EPI 252: Retired Navy SEAL Commander & Performance Expert Rich Diviney Reveals A Revolutionary Method For Training You And Your Team To Perform At Your Best.

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today, I am very excited to have Rich Divini on the line with us. He is a retired Navy SEAL officer in a career spanning more than 20 years. He completed more than 13 overseas deployments, and we certainly do thank him for his service on that. And he has now continued to contribute to everyone. He, we first had him on the podcast a couple of years ago, actually, when he had written a book called The Attributes, 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. So if you haven't listened to that episode, highly recommend you go back to that one. And we will probably touch on some of the things there as well, because it was such an important book. And now he has a new book called Masters of Uncertainty, The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success for You and Your Team. Rich, thank you so much for joining us here today. To Laura, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, yeah, let's let's do for maybe for people who didn't listen to the first episode, maybe let's just catch him up a little bit on your background and kind of how you got into the work that you're doing today. Yeah, I mean, if I give the Readers Digest version of 30 years, it was literally 30 years ago, I joined the Navy. I graduated college and went to join the Navy, went to SEAL training, became a Navy SEAL, and I was a Navy SEAL for 21 years. And and really during that time, as an officer, leading teams, training teams, selecting and assessing teams, I became really fascinated with what it what what that what that process was about and what it was about these human beings that allowed us to do what we did and and in kind of diving into that, got very interested in the human side of that. When I retired in 2017, I was in the leadership of space and and really performance space, but I it was mostly leadership, but I recognized, you know, I wanted to get back to the performance space and I knew that leadership starts with performance anyway. And so and so that's really when I decided to write the first book, which is with the attributes. And then the second book was really Masters of Insurgency is really the book I always wanted to write. The attributes was kind of a almost a precursor or a prequel to that because because Masters of Insurgency, some of the concepts include understanding one's attributes. So I do have a little section about the attributes, but it really it's about kind of my fascination with how human beings can actually operate more effectively in stress, challenge and uncertainty. And in many cases, and I think the seals are this this group of people who have mastered it to the extent that we can do it without thinking about it. We can do it very naturally. And that allows us to do some really special things to include step outside of our comfort zone more deliberately. So so that's really kind of the impetus. And and now we run we my wife and I run a company where we go and we help teams and businesses understand their attributes and understand how to do all this stuff. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, we want to learn some of those habits. Some of us some of us can't go an hour without coffee in the morning and, you know, I'm one of those people, by the way, I love my morning coffee. So yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about real quick so people understand what are attributes and then we'll kind of move into the new book as well. Yes, attributes are those quality qualities, those inherent qualities about a human being that kind of define how and why we perform and behave the way we do. And when it comes to after and so I'm thinking about things like patience, situation, awareness, adaptability. So they're not skills. Skills are things we're taught to do. That's like riding a bike or throwing a ball. Attributes are those qualities. And when it comes to the attributes, what we have to understand is there's 36 attributes. And we've kind of we've worked that list as we've matured the matured the process. And so now we're at 36 attributes. We have to understand that every one of us as human beings has all 36 attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each attribute. So so I'm high on adaptability. It's one of my top five, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it's very easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. OK, someone else's might be low on adaptability, which means the same thing happens to them. It's difficult for them to go with the flow. They are still adaptable because all human beings are. There's just more friction there. And so if we were kind of line up these attributes on a wall like dimmer switches, all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. And that starts to speak to our own unique performance. And what I want to kind of really emphasize for people is that it's I want us to think of it like every human being is an automobile. OK, but some of us are Jeeps, some of us are Ferraris, some of us are SUVs. And there's no judgment because you wouldn't judge a Jeep for not being able to do what a Ferrari does, just like you wouldn't judge a Ferrari for not being able to do what a Jeep does. So so when you think about and you start exploring your own unique attributes profile, there's no judgment there. And there's no good or bad or right or wrong or strengths or weaknesses. In other words, your your bottom five attributes, your success as a human being is as much because of your bottom five as your top five. What the stack tells you is your unique engine. And so we have to start thinking about it. This is this is our footprint. This is our unique fingerprint or footprint in how we behave and perform. And the final thing I'll say, this is actually how we behave at our most raw. So when the you know what hits the fan and we're at our most raw, this is how we behave. We orient ourselves to this attribute order. And so if people want to understand the secret to the