Transformation Tuesday: The Navy Seal Mindset

On this episode of the podcast we have our Transformation Tuesday webinar.
 
This week we talked about the pain of change, and how to create a lasting mindset.

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Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:46

Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with another special transformation, Tuesday episode of the podcast. Now every Tuesday, John and I, John or I, one of us, or both of us. Most times, both of us, we do a special zoom broadcast called transformation Tuesday. Now if you want to find out more about watching that live on Zoom, you can find out more@tesh.com we do it every week. We also do one on Thursday. You can sign up for both of those calls again@tesh.com but every once in a while, I want to bring you guys the audio from one of those one of those shows, one of those broadcasts, one of those meetings, one of those conferences, and today is one of those days. So here, without further ado, is this week's transformation Tuesday. Everything you need to know to get you from the place you are to the place you want to be. All right, everybody, hello and welcome to transformation. Tuesday. I'm Gib Gerard. As you can tell, I'm in my studio at my house. I'm in studio. It's my office off my garage. John is out again today. He is traveling for some promotional stuff, but I got some good stuff for you today, for those of you that aren't aware, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So I have been listening to Gordon Lightfoot for like the last week, pretty aggressively, not that song, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Why I told you what I was talking about, Chrissy, and then you go to a random Gordon Lightfoot song. How dare you the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was what I've been listening to, Jeanette in Ohio. That's where the Edmund Fitzgerald was was headed. And if she'd put 15 miles behind her, she could have made white fish Bay, but she didn't. Anyway, I've been obsessed. I've been obsessed like I've been reading about the wreck. I've been watching the old NBC footage of of the Coast Guard search for it. I don't know why. I've just gotten I like the song. I like storytelling in the song, and I've been I've been obsessed with it anyway. That's what's going on with me. Here's what's going on in your neck of the woods, the today. Yesterday, we are going to focus on a little bit more about the pain of change and a couple of things about what it takes for us to change, what we have to what we have to admit to ourselves, what we have to put ourselves through if we want to get to that new place, right? We're all here. I say this every week. We're all here. And I am, I am encouraged every week that I work on this show and on the Thursday broadcast, I'm encouraged by how much, how much this idea of thinking about change forces me to consider my life and forces me to consider the things that I want to accomplish. So we're all here, myself included, because we want to accomplish something. We want to change something about our lives. We want to be that better version of ourselves. We want to get from the place we are to the place that we want to be. And so today we are going to talk about what some of that takes, why we want, why we and I always, I call it homeostasis, why we have this tendency to stay the same, why we have this tendency to make choices the same, choices over and over and over again, even though they aren't getting us what we want. I've said it before. It's a great line. You can't get something you've never had. You can't be someone you've never been. If you don't do something you've never done, you can't you got to do something you've never done if you want to change your life. Otherwise, if you keep doing what you've been doing, you will stay the same. That is how that works. Why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep staying the same? We all want something else we all want. Maybe it's more, maybe it's maybe it's different, maybe it's it doesn't it's not just about career, it's about relationships, it's about everything. So here is the Turkish psychology site, psychologist Gib or mate, talking about why, how our brain works when we choose, when we choose pain of staying the same over the freedom. Why is it that we're so addicted to things staying the same or things not changing like that seems to be a core human addiction. Well, a therapist once said to me that it has to do with the nature of the mind that you're referring to, that if your parents didn't know or hold you, you developed the mind you hold yourself with. So you find safety in this mind that you created. And so the human mind, the ordinary egoic human mind, is basically a defensive structure. It's in significant ways. Is it's a response to pain. That's not all it is, but in significant ways, it's a response to pain. It's a fate of pain, and it's designed to keep you from experiencing pain. So it's worried and it's anxious and it's defensive. So when it comes to change and vulnerability, the mind wants to defend