Unbeatable Mind

call this potential your 20X Factor, in that you are capable of at least twenty times what your current paradigm allows you to believe. It

Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem from the same paradigm that caused it.

The skill is to rack up small, worthy, and achievable victories on the way to mission

accomplishment. In addition, it requires being able to reframe failures to find a silver lining.

Values are just words. SEALs take the words and make them habits, turn them into virtues and eventually their character, and so must you.

Navy SEALs solve problems in unique and unconventional ways not obvious to most people. Through trial and error we learn to reframe all problems by looking at them through multiple different lenses. We turn them upside down and inside out; we step out of the box altogether to look at them from a new paradigm, or dimension, or cultural

perspective. This is a SEAL-inspired version of the science of creative invention called TRIZ, developed by a Russian inventor, which we will get into a bit in chapter eight.

you must win in your mind before setting foot into the battlefields in life. Using visualization techniques I first learned from a swim coach and then honed in Zen training, I

planted the seeds for success into my subconscious mind. This training, along with positivity, self-talk, and proper goal setting, cemented the deal and ensured that I was using much more of my mental powers than my peers when I set foot onto the BUD/S grinder.

The major lesson I gained from my journey into Zen was that I could gain control over my mind if I practiced. The key was to learn to be silent, truly, in your mind silent. When you are silent, you can then witness the mind in action. In doing so you begin to separate your identity from “the thoughts” and get acquainted with that part of you watching the thoughts. That space between the thought and the watcher—your witness—is where the magic is.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. —Sun Tzu

First, Win in Your Mind

I think by now I have made it clear that SEALs operate at an elite level because they learn to control their minds and establish the win internally before they enter the fight.

Step 1: The first step is to focus your mind and prevent it from running all over the place.

The monkey mind is your enemy. The disciplined mind, on the other hand, is your calm, clear, focused ally, ready to lend a hand when you need it.

We are not encouraged to spend time in silence or get to know our own depth of character, and our souls cry out for attention.

Have you ever been knee-deep in an argument when you suddenly had the experience of separating from the dialogue and watching the absurdity of what you and the other person were doing? You may have broken out laughing as you instantaneously shifted from identifying with the thoughts and words spewing out of your mouth to what I call your witness.

You will eventually allow your witness an equal position with your rational

mind.

I offer some simple guided visualizations that focus and clear the mind quickly. One is called “The Fish Bowl” and the other “Still Water Runs Deep,” both of which can be used as a jumping-off point for mental control.

Fish Bowl Guided Visualization

One of the main reasons to develop mental control is so that you can also improve the quality of the content of your thoughts. As you gain control over the workings of the mind, you will also witness negative, flawed thinking. Then you have the opportunity to vastly improve the content of your mind.

I began to talk to myself: “What’s up? I have trained hard and made it this far. Many have gone before me and made it. If they did it, so can I. Quitting is not an option; they will have to kill me to get me to quit!” As I said those words to myself, I felt the fear gradually melt away, replaced by courage.

I was grateful that I had spent four years meditating and training my mind so I had the control to witness and dialogue with myself in this manner.

This is the specific process: Witness negativity. Interdict, or stop, the negative thoughts with a power statement. Redirect your mind with self-talk and imagery to something positive and productive for your current goal. Maintain your new mental state with a jingle or mantra.

Interdiction power statements are words that shock your monkey mind back into control. Words like no or stop work well, though I prefer using positive power statements, such as “I’ve got this,” “piece of cake,” “step it up, Mark,” or my favorite, “feed the courage wolf!” You will want to develop a power statement that resonates with you and practice using it daily. Practicing power statements until they become second nature will, over time, make the interdiction process automatic. Power statements blow up negative mental chatter and allow your mind to still itself and await its next set of instructions.

The last step is to maintain your positive mental state over long periods of time with a jingle or mantra. The jingle (aka mantra) is a song, rhyme, or saying that is positively charged and has a strong meaning to you. The jingle is like background music that keeps negativity at bay by engaging your conscious mind in its positive words, images, feelings, and meaning. I must reiterate that these coded messages must be charged with meaning beyond their simple words. For example, the jingle “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” was coined by the French doctor Émile Coué. This man was a hundred years before his time and was able to heal his patients by having them change negative thinking and emotional states. They changed to positive by saying and believing that one statement. I use it daily myself, along with a couple others. When the going gets tough, I revert to the one I used exclusively during SEAL training: “Feeling good, looking good, ought to be in Hollywood.” To this day that jingle kicks in the moment I start suffering in a workout or when any

serious challenge crops up in my life.