SEAL team is with a secret to any high performing team who can operate so effectively in complexity, challenge and stress, it's because we know ourselves at our most raw and we know how our teammates are going to act at our most raw. And so it's very natural for us to just act the way we act. And under giving that understanding to everybody allows them to do that, not only for themselves, for themselves, but their teams. So yeah, maybe we could talk about real quick, what are a couple of the most common attributes that you see? And I don't know if that's like in success. I guess it's kind of hard to say, right? Like in successful people or not, like different people have many different attributes. But I think it's very subjective. I would because because again, the attribute, the attribute list that makes up the great Navy SEAL, that list looks different than the attribute list that makes up the great doctor or teacher or business person or accountant. OK, so so it's very subjective to what you're trying to do. And I always say, I mean, Navy SEALs, yes, we are very high performer people in certain domains. We're also doofuses in other domains, just like all of us. I mean, you know, we are all high performing in certain domains and doofuses in other domains. So so there's no typical attribute profile. And there's only the only way you can start to think about where certain attributes play better to certain areas is in certain subjective areas. Right. The common Navy SEAL attribute is high compartmentalization. You can't make it through Navy SEAL training without being able to compartmentalize very, very effectively. So pretty much every Navy SEAL you'll meet is good at compartmentalization, is high in compartmentalization. So but that's going to be different for your accountant or a teacher or whatever. You name the position position. So it's really about really understanding who you are and how you show up. Yeah. And what attributes also be like, for example, you know, LeBron James was built and gifted with a certain body and genetics. But then you also have to he also has to combine that with the effort and the persistence and the work ethic and all that kind of stuff. Right. So I would say, you know, certainly, there's certainly physical attributes, but we don't we don't we're not talking about those. Yeah. But again, the difference between LeBron James and say another basketball player, OK, is and I'm sure there I am certain that there are basketball players out there who could make as many baskets as LeBron, if they put them side by side, they'd make as many as LeBron. What makes LeBron LeBron are the attributes. Talent is not just skills. Talent is a combination of both skills and attributes. And so so what makes your LeBron James is and your Drew breezes and your Tom Brady's is the fact that they combine their skills with a unique set of attributes that allows them to do. Now, part of those, obviously, for all three of those, there's perseverance and things like that that allow someone to and conscientiousness, I guess, to allow someone the work ethic to put in the hard work, because that's the other thing people don't see. They don't see the hard work that goes in behind some of this stuff. So so yeah, there's a combination of both. And what do you think about? So let's say someone says one of my attributes right now is that I'm impatient and I want to be more patient. Yeah, simple example. Well, so that's a great question. And so so the attribute is patience and whether you're high or low. If you're high, it means you have your high on patience. If you're low, it means you're low, which means you're impatient. Couple things someone has to consider. First of all, because there's no judgment in these things and because you don't, there's no, you don't look at your bottom five as weaknesses. The first question you have to ask yourself is, what are some advantages of my impatience? OK, because all of our low, all of our bottom attributes come with distinct advantages. They also come with blind spots. OK, all of our top attributes come with advantages and blind spots. So so if in the conduct of that question, you say to yourself, OK, well, my event, the advantage of being low patients is I make decisions fast. I move quickly on things. I don't waste time. I don't bang my head against the wall for very long at all. That's an advantage. Disadvantage or blind spot could be I may I may move too quickly for people. I may rush to judge my, I may be impulsive. OK, so maybe someone says, I want to increase. I've decided I'm going to increase my patience. OK, there's a couple of ways we can do that. Now, what's happening most often with our attributes is that we are consciously dialing up or dialing down these attributes based on the environment. So the low patients person in certain environments is saying, OK, I need to dial up my patients here and they're they're taking conscious effort to do that. That takes effort. That takes energy. That is possible. It's going to it's going to be energetically expensive. And you're not going to necessarily be able to do that at your most raw. OK, at your most raw, we're not dialing up anything. OK, because we're at our raw. So but the fastest way in normal everyday life is to dial up or dial down. All right. Now, say someone says, you know what, I actually think it would be beneficial to me if I increased my patience more permanently. OK, that needs to be a conscious decision because what you don't want to do is you don't want to increase an attribute and that will that will disrupt your performance. In other words, you know, if I if I put Ferrari tires on my Jeep because I wanted to go faster, it's going to ruin some of my jeepness. OK, so we have to just understand what developing will do. But admittedly, there are going to be some situations where you say, you know what, increasing this attribute will be beneficial over a long term. So at that point, someone has to make a very deliberate effort to place themselves consistently environments in environments that test and tease their patience. OK, whatever whatever that looks like for them subjectively