Mark Divine's Blog, page 48

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How to Manage & Control Your Emotions

Principally we are speaking about depth of character when we speak of emotional development.  As we train our minds to be still, and thus more perceptive and aware we notice that our bodies “speak” to us as well.  Our bodies are giant energy producers and storehouses.  The energy we store is often emotional “baggage” that ideally should not be stored at all.

How often have you cleaned your garage and thrown away junk that you were certain you would need “someday?”  Of course, this day never comes.  With energy stored as emotional baggage, however, the day comes when this energy haunts us in the way of fear, anger, timidity, jealousy, rage, a scarcity mentality and other negative beliefs and automatic responses.

Clearly these emotions and the belief systems that they prop up are not supportive of our journey toward self-mastery and the life of a true warrior.  As stillness of mind develops depth of thought and sincerity, so stillness of emotions forges depth of character.

Think of a stream, where it is shallow the water is choppy and turbulent, like our “monkey minds.”  Yet, in places where the water is deep, there is stillness and calm.  The master warrior exemplifies this stillness of mind and body.  Hence the saying “still water runs deep.”  In practical terms this means we have stilled our minds and emotions, hence have cultivated the ability to separate ourselves from both internal and external distraction.

What Does it Mean to Be Emotionally In-Control?

Consider how often we observe someone “losing their cool.”  Who is the loser in the following situation?

Subject A has a brief road rage incident and drives subject B off the road.  Subject B responds by flipping-off subject A then spends the rest of the day re-living the event at work and home, getting worked up each time.  Meanwhile Subject A goes his merry way and forgets the whole thing.  I would say that B, the victim, got the short end of this stick, wouldn’t you?  Lack of emotional control can literally ruin your day, and take a swath of other people with you.  A sad state of affairs, indeed.

The Importance of Emotional Control

Consider the life of Viktor Frankl as portrayed in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, where he discusses his imprisonment in Auschwitz during World War II.  He had everything taken from him – his family, his wealth, his health – yet he managed to find peace and happiness.  How did he do this?  By developing emotional control and practicing non-attachment.

Mr. Frankl was able to distill his “story” to the fact that the only thing that can’t be taken from him was his will to live, and with a strong will, you can have happiness even in the direst of circumstances.  His story is a testament to the fact that truly we run our own “Internal Affairs” departments.

In working toward self-mastery, emotional control is also a pre-requisite for authentic leadership.  Even if we don’t see ourselves as a leader, the more we develop in the Five Mountains, the more others will look to us for guidance and leadership.  So if we are prey to stored negative emotions when someone pushes our buttons, we will fail in our ability to focus clearly on the situation, to listen with our whole being, and to respond powerfully.

 

 

 

How To Develop Emotional Control

So, how can we develop emotional control? It is one of the more difficult challenges we face in training because the “shadow” side of ourselves is often deeply buried in our psyche. Like the soft underbelly of our lives, it is difficult to shed light upon. Regardless, uncovering buried emotional baggage is often all that is needed to release it.

It is critical to pay attention to this aspect of your being if you are to be a true warrior and live a purpose filled life. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject of developing emotional control and deepening your character:

Authentic Listening

The first and perhaps most effective skill to develop for emotional control is Authentic Listening. So often, we take listening for granted and do not pay much attention to it as a skill we need to develop. But have you paid attention to how well you listen?

Do you passively listen, while your mind wanders onto other things, such as a prepared response or other issues entirely? How often are we judging the speaker and consciously parsing and categorizing the information coming into our ears, without authentically listening to what they are trying to convey?

Ask yourself how well you just listen? Is it from the surface with little awareness, or from the depth of your entire being, with your ears, heart and soul? Be honest! If you ponder these questions seriously, you will find that most of us have missed the boat on this one and get a “D” for listening class.

Authentic listening is listening with your whole being in PRESENT MOMENT AWARENESS. This type of listening necessitates that the mind is not running off on some fantasy or internal dialogue. It also requires that our emotions are in check and not responding to the speaker’s words with the shadow self of stored emotions.

The magnitude of this task can be daunting. Try it and you will see what I mean. The first step is to pay attention to how little we actually listen, then work on staying aware and grounded in every communication. The very act of improving our listening will dramatically improve our overall ability to communicate – suddenly we are a “master communicator” in the eyes (or ears) of our team. It also requires awareness of the rising and falling of emotions triggered by the communication, which puts us back in the emotional driver’s seat.

Try this with your spouse or significant other if you want some immediate, and very positive, feedback!

Body Movement

The second tool I recommend in developing emotional control is a form of Body Movement. Moving in a manner that links your breathing, concentration and “flows” your energy is enormously useful for developing emotional depth. Yoga is a fabulous practice of this nature, as is Qui Gong, Tai Chi and many other internal martial arts practices. These practices, by their nature, are “integrated” training of the mind, body and warrior spirit.

At SEALFIT we train using a form of Yoga I developed called Warrior Yoga. The balance it brings to the hard core functional training is enormous, and it is the linchpin of our 4th mountain of training. Warrior Yoga is a blend of flowing yoga poses, qui-gong energy movement, meditation, concentration, breath control and functional fitness. I have personally witnessed trainees transform through this practice in combination with our other awareness training tools.

It is not uncommon to strike an emotional storage bank doing Warrior Yoga and release the energy for major breakthroughs. The release can be immediate and the practitioner is caught off-guard, often completely unaware that the stored emotion was there to begin with.

Structured Therapy

Last but not least, Structured Therapy is a powerful process for clearing emotional baggage. Many of us have a jaded view of therapy and think it is for the weak of mind, or those who can’t “GUT IT OUT” through difficult situations. Not true.

Not only does it take a lot of courage to approach therapy, but my experience has shown that it is the mentally tough who do so. Therapy is a terrific way to get professional support to shed light on your “shadow self.” It is a more direct approach than authentic communication and yoga, but it takes time and some money. Combine all three of these tools and you will accelerate your growth tremendously.

Like the proverbial monster that disappears when the light is turned on, negative stored emotions can be flushed out simply by shining the light of awareness on them. Therapy is preventative maintenance or “plumbing” to root out emotional blockages that can hinder your emotional intelligence and development.

Warrior Yoga is taking the physical approach to literally move you closer to the source of the problem, then allowing the movement and concentration to root it out. Finally, authentic listening with your whole being will instill a sense of silence in your body which will allow you to penetrate the emotional self with the light of your own awareness.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 10/28/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: For Time:

100x Man Makers (40/30)
1 Mile Run
100x Burpee Pull up
1 Mile Run

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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How SEALFIT Trains the Pull Up

In the last video one of our SEALFIT Coaches mentions the Pull Up as one of the skills that is vital at BUD/s. This video will give you an in depth breakdown of how we train the Pull Up and some potential programming to improve your Pull Up strength.

If you are a seasoned athlete looking for solid training or a crucible to test yourself check out both SEALFIT Online and our Kokoro Camp.

https://sealfit.com/online-elite-plus/

https://sealfit.com/kokoro/

If you are finding us for the first time and are looking for a place to begin, check out SEALFIT Bootcamp or the 3 Day SEALFIT Academy.

https://training.sealfitonline.com/op...

https://sealfit.com/sealfit-academy/

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Is It Time to Overhaul Your Diet?

Overhauling your diet is not an easy task—the availability of cheap food and the ingredients used to make that food make it tough. Consider the statistics that shed light on the uphill battle: some 45 million Americans each year try a diet, spending an estimated $33 billion on weight loss products.

So in winning the war in your mind first, it’s critical to have a visceral grasp on your why.

Why Would You Want to Overhaul Your Diet in the First Place?

Here are the core reasons why it would be worth your time overhauling your diet.

Improve Your Body Composition

Improving body composition means either shredding off unwanted body fat or it means increasing lean muscle mass. Or both.

Improving body composition drives a large part of the fitness magazine industry. Editors put models with great abs on the cover because they know it boosts how many magazines they’ll sell. The primary interest here, obviously, is the “I want to look good in bed” interest. Or look good in a way to attract potential mates. Hey—there’s nothing wrong with this. Evolutionary biologists will be happy to explain to you how all-powerful the drive to procreate is.

Reducing the Risk of Disease

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute reports that too much body fat can cause or contribute to the following severe health problems: Heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, type-2 diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, infertility. A person who is overweight, with the chronic cellular inflammation that is associated with metabolic problems, can decrease these risks in tremendous ways. In other words, everything your grandmother told you about why eating well can make you healthy is basically true. I’m not telling you anything new here.

Genes—the hand of cards you were born with—are the keyboard that your diet plays upon. Some folks can eat a bad diet and smoke a pack of cigarettes every day until their 90. Others who follow the same routine might have a heart attack at 38. You can get a decent idea of where things stack up for you by looking up your family history.

