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February 16 - February 17, 2025
I developed the mental calluses necessary to go to war with myself each day.
But when we find ways to harness our minds, we can defy all odds.
We also teach Carol S. Dweck’s philosophies on growth versus fixed mindset. Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton professor of psychology at Stanford University, and she is known for her work on the mindset psychological trait. She taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Illinois before joining the Stanford faculty in 2004. According to Dweck, in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience
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Each night, without fail, we closed the meeting by reciting a famous quote on the value of persistence from former President Calvin Coolidge. Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not: unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. —KENJI MIYAZAWA
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. —BUDDHIST PROVERB
Resilience presents a challenge for many psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to never experience any sort of adversity, you won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges. Do you succumb, or do you surmount?
As the Navy SEAL Ethos states, “My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies.”
Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski argues that fear, anxiety, and sadness are not always undesirable or damaging states of mind, but rather representative of the necessary pain for psychological growth. To avoid pain is basically to deny our own potential. You don’t build muscle or physical stamina without experiencing pain. But it’s the type of pain that signifies forward progress. Similarly, we can’t develop psychological resilience without experiencing emotional pain and suffering.
As the famed Marine Corps officer Chesty Puller said, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
The largest mistake people make is masking their emotions and denying their true suffering. This is counterproductive and can lead to deeper problems in the future. When each emotion comes, feel it. Your body will tell you when it’s enough. Cry, scream, and cry again—maybe not in public though (or SEAL training). Submit to the beginning of a process that will take time to complete. To feel is to be human, embrace it!
The only way to truly learn to let go is to allow time to heal you. You’ll know when you get there.
“Gleeson, we’re ready for the det cord,” our squad leader said, telling me to ready the detonation cord used to connect multiple explosive devices. “Roger that, stand by,” I replied, quickly digging into my pack. Then digging a little further. Then a bit further. Fuck! Oh shiiiiiiiit. “Gleeson hurry up, bro!” he said again. “Dude, I can’t find it. No idea what happened. I know I packed it!” I responded with a nice blend of panic and utter embarrassment. Luckily our philosophy is two is one, one is none. One of the other guys in the squad passed forward the det cord he had packed. We set the
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There was no longer a boundary to our comfort zone. Acceptance of pain was comfortable.
If knocked down, I will get back up every time.… I am never out of the fight. —NAVY SEAL ETHOS
How we view and respond to adversity is a choice.
Adversity distorts reality but crystallizes the truth.
Loss amplifies the value of what remains.
Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality, the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology, but let’s keep it simple: I’m basically talking about dwelling on the past. We should learn from it, but not dwell on it.
When we can transform our minds toward action-oriented thinking by accepting life’s sick little jokes and learning what we can along the way, awesomeness and winning are sure to follow. Just remember, winning never comes without adversity. They are joined at the hip.
Once you open up and start sharing your struggles with others you trust, you’ll always find people who have been through much worse. Use that knowledge to gain perspective.
It had been raining for three days. I had no skin left on my knees, between my legs, around my waist, in my armpits, or on the top of my head. My nipples were bloody nubs. I was covered in blisters. The severe sting of the saltwater on the open wounds was a nice touch as well. Oh, and my elbow was, of course, still fractured. One of my buddies who was in my crew actually had two broken shins—but he suffered through the extreme pain in silence so he could finish Hell Week.
It goes to show that life can be very short—why waste a second of it living misguided by a poor set of values?
One of my favorite poems is all about living a life of value, knowing your core values, and living by them every day. The poem is titled “Death Song,” and it was written by Tecumseh. Tecumseh was a Native American Shawnee warrior and chief, who became the primary leader of a large, multi-tribal confederacy in the early nineteenth century.
Resilience is not about hard work toward short-term gains, but rather maintaining the long-term grind toward an ultimate goal.
Before blowing the charges, we decide the humane thing to do is herd all of the enemy cows, goats, and llamas into a pen on the far side of the property so they don’t get incinerated.
As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Neuroscience research from Matthew Lieberman of UCLA shows how just acknowledging stress and adversity can move reactivity in your brain from the automatic and reactive centers to the more conscious and deliberate ones. For example, therapists who work with veterans suffering from PTSD use a desensitization method that gets to the root cause of the trauma, which is usually a very specific event. This allows the person to acknowledge it, see it, and eventually move past it.
SEALs are arguably the best at what we do in our given field. Yet we practice, rehearse, dirt dive, execute, and debrief constantly. Over and over. The general public might assume SEALs are constantly deployed downrange, but we actually spend 75 percent of our time training. The other 25 percent of the time we are deployed. And on deployment, when we aren’t fighting, eating, or sleeping, we’re training—living each day in a constant state of improvement.
On the literal battlefield, I ran swiftly to the sound of gunfire. In my current personal and professional life, however, I struggle with conflict avoidance. Tackling challenges and difficult conversations is critical for effective leadership. So, I make a point to practice, practice, practice. And it gets a little easier every time.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. —KAHLIL GIBRAN
The term “perception is reality” usually has a bit of a negative connotation. But it doesn’t have to. If we change our perception of adversity, imagine what could be possible.
You need to embrace your emotions more fully to experience their adaptive benefits.
Team discipline and accountability begins and ends with personal discipline and accountability and demands total engagement from each team member. The crews that win the most have members who look out for the person to their left and right more than themselves, which creates an overlapping web of high performance.
The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment.
Preparation and execution beat planning all day long. But you still have to plan.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR
