Dr. Mark Divine: Mental Toughness, Discipline & The Mindset Behind Lasting Health Transformation

Why do so many people know exactly what they need to do to improve their health—but struggle to follow through?

In this episode of Vitality Unfiltered, host David J. Bauder, PA-C, founder of Weight Loss & Vitality, welcomes Mark Divine, former U.S. Navy SEAL Commander, leadership expert, entrepreneur, and bestselling author, for an in-depth conversation about the mindset behind lasting personal transformation.

Drawing on decades of experience training Navy SEALs, executives, entrepreneurs, and elite performers, Mark explains why lasting change is rarely an information problem—it's a mindset problem. Together, David and Mark discuss how discipline is developed, why resilience can be trained, and how daily mental practices influence physical health, leadership, and long-term success. 

Topics include the difference between motivation and discipline, vertical versus horizontal learning, building an "Unbeatable Mind," purpose-driven living, self-awareness, resilience, leadership under pressure, and the power of intentional discomfort to create growth. Mark also shares his practical approach to breath training, recovery, stress management, and the simple daily habits he would use to help individuals struggling with obesity, chronic disease, or repeated failures finally build sustainable momentum. 

Whether you're working to improve your health, become a stronger leader, build greater mental resilience, or simply develop more consistent habits, this episode offers practical strategies grounded in decades of real-world leadership experience.

In This Episode

•  Why information alone rarely changes behavior 
•  Motivation versus discipline 
•  Mental toughness as a trainable skill 
•  Box breathing and stress management 
•  Building resilience through discomfort 
•  Leadership lessons from Navy SEAL training 
•  Purpose, identity, and long-term success 
•  Recovery as part of high performance 
•  Practical strategies for lasting health transformation 
•  Mark Divine's 90-day blueprint for building better habits 

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⚠️ Disclaimer
This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Listening to this episode does not establish a provider-patient relationship. Always consult your qualified healthcare professional regarding medical concerns, diagnosis, or treatment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Vitality.

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Vitality Unfiltered.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Unfiltered. With David Bowder.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Welcome to Vitality Unfiltered. I'm David Bowder, your host. What we'll be discussing today, uh, we have a special guest with us today, Dr. Mark Devine. He's going to be working, um, going through a bunch of information with us today and related to mental toughness and um perseverance of how to overcome obstacles. He's an expert in the field. One thing I've learned over almost three decades worth of practicing medicine is that most patients and people, they understand what they need to do on a consistent basis. They know how to eat healthier, they know how to exercise, they know how to sleep. It's not because they're not getting to where they want to go because they have a shortage of information. This generation that we have right now, we have more information in front of us than any previous generation, but yet people struggle to get it done. And so the question is why? Why is that? And I'll tell you why, because I believe that transformation is rarely because of an information problem, it's a mindset problem. And that's exactly what Mark does. He is a former Navy SEAL commander, leadership expert, entrepreneur, author of The Way of the SEAL, Staring Down the Wolf, An Unbeatable Mind, all great reads, by the way. And he has led professional athletes, corporations, helping with leadership courses. And today we're going to focus this on the patient and how we can transform what he has learned over decades worth of information and experience and try to translate this to help individual patients get it done. So, Mark, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

David, thanks so much for having me. Really an honor. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