Founder of the Zone Diet, Dr. Barry Sears, was motivated to apply his biochemistry and medical training toward figuring out this interplay because his father and uncles died from heart disease, all around the age of 50. “I knew I was a ticking time bomb,” he says. Sears ultimately embarked on a journey to try to repress the heart-disease genes he was born with by eating a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet. It’s working so far: Sears is now 70 years-old.

Fitness and Athletic Performance

Generally speaking, athletic superstars are athletic superstars not because of what they eat but the genes they were born with. Training is a help, and so is good coaching and other factors. Only in recent years have top athletes in major sports been working with nutritionists in droves. There may be a lot of reasons why this is so, but surely one of them is that some athletes have dismissed the need to worry about diet as long as they exercise a lot.

The question that we really want to drill into is this: Can nutritional dieting be used to improve physical performance? The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes. Research is now clearly showing that by eating a diet that takes it easy on your insulin system, you can, over time, transfer a sugar-burning metabolism into a fat-burning metabolism—allowing you to access stores of body fat for fuel rather than being restricted to the limited supplies of liver and muscle glycogen.

Energy

Do you have a problem with energy and mood throughout any given day? Waking up tired, going to bed exhausted, and just grinding through the day?

If you do, know this: It doesn’t have to be that way. By overhauling your diet, resetting your metabolism and building in a sustainable approach to food, you can look forward to waking up refreshed and full of energy—an energy that stays high throughout the day, until you start to wind down for a night of good, replenishing sleep.

Cognitive Performance

People tend to think of Navy SEALs as physical studs capable of incredible acts of stamina, endurance, and all-around athletic prowess. They would be right. But the work also requires superior levels of cognitive performance—even when it’s pitch black out, 0300 hours and you’ve been going all-out for hours or days. (Attend one of our SEALFIT Academies or camps, and you’ll notice how much emphasis we put on mental acuity and high-performance thinking in stressful situations).

Poor nutrition practices can sap brain cells of the nutrients needed to perform routine mental functions, like making good decisions and committing things to memory. Good nutrition, on the other hand, can have you humming along at high-speed even late in the afternoon after a long, challenging schedule of work.

Emotional Resilience

Emotional resilience is the heart of mental toughness. In our Unbeatable Mind Academy, we teach a process for changing mental habits so that dark thoughts and emotions don’t pull you under water into the jaws of the Fear Wolf. By interdicting these thoughts and feelings through a process of awareness and redirection, we learn how to transmute the energy of these feelings from a negative to a positive.

There’s a lot of biology involved here as well and food is a major player. When things get tough, if blood glucose is low and you don’t have the metabolic machinery to access alternative fuel sources, a negative, self-defeating thought can trigger your brain to start shutting things down. Perceived exertion goes way up, thanks to this action by the brain, and everything feels a lot harder.

The option of quitting begins to look good, as you weaken physically, mentally and emotionally. While there are ways to override these forces through training, if your nutrition was optimal—you will have a lot more psychological staying power in the bank to draw upon.

These are the major reasons why you might be inspired to do the work to replace a scattershot, junky diet with a high-test, sustainable nutrition program. So, what is your why? What’s most important to you on that list?

There is no one perfect nutrition plan that suits everyone, so if you want to perform at your peak you need to use your own body-mind as a test lab. I hope you take your fueling to another level and we stand by to help. In the meantime, train hard, stay focused and eat for performance, not just pleasure!

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Weekly Monster Mash – 10/21/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP and box breathing, then ROM Drills.

Work Capacity: 60:00 AMRAP: *Teams of 2:

400m Buddy Carry (200m per partner)
8x Rope Climb
80x Box Step up
20x Tire Flip
30x Burpee

*Partners may split up reps however needed. One partner working at a time.

Durability: Hydrate and fuel within 30 minutes. Journal post training session SOP.

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Tips for Developing an Unbeatable Spirit

Developing an unbeatable spirit is the holy grail of our training.  I often tell our Academy classes that the 5th Mountain encompasses training in all of the previous four Mountains: physical, mental, emotional, and intuitive.  We can not easily separate the training of the mind, body and spirit into nice little chunks and say, “I am now working the body…tomorrow I work the spirit.”

The unbeatable spirit is developed through life experiences and through crucible experiences, like surviving cancer, Hell Week, and Kokoro Camp.  

It is also developed through the sum total of our daily work in the other four mountains.

