Scales Of Success Podcast

#55 - How Navy SEALs Master Uncertainty and Potential with Rich Diviney

• Marcus Arredondo

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In today’s gripping episode of Scales Of Success, host Marcus Arredondo dialogues with Rich Diviney, a founder, retired Navy SEAL officer, author, keynote speaker, and workshop facilitator, to uncover how elite performers stay calm when chaos hits. From mastering uncertainty to turning pressure into power, Rich reveals the tools that build unshakable focus, humility, and drive. Tune in and learn how to think, lead, and win like a SEAL, no matter what battlefield you’re on.

Rich Diviney is a retired Navy SEAL CDR who spent over 21 years as an Officer, serving in several leadership positions and conducting over 13 combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since retirement, he has become a bestselling author of The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance and Masters of Uncertainty: The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success For You and Your Team. He and his wife, Kristen, co-founded The Attributes Inc., where they train and consult thousands of businesses and teams on how to build and sustain the highest-performing teams on the planet.

Find out more about Rich Diviney:
🌐 Website: https://learn.theattributes.com/mastering-uncertainty
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richdiviney/
📸 IG: https://www.instagram.com/rich_diviney/

Episode highlights:
(4:12) How SEALs adapt in chaos
(8:59) Skills Vs. Attributes: What really matters
(14:53) Perseverance and resilience
(17:43) Adaptability, task switching, and learnability
(22:18) The meaning of discipline and faith
(27:05) The Moving Horizons process
(34:27) Developing attributes and inner strength
(39:05) Courage, fear, and doing hard things
(44:22) Dynamic subordination: How elite teams flow
(51:35) Identity, “I Am” statements, and growth
(56:13) Why stepping into uncertainty changes everything
(57:04) Outro

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Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Rich Diviney

(0:00) I'm going to sort of focus on getting to the end of the Sandworm. (0:03) Now, what I did in that moment is I picked a horizon and I created a DPO, duration from now until end of Sandworm, pathway from here to end of Sandworm, outcome end of Sandworm. (0:13) And in essence, created a mini reward system.(0:15) First of all, I generated dopamine in my system to embark upon that goal. (0:19) And then I created a reward once I got to that goal that allowed me to come back out. (0:22) Once I achieved it, come back out, ask the question again and pick something else.(0:26) So all Moving Horizons is, is a cycle of creating DPOs, and it's going from known thing to known thing to known thing.

Marcus Arredondo

(0:34) Today's guest is Rich Deviney, a former Navy SEAL who's mastered the art of performing under chaos. (0:39) What struck me most is his calm, the way he brings clarity to concepts like perseverance versus resilience, or faith versus confidence. (0:46) We talk about his two books, Attributes and Masters of Uncertainty.(0:49) We also discuss how Moving Horizons can shrink overwhelming goals into actionable focus, why humility and awareness are the real engines of growth, and how elite teams succeed through fluid leadership and zero ego. (1:00) His insights apply whether you're leading a business or rebuilding after failure, reminding us the true strength comes from knowing yourself under stress. (1:08) Let's start the show.(1:09) Rich, welcome. (1:10) Thank you, man. (1:11) I'm excited to talk with you.(1:12) I've been waiting for this for several weeks. (1:16) Well, thank you, Marcus. (1:16) It's great to meet you finally.(1:17) So I'm excited to be here as well. (1:19) Likewise. (1:19) So I'm just going to kick this off because there was an article in, excuse me, because I'm looking off to the side because I'm pulling this up, but there's an article in the New York Times Magazine this last weekend talking about, it was actually about Captain Matthew Goldstein, who's a Green Beret, different, but part of the special services arm.(1:38) And so I won't necessarily go into it. (1:40) There's some controversy relative to Matthew Goldstein, which I'm not really interested in exploring, but he goes into a particular incident. (1:47) The source of this controversy is related to one of their informants.(1:54) No, actually it was somebody who they believed had killed one of their teammates.

Rich Diviney

(1:59) Okay.

Marcus Arredondo

(1:59) They saw this person walking. (2:02) They interrogated him. (2:04) And in order to interrogate him, they brought in the informant.(2:06) And by virtue of releasing the person they thought had killed their teammate, they realized they risked exposing the informant and all of his family. (2:16) And as a result of that, it compromised the entirety of the mission in a large way. (2:21) And he was faced with a very challenging decision as to what to do with the guy.(2:30) And this is in Afghanistan. (2:32) And I only articulate this because I'm hoping you can, I want to talk about Masters of Uncertainty. (2:38) I also want to talk about attributes.(2:39) You can't really talk about Masters of Uncertainty without talking about attributes.

Rich Diviney

(2:42) Yeah, that's right.

Marcus Arredondo

(2:43) But in order, before we talk about that, I wanted to give some context of the grayness entailed in the special services. (2:51) Because one thing that they did highlight in this article, (2:53) which seems relatively self-evident, (2:57) but the outsized, disproportionate weight that the special services carry (3:03) as it relates to reconnaissance, being in enemy territory, (3:08) putting themselves in harm's way to enable our greater military to be more effective (3:13) in broader circumstances, the training that goes into, you know, (3:18) training the allies or the enemies of our enemies to help with insurgencies. (3:24) So I only lay that out because I would like for you just to give some sense to civilians.(3:31) What sort of difficulties are entailed relative to when you're on the ground? (3:37) Because there's the mission that you put in attributes about, you know, everybody's got to plan until they get punched in the face. (3:45) And that sort of goes out the window because once that first shot is fired, you're sort of, you're making it up as you go along.(3:52) I'm going to open that up, but I want to hear what you're, if you could tell us what civilians don't know about what is entailed in, while being on the ground. (4:03) We'll talk about the training separately. (4:05) While you're on the ground, what do you think would be the most surprising element for civilians to understand?

Rich Diviney

(4:11) Well, it's a great question. (4:13) And again, I am not familiar with the article you're referring to, so I won't comment on it directly. (4:19) However, what I will say is that I think one of the things civilians don't maybe understand are the nuances of the profession.(4:27) And by that, I mean, there's just so many variables that go into decision making when you're in that environment. (4:36) This particular story, I don't, again, I don't know much about it. (4:39) I, you know, just based on what you told me, I am hesitant to believe that the choice was binary.(4:44) The choice is very rarely binary. (4:46) It's very rarely one or it's just one or the other. (4:49) That's rare.(4:50) There's usually other things. (4:50) And one of the reasons why special operators are who they are is a large part, just because of the creativity and innovativeness of their thinking. (5:00) We are selected and trained to think outside the box and not be binary in our solutions or our tactics or our processes.(5:10) And so I think what these stories tend not to highlight, just because it'd be a 1,000-page story versus a two-page story, right, are the nuances of these decision making, of decisions on the ground, and the fact that you are constantly dealing with different types of variables. (5:30) And by variables, I mean, all right, there's a bad guy, but what is the context of the bad guy? (5:35) What is he bad for having done?(5:37) There are bad guys who actually go and blow things up. (5:40) There are also bad guys who facilitate the guys who blow things up. (5:44) There are also bad guys who finance the facilitators of the guys who blow things up, right?(5:49) So what are the nuances of the bad guy? (5:52) Where does that come from? (5:53) And then, of course, then in this particular case, now you have a source that is somewhat connected to this whole thing.(6:00) And so now you have to start considering, okay, depending on my decision and what I do, I could be putting another person at risk and someone who's actually served and done good things for us. (6:11) So all that to say, I think special operations are designed to operate in the gray area. (6:18) And the gray area means you are picked, you are selected for the attributes that allow you to operate and make decisions in uncertainty by gathering the data that you currently have, making a decision.(6:31) Of course, you make a decision, you immediately take accountability of that decision and ask yourself, okay, was that the right decision? (6:37) Is that working? (6:38) Because as that decision is being carried out, as that action is being carried out, the environment might be changing, which means the decision you made 10 seconds ago may not be valid anymore.(6:48) So it's the fluidity of the environment, I think, that people don't understand. (6:53) And so back in the States, in the civilian world, people get snippets. (6:58) And just because of the nature of news and because of the nature of the way stories are told, even news stories, they have to paint a picture that generates understanding.(7:07) And the picture they can't paint in a news story is the constant change and variability of the understanding in the moment. (7:16) So that's the difficulty. (7:18) Yet, at the same time, we are the United States of America and our public, we are servants as the military, we are servants to the public, we are servants to the civilians, we are servants to the people of the United States.(7:29) So they deserve to know some of the things we do. (7:33) I am in support of secrets and I am supportive of classified information because we can't let our enemies know what we do. (7:40) But at the same time, I'm also in support of getting enough information out there to the people that we protect and serve so they have an understanding of what's going on.(7:49) And there's accountability as well, because there needs to be. (7:52) We can't have people running rogue out there. (7:54) That's not what we are.(7:55) That's not who we are.

Marcus Arredondo

(7:57) So what do you think? (7:58) So what I found fascinating about attributes, we'll sort of start there, is because you basically wrote this book and for the benefit of the audience, you break down these attributes as dissimilar to skills, right? (8:10) And the basis for this, I don't want to misquote you or misparaphrase you, but you were responsible for selecting among the candidates who were applying to become a SEAL who actually migrated into becoming one and were officially became SEALs.(8:29) There was discontent among many of the senior officers who had vouched for these other officers who had high skills but weren't getting passed through. (8:40) And it was a way to sort of create, not necessarily quantifiable, but some form of a matrix upon which you could assess their general capability as it relates to being in those environments where things are changing. (8:57) Is that a fair assessment?

Rich Diviney

(8:58) It is. (8:59) I'll add some color to it. (9:01) Color will provide clarity.(9:03) What I was in fact in charge of was the selection and assessment for SEAL Team 6. (9:08) SEAL Team 6 is one of our very specialized commands. (9:12) No one really knew what that command was until, of course, we rescued Captain Phillips and we got Osama bin Laden.(9:17) But to get to SEAL Team 6, there are a couple of things that have to happen. (9:20) First of all, you have to have been a Navy SEAL for at least five years. (9:23) That's the minimum prerequisite.(9:25) You have to have stellar performance reviews, stellar recommendations. (9:29) You have to have physical tests, psychological exams. (9:32) If you get through that battery of things, you come to the command and you're put through a nine-month selection course that we call, we nickname it Green Team.(9:40) It was that course that I was running. (9:42) When guys go through Green Team, 50% of the guys who start do not make it through. (9:47) What we're saying is 50% of the top dudes in the SEAL Teams don't make it through the selection.(9:53) This is where we began to have a problem because what was happening was we were unable to, up until that point, articulate why certain guys weren't making it through. (10:01) What would happen is a guy wouldn't make it through, we'd say something like, well, he couldn't shoot very well. (10:07) You tell a Navy SEAL of that caliber he can't shoot very well, this is a guy who's probably shot more rounds than most people in the military.(10:13) It's disingenuous to him, disingenuous to us. (10:16) Of course, the leadership starts asking tough questions. (10:18) When I took over, I went to the command in 2005.(10:21) I took over training in 2010. (10:24) When I took over training, my leadership said, Rich, we need to do a better job articulating what's going on here. (10:30) This is when I began to separate this distinction and bifurcate the difference between attributes and skills.(10:38) Skills being those things that we know. (10:40) They tell us that we know how to do the job. (10:44) Attributes tell us we have the qualities to be able to do the job.(10:48) We have what it takes to do the job. (10:49) Real simple example that kind of hit it home for me was I was talking to an older SEAL friend of mine. (10:54) He had been a SEAL instructor for our basic SEAL training.(10:57) Our basic SEAL training, by the way, that's in San Diego, California. (11:01) That's called BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training. (11:03) That's where regular sailors go to become Navy SEALs.(11:06) There's a 90% attrition rate in BUDS. (11:08) 90% of the guys who start don't make it through. (11:11) Anyway, he had been an instructor at BUDS even way before I had been there.(11:15) He said, Rich, there's a story about a kid who showed up to BUDS, to SEAL training one day. (11:20) He walked into the instructor's offices and he said, I want to be a Navy SEAL. (11:24) The instructor said, okay, but you have to do a swim test.(11:25) The kid said, fine. (11:27) They take him out to the pool. (11:28) It's an easy test.(11:28) It's 50 meters, so 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. (11:32) Kid gets all ready to go, proceeds to jump into the pool, and then proceeds to sink to the bottom of the pool. (11:36) At the bottom of the pool, he starts to walk across the bottom of the pool to one end.(11:39) He touches that one end. (11:41) He walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end. (11:42) He comes up.(11:43) He's gasping for air, nearly drowning. (11:45) The instructor looks at him and says, what the heck are you doing? (11:48) The kid who's still trying to catch his breath says, I'm sorry, instructor.(11:51) I don't know how to swim. (11:53) At that point, the instructor pauses, and he looks at the kid and says, that's okay. (11:56) We can teach you how to swim.(11:58) The question is, why did he say that? (12:00) He said that because he knew if this kid had the qualities, the attributes to show up to Navy SEAL training without knowing how to swim, he had everything inside of him that we needed for him to be a Navy SEAL. (12:10) Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be the easy part.(12:13) What I found was there's a huge difference between skills and attributes. (12:17) Oftentimes, we get locked in and seduced by skills when we look at performance because it's the visible stuff we can see, measure, and test. (12:23) We say, oh, that's the most talented person.(12:25) That doesn't tell us anything when it comes to stress, challenge, and uncertainty because in an unknown environment, it's very difficult to apply a known skill. (12:33) This is when we lean on attributes. (12:34) This is exactly why people misunderstand or they have the perception that if you're a great athlete, you can be a Navy SEAL.(12:41) There's many cases, in fact, a lot of cases where Division I athletes come to SEAL training, and they quit within the first two days because athleticism has nothing to do with being a Navy SEAL. (12:54) Athletics is one environment, one genre where performance is oftentimes measured by skill. (12:59) Again, there are attributes involved.(13:00) To be a pro athlete, it's not just about skill. (13:03) The Drew Breeses and the Tom Bradys, they were rockstar quarterbacks because they had attributes plus skills. (13:11) But all this to say, if we're ignoring these qualities, these attributes in our performance picture, we're ignoring a huge, if not the most important part of how and why we perform the way we do.

Marcus Arredondo

(13:20) I love that you brought up that. (13:22) I think I'd heard that maybe on another, you had referenced that story before. (13:26) I think it articulates something so fundamental about the distinction between the skill set and what attributes are.(13:32) For the benefit of the audience, you break it down into five overarching concepts, which is grit, mental acuity, drive, leadership, and team ability.

Rich Diviney

(13:41) I hate to, I don't want to break it to you, but since the book, we've actually created nine. (13:45) There are now nine categories and 41 attributes. (13:47) In the book, I talk about 25, but there are actually 41 attributes that we talk about.(13:51) So there's a lot.

Marcus Arredondo

(13:52) Well, this seems like an endless, I mean, there's gonna be even more and more nuance, right? (13:55) Because one of the things that I wanted to sort of point out was even inside of the grit, for example, the attributes you discussed within grit are courage, perseverance, adaptability, resilience. (14:09) And what I really enjoyed about the aspects of those chapters in particular were, it wasn't until my thirties that I started to understand the difference between disappointment, frustration, humiliation, embarrassment.(14:23) They all fell under anger. (14:26) But once I started to understand the nuances within them, I could start to create an awareness that was distinct. (14:32) And I only bring that up because there was an underlying theme.(14:35) And I don't know if that was just my own reading, but within all of this, it seems like you really highlighted the first step to anyone's assessment of attributes is awareness, is being aware of those attributes.

Rich Diviney

(14:51) So I wanna talk- Well, not only that, and I'll add real quick, the awareness of the distinctions between the attributes. (14:58) In other words, and you brought up the grit attributes, which I'm really happy you did. (15:02) Perseverance and resilience, for example.(15:03) Okay, a lot of people conflate those two terms. (15:06) They are not the same thing. (15:07) Perseverance is defined as the ability to get knocked down seven times and get up eight.(15:12) In other words, every time I get knocked down, I'm getting back up. (15:15) It's the Rocky Balboa effect, okay? (15:17) Resilience is when I get knocked down or knocked off baseline, how quickly and efficiently can I get back to baseline?(15:23) Resilience is about recovery. (15:24) Resilience also goes both ways. (15:25) When something really great happens, how much time do I spend up here resting on my laurels, getting complacent before I come back to baseline?(15:32) Why does this matter? (15:32) It's because I've worked with people who are very high on perseverance and low on resilience. (15:37) You know what that looks like?(15:38) That looks like burnout, okay? (15:39) Because that's someone who's gonna go and go and go and go and go and never take time to, in fact, recover. (15:45) So the distinction and the definition of these terms is very important to start to understand how these attributes can live independently of each other.(15:53) And when they do, it shows up some very distinctive behaviors.

Marcus Arredondo

(15:56) Well, you took the words right out of my mouth. (15:58) It was spot on because I wanted to talk specifically about the distinction between those two. (16:02) I also wanted to talk about compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.(16:09) And we can go to any of these, to be honest. (16:11) I mean, I don't wanna, if you would prefer to talk, use the entire time we have.

Rich Diviney

(16:15) No, I love those.

Marcus Arredondo

(16:16) These are critical to me because I've become an increasing fan of stoicism because of its practicality. (16:25) I do practice TM because I think of its practicality in implementing. (16:30) It's like, if you wanna build something great, you gotta start with a foundation because you're looking at the thing that's gonna create the highest leveraging effect, the greatest compounding effects.(16:40) These to me are human conditions. (16:43) They are human aspects that regardless of where you stand, my impression of what you were saying, which I happen to agree with, so please correct me if I was misinterpreting it, but we all have a natural tendency. (16:56) Babies have a natural state of their own attributes within all of these.(17:02) But I also took away from your explanation that these are learnable skills as well. (17:08) And just because you're low in one and high in another may not necessarily suggest that's a wrong thing or a right thing, but being aware of them and how to hedge against them, against maybe the lower part or the higher part because narcissism, you talk about, which I wanna sort of talk about as well, but that could be an extraordinarily negative thing in a lot of people. (17:30) But there also seems to be a requirement to have some morsel of narcissism in order to be a thriving participant within a SEAL Team community.

Rich Diviney

(17:42) Well, within life. (17:43) And so let me, because there's a lot there. (17:45) So let me just, because I love the attributes of our products.(17:48) So let's talk about them. (17:49) I'm gonna save compartmentalization till the end or till the last one just because compartmentalization is exactly aligned with the whole Masters of Uncertainty concept. (17:57) So I'll just save that.(17:57) But let's talk about task switching and learnability first. (18:00) And before I do that, let me just say for the audience, when it comes to the 41 attributes, we all have all 41. (18:08) We all have all of them.(18:10) The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. (18:13) So if we take, for example, adaptability. (18:15) I'm about, on our assessment tool, it's a seven is the high on a Likert scale and one is low.(18:20) I'm about a 6.5 on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it's fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. (18:28) Someone else might be a level three on adaptability, which means when the same thing happens to them, it's difficult for them to go with the flow. (18:34) They are still adaptable because all human beings are, but there's just more friction there.(18:38) So if we were lining these attributes up on a wall like dimmer switches, all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. (18:43) That starts to speak to our own unique individual performance. (18:47) And I want to kind of relate it to this idea that we're like, human beings are like automobiles.(18:51) Okay. (18:52) But yeah, because we all have the same component parts. (18:54) We have the steering wheel, the tires, the engine block, all that stuff, except some of us are Jeeps.(18:58) Some of us are SUVs and some of us are Ferraris. (19:01) And there's no judgment there because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can't do and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can't do. (19:06) But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what type of engine we're running with so we know how and why we perform the way we do.(19:12) So when I talk about these, and we're going to get into narcissism here too, but there's no judgment in any of these attributes. (19:17) And every attribute comes with advantages and blind spots, whether you're high or whether you're low. (19:22) And if you think about, again, we have our assessment tool, which if someone takes, you'll get your ranking of your attributes from one to 41.(19:29) And in the conduct of that, when you get those results, we encourage you to look at your top five and bottom five and ask yourself, okay, how do your top five and bottom five start to explain and articulate your behavior? (19:41) But one of the things we say is the attributes assessment is not like a personality assessment, okay, for a few reasons. (19:47) But one of the reasons is because your top five and bottom five do not equal your strengths and your weaknesses.(19:52) In other words, you are successful as a human being as much because of your bottom five as your top five. (19:58) If patience is in your bottom five, which means you're low patience, that is assisted and helped you in many ways. (20:03) There's advantages to that, right?(20:05) So there's no judgment in any of these when we talk about them. (20:08) Any of these attributes at extremes can be a bad thing, they can be harmful, but most of us don't live in extremes. (20:15) So let's just talk about a couple of the ones you brought up.(20:17) Task switching, which is a mental acuity attribute. (20:20) This is the ability to shift focus, okay? (20:23) The people who are high on task switching often get mistaken for multitaskers, okay?(20:28) But we now know neuroscience has proven that multitasking is in fact a myth. (20:32) Our frontal lobe, our conscious minds don't really focus on more than one thing at a time. (20:36) Now, people have debated me on this, they may have debated you on this.(20:39) They say, Rich, I can drive my car and listen to my podcast, okay? (20:42) But it doesn't count if you've relegated that other activity to your unconscious mind. (20:46) The reason why you can drive your car and listen to your podcast is because you don't have to think about driving your car.(20:50) If you are, however, driving your car and listening to your podcast and someone swerves in front of you and you have to take evasive maneuvers to get out of the way, you'll have to rewind the last 15 seconds of that podcast because your brain will have hopped, okay? (20:59) So, people who are high on task switching, they're really good at going like, say, from the email to the conversation to the phone to this to that. (21:06) They can pull out and refocus very rapidly.(21:08) People who are lower at task switching, they have difficulty pulling out and refocusing. (21:13) It takes them time. (21:14) They get thrown off, okay?(21:15) There's no good or bad, it's just how it is. (21:17) Same thing with learnability. (21:18) Now, learnability, again, it has nothing to do with our ability to learn, okay?(21:24) Everybody, every human being has the ability to learn. (21:26) Learnability has to do with the speed with which you uptake and metabolize information. (21:32) So, in other words, the high learnability folks, the other people who can be shown or told how to do something once, they very rarely make the same mistake twice.(21:40) They got it right away. (21:41) They pick it up. (21:42) Lower learnability folks, they take a little while to metabolize and process.(21:46) So, just an example, when I was going through my own SEAL Team 6 training, okay, I was lower on learnability as compared to my teammates, okay? (21:54) Because we'd finished a day of training and a bunch of my buddies would go out drinking. (21:57) I'd have to stay back and study my material and visualize and go through it because if I didn't, I wouldn't uptake it.(22:02) Again, there's no judgment. (22:03) It's just how we show up. (22:04) So, where these attributes are, where we fall on these things starts to matter and starts to really give good indicators of how and why we perform the way we do.(22:14) Can you talk about discipline versus self-discipline? (22:17) Yeah, so discipline as an attribute is really kind of this ability to understand a goal or objective, kind of look out and be very, understand immediately what has to happen, the wickets involved to achieve that goal, be disciplined in your execution. (22:32) The way I kind of separate kind of inner discipline and outer discipline is inner discipline has to do with those goals and objectives that the external world has nothing, that it has no say in whether or not you accomplish, right?(22:47) So, that means, that's something like, okay, if I want to lose weight and get in shape, okay, I can make a decision to do that and I can be in Vegas the next week and the Vegas buffet is not going to throw pastries at me, okay? (23:01) It's all up to me, all right? (23:03) Outer discipline, external, has to do with those goals that the external world has a say in whether or not you accomplish.(23:09) That's become a Navy SEAL or start a podcast, be a successful podcaster or write a book and become a successful author. (23:15) The external world has a say as to whether or not that gets accomplished. (23:18) They're going to throw things at you all the time.(23:20) So, someone who's really high on discipline and, for example, interdiscipline, they're that person who really thrives in a structured routine. (23:27) Maybe they eat the same thing every day, they work at the same time, they are really structured in their routine. (23:32) They could still be low on outer discipline, which means when the world throws something in the way, they get flustered.(23:41) They're inflexible, right? (23:43) You could also be higher on outer discipline, lower on interdiscipline, which is what I am. (23:47) I'm better at, I'm actually pretty good when the world throws things at me, you know, in my way.(23:52) I have a hard time with structure and routine. (23:55) And so, to up my interdiscipline, I have to create structure and routine for myself and then try to stick to it. (24:00) So, again, it's really, as you start to pull these apart, you really start to understand.(24:05) This is regular human language, but we often just kind of don't really decide to dig into the meaning and the etymology of the word. (24:13) And when we do, we start really getting some cool distinctions.

Marcus Arredondo

(24:16) Well, speaking of etymology, because there are two words that you, one I think you alluded to, the other you actually defined as, I think it was decision, which means literally to cut off. (24:27) Yeah. (24:28) Which is something that, it resonates when you understand the etymology a little bit differently because you start to understand that you're really deciding is the removal of the non-prioritized options.(24:40) Yeah. (24:41) The other one was confidence, which is with faith. (24:44) To me, it helped me to understand confidence in a different way, which was, I thought was more bravado, a little bit more, I don't know how to describe it other than when I realized it was faith, it was just simply taking stock of your own metal.

Rich Diviney

(25:01) Well, it's interesting. (25:02) I'm glad you brought that up because this is, again, this is yet again where we can put, we can dissect the words a little bit and find some distinction there. (25:08) Okay.(25:08) Confidence is really, I know I can do this. (25:11) All right. (25:11) That's all that is.(25:13) But as I dissect these words, I actually think there's a difference between faith and confidence. (25:18) Okay. (25:19) In other words, faith is belief without evidence.(25:22) Confidence is belief with evidence. (25:23) All right. (25:24) Now, faith is important in any goal or endeavor because just to get started, you always need to kind of start with faith because you need belief without evidence.(25:32) But as you go down the pathway, the desire, the hope is you will start to gain evidence, which then faith turns into confidence. (25:39) So both are just as important as each other, but there's a huge difference in the terms.

Marcus Arredondo

(25:45) Well, I'm glad you mentioned this because this was something I wanted to talk about or ask you as it relates to not just SEALs, but what you've done in the private sector in advising clients and businesses, CEOs, professional football teams. (26:00) How do you advise or what have you witnessed to be an effective tool to managing, you know, you talk about resilience, which is coming back to a baseline that's appropriate. (26:12) And you combine that in my mind with other attributes, but specifically confidence of, I can rebound to this baseline.(26:20) I can learn from those mistakes and I can have faith that I can continue to resolve the issue at hand. (26:27) But what happens when you see somebody on your team or next to you that is encountering failure after failure after failure, sequential failure, whether it's them or not, let's just for the benefit of the argument, say it's outside their control. (26:41) They were playing the hand, they were dealt correctly.(26:44) And it's just blow after blow where you just feel like you're in quicksand. (26:49) What have you found to be an effective way to manage that? (26:52) I mean, as a dad, I'm curious how you advise your own children who may face that in an occurrence.(26:59) And then I wanna bridge into how that ties to identity.

