviously, time. But it teaches that kind of, as you said, that teamwork, etc, etc. But it’s really that stuff afterward that teaches you kind of foundation of how to be a SEAL. And I think, in the broader society, we kind of turned to the shiny object, which you know, as BUDs and be like, how do we mimic all that, and we forget the rest of it. 

 

Mark Divine 23:21

That’s really cool. So your book is called Do Hard Things, what is like if you were to describe like your model, you know, for developing mental toughness, and we, of course, do hard things as part of that. What does that look like? And let’s talk about some of them. The more interesting things that you found.

 

Steve Magness 23:36

Number one, I think, is seeing things clearly or embracing reality, which I think is often what happens is we think of, oh, I need to be tough. So I got to put on this like external face and this external bravado. And what it really is, is no, you need to develop the inner confidence and the ability to see the task at hand very clearly, for what it is and also see what your tools and capability is, and are clearly as well. And that’s foundational to it. And I think you know, okay, so that’s, we’ll say, pillar number one of the model. The other things that I think are really important going through quickly, it’s that second pillar to me is like understanding your inner world, which as we talked about, emotional control, understanding the feelings, the emotions, the inner dialogue, the self-talk that comes with doing challenging things, is central to everything is we can’t just push it away and ignore it and say, You know what, I’m going to ignore these doubts through this emotion. You’ve got to learn what it means and how to navigate it. Instead of just kind of shoving it off to the side. 

 

Mark Divine 24:42

Yeah, and sports, athletics. Endurance is such a great way to come face to face with those patterns that are shaping our behavior anyways, right? So if it comes out when you do hard things, or you fail on the court or in the track, that’s great, because now you can take a look at it there, right? As opposed to it showing up, you know, in the boardroom later and destroying a business or a marriage, right or something like that.

Steve Magness 25:08

Exactly. 

 

Mark Divine 25:09

So, that inner terrain that you’re talking about really is the patterns. And the, you know, what the yogis would call the samskaras. You know, the the things that are kind of like shaped how our mind has been trained by our family of origin and epigenetically, and all that kind of stuff.

 

Steve Magness 25:22

Exactly. I think if we see our inner world as something that can be trained and developed all that stuff, it puts us off in a better spot. And I think often what happens is people make the mistake and saying, oh, like, you’re either tough, and you got to figure it out, or you’re not? Well, the reality is, that’s not the case is that we can all kind of develop this inner strength of this ability to navigate our inner world, it just takes repetition and putting ourselves in those situations where we have to navigate it. And sometimes that means failing and losing, which can teach us again, valuable skills for okay, how do we handle this in a better way. And I think so often what happens is, in our modern world, we often think of losing or failure is something that we should avoid. And that is like a testament that we ourselves are a loser failure. Instead of seeing it as this is part of the journey, this is part of the process, it’s gonna happen. And as you said, there, it’s often better to learn that lesson on how to navigate, bounce back, deal with it early on, through maybe spore, or school or what have you. So that when you face something that actually matters, and matters a lot, you have those skills to be able to process it and handle it in a better way. 

 

Mark Divine 26:41

Right. And you just alluded to one of those master’s skills is to learn that there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only learning and growth. 

 

Steve Magness 26:48

Exactly.

 

Mark Divine 26:49

One of the things I loved about athletics and, you know, martial slash military training is that you learn that training is paramount, right for your quality of life. And that if you’re not training, because every every one of us have experienced periods of non-training, either through injury or like you say, one of those, like, super peak moments, like, Hey, I just won the gold medal, and then you just stop everything, because you’re burned out, and you don’t have a goal. And then you go into this period of like, geez, you know, all these patterns are coming up, and you start to get shaped by other people and external events. And you’re like, wow, so where I’m going with this is, this is the thing I say often to my tribe is if you’re not training yourself, then someone else is training you. And the results will speak for themselves, right?  And so if you grow up in society, and you’ve never taken time to train your mind and your emotions and get control of that inner landscape and train your body to be healthy and fit and strong, then you are at the whim of a culture that is very intent on training you, right, through social media, through news through everything to be, you know, to be a good consumer to be, you know, in our day, and age of maybe a woke teenager, or whatever, whatever the cultural kind of quote, unquote air quote norms are, you know, someone’s training you.