How to Develop an Unbeatable Spirit

Though it is very difficult to carve out unbeatable spirit and train it separately, there are some ways that we can cultivate it.

Total Presence

The first is by practicing TOTAL PRESENCE – being 100% here, now.

The future and the past do not exist in the present.  The past is a memory and the future is a notion. Simply by collapsing our time to the present, we eliminate uncertainty and analysis paralysis.  We empower our unbeatable spirit.  Sounds simple, but alas, not easy at all.  Three tools we utilize to keep our minds focused on the NOW are: counting our breath, reciting a positive and powerful mantra (mine when I run is “feeling good, looking good, ought-a be in Hollywood!”), and practicing “wide-angle vision.”  All of these will be discussed in more detail in a future post.

Eliminate Fear

Next we seek to Eliminate FEAR.

Fear exists in the gap between what we know to be true, and what we know we don’t know to be true.  The wider the gap, the larger our fear. We must seek to narrow, and then eliminate the gap between the known and unknown by narrowing our focus to the present (thus eliminating the possibility for the gap in the first place). We must also seek to close the gap by “closing our openings.” To close our openings means to overcome weaknesses that can open us up to critical failures.  We don’t need to master everything in life, just the important things. This is why we teach Combat Defense and an Offensive Mind as part of our 5th Mountain training.  We want to be certain that if our life or the lives of our loved ones are in danger, we can deal with the threat. Thus we do not walk in fear of loss of life or limb.

Non-attachment is another way to eliminate the gap.  Having no attachments in life is the ultimate goal of many Eastern spiritual traditions.  Practicing non-attachment with your physical belongings is a great way to start. If you are not attached to loss, then you need not fear it.

Hyper Focus

The third practice is Hyper-Focus.

Hyper Focus is focus to the exclusion of everything else.  Once focused on an action, or goal, you place all of your emotional, cognitive, subconscious and action energy toward achieving that goal. There are no compromises.  There is no quit.  Using your eyes as a “laser beam” to focus, also called “spirit eyes” among certain eastern martial arts, is how we stay hyper-focused.  It also requires us to de-clutter our minds and environments, and be very selective of what we allow in.  Again, simple but not easy.

Total Commitment

Finally and closely related to intense focus is Total Commitment!  This practice (a warrior virtue) draws upon our values of discipline and courage and extends to both task and team.

Worthy pursuits are heady pursuits for the warrior.  They are not taken on lightly with an air of “maybe!”  I have seen many SEAL candidates fail on “maybe.”  No, we will carefully lay the groundwork for success, and embark on the final journey to our worthy goals only after careful consideration and study.  However, once the decision is made and the line crossed, you will have entered into the realm of total commitment to task and team – one that allows no room to even think about the quit or hesitate about the right action.  There is no turning back.

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Weekly Monster Mash – 10/14/2017

Baseline: Pre-SOP, Box Breathing, then ROM drill. 5 minutes: 10x Goblet Squat, rest in the bottom of the squat for the remainder of the minute, perform 5 rounds with no rest.

Work Capacity: 3 Rounds For Time with a swim buddy:

2 mile run
400m lunge
500m Swim

Durability: 5 minute plank, stretch, rehydrate, refuel.

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3 Things you can do to Get Ready for SEAL Training

It is pretty common knowledge that you have to be very fit and mentally strong to succeed in Navy SEAL training. In this video, however, are 3 unique suggestions to give you a greater chance at succeeding through BUD/s.

If you are a civilian or potential SOF Candidate be sure and check out our SEALFIT Crucible Events to get an insiders view on how you can thrive in a chaotic and unpredictable environment.

Also check out shop.navyseals.com for gear mentioned in this video.

Bonus: See if you cans spot which BUD/s student in the background is Mark Divine.

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“What starts here changes the world.”

10 Lessons From Basic SEAL Training That Apply to Anyone

I have been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. But it all began when I left UT for Basic SEAL training in Coronado, Calif.

Basic SEAL training is six months of long, torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacle courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.

It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure and hardships. To me basic SEAL training was a lifetime of challenges crammed into six months.

10 Lifelong Lessons I Took Away From SEAL Training That Can Help You

So, here are lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.

Do The Little Things Right

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we’re aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

During SEAL training the students are broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven students—three on each side of a small rubber boat and one coxswain to help guide the dingy. Every day, your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surfzone and paddle several miles down the coast.

In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be 8 to 10 feet high and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in. Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously tossed back on the beach.