Rich Diviney

(27:03) Yeah, so the secret to what you're talking about is actually what I outlined in the Masters of Uncertainty book. (27:11) This technique I call moving horizons because it's really about, and really this technique, moving horizons, the technique is kind of the compartmentalization attribute explained and really intensified, right? (27:22) So what moving horizons is, is one's ability to in any environment, especially in uncertainty, challenge, and stress to immediately ground yourself by asking, what do I know?(27:33) What do I know? (27:34) And what can I control? (27:36) And picking something to focus on.(27:38) Why this works is because when our brains, our brains are certain, our brains are trying to make certain the environment at all times. (27:47) Humans like certainty. (27:48) So we're trying to understand our environment.(27:50) That's what our brains are trying to do. (27:52) Now there are three specific factors that our brain is trying to figure out in any environment that are really necessary for us, for our brain creating certainty. (28:02) Those factors are duration, how long this is going to last, pathway, what's my route in, out, or through, and outcome, what's the end state here?(28:10) When we are in absence of one or more of those factors, we find ourselves in uncertainty, basically uncertainty, and then the challenge and stress that result. (28:18) Okay, so a quick example of illness, all right? (28:21) Strep throat is an illness that we all know.(28:24) Most of us have had strep throat. (28:25) It's not a, it's not an unknown thing. (28:27) There's a cure.(28:27) There's an antibiotic you can take for strep throat. (28:29) If either of us get strep throat, okay, we are in absence of just one of the three factors because we know the pathway, the antibiotic. (28:36) We know the outcome.(28:37) We're going to get better. (28:38) What we don't know necessarily is the duration because you may respond to antibiotics a little bit faster or slower than I do, right? (28:43) So we're in absence of one.(28:44) Our uncertainty level is mild. (28:46) Now let's take the flu, okay? (28:47) Flu, also a known disease or known illness.(28:50) Most people in today's environment, today's modern society do not die from the flu. (28:54) However, there's no known cure for the flu, okay? (28:57) There's nothing you can take for the flu.(28:59) There's a lot of ideas. (29:00) People have a lot of ideas of how you can cure the flu, but there's really no thing you can take for the flu. (29:05) All right?(29:05) So if we get the flu, now we're in absence of two of the three. (29:08) We know the outcome. (29:09) We're going to get better.(29:10) We don't know the duration. (29:11) We don't necessarily know the pathway. (29:12) So our anxiety level, our uncertainty level, excuse me, is at moderate.(29:16) Now imagine a disease shows up and no one's seen it before, all right? (29:20) It's kind of spreading across the globe. (29:22) Some people are dying.(29:23) Some people aren't dying. (29:24) Well, there's no known cure or vaccine and we don't know how long this is going to last, okay? (29:28) Enter 2020, right?(29:30) And COVID. (29:31) All of us were in absence of all three, duration, pathway, outcome. (29:34) This is when we are at our most, our highest level of uncertainty.(29:37) All moving horizons is, okay? (29:39) And you can do this in any environment, even the environments you just talked about where you just seem like you're repetitively failing, is you center yourself and you ask yourself, what do I know? (29:48) What can I control?(29:49) And you pick something to focus on and you move to that. (29:52) You create, in essence, your own duration, pathway, outcome. (29:55) I call it DPO.(29:56) You create your own DPO. (29:57) Real simple example, okay? (29:59) SEAL training, you spend, this is basic SEAL training, okay?(30:02) It's in San Diego. (30:03) You spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head, all right? (30:07) And during Hell Week, it's all the time, right?(30:09) I remember being in Hell Week. (30:11) It was three in the morning. (30:12) We had this damn boat on our head.(30:14) We'd been running for hours, okay? (30:15) We're all miserable. (30:16) We're on the beach and we're next to a sand berm.(30:18) And I remember being miserable and saying to myself, you know what? (30:20) I'm just going to focus on getting to the end of the sand berm. (30:23) Now, what I did in that moment is I picked a horizon and I created a DPO.(30:27) Duration, from now until end of sand berm. (30:29) Pathway, from here to end of sand berm. (30:31) Outcome, end of sand berm.(30:32) And in essence, created a mini reward system. (30:35) First of all, I generated dopamine in my system to embark upon that goal. (30:38) And then I created a reward once I got to that goal that allowed me to come back out.(30:42) Once I achieved it, come back out, ask the question again, and pick something else. (30:46) So all Moving Horizons is, is a cycle of creating DPOs. (30:50) And it's going from known thing to known thing to known thing.(30:54) The reason why this works in any environment is because we pick the distance of the horizon. (30:58) It's subjective to us. (30:59) It's subjective to the human, and it's subjective to the intensity of the environment.(31:03) So in other words, one of the things they do in SEAL training is they freeze you. (31:06) They make you sit in the frozen, in the freezing surf zone for hours, right? (31:09) It's the coldest thing you'll ever experience.(31:10) A lot of guys quit, okay? (31:11) I remember being in the surf zone and saying to myself, I'm just going to count five waves. (31:16) My horizon was right here.(31:17) Sometimes my horizon was, I'm going to wait until the next meal, or I'm going to get to the next meal. (31:21) Sometimes I was going to get to the end of the sand berm, okay? (31:23) We can constantly shift these horizons, and all we're doing is we're shifting that known entity, that certainty, to a place where we can get, make a reward, pick something else.(31:31) You can do this over and over and over again until one of three things happens. (31:35) Either you make it through whatever challenge you're in, okay? (31:38) You achieve the goal or objective you set out to do, or you generate enough certainty in your environment where you don't need to do it anymore, okay?(31:45) This is exactly how you do it. (31:47) This is what I teach my own kids. (31:48) This is the secret to making it through SEAL training, and life, okay?(31:52) The good news is every human being has done this before. (31:55) We've all done it, okay? (31:56) And you don't need uncertainty to do it.(31:58) Any of us who go to the gym do this all the time. (32:00) We don't focus on the entirety of the workout. (32:01) We say, I'm going to focus on doing my legs.(32:03) And then even in that, you could be doing a rep, and I'm going to do 12 reps. (32:07) You'd be like, okay, you do six, and you say, you know what? (32:09) I'm bringing that horizon.(32:09) I'm going to just do six more. (32:10) I'm going to count six more, okay? (32:12) So we've done this before, and if we practice this constantly, we will begin to do it without thinking, and we'll do it unconsciously.(32:19) And this is where you generate mastery of uncertainty.

Marcus Arredondo

(32:22) I love these examples. (32:23) So, you know, to go back to an earlier question, which is, are these attributes, they're not teachable. (32:28) I wouldn't suggest they're teachable, but I found myself thinking that they can be learned.(32:32) Meaning, you know- They could be developed. (32:36) Okay, fair enough. (32:37) So the way I was sort of thinking about this is, I was a really relatively introverted kid, and this doesn't apply directly to any of these specific attributes, but there was a discomfort.(32:47) There was a fear relative to maybe putting myself out there. (32:50) I had a godfather who was my dad's best friend who was very gregarious. (32:55) He was very good around women.(32:58) He taught me a whole lot, but by being around him, I started to develop this, there was some conditioning effect of starting to normalize maybe a playfulness in front of somebody. (33:09) And so these are not necessarily attributes. (33:10) My only point being that I think, do you believe that there is, let's say, for example, patience, one of the examples you give in Masters of Uncertainty about, maybe you're an impatient person, but that impatience actually provokes action and moves you further along the lines.(33:26) And I want to tether this to an underlying concept about teamwork and SEALs and sort of cooperating and developing teams that are greater than the sum of its parts that are developed outside just the summing of the skill sets that they have. (33:42) Right, right. (33:43) But back to sort of developing the patience aspect, it's like, well, find a partner that is longer, that has a longer upstart, so that maybe they can slow you down in the places that need to be slowed down and you can speed them up in the areas that you need to speed up.(33:58) So I guess, you know, my question is like, how developable are they relative to, you know, you as a dad seeing your own children? (34:05) Do you find yourself seeing like, well, you know, I think the development of this particular attribute might behoove this child. (34:13) I would like to implement certain systems as a father that the child might be able to witness or see.(34:20) Do you implement that? (34:22) There's a lot of questions there. (34:24) So you can take it however you want.

Rich Diviney

(34:25) Yeah, yeah. (34:25) Well, okay. (34:26) Let's talk about kids first.(34:27) I've always been reticent to, and I don't, and when people, I've had schools reach out and say, hey, we'd like to give your assessment to our students. (34:34) And I'm like, I don't want kids under the age of probably 18 minimum to take an assessment. (34:39) And the reason is because we, our frontal lobes aren't fully developed.(34:43) For men, it's like 24 or something like that. (34:45) For women, it's 22. (34:46) I think I've read that for men, it may not say in some cases may not happen until they're in their early 30.(34:51) Yeah. (34:51) 26 or 30. (34:52) Yeah.(34:52) Who knows? (34:52) I mean, but the fact is we are sponges as, as kids. (34:55) We are, we are constantly uptaking and learning.(34:58) Our brain is continuing development. (34:59) So an attribute assessment, I would not want anybody, any kid to label themselves. (35:04) They are still developing their attributes and seeing where they land.(35:08) Okay. (35:08) So, however, let's just talk about attributes themselves and where our, our kind of our attribute fingerprint is when, you know, you, we, we each have an attribute fingerprint and that's our kind of our stack, our ranked order of one to 41, where we, where we fall. (35:22) There's a couple of things that happen in that, in, in everyday life.(35:25) Okay. (35:26) And a couple of, a couple of ways we can play with this. (35:28) All right.(35:28) First, if we, what's happening in most everyday life, when there's not uncertainty, challenge, and stress when the, you know, what is not hitting the fan is we are actually consciously dialing up or dialing down our attributes. (35:39) Okay. (35:39) So in other words, if we're low patients, there are environments where we're going into, and we're saying, okay, I dial up, I got to dial up my patients here.(35:45) You're doing it very consciously. (35:47) Okay. (35:47) Uh, he's dialing it down as well.(35:49) I have a buddy, uh, seal. (35:50) His number one attribute is humor. (35:52) Okay.(35:52) And I said, are you sometimes having to dial down your humor? (35:55) And he's like, oh yeah, because the joke I want to tell is completely not appropriate. (35:58) Right.(35:58) He's dialing down his humor. (35:59) It's taking conscious thought to do that. (36:01) All right.(36:02) That's what it means. (36:03) Because, and we can do that. (36:04) We have the ability in normal everyday life to engage in conscious thinking and dial up or dial down.(36:09) It doesn't necessarily happen when, when we're at our most raw. (36:11) Okay. (36:11) And, and, and, and deep uncertainty, challenge, stress.(36:14) So that's one we can dial. (36:15) We're actually dialing up and dialing down our attributes all day, every day. (36:18) But there, but to, to move the other thing we can do, we can, we can also move the needle.(36:23) But the other thing we can do, you alluded to is we can lean on our teammates. (36:26) This is where proper teaming comes in. (36:28) Okay.(36:28) My wife and I, she's low patience. (36:30) I'm high patience. (36:32) That's worked beautifully for us in 24 years of marriage.(36:34) Because when patience is required, I step up. (36:37) When impatience is required, she steps up. (36:38) Okay.(36:39) Her impatience has prevented me on occasion from taking too long or, or moving too slow. (36:44) My, my patience has prevented her from moving too fast sometimes or running too, too, too quickly into a decision. (36:49) So we can lean on each other.(36:51) You can also, you can actually develop, you can move that dial. (36:55) Uh, that takes a little bit of time. (36:56) It takes a little, it takes more effort.(36:57) It takes an understanding that you need to move it. (37:00) Okay. (37:00) A desire and a motivation to move it because again, just because you're lower on something doesn't mean you need to develop.(37:06) In fact, developing it might be detrimental to what you want to accomplish. (37:09) I always say the standup comic with too much empathy is gonna be a lousy standup comic. (37:12) Right?(37:12) So, so, but assuming you want to move that dial, then you have to kind of do what you did. (37:18) You place yourself in environments that test and tease and develop that attribute. (37:22) Okay.(37:23) If you want to develop your patience, you go find environments that test and tease your patience, whatever it looks like for you. (37:28) It could mean I'm going to drive deliberately in traffic. (37:31) I might pick the longest line on the grocery store to stand in.(37:33) I say, have kids that'll develop patience, but whatever that is, you find those. (37:37) So what, in your case, you developed your, and I would, it's probably, it's probably a little bit of extroversion. (37:43) It might be a little bit of, um, social awareness, whatever that is.(37:46) We could dissect those, but you develop those things by hanging around a person who allowed you to explore and test it, right? (37:53) And, and, and start to test that and start to feel more comfortable. (37:56) So you, you move that dial.(37:58) So those are the three ways we can do it. (38:00) And they are not immutable. (38:02) They just can't be trained like skills.(38:05) Um, skills are those things that I always say, if you want to know the difference between attribute and skill, ask yourself, can I, can I teach her to kind of be taught? (38:11) If the answer is yes, it's probably a skill. (38:13) The answer is no, it's probably an attribute.(38:15) So you could say, rich, I want to learn how to shoot a gun and hit a bullseye. (38:18) I could take you to the range and teach you how to do that in two hours. (38:20) That's a skill.(38:20) Or you can say, rich, I want to be more patient. (38:22) I can't teach you how to do that. (38:24) Right.(38:24) That has to be self-developed. (38:25) There's no class you can take to learn how to be more patient. (38:27) Right.(38:28) So, so attributes must be self-developed.

Marcus Arredondo

(38:31) Yeah. (38:31) You, you wrote, uh, being, being courageous is something you can decide to do and you'll get better with practice. (38:37) So go do things that scare you.(38:39) Yeah. (38:39) And that, to me that resonated because, you know, doing fearful things, doing things that are hard, um, that's a hard thing to train, right? (38:47) I mean, it's hard for anyone to, to sort of voluntarily go do that.(38:51) But the more frequently I found myself doing hard things, the less daunting it becomes. (38:57) Not that it's any less difficult, just that, I guess the mental hurdle I have to overcome to start it is lower.

Rich Diviney

(39:05) Well, so, and again, this is where we get to the nuances of the definitions. (39:08) There's a difference between doing hard things and doing things that scare you. (39:11) Okay.(39:11) One is courage. (39:12) The other is perseverance. (39:13) And, um, and you can train in both factors.(39:16) Sometimes they look a little bit different. (39:17) They're both hard and scary. (39:20) Um, but they, there is a difference.(39:21) Doing things that scare you, uh, is, you're gonna, you're going to train your courage muscle by stepping into your discomfort more often. (39:29) All, all courage is, is it's basically your, it's your fear. (39:32) You're a big deal of getting tickled.(39:34) Those two choices are offered to you neurologically, fight or flight. (39:37) All courage is, is choosing fight. (39:38) That's all it is.(39:39) And it's a specific switch in the brain, by the way. (39:41) It's called, it's known as the courage switch that gets clicked. (39:43) When we step into our fear, that switch gets clicked.(39:46) We also get a dopamine reward for that. (39:47) Okay. (39:48) Yep.(39:48) All courage is, is stepping into that. (39:50) So, and again, it has nothing to do with what you do for a living. (39:53) You could be a generally anxious person, but because every day and all day, you're stepping into your fear and anxiety.(39:59) Okay. (39:59) Your courage level is high. (40:01) You can be someone who does crazy stuff.(40:03) I don't know if you've seen the, the documentary, um, free solo Alex. (40:06) Honnold is a free climber. (40:08) I mean, he does thousand foot climbs without ropes.(40:11) Crazy. (40:12) They look at his brain in that documentary and they realize that his amygdala doesn't get tickled at the same rate as other people's. (40:17) In other words, he's not accessing his courage switch the same way other people are.(40:21) It takes a while. (40:23) Now I'm not saying Alex is not courageous. (40:24) I'm just saying he may not be accessing that switch, which if, if he doesn't feel fear, he is not accessing the courage switch.(40:31) That's, that's neurologically the truth. (40:33) Doing hard things, that's perseverance. (40:34) Okay.(40:35) Now doing hard things is a different part of your brain. (40:37) The interior mid cingulate cortex is a part of the brain. (40:40) They, they discover that that gets activated when we actually engage in doing, talking and engage in things we don't want to do hard stuff.(40:47) Okay. (40:47) What's fascinating about this, this part of our brain is they've recognized the more people engage that part of our brain and get, and get activated. (40:55) Um, it, it's, it's linked to a being, being able to do hard things more, more frequently and believe it or not, longevity.(41:02) People live longer if they activate it more often. (41:04) Right. (41:04) So, so there's a benefit to doing hard things.(41:07) Okay. (41:07) Both, both, uh, it makes it easier to do it. (41:10) Um, and, uh, we live longer.(41:12) So it's cool. (41:13) How do you teach that to your children? (41:15) How do you implement that?(41:16) Well, the, the, the best way to do it is implement the moving horizons process is you, you implement that process. (41:21) You know, uh, the, I, so Huberman and I, when we were first looking at this, he helped me with a lot of this. (41:26) We did, we kind of looked into a lot of this together.(41:28) We decided that one of the best ways to practice horizon moving, horizon shifting is the ice bath. (41:34) Because it, because I guess I have an ice bath in my garage and, and every time I have to get into it, I don't want to get into it. (41:40) I dread it every time.(41:41) And people are like, well, you're an 80 seal. (41:42) You're used to the cold. (41:43) No one gets used to the cold.(41:44) I dread it every time. (41:45) All right. (41:46) So getting into that thing, do I, and I am, I remember my wife and my son wanted to try it.(41:50) I said, okay, as soon as you get into that thing, I want you to stare at my hand and I'm going to have you count to 10, right? (41:54) I was in essence giving them their first horizon.

Marcus Arredondo

(41:56) Sure.

Rich Diviney

(41:57) And they did that as soon as they got to 10, I was like, pick another point and pick a number. (42:00) And they did, they did that. (42:02) Each of them got through a minute and a half their first time by doing that.(42:06) so moving horizons is a way we can actually practice doing hard things.

Marcus Arredondo

(42:10) I really love that. (42:11) So I know that we're going to be coming up on time and I appreciate you bringing up Huberman. (42:14) There's a couple of others that I want to bring up as well, but how did you get connected to him?