 

Steve Magness 28:03

I think that’s spot on, because the way I kind of look at it is our kind of alarm in our head, it can be adjusted. So if you walk around, and the information you consume, the people you surround, tell you that the world is, you know, threatening or dangerous to push through or whatever have you, like, your alarm is going to be on the lookout, like, Oh, where am I going to be offended or what is going to send me over the edge. So of course, your brain goes off at the simplest of things, right? That alarm sounds. The way I kind of look at it is, you know, in exercise if you’ve maybe you’ve been injured for a while, and you go out for a jog or you go lift some weights, if you haven’t exercised in a while, that pain alarm sounds very early, because you’re not used to it. So it’s very sensitive, even though you know, hey, I’ve been here before, I can’t go much further or longer or harder in this workout. But because you’ve kind of been away from it for a while that sensitivity goes up. So we need to in our own lives. Make sure that our lives, our foundation of what we’re doing from a physical health standpoint, from an information consumption standpoint, is like giving us our brain kind of feedback on reality, so that our alarm isn’t, you know, super sensitive and gonna go off at any sign of danger, but it’s calibrated. So it’s like, yeah, it goes off when we’re actually in trouble or when we actually need to pay attention to the pain, discomfort or anxiety that’s going on. 

 

Mark Divine 29:33

The subtitle of your book is why we get resilience wrong in the surprising science of real toughness. What did we get wrong about resilience? And what is the surprising science of real toughness? Because I’m curious about that myself. 

 

Steve Magness 29:46

So I think what we get wrong and we’ve kind of been hinting around this, but I think what it is, is a couple of things. A: we tend to think that toughness is only about you know, gritting your teeth, putting your head down, and pushing through. And often it’s like we talked about, it’s about being able to relax or sometimes let go, or bring in some of that training for maybe from mindfulness or meditation, where it’s like, how do we learn to not fight through this moment, but accept it, right? In, I think, in the popular culture, it’s almost like we give people a hammer and say, Hey, this is going to solve every difficult challenge that you can face. And instead, what we need to do is equip them with a multitude of tools to say, Hey, you’re going to face a lot of challenges in life. And sometimes you’re gonna have to pull out the wrench, sometimes you’re gonna have to pull out the saw, and that might be pushing through that might be letting go, that might mean using mindfulness or visualization or whatever, have you. But we need to have equip people with those tools so that they can do the thing. 

 

Mark Divine 30:50

Yeah, I love that. I think in the West, we have such a bias toward action, you know, Do this, do that, fix this fix that, you know, for the hammer, like you said, usually being your dominant tool, you know, when you combine that with equal bias toward non-action, you know, which is where mindfulness comes in, and time and nature and downtime, you see, you don’t get burned out, not just keep thinking you have to train harder, harder, harder, longer, longer, but you don’t maybe that’s not it, right? They found that in exercise. Yeah, my SEALFIT workouts, you know, back in the day, we’d go to three hours at a time, you know, and then I was finding like, wait, I’m not sleeping well at night. Make sense? Right? My cortisol was all jacked up and say, okay, so I broke those apart, and I streamed it down. And there was a time to do that, but not all the time. So that’s when I built in yoga and, and active recovery days and full-on, do nothing days. And everything really balanced out. Because I was able to balance the yin and the yang, you know, the action with the inaction.

 

Steve Magness 31:43

I love that because what it gets at and this is kind of what I tried to bring in, in this book is, it’s about that nuance finding that kind of middle path, where Absolutely it is about like putting yourself in, in challenging situations. But as you said, there, in order to be able to put yourself in that situation, you have to be in a place where you’re balanced and where you can perform, which often means you have to be recovered, or you have to have the sleep necessary, or you have to have the life in the environment that supports you too, you know, take on challenges. 

And I think this is evident in our modern workplace often is I get people who I talked to are like, I’m trying to take on more in my work. And I’m trying to like, you know, move up the ladder, but I just feel exhausted and I can’t do it. And you talk to them a little bit about their situation. And they’re like, they’re micromanaged to death, they have no pathway forward in their company. And you’re like, of course, you feel unmotivated and apathetic because you’re not satisfying kind of your basic psychological needs that fulfill that motivation. And if you can do that, then you’re going to be able to perform out of a place of, you know, being able to take risks and play to win instead of just kind of playing not to lose. 

 

Mark Divine 32:59

Can you address the fact that you know, hard is, has many phases to it. Let me give example, for our SEALFIT training, our version of hard things is 50 hours of nonstop physical, mental emotional team training called Kokoro Camp. And at the end of Kokoro Camp, we recommend everyone Okay, great job, those of you who completed which is usually about 30 or 40%. Now, don’t do anything for a month. And honestly, that’s harder than Kokoro Camp for many of them, because they’re like, wait, you know, I’m addicted to training, you know, how am I supposed to not do anything was like, Well, you know, stretch a little bit, drink a lot of water, you know, but don’t do anything hard for 30 days. Because guess what, you just put an enormous load on your body think about 50 hours of training that you need 50 more hours of days of recovery probably or not quite that but what do you think about that? 

 

Steve Magness 33:45

There’s one story in the book that really resonates with that idea is that I talked to these is world-class climbers who would climb you know, like Mount Everest and what have you. And they kind of reframed this idea of like toughness, which often I think of is or we often think of as like, oh, just persist, keep doing challenging things. And one of them put it like this, he was like, the tough decision is, when I’m going up that mountain, we’re like a couple 100 meters away from the peak, I see it, but I have to stop and be very self-aware and decide, do I have the energy to not only make it up to the top of the peak but also all the way back down? In? That’s where I think, you know, often we think it’s like persist make it to the peak. Well, that is often the kind of the easy decision when you’re getting closer because your motivation is all towards that that kind of reaching that goal. But that tough decision is self-awareness to say okay, what’s best for me my goals, my life, my purpose, my meaning aligned and a lot to tell you it’s like to stay alive to see my family, like the goal of the peak doesn’t overwhelm that. And I think that resonates with the point you made, which is something that I saw working with uh elite marathoners, for example, are among the best in the world. And so they would tell me, or I would I quickly found out. My job as a coach wasn’t necessarily to push them forward. They know how to do that. That is the skill they’d been developing for life. But my job was to in those moments, like you just mentioned about to hold them back from doing something dumb after they’d done something like incredibly hard, like, you know, run the marathon, it’s to say, Hey, you got to take some time off to let your body to recover and your mind to recover because, you know, you just put it all out there. And for people maybe like yourself, and I who maybe think of ourselves maybe as pushers and like high performers, and always striving, it’s often that stepping back in not doing the thing. Often that is the toughest challenge

 

Mark Divine 35:43

I had a podcast yesterday with a world record-holding mountaineer Colin O’Brady. He said that it was Vipassana, one of the hardest things he’d done was taking 10 days of doing nothing but sitting in silence. And he credits that with saving his life on K2, right? Because he had done exactly what you were just talking about when these other climbers talked about he had made it all the way up to the final summit push it, some other teams were up there as well. And one team had forgotten that tent. And so they all you know, of course, you know, you do you help your teammates out. They weren’t his teammates, but you help your fellow mountaineers out. And so they all crammed into his tent. And we’re talking about when he is gonna go up. And he was like, he started to get just this odd feeling, right, and he closed his eyes and started meditating. And he got this intuitive hit that said, don’t go. So he said, I’m not going. And they were all stunned. And he didn’t go and five climbers went up and didn’t come back. The point here is that, had he all been just do do more and more climb, climb, and not also simultaneously developed that Yin practice of the inner awareness, inquiry, and listening, he could have easily been one of those five, or would have been six climbers and didn’t come back. 