could be. I'm going to deliberately drive in traffic. It could be I'm going to pick them on the grocery store to stand in. I always say have kids that might do it. But but whatever that is, you have to consistently place yourself in those environments. So you slowly move that needle. It takes a while to move the needle. One of the attributes I recognize, you know, I'm low on empathy. It's one of my lower attributes. Now as a Navy SEAL that comes in handy, you can't be too high on empathy as a Navy SEAL. Same thing, by the way, with ER workers, ER surgeons and ER nurses say the same thing. They can't be high on empathy. Now as a husband, though, and as a father and as a leader, I felt, you know what, I should probably work on my empathy. I wanted to work. So so for the last almost 20 years, I have been slowly working on my empathy. What I do is a lot of times I try to make an effort and attempt to try to feel what other people feel. I'll literally go and try to find someone whose opinions and perspectives I disagree with vehemently. And it's not hard to do, by the way, in today's environment, right? But and see if I can put myself in their shoes. Can I can I really get put myself in their perspective? Now, the cool thing is empathy does not require agreement. OK, doesn't mean I agree with that person at the end of the day. But but what does it mean? I'm making the effort to actually feel that feel that feeling. OK, so so I have been able to move the needle on my empathy over the years and it's been successful. So so you can do it. You just have to do it. It has to be a very deliberate, conscious decision to make sure you're doing it for the right attributes. That's really, really good. Yeah, I love what you said as well about, for example, with patients, right? It's like, well, in business, probably the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are pretty impatient in their business. But when you want to be a parent, probably not a good attribute to be impatient. Right. So this is also where teaming comes into play. High performing teams. What happens is you attributes begin to mesh like a zipper. And in some cases, the best teams have both polarities represented. So my wife and I, my wife and I have been married 25 years. We've lived the war together. We've raised two kids. They're now young men. OK, we've done a lot. Right. We are a high performing team at this point. She is impatient. OK, she's low patient. I am high patients. That has worked beautifully for us in 25 years of marriage, because when patients has been required, I step up. When inpatients are required, she steps up. Her impatience has prevented me on occasion from making, you know, going too slow on something or procrastinating. My patience has prevented her on occasion from making too quick a decision or being too impulsive. And so so you can even lean on teammates in a way that that that buttresses your attributes. So just because you're low, it doesn't mean you have to develop. In fact, your team might, in fact, need your lowness to operate as a team. OK, so it's just we all want to I just want to emphasize the fact that everybody has to be very careful. This is not like a personality test where you have strengths and weaknesses. This is really an attempt to give you the fingerprint of you. What vehicle are you and ask yourself, OK, how can I be the best vehicle I can be? And how can I maximize my unique vehicle in this for myself and my team? Yes, really, really good. Yeah, it reminds me recently we had a bad Airbnb experience and the Airbnb host was being quite a jerk and he he actually texted both my wife and I. And I just felt the impatience and the anger starting to come up. And I said to my wife, I said, you know, you're a lot more patient than I am. Can you please reply to him directly on your own? Because if I start seeing these messages fly back and forth, I might lose it. I might lose it. Yeah, I guess in that case delegated to someone who was better at patience on my team. So that worked out really, really good. And I also love how you said. And I think this is a key point I really want people to to understand and remember and take away from this is that to improve on an attribute that you want to improve on, you must put yourself in those situations, right? Force yourself like you said, drive in traffic if you're impatient, right? Some something like that. Put yourself in those situations. And I think that's the step that people might hear this. But will they actually take the action to be put themselves in an uncomfortable situation and actually do that? It takes discomfort. It takes discomfort to do that. And this is where we get into getting better at stepping outside our comfort zone and into uncertainty challenges, trust it, because to to to evolve anything to change anything is going to take a step outside of our comfort zone. So. Mm hmm. Well, it's a great segue then into Masters of Uncertainty, your new book, The Navy Seal Way to Turn Stress into Success for You and Your Team. So I'm sure a lot of people listening as well are interested in that. How do we turn stress into success? Well, mastering uncertainty. So so what I recognize when I started digging into what it takes to master uncertainty and what it takes to do better in uncertainty is it actually breaks down into six pieces, all right? The first three things are have to do with our neurology and our neuro and our physiology, OK? And and they're and they're they're the same for every human being. In other words, we all can do these things because we all have the same makeup. We can all use these same tools in the same way. The other the second three things are unique to us as individuals. In other words, what are we bringing into uncertainty that's unique to us? Now, one of those three things are our attributes, as you can imagine, we have to understand the attributes we have. So we know how we're going to show up at our most raw. And then there's objectives and identity, which we can get into later. To start with the neurological piece, OK, what we have to understand is that when we are in uncertainty, challenges, stress, I should