Podcasts about commander mark divine

Sponsored by Eco-Cool HVAC In this episode of Conversations with Rich Bennett, Rich talks with performance coach and strategist Michael Ostrolenk. From learning meditation and biofeedback at age nine to training with Navy SEALs and launching Team Fudoshin, Michael shares how his unique path of self-mastery has helped elite performers and everyday individuals transform their lives. This powerful conversation dives into resilience, emotional regulation, peak performance, and living with purpose, making it a must-listen for anyone seeking personal growth. Guest: Michael Ostrolenk Michael Ostrolenk is a master coach, integrative wellness expert, and human performance strategist with over 30 years of experience. He has trained elite military personnel, executives, and everyday individuals to reach their physical, mental, and spiritual potential. Michael co-developed the Unbeatable Mind Academy with SEALFIT's Commander Mark Divine and is the founder of Team Fudoshin, a tribe-driven resilience movement. His background spans transpersonal psychology, body-based therapies, and tactical training. Main Topics: ·         Discovering meditation, yoga, and biofeedback at age 9·         How childhood mental health challenges shaped his path·         Training with SEALFIT and working with elite operators·         Launching Team Fudoshin and its mission·         The power of breathing and somatic psychology·         Resilience, emotional regulation, and post-divorce growth·         Helping veterans, couples, and individuals thrive·         Building a personal PhD: self-education and continual learning·         His podcast journey and lifelong commitment to learning  Resources mentioned: Send us a textPre-order your copy todayEco-Cool HVACYOUR FRIEND IN THE SUMMERS & WINTERS! Heating & Air Conditioning Service and Repair, Furnace & BoilDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showRate & Review on Apple Podcasts Follow the Conversations with Rich Bennett podcast on Social Media:Facebook – Conversations with Rich Bennett Facebook Group (Join the conversation) – Conversations with Rich Bennett podcast group | FacebookTwitter – Conversations with Rich Bennett Instagram – @conversationswithrichbennettTikTok – CWRB (@conversationsrichbennett) | TikTok Sponsors, Affiliates, and ways we pay the bills:Hosted on BuzzsproutRocketbookSquadCast Contests & Giveaways Subscribe by Email

Unbeatable Mind book : https://amzn.to/3UOWVp3 To be a soldier requires a particular kind of mindset, discipline and mental toughness. And to be a member of the special forces requires serious mastery of the mind. In an effort to tap into this mindset I speak with Navy Seal Commander Mark Divine who by his own admission was the archetypal overachiever physically, but it wasnt until he discovered karate and zen meditation that he really tapped into what he was capable of physically and mentally. We hear about his chaotic family background growing up and how it undermined his confidence which was in contrast with his physical prowess and success in sport up to that point. Commander Divine talks about how transformative meditation was in how he saw himself and life's challenges, and how it gave him the vital strengths to change career, enter the military and lead a team of 6 navy recruits through the tortuous 9 months of navy seal training which included the infamous hell week. Divine was 1 of only 19 recruits out of a total of 185 who passed navy seal training, and would go on to spend 20 years in the navy seals. We explore the 4 key skills that are crucial to Commander Divine's philosophy, including vizualisation and positive self talk. While the terms 'navy seals', 'special forces', and the 'SAS' will conjure up various perconceived notions you have of that world, I want you to park them, because this conversation focuses on mastering your mind, overcoming that inner negative dialogue which we all engage in to our detriment. Lets be honest if someone who faced the brutal training and life threatening situations which Commander Divine had to, then I know we can absolutely glean some really great advice to help us deal with our everyday lives. www.sealfit.com Order Happy Habits for Mind and Body Audiobook: https://rb.gy/h5jjjg Order Kindle copy of Happy Habits for Mind and Body : https://rb.gy/jiojcc Order US paperback of Happy Habits for Mind and Body : https://rb.gy/sirste Order UK paperback of Happy Habits for Mind and Body : https://rb.gy/jtfea5 Listen to all previous podcast episodes of the Happy Habit Podcast via these podcast platforms : Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/happy-habit-podcast Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Habit-Podcast/dp/B08K5887J8 Amazon music : https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/670836c2-ea4c-4a23-a67d-a54dd804ef61/happy-habit-podcast Spotify https://https://open.spotify.com/show/2VKIhQK6mYTzLCO8haUoRd Google Podcasts : https://t.ly/hTU8q ----- Follow the Happy Habit Podcast at: Website: https://happyhabitpodcast.wordpress.com/Facebook: Twitter: https://twitter.com/mathieunorry Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/happyhabitpodcast/ Newsletter:

Becoming a Self-Transcendent Leader Calling All Leaders to Attention to Rise Above the Challenge! With democracy worldwide declining, leadership is facing its greatest trial in modern history. But what if the real challenge and solution lie within us? Yes, as leaders of our businesses, communities, and families, you and I. Can we break free from our limitations?  Join us for an enlightening next two episodes and possibly shocking discussion with my incredible soul warrior brother, Mark Divine. As a retired SEAL Commander and founder of SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, Mark knows what it takes to transcend ego and embrace a higher purpose. But that's not all! Mark is also a bestselling author of 5 empowering books, including "Staring Down The Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams." He also hosts the #1-ranked podcast on iTunes, Mark Divine's Unbeatable Mind, and has founded 5 successful companies. Get ready to be inspired as we delve into the power of purpose and service in solving society's real problems.  Together, let's rise above and make a difference! Don't miss out on this captivating conversation - link to the podcast and more details below.  Let's lead the way from Leadership to actualized Leadership and onto Becoming Self-Transcendent Leaders! Website http://www.unbeatablemind.com/ Social Media https://www.facebook.com/TheMarkDivine/   https://twitter.com/SEALFIT   https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdivine/   https://www.instagram.com/realmarkdivine/ Part 1) The Relentless March Toward "Freedom." When We Discover "This Path is Not My Path!" The Crossroads of the Zen Accountant What's Your Purpose, Primal Urge, and Archetype How do we measure consciousness? The Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Journey of a Warrior. Even Though we are Now Leaders, the Importance of Looking Back at What Formed Us. Recognized The Fallout of Our Action Bias The Unmasking of Global Leadership Gritty Leadership to Scullery Leadership, Teacher, Leader, onto Warrior Monk Is Command Leadership Why is Authoritarian Leadership is On The Rise The Gilded Cages of Capitalism When Freedom is a Lie Discover how tapping into the Anatomy of Meaning can #actualize your #business, #culture, #Leadership, and #tribe DovBaron.com ___________________ Dov Baron's brand new course has just been released on coursifyx.com/belonging Titled: "CREATING A CULTURE OF BELONGING." The course is separated into eight sections that will take you by the hand and walk you through exactly how to create a culture of belonging. Because: CREATING A CULTURE OF BELONGING MAXIMIZES PERSONAL AND CORPORATE SUCCESS.   Get Ready to strap on the tanks and Dive Deep into, What it Takes to Create a Culture of Belonging in your organization! Curious to know more, coursifyx.com/belonging  "Those Who Control Meaning for The Tribe, Also Control The Movement of That Tribe" #videopodcast #leadership #leadershipdevelopment #emotionsourcecode #neuroscience #emotional #meaning #emotional #logic #culture #curiosity #humanbehavior #purpose Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are honored and delighted to speak with Mark Divine, a former Commander of the SEALs!  Mark is an amazing individual! He is spent 20 years with the Navy SEALs and is a business entrepreneur and a New York Times Bestselling author! In this exciting episode, he discusses how to get to know yourself, knowing how to breathe, how to focus, and how to control your thoughts. We hope you enjoy listening to today's fascinating interview with Mark Divine! Mark Divine Speaker Bio:  Mark Divine is an entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and one of the world's top leadership and coaching experts.  After a successful 20-year career as a Navy SEAL and SEAL Commander, Mark was hired by the Navy to create a nationwide coaching and leadership program for the SEALs. The bold goal of this program was to give the SEALs the best leadership and mental-management tools in the world – to help them forge unbeatable SEAL teams that achieve mission success in the most stressful, challenging environments on earth.  Divine's leadership and coaching program for the SEALs was so effective that it's now being used outside of the Navy by top CEOs, Fortune 100 companies, USA Olympics, elite universities, major league sports franchises, celebrities, and successful individuals from all over the world.  Mark Divine is the author of 5 best-selling books, including his latest book Staring Down The Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments That Forge Elite Teams. He hosts a #1-ranked podcast on iTunes (Mark Divine's Unbeatable Mind) and is the founder of 5 successful companies: Unbeatable Mind, SEALFIT, NavySEALs.com, CrossFit, and the award-winning Coronado Brewing Company in California.  Divine believes that any individual, team, or company can unlock 20X performance with the right tools and training. His company, Unbeatable Mind, helps millions of people achieve their full potential in life and business through their free training resources and advanced training programs for leaders, corporate teams, coaching professionals, and high-achieving individuals.  As a philanthropist, Mark Divine founded the Courage Foundation to help our wounded Veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS). Recently Divine and his Courage Foundation team set a world record by completing over 22 million burpees to raise awareness, support, and funding for our Veteran heroes. Mark's story While getting his MBA at New York University Stern School of Business and working toward becoming a CPA, Mark began meditating under the auspices of his martial arts instructor, who was also a Zen practitioner. He discovered he was physically amenable to the meditation practice and started training daily. Six to nine months later, he began experiencing intense flow states and sensing energy moving through his body. He also started coming out of meditations feeling that he was accessing who he truly was and bringing back information. He saw that he had been following someone else's script and understood that he was not supposed to be the CPA, MBA financial guy making a ton of money.  Finding his calling Mark began journaling and asking questions about his true calling before meditating. Then, after meditating, he began sensing the idea that he was meant to be a warrior. Through that, he learned that one's calling in life is not a job or career. It is what you are, and it has an archetypal energy to it. Becoming a warrior The notion of the warrior kept coming back to him. So he accepted it and began to imagine different ways of becoming a warrior. When he saw a poster in a Navy recruitment office about the Navy SEALs, he knew that would be his path to becoming a warrior. He decided to finish his MBA and CPA studies and apply what he had learned with the SEALs. A sense of certainty Mark applied for the SEALs but did not get his hopes up because they only take two civilians a year into Officer Candidate School and Navy SEAL training. After about nine months of visualizing himself as a Navy seal, a sense of certainty washed over him. Two or three days later, the recruiter called to tell him he was accepted. Visualization  The essence of visualization is creating a “future memory” by tapping into who you are and focusing on the purpose of what you are doing and how you will use it to serve others. The more you focus on that future memory, the more you create a magnetic pull, and the more real whatever you visualize becomes. The Mind Gym After being accepted by the Navy, Mark knew he needed to do everything in his power; physically, mentally, and emotionally, to get through the SEAL training. So, inspired by the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, he developed a visualization practice to help him succeed. He later developed that practice even further to become the Mind Gym. The Mind Gym is a mental place you go into to do meditation and visualization. In it, you build an imaginary sacred place where you are held and protected, and your mind is held steady. You can invite imaginary advisors and your future self to join you and share information in your Mind Gym.  SEALFIT After getting married, Mark transitioned into the reserve SEAL teams and launched SEALFIT to teach the skills he had learned to other SEALs, operatives, business professionals, and corporate teams. The Big Four Mark refers to the skills he developed, refined, and taught as the Big Four. When practiced for 20 minutes daily, those skills help people reconstruct their lives and achieve goals they previously believed were insurmountable.  They are: Breath Control (Box breathing) Mental control (With positive thoughts and internal dialogue) Imagery (Imagining or visualizing the desired outcome) Focusing wholly on the task at hand and breaking it down into micro-goals The SEALFIT Academy Mark created a 30-day in-house training program called the SEALFIT Academy to teach his Big Four skills to the “Western Warriors” who wanted to learn them. Out of that, he developed another three complete training programs: SEAL FIT, Kokoro Yoga, and Unbeatable Mind. Those programs are so effective that 90% of the Navy SEAL candidates who complete them get through the Navy SEAL training!  Mark's Six Pillars To overcome the training programs of consumerism, corporatism, and social media, Mark teaches his trainees to notice where they get conditioned and how to deconstruct that conditioning. To do that, they must create healthy habits around nutrition, sleep, exercise, time in nature, stress management, and community practices. He calls these the Six Pillars.  Mental toughness People develop mental toughness when they learn how to control their thoughts and emotions. That can be achieved by practicing mindfulness and meditation. The future To overcome unhealthy societal conditioning and create a new and non-violent culture, we need to take back control of our lives. Mark recommends doing that positively. So, we should not fight back against the government or corporate interests. Rather, we should ignore all the negativity and violence, develop and cultivate a positive mindset, and have a positive view of the world and the future.  The Courage Foundation Mark created the Courage Foundation about five or six years ago to raise awareness about the high suicide rate among veterans, to support veteran organizations, and to help veterans with PTSD. Connect with Eric On LinkedIn On Facebook On Instagram On Website Connect with Mark Divine On his website  SEALFIT Training    On LinkedIn  The Courage Foundation   Books mentioned: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Mark Divine didn't just try out to become a Navy Seal.  He finished first in his class.   He didn't just become a Navy Seal.  He became a Navy Seal Commander.   Everything he has done and continues to do in his life he does with an elevated state of mind that translates into his day-to-day life and breeds both a healthy mental and physical way to attack this crazy world we live in.   Whether you're an athlete looking to find the mental edge to get better or just looking to be your best self at whatever you do - both in business and your personal life - you have to hear the amazing story of this even more amazing person.   We dive deep into his Seal Team's deep dives into battle.  Plus we get Mark's incites as to how to focus your mind and body to be the best athlete, student, mom, dad - you name it.   Sean could not be more fired up to pick the brain of a true American hero on this week's badass edition of The Mayor's Office with Sean Casey.  Hoorah!!!!!!!

I hope you have had an amazing week. In this week's episode of the BFE we go through what Navy SEAL Founder of SEAL FIT Mark Divine calls 3P's and One Thing. If you can get these figured out you will move exponentially toward achieving your goals and finding your life's purpose.

To watch this as a video Download it and play it from the Downloads section in the Castbox app on your device.In the Limitless Mindset podcast interview with Commander Mark Divine of the Navy SEALs, he said something profound about lifehacking that made me think of my favorite Bruce Lee quote: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. It's not the daily increase but the daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."

Adam is joined by former Navy Seal Commander Mark Divine who teaches how to think like a sniper to destroy negative thinking. They talk about the misinformation spread during COVID and how positive mantra affirmations can help people to stop feeding their fear wolf. Jodi Miller reports on today's news stories including: the Dave Chappelle's assault at the Hollywood Bowl, the Hunter Biden laptop repairman suing after his store had to close, and the new details on the infamous Kim Kardashian sex tape. THANKS FOR SUPPORTING TODAY'S SPONSORS: SimpliSafe.com/Adam Stamps.com enter ADAM Hyundai LifeLock.com enter ADAM

Commander Mark Divine is well known for his SEALFIT program, selling books on leadership, mental and physical strength and his podcast "The Mark Divine Show", but his journey to becoming an expert and educator on leadership had some unexpected beginnings. Mark joins Abby and Leeds to discuss how his path from a difficult childhood to a financial educational track eventually led him to the Navy SEALs - where he was the #1 ranked trainee.   Produced by Dear Media

Today, Commander Mark Divine speaks with Tim Grover about his drive for success as a first generation American, his career training elite athletes, and how we can all develop a winning attitude.   Tim S. Grover is the CEO of ATTACK Athletics, Inc., founded in 1989. World-renowned for his legendary work with elite champions and Hall of Famers, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and hundreds other NFL, MLB, NBA, and Olympic athletes, he is the preeminent authority on the science and art of physical and mental dominance and achieving excellence.   Author of the national bestseller RELENTLESS: From Good to Great to Unstoppable and his latest book, Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, creator of digital training platform The Relentless System, Tim appears around the world as a keynote speaker and consultant. He is a featured columnist at SI.com and Yahoo.com; he also appears on ESPN, FoxSports, and other media outlets.      Key Takeaways: Greatness is not an end goal. It is something to strive for every single day. After each win, start over and continue to strive for the next victory.    It's crucial to determine and address weaknesses and injury prone areas before focusing on building overall strength.    You have enough haters! Don't be one of them. The importance of being your own biggest fan can not be stated enough.    Fear is a natural and necessary part of life, but we can't allow it to control us. We must trust ourselves and let go of doubt, so we can control fear and have better control of the outcome.    Wisdom from Michael Jordan: If you get knocked down, don't just stand back up. If you stand up before you have figured out why you fell, you haven't learned anything. Figure out why you fell, then stand up a changed person less likely to repeat the same mistake.  Tim Grover - Best-selling author and Keynote Speaker   Instagram   Twitter   LinkedIn

Today, Commander Mark Divine speaks with Tim Grover about his drive for success as a first generation American, his career training elite athletes, and how we can all develop a winning attitude.   Tim S. Grover is the CEO of ATTACK Athletics, Inc., founded in 1989. World-renowned for his legendary work with elite champions and Hall of Famers, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and hundreds other NFL, MLB, NBA, and Olympic athletes, he is the preeminent authority on the science and art of physical and mental dominance and achieving excellence.   Author of the national bestseller RELENTLESS: From Good to Great to Unstoppable and his latest book, Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, creator of digital training platform The Relentless System, Tim appears around the world as a keynote speaker and consultant. He is a featured columnist at SI.com and Yahoo.com; he also appears on ESPN, FoxSports, and other media outlets.      Key Takeaways: Greatness is not an end goal. It is something to strive for every single day. After each win, start over and continue to strive for the next victory.    It's crucial to determine and address weaknesses and injury prone areas before focusing on building overall strength.    You have enough haters! Don't be one of them. The importance of being your own biggest fan can not be stated enough.    Fear is a natural and necessary part of life, but we can't allow it to control us. We must trust ourselves and let go of doubt, so we can control fear and have better control of the outcome.    Wisdom from Michael Jordan: If you get knocked down, don't just stand back up. If you stand up before you have figured out why you fell, you haven't learned anything. Figure out why you fell, then stand up a changed person less likely to repeat the same mistake.  Tim Grover - Best-selling author and Keynote Speaker   Instagram   Twitter   LinkedIn

Ed O'Keefe is the Co-founder of Consulting For Equity, where he teaches Roland Frasier's CFE™ method that generated 20,000 new customers through a 5 Day Challenge. Ed is also the Author of the book Time Collapsing! The New Art of Speed, Money, Power, and Meaning. He has used his time collapsing methods to leap to the top of industries. He has started multiple companies from scratch and built them up to seven and even eight figures. In the dentistry field, Ed sold over $50,000,000 in marketing systems and seminars. He started Marine Essentials and has sold over $60,000,000 in health supplements. On top of having seven kids and running his businesses, Ed is a graduate of Kokoro 40, the 51-hour mini hell week challenge created by Commander Mark Divine. In this episode… How do you push yourself to do what scares you? Many people stop themselves from doing physical challenges by thinking that others who have achieved these feats do not feel the same pain.  The episode is about pushing yourself mentally and physically and having others help drive you towards your goals. Ed O'Keefe has been through it. He was a graduate of Kokoro 40, a 51-hour mini hell week created by Commander Mark Divine. If you want to successfully take on a physical feat or challenge, this episode is for you!  Listen to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz featuring the Co-founder of Consulting For Equity, Ed O'Keefe. Ed challenges Jeremy to do a Murph, and they discuss how people stop themselves from taking on physical challenges, the importance of remaining positive and present, and how to do what scares you to death. Stay tuned.

Today, Commander Divine talks to Commander Hiner about their shared experiences, the impact of stress, teamwork and how leading in a time of stress changes your leadership style.  Lieutenant Commander Ed Hiner was a Training and Readiness Officer in charge of basic and advanced combat training for Seal Teams, Ed designed the most elite organization on earth. On this episode, Commander Mark Divine and Commander Ed Hiner talk about the ways SEAL training and active duty have shaped them and how their skills translate to entrepreneurial ventures, as well as philanthropy.  Ed discusses why Team toughness wins the day and the importance of creating a space where everyone is involved, feels ownership of the process and from that a shared vision is formed. He discusses how a collective/shared vision decreases anxiety. Ed also talks about how fear can be a motivator and how important it is to eradicate the debilitating effects of fear.  Key Takeaways: Team toughness wins the day. Fear can be a motivator, and rumination is the enemy of action.  Getting back to basics often helps even the most complex situations Break your relationship with excuses and create accountability. 

Today, Commander Divine talks to Commander Hiner about their shared experiences, the impact of stress, teamwork and how leading in a time of stress changes your leadership style.  Lieutenant Commander Ed Hiner was a Training and Readiness Officer in charge of basic and advanced combat training for Seal Teams, Ed designed the most elite organization on earth. On this episode, Commander Mark Divine and Commander Ed Hiner talk about the ways SEAL training and active duty have shaped them and how their skills translate to entrepreneurial ventures, as well as philanthropy.  Ed discusses why Team toughness wins the day and the importance of creating a space where everyone is involved, feels ownership of the process and from that a shared vision is formed. He discusses how a collective/shared vision decreases anxiety. Ed also talks about how fear can be a motivator and how important it is to eradicate the debilitating effects of fear.  Key Takeaways: Team toughness wins the day. Fear can be a motivator, and rumination is the enemy of action.  Getting back to basics often helps even the most complex situations Break your relationship with excuses and create accountability. 

Mark Divine is an entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and one of the world's top leadership and coaching experts.After a successful 20 year career as a Navy SEAL and SEAL Commander, Mark was hired by the Navy to create a nationwide coaching and leadership program for the SEALs. The bold goal of this program was to give the SEALs the best leadership and mental-management tools in the world – to help them forge unbeatable SEAL teams that achieve mission success in the most stressful, challenging environments on earth.Divine's leadership and coaching program for the SEALs was so effective that it's now being used outside of the Navy by top CEOs, Fortune 100 companies, USA Olympics, elite universities, major league sports franchises, celebrities, and successful individuals from all over the world.www.unbeatablemind.comPodcast: Unbeatable Mind (Mark Divine)www.unbeatablemind.com/challengeBook: Unbeatable Mind on Amazonwww.sealfit.com

Mark Divine, a Navy Seal Commander, explains how he overcame a plane crash and trauma from his military service to build a successful business. In addition, he shares lessons on post-traumatic growth, burnout prevention, and survivor guilt. Mark Divine is an entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, philanthropist, and one of the world's top leadership and coaching experts. Divine believes that any individual, team, or company can unlock 20X performance with the right tools and training. His company, Unbeatable Mind, helps millions of people achieve their full potential in life and business through their free training resources and advanced training programs for leaders, corporate teams, coaching professionals, and high-achieving individuals.

Barry Sloane is an Actor, Producer, Musician and also my husband! In this episode we discuss Barry's experience at Sealfit (a Navy Seal run training camp in Encinitas, California) and how meditation and visualization are an integral part of the training in order to enhance mental strength and physical endurance. Barry shares his experience of this intense and somewhat torturous training with Commander Mark Divine and how this changed him, shaping his mind and body along with his portrayal of character 'Joe Graves' in the hit show 'Six'. We also talk about maintaining mental health as an actor, after delving in to the mind of dark and disturbing characters and how to release from this energy. Barry also discusses his current projects; playing lawyer 'Jake Reilly' in NBC's 'Bluff City Law' and taking on the iconic role of 'Captain Price in 'Call Of Duty - Modern Warfare'.