Rich Diviney

(42:18) Well, that was a, so back in 17, I had a mutual, another, we had a mutual friend with a, he was designing this, he wanted to design this day for executives, this high performance day. (42:27) And he said, Hey, I'm gonna have this neuroscientist here. (42:29) You're going to love him.(42:30) This was before this pre podcast, by the way, he wasn't famous, but they say you're going to love him. (42:34) And of course, as soon as we met each other, we got on famously because he was running his fear lab at Stanford. (42:39) And I was really interested in the science behind fear.(42:42) And he was really interested in how Navy SEALs step into doing scary stuff. (42:46) And so we collaborated quite a bit. (42:47) A lot of the stuff in my masters of uncertainty book, we collaborated on together.(42:51) So he's, he continues to be a great friend. (42:53) He's a lot busier now. (42:54) So I can't, I don't talk to him as much, but I'm very proud of what he's been doing.

Marcus Arredondo

(42:58) Well, I love what he's, he's just sort of made very complex information accessible to larger groups of people, which I think gives greater agency to more people to actually take on bigger challenges than they would otherwise. (43:10) Cause otherwise it seems a little bit daunting. (43:12) Another person I wanted to talk about was Stephen Kotler.(43:14) I read stealing fire where, and for the benefit of the audience, stealing fire is really a book about achieving flow. (43:22) Stephen Kotler has been the leading advocate spokesperson on being able to achieve flow more voluntarily than, you know, accidentally. (43:34) And one thing he alluded to, which actually reminded me of, I don't know if you've read of wolves and men by Barry Lopez.(43:40) It's about wolves.

Rich Diviney

(43:42) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(43:42) I've heard of it. (43:43) They talk about how, you know, they, there's a common misconception that there's an alpha wolf, but the alpha wolf actually switches from at different times as they're hunting. (43:53) And it reminded me a lot of the seals in house, Stephen Kotler was talking about the communication patterns as your, I mean, I, you have to forgive me cause I don't have military vocabulary, but as you're advancing into new terrain, each member of the group has a different perspective, right?(44:14) But there's a, there's a fluency to being able to acquiesce to the person who might have the greatest perspective.

Rich Diviney

(44:21) So this is something, um, this is, so first of all, I don't know if you knew this, but, uh, but I helped I in stealing fire. (44:27) I am rich Davis. (44:28) I didn't know that.(44:29) Yeah. (44:29) Yeah. (44:30) So, so he, so I, I helped him write that chapter, but that is me.(44:33) I was running the mind gym at the time and they asked me to help on that. (44:35) So, so, uh, so that was fun to help them do. (44:39) Um, what he's talking about is the concept I talk about, um, in terms of how high performing teams task organized.(44:45) And the way we do it is this concept called dynamic subordination. (44:48) Dynamic subordination means that a team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. (44:55) And when one does, the person who's closest to the problem, the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead and everybody supports.(45:02) And then the environment shifts and someone else steps up and everybody supports. (45:05) It's that dynamic swap between leader and follower. (45:07) Cause I also call it alpha hopping.(45:09) That alpha position just hops to wherever it needs to be. (45:12) This is how all high performing teams operate. (45:14) I was an officer in the seal teams.(45:16) I did hundreds of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. (45:18) I was in charge of every single one. (45:20) It did not mean I was always being supportive.(45:22) In fact, most of the time it was the opposite. (45:23) I was supporting other people, snipers, breachers, assaulters. (45:26) Sometimes the environment would shift and they needed the support of me, but it was all environmentally dependent.(45:31) And this tells us that on a team, it's really important on a team, our position on a team has nothing to do with our rank and hierarchy. (45:37) It has everything to do with what we are there to contribute to the team. (45:40) Okay.(45:41) And you have to, and our job as leaders is to set up that environment of dynamic subordination. (45:45) This is exactly what seals do. (45:47) This is how teams get into flow states.(45:50) To do that, you have to understand each other's attributes. (45:52) Because if I don't know what attributes guys have, I don't know who's going to step up. (45:56) I don't know who to push forward or who to support, right?(45:58) So the dynamically subordinated environment is the ultimate task organization structure for any high performing team. (46:05) And something we explored when I was helping Wright stealing fire, or at least that first part, one of the ways we got, we kind of saw this was in the kill house. (46:15) I was running training at the time.(46:17) And when you do this kind of complex close quarter combat thing where you're going room to room, what's happening is the number one man, the lead guy, is always constantly swapping and swapping based on threat. (46:28) You can go into a room and you have four guys and your number one man who went to the room becomes the number four man because the number four man is closest to the next threat. (46:36) So now there's a new number one.(46:38) Okay. (46:38) And it's just almost a dance of leader and follower. (46:42) So this is what we're talking about in kind of flow states, especially when it comes to team.

Marcus Arredondo

(46:47) So on that note, you've given an analogy in attributes of, I think it was a marketing team who had assembled the greatest of the great to come in, take on this new client, and they had everything on paper, but when they were thrown into the foxhole, all sorts of chaos broke loose. (47:05) The client was challenging. (47:07) As a result, some of the creatives were unbending about some things.(47:10) My question to you is more related to, you know, in Navy SEAL training, you have, just by virtue of surviving, that by itself to me would suggest a bond and a trusting nature between the people within it, and then you continue to train together. (47:26) You start to understand (47:27) certain behaviors, (47:28) even like, (47:29) even minor movements, (47:30) you start to understand, (47:31) I would imagine, (47:32) like what they're thinking, (47:33) what they're, (47:34) how they pursue certain things, (47:36) but in more civilian life (47:38) where, you know, (47:39) I don't know if it's, (47:40) you know, (47:41) a group of dads (47:43) who got assembled (47:43) to go on a camping trip (47:45) or trying to put together (47:47) a team that you're going to go pitch (47:50) for a long-term commitment (47:51) with another partnership.(47:53) In my case, I do, you know, doing real estate deals, those deals, we don't, time is our enemy oftentimes, and we're having to assemble the right team. (48:02) How do you assess, bring, how would you suggest bringing those attributes into the conversation as not subordinate or potentially on par or greater than the skill conversation where all those people can actually be relied upon to be effective at communicating and supportive in environments where you are under threat?

Rich Diviney

(48:24) Not military threat, to be clear. (48:26) No, no, yeah, again, threat is threat because whatever is kicking off that amygdala, I would say, threat, fear is subjective because you could have a group of baby seals in a gunfight with Al-Qaeda who are feeling less fear in the moment than the eight-year-old you just asked to step in front of the classroom and introduce themselves, right? (48:40) So it's all subjective, but it's all physiologically the same thing.(48:44) The answer to that question is as a team, and so one of the things we do is we go into businesses and teams and organizations and give them their attributes assessment and help them explore their own performance through their attributes and then show them how that looks as a team, right? (48:58) In other words, how do they start meshing and melding as a team? (49:01) And oftentimes, like we talked about, the polarities of these attributes begin to mesh very, very beautifully.(49:06) In other words, every team benefits from having some low patience, some high patience. (49:11) Every team benefits from having some people who are high competitive and some people who are low competitive just because of the way they see the world. (49:17) And so we allow teams to start understanding those nuances.(49:20) Any team, regardless of the genre, regardless of the niche, will do better, move faster, operate more efficiently if they understand themselves and each other and they're open about that. (49:30) This is what the highest performing teams are. (49:32) They're massively vulnerable.(49:34) In other words, vulnerability is not just weakness. (49:35) I'm wearing my strengths and my weaknesses on my sleeve so that everybody understands, everybody knows, and we know when we can lean on each other, when we're going to actually step up. (49:44) So taking account and starting to understand each other's, ourselves, our own attribute profile and each other's attribute profile allows the team to start to seamlessly work together because it allows you to understand what to expect and, by the way, it eliminates judgment.(49:58) One of the biggest blind spots we have in our attributes is we often are frustrated with people who don't have the same attributes as we are, as we do. (50:06) So in other words, the low-patience person gets frustrated with the high-patience person because they think they're slow, apathetic, and they move too slowly. (50:13) The high-patience person has the same frustration with the low-patience person.(50:16) Once they come at it from an attributes perspective, judgment goes away. (50:20) They're like, oh, wait a second. (50:21) I appreciate your low-patience.(50:23) Oh, wait a second. (50:23) I appreciate your high-patience and now I know when low-patience is required, I'm going to follow you. (50:29) I got your back.(50:31) When a lot of patients, high-patience is required, the low-patience will be like, yep, you got it. (50:36) I'm going to have your back on that and you start to seamlessly integrate. (50:39) Judgment is the glue that binds up the gears of teaming.(50:43) And the attributes allows us to eliminate judgment and starts to understand what type of vehicle everybody on a team is. (50:50) So when the Ferrari is needed, the Ferrari steps up. (50:52) When the Jeep is needed, the Jeep steps up.