against it. And so it's it comes out of fear, which comes out of childhood experience where the pain that you had wasn't held, therefore you develop these mind structures to keep you from experiencing it. And I mean, one of them, clearly, is addiction. And you know, Keith Richards, the world's most famous former heroin addict, the Rolling Stone guitars said about addiction, for example, his heroin use that the contortions you go through just not to be yourself for a few hours. Why would somebody not want to be themselves because it hurts so much at some point to be yourself, and then a mind comes in and tries to protect you from that pain of being yourself with its ideas and its beliefs and its certainties and its endless desires and its artificial needs, and it's afraid to let go. If I let go, I'll be helped this child again, but the mind large is a defensive structure, and then often will react that way. Okay, let's unpack some of that, because there's, there's a lot that he's saying there. One of the things I want to start with is the nature of the question itself. It's a core human addiction that we want to stay the same, right? And I mentioned before this idea that at its core, change comes when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. But we have a society. We have a we have a system right now that is structured to keep us the same and to make the pain of change even greater, and we feed this with addictions. And the addictions are, they are, are chemical, right? We'll and again, I say this is somebody who does not mind a glass of wine or two at night. I say this is somebody who drinks martinis. We have alcohol is one of our addictions. We have tons of drugs that we use, sometimes prescription, sometimes recreational, but we are numbing ourselves to those moments of boredom where we have to live with ourselves and acknowledge the pain that we are running from on a daily basis, and what that does is it keeps us from feeling the pain of staying the same, which is the most motivating factor in getting us to change, because we if we can get that pain of staying the same, greater than the pain of change, that's when we are motivated to actually change Our lives. But we become addicted. We scroll, we watch and listen to and consume news that makes us feel better about the place that we're in. It makes us feel like it's not our fault, and we do those things because it keeps us from feeling the pain of our choices, the pain of who we are, the presence of who we are at any moment, and that keeps us from changing. That is how we stay in what you know, in that negative homeostasis, that place of our whole life is designed to keep us in the same spot, and we just keep grinding on that, on that wheel until the end of our lives. So if we want to change, we have to be honest with ourselves. We have to figure out, what is the pain that I'm avoiding that's keeping me in these same patterns, and that requires a ton of self reflection. I'm saying this matter of factly because the idea is simple, the process is hard, the solution is simple. Do the things you've never done? Embrace discomfort, lean into who you are right now. Do the I mean, we say it. I say it every week. Do the journaling, do the prayer, do the meditation time? Do it? Sit with yourself in boredom. Sit with yourself without mollifying any of your pain that you are experiencing, so that you can be honest with yourself about who you are, about what pain you are avoiding and what you actually want. I'm going to pivot right now to some of the truths about change. This is Jocko Willink. He is a former Navy SEAL, and now he sells supplements and is a podcaster, like a lot of people, talking about how to enforce change. Do you actually want to do this or not? Do you actually want to do this or not? Because if you actually want to do it, what's going to stop you nothing, and if you don't really want to do it, what's going to stop you? Just about anything that comes up, just about any obstacle that gets in your way, becomes an excuse. It becomes a reason. It comes a rationale for not proceeding down that path. You. Right? How badly do you want it? How much are you telling yourself, oh gosh, I really just hope that this meeting today cancels because I'm not ready. I'm too tired. I can't do it. I can't I can't live like this. I don't want to. I just, I just, I would love, I'd love to just sit and there's a new episode of Toddlers and Tiaras that I want to watch. I don't know whatever love island I want to watch. Love island I don't want to talk to my spouse and deal with some of the issues that are holding our marriage back. I would like to watch love Island and fantasize about or judge people who are behaving differently. If we want it, if we want a better marriage, if we want a better relationship with our children, if we want a better life, if we want those things that we think that we are capable of, but that we've never pushed ourselves into, we got to do it. We have to be honest with ourselves and experience that pain, and you've got to get yourself to that mindset. And this is why, look, why are so many Navy