say when we're in any environment, our brains are trying to figure out that environment. Our brains are always trying to create certainty in our environments by asking and interrogating our surroundings. The three primary factors that the brain is trying to figure out to determine uncertainty are duration, how long this is going to last, pathway, what's my route in out or through, and then outcome, what's the end state. If we find ourselves in absence of one or more of those three things, we feel that stress and anxiety, that uncertainty bubble up in our system. OK, so let's just take illness as an example and say you and I get strep throat. Strep throat is an illness that we all know there's an antibiotic we can take for strep throat and we can get better from strep throat. So if we get strep throat, we know the pathway antibiotic and we know the outcome. We're going to get better. What we don't necessarily know is the duration because you may take three days to respond to the antibiotics I might take all seven. All right, so but that means we're in absence of only one or uncertainty levels mild. Now imagine we get the flu. OK, the flu also a known illness. No one really in today's modern society, certainly the first world dies from the flu. OK, however, there's no known cure for the flu. There's nothing you can actually take. A lot of people who say that you can take this and it'll work, but there's nothing you can actually take. So if we get the flu now, we are in absence of two of the three because we know the outcome, we're going to get better, but we don't know the pathway and we don't know the duration. So our uncertainty level is now moderate. Now let's just imagine take ourselves back to 2020 when a disease shows up and none of us have seen it before. It's some people are dying. Some people aren't dying. There's no known cure or vaccine. We don't know how long it's going to last. OK, when covid showed up, we were in absence of all three of these. And that's why our uncertainty level was where it was. All right, all this tool is, it's a tool called Moving Horizons. All Moving Horizons is, is a tool that you use to generate certainty in the moment by creating your own duration pathway outcome, your own DPO. OK, let me give you an example. The Navy SEAL training, you spend hundreds of hours running around the big heavy boats in your head, especially during Hell Week. You everywhere you go, you have these damn boats in your head. OK, and I remember it was three in the morning, one of the mornings, and we were on the beach running with these boats. We've been running for hours. And I remember there was a sand berm next to me, and I was miserable just like everybody else was miserable. And I said to myself, I remember saying to myself, you know what, I'm just going to focus on getting to the end of this sand berm. Now, what I did in that moment inadvertently that I didn't know is I picked a horizon and in essence created a DPO, duration from now until end of sand berm, pathway from here to end of sand berm and outcome end of sand berm. In doing so, I initiated a dopamine system, which we'll get to in a moment. But I also initiated a dopamine reward when I accomplished that goal and allowed me to come back out and pick a new horizon. OK, so all moving horizons is a process by which you can generate certainty in the moment by focusing on something you control in the moment. And in essence, creating your own DPO. Now, what's the kicker on this? The kicker on this is that these horizons are subjective to the individual and subjective to the intensity of the environment. So in other words, the more intense the environment, often the shorter that horizon has to be. I remember in SEAL training, they make you sit in that surf zone for hours and freeze, coldest thing you'll ever do. And I remember sitting in the surf zone and saying to myself, OK, I'm just going to count five waves. That was my horizon. Sometimes my horizon was I'm going to make it the next meal. Sometimes I run to the end of the sand berm. What we have to understand is we have to pick meaningful horizons. And what I mean by that is meaningful horizons is you are when you're picking a horizon, you're creating a DPO, you're you're initiating your dopamine system in your in your body. Dopamine is a very interesting chemical. And most people think of dopamine as just a reward chemical. It's in fact much, much more than just a reward chemical. It's a it's a motivation chemical that actually it actually gets us up and moving. They did an experiment with rats in the lab at one point. And they put a rat in this cage and next to the rats or in the cage, they had this this device where the rat would just hit this little lever and a tasty pellet would come out. OK. And so obviously, the rat would just sit next to this thing and just hit it over and over again. And then they would move, of course, they'd move the rat to the other side of the cage. The rat would run over and start hitting it again. OK. But then they removed the dopamine from the rat. They could do that chemically. They took all the dopamine out of the rat and they moved the rat just a rat's length away from this lever and the rat never moved. The rat would actually have sat there and starved if they let if they let it. OK. And what they realize is dopamine actually is what initiates us and gets us moving on our goals. And when we don't have dopamine, we quit. OK. So if you pick a horizon that's too far, you will run out of dopamine before you get there and you will quit your goal. OK. This is anytime you quit anything, you've run out of dopamine. All right. So so so we have to pick a horizon that's not too too big. It's too too over to overindulgent. And if we pick one that's too close, too short, then we may not actually register our reward. It will just be it would too. It's too easy, in other words, right. So so there's a sweet spot for these horizons. And the good news is we can actually rehearse this and we can actually change along the way. You can you can if you pick a horizon that's too far, as you're moving towards that, you can say to yourself, oh, wait a