Marcus Arredondo

(50:54) Great answer, by the way. (50:55) I appreciate that. (50:56) I was going to ask, I had asked earlier, but I want to scratch on a little bit more about identity.(51:01) How has your identity changed? (51:03) You talk about this in Masters of Uncertainty. (51:06) You know, it was lacrosse player, it was Purdue grad, it was Navy SEAL, it was dad and husband, it's entrepreneur.(51:14) You know, when you look back, what can you deduce about identity and how that relates to attributes? (51:20) Because I couldn't help but think to some degree how you shape your identity or at least your future identity also informs in part what you're going to focus on developing, what attributes you're going to be focused on developing.

Rich Diviney

(51:33) Well, certainly it's going to highlight that, but it really also highlights our behavior. (51:40) And so the way identity kind of falls into this is in the Masters of Uncertainty, I outlined six elements of Mastering Uncertainty. (51:47) The first three have to do with physiology and neurology.(51:50) In other words, moving horizons and things like that, it's ubiquitous to all human beings. (51:54) We all have that capability. (51:55) The second three are things that are unique to us.(51:58) In other words, what do we uniquely bring into an uncertain environment? (52:02) One of those things are attributes. (52:03) Our unique attribute profile is what we bring in.(52:06) That's important to know. (52:07) The other thing is identity. (52:08) And the reason why identity is important is because we are in essence a collection of I am's.(52:13) And every I am that we collect over the course of our life comes with it some rules and conditions that can define or define what being in that I am is. (52:24) So I went to this high school. (52:26) Like I said, I'm a lacrosse player.(52:28) I'm a Navy SEAL. (52:29) I'm a husband. (52:30) I'm a father.(52:30) I'm a Metallica fan. (52:32) I'm a motorcycle enthusiast. (52:33) Every one of those is going to come with some rules and conditions, behaviors that kind of showcase that how you are in that identity, how you show up in that identity.(52:45) What we have to understand is those identities are driving our behavior, sometimes unconsciously. (52:50) In other words, in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we are going to behave towards whatever identity we're prioritizing in that moment. (52:56) So it behooves us to understand and prioritize the right one.(53:00) An example of this going wrong is the classic story that we always hear of the fanatical fan beating up the other fan of the other team. (53:07) Okay? (53:09) And eventually that fan gets in trouble, gets in front of the judge.(53:12) The judge is like, what were you thinking? (53:13) The guy's like, I don't know what I was thinking. (53:15) I was just in the moment, right?(53:17) What was happening is that guy was behaving towards an identity in that moment that he wasn't conscious of. (53:22) Okay? (53:22) Now, had that guy been conscious of that identity and other identities, maybe husband and father, maybe professional businessman, that guy might have made different choices.(53:32) And so understanding the collection of identities that we have starts to allow us the opportunity to plug and play the identities that we want to in the moment. (53:43) Or, in some cases, get rid of identities that are meaningless to us anymore, or create new identities, going from Navy SEAL to entrepreneur or author. (53:52) And so the exercise of recognizing the identities we carry is really important because so many people out there are just operating and behaving in a way that's completely subservient to whatever identity that they have, and they don't even know it.(54:06) And it's important to know it.

Marcus Arredondo

(54:08) Yeah. (54:08) I think that's part of what Sam Harris talks about waking up.

Rich Diviney

(54:12) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(54:12) You know, just living in this state of default. (54:14) But I'm glad that you brought the I am not component because I think that's a really important component to, I mean, just take somebody who maybe has an alcohol abuse problem. (54:24) Yeah.(54:24) But they want to be a great father and a great contributor. (54:28) I think a really important component to that might be I am not, it's not that I drink less, I just don't drink at all.

Rich Diviney

(54:35) Yeah, yeah. (54:36) I am not a drinker. (54:37) Right?(54:37) I mean, and this is really important because even the negative identities have power, but oftentimes we use those the wrong way too. (54:44) Right? (54:44) I am not creative.(54:46) Right. (54:46) I'm not social. (54:47) I'm not attractive.(54:48) Okay? (54:48) You are generating an identity with a I am not statements that you are going to behave, as soon as you say to yourself I am not attractive, guaranteed you will slump your shoulders, you'll mope around, you will look unattractive to you and others. (55:01) Okay?(55:01) You will put out an energy that way. (55:03) As soon as you say the opposite, I am attractive, all right, your shoulders likely go back, you have a positivity, there's an aura that changes. (55:10) Okay?(55:10) So we just have to be very cognizant of how we're using this I am statement because they are, in my opinion, the two most powerful words of the human language. (55:18) Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo

(55:18) That really resonates. (55:19) I had a guest on who had fibrosarcoma, which is a skin cancer. (55:24) He ended up when he was 20, he had 30 surgeries over seven years and he had a facial difference and for years, he would see children run in fear at the Starbucks and years later, he still, he goes around and, you know, could smile at him and stuff and he's like, nothing changed with them.(55:43) It just changed with me. (55:44) With me. (55:45) Yeah.(55:45) Yeah. (55:45) So that really rings true. (55:47) I, you know, Rich, I know we're coming up on time.(55:49) I'm so grateful for you coming on. (55:52) I loved your two books. (55:53) I would support them in being read by anyone as young or old.(55:59) I think it's irrespective of sex or age and I think you're doing some really incredible work. (56:07) I want to just ask, is there anything you think we might have missed or?

Rich Diviney

(56:12) No, no, I love our conversation. (56:14) I appreciate it, Marcus. (56:15) I love the line of questioning and what I will say is, what really jazzes me about this work is not only helping people do better when uncertainty strikes without warning, because it always does.(56:26) If there's anything certain it's that uncertainty will strike. (56:29) So not only helping people when uncertainty strikes without warning. (56:32) If you get really good at this, you begin to deliberately step into uncertainty and that's where all of our evolution, that's where all of our growth, that's where all of our discovery lies, right?(56:41) We are a species that has gone from cave dweller to space explorer because of the ability to step into our discomfort and step into our fear. (56:49) And so, if we want to explore our potential, we need to be able to do this and what really excites me is that I can help people figure out and practice tools in which they can use to explore their potential. (57:01) Man, that's worthwhile.

Marcus Arredondo

(57:03) Thank you, Rich. (57:04) Thanks for your service. (57:05) Appreciate all you're doing.

Rich Diviney

(57:06) Yeah, thank you, Marcus.

Marcus Arredondo

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