SEALs influencers? Why are so many Navy SEALs quoted by by motivational experts? It's because there is something about the training, the Navy SEAL training that acknowledges this idea of pushing yourself beyond what you thought possible. That is the mystique of the Navy Seal, right? It is. It's not. I mean, look, it's an elite fighting force, and that's cool. But we we look at that Navy SEAL training because we see those images of them carrying logs on the beach, we see the images of and we understand how far they're swimming, how much time they're spending in the ocean, what they put their bodies through, not because we care about strategic and tactical readiness when it comes to war, but because what we see in those individuals, and what the Navy is trying to find in those individuals, Is that understanding of where the limits are and how to put push past them, that ability to put themselves into situations that could or should kill them, but that they have the willpower to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. That's why we lionize Navy SEALs. I mean, you may have a different explanation, but that is my take. That is why we let Navy SEALs become influencers. Jocko Willink is just one of many. I'm sorry I'm blanking on these on the other ones, but it's why we do it. It's why we want to listen to them. Oh, Navy SEAL training, there's something to that. There's this guy. He is a former Navy SEAL, and now he is a professional storyteller. So he is, he is a he tells these strange stories on a podcast, on YouTube, on Instagram, my kids and I have to find the ones that are not too gory. It's like true crime and then scary stories. His name is Mr. Ballin, and he is a former Navy SEAL, and he tells these stories, and I happen to love them. They are a little bit dark, a little bit strange. And again, I my kids like him, but I have to find the clean ones. So I listened to it a ton so that I can figure out which episodes I could listen to with my kids. They like the mystery here he is talking about exactly what I was just saying, the mindset shift that is required to survive Navy SEAL training, and how and on the other side of it, I'm gonna talk about what that means for us. When I was in SEAL training, everyone thinks the hard part is at the beginning of training, the hardest part comes about halfway through training. It's a six month long. Course, halfway through, you're in the underwater phase. And by this point, statistically, everybody in your class is going to graduate despite the difficulty of this test. It's the moment you all are literally forced to have this moment, right? It's horrifying. There's this test called pull competency. They tell you, just go under scuba tanks, and the instructors are gonna come down. They're just kind of screw with you, and you're gonna follow you're gonna follow procedures that you're taught to basically, after they finish tumbling you around and turning your air off, you go back on your knees, and they're watching you the whole time. And you follow these steps. You reach back, you turn on your air, you check your J belt, you check your straps. It's a procedure that no matter what happens to you underwater, you reset. You follow the procedure, but each problem that they give you gets progressively harder to fix, and so each time someone's come down on you, you have to go into the fetal position and just wait. You're going about 60 seconds to 90 seconds with no air. And then you need to follow the procedure. So you can see you become more and more hypercapnic. And it's this test of staying calm and following the procedures despite literally being on the precipice of passing out, right? People call it simulated drownings, and you get four attempts at it. And so I went in, and I'm doing the test, failed it miserably four times in a row. Wasn't even close. I actually was the guy that they had to put a pink piece of tape around my ankle. And it wasn't even to humiliate me. It's I would get so panicked I would push off the bottom of the pool and go to the surface, but we're breathing. Mixed gas. And if you do that, you can risk rupturing your lungs with air bubbles. And so there's like, standby divers there to keep me from panicking and rocketing to the surface. And so I failed four times in a row, and as a result, I actually got rolled out of the class I was in. And they're like, look, we're gonna give you one more shot, and you're gonna leave this class, go to the next class, and you can try again with that class. And so we get to test day, and I failed the first two attempts, not out of panic, out of procedural problems. And so I fail on Friday. There's two more attempts left, and it's on that Monday, and if I don't pass them, not only will it humiliate me, but I'm dropped from SEAL training. Yeah, that weekend was horrible, because I'm thinking about this test. On Monday morning, I got to the pool deck, and I was so nervous all weekend, they make you sit with your back to the pool, and they made me go last that day, and then when it was my turn, I just had this mental shift occur where I was like, holy, I'm gonna die in that