So when you think, when you, you know, with all your experience that you see, you know, like you've seen this from all levels, you've seen the corporate boardroom, you've seen the operational tempo out there in different different environments. Uh when we start to think about how this translates to the average person and how the person fails to kind of move forward, why do you think, why is it that information is rarely enough to get it done?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Well, I mean, there's so many different ways to kind of start this conversation, but information is like as you said, first of all, it's we're just swamped in it, right? Um, and and information doesn't equal learning, and and learning doesn't equal growth. Right. And so what we're looking for here is growth or transformation, the ability to to literally transform how your mind works so that discipline isn't a struggle, it's just part of your um part of your makeup. You know, so so transformation happens first when you're exposed to the right kind of information that could be useful for you, um, let's say about health or or or like you said, mindset or mental toughness. And so then you consume some knowledge, right? You it's like like a computer program. You download that information and hopefully that information is organized in a proper way and it's complete. And not all the time can you be guaranteed that the information is factual, organized in a way that you'll understand it. For instance, if you if you're gonna get your information on mental toughness from a different language author, you're you're not gonna understand it or from a different culture. So it's got to be the right information organized the right way. And there's just how do you discern that? There's just so much junk out there. So discernment of what information is right for you is really kind of like the first step. Then you download and consume that information, and most people just leave it there. Then they bounce on to the next podcast or the next book or the next chiropractor or doctor or whatever. And so we have this kind of um this epidemic of just chasing the newest information, right? The newest academic study and the newest whatever, and and clickbait and social media amplifies all this stuff. And so you're just running around the base of the mountain. You're never ever starting to explore deeper uh along a path that could lead to transformation. So even in this very first phase of trying to transform, we're already bogged down because we have too much information. The information is flawed or outright false or hyped up and amplified, or it's not organized in a way that's right for you as an individual. And so we don't have any way in our institutions that teach us how to discern what's the right information for us because school is basically programming, it's not personalized uh you know, education. And that will change with AI. The second phase of uh process of transformation is taking the information that is right for you. Let's say you stumble upon Mark Devine's work and you read on Beatle Mind or The Way of the Seal, but they're both kind of like give you roughly the same information, and you discern that to be um valuable information, grounded in truth, backed by science, uh provable and repeatable, and um you can experience it because in the book, you know, you offer, I offer, you know, easy uh drills that can you as a study of n equals one can immediately get some feedback and say, holy shit, this work, this box breathing stuff that Mark's talking about really has had an impact. And I've only worked on it, I've only done it for a week. So so you take that information and then you start to work with it. Right. Here's another problem with kind of the Western academic approach is like you you get a you get an academic book or you get a you know, read a research paper or the news article on it, and it doesn't tell you what to do and how to do a practice, like how to transform, it just gives you the information. So you want to then take the information and s and in a very simple way begin to apply it in your life and turn it into you know what I would call a practice. In other words, training. And I have a saying that I uh have with my clients like if you're not if you are not training your mind, and I include the body in that, because the mind, the body, and the mind are you know one thing in my world, the body follows the mind, mind follows the body, they're inseparable. So if you're not training your body-mind, then the world is training it for you. And it's training it for you in the endless um, you know, amount of information that's being shoved down your throat. And most of that information, actually, for the average person who's not looking for specific knowledge around transformation, is gonna be uh fear-based, violent, consumer, you know, um marketing and or peer-based social media, which is all bullshit. So all of that is essentially imprinting moment to moment to moment, thousands and millions of impressions, which is training the mind. So your mind essentially, your mind is amorphous, right? It will take the shape of the primary energy of the con of the content that you're feeding it day in and day out. It literally takes the shape. And then your body will begin to take that shape too, and you become fear-based, negative, uh, violent even to yourself by the way you talk to yourself, the way you think about yourself or others, judgment, you know, projections and whatnot. And then eventually that shows up in your body as homeostatic imbalance, hyper-arousal, you know, excess cortisol, poor sleep, obesity, and then disease. So, wow, what a horrible situation. So, you so if you're not training your mind, the world's training it for you, and it's gonna lead to unsuccessful results. Results will speak for itself. So, back where I was going, so you have to develop the discernment to find the right knowledge. This is why shows like yours are so important, right? It's because you can be like, this guy is an expert, listen to what he says, read his book, trust me on it, do some of the practices. If they don't work for you, then then you can forget about this conversation, move on to the next thing. But if they do work for you, then train it. And that begins the process of taking control back of your life when you begin to train your mind. If you don't train your mind, you have you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of uh of having any real autonomy in this world. And I mean intellectual, um, emotional, spiritual, and mental autonomy, where you're not at the vaggies of of all that input and training and control that's being you know foisted on us. So that's the second phase, training. And then the third phase is mastery. Mastery is when the training falls off because the new knowledge, information, slash processes, practices is essentially the what and the how has become the who. And now your mind is just operating at this entirely new level, like metamorphosis, metanoasis. Like you your mind is completely transformed and now taken the shape of the new information that's been trained. And the new information, of course, is you know, if it's if it's legit information, is going to be at a very high vibration level, very high uh consciousness level. So it's gonna be vibrating at a level of you know, forgiveness, love, universal love, compassion, acceptance, and the training of the mind with those frequency levels and with the practices such as box breathing, concentration, meditation, attention control, um, feet, what I call feeding the courage wolf, staring down the fear wolf, is going to help your mind take a brand new shape. And then guess what? The body soon follows with optimal health and much more energy and vitality, which means you're gonna sleep better, your stress hormones come back into balance, right? You're breathing deeper and better because you know, box breathing or or deep diaphragmatic breathing is part of your new practices and you own that, right? It's who you are. You're thinking much more clearly, so you've got clarity, your heart is open with more compassion and love and forgiveness, and you're able to create that um that holy grail that mindfulness points to of um being able to rest in awareness, recognizing that you are not your thoughts and emotions, but they're things that are happening to and through you. And so you get to, you get choose, you get to choose whether to retain them or to eradicate them. And then you can curate new qualts that have a higher quality of vibration. And so this is the only place that a human being can be said to have free will and autonomy is when they when they have this separation, this experience of operating from awareness and not from the whipsawed um dramas of the ego personality mind. So that's that's it. Mental toughness is essentially uh beginning to recognize that you need to be very discerning about what information you want that's going to lead to the transformation that's right for you, which is pretty much universal for all humans, by the way. It's just there's many different paths, like the Zen, you know, the Zen people say there's many paths up the mountain. They're all legitimate. Choose one, right? But each human being has might be maybe slightly different personality types. Maybe they're further along in their on their spiritual evolution. And so not all are going to be suitable, right? Some people need to like start way back at the beginning at a like a physical training kind of program, like we did with SEAL fit to get them really healthy and thinking right before they move on to the more you know emotional and spiritual aspects. Whereas other people, you know, maybe been doing yoga for 30 years and they're ready to go right into the higher mental and emotional um training grounds where they can accelerate up their mountain. But you got to choose a path and stick with it, otherwise, you just get stuck chasing the shiny ball around the base of the mountain and you get nowhere. And I think people are really uh burned out and frustrated because they've just, you know, our culture hasn't provided any substantive or meaningful path for transformation. And in fact, it's almost like they've uh denied, withheld, obscured, and denigrated, you know, this idea that the human being can utterly transform themselves. You don't need to be beholden to your government or your insurance policy, right? Or whatever it is, right? Like every individual has a r off has the potential to be absolutely free and um and has incredible, infinite potential lying within them if they could just slow down and learn how to access it. That was a really long-winded answer to your question. So I appreciate you being patient.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