My recommendation is to settle into your silence practice (Fish Bowl) for a few weeks and then implement the four-step process of Witness, Interdict, Redirect, and Maintain to starve fear and feed courage in your life.

The ultimate goal was, and remains, to become the best possible version of you

possible.

After one of our Zen trainings, Kaicho gave a lecture titled “One Day, One Life.” He explained that a warrior experiences a lifetime in a single day. You see, the warrior doesn’t take anything for granted. He or she lives on the razor’s edge of experience as if each day were potentially the last. Each moment is lived as if one’s hair is on fire—with a fullness and purpose. He or she avoids getting caught up in the dramas of life, preferring to avoid regrets and desires by keeping things simple and practical. In order to experience one life in one day

the warrior trains his body, mind, and spirit to be at the ready.

I was very moved by the lecture and thought deeply about it over the next few weeks. What would I be like if life had a deep purpose beyond career or job? How motivating that would be to wake up every day with that hair-on-fire passion to fulfill a deep purpose! This awakening allowed me to finally drop the old beliefs about work, the corporate ladder, and success and to accept a whole new philosophy of life.

The Physical Mountain: methodically developing the ability to use your body fully and functionally. This builds confidence and self-esteem and makes you more useful in life and to your team.

skills of strength, stamina, work capacity, endurance, and durability, as well as properly fueling the body, sleep, and recovery. The Mental Mountain: cultivating mental control for a positive contribution to the world, the mental toughness to stay in the fight, and the creativity for more potent work. This includes learning to tap into and rewire subconscious programming and to master the skills, knowledge, and expertise necessary to your personal or professional calling. The Emotional Mountain: understanding, harnessing, and controlling your vast emotional power, transmuting negative emotional baggage into powerful drivers, and forging resiliency in the face of great challenges. The Intuition (and Awareness) Mountain: becoming an aware and intuitive leader by learning to look within and develop your sixth sense, to listen with your belly, and get sheepdog strong.

you obviously have a choice to be in control of your life. How you use your mind, body, emotions, and intuition and connect with your spirit is a choice. Do you leave it to chance, letting the preconditioning of life write your script, or do you take control and write your own best seller? The answer is clear.

disciplines are like railroad tracks for your life: they keep you on track while directing the way forward.

Remain content with where you are while executing a simple strategy for getting to where you want to go.

Training must be planned and purposeful and approached with a “crawl, walk, run” methodology. Dedication is required to show up and put out every day.

Living with integrity begins with mental control and directing your thoughts toward positive, powerful intentions. Then you work to align your words and deeds with those thoughts.

Self-respect is developed by forgiving oneself and letting go of all regret.

Mental toughness is a choice. First you must choose to control your mind and turn it toward

success, and then the skills for mental toughness can be honed.

Stress kills mental toughness, so it must be understood, harnessed, and directed into a positive force. Breathing and concentration are the best-kept secrets for establishing the conditions for mental toughness. A simple drill I use and call Box Breathing utilizes both and will change your life if you use it daily (more on Box Breathing later).

Most of what we consider mental toughness is actually emotional resiliency. Learn to be emotionally resilient, and you will be mentally tough.

As you learn to control your mind, life opens up to choice rather than being buffeted by the winds of chance and fate. Prior to your mentally controlled life, things seemed to happen to you. Life was random, and you often felt out of control, because you were, and it was. Now that you are learning how to control your mind, you are back in the driver’s seat. You will be able to create exactly what you desire and avoid what you need to. You are writing the script of your own masterpiece…your life.

stress and success are defined by choice,

Since stress is so often cited as the cause for poor health, breakdowns, and lack of success, it makes sense that we seek to understand what stress really is and why it’s a myth that stress is your problem. It is that belief that is really the problem.

Step 1 is to witness the adverse stressor as it impacts you and begins to affect your psychology and physiology. Step 2 is to interdict the response to the stress and then redirect your psychology and physiology to counter the impact of the stress and transmute it to positive performance. Step 3 is to use breathing and concentration techniques to maintain performance and eliminate the stress from your mind, body, and life. With this process you take back control and move from stress to success!

There are a million courses out there that propose to eliminate financial stress, work stress, relationship stress, everything stress. Good luck with that…it is like peeing into the wind; it doesn’t work very well. Everyone faces a massive amount of stress every day, but he who manages it well wins.

The story that stress is bad is not a good one. Stress is stress; how we learn to respond to stress and use it to grow is the better story.