 

Steve Magness 36:36

That’s a powerful story. And it resonates because actually, one of my chapters in the book I kind of outline I call it to listen to your body, which is that exact skill is you see the best athletes, the best performers, what they’re really good at, is going inside in those difficult moments and being like, okay, like, where’s the truth? And like, what my body is telling me? Should I keep going to the summit? Or should I turn around and come back, it’s often difficult, but the more time you kind of spend developing that muscle, which can be done through Vipassana, or mindfulness or other skills, which I think you know, talking about societally, we often neglect because we never spend any time alone in our head often because we always have distractions or other things that can kind of occupy that space or boredom. So that skill is, is for a lot of people never trained. So one of the things to me on, okay, how do you want to be tough, one of those foundational skills is where you got to spend a lot of time in your head alone, right?  And if you do that, it gets a little more comfortable, you’re able to kind of see the nuance of how thoughts float into your mind and what you know, feelings and emotions arise, and whether you should shine the spotlight of attention on them or just kind of let them float on by. But the only way we develop that muscle is spend time, you know, being there, which again, modern society kind of pushes us against, 

 

Mark Divine 38:08

Yeah, it is a skill. You have a works-every-time tool for getting someone out of a rut or helping someone get out of a rut. 

 

Steve Magness 38:17

Yeah, that’s tough. I don’t have a work every time but what I like to call it is like, you’ve got to find some way to dislodge you from that pattern. The simple model I kind of use is, again, when you’re in a rut, one of two things happens, either your world becomes so narrow, that it seems like you know this stress or difficult moment or whatever you’re struggling with is the be all end all its life or death. Or you’re zoomed all the way out and your brain has kind of checked out where it says you know what, this is too threatening, dangerous difficult. My egos under attack, like I’m just going to check out and zone way out. In generally what you see is to get out of that space, you got to dislodge your brain by taking it in the opposite direction. So if you’re narrowed in, you’ve got to do some things that create perspective. You know, maybe being out in nature, right where it zooms you out, or you know, spending time with friends who give you that perspective on what it’s actually like to go through a challenge. And to reframe it. If you’re kind of often in zoomed-out world and kind of dissociating, you’ve got to zoom in, which means focus on that next step. Like what is the simplest thing that you can control in this moment to get to that next spot in don’t worry about what’s come in, you know, down the finish line. And often you see this happen in runners I’ll use the marathon example is people freak out early in the marathon because they sit there like I have 26 miles to go I’m only on mile three, it’s kind of painful already. And their minds just kind of check out in zoom way out and freak out and spiral because they can’t conceptualize how am I going to get through this entire run or raise. 

So you have to literally narrow in and be like, forget that you know, 10 good steps or make it to the next turn, or I’ll check in at the next mile marker, and you’ve got to really kind of refocus and get your brain out of that kind of lost and broad view. 

 

Mark Divine

You know, I often, when I trained SEALs, I use the metaphor of a sniper team, right? The sniper team has the spotter, who’s doing that really, really narrow, focused work, you know, just keeping his eye on the target. I mean, the sniper, the shooter, and then the spotters is taking that broad perspective scanning using the threats are coming in checking the weather and the wind direction, all that. And I said, Okay, so one of them is trained through concentration training, the other is trained through mindfulness, concentration takes you narrow attention, control, focus, laser-focused, and the other through broad perspective and being aware of your thoughts and emotions as well, as you know, situationally, what’s going on around you, they said, the holy grail is to train these, so they come online simultaneously. So it’s akin to developing, you know, a whole mind approach. You don’t have to toggle back between left brain and right brain thinking or between focus and expansion, you can have them both online simultaneously, I call that simultaneous mind.

 

Steve Magness 41:10

I love that concept. And I’m going to add some research to that, which if you look at, again, there’s been some research on the best marathoners in the world. What they do, when you compare their psychology versus novices is they have that ability that you just talked about to go broad and narrow. And you look at the novices or the you know, level down, what happens is, they get pretty good at one of those things. And they don’t have the ability to integrate or use both. So what happens is they can succeed for a little bit because they, you know, maybe have that narrow concentration, etc. Until at some point, it inevitably, you know, fails them, and then they have no other skill, nowhere to go. So I think that integrations point is like, backed up in the, again, the research on some of the best athletes in the endurance athletes in the planet. 