There's a lot in there. So I was um, you know, and prepping for this, right? I was like, oh, let me pull out these books here. And so I I'm going back and I'm rereading stuff, right? I'm going like, but I noticed that when I'm when I'm rereading this, well, you know, the way of the wolf, uh stirring down the wolf, I mean, I started to, you know, I'm like, okay, looking at the plateaus, and I'm like, plateau one, plateau two, or I'm going through this, but I'm thinking about it differently because I'm prepping, you know, I'm coming, you know, we're gonna have this conversation. And I found that it was a complete, totally different experience than when I read read your book the first time.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Well, plus, plus you're different. You're different every day. That's true. So you've had, you know, first time you read it, you were one version of yourself, and now you've had, you know, let's say it was three years ago, you've had, you know, almost 1200 days of training your mind and and thinking more clearly and opening up to new ideas. And so when you revisit really legit, I I mean I've read some of my most like cherished developmental books, and they're mostly come from like Buddhist or yoga traditions, you know, like with names like Maharaj or Yogananda, right? I read them, you know, six, seven, eight times. And every time I read them, just like you said, they're they're new to me because I understand them from a different level.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

And we we've seen this, you know, they think think back in the years of the military, even, you know, the military, leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership, you know, train, train, train all the time, right? The all of the pro the professional programs that they set up. It's always about leadership. But I it's almost like similar to reading a book. You read it and you almost expect a certain outcome after that, but there's really no work after that, right? There, the the hard stuff comes after you actually read the book or after you attend some leadership development course.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