pool before I fail this test. Yeah, and I got in the water and it was like, calm comes over me, and I begin this test. And it didn't matter how long I went without air. It didn't matter what the problem was. I had fully committed to this concept of I will literally die before I fail this test. Yeah, and I passed, and it was so easy, and it showed me that there's a point where you can convince yourself that your mind can sort of override all the discomfort and you can basically do whatever you want. That's it. That's what we're talking about. Guys. Uh, sorry, they believe the cussing. So, you know, i That's why I left it in. But that's what we're talking about. You get to a place where there is nothing if you are committed to being this new person, if you are committed to changing your circumstances, your relationships, your finances, your career, whatever it is, whatever goal that you've had on the back burner for a long time that caused you to sign up for this. How committed are you? Are you Navy SEAL? Committed? That is the mystique. That is the fascination is that they all get to that place. And what Mr. Ballin is describing there is not unique to him. It is pretty universal for people who have completed seals training. It's that you get to the place where you understand what that mindset shift is. To say there is no going back. I have burned the ships. There is only forward. There is complete this or die and what that's what SEAL training provides, is the context for you to get to that place, hopefully with safety, so that they know, okay, I want to actually die. Are you doing that? Are you? Are you willing to push yourself into that place where this thing that you want there is no turning back. You got, you got, you've got to do that. You've got to do if you want the new thing, you've got to get to that place. There is a neurological backbone to what we're talking about. There is a neurological structure that we've actually mentioned before, and it is the neurological structure that grows when we embrace discomfort on a regular basis and you have to practice this. The Navy SEALs are given a gift. They have a specific training regimen that they have to go through in order to learn this about themselves. You have it's harder for us. You have to, you have to figure out how to put yourself in that position to change yourself. There is no roadmap. So here is Dr Huberman talking about this. But I want you to listen to this and watch this with the understanding that what you are what this is what you have to pursue, that this is how you are able to create that change. I'm gonna share a little neuroscience tidbit, but I think it's one that you'll appreciate. Most people don't know this, but there's a brain structure called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, as we pointed out before, that's a noun, it's a name. It doesn't mean anything. We could call it the Cookie Monster, right? But what's interesting about this brain area is there now a lot of dating in humans. That's a mouse study showing that when people do something they don't want to do, like add three hours of exercise per day or per week, or when people who are trying to diet and lose weight resist eating something, right? When people do anything that they and this is the important part that they don't want to do, right, it's not about adding more work. It's about adding more work that you don't want to do. Yes, this brain area gets bigger. Yeah. Now here's what's especially interesting about this brain area to me, and by the way, I'm only learning this recently because it's new data, but there's a lot of it. The anterior mid cingulate cortex is smaller in obese people. It gets bigger when they diet. It's larger in athletes, it's especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge, right? And in people that live a very long time, this area keeps its size in many ways. Scientists are starting to think of the anterior mid cingulate cortex, not just as one of the seats of willpower, right, but perhaps actually the seat of the will to live. Now we're talking and when I learned about the anterior mid cingulate cortex, I was like almost out of my seat. And I've been in the neuroscience game since I was 20. We're the same age, and I was so pumped, because I've heard of the amygdala, fear prefrontal cortex, it's planning and action. I could tell you every brain area and every I teach neuroanatomy to medical students, but when I started seeing the data on the anterior mid cingulate cortex, I was like, whoa. This is interesting, and all the data point to the fact that we can build this area up, but that as quickly as we build it up, if we don't continue to invest in things that are hard for us, that we don't want to do, that's the part that feels so Goggin esque to me that we don't want to do, like, if you love the ice bath, yeah, I love the ice bath. You go from one minute to 10 minutes. Guess what? Your anterior mid cingulate cortex did not grow. But if you hate the cold water, if you're afraid of drowning, and you get into water and put your head under, then your anterior mids and survive, then