Through my own training and by helping thousands of special operations candidates, I have found that stress is easily managed through breathing and concentration tools.

Deep, long, unbroken, and inspired concentration is a hallmark skill of super-successful people. Yet the only way to improve concentration is by practicing concentration.

The guided visualization drills introduced in the first chapter are concentration practices, as is the basic Zen practice.

Any endeavor where you take dedicated time to focus on a very narrow range of things, or just one thing, can be classified as concentration practice.

Most of what passes for meditation in the West today is actually a concentration practice.

The concentration practices that I use include Box Breathing, yoga, Qigong, and mind games.

Concentration training requires daily effort.

Here it is: Begin to inhale deeply through the nose. On each inhale, fill the belly up with your breath and expand the belly with air like a balloon. Then on the exhale, expel all the air out from the belly through your nose. Draw the navel back toward your spine to make sure that the belly is empty of air. Repeat this for three to five cycles. On the next inhale, fill the belly up with air as in step one, but when the belly is “full,” draw in more breath with your diaphragm into the ribcage, causing the ribs to widen. On the exhale, let the air go first from the ribcage, letting the ribs slide closer together, and then from the belly. Stay with this for three to five cycles. Finally, fill up the belly and ribcage as described above, and then draw in even more air into the upper chest, all the way up to the collarbone. You will note your upper chest rising and expanding. On the exhale, let the breath go first from the upper chest, then from the ribcage, and then from the belly. You will feel a relaxing, settling feeling as you release the pressure. This three-part breath focuses you on the three areas to be filled with air and then released in sequence.

It is called Box Breathing and it is simply adding a hold at the end of each inhale and exhale. Start by exhaling all of the air from the lungs. Now inhale to a count of five, and then hold your breath to a count of five. Next, exhale to a count of five, and hold the exhaled breath for a count of five. For a profound impact, recite a powerful jingle/mantra on each hold, such as “getting better and better, stronger and unfettered.”

The first attitude is to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is the emotional state of feeling

worthy and respected by others.

can come from childhood abandonment, volatile environments where your voice is not heard, or outright abuse. If these attributes exist in your consciousness, then it is imperative that you get some therapeutic help and go deep into the silence practices to taste the underlying goodness inside of you.

“first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5)

we easily see the shortcomings of other people’s beliefs and behaviors while remaining ignorant of our own limitations, which are equal or worse.

As James Allen’s quote suggests, you can’t hide from your own beliefs. What you believe in colors every thought you have and action you take…and the very person you become. Likes and dislikes, opinions of other people, career choices, and even the food you eat are all a by-product of your beliefs.

But when is the last time you examined and challenged the very beliefs you hold dear in your life?

Socrates made this comment long ago: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” But what does it mean to examine a life? I think it is clear that he meant to examine your beliefs before a train wreck

forces you to. Really, does it make sense to go through life assuming that all the ideas that we have ingested are unassailable?

The confluence of your beliefs, values, expectations, and level of consciousness forms the foundation for your overall belief in yourself as a

person.

The law of cause and effect: this law states that for every cause there is an effect. It is also known in the East as karma. Your resource is to study Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

The law of abundance: this law states that the world has enough for everyone who abides by this law. Your primary resource for this law is the Bible.

The law of winning in your mind first, before acting: this law says that you will achieve victory every time if you first see it, say it, and believe it in your mind. Your primary resources for this law are Unbeatable Mind and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

The law of receiving: that you receive in proportion to the value you deliver in life. Your primary resources are to study Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your primary resource is the New Testaments of Jesus.

The law of surrender: this law states that instead of pushing against the tide, surrender to it, and you will find enlightenment and peace. Your primary resources for this law are to study Buddha and the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

The law of forgiveness: this law says that if you forgive yourself and others, you will release negativity and find happiness. Your resource is to study the life of Nelson Mandela.

The law of nonattachment: this law says to let go of attachment to material things, your ideas, and ultimately to life itself for lasting contentment. The resource is to study the writings of the Dalai Lama.

The law of nonresistance: this law is similar to nonattachment, but it specifically applies to nonviolence. Fighting violence with violence should be a last resort and only done in self-defense. Your resources are to study the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The law of focus: this law says that what you focus on with intensity and duration will come to pass. Your resources for this law are Unbeatable Mind and Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich

laws. I propose three awareness practices, which I provide a brief description of below. It is left to you to investigate each and integrate into your training as you see fit. Insight meditation Contemplation Recapitulation

Insight meditation has you select an internal aspect of yourselves to meditate upon, such as an emotion, a particular belief, or a sticky thought pattern. Rather than obsessing about a detail of your life with your cognitive “monkey mind,” (more on that in the next chapter), with insight meditation you will call your attention to the issue and just let your awareness rest on it, trying to penetrate deeper and deeper into the object of your attention. Don’t try to actively think about it; rather, just observe it and note what comes up. What comes up will be insight about the issue that you hadn’t considered before.