That's right. You're describing the difference between the Western model of horizontal development versus kind of this emergent or is even found in the Eastern traditions of vertical development. So horizontal development, you get out, you go to a leadership program or team building event, or even traditional academia, and you just consume content, you sit in your seat, you might do some tabletop exercises, and you leave with a temporary state of, hey, I I learned a lot, and then you know, a month later you remember less than 5% of it. And you haven't changed anything. Vertical development is where you go and and you learn practices that change how how your mind works, not what you know. You're not just trying to pack new content in. The only new content is the is the theory, science, and practices around how to change how your mind works. You know what I mean? Like you there might be content in my programs around why box breathing works, why nostril breathing is important, what happens, you know, to your vagus nerve, you know, all that kind of stuff. And people, they jones on that because they think they're learning new knowledge. What I'm really doing trying to do is just establish the credibility for why deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing at a kind of five count in and five-count out is transformative and almost seems too simple. So you have to have all the other science-y stuff, you know what I mean, for the average Westerner to be like, oh, this is real. But the juice is in the practice. And so vertical development transforms who you are, not just what you know. Because quickly, after, you know, the and maybe it's like 10 or 15% content, and then it's 80% practice. And you're gonna hit that practice up multidimensionally. And I call you remember the five mountains, right? So you're gonna hit it up physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally, spiritually. You're gonna hit it up, you know, alone in solo practice, you're gonna hit it up in team practice, you're gonna hit it up when you're calm, and you're gonna hit it up when you're under pressure. And through that, you begin to embed/slash embody the tools slash practices that will lead to transformation or vertical development. And the verticality is related to those stages of development you talk about, which I call the plateaus. There are several, there are actually many different stage development models. Like probably one of the earliest ones that people would recognize is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In his published work, his highest hierarchy was self-actualization, but but in his um later stage work, which was unpublished, he also talked about self-transcendence as a final stage. And that's really what we're looking for. That's the fifth plateau that I talk about in Staring Down the Wolf. First plateau is survivor, stuck in most of humanity is stuck in survivor plateau, right? Just what's the next meal? Am I gonna survive today? You know, if you're in war-torn Ukraine and Russia or whatever, Syria. Anyways, and then the second plateau is protector. This is where like the bureaucratic class and those who are like staunchly protecting a status quo, you know, so you have a lot of, you know, gang protector and survivor can overlap, right? Or um you can actually be quite uh successful in the protector class, but you you aren't gonna go beyond the belief systems and your rigid, you know, your rigid fixed mindset. So very fixed mindset. The third plateau is uh equalizer, and this is where you get entrepreneurs and and you know, uh people trying to to go out and build things and to create things, and and um it's much more world-centric, you know, and less ego or ethnocentric. Um, and the positive qualities of that are like all this prosperity and wealth and and technological progress. And the negative sides are you know, that technology can be used for for harm, you know. And then the fourth plateau is equalizer, and this is where you get a lot of like social justice work and um you know, wanting to really level the playing field. A lot of the discussion today about extreme uh wealth disparity, you know, coming from the equalizer class, even though you know the negative side of that could be like my way or the highway, or you know, it could be co-opted for political means and violence. So that's um you got to look at the positive and the negative, each one of these. But you don't, until you get to the fifth plateau, which is the integrator, you you're not actually at the point where you're able to self-transform. And what I mean by that is you're still under the influence of all the training and conditioning that you've had throughout your entire life. You haven't been able to break free of that. So you identify as those thoughts and emotions. The integrator plateau, you could be a, you know, akin to like the first stages of awakened awareness, where as I described earlier, you see that your entire life has been one nonstop act or receipt of just conditioning to form you into the current world, your culture, your institutions, your whatever, your family even view of reality, which is false, necessarily false, because it's radically limited and contracted to those points of perception. And so when you have that through deliberate mental training, you can even use the term meditation, but most people have no idea what meditation really is. So I use the term mental training. Through deliberative mental training, you will eventually crack open or pop into this um awareness that you are not those thoughts, beliefs, ideas, conditionings, patterns. Those were all foisted upon you. And so then you get to choose. And that's the integrator plateau. We are finally integrated as a whole human adult. And there's, you know, very small percentage of the global population probably has, you know, is at this uh stage, but I think there's a growing number that are accelerating toward it because the type of training I'm talking about in this vertical development, right? We've been doing it since 2006, and more and more um, there's more and more acceptance of these practices, right? Like you see it all the time, right? When back in 2006, when I taught box breathing to the Navy SEALs, I mean, they're rolling their eyes. And and now they actually teach it at SEAL training. And they have yoga in the SEALs. And when I taught yoga to SEAL trainees back in 2006, they wouldn't even step into the studio. So more and more people are exposed to these authentic um mental training practices that will lead toward this integration and this pop into this field of awareness that is this recognition that you you are not what you thought you were, and that you now you now you have an opportunity to redefine what you are and what it means to be human. And it's much more expansive than you know, 99.9% of the pop global population is willing or capable of understanding right now.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

I think this is great. Well, like how you how how that's framed out. I think this is perfect to talk about motivation and discipline. Because what you just described is when motivation runs out, you have nothing left, right? So it's it's kind of like moving on to all of these additional the additional concepts to keep the momentum going because motivation wears out. Everybody's motivated. They're all motivated on January 1st of every year, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:09