the anterior mid cingulate cortex gets bigger. But if you don't do it the next day, or if you do it the next day and you enjoy it because, hey, I did it yesterday. Woo hoo. Happy me. Merry Christmas. Is Merry Christmas. Guess what? The anterior mid single cortex shrinks. The anterior mid single record that shrinks if you start to enjoy those activities. Now, the guy that he's talking to, the Huberman is talking to, is Goggins. He is also an ABC. So this is a conversation that is right in line with what we're talking about. If you want to change, if you want the thing that you've never had, if you want to be the person you've never been, if you believe that there is something for you on the other side of pain, you have to practice the anterior mid cigarette mid, mid cingulate cortex and its growth, you have to practice stimulating that by being uncomfortable. That means having hard conversations that you don't want to have, that you hate the whole time, and doing that again and again. And when that becomes comfortable, you've got to find something else that's uncomfortable to do, and you have to fall in love with being uncomfortable, and you have to see the rewards that come from being uncomfortable. So when we talk about your life changing, we talk about you becoming this new person. When we talk about this idea of of what's on the other side of this pain, it's not about getting what you're trying to get. It's about becoming the person who can get that 1000 times 1000 times 1000 that's the that's the thing. That's the magic is that you become that person. Not that you get the stuff, not that your marriage gets just gets better. It's that you become better at dealing with the hard parts of your marriage. It's that you become better at navigating the risky waters of entrepreneurship. It's not that you got the one idea winning the lottery is a ticket to bankruptcy. It's not about winning the lottery. It's about becoming the kind of person who can win the lottery over and over and over again. The lottery, obviously you can't win over and over and over again, but you know, I don't know if you guys were this, if you win the lottery, you are more likely to become bankrupt than you are to live a life of luxury. There's tons of statistics on this. It does not actually fix anything, but if you make a million dollars, you're more likely to make another million dollars, because you've become the person that did that. You didn't win the lottery. You became the person that did that. And that is the power, that is what we're trying to create in ourselves, to become the person that can do this over and over and over again, become the person that has that extra bit of willpower to overcome obstacles over and over and over again. And we get that we practice that by putting ourselves into discomfort constantly. It's why we love the metaphor of exercise. That's why we always come back to it on. Program, because exercise is a very clear analog to everything you're trying to accomplish. You have to constantly push yourself. If you start running three miles every day, eventually three miles becomes easy, and guess what? You'll start to gain weight again. It's that we reported on this on on the on the radio show before it's the chubby spin instructor, your body adapts if you're doing the same exercise over and over and over again. Your mind will adapt if you are in a pattern of comfort and mollification over and over and over again. So how do you embrace that? Well, here is a philosopher, Elaine de Batol, talking about how to embrace something that the ancient philosophers know. I think we regularly have to start all over again. And I think you know that old adage, Socrates was asked why he was so wise, and he was said that he was so wise because he knew that he wasn't wise. In other words, ignorance, a capacity to acknowledge one's ignorance, is at the root cause of sophisticated thinking that you should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance. Remember the story of Picasso, who went to an art school in old age, and he looks at some children scribbling and doing drawings, and he said, You know, when I was their age, I could paint like Raphael, and now I'm learning again how to paint like them. That's really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again. And I think that's a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say, You know what, I don't know very much at all. I mean, people often say to me, they must say this to you, you know, people say to me, Oh, you must know so much about love or death or this or that. You know, spend all time thinking, and I rush to tell them I literally don't know anything and I'm not this is not false modesty. It's a genuine sense that with every passing day, I know less. And, you know, it's not even wisdom, it's just comedic, really. And every passing day I know less, I love that you have to. I mean, look, this, this is in every it's, it's part of philosophy, right? You admit you, you approach every day as if you know nothing. The source of your wisdom is in your lack of wisdom, approaching faith, approaching God with the faith