Contemplation is a more active process than insight meditation. With this practice you will choose a subject (such as a belief) or an object (such as a Bible verse or Rumi poem) and think deeply about the meaning. Contrast your actions, integrity, and standards with the object of your contemplation, and reflect upon how we can move in the direction suggested or the direction that your witness knows to be best. This can be very motivating and lead to a strong desire to grow toward the ideal.

Finally, recapitulation is an incredibly powerful tool to uncover and eradicate BOO. The process of recapitulation is to go back to review your life at moments where you think and feel you got stuck.

Journaling is an excellent tool to complement these drills. When you journal thoughts, ideas, fears, desires, and other things that come up in insight meditation, contemplation, and recapitulation, you will observe patterns in your thinking. Those patterns point to the very habits of thoughts and behavior that you are seeking to understand and perhaps change.

Who am I and what am I here for? What is the One Thing I am supposed to accomplish in my life, and what does that mean for me right now? That is, what is today’s One Thing connected to my big One Thing? What is my Purpose? How do I take my One Thing and activate it in the world? What am I Passionate about and how can I do more of that? What do I value, and how can I develop these Principles so they define my character for the rest of my life? Mastery over the self is somewhat difficult if you don’t have clarity on these questions. The answer to these questions is what gives you

direction in life. If you don’t know yourself, what are you are supposed to do besides just get by?

One of the finest ways to cultivate insight to your One Thing and Three Ps is the aforementioned insight meditation, contemplation, and journaling. You will start by asking deeply personal questions in layers. This is likened to cleaning layers of dust off a mirror in your mind to reveal the real image beneath. Looking inward and writing down what comes up in a free-flowing manner gets you into an ideal state for the intuitive and creative aspects of your mind to be heard.

These are good layered questions to reflect upon and journal about: Your Passion: What are you passionate about in a way that defines who you are? What make you feel as if your hair is on fire (besides a fire)? What unique skills or talents do you have that you love to use and that make you feel different? If you won the lottery today, what would you do differently? Your Principles: What is it that you truly value in your life? How can you move toward those things you truly value and away from the things you don’t value as much? What do these values say about what you are passionate about? Do these values point to an overarching purpose in life? Can you make a habit of the big, positive values so they become part of your character and then your destiny?

Your One Thing and Purpose: What have you been conditioned to think you are supposed to do with your life? What do you think you are really supposed to do with your life? What do you feel you are really supposed to do with your life? Is there a tiny voice of doubt deep within you suggesting you are on the wrong track? Is that same voice nudging you forward with the sensation that you are on the right track? What One Thing do you think you are here for? What One Thing would you focus on if you had nothing holding you back? What would you do differently if you knew you had one year to live? Write your epitaph from the perspective of having fulfilled your One Thing and lived your purpose in life.

Don’t blow off the obituary exercise; it is very powerful. The assignment is to write the obituary as you want to be remembered, not as you are now.

The person writing the obituary “knew” the major impact you had on others and the world, as well as all the good things about you. This may be uncomfortable at first, but focusing on your legacy can be very enlightening. It will expose the gap between where you are now and where you can be at the end of your life…if you align with your One Thing and Three Ps. Once you can clearly articulate your One Thing and Three Ps, write them down someplace where you can review them daily (mine are in my smartphone notepad).

If you want some self-defense training, I recommend Krav Maga or attending our three-week SEALFIT Academy.

In the SEALs we used a number of these, including the OODA loop, the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP), the CARVER target evaluation process, and the SMEAC mission planning process.

SMART-FITS goals are precisely and positively stated and possess attributes for effective execution. First, they are specific and detailed rather than vague. Part of the detail is that they are measurable and it is easy to determine your progress. In addition, they are assessed as achievable, which is first assessed when you determined that the goal fit you. Achievability speaks to your skills and available resources. Next the goal must be realistic, such that you can achieve it within the timeline proposed without causing a debilitating failure in another mission or follow-on mission. Finally, as stated already, the goal must have a time for achievement boundary. A goal time frame that is too short or too long can set be a setup for failure.

Begin writing them down in a list, and then establish dates for knocking them down. Use the SMEAC or PROP method to plan your mission. Then review your progress on a schedule that is suitable for you. I like to do it daily and recommend you do it weekly at a minimum.