And then for a few minutes they're motivated, yeah. Discipline is what makes motivation unnecessary. It's just a nice little boost, right? It's like adding a little nitrous oxide to your, you know, to your project or your day or whatever. But without it, when that when that burns off, you're still there showing up, doing the work and making progress. So discipline simply means to be a disciple to something higher than yourself. And it all comes down to knowing who you are and why you're on this planet, right? And so we have an exercise called the three Ps uh with our um with Unvealed Mind. And it's like what to really answer, not like, hey, you know, like a like a rapid fire question what is your purpose, what is your passion, what are your principles, but to answer it over the course of maybe a year or two through deep contemplation, journaling, introspection, um, and and visualization. And because everybody has an archetypal energy, which is the primary, like if they had no obstacles, like money wasn't an obstacle, relationships weren't an obstacle, their conditioning, you know, that says you have to be this or that in society to be looked at as successful. If none of that existed, you would be doing something that you are absolutely, utterly certain you would you should be doing because it just feels right, and you're you're passionate about it. And then the third P is what are your principles, right? Because you know, we're operating in the world, right? It's very helpful to have an ethos. I learned that in the SEALs, right? We had a very powerful ethos. So and the ethos helps you know where you stand when things get really murky, you know what I mean? Cold, gnarly, bullets flying, cloudy. I mean, your mind gets cloudy, so those are become the principles become your guardrails, you hold on to. So discipline, you want to be a disciple. Some people say, Well, I'm a disciple to my higher power or God. I'm like, that's great. Do that. But that may not provide you the discipline to show up and train every day. In fact, too many people have said, That's my, that's my, you know, that's my higher power, and I'm gonna just let go and let God. And then they just become listless, wandering because they don't realize they they think it's all about disengaging from the world and not doing anything. And then they don't know what to do because they don't know who they are, because they've let go and let God. They've given it up, right? And so they really haven't trained their mind, they're just surrendering and off and now life could actually get worse if you just surrender and you and you don't take the time to be thoughtful about how to engage in the world in a way that is is right for you. So don't argue with your duty, don't argue with your your your purpose in life. And your purpose, Dave, uh, is not a job or a profession, it's a calling. And the calling is also not a job or profession, it's a archetypal energy, right? Like warrior or teacher, right? It might be just mother or father, right? Or healer, like in your case. Like your your purpose is a healer. Now, how you bring that to the world has probably changed several times, right, over your life. Um but that archetypal energy, that purpose has always been there. So you're you've got this higher calling that you have to bring healing into the world, and because of that, your discipline, you're a disciple to that, and you know, in order to do that, you've got to show up every day and like earn your trident, like we used to say in the seals, earn your navy sealness every day, and that requires training and new skills, and never really um, never compromising because compromising is giving up on yourself, on your purpose. Now, here's the other thing about motivation and discipline, and especially, you know, like some people from my background, the SEALs, who have gained notoriety to teach mental toughness or whatever, teach it all as push, push harder, right? Suck it up, buttercup. Pain is weakness leaving your body. You've got when you hit the wall, you've got 40% more. You're capable of, you know, and and I I have some of that language in my earlier SEAL food programs, but I always balanced it out with right, you gotta bring the yin to the yang. You gotta have recovery and uh, you know, and you gotta have the surrender to the effort, right? Everything has to be in balance. You know, you know, obviously you know that from the from the healing arts, but it it's the same when it comes to performance and mental toughness. When I uh trained young SEAL candidates, I used to say, you know, they all want to get freaking strong and ripped and and it's good. And I said, said to them, you know, hey, let's say the tsunami were coming today, and would you prefer to be the mighty oak, which you're trying to be right now, or would you prefer to be the reed? And they think about it a bit, they're like, well, the mighty oak would probably get swept away with a tsunami. I said, yeah, and the reed would just lay down and then pop back up, right? He goes, yeah. So you gotta develop the reed-like qualities of flexibility, adaptability, you know, creativity, acceptance. Those are very yin qualities, right? And you don't develop those qualities by just pushing harder, pushing harder, you know, going 40% more, get up and when you're exhausted and just do it all over again. Maybe you need to take some time off. So our program, and and um, this is something that's really important. Discipline isn't just about hard. In fact, the word I like to say again, this to be a disciple. It doesn't mean to be to be hard-headed and just suck it up and do do it, regardless of how you feel. So change your relationship with that word. Discipline should be fun, it should be relaxing, it should be, it should be, I put some effort in and then I take a break and I surrender a little bit. And this is played out on a daily basis through um how you approach your day. So you approach your day where your morning is all about yin practices of preparing to win the day, using your imagery, your breathing, your meditation, your journaling. We call that winning in the mind before you step foot in the battlefield. And then you go out into your day and you might do something hard, right? You maybe your first thing is a hard workout. Great. Recover afterwards. Do the 20-minute yoga, do the sauna cold plunge, do the walk uh in the sunshine, but don't blow off your recovery, right? And then you might have a period of deep work. Good. So if your work is deep work is like an hour-long, you know, conversation, an hour-long meeting, an hour-long podcast, and well, block those for uh 50 minutes instead of an hour. Or if it's an hour and a half, block it for an hour and 15. And take that 10 minutes or 15 minutes after each one of those deep work blocks to recover. And that recovery could look like 10 rounds of box breathing. Get up off your chair, go outside, walk around the building, or walk around your office, whatever, uh, get a drink of water, go, you know, express some gratitude for someone, you know, who's doing good work, anything like that that's gonna just release your nervous system, get you back into that homosexic balance, and also give your brain time to process what just happened, right? And then after the day is over, you got to look at the whole day as a performance event. You just had a whole performance event, even though you've had minor moments of recovery. But even like in a sporting match, you're not out there playing the entire time. You've got time to recover, but you do need to recover also from the whole match. So at the end of the day, take it, it doesn't have to be long. You know, the evening, afternoon ritual, afternoon or evening ritual can be like 10 minutes or 15 minutes, but it's incredibly valuable. You're just gonna pause and stop the world again. You're gonna box breathe, and then you're gonna go back and recapitulate your day. You're gonna go back, it's like a Navy SEAL debrief. You're gonna go back through your day, you're gonna say, you know what? What went well? Look for the wins. And is there any particular reason that it went well? Oh, yeah, because I was present or because I'd done that recovery, or I was just aware, you know, I caught myself. And then great. So celebrate the wins, which helps with your motivation. And then ask yourself, well, what didn't go so well? And but don't dwell on them, just note them and say, What did I learn? Oh, wow, I learned that I was moving too fast, or I got stuck in my head, or I needed to break, right? And so note that and you can start to you know pay attention to those patterns so you can change those patterns. The other thing that's great about this second part is oftentimes when you note things that didn't go well, you realize that you might have dropped a little hand grenade in your wake. You know what I mean? You said something that that um was unloving to somebody, or you were sarcastic, or you're short with somebody, or you know, didn't tell the truth, or you manipulated them. All sorts of scenarios happen and we don't rectify them. And so then they become like these this pile of regrets you start dragging around behind you, right? And they just build up, it's it's accumulated energy. So you have an opportunity in this evening bookend ritual to uh this yin slash recovery practice to eradicate any potential regrets by just sending off an apology or or making a plan to do it the next day.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Let's talk a bit about discomfort. You talk about discomfort, you know, looking at the future. Like, how do you overcome daily discomfort for the benefit of the future? You've mentioned that a few times. Like looking at discomfort, kind of embracing it and working through this is a big deal. This is actually a really, really kind of significant again.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