second, this is too far and you can bring that horizon in. OK. You can change. Now, most of us have done this. We've done this when we've worked out before. We start and we say, I'm going to do 12 reps and we do the first six. And we're like, you know what, six more. What we've just done is we pulled our horizon in. OK. And it works psychologically because we've just reset our dopamine system. OK. So so moving horizons is a is a is a very powerful technique that someone can use to create certainty, ask themselves, what do I know? What can I control? Create certainty, pick something to focus on and move towards it and then do it over and over and over again. You can do that until one of three things happens. Either you you're through the challenge and certainty stress. You've accomplished your goal or there's no more certainty in Australia. You know, you've generated enough certainties because sometimes when you do this process, your your certainty optics slowly opens up as you make movement. So once there's no certainty, uncertainty anymore, you actually you can understand the environment. But but you could just do that over and over again until you're through. And that is probably the single most powerful tool that someone can use to actually manage themselves in uncertainty, challenge and stress. That is such a powerful tool. I absolutely love it. I've heard this a lot from people who've run marathons or these 100 mile races. And they're just like, focus on that thing in the horizon. Just get there. And then when you get there, you focus on the next. And I mean, that's these are physical examples that we've given, but there's also mental examples, right? And what comes to mind is like an alcoholic or a drug addict who's trying to recover rather than thinking, oh, man, I need to be sober for the next 30 years. It's just like one day at a time, right? What do they say one day at a time? Just get through today, make it to tomorrow, right? Then the next day, just get through today. So that's kind of a mental example of that. Wouldn't it be? Totally. In fact, it's it's, you know, one of the things that one of the ways that hit me was I was I write about this in the book, I was in a I was getting a talk and this guy came up to me after the talk and he said that he was an ultra runner and we know you just, you know, that ultra runners are the 100 mile racers, 100 mile runners, right? And I, which is, I can't even imagine. And I said, that's interesting. How did you get into ultra running? And he said, well, you might not believe this, but I used to be 450 pounds. And I said, whoa, tell me that story. He's like, well, I was so overweight and so unhealthy that one day I just said to myself, you know what, I'm sick of this, I'm going to, I'm going to make a decision. I'm going to set a goal. I'm going to run a marathon. And I said, OK, what'd you do? He's like, well, the first thing I did is I went home and I ordered running shoes and the running shoes came and said, when the running shoes came, I said, OK, tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and I would put on my running shoes, which he did next morning he put on his running shoes. He walked to the front door next morning. He walked to the mailbox next morning. He walked to the end of the street and he slowly started moving his horizons out until months later he was running his first race. And then, you know, years later ran his first marathon. But, but for him, that's exactly, it was a mental thing. And so, so horizon, I mean, you could do horizons at work. We could do this. We can say, you know what? I'm going to focus on this email. Nothing else. I'm going to block out everything else and focus on this email. Or you can you can go into a meeting and say, I'm not going to worry about any other part of the day. I'm going to focus on the focus on being intense and invested in this meeting or this conversation. Right. So we can actually practice this technique and there doesn't have to be uncertainty involved. We can practice it in any environment so that when uncertainty actually hits, we're really good at it. And ideally we're doing without thinking. Yeah, that's so good. I mean, sometimes when I catch myself like procrastinating or something, I'll literally just take the timer out and I'll be like, you know, there's like some annoying accounting thing or something that you just don't want to do. You're just dreading it and you're procrastinating as much as possible. And then I'm like, you know what? I got to get this done. Stop procrastinating. Put the timer on for 30 minutes. You got 30 minutes. Go. And then like you just, I just closed this, made this time, this horizon that like I'm going to get this done and then boom, it gets done. You locked in. You locked in. And for someone else, I taught, I was teaching this to an executive team and the next day, because it was a couple days thing. And he said, you know, last night I tried this thing, you know, and I set my, I was going to do emails. So I'm going to focus on emails for 10 minutes or something. And I couldn't do it. I had to bring it in. I, for him, you know, he had to really set short horizons. By the way, our phones are killing our ability to do this, right? The doom scrolling and the constant dopamine reward, the more you've done that, the more you've indoctrinated yourself to very fast dopamine hits, you're going to have to, you're going to find those horizons have to be very, very short and you're going to slowly have to push them out, push them out because, because if your body's used to instantaneous dopamine, it's going to be tough. You're going to have to keep those horizons pretty short because your focus, your attention is going to, going to wander. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the other things you mentioned. I definitely want to get into identity. And I think there was one more before that that maybe you wanted to touch on, but I certainly want to talk about identity. Okay. Yeah. Well, let, so let me, before identity is a big one, and you and I could probably spend, you know, three hours on that. Let me, so let me talk about the other one, because it's not as big as basically the other one is objectives. And what do I mean by objectives? It means something to in fact anchor on. Okay. We add something to, and when you anchor on something, you can then DPO your way, right? So, so in other words, for, for, for George, the ultra runner, his, his, his purpose, his like overall vision was to get healthy. Okay. But that's too lofty and it's too soft and ethereal. He made progress when he picked an objective and said, I'm going to run a marathon. Okay. For me, when I was a young, you know, in the late 80s, you know, when I wanted to, I knew I wanted to join the military and I wanted to do something special, you know, be a warrior of some sort. That's a lofty vision. Okay. It wasn't until I said, I want to be a Navy SEAL, right, that I anchored into objectives. So our objectives are those beacons that we can basically anchor onto. They're kind of the lighthouse, the guiding light for us. Now, what we have to understand is when we create those objectives, and we're pulling those into our uncertainty, right? When we create those objectives, we're not focused on them. We just are aware of them. Okay. Because I always say, keep your eyes off the prize. Because if you focus on them, now you're, it's way too, it's way too far. But you know, you can DPO your way. You can, you can pick horizons to get you there and understand that that lighthouse is still there. The reason why this matters is because, and the best analogy would be a rock climber. A rock climber will look at a cliff that he or she wants to climb and basically usually look at it and say, okay, the top is my objective. Okay. And often map out kind of visually, I'm probably going to go this way or whatever. But they know they have to get on the rock to start climbing. They're going to get on the rock, they're going to start climbing. And inevitably, they're going to get to a point where they thought they were going to go one way, but they realized there's no handhold to foothold. So they can't go that way, which means they're going to look for the next best one. And the next best one might be like down into the right. Okay. Which means now it's going to feel like they're moving away from their goal. But all they're doing is getting another, they're DP owing their way to another handhold foothold, but they have this, the goal is still, the objective is still there, right? It's still, they still, they know where, they know where true north is, but they're just DP owing their way to get there. Right. So that's why the objectives are important. You have to have something that acts as true north. And so that will be objectives, attributes, and then finally identity. Yeah. And then, okay, so then, and then I want to also kind of come back full circle at the end here and talk about how you maybe help teams or businesses or people implement, you know, these kinds of things in their life. But, and I know identity, like you said, we could talk for hours about it, but why don't we give people just like a little overview and then obviously highly recommend everyone by the book and go deep on this because identity is, in my opinion, like, it's just everything, right? Like your identity is like, what kind of the unconscious controlling factor of like almost everything you do kind of really all comes back to, to your identity and what you believe about yourself and things like that. But we'd love to hear your kind of overarching view on it. I think, I think you're, I think you're right. It is everything. In fact, I'm starting to put together the third book, which I'm going to do on identity because it's so it's such a, it's such an important topic. And I'm so fascinated by it. It is, it is super important. So what do I mean by identity? Identity is really what are the, what are the things that we're putting after the two words I am? Okay, because anything we, because I am, I think I am are the two most powerful words in the human language, because anything you put after those two words are what shapes your behavior. What we have to understand is that as human beings, we are actually a collection of I ams that we collect over a lifetime and over, over, over different experiences. And some of them are very powerful. Some of them are fairly benign, right? I went to this high school. I played this sports. I am a Navy SEAL. I am a husband father. I'm a Metallica fan, right? Whatever the, you know, whatever those identities are, we collect all these things. Every one of these identities that we collect comes with rules and conditions and behaviors that define what being part of the identity is, right? As a Purdue graduate, I'm supposed to hate Notre Dame. Okay, that's just what you're supposed to do. Okay. As a Navy SEAL, I'm supposed to behave a certain way. Okay, so these behaviors and conditions are driving our behaviors. And what we have to recognize also is that when we, when we're in uncertainty, challenge and stress, we are going to, we are going to behave towards whatever identity we're prioritizing in that moment. Okay, that's that those are the behaviors we're going to behave. Now, this can happen consciously or unconsciously. And it's better often if it happens consciously because if it happens unconsciously, we may not behaving in a way that makes sense to us, right? This is the classic example of the, the, the sports fanatic that beats the crap out of the other sports of the, out of the opposite team's fan. And it gets in trouble and standing in front of the judge and the judge is like, what were you thinking? The person's like, I don't know what I was thinking. I was just, you know, that person was behaving towards an identity in that moment. And that wasn't conscious of them. If they have been conscious about it, they may have said to themselves, you know what? Okay, yes, I am a sports fan, but I'm also husband. I'm a father. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a professional business, whatever that is, that would have changed their behavior. Okay. And so, so understanding how understanding our identities in the book, I give some, some tips on how you can kind of understand these about yourself and understanding how you prioritize those allows you to actually pick the ones that are most meaningful. You know, obviously, when you're in, when you're deployed overseas in combat, you know, the Navy SEAL identity is the one you're prioritizing. That's, that's obvious. Okay. But sometimes the target would change. We'd have to deal with women and children. And sometimes I'd pull out my husband and father identity. Okay. I prioritize that in terms of changing my behavior. So, so to be able to, to understand and prioritize more consciously will allow you to be able to behave and perform more effectively. And it'll also allow you to kind of discard those ones that aren't as meaningful. Because there are, we have some identities who can kind of, you know what, I can let that one go, or that's not valuable to me. And it can also allow you to build new ones, create new ones. You know, you leave the Navy SEAL teams. It's a, it's a, you know, Navy SEALs is not like the Marine Corps. You know, Marine Corps is once a Marine, always a Marine. Okay. They're really excellent at building that identity forever. Navy SEALs is not like that at all. Once you leave the SEALs, you are not a SEAL anymore. Okay. It's a, our, our, our motto is earn your trident every day. That's our pen that we wear. So when you take off that trident, you're not earning it anyway. And yeah, so you're a former SEAL. So that could be a huge dearth for many people in terms of the loss of identity. And so, so those, those folks, though, to include myself who have been able to do it in a healthy way, we all had other powerful identities that we could actually fall back on. For me, it was always husband and father. I could fall back on my husband and father, because that was always the most powerful, most important one for me anyway. But then that allowed me space to build a new one, you know, author is the new identity, entrepreneur is a new identity, and they're kind of build a new identity and try something new. And so, so just the being conscious of this in ourselves allows us to not only manipulate and build and discard, but also actually prioritize and bring forth the behavior you want, we want to see. And this can be done by a group as well. Group identities, you know, one of the most powerful ones is the Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts have what's called the Girl Scout code. And any Girl Scout you ever meet, you just ask them the Girl Scout code, they'll be able to, they'll be able to just say the group, they memorize it. Okay. And it's, it's a series of statements that define what their behavior, what it means to be a Girl Scout, what they do as Girl Scouts. Okay. Super powerful, no matter where you go in the world. Same stuff. Okay. And Girl Scouts understand that this is how I behave, right? So, so that's the idea behind the power of identity. So powerful. That's so powerful. I really hope people dive into this and really take this on because I also believe that once you, first of all, you have to think about, right? I just, well, I prioritize a lot of thinking time, quiet time, give myself space to actually think about what do I want to believe? What are the beliefs that will serve me the most? And what is the identity that I want to have for myself? And I believe that once you have that, first of all, you got to get clear on what you want. Then once you start to develop that identity, it actually makes everything easier. So I'll give you an example, like for me, I went through a bunch of pain and inflammation and health issues many years ago. And then now I healed myself through being super healthy, lowering inflammation in my body. And now I just have this identity of I am healthy. But even further than that, I have an identity that like, I don't eat bread. I don't eat cake. These are just, this is part, literally part of my identity. So it's like, when, when I go to a kid's birthday party and they're handing out cake, I don't have this anxiety of like, should I eat the cake? Should I don't eat the cake? Should I not eat the cake? I'm just very clear, like, no, thank you. I don't eat cake. It's like, if someone offers you a cigarette and you don't smoke, you say, no, thank you. I don't smoke. That's your identity. You're not a smoker. My identity is I'm a healthy person. And so it actually just makes your decision making a lot easier when you're congruent with your identity. Because what you've done is you've defined the behaviors that, that, that, that what it means to be healthy. You're, you're the behaviors that define I am healthy for you. You've, you've been able to solidify. So it becomes easy. And I will say there is a, well, I wouldn't, well, I wouldn't overindex on the, the, the, the negative statements, negative statements do work as well. I am not a smoker. There are, there are smokers who have said, as soon as I said to myself, I am not a smoker. I began to behave differently. Right. So, so there's a power to those as well. But you know what's interesting, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna dive into that. I'm gonna start interviewing people, I'll dive into the science behind this more effect or more deeply, but, but just the physiological change that, that our identity can actually give us. So there's been studies and there's a lot of stuff out there. I got to sort out the, the, the wheat from the chaff here, but, but I know that some of them, some of the, the true blue codified studies of DID, dissociative identity disorder, multiple, multiple personality disorder. And in some of the, in some of the, the proven studies, there's a lot of stuff out there, like I said, but in some of the proven studies, they've had people come into the lab who have, you know, 10, 12 different identities in one personality, they are diabetic. And as soon as they shift personalities, they don't need insulin anymore. Right. I mean, this is, there are, there's another one in one personality, they're allergic. They have rashes and as soon as they shift, the rashes go away. Okay. So, so the even that our physiology will change depending on the placebo