 

Mark Divine 41:59

And it’s interesting, and I’ve studied meditation now for many, many years. And concentration is one path. And mindfulness is another. And there are others that one TM calls their path, automatic transcendence and there is some like nondual, you know, touching the void, Taoist type path. Usually, people unknowingly stumble into one or the other. And then they find that it’s hard, right? It’s hard because there’s, there’s prerequisites. And there’s antecedents to both paths. The two primary paths, concentration, and mindfulness, you go jump right into mindfulness and your mind isn’t able to concentrate, then you’re basically just sitting down and thinking, you’re still merged with your thoughts. And if you go into concentration, and you never leave concentration behind, then you don’t develop the metacognitive ability to have that broad base situational awareness. So it’s not an either/or it’s a both/and. I think that’s one of the things that I’m trying to do is demystify meditation to bring it into the context of mental development, mental and emotional development and parse out, you know, what’s a path to develop that whole mind, simultaneous mind and then go beyond even into the spiritual realms.

 

Steve Magness 43:01

I love that about your work. And I think that’s one of the important things you’re doing. Because often what what happens is people hear mindfulness meditation, and they, they have preconceptions, that often makes it where they resist that, but it really is that mental performance and maybe to add a layer on this, there’s some wonderful work and in the field of sports psychology, that kind of approaches that same concept you’re talking about with that concentration versus mindfulness, and they tie it to performance, where they say there’s all these performance states but if you look at the two main ones is there’s this this feeling and experience of flow, which is often tied to this kind of mindfulness you know, experience they’ve classified another which is called a clutch state, which is often tied a little bit more to this narrow experience in similar to what you said there is it’s not this either or it’s about having those both of those abilities so that when whatever prerequisites come in and you know, put you in that space where you could go one of either routes or go in the middle and use a little bit of both you’re equipped have the tools to do so instead of just relying like well I’m only performing when I can enter flow or I’m only gonna come through when I feel like that that clutch state where my adrenaline is high and I can just like focus on this one task. It’s really is that both/and.

 

Mark Divine 44:26

That is awesome. I’m totally in alignment and it’s been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your work and your insight in this stuff. So your book Do Hard Things: why we get resilience wrong and the surprising science of real toughness is out in the Marketplace. Where do we find it? And where can people reach you?

Steve Magness 44:42

You can get it anywhere books are sold Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all that stuff. You can see my work at SteveMagness.com or on all social media @ Steve Magness and I really appreciate your work and this conversation Mark. It was it was a blast and a pleasure.

 

Mark Divine 44:56

Yeah, likewise, Hooyah! 

Great show interesting guy, Steve Magness, author of Do Hard Things: why we get resilience wrong and the surprising science of real toughness. You can learn about him at Steve Magness and Magnesss.com. We talked about some really interesting things. And we’re totally in sync on how to develop the mind and the heart to be a world-class athlete or a world-class CEO or just a world-class human being. Shownotes and transcripts are on our site at MarkDivine.com. And the video will be up at the YouTube channel, MarkDivine.com/youtube, you can reach out to me on Twitter @Mark Divine or on Instagram and Facebook @ real Mark Divine, and also on our new Tick Tok channel @ Real Mark Divine, how cool is that? I’m on LinkedIn as well. My newsletter Divine Inspiration comes out every Tuesday, where I have my blog and show notes from the podcast as well as other interesting and inspirational things that come across my desk, that I think you’d find valuable. If you’re not a subscriber if you’d like to be you can sign up at my website, Mark Divine.com. Special shout out to my amazing team, Geoff Haskell, Jason Sanderson Q Williams and Jeff Torres, who helped bring this show to you every week. And these amazing guests. Reviews and ratings are very, very helpful and appreciated. So consider doing that wherever you listen to this show. So that’s it for this week. Thanks so much for being part of the Mark Divine show journey and being the change you want to see in the world. We’ll do this one day, one life at a time. Hooyah, till next time.

Transcribed by Catherine and https://otter.ai