You have to reframe your relationship to a word like discomfort. So come comfort is like, oh, everything's feels good, and discomfort is well, the opposite of that. It doesn't feel good. So you want to identify things that don't feel good that are helpful versus harmful. So an example of something that doesn't feel good right away that is helpful is hard exercise or the cold shower or the cold plunge, right? Well, what we notice through our lived experience is that when you are able to lean into the good things that are that bring discomfort, then we um we desensitize ourselves, we develop a new relationship with it. And it suddenly starts to get a little bit easier and a little bit more comfortable until it actually becomes enjoyable. You actually learn to enjoy getting into the ice plunge or you learn to enjoy the hard workouts. And suddenly now you can push the envelope a little bit further. And through riding the edge of that comfort-discomfort line, um, you're you're you're broadening your capacity as a human being to withstand other types of discomfort that may not be selectively curated by you, but may come to you because of some sort of life circumstance, like a like a crisis or a natural disaster or heaven forbid, a war or something like that, or a disease. And this is also part of training the mind, but it's a more active part, right? It's bringing the body in the equation because the body is the experiencer of discomfort through a sensation, and then the mind will work with those sensations and change its relationship to it until eventually, like for me, I don't look at exercise as uncomfortable, I look at it as joyful.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

I can't imagine going without it. Yeah, same here, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:58