For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.

You can’t change the world alone—you will need some help—and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide them.

If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

Measure People By the Size of Their Heart

Over a few weeks of difficult training my SEAL class, which started with 150 men, was down to just 42. There were now six boat crews of seven men each.

I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of the little guys—the munchkin crew we called them. No one was over about 5-foot-5.

The munchkin boat crew had one American Indian, one African-American, one Polish-American, one Greek-American, one Italian-American and two tough kids from the Midwest.

They out-paddled, out-ran and out-swam all the other boat crews.

The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the nation and the world, always had the last laugh—swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.

SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.

If you want to change the world, measure people by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

Keep Moving Forward… No Matter What

Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was exceptionally thorough. Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed and your belt buckle shiny and void of any smudges.

But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat, or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle, it just wasn’t good enough. The instructors would find “something” wrong.

For failing the uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed, into the surfzone and then, wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered with sand. The effect was known as a “sugar cookie.” You stayed in that uniform the rest of the day—cold, wet and sandy.

There were many students who just couldn’t accept the fact that all their effort was in vain. That no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right, it was unappreciated.

Those students didn’t make it through training. Those students didn’t understand the purpose of the drill. You were never going to succeed. You were never going to have a perfect uniform.

Sometimes, no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.

If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.

Embrace Failure

Every day during training you were challenged with multiple physical events. Long runs, long swims, obstacle courses, hours of calisthenics—something designed to test your mettle.

Every event had standards, times that you had to meet. If you failed to meet those standards, your name was posted on a list and at the end of the day those on the list were invited to a “circus.”

A circus was two hours of additional calisthenics designed to wear you down, to break your spirit, to force you to quit. No one wanted a circus. A circus meant that for that day you didn’t measure up. A circus meant more fatigue, and more fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult—and more circuses were likely.

But at some time during SEAL training, everyone—everyone—made the circus list. Yet an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list. Over time those students, who did two hours of extra calisthenics, got stronger and stronger. The pain of the circuses built inner strength—built physical resiliency.

Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core.

But if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained 25 obstacles including a 10-foot-high wall, a 30-foot cargo net and a barbed-wire crawl, to name a few.

But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life. It had a three-level, 30-foot tower at one end and a one-level tower at the other. In between was a 200-foot-long rope.

You had to climb the three-tiered tower and, once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end.

The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began training in 1977. The record seemed unbeatable until one day a student decided to go down the slide for life—head-first. Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the top of the rope and thrust himself forward.

It was a dangerous move—seemingly foolish, and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the training. Without hesitation, the student slid down the rope, perilously fast. Instead of several minutes, it only took him half that time and by the end of the course he had broken the record.

If you want to change the world sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head-first.

Don’t Back Down

During the land-warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island near San Diego. The waters off San Clemente are a breeding ground for great white sharks. To pass SEAL training, there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One is the night swim.

Before the swim, the instructors joyfully brief the trainees on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente. The instructors assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark—at least not recently.

But, you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid. And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you, then summon up all your strength and punch him in the snout and he will turn and swim away.

There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim you will have to deal with them.

So, if you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.

Be Your Best Self in Your Darkest Moments

As Navy SEALs, one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practiced this technique extensively during basic training. The ship-attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then swims well over 2 miles—underwater—using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to their target.

During the entire swim, even well below the surface, there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you. But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade. The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight, it blocks the surrounding street lamps, it blocks all ambient light.

To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel—the centerline and the deepest part of the ship. This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship, where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening and where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.

Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the time when you must be calm, composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Hope

The ninth week of SEAL training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment and one special day at the Mud Flats. The Mud Flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana slues—a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing-cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure from the instructors to quit.

As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some “egregious infraction of the rules” was ordered into the mud. The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit—just five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold.

Looking around the mud flat, it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up—eight more hours of bone-chilling cold. The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything. And then, one voice began to echo through the night—one voice raised in song.

The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three, and before long everyone in the class was singing.

We knew that if one man could rise above the misery then others could as well. The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing—but the singing persisted. And somehow, the mud seemed a little warmer, the wind a little tamer and the dawn not so far away.

If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person—Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela and even a young girl from Pakistan named Malala—can change the world by giving people hope.

So, if you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

Never Give Up

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see.

All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT—and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell.

If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

It will not be easy.

But start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often, but if you take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up—if you do these things, then the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today. And what started here will indeed have changed the world, for the better.

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