We live in a fast-paced world, with more everyday demands. And we know that we need good health to keep up. Nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness are often hailed as important pillars. However, there is something even more fundamental for better health—sleep. Sleep ensures we can actually perform. With better sleep, we'll be living better lives. But, how many of us actually prioritise sleep?     Dr Kirk Parsley joins us in this episode to explain how sleep affects our lives. Poor sleep can significantly change our bodies and performance. He also shares that we can achieve good sleep through lifestyle changes. A better life is not about taking more supplements or using gadgets and tools; it's about creating new and better habits.  If you want to know more about the science of sleep and how sleep affects our lives, then this episode is for you.    Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how sleep affects our lives and why it is so fundamental to our health.  Understand that it's more important to change our behaviours and lifestyle rather than depending on supplements.  Discover the ways we can create the right conditions for better sleep.     Resources Get Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy here!  Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  A new program, BoostCamp, is coming this September at Peak Wellness!  Listen to my other Pushing the Limits episodes:  Episode with Mark Divine Connect with Dr Kirk: Website I LinkedIn I Instagram I Facebook I Email  You can also get the free downloadable resource on decreasing stress before sleep here.   The Unbeatable Mind Podcast with Mark Divine Dr. Kirk Parsley - How to Supercharge Your Sleep Dr. Kirk Parsley on Sleep And Longevity Melatonin Supplementation with Dr John Lieurance in the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.     Melatonin: The Miracle Molecule by Dr John Lieurance Dr Harch's Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy America's Frontline Doctors How to save the world, in three easy steps. from Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Podcast   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combats the effects of aging while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Episode Highlights [03:28] How Dr Kirk Started Working on Sleep Dr Kirk used to work for the SEALs. Later on, he enrolled in the military's medical school. After getting his degree, Dr Kirk became the manager of a sports medicine facility for the military. Here, he worked with other medical experts.  Those in the military will usually lie to healthcare providers so they won't get excluded from work, but they tend to be more honest with Dr Kirk because they have worked with him before.  After testing for vitamin deficiencies and adrenal fatigue, Dr Kirk realised that many of his patients were taking Ambien, a sleeping drug.  After learning more about sleep, Dr Kirk realised that every symptom his patients were presenting could be explained by poor sleeping.  [17:31] Sleep's Various Cycles With a sleep drug, you are just unconscious and not sleeping.  Proper sleep needs to go through a repetitive pattern of deep sleep at the beginning of the night and then REM sleep by morning.  The different cycles are important since they affect our bodies in different ways.  Sleep can help boost your immunity and memory! Learn more benefits in the full episode.  [20:12] How Sleep Affects Our Lives If you don't give yourself time to recover, sleep pressure can accumulate and have progressively worse effects.  If you go to bed with high stress hormones, this can worsen your sleep. Poor sleep then leads to higher stress levels, and the cycle gets worse.  People who get poor sleep age faster, not just in appearance but also in their physiology.  Poor sleep can lead to protein structure breakdown, decreased blood supply, aged tissues, and more.  As we age, we also face the problem of not repairing as fast. This is how sleep affects our lives.  [23:56] The Foundation For Better Health We are often taught the basics of health are sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress management.  However, these pillars cannot function without sleep as their foundation, emphasising how sleep affects our lives.  For example, exercise becomes counterproductive when you're sleep deprived because you're not recovering.  Poor sleep can also change your insulin sensitivity and gut biome, which changes your nutrition levels. Because of how sleep affects our lives, it should be our priority. Sleep deprivation is the fastest way to break someone down, this is why it's used as an interrogation technique.    [28:35] How Do We Sleep? We need eight hours of sleep a night. Make your sleeping routine simple. The more complex it is, the more likely you will fail.  First, convince yourself that sleep is important.  We are all born to sleep, and we don't need to learn how.  Before electricity, people used to fall asleep three hours after sunset. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about the neurochemical process of sleep.   [35:36] Creating the Right Conditions for Sleep During sleep, our senses still work, but they don't pay as much attention to external stimuli.  For our ancestors, the sunset will lead to decreased blue light, decreased temperature, decreased stimuli, and increased melatonin.  Better sleep is just creating these conditions in our environment.  If we take melatonin, we should be careful to take only small amounts.  [39:20] Melatonin Supplementation Some have argued that melatonin supplementation does not downregulate our brain receptors, but there are no definitive studies on this yet.  In fact, measuring melatonin is difficult due to its quantity and concentration in each part of the brain.  It's okay to take melatonin supplements but not in physiologic amounts.  [45:15] Can We Reverse Aging? You need to understand your genetics and what ratios will work for you.  While good habits and supplements can improve your overall health, we don't know if it undoubtedly reverses age.  Our bodies are more complex than we think. Shorting yourself two hours of sleep can change over 700 different epigenetic markers.  We can only describe biology. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time.  Dr Kirk also shares his experience with hyperbaric oxygen therapy in the full episode.  [1:03:36] Paradigm Shifts in the Medical Industry There is a lot of dishonesty in both the media and the medical industry.  Many doctors and medical experts have been silenced on potentially better cures, especially during this pandemic.  Western medicine is effective in treating the sick, but it doesn't keep people from getting severely sick in the first place. A lifestyle change is more important than taking supplements.  [1:12:22] The Importance Of Behaviour Change  People often don't want to work on their behaviour because taking medicine is easier.  We also need to be aware of how the food industry is tapping into our addictive mechanisms to keep us eating more.   Caffeine consumption can also ruin our sleep. More than 200 milligrams can give the opposite effect of staying awake and alert.  Learn exactly how sleep affects our lives, together with caffeine and sugar consumption, when you listen to the full episode. [1:19:40] Widespread Impressions on Sleep and How It Affects Our Lives People have grown to believe that sleep is for the weak and lazy.  This belief also impacts our children, especially since they are still developing.  Losing two hours of sleep can decrease testosterone and growth hormone by 30% and increase inflammation by 30%, among others.   Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system. Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, experiences a shift during adolescence. [1:26:34] How Sleep Affects Our Lives as Kids Dr Kirk delved into researching how sleep affects kids after giving a lecture for American kids overseas to professionals in the school system. Kids' brains are still developing. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to simulate things, is formed during adolescence. Furthermore, adolescents also require more sleep because of a shift in their circadian rhythm. Requiring kids to do more with less sleep interferes with their development. [1:31:40] How Sleep Affects Our Lives When We are Sick A new field in medicine called chronobiology is studying how sleep deprivation precedes any psychiatric disease or psychological flare-up. An Ivy League hospital managed to get their patients off medication by regulating their circadian rhythm and chronobiology. [1:34:34] It's More Than Switching Things On and Off Medications can be difficult to get off because they have too many side effects.  For example, most antidepressants are not just working on serotonin. Instead, they affect several neurotransmitters as well.  Physiological doses are artificial and can cause you more trouble.  Learn how sleep medication and affects GABA receptors that slow down the brain when you listen to the full episode. [1:41:17] Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy Dr Kirk discusses how cavemen took around three hours after the sun went down to fall asleep. In the present day, what can people do in those three hours? To fall asleep, stress hormones need to come down due to lifestyle. Dr Kirk's Sleep Remedy involves getting the proper ratios of substances. His product comes in the form of tea, stick pouches, and capsules.  [1:46:27] Dr Kirk's Final Advice Change your environment by decreasing blue light and stimulation.  Learn to slow everything down.  Just like how you slow everything down to get a kid to sleep, so should you do the same for an adult.   7 Powerful Quotes ‘You aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep.' ‘Often, if you're sleep-deprived, more is worse for sure. You don't really need to do any exercises. You just stay active until you've recovered, and then you can exercise again.' ‘Insulin sensitivity is decreased by 30%, just by losing two hours of sleep. One night with two hours of sleep. So you go from sleeping eight hours of sleep to six. If you're pre-diabetic, you're waking up diabetic.' ‘Even though I'm known for sleep, the hardest thing for me to coach people to do is to sleep.' ‘The most sleep-deprived years are the most horrible years of the brain development.' ‘Get rid of the blue light. Decrease the stimulation. Lower your body temperature. That's sleep hygiene.' ‘Part of lowering stress is just slowing down your thinking. You can't work on your computer until 9:59 and get in bed in 10 and think you're gonna be asleep.'   About Dr Kirk Dr Kirk Parsley was a former Navy SEAL who went on to earn his medical degree from Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda in 2004. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an Undersea Medical Officer at the Naval Special Warfare Group One. He also served as the Naval Special Warfare's expert on sleep medicine.  Dr Kirk has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006 and consults for multiple corporations and professional athletes. He gives lectures worldwide on wellness, sleep, and hormonal optimisation. He believes that many diseases and disorders are unnecessary complications of poor sleeping habits. We can achieve the highest quality of life possible by changing this habit problem.  Interested in Dr Kirk's work? Check out his website. You can also reach him on LinkedIn, Instagram,  Facebook, and email.       Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn how sleep affects our lives and what we can do about it. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript of the Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by www.lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone! And welcome to Pushing The Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I managed to get some incredible people. I have Dr Kirk Parsley with me. He is an ex-Navy SEAL, and also a medical doctor. A little bit of an overachiever, this one. He spent many years in the SEALs, an incredible man. He also was involved with the first sports medicine rehabilitation centre that was working with the SEALs, an incredible expert on sleep. And that's what we do a deep dive into today. We also talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We also go into areas about the current state of the medical system, one of my favourite topics. And I hope you enjoy this episode. It's really, the most important thing is around sleep.  Sleep is something that all of us, I think, are underestimating its importance. And that this is the biggest lever, not food, not exercise, not meditation, not mindfulness, not anything else. Number one of all leverage points is sleep. So how the heck do you get enough sleep? What is enough sleep, and how to get it is what this episode is about.  Before we head over, I just want to remind you we have Boost Camp coming up. This is our eight-week live online program. There, Neil Wagstaff and I, my business partner and longtime friend and coach are doing. And we're going to, if you want to come and hang out with us live every week and learn everything about upgrading your life, basically, your performance, how to optimise all areas of your life, then we would love you to check the information out, head over to peakwellnessco.nz/boostcamp.  On that point, if you're also interested, come and check out our flagship program, which is our epigenetics program, where we look at your genetics, and how to optimise those specifically, all the areas of your life: your food, your nutrition, your exercise, your mood, and behaviour, your hormones, all these important areas, specifically to your genetics. One-on-one time with us and help us to understand everything about your genetics. It's an incredible platform and amazing AI technology behind us. And we'd love you to check that out.  Go to peakwellnessco.nz/epigenetics. Or reach out to me if you didn't get that. We will also have the links down in the show notes, if you want to just click over to that. Or you can just head over to my website, www.lisatamati.com. And hit the work with us button for our programs listed on there as well. So without further ado, now over to Dr Kirk Parsley.  Well, hi, everybody! And welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have a superstar, who is a good friend of Commander Mark Divine, you may have heard previous weeks on my podcast. We have Dr Kirk Parsley with us today. Welcome to the show.  Dr Kirk Parsley: Thank you. I feel very welcome and happy to be here. I'm still here. I'm happy to be sharing this airspace with you or whatever it is sharing.  Lisa: I'm really super excited. I've heard you a number of times on Mark's show and just thought how hefty you're on because you're such an expert. We're gonna dive into a little bit into your background, but you're an absolute sleep expert. So I'm really keen to help my audience with their sleep, and their sleep patterns, and all of that good stuff. But before we get into that, we were just chatting about genetics and endurance. So, give us a little background. You've been a Navy SEAL. You've been in the military, in the naval military. So give us a bit of background on yourself, personally. Dr Kirk: Yes. So ironically, I actually dropped out of high school. I was a terrible student my whole life, didn't have any interest in school. And after you don't do well for long enough, you just convince yourself that you can't do well. And so you're just, ‘I'm just done. I can't do it'. I was always very physical, very athletic. Just fortunately, genetic lottery, I won, just be an athletic and strong guy. And it came pretty easy to me. But I worked hard at it because I didn't do school work. So when I dropped out of high school, to join the military and do the hardest training in the world. And that was what the SEAL training was supposed to be, as the toughest training in the world like, ‘Well, I'm gonna go do that.' So I went to do that.  This was a way long time ago. This is 1988. So, it was long before anybody knew what SEALs were. They didn't have the notoriety they have now for sure. And when I would come home from the Navy and tell people as I was a Sealer, like, ‘What do you mean, you work for SeaWorld or something? What do you do?' Kinda. So, I went through SEAL training, I would say I made it through SEAL training, I became a SEAL. That was pre-9/11, obviously. So we didn't have the combat that the SEALs of this generation do. So it's not really comparable. We were still mainly working in Southeast Asia doing police work and training other militaries.  I did three deployments. It was really the same thing over, and over, and over again because there was no combat. So you just did the same training, and then you deployed, and then came home, and you did the same training. And of course, I was like, ‘Maybe, I'll go do something else.' And I thought I would be—I was dating a woman who would become my wife. She was getting a master's in physical therapy. And I was reading her textbooks on deployment to make myself a better athlete. And I thought, maybe I could be a physical therapist. And so I started working, I started volunteering in a physical therapy facility in San Diego, called San Diego Sports Medicine Center. And it had every kind of health care provider you could possibly imagine. And this building, it's just this healthcare Mecca. It's the most holistic thing I've ever seen to this day.  I decided pretty quickly, I didn't want to be a physical therapist, but I don't know what else I wanted to do. But I got to follow the podiatrist around, and acupuncturist, and massage therapists, and athletic trainers, and conditioning coaches, and the orthopedist, and the family practice, and the sportsmen. I just got to follow them around and see how everybody worked. And a group of young doctors there, who were probably only five or six years older than me, and they were saying, ‘Well, you should go to medical school.' And I was like, ‘Pump the brakes, kiddo. I didn't even graduate high school. I'm not getting into medical school.' And then the senior doctor overhears the conversation. He comes out of the office. And he says, ‘Kirk, the question isn't, “Can you get in?” The question is, “Would you go if you've got in?”' And I said, ‘Of course, I'd go.' So, well, there you have it. So, he sort of shamed me into it/  I studied hard and got really good grades. And then when it came time to apply for medical school, this was pre-Internet, so you had to go to the bookstore and get your book review and look and see what schools are competitive for. And when I was going through one of those books, I found out that the military had their medical school. The military was a closed chapter in my mind. I'd done that. That's something that I figured I'd always do in my life. But it was never meant to be my whole life. And so I had done that. I was, I figured I was done. But I was already married and had kids. And I was like, ‘Well, the military will pay me to go to medical school. Or I can pay someone else to go to medical school and my wife can work while we're in medical school.'  I made enough to support my family and go to medical school for free. And then to pay off in the military's, they'll train you to do anything. You have to give them years of service and your job. So once you finish your medical training, you have to be a doctor for the military for eight years. And so I figured, ‘I'll get back to the SEAL teams, I'll go pay something back to the community that helped me, was hugely formidable in who I became in my life.' And went back to the SEAL teams, really well-prepped to do sports medicine and orthopedics. And I knew quite a bit about nutrition, and performance, and strength and conditioning. I was pretty sure I had the exact pedigree. When I got there, they had just gotten the money to build a sports medicine facility, which was actually their vision was exactly what I told you that I worked in in college. That's exactly what they wanted to build. I'm like, ‘I got this.' So they put me in charge of building this out. And I was a significant part of us hiring everyone we hired. So we hired our first strength and conditioning coach, our first nutritionist, our first PT, our first everything.  We built our own sports medicine facility. And then orthopedics was coming through every week, and they had to do rounds there. And we'd have pain rounds, pain management rounds come through. We had an acupuncturist coming through. And we hired all these people from the Olympic Training Center, and professional sports teams, and the best colleges. And so, we had all these brilliant people who knew way more than I did about what they do.  Lisa: So you went from there to there.  Dr Kirk: Yeah. And so at that point, I was the dumbest person around, right? Because we had all these experts in every little niche that I knew this much about. We hired experts who knew that much about. And so in the military, when you're the dumbest guy, they put you in charge, right and say, ‘Well, you manage this,' right? And so, I'm managing all these people who know more than I do, however that works. But my office was in this facility that we built.  The SEALs are a lot like professional athletes in that you put them on a bench, so to speak, right? Because they're injured, they need some help. So they can't work. It's the worst thing. Worst thing. So when they see a health care provider, they just lie because they don't want to be— Lisa:  They don't wanna be taken out.  Dr Kirk Parsley: They will take money out of their pocket, and go into the city, and find a doctor to treat them so that the doctor at work doesn't know, so they don't get put on the sideline. But because I was a SEAL, and there were still a lot of SEALs at the SEAL team. It was close enough to my time. There are still a lot of SEALs at the team who I worked with, and I trained with, and deployed with. And so they knew me. And I had a good reputation. And so they trusted me, and they come in my office and they say, ‘Let me tell you what's going on with me.'  They reported this litany of symptoms that didn't have any pattern that I could recognise. And so they were saying that their motivation was low, that they're very moody, that they couldn't concentrate. They're super forgetful. Their energy was low. Their body composition was shifting. They felt slower, and dumber, and colder. None of them were sleeping very well. They're all taking sleep drugs. They had low sex drive. They had a lot of joint pain, a lot of inflammation. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I'm like, ‘And I know it sounds like you're obese and 65. But I'm looking at you and you're not. So I don't know what's going on.'  I just started testing everything I could possibly test. I tested literally 98 blood markers. They were giving 17 vials of blood. Now just shotgun approaches, test everything, and see what's abnormal. And I started seeing some patterns. And they had really low anabolic hormones, so the DBTA, and testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone, pregnenolone. All of that was low. They really have high inflammatory markers. They really had poor insulin sensitivity for how healthy I knew they were, and how well they ate, and how much they exercised. But it's still within the normal range. But it wasn't. Everything was in the normal range. But everything that should be really high was just like barely in the normal range. And everything that should be really low, it's just barely inside of that range. They didn't have a disease. And I was a medical doctor, so I had learned how to treat disease, then they didn't have disease. So I was like, ‘I don't know. What am I going to do?' So that led me to having to train with outside providers. And fortunately, at that time, the SEALs did have the reputation. They'd already done all these amazing things. This was in 2009. So, I think they'd already shot Bin Laden and at that point. So I could call anybody, right? I'd watch somebody's TED Talk, read their book, I'd see them lecture. And I'll just call them and say, ‘I'm a doctor for the West Coast SEAL team. Could I come train with you? Can I consult with you? Can I ask you some questions?' And everybody was generous and said, ‘Absolutely'. So I get to learn a lot really quickly. I take a lot of leave from work and just go sit in these guys' clinics for four or five days. And just pick their brain, go see patients with them, and take notes, and learn. And then I just call them every time I have a question. And I just got to learn really quickly. It's like this team of experts who knew everything about the alternative world.  I was trying to treat people for adrenal fatigue. And I was trying to treat people for vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which are obvious from what was going on. And I couldn't quite figure out what it was. And about 100 patients into it, and probably after 30 guys came in, I could have told everybody, they could just sit down. I'll tell you what you're going to tell me. I could have just just route it off; it's so similar. And about 100 guys into it, embarrassing that it took so long, but I remember this guy telling me that he took Ambien every night. What do you guys call it? Stilnox, I think, right?  I was married to an Aussie, so I know a lot. I mean, I know you're not an Aussie, but I know a little bit about your world, as in your language. And I remember putting a note in the margin, ‘Seems like a lot of guys take an Ambien.' Then I go back through everybody's records, 100% of the guys who had been in my office were taking Ambien. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe that's an issue, right?' So, let me go look at the side effects of Ambien. And it was a fairly new drug. And the pharmaceutical industry, they get to cherry-pick their data. So they were like, ‘Oh, it's the safest drug ever. There's nothing, no problems.' And I'm like, ‘I don't quite believe that.'  Unfortunately, like every other doctor in America, I didn't know anything about sleep. I never had a single class on sleep in medical school, didn't have the foggiest idea what should be happening. I knew what you called a mechanism of action on this drug, which means molecularly what does it do. Well, it binds GABA receptors and has an effect called GABA analog, and benzodiazepines are the same, things like Valium. And so that's about as much as I knew, Well, what is GABA doing? What is GABA supposed to do? And then you can't really understand that without understanding what's actually going on in sleep.  Then, I had to learn about sleep physiology. And what's supposed to happen during sleep? And what are the normal shifts and changes? And what does that do? And if that doesn't happen, what effects do you get? So after studying quite a bit, I figured out the general Occam's razor principle of the thing with the least assumptions is, literally, every single symptom that these men told me about, could be explained by poor sleep.  Now, I didn't think that it would be, right? I wasn't naive, but it could have, then, right? So if this was definitely the most powerful thing, because being a Western doctor I wanted to give them Cortef and raise their cortisol. I wanted to give them testosterone and raise their testosterone. I wanted to get like, I wanted to give them medication to improve their insulin sensitivity. I wanted to just go in there and do it. But I couldn't do that, right? Because you can't give SEALs medication that they're dependent upon. Because then, what if they go out on the field, and they don't have their medication, they can't do their job and it's a waste. So that puts people on the bench, that disqualifies people. So I couldn't do that.  I had to figure out, well, what else can I do? So like I said, sleep seemed like the unifying theory. So let me see about that. And this was right around the time that everybody was catching on to the important vitamin B3. And that was associated with poor sleep. So, I tested all my guys. Every one of them had low vitamin B3. So I'm like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to give them vitamin B3. I'm going to be a hero. Everyone is gonna love me. I'm the best doctor ever.' And it helped a little bit. But it wasn't everything.  Like I said, I had this epiphany with this sleep drug. And once I learned enough about the sleep drug, you aren't actually sleeping when you're on sleep drugs. You're just unconscious. Your brain is dissociated, but it's not sleep. Because sleep has to have, as one of its criteria, you have to have this predictable sleep architecture. You have to be going through these sleep cycles that take you through these different stages. And a particular pattern is repetitive, and it's primarily deep sleep in the beginning of the night, and almost exclusively REM sleep by morning, and you have to do that transition.  If you don't do that, then it's not sleep. It can be partially sleep, if you're just getting poor sleep. But I was having these guys do sleep studies. And they were coming back with 99.9% of their sleep study being stage 2 sleep, which is just the transition. It's what we call a transitional sleep phase. So it's not deep sleep or REM. So they weren't really getting any of the benefits of sleep. And of course, that's an oversimplification. They're obviously getting something, or they'd be dead. But we don't know what they're getting.  That's all we know is that healthy sleep does this, and when you go through these cycles, we know these things happen. Like when you're in deep sleep, we know that's when you're the most anabolic, and you're secreting your anabolic hormones like growth hormone, and testosterone, and DHEA is being ramped up, your immune system's being ramped up. We know this happens. And then we know in REM sleep, what's going on in the brain: the physiological changes, forming more durable neural tracks, that neurological memories, shifting things from working memory into long term memory, pruning off useless information, these little buttons that grow on the side of your nerves that are starting to bud new information. You're like, ‘I don't need that.' You clean up all that. You get rid of weak products and you get the brain working better.  The whole purpose of going to sleep tonight is to prepare myself for tomorrow, right? Whatever I do today, that's what my brain and body are gonna think it needs to do tomorrow. It's gonna use today as a template to try to make me better tomorrow at doing what I did today. And if I don't get enough sleep, if I don't get to restore, I still have to do tomorrow. And how do I do that? Well, I do it the same way you do anything. I'm stressed out. I use Marinol and a bunch of cortisol and DHEA. And I start robbing all my nutrients for my cells. My blood glucose is going up, I'm getting fuel sources that way, epinephrine and norepinephrine stimulate my brain and my tissues to be able to get energy where there's really no energy there. And then I'm going to bed with these really high stress hormones, which are supposed to be low when I sleep, and then I'm trying to sleep with high stress hormones. Then, I get worse sleep. Then, I need more stress hormones tomorrow. And that's what breaks people.  In fact, when you see somebody who doesn't sleep well for even six months, they look so much older. ‘Why does he look old? That doesn't make sense. Is it just because they're tired? Is it tired old?' But if you think about it, you're born into this contract. You're born into this contract; you can't get around. It's just like you're born knowing you're going to die, 100% certain you're going to die. There's also this other contract that certainly is your body ideally worked for about 16 hours, and it needs eight hours to recover. That's the way it works. That's what you're born into. There's small variations there. But obviously, you can't get around that.  If you don't get those 8 hours, you didn't recover from those 16 hours. And so if you think about it logically, obviously, when you're a kid, you need more sleep. So it's not a great example, when you're really young. Kids actually sleep a lot more than eight hours by and large, but you see them actually getting better every day, right? They're growing. They're getting smarter. They're getting more coordinated. You can see that every day. But if you think about, say, like, once you hit 25, and your brain's fully formed, and everything's static. If you could recover 100% every night, and wake up the next morning as good as you were that other morning, you wouldn't age, right? There would be no aging because you would have recovered 100%.  Lisa: It's very important, yep.  Dr Kirk: Everything that you're deficient in, if you're missing 10%, you're going to age that 10%. And if you're missing a little more, you're going to age faster. So when you see people who haven't been sleeping well for a year, they are literally older because they've been recovering less and less every night. So yeah, there's a breakdown in their protein structure. There's decrease in their blood supply, their peripheral vascularisation. Their tissues are aging. There's a buildup of waste products that aren't getting out, and that's toxic. And that's damaging the mitochondria and forming more senescent cells, and all these other things, they're building up. And every marker that we have, even genetic marker, when you look at your children and linked methylation on the genes. Every marker, they look older. And then when you look at them, they look older. That's why.  That's really what aging is. It's really just the absence of being able to recover 100% every night. And as we get older, we just don't repair as fast. And that's, unfortunately, when most people quit sleeping as much. And now that's double whammy there. You're getting twice the aging effects that way. And there's no reason to sleep less when you're old. It's typical, but it's not something you have to do. I've had 84-year-old women who haven't slept more than 4 or 5 hours in 20 years, and I get them to sleep eight hours a night.  Lisa: I've got one over there who's rustling around, walking around behind me. She's 80 years old, nearly. Hey, mum. And she's struggling with sleep in the early morning hours. And therefore, you know her memory and things. So I want to pick your brain on that. Can I just slow you down a little bit because we just covered a ton of ground here. Dr Kirk: You just asked me about myself, and I just couldn't stop. Lisa: No, but you were on an absolute roll. So I didn't want to interrupt you because there was so many things, but my brain's just going like, ‘There's so many questions!'  Dr Kirk: That was just meant to be an overview.  Lisa: That was an overview. Now can we dive deeper into some of the weeds because now I understand why you've become, classically, the sleep expert because obviously that was the biggest leverage. In other words, this is the biggest leverage point that you see. When we think of the SEALs, we think of the SEALs as being these gods of amazingness that can do everything. But what you're saying is like these guys are pushing their limits: endurance, and in fatigue, and all things like that. And so they're going to be the Canaries in the Gold Mines in a way because they're going to be coming up against the limits of everything.  For you to say, as an ultra marathon, so I've come up against the limits in certain ways, like with sleep deprivation. And I sort of understand some of the things now that you were talking about. So you've ended up finding out that this is probably the biggest leverage point in anybody's life, basically, for their health is their sleep. So people, take a bit of a grip on that one. It's not necessarily the food or nutrition, it's the sleep. Would you agree? Dr Kirk: When I first started lecturing, I used to say there were four pillars of health: sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then the fourth pillar is audience dependent. It could be mindfulness, stress medication, it could be community, whatever it is that controls your stress hormones, and your emotions, and your mood, and all that stuff. Then after a while, I shift to there's three pillars sitting on the foundation of sleep. Because if you take the sleep away, none of those are going to work. There's nothing you can do. In fact, if you exercise when you're sleep deprived, it's counterproductive because you're not recovering. And we all know that you don't actually get better when you exercise. You damage yourself when you exercise. Then when you sleep, you recover, and you come back stronger. When you deprive yourself of sleep, you change your entire gut biome, you change your insulin sensitivity. You change everything here. And now your nutritional status doesn't work anymore. And when you don't sleep well, as I said, you increase your stress hormones. So you can do the mindfulness training and all of that stuff, meditate and all that, but you're just going to bring yourself down maybe to where you would have been if you just slept well and didn't do any kind of training.  It's really the foundation for everything. And I say that all the time. It sounds hyperbolic, but I'm 100% convinced it's true. There's nothing that you can do that will, nothing that will break you faster than poor sleep, and poor and insufficient sleep. There's a reason we use it as an interrogation technique.  Lisa: Exactly. Yeah.  Dr Kirk: There's a reason we break people down, intentionally, this way because it depletes all your resources. It interferes with your brain function, your willpower, your problem solving, your speech, your ability to formulate plans, your motivation, your mood. Everything goes almost instantaneously with one night of lack of asleep. Never mind keeping somebody up for three or four days in a row. They're just a mess. They're just in input mode. They just want you to just, ‘Tell me whatever I have to do. I'd do it. Then I'll sleep. Anything I can do to get sleep, I'll do it.' You don't have to rip people's fingernails out of stuff. You just deprive them from sleep.  Conversely, there's nothing that will improve the quality of your life and your performance faster than sleeping. Well, if you're an inadequate sleeper, which most people are. They don't even know they are. Everybody has these 30-day challenges and 60-day challenges. I'm like, ‘I only need seven days.' Again, one week where sleep is your number one priority. And you do everything right, and you get eight hours of sleep, at least eight and a half hours in bed every night, and you're sleeping approximately eight hours a night. And give me that for a week. And then, if you're not convinced this the most powerful thing, go back to wherever you're going. But nobody's ever gone back.  Lisa: A lot of us, I can hear people saying, ‘Yeah, but I go to bed, and I can't sleep. And I wake up at 2 am. And my brain is racing and I've been told to do some meditation. And maybe it's my cortisol.' Let's look now because if we haven't got the message across now that sleep is the number one thing that you should be prioritising about everything that you do, we haven't done very well for the last half an hour.  How do we sleep? What foods do we need to eat before we go to bed or not eat? What supplements can we take? You've got your sleep remedy that we'll get into a little bit. What routine can I do to optimise? What light-dark cycles? All of these things that can be leveraged points for us in optimising our sleep. And how do we test that we're actually in that deep-sleep phase? What are one of the best tools that you've found to work that out? So that was a mouthful, but yeah. Dr Kirk: So the first thing we need to do is get away from that phonetic question right there, which is what everybody's going through in their heads up like, ‘What about this? What about that?' And so my job is to make this really simple. Because simple things we can do, and the more nuanced your plan is around sleep, the more likely it is to fail. And we're doing big, macro movements here. So the very first thing is, what you said, I think we've already covered. The very first thing is to convince yourself that sleep is the most important thing. And to make it your priority for at least one week to get everything going.  Now, when I say your priority, I mean the true meaning of that word. There's only one thing there's nothing else, that's the one, including raising your kids, and your dog, and your exercise routine, and everything else. The most important thing is to sleep. The most important thing for winning. If you aren't quite convinced yet go to PubMed, or go to Google Scholar, or something like this, then put in sleep and anything else you care about: being a parent, mood, dating, sex drive, athleticism, strength, endurance, concentration, memory, I don't care. Whatever it is you care about—strength and this, strength and business, strength and I don't care. Anything you want.  Read to your heart's content. It will convince you that the one good thing about sleep, in the sleep sciences, it's not actually controversial. There's no one out there saying, ‘Oh, you don't really need to sleep.' Everybody agrees. There's nuances and people are different. Everybody agrees you need about eight hours of sleep a night. And just convince yourself that is the most important thing. Once you're there, that's the most important thing.  After that, recognise, ‘Okay. I'm going to make this my number one priority.' Recognise that you're born to sleep. You don't need to learn; you need to unlearn some stuff, right? You're designed to do this. And this should feel good. You should enjoy sleeping. You should usually look forward to going to bed and waking up in the morning, like, ‘Man, I feel so much better. I'm ready to go do my day.' This should be as easy as selling sex but it's not. People resist this forever. I have no idea why. It's great. Why don't you like sleep? I've always liked sleep. So then you just think, ‘Okay, when did sleep go bad for humankind?' Probably in the last seventy years.  Lisa: Yeah, when we got electric light.  Dr Kirk: That's about it, right? It's only been, really since rural electrification, right? Since they got electricity out to everybody. That's really when it started. When you look back in America just 100 years ago, look at people's journals in the winter, they spent like 14 hours a day in bed. That's a certain thing they do. So if you think about it, and just say, ‘I know this is simple. I'm going to let myself fall into it.' And then I'll tell you, there's all the sleep hygiene. You can get on the Internet, and you can find, ‘Oh, do this. Drink a hot cup of tea. Drink milk. Do this. Make your room really cold. Make your room really dark. Make your bed really soft. Make your bed really hard. And get a white noise machine. Get rid of all the EMF.' A million people are going to tell you all sorts of different things to do. And I'll cut through all the BS, and then you can pick and choose. The real answer is all of that stuff works, to some extent. All of that's important to some extent. The way I work with clients is at least 95% of all the successes is from lifestyle. And then all these little gadgets, and your mitigation tools, and supplements, and all this stuff back, that's the other 5. It's 95% behavioural. So you just look back, how did we evolve to sleep? Nobody teaches people how to sleep, right? You're born as a baby; you sleep. So how did we sleep as adults in cultures 100 years ago? Well, when the sun went down, we fell asleep about three hours later, and we woke up around the time the sun came up. It was pretty much that easy.  Okay, so let's reverse engineer that a little bit. I think most people know that blue light is a stimulus for being awake. We don't truly have a sleeping program. If you think of it like software, we don't have any sleeping software. We just have lack of awakening software. So we have things that go on in our brain and body that make us still awake and make us interact with our environment. And then when you take those things away, we're in what we call sleep. The blue light, actually, has nothing to do with the vision. There's nerve cells in the back of your eyes. It senses blue light. That's all they do. And then they fire pathways back to the circadian pathway membrane, essentially. And then the pineal gland secretes melatonin. The melatonin is a hormone, the starter pistol. It initiates all these cascades. And then one of the cascades that it initiates is the production of this peptide called GABA, capital G-A-B-A, gamma-Aminobutyric acid. And what that does is it slows down the neocortex.  When you think of the human brain, the picture of the human brain, we all have that big, wrinkly, massive crescent shape. That's what we call the neocortex. And that is how we interact with the world, right? All of our senses get processed in that, and then all of our movement is processed from that, right? So when we're asleep, all that's really different with our sleep, about in a general sense, right? There's nuances in every neuron and every molecule. And then, in the neural sense, there's a barrier between us and our environment is how it's phrased. What it means is we aren't paying attention to our environment anymore. Our eyes obviously still work, right? You can turn the light and you can wake somebody up. Our ears still work, you can make your noise and wake somebody up. Our sense of touch still works. You can shake somebody. They can roll into something sharp, and their pain receptors will wake them up. Heat will wake them up. Cold will wake them. So we still work. Everything still works. We start processing it. We're not paying attention to it.  What helps us do that is GABA. So GABA involves neurons. A neuron has what's called a resting potential. So there's like an electrical current in here. And when you put in enough electrical current, it goes like this. And that neuron fires. And then, does whatever it does and forms pathways. Well, GABA lowers that. Now, it takes more energy to make that thing fire. And you can overcome this by just putting a lot of energy into the cells. So if you've ever been exhausted, woken up exhausted, didn't get enough sleep for whatever reason. Like, ‘I'm going to go to work. I'm gonna come home. I'm going straight to bed. I'm gonna sleep 12 hours a day.' And then your friends talk you into going out or you get a cup of a drink. You stay up ‘til midnight, ‘I feel fine.' And then you suffer again the next day, right? Because you just overcame that.  You can actually read about this because this still exists, believe it or not, they're still I think 35 or 45 pretty large communities around the globe that have never experienced electricity. And they just lived like hunters and gatherers. They go out. And the men go out and hunt. And the women pick, and nurture their kids, and weave. And just when you think of your caveman doing, they still live like that today. And we study these people. And we did actigraphy. So it's not true sleep, say. It's just movement to know when they're likely to be asleep. And what we find is, the sun goes down. Again, the blue light goes out of their eyes. It fires, the brain starts secreting melatonin that leads to a cascade of 365 billion other chemical changes in the brain, right? But that initiation has to happen. Once that initiation is going, one of the things it does is secrete GABA, increase GABA production in lots of regions of the brain that starts slowing the brain down.  The sun goes down. They don't have electricity, right? The best they have is a fire. So what else happens? Their body temperature goes down. So when the sun goes down and it is dark, we can't see well at night, we can't see very far. So there's way less stimulus, right? They don't have flashing lights. They don't have loud music. So there's not much to stimulate them. So they sit around a fire. Maybe if they're lucky, if not, they just stare around the dark, and they have some quiet, calm conversations, and then they drift off to sleep.  That's all sleep hygiene is. That's it. Those three things: decrease the blue light, decrease the stimulation to your brain, and drop your body temperature. You need a cool place to sleep. One of the things that you can do to speed these things up is to concentrate the right nutrients in your brain. If you are going to take melatonin and just take a very, very, very, very small amount. You just want to initiate. You don't want to put so much melatonin in your brain that your brain doesn't need to make melatonin because then you start running insensitivity to melatonin, and now when you take it away, you don't have, you're essentially melatonin deficient because you've downregulated the receptors, and your brain is not sensitive to melatonin anymore. Lisa: Can I just stop in the first, one second. Dr John Lieurance is his name and he was on the Ben Greenfield podcast, and he's written a book about melatonin. And he argued that melatonin, interesting work, doesn't downregulate when you take melatonin, and doesn't cause that downregulation. All the other hormones do. If we take testosterone, we're going to downregulate our own testosterone, if we take right whatever. He said that they didn't. And he was advocating in his book for actually, super-physiological doses of melatonin. Certainly when you're doing things like jetlag, or whatever you're trying to reset, but also for a raft of other ailments to help with many diseases. Have you heard of his work or? Dr Kirk: I'm familiar with him and his work.  Lisa: Yeah. What's your take on that? Because I was like, ‘I don't know.' Dr Kirk: So, I disagree, obviously.  Lisa: Yeah. That's what I want to know. Dr Kirk: But specifically, so what he's talking about, 90% of his work is about the antioxidant. Lisa: Yes. Is it an antioxidant? Yep.  Dr Kirk: The studies that he's quoting are saying that melatonin doesn't downregulate. We don't know for sure. It's like, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The only way we would know is if we could actually drop a catheter into somebody's brain and sample their fluid in their brain 24 hours a day and study this over months. And so we can't say for sure. We can do animal models. Again, it's hard to quantify because from the time the sun goes down, which is about three hours before you'll fall asleep, to the entire time you slept, until the sun comes up, you're looking at somewhere between 11 and 12 hours. That entire time your brain will only produce five to six micrograms of melatonin.  Lisa: Tiny amount. Dr Kirk: So how do we study, right? It's really hard to study, and you think of it in a mouse model, how much smaller the quantities are we're looking at that point. And the concentration of melatonin in each region of the brain is not the same, it depends on some cells in the brain can actually be stimulated by melatonin. It's somewhere. It's different. And same with GABA. GABA doesn't go to every region of the brain because it can stimulate regions of the brain. But what we do know, so first, I always go with, we don't know anything. We have research that makes us believe certain things are likely to be true based on the best science we have right now. So we don't know anything. And I believe that to be true about everything in science. Just wait a week, it might change. But what we do know is that every other hormone does this.  Lisa: Yes.  Dr Kirk: But if it doesn't do this, it's the only hormone in the body that doesn't. Pretty unlikely. But what we do know with 100% certainty is that it does downregulate melatonin receptors. Lisa: Right. Dr Kirk: It can take away melatonin receptors. If I normally have 10 melatonin receptors, and I go down to just having one, now even if I'm sprayed with melatonin, I only have one. And I have to have this supersaturation for this one receptor to do all this work. And if I go down to normal physiologic levels of melatonin and this one receptor, there's just getting an occasional melatonin coming by, I'm going to be, it's no different. It doesn't matter whether I'm not producing enough, or I don't have enough receptors, it's the same end result. You have to have melatonin binders stuffing pulled into the cell to have it function. Lisa: So can I ask one question there like, so for elderly, who, from what I understand, in my basic research on melatonin, is that their melatonin production goes down with age, and, therefore, they could benefit from melatonin supplementation. Is that a thing or? Dr Kirk: Yeah, I agree. And so what happens is that the pineal gland calcifies just like our arteries. And every vessel, everything in our body calcifies, right. That's sort of aging. Lisa: One of the majors.  Dr Kirk: And so it calcifies, and you do almost certainly secrete less melatonin, right? And again, the only way we would know is to drop a catheter into somebody's brain. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't take melatonin at all. I'm just saying you shouldn't take super physiologic. So his example of when you're speaking about the melatonin work earlier, right? His example is, well, this is a great antioxidant. Now, if I do these super physiologic amounts, there's all these benefits to it. Well, if I give you 10 times the amount of testosterone that your body ordinarily has, you're gonna feel fantastic. If I give you something that secretes a bunch of epinephrine and norepinephrine, like cocaine. And you have this huge rush of norepinephrine; you feel fantastic. And you're super productive, and your brain's really sharp. Does that make that a good idea? I don't think so. I don't deal with anything super physiologic.  Again, I'm the behaviourist, and 95% of all your health is going to come from re-approximating the way you revolt. This body takes hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to this planet. And now we're just like, ‘No, we're smarter. Like I'm a 35-year-old biohacker. I read a bunch of books. I know I can do it better than–” We know nothing about the body. Lisa: Can we all mean for people–we also know that people tend to die. If we wanted to extend our healthspan and their lifespan, but healthspan mainly, can we, with hormone replacement therapy, there's a raging argument: should you be on hormone replacement therapy, should you not? If you're wanting to optimise. Now, there's downsides. And you need to understand your genetics, and you need to understand all of those aspects.  There is benefits for us to taking testosterone or DHEA or all these things in the right physiological doses of, say, a 30-year-old, like, I'm 50 or 52, I want to be at the level that I was, say at 30–35. I understand my genetics, I know where my risk factors are. I can keep an eye on all of that sort of stuff. Can I all meet that so that I live and function longer? Because I think the core question here is how do we optimise? Yes, we've developed like cavemen but then they die at 70–80, as well. Can we extend that with the knowledge that we currently have? Dr Kirk: Well, so I don't ever promise anybody that I can make them live longer. I say, ‘You might live longer from this.' If you think about it, think about it this way: at first, we talk about what sleep does, right? And if we could catch up every night, we wouldn't age. So what are we doing when we're doing things like hormone-replacement therapy? We're doing metabolomics. And we're doing all sorts of supplementation around that, or we're doing artificial things like hyperbaric, and near-far IR sauna, and ice baths, and doing all these steps to stimulate the production of the thing.  Of course, now we have antibiotics, and we have all sorts of treatments to keep people from dying as young from certain diseases. So certainly, we should be able to either, probably add years to your life. But if not, definitely we can add life to your years, right? If you're going to die at 80 either way, one version of this, you could die hiking Mount Kilimanjaro, another one you're dying in a little chair in a nursing home. So I don't know.  The question is, even with the longevity work that people are doing, really smart guys like Sinclair and all these guys are doing all these things, and they're doing all these things with clearing senescent cells, we're doing all these things with peptides. And now I give my patients peptides for certain things. I don't know nearly as much about the longevity stuff as I'd like to. And we and we're reversing aging genetically, right? We're going in there and saying, ‘Actually, over the course of a year, with a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of tries, a lot of modalities, really focusing on your lifestyle and doing everything. Ideally, we can actually, probably, reverse your genetic age a little bit.' Are we actually reversing age? I don't know, we made your telomeres longer. The increased the methylation on your genes, and those are markers for age, does that reverse it? We don't really know, right?  Lisa: We haven't been around long enough to work it out.  Dr Kirk: Right. It's like with omega-3s. If your omega-3s are this, then we know that certain things go this way. Well, but if we supplement your omega-3s, is that the same as you having that nutritionally. Or vitamin B3? Is that the same? We don't know. We're thinking that it probably is. And we're thinking if we're reversing the markers we know for genetic aging that's making you genetically younger. But maybe there's some totally different information in there on aging that we don't know anything about yet. That's possible, too.  I think from what I know about you, you probably agree with me. I think epigenetics is more important than genetics, anyway. You have certain genetics and you change half a dozen things about your day, and your epigenetics are totally different. If you short yourself 2 hours of sleep, you change 735 different epigenetic markers from just 2 hours. All your pro-inflammatory ones are the ones turning on, and all of your anabolic ones are the ones turning off. And again–  Lisa: That's still the biggest leverage point, isn't it?  Dr Kirk: It's still a crazy complex to think that you can decipher what 735 changes in epigenetics mean. We have some ideas of what certain things, how does all that work in synchronicity, but even though we're the smartest animal on this planet, we still have a very feeble mind. Lisa: We're still dumb.  Dr Kirk: When it comes to understanding the complexity of our bodies, we can't understand the complexity of the planet, much less our bodies. And life is just this amazingly complex thing. We don't have systems in our body. We divide the body up in systems as a way to learn it so that we can systematically learn and we can test about the learning, but the body doesn't work in systems. Lisa: I have such an issue with it, too. It's nothing like the way that the medical model breaks us all down. Dr Kirk: The reductionist model doesn't work for life. And if you think about it, most of biology is purely descriptive. All of it is, we've come up with better and better ways to test things and look at things, and then we can describe what's going on. We don't know how to manipulate it most of the time. If we do, it's really clumsy. And it's causing 500 other changes because we wanted to flip this one switch this way. Then what are the downstream effects? We don't know. We'll find out in like 30 years after 100,000 people go through this. It's really clumsy.  I don't know if can I make somebody live longer. I'd never make that claim. But can I make people look, feel, and perform better? Absolutely. I can do it all the time. And me, personally, like you're saying, I just approximate use. Their arguments, there are people out there saying, ‘Well, these hormones will cause this or that.' I'm like, ‘Okay. If high estrogen levels cause breast cancer, why don't young women get breast cancer? Older women, they're the ones who are getting breast cancer, why?' That thing with men and prostate cancer, giving them testosterone is gonna cause prostate. No, it's not. If that were true, then a 20-year-old would have prostate cancer, and a 60-year-old wouldn't, right? It's a lack of this. And I think breast cancer is a lot like prostate cancer. What we know with prosta