The big four are: Properly set goals Arousal control through deep warrior breathing (four-count inhale and exhale) Attention control through positive self-talk Visualization

During SEAL Hell Week I didn’t set my sights on becoming a Navy SEAL or getting the trident. Rather, I set my sights on getting through the next few hours. At night my goal was to see the sun rise. The nights were long, cold, and demoralizing. Most people quit in the dead of the night, but the rising sun was such an inspiration, and it literally warmed our bodies and spirits. Such a simple rule, “never quit at night,” would have saved many BUD/S dropouts from themselves. During the day I made it a goal to get to the next meal. Then if the shit really hit the fan, it was to just get through that evolution so I could recover. I learned that this process allowed me to eat an elephant one bite at a time! I call this tool the micro-goal process, whereby your goals collapsed to very short-time-frame achievable goals, allowing you to create a

series of short-term victories. Micro-goals keep you focused and present, while allowing you to develop confidence and momentum.

A final note: Effective goal setting facilitates new strategies for learning and development. If your strategy includes a daily goal review during your morning ritual and a progress recapitulation during your evening ritual, there’s a high degree of likelihood that you’ll remain focused and persistent

until you achieve it. The daily review process allows for modification and shifting fire as the realities of the daily drive impact the timing and realism of the goal.

Visualization is the creation or re-creation of an external experience in your mind.

Coach Benson had me swim the two-hundred-meter breaststroke in my mind with a stopwatch before bed at night.

There are two major forms of the practice of visualization. Mental projection is visualizing a personal future state or victory. Visualized images create energy around a desired future experience before you experience it “for real.” I call this type of visualization a Future Me visualization because you are envisioning a future “ideal” version of yourself. Earning the SEAL trident is an example of a “future me” visualization. Achieving a major milestone with a new business venture is another example. In either case you create the event in your mind well before it happens. The visualized event is then charged with emotions and vivid colors, sounds, smell, and tastes. You will reinforce those visual images through repeated practice sessions. This process plants a powerful seed in your subconscious mind of the potential energy for the event. Then as you work on the goal, your subconscious mind goes about supporting you with the resources necessary to nurture the event to its fruition. In a sense you could say that visualization rewires the System 1 brain to align with your goals.

The second form of visualization is a Mental Rehearsal, whereby you practice a skill or prepare for an event in your mind. A SEAL platoon will “dirt dive” a mission to set the patterns for winning in the mind prior to executing it for real. The SEAL operator will walk through a dive profile on dry land while visualizing every detail. In this manner he performs all the major elements of the dive before ever getting wet. This was an important part of my mission prep when I was at SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1. The mini-sub dives were often six to ten hours in duration replete with complicated navigation patterns. Dirt diving the missions prior to launch proved crucial during the mission when fatigue and Murphy’s Law reared their heads. The mental rehearsal implanted the route in both conscious and subconscious minds and provided a memory aid as well as subtle physiological cues. Additionally, it helped identify potential challenges before the mission hit the reality of the deep face-to-face. Both forms of visualization can be performed from the first person or third person perspective. What I mean by this is that they can be imaged from your subjective frame as if you had a helmet camera on, or imaged from your objective frame as if watching yourself in a movie. Either method is effective; however, most people start with the objective frame and then migrate to the subjective frame as they gain experience.

First, it leads to improved concentration in that the practice of

visualization requires you to develop greater powers of concentration due to the effort required to construct and maintain the visual imagery.

research has proven that effortlessly throwing a basketball into a hoop visually leads to the same performance gains as doing it for real.

Identify the space between a thought or emotion and the reaction. As you witness negativity, interdict it (cancel out negative thought patterns), and then redirect the mind toward one of the positive patterns noted above. Interdiction is done with a power statement that will interrupt the negative thoughts and energy. Once the negative thought pattern has been successfully interdicted, it is maintained with your jingle/mantra, such as “looking good, feeling good, oughta be in Hollywood!”

The SEALs have a class titled “The Big Four of Mental Toughness.” The four skills that they cover we have now discussed in detail. I will quickly review them, and include a graphic for reference: Arousal Control: using deep breathing to manage stress and the arousal response (fight, flight or freeze). Attention Control: learning to control your mind and maintain a positive attitude through positive self-dialogue. Visualization: using mental imagery to ensure that your emotional and mental “picture” is mission focused and aimed toward victory. Goal Setting: learning to set proper goals, and scaling them to micro-goals when the going gets tough.