And then that was just through training my my mind to recontextualize the sensations that my body was feeling. So when I feel that sensation, I don't I don't feel pain anymore. I feel energy, right? Or excitement. So the more you lean into the discomfort in your life and um swap it out with practices that expand your capacity to deal with it and change the the mental relationship with it, then the more prepared or aka resilient you're gonna be when life throws a curveball at you, which it will, because that's what you know human experience is all about. So you could say that resilient people, either through training and through or through their childhood upbringing, let's say like on a farm or like I had I grew up in upstate New York running up and down mountains of the Adirondix, and I had a a dad, God bless him, you know, who used to beat us with a belt, you know, and so I learned how to handle discomfort. So when I went to SEAL training, which is probably the most uncomfortable place on the planet that you can volunteer to be in, my um my capacity to deal with discomfort was through the roof compared to a lot of my teammates. And, you know, as honor man, I'm number one graduate in my class of only 19 out of 185 who graduated. So, you know, there were 165 people, 66 people who couldn't handle that discomfort. But so through life circumstances and through a hard physical training with athletics and martial arts, I was able to handle it with with relative ease, I would say. So resiliency essentially is the ability to handle life's crisis discomforts because you're prepared for them, whether you know it or not. Uh, most people do. And so when the crisis happens, the preparation you know kicks in. So the body's already gonna be more adaptable and more flexible. It's gonna have that read-like quality to it because of the you know, the training and the adaptation you've had to do in your life. Your mind is gonna be much more flexible and and creative with your response. So you're gonna have that uh growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. And your mind is also gonna be immediately looking for you know the silver lining. Like, oh wow, that was a really good one. I don't want to go through that again, but let's not waste the opportunity to learn something here, right? I remember last year I hit had a really serious snowmobile accident that almost took my life. I I got run off a trail in Canada and it hit a tree going like 40 miles an hour. By the grace of God, I didn't hit my head square on. We wouldn't be having this conversation, but I kind of nicked the side of my helmet as my body rolled into the tree and I shattered my scapula into 18 pieces, broke eight ribs, you know, punctured my lungs, lots of internal damage. I remember as soon as I opened my eyes laying in that snowbank and realized that I was alive and not paralyzed, I was just overcome with gratitude because I didn't think I was gonna make it. And then my next thought was wow, this is a doozy. Let's not waste this opportunity. Right? Let's not waste this. Like, pay attention. Let's think, you know, let's just reflect. Even then, why did this happen? Where was my mind at? Oh, I was super distracted. Oh, there's a lot of things there that I'm like, I just immediate lessons, boom, boom, boom, boom, started coming to me. And then over the course of the last year and a half of recovery, like it's just been amazing how many positive things have come out of that that near death accident. That's resiliency.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Yeah. No, I got it. Yeah. So um I was gonna ask you too. You've worked with a lot of professional athletes, correct?

SPEAKER_00 36:39

I mean, you've had you've you've done yeah, what yeah, a lot of pro athletes and Olympians and what what's but mostly with everyday executives and leaders.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

What have you on some of those uh high-level functioning athletes that you've seen, what have you noticed like the separation? Like it like what what drives them to be able to execute like they can execute? Like you know, like when you when you have a team, for example, what I was trying to go like, sometimes people function because they're in a team. You know, they uh they'll execute because they're part of a team, but a lot of times you have athletes and of one, right? They're just one person. Like what what's the difference that separates the average from the elite?

SPEAKER_00 37:16

Unless you're in an extreme individual sport, you'll never reach the top if you don't learn to be an exceptional team player. You just you're not gonna do it because you'll be the you'll be the factor that holds the team back. And this is why the great coaches recognize this. Like it's you got some great athletes, great, but if they're not a team player and they can't, you know, be trained or taught to be a team player and to put the team ahead of themselves, they usually don't make it on a team, right? Even then, that said, individual sports are also a team sport because you got your coach and you got your support team, you know what I mean? Like tennis. And the best tennis players who make it to the top were great team players because they were partners with their coaches. The second thing that's absolutely critical is assuming we we all have to assume that the individual at that level has the fundamental skill and um has trained hard, or else they wouldn't be there, right? Correct. They've got the fundamental skill and they've trained hard. And so I would say that because of you know, that's related to that uh purpose we were talking about earlier, right? Like they came into this planet, into this incarnation. The final piece that determines whether you're gonna be a champion or not is self-esteem. And self-esteem is gonna dictate how you talk to yourself and how you think about yourself and how you see yourself, especially when you're getting your ass handed to you. It's the same thing with the SEALs, right? Like the juice is is happens in the firefight, and if you think you're gonna die in a firefight, you're gonna die in a firefight. So SEALs never think we're gonna die. We always think we're gonna win, and we always find a way to win. Because you wouldn't make it onto the team if you didn't have a high degree of self-esteem, and you weren't an excellent, exceptional, I might add, teammate. And you didn't always have this mindset that we're gonna find a way or make a way, period.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

We got it. Well, I know we're running we're running a little bit short of time, and you've been very gracious with your time, Mark. And I um I like to do this at the very end. I like to do what's called my favorite five. So I like to give a word and you have to give an answer. All right. So if I was to say discipline is, how would you answer that question?

SPEAKER_00 39:40

I borrow from my friend Jocko. Discipline is freedom. Freedom. And fear is fear is uh failure, failure is expected. Are you ready for it?