In this episode Greg discusses his motivation for writing his new book “WARRIOR” and explains the theology of the warrior archetype. Greg's book is now available on Amazon and in bookstores around the country. A special thank you to Col. Dave Grossman and Commander Mark Divine for their contributions to the book and the entire team at Eagle Rise Publishing for their support.    Enjoy the show!    Support this Ministry: https://www.patreon.com/gregamundson    Connect with Greg on Instagram: @GregoryAmundson    E-mail Greg: Greg@GregoryAmundson.com

Imagine yourself standing smack in the middle of a busy city. You'd get dizzy just by looking at how fast people go about their daily lives. Everyone is so hyperactive and absorbed in getting things done. Amid all the chaos, we forget to take a pause, be still and breathe.  Remember, we can only evolve into our best selves if we take a moment and be present. And no one knows this more than the ultimate warrior, Mark Divine. He joins us in this episode to share his experiences in the military and how meditation helped him develop inner strength. Mark also teaches us how to use positive internal dialogue in visualising and attracting victory.  If you want to know more about the benefits of meditation through the experience of an ultimate warrior, then this episode is for you.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/. You can also join their free live webinar on epigenetics.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity, or want to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:  Find out Mark's experience with meditation and how this made him into an ultimate warrior. Discover how a positive internal dialogue can train your brain to be focused. Know about recapitulation and how it can help in dealing with traumas.   Episode Highlights [05:34] Mark's Background Mark's experiences with his father forged his mental toughness and resilience. This laid the foundation for him to be an ultimate warrior. He grew up boating, hiking, and running trails through the mountains. Athletics was his escape, but he wasn't able to think about his future.  When Mark left college, he was fortunate enough to get a job in a big accounting firm; this allowed him to go to a top business school.  Despite school and work, Mark was determined to continue his athletic career. He then became interested in Seido karate. Meditation made him realise that he wasn't following his true path.  [15:13] Becoming an Ultimate Warrior Mark came across a Navy recruitment centre, saw their poster, and applied to be a SEAL. Mark graduated with his entire boat crew. He was number 1 in his class.   Mark credits this achievement to meditation training and the team building activities that compelled you to tame your ego. [19:59] The Importance of Meditation and Yoga Mark meditated and trained in yoga every day in the war zone. He felt stronger and more confident.  Yoga is the oldest science of mental and personal development.  Mark learned that training one's physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual aspects mean you can access more of yourself and your potential. Yoga, in a sense, is integration; it is coming back to who we are and being whole.  Listen to the full episode to learn how Mark got into yoga and how this contributed to him becoming an ultimate warrior. [26:33] The Importance of Emotional Strength In SEAL training, most of those who quit were physically strong but lacked the emotional strength to handle extreme moments of crisis and doubt. The person subconsciously created the injury to quit.  Mark tried to be flexible and didn't let anything bother him during SEAL training.  Mark trains SEALs by teaching the Big Four: box breathing, positive internal dialogue, visualisation, and micro-goals.  [35:19] Examining Your Internal Dialogue Meditation is a critical part of examining one's internal dialogue.  How you talk to yourself has an incredible impact on your energy and motivation.  The term 'feeding the fear wolf' means to allow negative dialogue, imagery, and emotions to control and weaken you.  Positive thoughts, or ‘feeding the courage wolf', creates a higher vibration, bringing in more energy and access to creativity.  Controlling your breathing and adding a positive mantra can be very transformative; it helps you develop concentration and increase productivity.  [41:33] Imagining Victory Our belief systems are made out of statements that may or may not be true.  Pay attention to your thoughts and make them positive. Know that you are competent.  Although you may not feel it yet, continue meditating to get rid of that negative side.   When you understand your capabilities, you can project them into the future and have an image of your success.  When positive thoughts overcome negative ones, you can see your true self more clearly, and powerful thoughts start to spread.  [46:10] The Zen Process Meditation is challenging, especially for active people. We have to disconnect from various distractions and be still.  You can't evolve if you are constantly active; the only way to go inward is to slow down and be quiet.  The first step in meditation practice is box breathing. It releases stress and brings brain-body balance.  In the second step, the box pattern turns into concentration practice. The mantra is also added to train concentration and attention.  The third step allows you to put less energy into concentration and observe yourself from a witness perspective.  [53:00] The Importance of Doing Emotional Work Doing emotional work is the foundation of meditation.  Without this, you don't get the full benefits of meditation. Meditation requires patience.  The process is different for everyone.  [55:44] Going into the Witness Perspective In this part of the process, you empty your mind and allow any thought streams to come in. You experience a metacognitive split here.  You see the thoughts that come up from a perspective that's separate from them.  Through this, you realise you're not your thoughts and emotions. And so, you have the power to change your story. When you visualise from the witness perspective, you see what your spirit wants you to see. You realise your true purpose.  If you do this every day, you attract the future that's right for you, and you feel connected to the world. Through this, you eventually gain enlightenment. [01:02:43] How Meditation Can Help Athletes Meditation supports total health. Through it, you'll become more healthy, strong, and motivated. Awakened athletes and warriors who serve the world can change it. Athletes can do so because they are emotionally balanced. [01:05:25] What Is Recapitulation? Recapitulation is where we use imagery to go back into our past, relive traumatic events, recontextualise them, and forgive.  It is to see yourself forgiving your younger self and changing the image and energy associated with your traumas.  Awareness and identification of traumatic events is the first step to the recapitulation.  Recapitulation can be used to go back and overcome big traumas and to make sure you are not dragging past regrets.  Recapitulation then becomes a daily practice of letting go of regrets and resentments. Listen to the full episode and hear some examples of this!  [01:18:28] How to Be a Good Leader Show up as the best version of yourself. Be humble, authentic, trustworthy, courageous, and respectful.  It takes time to develop those qualities and work on them with your team.  Listen to the full episode to know how Mark does leadership training in his programs!   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-aging and longevity with NMN Bio.  Listen to other Pushing the Limits episodes: #183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #189: Understanding Autophagy and Increasing Your Longevity with Dr Elena Seranova #199: Episode with Dr Don Wood Connect with Mark: Website | Instagram  The Unbeatable Mind Podcast with Mark Divine Bedros Keulian on Learning How to “Man Up” How to Deal with Trauma with Dr Don Wood Check out these books by Mark Divine!  Staring Down the Wolf  Unbeatable Mind  8 Weeks to SEALFIT The Way of the SEAL  KOKORO Yoga Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda 2021 Unbeatable Challenge   7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode ‘It was about physical, it was about mental, it was about emotional, it was about intuitional and spiritual aspects of our being. In that, I learned that if you train those together, then you will integrate, you'll become whole again.' ‘Human beings have not learned to be whole, and they don't recognise that we're all interconnected. And every one of our thoughts, every one of our emotions, every one of our actions has an implication or impact on the whole.' ‘How you talk to yourself has an incredible impact on your energy and your motivation. Literally, we use the terminology “feeding the courage wolf” versus “feeding the fear wolf.' ‘Understanding your capability as a human being, the potential that you have, the power that we have, you can then project that into the future and say, “What does victory look like for me?”' ‘I think that there's two reasons we're on this planet. One is to evolve to become the best version, highest and best version of yourself in this lifetime. The second is to align with our calling or our purpose.' ‘Ultimately, we create our own reality. It's all basically, it's all experienced with [the] mind. So that's powerful.' ‘You can do anything, one at a time.'   About Mark Mark Divine grew up in Upstate New York. He has a degree in economics from Colgate University and an MBA from NYU. He is a New York Times best-selling author, leadership expert, entrepreneur, motivational speaker.  Mark is also a retired U.S. Navy SEAL Commander. He spent nine years on active duty and 11 as a Reserve. With 20 years in service, he served in over 45 countries. During his time in the military, Mark created a nationwide mentoring program for SEAL trainees. Because of his success, he decided to start SEALFIT. This fitness company aims to prepare civilians for the physical and emotional demands of a SEAL-like lifestyle.  Mark knows the value of emotional strength in transforming lives. With this in mind, he published Unbeatable Mind in 2011, which includes an at-home study program. Mark also has several other entrepreneurial endeavours and books in his name. He's also the host of the Unbeatable Mind podcast. With all these ventures, Mark's ultimate aim is to create more resources to improve the lives of everyone he meets.  If you want to know more about Mark and his work, check out his website and Instagram.     Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can be motivated to be their real selves through meditation. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential. With your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com. Lisa Tamati: Well, hey everyone, Lisa Tamati here. Fantastic to have you back at Pushing the Limits this week. Now I have a wonderful man who I've followed for a number of years. He's one of my heroes, I was a little bit of a fangirl in this interview I have to admit. But it was pretty crazy. I have Commander Mark Divine on the show. Mark is an ex-Navy SEAL. He was a Commander in the Navy Seal. He was there for 20 years, and he was a fantastic leader. He was deployed in over 45 countries around the world. He also trains, trains a lot of the SEALs who are going into BUD/S training. He was number one on his course when he went through BUD/S, and that's saying something. That's nine months of hell on earth, so if you get through that, you've got to be pretty cool, and to be number one in the end of the whole 190 that went on, that's pretty amazing.  He's the author of a number of books: Staring Down the Wolf, Unbeatable Mind, and SEALFIT, and runs a number of multi-million dollar companies. As a leadership consultant, he trains, not only does he train the military, he helps people prepare for SEAL training. He also now runs through his innovative SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind training systems. Kokoro crucible is one of his programs. He shares the same secrets with entrepreneurs, executives, and teams through his book and through his book, and through his speaking, and through his award-winning podcast. He has his own, and I have the privilege of being on that one shortly. He runs world-renowned leadership and team events. Wonderful man to talk to, someone that I really, really look up to and respect. His discipline that he brings to everything that he does is quite amazing. So I hope you enjoy the show. Before we go, I just want to remind you to check out our epigenetics program, if you haven't already. Head over to lisatamati.com and hit the work with us button, and find out about our Peak Epigenetics program. This is all about understanding your genetics, and how to optimise them for your best performance. So everything from food, to exercise, what types of exercise to do, what times of the day you should be training, what times of the day you should be eating, and how often. What type of diet is right for you, right down to the nitty gritty. You know, eat almonds, don't eat cashew nuts, right specific to your genetics, so to speak. It also looks at your whole mood and behavior, what makes you tick, why do you think the way you do, what areas you may have problems with, your predispositions.  That's not to be all deterministic, and negative, that's all to be like this is what you're dealing with, and this is how we can hit things off at the pass. This is a really life-changing program, and we're really proud to bring it to you. We've been doing it for a number of years now. We've taken hundreds of people through this program, and we work with corporate teams. So if you're out there and you have a corporate team that might be interested in doing either this or our boost camp program, which is all about upgrading and learning all about how to manage stress, how to reduce the effects of stress, and be more resilient and bring a higher performance to your game, then please reach out to us. Go over to lisatamati.com. and check out all the programs that we have here.  Just a reminder too, I have a new book out called Relentless: How a Mother and Daughter Defied the Odds. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you would hear me harp on about my amazing mum and the journey that we've been on back from a massive aneurysm that left her at the age of 74 with hardly any higher function, and a prognosis that said she would never ever do anything again. And they were very, very wrong. So I want to share this book, I want to share the story, because it's a very empowering story. So if you haven't read the book Relentless, I really encourage you to go and do that. I'm really keen to get this out there because this will empower and change lives, and already has, so make sure you read Relentless. Right, over to the show with Commander Mark Divine. Hi everyone, Lisa Tamati here. I'm super, super excited. I'm jumping out of my skin, I can't sit still. I have one of my great heroes that I've followed for such a long time, so I'm a little bit, being a bit of a fangirl right now. But I'm sure I'll calm down in a minute or two. Commander Mark Divine is with us. He has such a huge history. You are known, really, as the warrior man, Unbeatable Mind, SEALFIT. You've done a heck of a lot in your life. Mark, it's just, I can't wait to share some of your insights, because what you do and what you've done is just absolutely amazing. So, welcome to Pushing the Limits. Can you give us a little bit of background, Mark, on where you come from and what you've done and how you've, just to give us a little bit of, because you, obviously you've been in the SEALs, you're a commander in the SEALs, you're a trained SEAL. So let's start there. Let you come to it. Mark Divine: Oh, my God, where to start? Lisa: Maybe childhood. Mark: I was born at a very young age in a very small town in upstate New York, a province of the United States. I'll try to keep this short because sometimes I have a few run-on sentences. Go like 40 minutes, right? We don't want that to happen. That's when we have a good time. So yeah, I was a pretty normal kid growing up, running around the woods of upstate New York, crazy family, lots of alcohol and anger. The belt would come out pretty much every other night. My brother and I would literally just provoke my father just to do it, because we stopped taking him seriously after a while. In that regard, I feel pretty fortunate that my young spirit was like, ‘You can't break me'. I realise now that we all choose our parents, let's just say, from a spiritual perspective, I certainly believe that. For certain experiences, and for a while I played the victim, woe is me.  But now I look back and thank God, that really forged my mental toughness and resiliency. I had to unpack some crap from that, obviously, but it made me a Navy SEAL warrior, right? When I went through Navy SEAL training, you could not hurt me, because nothing was compared to my dad. Anyway, so that's a little aside. Upstate New York had a really— it's beautiful. I've been to your country in New Zealand. It's just absolutely gorgeous. I feel the same way about America in certain places, the much bigger. New York is one of those areas that, 6 million acres of unfettered, protected land in northern New York called the Adirondack Mountains, and that was my playground. And our summer home was on the west shore of a lake called Lake Placid where the Olympics were, you're probably familiar with that.  Lisa: Yeah.  Mark: There was no road access to my house. There was no TV, no internet. Still, there's finally internet after but no TV, and we would have to take a boat to get there. And so I grew up with boats and I grew up hiking in the Adirondacks and a lot of time alone in the wilderness, which is one of the reasons I became kind of an endurance athlete. I know you're an endurance lady. Because I was comfortable, being alone. I was comfortable running the trails in the mountains, and I used to have a friend, we would run up Whiteface Mountain, which is at the base or the foot of Lake Placid. Not a huge mountain, it's 4,000 feet, but you know it took a couple hours. If you're going to hike up there it takes a few hours. For us to run up there, took us 45 minutes. People used to think we were crazy. When we got to the top we would wrap our ankles and our knees and we would play tag on the way down. The trails are steep and just rocks and ruts and roots. It's amazing we didn't kill ourselves.  So that was my like early childhood upbringing, nature being in the woods and in the water were my solace away from the family dynamics. That led me to be a competitive athlete in high school, 12 varsity letters and then into college, I was recruited for swimming and I became a competitive rower. And then I started triathlon. So, I was an athlete, but the athletics really was my escape and kind of my grounding rod, like it is for so many athletes, right? When I— then I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I didn't really spend a lot of time in my youth thinking about my future, I kind of accepted a lot of the stories for my family that I was going to go back and be part of the family business. That business was really the place that Divines go, you know, we don't go into the military, we don't go into academia, we don't do those things. So anyways, it's as your listeners are hearing this, they're probably like, ‘Yep, check.' Lisa: They may have done that. Mark: That's the norm, right? That's not, I wasn't off, but it's certainly not what I teach today, right? Because, right, I think if we're— if we don't follow our passion and find our calling in life, then we're going to have discomfort later on, and discomfort is going to lead to existential crisis. So I was very fortunate, incredibly fortunate that when I left college, I got a job with a big accounting firm, consulting accounting firm called Coopers and Lybrand, which became accountant, became— Lisa: You were an accountant. I mean, that makes me laugh, really. Mark: I was an accountant. Lisa: I was on the way to being an accountant too. So because of what my dad wanted, and I'm about as far from an accountant, as you can get, you know.  Mark: I was too. Lisa: That's a good story. Mark: But I stuck with it long enough to become a certified public accountant, I had to pass the exam.  Lisa: I didn't. Mark: I got my— I tell you what, I would rather go back to BUD/S Navy SEAL training than try that darn exam again. That told me something right there. But you know, it is a great opportunity. Because here I am, you know, I got a degree from a pretty good university called Colgate. But I didn't really have any skills. And so this job opportunity gave me and sent me to a top business school in the United States called NYU, New York University. So I got my MBA in finance, and I became a certified public accountant for four years. I got to work on a lot of different companies as a consultant and auditor. So I saw a lot. But, so that was kind of formative, in a sense, like, I learned a lot. What was probably more formative, or more substantial for me was, once I got into that suit and tie, and I was working eight hours a day, mind you, they allowed me to work only 8 or 10 hours a day. Most people in those scenarios work 15 to 20. But because they were sponsoring this small group of us to go to business school at night, they had to let us off, and then we would go to school full-time during the summer, and just come in on Fridays. It was a really cool program. So I was working 8 to 10 hours a day, going to school at night. And it's— I was an athlete, right? And I was like, ‘How am I going to, how am I going to stay as an athlete?' Right? Most people don't. Because you know, in the corporate world, and I was like, ‘I've got to, I've got to continue my athletic career.' And so I would get up really early in the morning and go for a six mile run. And then at lunchtime when all my peers would go have a beer or martini and lunch, I would go to the gym and do like this, what I now know is a high intensity functional workout, which back then nobody talked about. Because I had to go fast, and I was wanting to do a lot of different variety, and I had to be in and out of there in 45 minutes. And then after, they let me go at five o'clock in the afternoon, and my first class wasn't till 7:30. So I'm looking at that saying, ‘Look, I got two and a half hours. I could do some training here.' So one night, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. But one night, I was walking down 23rd Street, I was living on 22nd in Manhattan, and I heard these screams coming out of this building. And I stopped and I looked up and I was standing under the flag of the World Seido Karate Headquarters.  ‘Oh, interesting. Maybe it's a martial art.' And I had been intrigued with the martial arts. But in Upstate New York, that just wasn't much. There's nothing as a matter of fact, in my time, and so I didn't really get a chance to study anything. So I went in there and I was floored. I was stunned by what I saw. It was an incredible art. This was the headquarters of a worldwide art called seido, they had three or 400,000 students. And the Grand Master, the founder was on the center of the floor, this Japanese man, 10th degree black belt, looked like a frickin' tank. And he was, his name was Nakamura, and he became my mentor, my first real mentor. Yeah. Now what's interesting, he says it wasn't really the karate that changed me. It was the zen training. And he is one of the few masters who kept the old ways of training the mind and the body and the spirit, and understood that they all had to be in balance, and they all were part of the package of developing these corrupted, these trainees.  I loved the zen part, and there was a zen class we had every Thursday night for an hour, we would sit on that little wooden zazen bench. And honestly, this studio is the headquarter, had well over a thousand students. There were ten of us in this class, most of them black belts, and I was a white belt, and I was like, ‘Where is everyone else?' I didn't get it. And then there wasn't a lot of understanding or talk about meditation back then. But boy, I did this thing to do meditation. I had all the usual kind of resistance to it, and my monkey mind going all over the place and wondering if it really worked. I trusted Nakamura and the way he acted and presented himself as a character, just who he was, was so different than any other human I've ever seen or experienced. And I was like, ‘There's got to be something to this, right?' So I stuck with it. And it literally changed almost every aspect of who I was and how I saw the world and what I perceived to be my calling and my purpose in life. And it was sitting on that bench that I realised that I was going down the wrong path with this MBA, CPA, working in the corporate world. Even if I went back to the family business, it just wasn't what I was meant to do. That was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to examine my core story that said, this is who I am, and to recognise it was built on a lie. Lisa: Yeah. And you weren't following your true path. Mark: I wasn't following my true path. But my true path wasn't exactly laid out for me, in those meditation sessions. It was more like the archetypal energy in the arc of my life was shown to me and that that art was to be a warrior, and then it would lead somewhere else that wasn't quite clear to me, but the warrior part was very strong. And it didn't— I didn't get messages while I was meditating, saying, ‘You're going to be a Navy SEAL.' What I got was ‘warrior' and, ‘You're going down the wrong path with this business stuff.' It was when I finally started to accept that, that I learned about the Navy SEALs, right. Remember, this is 1987, 88, there was no TV shows and movies, no famous names.  Lisa: They weren't famous back then.  Mark: Nobody knew them. In fact, the few people that did know them were like, crazy guys. So I— one day, I was walking home from work, and I came across a Navy recruiting station. I didn't even know it was that but I saw a poster in the window. I took a double take of this poster. I was like, well, the title of that poster was, ‘Be Someone Special'. And it had Navy SEALs doing really cool shit. Jumping out of airplanes, yeah, blocking out little mini submarines, sneaking through the water. It's just so cool for me. I just sat there kind of transfixed, looking at that, and I didn't say anything about the SEALs. They said, US Navy, and I was, ‘Huh, interesting.' So I went back and I talked to the recruiters so what, ‘Who are those people in that poster?' They said, ‘Oh, they're crazy Navy SEALs. You don't want to do that.' I said, ‘Yeah, I do. Tell me more.' So long story short. I started that whole CPA, MBA bullshit, 1985. In November of 1989, I got my black belt, I got my MBA, I got my CPA and I was on a bus. I was on a bus to Officer Candidate School. Lisa: That was the next mission. Mark: On to the next mission. I wandered away from, I walked away from probably what would today's dollars be $200,000 salary to get paid $500 a month?  Lisa: Wow. That takes— Mark: For heading off as a candidate. Lisa: That takes courage. That alone takes courage. Mark: But I didn't question that. You know, I knew it. I knew this is the right path. And when I got to SEAL training, what we called BUD/S, basic underwater demolition SEAL training. Man, I felt like I was home, and there was no way that they were going to get me to quit. I mean, other people said this, but I said this very clearly: ‘You have to kill me to get me out of here.' And I don't think they can legally do that. Although they sure do try. Lisa: It can get pretty close. Mark: It can get pretty close, yeah. I sailed through SEAL training. We had 185 in my class, hardcore, awesome guys. And 19 of us graduated. I graduated number one in my class and my entire team, my boat crew that we trained together from day one, graduated with me.  Lisa: Wow.  Mark: So there's something about that meditation training, Nakamura and the skills, and the values on team building and taking my eyes off myself and putting them on others, the taming of the ego, it really allowed me to help lead my team to success, right? We made it about the team and not about me, and everyone else was about them. And they— the team's, the instructors are, their job is to select the next crop of teammates that they will go to war with.  Lisa: Yeah.  Mark: So what they're looking for is not who's the toughest guy, not who's the best athlete—  Lisa: Not the coolest, yeah.  Mark: Yeah, exactly, not the best looking whatever. It's, ‘Are you a great teammate? Are you gonna have my back?' So that's something that I guess I demonstrated.  Lisa: Wow, that's a brilliant intro into your background. What fascinates me with you too is that you like— you know, because the SEALs are known for being hard asses. I mean, you know they are hard people, they have been through tough stuff, they go through tough stuff every single day that you're out there. But you've got this meditation side, you do a heck of a lot of yoga. You do, you talk about authenticity, and I know you don't like the word vulnerability, but you're quite, you're open about the stuff. That's quite the opposite of most, in the training that you get. I suppose this comes from Nakamura being your master, that he taught you that very early on, they're sort of the both sides of the coin.  I get that question quite a lot, too. When they— when people read what I've done and achieved and so on, they're like, ‘Wow, you must be a super hard ass.' And then they meet you and realise that you're actually very vulnerable or cry a lot. I'm very full of mistakes and problems and stuff that I'm working on at all times. But the difference is, I think, that you embrace both sides. And that you are always in pursuit of excellence, and you're always improving, and you're always developing. And I found that a really interesting combination in someone who's so physically tough and mentally tough to have had both sides. Was that a hard thing in the beginning with the SEALs? Mark: I think you're right. I did learn that initially from Nakamura and so every day, you know, I was so committed. Every day I would stretch and I would do my breathing practices and my visualisation while I was going through SEAL training. Every day in the SEALs, I do some version of that. It was you know, it's difficult for a military operator to keep a daily dedicated practice going if you're up 24 hours a day, and you're in combat. Honestly, when I went to Iraq and combat, I meditated and trained yoga every single day. And it had a profound effect on me, right? In the war zone, all my teammates are just getting frayed at the edges, and I felt strong and confident, and I knew I was going to survive, because I did, I had that vision. I was going to be home with my child, you know, my wife and son.  