of a child. That's it's biblical. It's in every major religion. It's in every major philosophy. This idea that you have to embrace things with newness, that you have to find that essence. And it goes back to Everything we've talked about today. If you want to unlock that potential, you have to approach your life. You have to approach these problems as if you cannot fail. You have to approach these problems as though there you have nothing but yourself to start with, right? And you have to approach it as if discomfort is necessary. Kids are always uncomfortable. We spend the first half of our lives constantly putting ourselves in situations where we have to grow as a parent, I'm watching my kids. They play sports. I watch them, they're constantly uncomfortable. They're always moving one level up and having to deal with the consequences of that. They are always as soon as they get comfortable with something, we put them in a new situation. Oh, you've mastered seventh grade. It's time for eighth grade. You've mastered Middle School. It's time for high school. You've mastered High School, it's time for college. And then we get to our adult lives, it's like all right, you know everything you need to know now. Now go figure it out. We lose the roadmap. We stop pushing ourselves we start to seek comfort. We need to figure out what it was as a kid that we were running from, and then we need to approach that fear. We need to approach that discomfort with the faith of a child that we cannot fail. That discomfort is necessary. The discomfort is a part of what we have of life, and the discomfort is a part of getting us to the place that we want to be, and we have to approach that with the with the willpower of a Navy SEAL. And the more we do that, the more powerful we become. And then, guys, we become that person that we started this whole process with. That's it. That's it. April's asking when we get comfortable with being uncomfortable constantly, what works or then does that feel the same? You need to become comfortable with the idea that you're going to be uncomfortable if you begin to get this is, again, why the exercise analogy is so good. If you are comfortable running three miles, you need to run four. It's not that you are comfortable in your discomfort and that and that erodes it. It's that okay. I know what it feels like to run three miles has become easy. I'm not going to get the cardiovascular benefits from running three miles anymore. I've got to run four. I've run 10. I've walked 10,000 steps every single day. I. I've stopped losing weight, and I'm now, I'm just kind of, I am where I am, and I don't get the cognitive benefits anymore. Well, it's time to go 12,000 steps. That's, that's the thing. That's, again, that's why the that's why the exercise analogy is such a powerful one. April, because it's not that you, if you fall in love with the exercise and the exercise becomes easy, then we know every, every fitness trainer you know in the country, from the guy who has barely any certification to the PhD who is teaching, who's setting all the policy, knows that you have to embrace the discomfort. You have to you have to embrace this idea that if you if you were able to curl 25 pounds last week, and 25 pounds is easy for curling this week, well then you should switch to 30 pounds. And if 30 pounds is too hard and you're going to hurt yourself, go down to 27.5 but you can't stay at 25 pounds if curling 25 that's again. This is the exercise analogy, curling 25 pounds is really hard when you start, and then it gets really easy. And we all know intuitively that if you keep curling 25 pounds, eventually it's diminishing returns. You're not going to see any more muscle growth, and eventually your muscles will become more efficient, and you'll actually see muscle decline. We know that intuitively, explicitly. We see it in the gym. We felt it in ourselves. So do it? Switch to 30 pounds. Embrace that discomfort. You can become comfortable with being uncomfortable and still get the benefits of discomfort, but that's the point. How much are you willing to look at yourself? How much are you willing to analyze that you have been curling 25 pounds for the last 15 years, and you're you want bigger biceps, metaphorically or literally. I don't know what your thing is. Switch to 30 pounds. That's my goal for you guys this week, right? We talk about taking something out of here, taking something to work on every single week. Switch to 30 pounds. You've been doing 25 pounds long enough. What are you protecting yourself from that keeps you in 25 pounds? Okay, that's it. And again, I mean that metaphorically or literally, depending on who you are. Thank you guys for being a part of this. We will see you next week. That's it for the show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast, it helps us out a lot. If you guys rate and comment, it really does. It helps boost our coverage. And if you liked today's episode, share with a friend. If you share with a friend, it doubles our reach and allows us to continue to do this podcast, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You.