SPEAKER_02 39:54

Then we get back into leadership for a second. If you were to say leadership starts with leadership starts with self-awareness. And my last one is improved health requires out of everything, uh big buzzwords here, right? Health, right? Improved health for individual people out there. Improved health requires what? Improved health requires that you breathe properly. Wow, that's a good one. You want to expand on that one just a second?

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah, it all starts there. In fact, if you're if you're struggling with your health and you want to get back to like super health, start breathing slowly through your nose every day as a daily practice. 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes evening. My recipe is box breathing. Inhale, five count, hold your breath, five count, exhale, five count, hold your breath, five count. That's three breaths per minute. You train your automatic breathing process this way to ultimately breathe five, six times per minute through your nose and to really use your diaphragm. And so what you're doing here is you're getting all this more oxygen energy slash life force into your body and you're expelling all the toxins. And so now you're getting your body back into homeostatic balance and you're completely rewiring how you breathe so that most of the time, unless you're talking or doing a hard workout, you're breathing through your nose. Five count in, five count out, six breaths per minute. So that's the most important thing. After that, or while you begin and take up that practice, you can then work on um uh increasing your exercise load, right, incrementally and decreasing the amount of um negative foods that you put in your body, anything that's you know, any sugary, starchy stuff, to cut out, you know, you don't have to eliminate alcohol, you don't have to eliminate everything. I do it the 80-20, like just eliminate most of the crap and replace it with something healthy, and then your body's gonna have more energy and then you're gonna start sleeping better. But if you start with the breath, everything else will follow.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

And you might have already answered my last question. My last question to you was gonna be you walk into a situation room, the first thing you see is 100 patients, people, clients sitting in the room. You've never seen them before, but they're the ones that have struggled their whole life with obesity, hypertension, diabetes, a lot of disappointment, failed programs, they've started and failed, lack of motivation, you know, it's the full gamut. You walk in there, you have 90 days to take them from zero to the as far as you can. What do you start? What's the first thing you do, or what's the first thing you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 42:30

Well, I would tell them what I just told you. That's what I figured. And lead them, I would lead them right into a box breathing practice. Um, if I only had 90 minutes, um 90 days. You got 90 days. Okay, then I would um set up a discipline protocol where they're box breathing twice a day and they're reducing their caloric intake, their intermittent fasting, um, their fast mimicking, right? And um they're watching and tracking their sleep using a whoop, right? Or or their Apple Watch, and they're making sure that they, you know, really start to identify how valuable sleep is. And then they they start an exercise regimen or they ratchet it up. And so we we dial that in as appropriate. And for these, for this population is gonna be walking, right? Just walking a little bit every day. And by the end of 90 days, I would like them to be walking with a weight vest.

SPEAKER_02 43:21

Get them started, just get them started, just get them started.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

That's right. And that you know, you can absolutely transform in 90 days with that protocol, but you got to stick to it. It's a day by day, right? If you if you do it once in a while, you get no progress. It's like trying to learn how to snatch by going to the gym once a week, you know, and throwing you know a ton of weight on the bar, you're just gonna get injured. You got to do it every day.

SPEAKER_02 43:40

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

But you don't have to over overwhelm yourself, right? And I mean, you've had so many people, that's why, that's why the New Year's resolutions don't work. They don't. You know, you you focus on this massive end goal and it never works. So you got to chunk it down in these these little micro goals that are easy to accomplish every day. It's easy to sit and breathe. You're gonna breathe anyway, so why not do it effectively twice a day?

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Yeah, you can't make an excuse, yeah. And you can't make an excuse that you don't have time to do it. I mean, everyone's got time to do that.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

I mean, everyone's got time to breathe because otherwise you'd be dead.

unknown 44:11

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show here today. And uh, you're invited anytime. Um uh just it's really great to listen to you talk and and uh it's very useful information. And um absolutely so if it if my for my listeners out there, um, you know, you can find Mark you know on his webpage, markdevivine.com. And he also has a great YouTube channel.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

The training can be found at unbeatable mind.com, and that's where like if you really want to go deep, like we've got a 30-day challenge and we we go through all the box breathing and mental management tools we talked about. That's a lot of fun. Our community, our mental toughness community is awesome. So if you want to learn more, um, check out unbeatable mind.com.

SPEAKER_02 44:55

I appreciate it, Mark. Thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Thanks for joining us on Vitality Unfiltered with David Bowder, addressing norms, blasting myths, and uncovering health realities for a more vibrant life today. For more expert insights and real talk, make sure to subscribe and join us next time.