So it came first from Nakamura, and then I started into yoga. It's not my career, it's important people know, I did plus-20 years in the Navy SEAL, but about nine years active duty and 11 years reserve. So as reserve, so nine years after I joined, even while I was on active duty, I started to get into yoga. But when I got off active duty I had more time. I went full on in, and that was because— actually it is a blessing in disguise. I was living in San Diego and there was no seido karate out here. Otherwise I would have gotten back into seido karate. So first I got into something called goju karate, I got a black belt there. It was very similar to seido but it lacked the spirit and like the mental, the meditation, so I didn't really stick with that. And then I got into ninjutsu, thinking ninjutsu might be a little bit more spiritual. I really liked the teacher but he was a horrible business guy, so right on the cusp of getting my black belt, he shut his school down and ran out of money.  And then I found yoga kind of about the same time as ninjitsu. But I didn't really understand it until I read Patanjali's yoga sutras and also Paramahansa Yogananda's autobiography yoga. And those just absolutely shattered my paradigm of what was possible and what yoga was, as the oldest science of mental and personal development. So I fully went into yoga and I ended up getting 700 hours of certifications and started my own yoga program and wrote a book about it eventually, but, and started teaching it to SEALs. And so all this I was still a SEAL officer. Because I didn't retire from the SEALs in 2011, but I was able to do all this and build a business that started to teach Navy SEALs everything I would have been learning. And that's called SEALFIT. That was the business that everything I've been learning and applying in my own life, right? And this was this integrated model of development. It started with Nakamura where it wasn't just about the physical. It was about physical, it was about mental, it was about emotional, it was about intuitional and spiritual aspects of our being. In that, I learned that if you train those together, then you will integrate, you'll become whole again. What that means is you'll become more, you have access to more of yourself. You have to put more potential. You can maintain peak performance, you can serve more profoundly, you can do more, you've got way more energy, way more enthusiasm, way more motivation, way more peace of mind, way more clarity.  It's extraordinary. In a sense, it's like coming back to who we are. That's why I call it integration. In fact, the word ‘yoga' means union or integration, and so does is zen, believe it or not. Those practices and traditions are really all about becoming whole as a human again, as opposed to fragments and separate, separate from yourself and separated from others. So I stumbled upon this, and created my own path or my own model. And then when I had started to teach it to SEALs and special operators, and other military operators, a ton of people, even from New Zealand, some of your listeners might have been to my training. Then I started to recognise that, ‘Wow, this is necessary in our culture.' Because most Westerners have no connection to this, this way of living of, taking care of the internal while you are working in the external, the yin and the yang, the balance between being and doing, becoming whole again, so you can do your work from a whole perspective as opposed to a fragmented, separated self. Which leads to suboptimal results, at a minimum, in at least a flat out crisis or destruction at the maximum level. And that's, we're seeing that both in from the investment in violence, military build-up, conflict, as well as environmental degradation is because human beings have not learned to be whole, and they don't recognise that we're all interconnected. And every one of our thoughts, every one of our emotions, every one of our actions has an implication or impact on the whole. Lisa: Yep. This is really good. Because I think, we live our lives very much in the doing. We're busy all day, we're busy with a billion million things, we're running businesses, we're— we've got families and so on. And it's really hard to find that stillness. And I know that even as an athlete who, I think for years, I was just headed through the wall, you know, taking— Mark: Most people are, that's how they learn, until they hit the wall, right?  Lisa: Yeah, no, I hit the wall a couple of dozen times before, because I was a bit thick. I didn't wake up, said, ‘Hang on, this stuff isn't working anymore.' And it works when you're 20. And it works when you're 25. And it works when you're 30. And but when you start hitting your 40s, and you're still smashing the crap out of your body, and you're not really not refilling the tank, and you're not re-examining what the hell are you doing, I think that's when the wheel started, when the wheel started to fall off for me. And I'm like, ‘Hang on a minute, this— why isn't my body doing like, it wasn't what it was supposed to do?' And when you've grown up, though, with that expectation of, you have to be tough, you have to be hard. And I grew up different to you. But I had a dad who was very, he was an awesome father, but he was a hard ass. And he expected you to be tough and mentally tough, physically tough. He didn't really tolerate a lot of weakness or sickness or anything like that. And he was an amazing dad, but he pushed really hard. And that sort of makes you think, well, you have to be hard all the time. And then when you break down, then it's you being weak. Instead of looking at the whole picture, and quieting the mind and doing these things like meditation was for me. Yeah, I know, I hear it's really important, but I can't sit still. I need it twice as much. Mark: Yeah, well, there's a reason for that. It'd be fun to talk about. But think about, when I reflect back, and my SEAL training and all these other guys were trying to be hard, and they had the same thinking, because America has a real soft side to it. But there's a lot of freakin' warriors in America. And we have that same kind of what your dad's talking about. Gotta be hard. Like, there's no room for weakness. It's got to be tough. You think about the metaphor, the guys who quit were just bad asses. Yeah, why did they quit? They quit because they didn't— they lacked the emotional strength to understand what was happening to them in their either most extreme moments of crisis or moments of just doubt, right? And then they're like, so they let uncertainty in, let doubt creep in and corrupt their decision making and then, one mistake leads to an injury we call, quinjury. And you've probably seen this in endurance athletes' is when all of a sudden the injury kind of crops up and then the person's out. And then really, reality is they created that injury to quit.  Lisa: Yeah, because they wanted a way out.  Mark: Because they wanted a way out. It's very subconscious. It's not prepared. It's not preparing properly. It's not recovering properly. It's not understanding that this is a long game and getting your ego out of the way. Lisa: It used to prop up for me every— before any big race, that in the week ahead of that race, I would get sick. And I would, I'm sure that that was my subconscious trying to stop me do it. Mark: Yeah, I've given you an out, right. And so— Lisa: You've got a cold, you've got the flu. Mark: Think about the metaphor between, if you got a tsunami coming, like, consider tsunami a metaphor for a crisis, or a big challenge, like BUD/S or a 50 mile or 100 mile race or something like that. There's a tsunami coming. Would you rather be a mighty oak facing that tsunami, or would you rather be like a reed?  Lisa: A reed, definitely. Mark: Yeah, if so, when I went to SEAL training, I tried to be the reed, right? I tried to be really flexible. I didn't let anything bother me. You know, structures would come up and, during Hell Week for us, which week seven back then. But now it's more like week three or four, seven days non-stop training around the clock, no sleep. Everyone's heard about that. Like a day, Thursday, like the day before, we're over it most of it, we're down to 60, 35, maybe 45 or 50, actually, in our class from 185 already. And instructor evil comes over and he's like, ‘Mark, I don't like you, I'm gonna make you quit.' And in my mind, I was like, ‘Good luck.' And I even think I started— Lisa: That confidence! Mark: I don't know, it was just my spiritual strength saying, ‘No, you're not going to get me to quit, you can't.' And so I actually was challenging him in my mind, and it must come through on my face. And he goes, ‘I'm gonna wipe that smirk right out that effing face.' And he just made me start doing 8-count bodybuilders, which are like a burpee, basically. And I remember in my mind thinking, ‘Okay, all right. Let's do this.' Right? All I got to do is one 8-count bodybuilder at a time, until he gets tired. Lisa: Until he gets tired. Mark: Exactly! So that's what I did. I just did one. I just want, did one 8-count bodybuilder. And then I just did one 8-count bodybuilder. And then I just did one 8-count bodybuilder. And when we got up to like— Lisa: You broke him. Mark: 800.  Lisa: Holy heck.  Mark: Which is nothing, right? I did 24 hours of burpees last, a couple of years ago, as part of our challenge. We did, check this out: we did 22 million burpees as a tribe to raise money for veterans. And part of that was to break a world record where our six-person team, you would love this, three men and three women, we did 36,000 burpees in 24 hours, so I did 7,500 or something like that. So 700 is nothing. Back then I didn't know if it was going to be 700 or 7,000 or 70,000. But he got bored, and he walked away at about 700, and I have to say, that worked. That's a good strategy.  Lisa: What about the burning in the muscles and the exhaustion and the running out of glycogen—  Mark: You can do anything, one at a time.  Lisa: Wow.  Mark: It's just like in a race, I'm sure you get to a point where all you have to do all you are saying to yourself is, ‘Just one more step.'  Lisa: One more step. Yep, absolutely.  Mark: Same thing. We call them micro goals. And so we teach— I started teaching these to SEALs, and the best guys already did this. But now we teach it, the SEALs are teaching what I call the Big Four. And they're teaching box breathing for controlling their stress, they're teaching positive internal dialogue, and mantras. And they're teaching visualisation, visualise every event and visualise what the end state looks like for you and then visualise the mission and whatnot. And then micro goals. Like go to BUD/S thinking about eight months of training, you go to BUD/S thinking about, ‘What do I got to do today to win this?' And then when today gets hard, you just collapse. ‘What do I need to do to win this evolution or event that I'm in?' And then when that gets harder, you know, it's like, ‘What do I got to do to get to the next five minutes?' Anytime you quit, or you have the thought, ‘Well, this sucks. I think I want to quit.' You just say, ‘Well, let me just push through to another— let me just push through another five minutes.' Or, ‘Let me just get to that berm up there,' if it's a run, or Log-Pt could go on forever. ‘Let me just finish this evolution, then I'll make a decision.' And so you just keep kicking the can down the road of the pain and the quit decision and the suffering and eventually the suffering goes away, because that's a temporary state. Lisa: And this is like that you just dropped so much golden inside of two minutes. Take a couple of those because these are things that I've took me 20 years to learn. Mark: Play it back in slow motion. Lisa: You know, like this. That's how that's how I break down. You know, every mess of the like, I remember and my listeners have heard me tell the story. But I ran 2,250 kilometers from New Zealand for charity.  Mark: Wow. Good for you. Holy cow.  Lisa: Yeah, no, it's like, but I've been so busy in the build-up doing— I've been at other races around the world, done Badwater in the States, just come back from that, just launched a book and then I'm standing at the start line. I've been so busy in the thing that I actually hadn't thought about actually running the— because I was just like, ‘Yeah, I got everything, sweet.' And then I'm starting at the start line and I just had a panic attack, like the first real big panic attack. And I'm not, because you're staring down the barrel of this—  Mark: Like, holy shit, this is too high to climb. What the heck have I done? Lisa: What the frick was I thinking? And I went home, we had media, we had all my crew and everybody there and I just went away behind the one of the cars and got my mum, my mummy ‘cuz she's my safe place, went to my mummy and I just bawled my eyes out. And said, ‘Mum I can't do this, I don't know what the frick I was thinking. I can't, and there's no way out.' And mum's just like, ‘Hey,' as she hugged me, as mums do. And she said, ‘You don't need to do 2,250 today. All I want you to focus on is that little box up there,' you know, that was a couple of hundred meters up the road. ‘That's what you got to do right now. And then you're going to, you're going to get through to lunchtime, and then you're gonna have lunch. And then we're going to get through to this and that.'  She just broke it down into pieces, and she took all of that load that I was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is huge,' and she broke it into one step at a time, basically. And that was some of the greatest learnings that I've taken away for every event that I've done when— and there have been times when I've broken and I've just crashed on the ground. I don't know how to get up and people have come along and they've got me up and walked me through the next few steps. Or the next— and that has gotten you over that hump, you know? And I just wait, you know, that's so much gold, right there, what you've just said. I think if we can do that in daily life so when we're faced with some big scary thing coming at us, how do I just get through this moment? And we're very— if you can get through these impulses, you know, like there's 30 seconds, through the 30 seconds almost, sometimes you can get to a place where you can cope again. And then you can sort of get back up. Mark: And this goes back to like the internal dialogue. Most people don't examine their internal dialogue. And this is where meditation is so critical. And you can also consider, like running or swimming or biking, endurance sports generally, are also very good for examining internal dialogue, because you're going to meet resistance. How you talk to yourself has an incredible impact on your energy and your motivation. Literally, we use the terminology ‘feeding the courage wolf' versus ‘feeding the fear wolf'. Feeding fear is allowing negative dialogue and negative imagery and negative emotions to kind of run the rule the roost of your psychology, and that weakens you. Negative thoughts demonstrably weaken you as a human being.  Lisa: Yeah, because—  Mark: They're gonna not just weaken your motivation but literally musculature-wise you get weaker, and that's been proven through kinesiology. So positive thoughts create a higher vibration, which bring more energy, more access to more creativity and motivation. And so you got to train positive thoughts. That's what I mean by feeding the courage wolf. And the more you feed the courage wolf by training positive mantras and positive thoughts, then the more you starve the fear wolf until he goes away, until he just doesn't have the food anymore. And those patterns dry up and blow away. So I created a bunch of positive mantras that I would say in the SEAL training, and they're still with me today.  As soon as I start a hard workout, they kick back in. ‘Feeling good, I'm looking good, ought to be in Hollywood. Feeling good, I'm looking good, ought to be in Hollywood. I can get out of me in Hollywood. I've got this easy day, piece of cake. Boo yeah, hey, got this. Easy day, piece of cake. Boo yeah, hey.' And then I'll synchronise that with my breathing. So, hardcore, run three steps and inhale 1, 2, 3, ‘I've got this. Easy day. Piece of cake.' Exhale 1, 2, 3. Right.  Lisa: And the rhythm is good too, hey. Mark: Yeah, exactly. So I was synchronising those before, the big four. The first skill I said, box breathing, it's really breath control. Running, anything you're doing, always breathing through your nose as best as possible, and controlling the breathing and creating a nice rhythmic pattern with the breathing. It's going to be different depending upon what you're doing. If you're lifting weights, gonna be one thing, if you're running another, swimming another. Swimming creates its own little breathing patterns, because head in the water versus out of the water. But just starting there, controlling your breathing and adding a positive mantra, or a positive internal statement that's linked to the breath is transformative. Not only does it keep you in the game athletically or whatever, but when you do this during your regular day, day in and day out, you're training your mind to be really positive and to be very concentrated. So you're developing concentration power. So you're turning your mind from like a scattered floodlight, which is flickering on and off, the monkey mind, to a very, very concentrated laser beam that you can point that laser beam on anything, any task, any project, and it deeply improves your productivity, the ability to get things done, you know, significantly.  Lisa: Wow.  Just interrupting the program briefly to let you know that we have a new Patron program for the podcast. Now, if you enjoy Pushing the Limits, if you get great value out of it, we would love you to come and join our Patron membership program. We've been doing this now for five and a half years and we need your help to keep it on air. It's been a public service free for everybody, and we want to keep it that way. But to do that we need like-minded souls who are on this mission with us to help us out. So if you're interested in becoming a patron for Pushing the Limits podcast, then check out everything on www.patron.lisatamati.com. That's P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com. We have two Patron levels to choose from. You can do it for as little as $7 a month, New Zealand, or $15 a month if you really want to support us. So we are grateful if you do. There are so many membership benefits you're going to get if you join us. Everything from workbooks for all the podcasts, the strength guide for runners, the power to vote on future episodes, webinars that we're going to be holding, all of my documentaries and much, much more. So check out all the details: patron.lisatamati.com. And thanks very much for joining us. Mark: And then the imagery, right, the imagery. Well, let me backup. The other thing that that process of paying attention to the quality of your thoughts and changing them to positive thoughts, and increasing your concentration power, as you start to look at the dialogue too, in your head. What is actually going on? And you recognise that typically what's going on in your head is a series of statements that are also based upon belief systems, but it can be framed as questions. When people say, ‘I don't think I can do this,' what they're really saying is, ‘Am I worthy? Am I competent?'  We can begin to recognise that our belief systems are based upon questions and statements that may or may not be true. And so you want to take a look at the ones that are questionable, especially if they have a negative quality, and say, ‘Is that true?' And you realise, ‘It's not true. I am worthy. I am competent.' Now, I may not feel that yet. But the more I tell myself that and the more I can see that in myself, and the more that I meditate and actually feel into my worthiness and my confidence, and the more I work to eradicate the emotional side or shadow that may have, be tied to related to that — for me, it was because of the childhood abuse, I kind of felt a little unworthiness and whatnot, even though I was capable as a SEAL, it's still kind of plagued me for a while, until I had to stare down that wolf of fear and be like, ‘Yeah, that's all bullshit. That's just a story that I'm holding on to and I was able to release all that energy and feel that worthiness now.' Then that leads to a whole nother set of questions, which are extraordinarily empowering, right. So when I— understanding your capability as a human being, the potential that you have, the power that we have, you can then project that into the future and say, ‘What does victory look like for me?' Right? ‘If I'm going to run this 2,000 meter, or 2,000 kilometer race, and I'm going to raise money for charity, what is that for? What's my ‘why'? And what does victory look like?'  You get a clear sense of what victory looks like. And then you can even do that with the micro parts. So you chunked it down into 100 kilometer segments, let's just say. What does victory look like for that segment for the next five days? What does it look like for today? What does it look like— this is, in a sense, what your mom was doing, but she was doing it from the other way around. What does it look like for the next six hours? What does it look like for the next three hours? You get a clear picture because you're asking the right questions, and you're winning in your mind before you step foot into the battlefield. So asking really powerful questions like, what does victory look like? Who is on my team? Who's got my back? Why am I doing this? How is it related to my purpose in my life? These are the questions that we start asking, because now we've drowned out the negative incessant chatter, which is just holding us back and distracting us. We've created this space, and I use the metaphor still water pond. We've taken our mind and we've created it instead of this choppy, you know, bouncing all over the place, turbulent thought stream, largely negative, we've calmed down. And it's now this still water, and on this still water, you can look at it, you can really see a reflection clearly. So that's kind of a nice thing, you get to see your true self more clearly, but also, what you drop into that water in terms of the thought is going to ripple out and affect everything. So you end up dropping thought seeds that are really powerful, instead of chaotic and negative. Lisa: Because there's this whole, these automatic negative thoughts and if we think about how we evolved that was there for our survival. Because we needed to be aware of dangers and things in our environment, so we were always looking for the bad thing that was going to come at us. But in our world now, where we just, we have this constant chatter in our head. And it's, you know, I've certainly dealt with this for a long time, and I and I fought against the whole sitting still thing, and focusing inwards. Because it's very unpleasant, when you having— when you want to move, you just want to move. Give me a hard ass workout, any day, over meditation, you know, because it's just like this energy, this agitation, but that's why I need to do it. So that I can break through that piece of the puzzle. And then you can tap into strengths that you didn't know you had, and quietness, and then you start to really reflect and like, for me, it has only really been, even in the last few months where I've been— My dad passed away, and it was one hell of a battle for his life. And I, yeah, it was a real— I was fighting against the system. And it was a mess of battle. It's all good when you win, but it's also good when you don't win. And so this one, just been— I was a bit of an existential crisis after that, because I'd lost this battle for my dad, who I loved dearly. And it made me go inward. It made me start to really question some of the biggest things because you start realising that life's short, shorter than I think it's gonna be. You want to understand why, and then going inside and doing some deep work and doing some trauma work and doing all that sort of hard stuff has been great. There's always good that comes out of shit. You never ever want to go through things like that, but when you do, you can always turn them into something, a learning curve of some sort. And having that, I was listening to you with Bedros Keulian, who's also is another one that I— Mark: Yeah, he's an awesome guy. Lisa: Yeah, he's just a rock star. in you, when you were talking about how you went through the zen process where you were, for a start, you started meditating, but you're just learning to quiet the mind. And then after a few months, that became then mindfulness. Where you're starting to observe yourself from outside in splitting the mind or somehow you put this and you're actually observing yourself as this higher self, if you like. Can you explain that a little bit? And how does that— Mark: Yeah, so glad you brought that up. Because I wanted to talk about that. Because you're right. It's— meditation is hard, especially for active people, which everybody, everybody listening, everybody in the Western world is pretty much hyperactive. Yep, that's what we're taught; it's reality. Like, ‘Go, go, go. Do, do, do.' We get over-committed. Now we have, you know, constant distraction with our iPhones and social media, and it's just gonna get worse, worse, worse. Wait until we get plugged in with a neural link, you know, like, wow. So we got to push back against that. The only way to push back against that is to disconnect from all that and to sit still, or stand still, or take a walk. But don't do anything, right. Don't do it for a goal. Don't do it to check it off a box. Don't do it to be the best meditator you know. Lisa: Tick that box.  Mark: It doesn't work, right? Lisa: That was what I was going to— Max: There's no goals here. Right? It's about becoming still, getting that clarity and this still water mind back, if you ever had it, but we had it when we were kids, of course, but in a different sense. So that you can evolve. You know, let me start there. I think that there's two reasons we're on this planet. One is to evolve to become the best version, highest and best version of yourself in this lifetime. The second is to align with our calling or our purpose. And those two really kind of go hand-in-hand or hand-in-glove. You can't evolve if you're constantly doing. You actually will stay stuck. You'll keep getting your ass handed to you. You'll keep suffering. You'll keep feeling victimised. And you'll keep looking outward for the solutions. And you'll keep blaming other people, or society, or taxes, or the government, or God. Lisa: A lot of fingers are turned. Mark: The answers lie within, right? And so the only way to go inward is to slow down and just be quiet. Right? So it's imperative. Now, why do most people fail? A) Because everything I've just talked about, they haven't been taught this. And B) because they're body mind, their body brain is very, very agitated. It's amped up because you've been taking all this stress on throughout your life. So what I teach is that the first step in meditation practice isn't mindfulness. It isn't a mantra practice. It's just a box breathe, which is a pattern breathe, five-count in, five-count hold, and five-count out, five-count hold, or four, or three, if you have trouble with that. And just let that nostril breathing in that massaging that the vagus nerve, stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. And it's bleeding off stress and bringing your body brain back into my balance.  Lisa: Yep.  Mark: When your body brain is back into balance, your brain is going to experience that as a lower frequency rate. Lower frequency means fewer thoughts, right? If you're in gamma, it's like tick-tick, popcorn brain. But if you're in alpha, like listening to beautiful music, classical music, or you're maybe doing some journaling, your mind stops racing. It starts to get into— Lisa: A lovely alpha state of focus.  Mark: Yeah, and so the box breathing practice trains your mind to get back into alpha, trains your body to de-stress, and you do this. It might take you months, usually about three months. I— my clients have this extraordinary calming that comes over them. And they're already changed. But this is, you know, just the preparatory work, right? This also, for those who are working on their physical structure in their health and their weight, this also has enormous benefits because you begin to feel a lot better. And you begin, you know, you're starting to breathe in that life force again. You're getting more oxygen with every breath, and you're retraining the breathing patterns so this becomes your more natural state. If you, let me just pause here, if you train for 20 minutes a day, have a five-count box breath, that's three breaths per minute, over time, and might take a year or more, you're gonna eventually settle into a natural breath pattern of six breaths per minute, which is now proven to the optimal. Lisa: Exactly.  Mark: I've been doing this for years, I never knew that, it just settled out there to where six breaths per minute through the nose was standard for me, or a standard, and that's what will happen to you.  Lisa: Yep.  Mark: Yeah. But those are full breaths, full exhales, getting all the toxins out there.  Lisa: Basically the exhale. Mark: It's enormously beneficial for your body, and everything starts to come back into balance: you start losing weight, you start eating better. Because you want to eat better, you start sleeping b

This wasn't your typical conversation with a Navy Seal... Commander Mark Divine has an incredibly unique perspective that pairs elite mental toughness with spirituality and a profound understanding of energetics. Want to learn more about Mark? Listen to his podcast The Unbeatable Mind Podcast!

Mark Divine is an ex-Navy SEAL Commander, serial entrepreneur, and NY Times bestselling author. Mark, a self-described "warrior monk," is a master of human performance, both mental and physical. As you'll hear he started out on Wall Street before getting into martial arts, entering the SEALs (where he was the Honor Man of his class), and starting multiple million-dollar businesses, including SEALFIT. Topics in this episode include Zen, Navy SEAL training, mental toughness, and his unique model of training that combines principles from martial arts, yoga and CrossFit. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind  Website: www.fitmind.co

Commander Mark Divine discusses his book STARING DOWN THE WOLF

Mark Divine was one of America's top warriors, but his path and approach to becoming a Navy SEAL Commander was anything but ordinary. Mark joins Will Ahmed to discuss how he went from being a CPA to a SEAL (4:55), how mindfulness, meditation and zen led him to become a warrior (7:51), the importance of listening to your heart and gut (12:31), similarities between meditation and exercise (19:26), why leaders should meditate (25:12), how he uses WHOOP and how it changed his outlook on wearables (30:41), what SEAL training is like and how his mindfulness toolkit helped him become the No. 1 graduate in his class (36:29), how 185 guys got weeded down to 18 (42:07), his views on training soldiers of the future (46:06), what a "true warrior" is made of (47:10), and his approach to business and how leaders should carry themselves (51:04).Support the show (http://whoop.com)

Navy SEAL Commander and mindfulness expert Mark Divine shares his background in zen, martial arts, corporate America, the military, mindfulness and strong mindset. He’s done it all and we can ALL learn something from him! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/veteranspath/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/veteranspath/support

Hello my friends today my guest is Commander Mark Divine. Mark is an amazing human being whose nickname when he was in the Navy SEALs, was Cyborg. In his class of 185 participants, 19 graduated and he was the number one of those 19 earning the Honor Man. He’s unquestionably a leader and a warrior … Continue reading "Mark Divine: Unbeatable Mind"

In this short outtake from Episode #36 on the book "Unbeatable Mind" Craig and Chris talk about why most people default to negative thought patterns and they discuss a process to redirect negative thoughts to positive thoughts! This process is outlined in Commander Mark Divine's, US Navy SEAL Retired, book "Unbeatable Mind" If you haven't listened to Episode #36 you can hear the complete conversation there!

Whether he knows it or not, every man lives by a code. But without intentionality about what that code is, it’s easy to get lost in a world filled with chaos, clutter, and distraction. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to identify the code you want to live by and consistently measure up to it. That’s why I wanted to have a conversation with my guest today, Brady “Totanka” Cervantes. He is a former Marine Corps sniper and, more recently a professional bull rider. Today, we talk about his experience as a sniper, how it translates to civilian life, the struggles of transitioning in life, how to clear your head in chaos, and how to establish and live by a code. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Learning perspective as a young boy Finding middle ground Seeking guidance from the right source The importance of parental guidance Living out of a truck Life in the Marine Corp. The impact of TBI Understanding the consequences Pushing past fear The mental game Becoming legendary A level of discipline One thing at a time Overcoming ego Dealing with your own battle BRADY “TOTANKA” CERVANTES My guest today is Brady “Totanka” Cervantes. He spent nearly 10 years in the Marine Corps and, as a Scout Sniper, had several deployments throughout the world, including two deployments to Iraq and two deployments to Afghanistan. After his military service, he began training as a lead instructor for several tactical training companies, starred in a survival TV show called Kicking & Screaming, and, more recently, riding bulls professionally with the PBR. I met Brady several months ago at Sorinex’s SummerStrong event and as I got to know him over a couple of days, I was extremely impressed with his clarity, confidence, and level of humility. All of which we talk about in our conversation. IRON COUNCIL If you’ve been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know a little bit about our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council. This is a fraternity of men who are all working together to improve their lives, gain new perspectives, get accountability, and the motivation and tools they need to excel. This month inside the Iron Council we’re talking about forging and iron-clad mindset, and one of the things we do is bring in guest experts to cover the monthly topic, do some live Q & A with, and learn. On the 28th of this month, June 2019, Commander Mark Divine will be joining our live call to discuss the tools, strategies, and skill-sets of an iron-clad mindset. So, if you want to learn from the best and band with other men who will hold you to the highest possible standard, join us inside the Iron Council at www.orderofman.com/ironcouncil. Connect with us on Instagram and Twitter Please leave us a rating and review Support Order of Man by picking up some new merchandise in our store Show notes https://www.orderofman.com/222  

https://youtu.be/vVl1YheANhw Mark Divine is an expert in human performance as it is displayed in mental toughness, leadership and physical readiness. His work is based on an integral warrior-leader model that he developed and tested on over a thousand special operations candidates worldwide. The integrated training, which involves physical, mental, emotional, intuitional and spiritual training, has resulted in over a 90% success rate for the Spec Ops candidates. It is now taught to executives and corporate teams, tops sports teams, top athletes, professionals, first responders and warriors from all walks of life.  Mark is the founder and leader of several highly successful enterprises including SEALFIT (Physical and mental training), Unbeatable Mind, LLC (Executive Mastery Development), NavySEALs.com and USCrossFit. He also co-founded the Coronado Brewing Company in Coronado, CA. SEALFIT developed out of the Navy's SEAL candidate Mentoring program, which took the pass rate for Navy SEAL candidates from 33% to over 80% on the Physical Screening Test at Navy Boot Camp. This program was instrumental in helping the Navy grow the size and quality of the SEAL force.  Mark's other professional experience includes 20 years as a Navy SEAL officer, retiring as a Commander in 2011. Also 4 years as a CPA with the firm now known as PriceWaterhouseCoopers prior to his joining the Navy. As a reserve SEAL he led several prominent projects, including the Navy's internal study on whether to support the invitation of USMC into the Special Operations Command. Mark served as Adjunct Professor of Leadership at the University of San Diego and has authored four books: "The Way of the SEAL," published by Reader's Digest Publishing, "8 Weeks to SEALFIT" and "Kokoro Yoga" by St. Martin's Press, "Unbeatable Mind" and the "SEALFIT Training Guide," both self-published.

This week on the Better Human Project podcast, we're talking to former Navy SEAL commander, SEALFIT founder, author and all around amazing human Mark Divine. We sat down with Mark a few weeks ago at SEALFIT HQ in Carlsbad, CA between our stops in SD & LA to talk about Mark's pillars for leadership, growth, [...] The post BHP 045: Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine on Developing Unbeatable Minds and Leaders appeared first on Ryan Munsey.

We bring you part 2 of our interview with Commander Mark Divine. We discuss the process of goal setting, the necessary steps to take in order to hit your goals, and a variety of techniques you can use everyday to improve your focus and overall mood heading in to the new year.

We had the opportunity to sit down with Commander Mark Divine, a retired Navy Seal and current leadership development expert who trains thousands of individuals out of the San Diego area. He met with us to share insight on his background & what you can do to overcome mental blocks & the hindrance of internal fear to accomplish your personal goals.

Commander Mark Divine is a retired Navy SEAL officer and founder of SEALFit. We talk about mental toughness, stress inoculation, kokoro yoga and much more.

Joshua Cooper Ramo (@jramo) is the co-CEO of Kissinger Associates, a geopolitical consultancy and author of the new book "The Seventh Sense," about the importance of recognizing and using new global networks effectively. He has also been a pilot and a competitive aerobatic flyer. Commander Mark Divine and Joshua discuss the importance of nature and networks to an understanding of the modern world. The conversation veers from politics to spirituality.  Learn how to use your Unbeatable Mind to understand our complicated world.  

Joshua Cooper Ramo (@jramo) is the co-CEO of Kissinger Associates, a geopolitical consultancy and author of the new book “The Seventh Sense,” about the importance of recognizing and using new global networks effectively. He has also been a pilot and a competitive aerobatic flyer. Commander Mark Divine and Joshua discuss the importance of nature and networks to an understanding of the modern world. The conversation veers from politics to spirituality.  Learn how to use your Unbeatable Mind to understand our complicated world.  

Brian Johnson talks about his career as a philosopher or “lover of wisdom,” an author and as an entrepreneur.  He and Commander Mark Divine talk about his journey, his latest venture with “optimize.me” and creating a facility for people to discover and be at their best. We all want to live with virtue and excellence.  Discover what you can learn from Brian’s career and his approach to philosophy and personal performance.

This is the time of year when our resolutions are already starting to get difficult, so Commander Mark Divine is giving us some pointers on developing a few, specific skills to enhance our mental toughness so we can follow through on the commitments we’ve made. He also focuses specifically on one of the most common resolutions which surrounds diet, nutrition and weight loss. Find out what you can learn and put into practice to help yourself achieve your goals in 2017.

Commander Mark Divine interviews the Iron Cowboy about his work as an ultra-endurance athlete. James Lawrence holds various Guinness World Records for triathlon, and recently completed the "50-50-50" challenge: completing 50 Ironman distance triathlons in 50 states in 50 days. Hear how James was able to foster the mental, emotional and physical strength required to complete it and what you can learn from his efforts to overcome extraordinary challenges and apply it to your life.

Commander Mark Divine talks about the difference between force and power in this podcast, and tells us how we can make the right kind of mental moves in order to be able to Power Up our mind. In addition, he is always in favor of achieving excellence, and he helps us toward that goal. He talks about how we often don’t seem to have the time to achieve what we’d like to, and how to manage time in ways that help, instead of hindering your goals. Hear how you can benefit from the information the Commander is bringing to you in this solocast.

What does a 20 year Navy Seal Veteran, successful entrepreneur, coach, author, and sought after professional speaker do to cultivate an unbeatable mind?   On episode 086 for Wellness Force Radio we’re learning and growing from the founder of SEALFIT, and the Unbeatable Mind Academy, Commander Mark Divine. Get ready to be inspired from a truly legendary man who just happens to run his business right in Josh's hometown, Encinitas, California.   "The nature of the mammalian mind is to constantly scan for threats and be poised to react to them. Is it any wonder that our minds feel a constant tug toward negativity?" - Mark Divine, from his book "Unbeatable Mind"    Unbeatable Reeve WOD Challenge   Be part of the team effort involved in supporting the Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation. There are 5.4 million Americans living with some form of paralysis. You can make a difference for these individuals by signing up for the Reeve WOD challenge today. Over $30,000 in prizes will be available to top fundraisers and top teams, and you can participate as an individual, or get your gym involved as a team. This event is powered by www.SEALFIT.com, Unbeatable Mind, and your generosity in contributions to the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation.   Creating The Unbeatable Mind   Listen the the podcast above as Mark uncovers the steps on how to create an Unbeatable Mind:   How to live life with your heart and your sword How to change your self narrative How to feed the courage wolf and starve the fear wolf Quieting the monkey mind How to create your personal ethos, including what your passion, purpose, and principles show about the direction and targets that are ahead, as well as learn about his five mountains of mastery Why the physical mountain leads to all others How to avoid "Weapons of Mass Distractions” mentioned before on WFR by Dr. Gay & Katie Hendricks How his Kokoro and 20X physical challenges help to purify the mind How Gratitude can rewire your nueroplasticity in the brain  Why Mark's Box Breathing training is one of his top tools for self-mastery   "The grueling intensity of this event brought me peace. It gave me a place to go within myself that I can be calm. This was unexpected. There are no obstacles that could EVER stand in my way again: physical, mental, emotional, intuitional. I'm able to handle ANYTHING! I'm forever changed & grateful. HOOYAH 32! CMDR Divine, Thank you for being my mentor, my coach, my leader, my friend.” - Danielle Gordon, Health & Wellness Professional, Kokoro 32 Graduate   Mark's Five Mountains of Self-Mastery Physical Mental Emotional (men tend to ignore this mountain) Intuitional Spiritual   "The warrior is committed to two things: one is self-mastery and the other is  service. We can't go serve if we don't work on ourselves every day towards mastery." - Mark Divine on Wellness Force Radio    7 Authentic Answers From Mark Divine Listen to the podcast to hear Mark's authentic answers: How has your personal mediation practice changed as your business and life responsibilities have grown? What is one thing we can do every morning to create an Unbeatable Mind? What makes you laugh out laugh, what cracks you up? What do you think holds coaches, trainers, and health practitioners back from using more Emotional intelligence and mental training in their practices? You recently interviewed Daniel Schmachtenberger from Neurohacker Collective on the Unbeatable Mind Podcast. What do you think is the most powerful mindset for Americans to have as we step into the next 5 years of exponential growth in technology? With your decades of training and cultivating mental toughness, does anything out there or any existential issue cause you fear, and how do you dance with that? What is wellness to you, how do you define wellness?   About Mark Divine   Mark Divine is a highly sought after speaker, coach, and multiple published author of many best-selling books, including 8 Weeks To SEALFIT, The Way of The SEAL, Kokoro Yoga, and Unbeatable Mind, which is soon to have its fourth edition.   He is the creator and developer of cutting edge training programs for warriors athletes and professionals. These innovative programs include the integrated functional fitness program SEALFIT, the life acceleration program Unbeatable Mind, and the integrated yoga system, Warrior Yoga.   SEALFIT has helped thousands transform their lives, both online and on-site in Encinitas, California Mark is a highly sought after speaker, coach, author and makes frequent media appearances to discuss SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind.   The mission at SEALFIT is to develop mental toughness and promote spiritual growth in their clients – changing their lives and the lives of those they touch in the process.     Unbeatable Mind Podcast With Mark Divine Retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine and his SEALFIT Coaching team take on guests with subject matters that follow along with Mark’s 5 mountain training path of developing your Mental, Physical, Emotional, Intuitive, and Kokoro (Heart) self. Recently listed as the #1 Health Podcast and #30 overall in iTunes.      Links From Today's Show   Sign Up For the 2nd Annual REEVE WOD The Way of The Seal, by Mark Divine 8 Weeks to SEALFIT, by Mark Divine Unbeatable Mind, by Mark Divine Kokoro Yoga, by Mark Divine UnbeatableMind.com SEALFIT.com NavySeals.com Mark's Unbeatable Mind Academy Online Training Program Sign up TODAY for the 2016 UM Retreat, December 2nd, 2016 in San Diego, CA Join up with Josh Trent for his birthday in Encinitas, CA for the SEALFIT 20X Challenge 4/29/2017 Peter Diamandis Nuerohacker Collective Personal Gold Film Mindset, by Carol Dweck Box Breathing Wellness Force Radio Episode 086 Listen as Josh tells the story of how he first came across Mark’s work in 2013 at the UCSD CALIT2 Center for an early screening of the quantified self and digital health technology film "Personal Gold”  which eventually inspired him to launch this podcast and explore the powerful intersection between between behavior change, wellness, and technology. In the film, Mark was a key advisor on leadership to one of the first guests on Wellness Force Radio back in 2015, olympians Sky Christopherson and Tamara Jenkins.     Rate & Review Wellness Force Aloha! Josh here. Listen, I deeply value your thoughts, now let your voice be heard. I live to serve the Wellness Force even better based on your words, feedback, and requests. (including how these episodes can allow you to break bad habits)   Thanks To Our Amazing Sponsor Want to avoid more trips to the store and save hundreds of dollars a year on superfood supplements? Check out Perfect Supplements.com Go to perfectsupplements.com/wellnessforce to get your grass-fed collagen from today's show and sign up for a free membership, plus get 10% off your entire order - just enter promo code "wellnessforce" at checkout. Ask A Live Question For The Next Episode Click here to leave a voicemail directly to Josh Trent to be read live! Get Your Free Audio Book http://www.wellnessforce.com/FreeBook  You May Also Like These Episodes Food Freedom Forever With Melissa Hartwig Nir Eyal:Breaking Bad Habits, Technology Addiction, & Emotional Triggers Healthy, Happy & Harder To Kill w/ Steph Gaudreau of Stupid Easy Paleo Beyond Meditation: How To Get A Better Brain With Ariel Garten Living A Healthy Lifestyle In A Modern World With Dan Pardi Creating A Life Worth Living With Michael Strasner Get More Wellness In Your Life: Download Your Free Wellness Technology Guide: wellnessforce.com/radio Don't miss next week's show: Subscribe and stay updated Did you like this show? Rate and review Wellness Force on iTunes So nice! You read all the way to the bottom? That's what I call love! I do the same thing for the people, things, and movements I care about as well. PS: Looks like you and I share the same passion. I'm grateful for you and want to extend you my email address. Write to me and let me know what you'd like to have to get more wellness in your life!

Ben Greenfield is a well-known athlete and biohacker, as well as being an old friend of Commander Mark Divine. They discuss Ben’s background, his approach to training, and his latest finds in the realm of biohacking. Ben will be one of the speakers at the Unbeatable Mind Retreat, December 2-4, and he shares some of his insights with us. What will you be able to take from Ben’s knowledge about fitness and technology?

In the third and final podcast of the series, Mark talks about the crucial importance of recovery, sleep and integrated training. He points out that we can’t just train without learning to rest properly in between workouts. He also shows us that our best performance is connected to the 5 mountains of Kokoro. Will you be able to re-adjust your thinking about rest and connect your training into other parts of your whole person?

Hey hey! Welcome to episode 209 of Life on Fire. If someone told you that you were capable of increasing your performance and your results by 20x would you believe them? Now what if the person who was telling you was a commander and one of the most decorated Navy SEALs in history? Then would you believe that person?! On this episode, Commander Mark Divine drops by to explain why you truly are capable of 20x your performance and the four skills you need to develop to do so. We also talk about my experience at his Unbeatable Mind program, and what you can expect to hear from him when he speaks at our Life on Fire event in December. In this episode you’ll hear: Why applying principles is as important as learning them. (4:05) How do yoga and martial arts help develop character? (9:55) One breathing technique to slow your body and mind. (13:40) What does it mean to feed the courage wolf? (21:10) What is the difference between visioning and visualization? (25:35) And so much more! When you hear Mark Divine’s Navy SEALs background you can’t help but be impressed. He entered BUDS training at 25 years old (it’s the six month program to become a Navy SEAL) and he graduated first in his class.  For the next 10 years he was on active duty, doing intelligence and foreign internal defense work in 45 countries. The decade after that he was in the SEALs reserves as part of Special Operations Command in the Pacific and Hawaii region. He was the commanding officer of SEAL Team 1 on the reserves side. His time with the SEALs saw him serving in Iraq and the Middle East, before he retired as a commander in 2011. While in the reserves, he got back into the business world when he launched the Coronado Brewing Company. He followed that success with SEAL Fit and Unbeatable Mind. His primary focus today is on SEAL Fit, Unbeatable Mind and his newest yoga program called Kokoro Yoga. He’s taken what he’s learned from his time as a SEAL and translated it into lessons and programs for entrepreneurs, business owners, and anyone else wanting to develop their full potential. His programs are based on the fundamental principle that character is developed through integrative training. That integrative training encompasses the physical, spiritual, mental, emotional and intuitive parts of our selves. There are four skills that when combined set the stage for this integrative training: they are breath control, positivity, visualization and action. He explains each of the four in detail during our show today, a summary of each is below. 1. Breath control Mark explains breath is profound, it links the mind, spirit and the body. So learning to control it and use it for different purposes is critical to generating your highest level of performance. For example, you can calm yourself in any situation by learning and training your body with a technique like box breathing. Box breathing is when you breath in through your nose for four counts, holding it for four more counts and then exhaling through your nostrils for four counts. 2. Positivity Once your breathing is under control, the next skill is positivity. With a calm body, you can become aware of your thoughts and you can change them as necessary. Create a mantra for yourself, like the one we used at Unbeatable Mind: “…feeling good, looking good, I oughta be in Hollywood!”. 3. Visualization With a calm mind and body that are focused on the positive, you can move onto the third skill: visualization and the use of imagery. Now you can focus your positive thoughts to lead you to victory. Create a clear vision of what that victory looks like, be as specific as possible and include smells, sights, sounds, and feelings. Make the visualization as rich as you possibly can. 4. Action With the other three under your belt, ask yourself what is the smallest task you can take that will lead to the biggest opportunity for success? Then take that action, with your image of victory in mind. Mark says no plan survives contact with reality so you must have vision of victory. But right now with best information you have, take the simplest and most effective action step to lead you in that direction. He explains each of those four skills in greater detail on today’s show, as well as why they need to be developed individually before you can effectively combine them all. He also gives an example of how to develop and implement these four skills. Mark is one of our speakers for December’s Life on Fire event so he also shares what he will be speaking about from stage. Be sure to check out what he has in store for you on episode 209 of Life on Fire!  EPISODE RESOURCES SEAL Fit Unbeatable Mind Mark Divine’s books Life on Fire event Subscribe to Life on Fire TV Podcast Write a Review on iTunes

Hey hey! Welcome to episode 209 of Life on Fire. If someone told you that you were capable of increasing your performance and your results by 20x would you believe them? Now what if the person who was telling you was a commander and one of the most decorated Navy SEALs in history? Then would you believe that person?! On this episode, Commander Mark Divine drops by to explain why you truly are capable of 20x your performance and the four skills you need to develop to do so. We also talk about my experience at his Unbeatable Mind program, and what you can expect to hear from him when he speaks at our Life on Fire event in December. The post 209: 20X Your Performance With These Four Skills, with Commander Mark Divine appeared first on Life On Fire.

Hey hey! Welcome to episode 205 of Life on Fire. This is a special episode dedicated to our upcoming Life on Fire event, and what it means for you. On December 1st, 2nd and 3rd of this year we are hosting a one-of-a-kind experience in San Diego. This is your chance to experience the Life on Fire community, firsthand. On today’s show we’ll talk about what makes this event so unique and so transformative. Check out episode 205 and then share with your friends and family - and bring them with you to San Diego in December! In this episode you’ll hear: The goal of each Life on Fire event is what? (2:30) Why you need a vision for your life, and how this event will help you create it. (3:00) How to reignite your childhood dreams. (4:50) What this event will do for your limiting financial beliefs. (6:00) And so much more!   When we created this event, my wife Megan and I, we designed an event that would be exactly the kind of event we’d want to attend. Having invested thousands of dollars in our growth, both individually and as a married couple, we have been to many events over the years and have learned what really works as an attendee. The kinds of events we’ve both been to have been everything from NLP to emotional intelligence to tons of marketing programs. What we’ve learned and what has worked for us is what we share with you. For me personally, attending live events is what took me from failing at 11 different businesses to growing and selling a company in just two years. I created that breakthrough because I attended a weekend seminar, and that’s the kind of experience both Megan and I are committed to you having at our Life on Fire event. We want you to have breakthroughs and transform your life, and truly experience what it is like to live a life on fire! Living a life on fire means all areas of your life are working, and you are happy in every aspect of life. Your finances are increased, your health is good, and you have faith or your spirituality at the center. And you have love at the core. We help you create this with specific skills and techniques we teach you, techniques that create lasting change in your life. It's about creating the full and complete picture of your ideal life. It’s an event that is designed to literally transform your life - so you have more love, more money, better health and you’ll walk out playing at a bigger level! People have left this event, quit their jobs in the next 30 days and gone on to create 5 and then 6-figure businesses…after never having made money in previous businesses. And they do so because we help them remove limiting beliefs, both in finances and other areas, and help them build a strategy to create lives they love. We’re bringing in some of the best speakers we know: Joseph McClindon III who is Tony Robbins’ top speaker and a multi-million dollar business owner in his own right. As well as Commander Mark Divine, who was first in his Navy SEALs BUD class. This man will show you how to do 20x more than you thought possible - I know firsthand because he’s done it for me! Our goal is always to make each event bigger and more transformational than the previous one. We want you to join us in living full out, and the first step to doing so is to come to our Life on Fire event in December. We are so excited to see you there!   EPISODE RESOURCES Life on Fire event Subscribe to Life on Fire TV Podcast Write a Review on iTunes

Ryan Holiday got his start helping Tucker Max and now runs Brass Check marketing, which has helped a huge number of clients, including Google and Tony Robbins, market their products. He talks today with Commander Mark Divine about his own books and the Stoic philosophy that underpins them. He also shares his thoughts about marketing and especially book marketing. What will you be able to take from Ryan’s insights, and how you will you be able to use them for yourself?

This is the second of Mark’s solocasts about fueling and The Three Pillars of Longevity. This week, he talks about breathing and hydration, and the importance of learning how to breathe properly and making sure you’re adequately hydrated. He emphasizes that macronutrients are not the only part of fueling. Would you like to learn more about different aspects of fueling so that you can get the most from yourself in every way?

Hey hey! Welcome to episode 203 of Life on Fire. Today it’s just you and me talking about the value of accountability and coaching in creating lasting, powerful results. Recently I asked people to take a survey and share with me the top challenge or frustration that was holding them back from living their life on fire. And the #1 response was lack of action. Most people know what needs to be done, but they find reasons not to do it. On this edition of Life on Fire, we’ll be exploring why accountability is the easiest way to get ourselves to take action and why having a coach is one of the best accountability tools you can have in your personal toolbox. In this episode you’ll hear:   What is the pain vs pleasure Tony Robbins talks about? Why it all comes back to motivation. What is the shortcut to getting higher personal performance? How to achieve 20x more than you think you can. And so much more! We all know what we need to do to make our goals a reality, but many of us find different ways to avoid doing what it takes. We find other busy work and at the end of the day, the week, the month or the year, we haven’t achieved our goals. The one thing that changes all of that is accountability. Personally, accountability is one of the main reasons I have a coach, and why we offer coaching at Life On Fire. All of us are far more likely to go the extra mile and exceed what we believe to be our potential when we are performing for someone else. Here’s a great story to illustrate my point, it’s how I learned this firsthand. I participated in Commander Mark Divine’s Navy SEALs experience. In that group setting, he proved to us that we will actually perform so we don't let others down and outperform what we believe we are capable of. He says we can go 20x past what we think is possible in a group setting! At his event, called The Unbeatable Mind, we all arrived and dropped off our things in our barracks. I had no idea what to expect, and neither did the other guys there. When we went downstairs we were sprayed with hoses and told to do 50 push ups. If any of us faltered before we all reached 50, we would have to start over and keep going until we all did 50 together!  There were 15 of us and I didn’t want to be the one who let everyone down. At that point in my health, I was recovering from knee surgery and could only do about 30 push ups on my own. But I was not going to be the guy who didn’t make it to 50! Being in that group setting made me pull out more of my own potential, for the sake of the group. And that’s true for all of us: we are all more inclined to work harder and at a higher potential when it's for others and when we are accountable to someone else. Having coached hundreds of people, I have seen this time and again. I have found that when people come to their coaching call and declare what they are doing they are more likely to do it. They don't want to let their coach down! I’d encourage you to find a coach or someone you admire and ask if you can be accountability buddies for a month. Call each other at the same time every day and declare what you are doing for the day. That little piece of not letting someone else down will help you get so much more accomplished! Tune in to episode 203 of Life on Fire then find yourself an accountability partner or join us for our 90 day sprint. Email my Life on Fire team to get more details - and get started living your life on fire! EPISODE RESOURCES Interested in the 90 day sprint? Email us! Life on Fire Movement Life on Fire Fest 2016 Subscribe to Life on Fire TV Podcast Write a Review on iTunes

Commander Mark Divine talks with former SEAL Mitch Hall about the role he’s played in the SEAL teams, their current role in Special Operations, and how he was able to effectively make the transition from military service to become a highly successful technical consultant in the entertainment industry. In his 21 year career with the SEALs, Mitch was deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, and various other locations. He has since consulted on the Hollywood hit “Zero Dark Thirty” and is currently consulting in the production of the series “Six” about SEAL team 6. What is his insight into current issues and how can you learn from his determination and his career as a SEAL?

Many have heard of his brother, Deepak, but Dr. Sanjiv Chopra is an accomplished medical professional as well. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and is an expert on the GI tract and the liver. He is also an author, and today he talks with Commander Mark Divine about his most recent book, “The Big Five: Five Simple Things That You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life.” Are they really that simple? And how can you start using his tips in your own life?

This week Commander Mark Divine talks to Olaniyi Sobomehin about how to foster mental toughness. Olaniyi is a former NFL player, and has just left firefighting to focus on his business and his podcast, “I’m not you.” What are the mental and emotional strategies that he’s used to foster mental discipline in his sons, his athletes and himself? How will you be able to apply them to your own life? Enjoy the podcast, and check out the gift that he’s put together for Unbeatable Mind listeners at imnotyou.com/divine.

Cal Newport has his doctorate from MIT, and is a professor at Georgetown University in computer science. He is also the author of several books for students and businesspeople to maximize their potential. He has written books including, “How to Win in College,” “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” and his most recent book is “Deep Work.” Commander Mark Divine and Cal discuss his concept of “Deep Work,” and how to make sure that despite all our distractions, we give our time and attention to the important tasks.

This week we have the first part of a series of solo casts called The Three Pillars of Longevity. The first pillar is fueling, which includes macro-nutrients, hydration and breathing. How we fuel is an essential part of our overall health. Do you want to know how to optimize your eating so you can enjoy training, work and time with family? Don’t miss this podcast.

This week Commander Mark Divine talks to Dr. Sue Sisley about her work with marijuana as a treatment for veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In April 2016, Dr. Sisley received approval from the DEA to conduct the first study to test how marijuana interacts with veterans with severe PTSD. She explains why the process took nearly seven years, and how she, along with the veteran community, were tenacious and determined to overcome the obstacles

In this casual podcast, Commander Mark Divine catches up with Spencer and Andy Hendel about the evolution of Crossfit, the games versus the open, and the difference between Andy’s Masters competition and the regular competition that Spencer will be participating in. Andy specifically talks about his approach and the rewards he gets out of being an athlete over fifty. They both talk about the challenges that they’ve faced and the determination that they’ve shown to overcome them.

This week Commander Mark Divine has a conversation with Mark Erwin, former United States ambassador and successful businessman about his book “The Powers: 12 Principles to Transform Your Life from Ordinary to Extraordinary,” and the role that discipline and positive thinking have played in his life. From a very challenging adolescence, to becoming a millionaire and then on to United States ambassador, Mark Erwin shares the key powers that have made him successful both financially and personally.

This week Commander Mark Divine talks to Tony Wrighton from the UK. Tony is a presenter on Sky Sports TV, and has also devoted himself to NLP or neurolinguistic programming as a sideline. He is the author of several books, including “Confidence in a Minute,” “Relax in a Minute,” and “Persuade in a Minute.” He is also the host of the podcast “Zestology.” He and Mark talk about the British exit from the EU or “Brexit,” neurolinguistic programming and the importance of being able to using positive language to improve the mindset of both yourself and others. Learn about the importance of internal and external dialogue to keep yourself and other people in the right frame of mind.

The Amens talk to Commander Mark Divine about their work with brain health. They have both authored several of books, and they are both New York Times bestselling authors.  By using SPECT scans, they have been able to identify issues in their patients’ brains. They are then able to help people work on and fix their health issues through the use of nutrition, exercise and meditative practices, as well as more radical measures like hyperbaric oxygen and transcranial magnetic stimulation. They take a warrior’s approach to brain health, and they have two books coming out in the fall about being a Brain Warrior. They share their approach to brain health with Mark in this podcast.

Commander Mark Divine talks to Warden Shelith Hansbro who has run the Decatur Correctional Institution for the past 6 years. This podcast gets into how a prison warden can have an Unbeatable Mind, in the midst of an environment that often brings despair, crime, hopelessness—but can also sometimes bring restoration, hope and change for the better. After spending time there with the team, Shelith Hansbro shares her perspective on how prison works, ought to work and describes a number of innovative programs she has developed for offenders, including a program to keep pregnant mothers with their new-born children in prison.

Two old friends, Captain Bob Schoultz and Commander Mark Divine talk about how recent publicity has impacted the SEALs. Bob Schoultz is an expert in leadership, and he’s both a speaker and guest at the Unbeatable Mind retreat. He’s taught leadership ethics in both in business and the military at the graduate level. In this wide ranging conversation, Bob and Mark touch on the importance and meaning of the SEAL ethos, the value of leadership and the different meanings of heroism. All of these subjects are essential for both the military leader and for understanding leadership in business.

Commander Mark Divine interviews Wesley Chapman. Wesley started his entrepreneurial career during a troubled childhood by selling flowers at the age of eight. He’s had many successes since then, and now he is the founder of “A Human Project” and devotes himself to speaking and helping children find their way through often difficult circumstances so that they can find purpose and happiness. He shares his story with us, and tells us how he has come to embrace his mission of helping children succeed.  

This week, Commander Mark Divine interviews Lewis Howes, former football player, currently on the US Olympic handball team and an entrepreneur, speaker and author of the bestselling book based on his own podcast “The School of Greatness.” Lewis has been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs under 30 by the president, and has been featured in Forbes, Men’s Health and The New York Times. Mark and Lewis speak frankly about the role that adversity can play in success in addition to determination and an underlying dedication to principle and gratitude.

Jesse Itzler has had a musical career as a rapper, is owner of the NBA Atlanta Hawks and is also an endurance athlete, having run 100 mile races. He’s done it all with a sense of adventure and determination. Most recently, he spent a month living with a former SEAL in order to better understand the kind of mental toughness that they have. In this podcast, he talks frankly with Commander Mark Divine about his unconventional path and his unique approach to life and work.

This episode is sponsored by InBody.Commander Mark Divine is the founder of SEALFit. He’s the author of Unbeatable Mind, The Way of the SEAL, 8 Weeks To SEALFIT and his new book, Kokoro Yoga. In this episode, Mark talks about using Yoga to develop a warrior’s mindset and improve athleticism. This isn’t the foo-foo stretchy-pants-and-fancy-mats yoga from a Lululemon poster: this is the battle-born practice of preparation.0:00 – Commander Divine talks about his background and development: being trained as an accountant, and finding his way to war7:00 – Mark finds CrossFit7:40 – “Yoga is really a personal development system”10:00 – Developing SealFIT, the “working out” program and the “working in” program 10:45 – Kokoro Camp is a test11:40 – “Not everyone in the world is attracted to SEALFit-type training. My desire is to reach as many people as possible.” Mark talks about using his service to approach entrepreneurs and corporate types in a different path from athletes.15:50 – The Flow State20:20 – “Yoga means integration." Mark talks about the functional movements of CrossFit and getting into the “flow state.”21:55 – “Thinking Body, Dancing Mind” by Chungliang Al Huang 25:20 – Why getting “pumped up” for sports isn’t always best – practicing mental power vs triggering the “arousal state”28:00 – How to introduce yoga to warriors and athletes in your gym29:00 – “Mobility and durability are just a side effect of yoga.”30:30 – Mark talks about his first “airline yoga” on a transport into Baghdad33:30 – Stripping down yoga in a war zone40:00 – What yoga REALLY is44:40 – The importance of understanding WHY you’re doing anything45:50 – The best ways for gyms to introduce yoga into their practice49:00 – “Coach” vs “Senior Student”50:50 – Mark’s dog has a dream about snatching51:10 – Why you need mental development to help avoid injury54:10 – How to win the battle before it starts54:55 – The 80/20 rule of starting a yoga practice57:00 – Keeping “the main thing” your main thing1:00:00 – Mark lists his mentors1:02:00 – “Feeding the courage wolf” and teaching the concept to kids1:06:00 – Mark’s advice to CrossFit affiliates

In this podcast, Commander Mark Divine talks to Mitch Horowitz, author of One Simple Idea: How the Lessons of Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Life about how the practice and philosophy of positive thinking have had a massive impact both on individual people and America as a whole. In this far ranging discussion, they touch on meditation, yoga, Ghandi and Napoleon Hill.

Commander Mark Divine talks with Dr. Kirk Parsley about sleep and how to make sure that you are getting enough good quality sleep. Former Navy SEAL, Dr. Parsley has helped military and civilian employees that battle sleep deprivation and chronic problems alike achieve better rest and a better life.  Learn how you can too in this episode.

In this solo podcast, Commander Mark Divine talks about his recent visits to the prison system in New England, ponders the current relationship between politicians and the military and gives us insights about how to keep ourselves and our time directed and organized. He talks about the book “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown. He describes how it is important to be aware of what your goals are and the “why” of what you are doing so that you can choose what you need to do to get there and say “no” with confidence. Knowing the “why” of what you’re doing is a part of knowing yourself and being connected to your passion, purpose and principles.

 In this special podcast, Commander Mark Divine talks to Gary Johnson about how he’s managed to successfully combine a political career, personal life and his dedication to fitness. You will learn about the challenges of being a third party candidate. Governor Johnson demonstrates how his mental toughness has allowed him to survive near death events, climbing the seven highest peaks in the world and excel in politics all by putting one foot in front of the other.

In this podcast, Commander Mark Divine talks with Steve Weatherford about his ADHD and OCD.  Not only was he able to overcome these obstacles but use them to his advantage  to become a successful pro athlete in the NFL. You will hear how his mother was at the cutting edge of nutrition and fitness and enacted holistic tools and techniques to keep her son focused and progressing. You will cheer for Steve and his accomplishments and his ZERO to HERO story! 

Will he be crowned the world fittest man after 11 years of competition? Listen in to this intriguing podcast and decide for yourself.  Has Josh grown and developed into a Crossfit Champion? We believe he will make it happen this year.  He has ended his career as a SEAL and opened up the path for the serious training it takes to persevere.  Find out his training schedule, mental tips, and his background in badness that has gotten him where he is now. 

KOKORO Yoga is different from the rest and in this podcast you will learn why. Catherine Divine is an instructor at Sealfit and is also the co-author with Commander Mark Divine of the new book “Kokoro Yoga.” While yoga isn’t necessarily thought of as a warrior discipline, they let us in on how the self-mastery of yoga fits perfectly with the warrior mindset. Kokoro yoga brings out the best in you and that’s exactly what a warrior needs in any situation. Catherine speaks to what it means to be a  warrior and how all warriors will be able to use the clarity and inspiration that yoga provides.

In this podcast you will learn the fundamentals of being Sheepdog Strong from Commander Mark Divine. Be ready in a state of passive alertness at all times like Mark's guest and SEALFITTER KOKORO participant, Dr. Patrick Martin, was when he was called on to act in order to save lives at a Missouri high school recently.  Prepare to be inspired and motivated by this amazing podcast.

Today Commander Mark Divine has Ryan Michler with him to talk about the importance of manly virtues. They talk about the need for men to figure out how to say no, fulfilling your commitments and how to live with integrity.

The CrossFit Open competition has just gotten started, and Commander Mark Divine has a personal story of how the concept of the courage wolf helped him in his own CrossFit competition. He lets us in on how he was able to use the Unbeatable Mind concepts to overcome the challenges that CrossFit competition presented to him.

The Spaniard, Charlie Brenneman, straight out of Pennsylvania gives it to us straight on his wrestling background that led him from a teaching career into the MMA world of fighting.  As one of the best fighters in the world, you will learn how much money he made as a novice,his training rituals, and even the surprise and awe he encountered when some  fans turned on him.  Mark and Charlie talk about the mental game involved and how Charlie entered the ring an empty vessel of power.

Commander Mark Divine speaks with author, athlete and primal lifestyle-guru Mark Sisson about how to train slower to go faster, burn fat in your diet instead of a constant supply of carbs, and, most importantly, how to make sure that being active and athletic is fun rather than being a chore.

Part 2: This episode will uncover one side of the Chris Kyle Controversy and leave you with resources to form your own opinion. More politics, more show biz, and stories of a man trying to stay off the grid of our fast moving technological life. How does he do it and will he run for President? Find out in this podcast!

Part 1: DO NOT MISS this captivating interview with one of the most interesting SEALs of all time. This episode will give you a glimpse into the fascinating life of a man hell bent on creating positive change in this country and the world. From his humble military upbringing to life in the spotlight to the SEAL team controversy you have all been waiting to hear, this episode has it all.

Father of 7, Ed O'Keefe shares how he prepared for SealFit's Kokoro Camp 40. 0:00 - 2:03 Introduction 2:03 - 4:22 How it Started 4:22 - 15:00 Preparation Work 15:00 - 21:10 Mindset 21:10 - 29:16 Training 29:16 - 31:25 Rucking and Gear 31:25 - 33:25 Team Work & Leadership vs. Athleticism 33:25 - 36:10 Support with the Experience References: 5:01 - sealfit.com 8:03 - Ben Greenfield -Kokoro Articles 9:19 - Beyond Training by Ben Greenfield 10:26 - Grander Pt by Coach Brad 14:56 - The Willing Warrior by Joe Stumpf 15:15 - Way of the Seal by Mark Divine 15:18 - Unbeatable Mind by Mark Divine 19:30 - Tim Ferriss- The Scariest Navy SEAL Imaginable…And What He Taught Me 19:40 - The Warrior Elite by Dick Couch 27:10 - Box Breathing by Mark Divine 31:00 - Lance Cummings Tips on Rucking and Gear If you ever wanted to train like a Seal and experience a glimpse to what Hell Week is like, then Kokoro Camp is for you. http://sealfit.com/sealfit-events/sea...Created by Commander Mark Divine, Seal Fit is an academy that has some of the best training in the world for people who want to test themselves to the ultimate limits.From the SealFit Website:SEALFIT Kokoro Camp is, quite simply, the world’s premier training camp for forging mental toughness, modeled after the US Navy SEAL Hell Week. Yes, it is brutal. No, it’s not for everyone. You may not qualify, or make it through the training. Yet, if you’re ready for this challenge…YOU’LL FIND IT TO BE AN EXPERIENCE THAT CHANGES YOUR LIFE, FOREVER.Kokoro is designed to break you down, then rebuild you into a powerful leader and consummate team player—the kind that makes everyone else better. Whatever your path in life, the confidence and wisdom gained during this 3-day intensive can multiply your performance and success by a factor that’s impossible for you to even imagine right now.Kokoro Camp is designed to help you discover the deep power of your resilient spirit over your mind, and your mind’s control over your body. The program is skillfully executed by a cadre of SEALs with over 125 cumulative years of Special Warfare experience.You’ll be pushed to your limits, because that’s where the biggest breakthroughs happen. That’s also why this is not “something you try”. It takes absolute, 100% commitment. You must have a deep and powerful reason for attending this camp, and be ready to pay the price for the ultimate freedom you’ll gain by the end."This video is a quick recap of how Ed O'Keefe, a serial entrepreneur and father of 7, prepared for this 50 Hour Non-Stop Event!

A few months ago I received an email from Ramit Sethi with the subject line: "20x your potential: Hell Week (with a retired Navy SEAL)" - It got my attention! The email was for a free 5-day intense training program, designed specifically to push the limits of your mind and body. One of the first challenges was a 20-minute plank, a challenge that took me 48 minutes to complete. The sense of accomplishment after completing it was mind blowing. When Mark agreed to join me on The Happiness of Pursuit Podcast, I was absolutely thrilled to be able to share his insights on mental toughness and how you too can live a 20x life. For someone who left a comfort in a career as a CPA to commit to a life of service as a Navy SEAL and now as a lifestyle entrepreneur, I knew he would bring incredible value to listeners. What you will learn in this episode of The Happiness of Pursuit Podcast: ~How to 20x your life ~How finding a passion will improve your ability to make better decisions in life and business ~The importance of a daily routine ~How anyone can make a massive life transition and still succeed To see the video and connect with Commander Divine visit www.douglasjfoley.com/17 .

Commander Mark Divine is an expert in human performance,mental toughness, and leadership.   Commander Divine’s journey went from MBA to CPA to elite Navy Seal Officer to founding successful Coronado Brewing COmpany, NavySeals.com, to Founder of SealFIt   He is a New York Times selling author of  Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level   http://www.inspiredinsider.com/mark-divine-sealfit-interview/

Unless you can get crystal clear about what you want and how to create a plan to accomplish your goals, it will be difficult to realize any measure of success in your life. My guest today, Retired Navy SEAL, Commander Mark Divine makes the case for the power of silence,The post OoM 016: The Power of Silence, Meditation, and the Mind with Commander Mark Divine appeared first on Order of Man.

How rested and recharged do you feel when you wake up? If it’s anything below an ‘8’ on a 10-point scale, you owe it to yourself to listen to retired Navy SEAL, Dr. Kirk Parsley, discuss the secret science of sleep with Commander Mark Divine. Dr. Parsley has specialized in sleep, recovery, and nutrition for decades and will cover everything you need to maximize the health, longevity and performance upside good sleep can give you.

Learn how to make your ‘dent’ in the Universe and create the legacy that will define your life. Leverage computing, your entrepreneurial spirit and game-changing technologies to get more done in less time, while making the world a better place for you and your family.  Listen to Commander Mark Divine and Charles discuss how old thought processes are being replaced by radical new paradigms that will transform your life.

Ready to reach ‘superhuman’ levels of performance? Listen to Commander Mark Divine chat with renown ironman, fitness guru and biohacker Ben Greenfield, as they discuss training, 20X performance, mental toughness, the world's toughest 48-hour challenge (KOKORO) and tons more. Learn how Ben uses qualitative and quantitative measurements to fine tune his results.

You can live naturally AND leverage scientific breakthroughs to revolutionize your health and fitness. Renown author, blogger, speaker, educator and endurance athlete (4th in Iron Man), Mark Sisson talks to Commander Mark Divine about turning back the clock of time and anti-aging. He also shares his “primal blue print” and simple template for living an awesome life. We were born to burn fat, and you’ll learn how both science and nature can help you get your best body.

If you read the article "", then you know that in an effort to challenge my body and mind, I'm personally adding some epic events to my 2014 calendar, such as the , the and the How about you? Do you want to know how to train, eat and think like the world's toughest fighters? Turn yourself into an absolute physical beast? Or perhaps just get the mental edge to be tough when it really counts? Then today's podcast with (pictured above) is for you. Mark is the mastermind behind . His certifications, experience, and honors include: -CPA, New York State -BUD/s class 170 Honor man -SEAL TEAM 3 Platoon CDR -Commanding Officer, NR SEAL TEAM 1 -Commander, US Navy Reserves -Colonel, Kentucky Order of Colonels -Ambassador, SEAL (NSW) Foundation -Ashtanga Yoga Instructor training -Combat Defense Master Trainer -S.C.A.R.S. Military H2H instructor -Seido Karate: black belt -Goju Ryu Karate: black belt -Saito Ninjutsu: brown belt -Various CrossFit and Self Defense certifications Mark is the , including , and , and during this show, you'll discover: -Mark's unique story of how he went from financial accountant to Navy SEAL... -Some of the craziest things that happen during the Seal's infamous "Hell Week"... -Mark's top tip to deal with extreme cold and fluctuations in temperature... -2 potent tricks the Navy Seals use to deals with sleep deprivation... -5 components of fitness to make you extremely physically tough... -A sample workout to see if you're fit enough to be a Navy SEAL... -What the SEALs do about overtraining, and how to make sure you don't overtrain... Questions, comments or feedback about How To Train, Eat & Think Like The World's Toughest Fighters? Leave your thoughts at and either myself or Commander Mark Divine will answer!

I am excited (read: slightly intimidated) to present you today with former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine.  Mark is the founder and CEO of US Tactical, inc. which operates SEALFIT, NavySEALs.com and US CrossFit. He started his athletic career as a collegiate swimmer and rower, then competitive tri-athlete and martial artist before joining the Navy in […]

For more episodes and free goodies, visit https://abeljames.com/

For more episodes and free goodies, visit https://abeljames.com/

Mark Divine (born July 14, 1963) is an American author, podcaster, and retired Navy SEAL Commander.[1][2] His military service spans 20 years (1989–2011) where he oversaw various missions around the world including Asia Pacific, Africa, Bahrain, and Iraq[3] He retired at the rank of Commander in 2011. Mark is founder of the personal development program at SEALFIT.com, and author of numerous books and programs on personal excellence.SHOW NOTES: - Your belief is a powerful force and attracts (like with success) or repels (like sharks), if you're being true to yourself | - Mark acquired NavySEALS.com in the mid-90's and used it to help prepare clients in their physical, mental, and emotional lives especially to get ready for SEAL training | - His mentoring process increased successful output of SEAL candidates by 5%, a huge impact on the program...but then a bigger business competitor swooped in and took it away | - That was a crushing blow, but served as an evolutionary moment for Mark's growth both personally and professionally | - Use every experience in life to make your life and contribution better.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/beyond-your-limits/donations

Mark Divine (born July 14, 1963) is an American author, podcaster, and retired Navy SEAL Commander.[1][2] His military service spans 20 years (1989–2011) where he oversaw various missions around the world including Asia Pacific, Africa, Bahrain, and Iraq[3] He retired at the rank of Commander in 2011. Mark is founder of the personal development program at SEALFIT.com, and author of numerous books and programs on personal excellence.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/beyond-your-limits/donations