effect, right? There's, there's tons of stories about the placebo effect. In fact, that's the reason why when you want to test the drug, you now have to do a double blind placebo controlled trial. Because before that, when they would say, Hey, here's this drug, does it work? It would work for everyone because, you know, we're almost at it because of the placebo effect. They believe it would work. So it did work. Right. And actually, I, I, you know, not to go too deep down the rabbit hole, but I think you have to be very careful. Like I even think that, you know, it's controversial for a doctor to be able to be even able to tell someone, Hey, you only have three months left to live. Because if you look up to that doctor and you believe them, you're going to maybe not have a, the same chance of living a longer life compared to if the doctor would have said, Hey, you know, you could you have anywhere from six to 10 years, many people live 10 years and they, and they start convincing you and developing this belief system in you. Right. So I personally think it should, you know, doctors should really be much more aware of this belief belief system as well. I think that's, I mean, I'm hoping that's where medicine, I think, I mean, medicine has obviously gotten better and better, but, but just what we understand about ourselves and our own physiology has increased and over the, you know, 10 fold over the last many, many years. And so, but I'm really fascinated with this and this, this, but just at a very base level, just putting something after I am, we'll shift your physiology, we'll shift your mindset, we'll shift the rules, you the way you, the way you behave. It's that important. So yeah. And being very careful about what you say about yourself, right? Well, right. And so I remember when I first like got into Tony Robbins many years ago and got super into personal development, I wore, I was trying to limit trying to stop my limiting beliefs and stop limiting myself and stop saying negative things. And so I wore a rubber band and every time I would catch myself saying like, Oh, I'm not good at that or whatever. I would just snap myself and say, and then I would turn it around and say, Oh no, I used maybe, maybe in the past. And that's the thing that people have to realize. Like just because something was a certain way in the past doesn't mean that your present and future have that way. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah. Totally. I mean, look, we just, I mean, just the example I just gave, I mean, when, when, when you, when someone can shift personalities and they're not allergic to something anymore, a rash disappears, you know, or they're not diabetic. I mean, listen, we are, we are, we are fascinating creatures as human beings. So, so yeah, our, and our brains are fascinating, you know, things. So, so we just have a lot more power than we think. You're absolutely right. Tell me how, how you work with like a team or an organization or a business or something like that. And then I guess you could kind of through talking to everyone or meeting with them see, hmm, here's kind of what it seems like their identity is, or maybe they're not, they don't even have a clear identity, but here's what I'm getting. And then how do you help them shift to kind of create maybe a more powerful identity or whatever their goal may be? Yeah, I mean, so, so a lot of the work we do with teams initially is to help them figure out their attributes because we can actually start our starting point or starting block can be that. And so, so we'll go into teams and organizations will help them all understand their attributes as individuals, then as a team. And then we'll start saying, okay, how does that manifest in your, in your teaming? And what are those things that allow you allow you, what are those things that you are capable of doing because of these, these specific attributes? Once we start talking about identity, we can get into the culture, the culture is really when we talk about teams, culture is basically identity, your culture is your team identity. And so what, what we can do and what we are what we always encourage people to do is groups to do is say, okay, what are those things about your culture that define you? And what are the, what, you know, let's talk about that. Let's, let's start, let's start figuring that out because you can start building what that is. What does it mean to be part of this team, part of this organization? You know, how do I behave as a part of this team organization? You know, how do I behave in the position I'm in, you know, and so, and so the what we'll do is we'll go and we'll hop, we have, we have workshops we can, we can take groups through around attributes around trust and dynamics, coordination around mastering and certainty that allow them to kind of dive into these concepts and really explore them and get them to a position where they can actually start to really embody this, not only from an individual standpoint, but from a team standpoint as well. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I heard, it was an awesome motivational speech that I heard someone once give to a collegiate sports team. And he said, look, we can't control the tat, you know, the athletic ability of us versus the other guys, what we can control what we're going to build an identity of is we're going to be the hardest working team out there. And we're going to show up early, we're going to stay late, we're going to work harder. And you know, when we're, when we're warming up out there on the field, they're going to see man, these guys are warming up with intensity, we're not just half assing it and you know, doing, you know, we're warming up with everything we're doing is with intensity and we're going to outwork everyone. And that's the identity we're going to have. And when other teams see that, that we have that identity, it's going to put fear into them. And we're going to, you know, be the best that we can be. And I was like, I got so pumped up when I heard that I thought it was so good. Yeah, no, it's amazing. It's amazing what it can do. So yeah, yeah, amazing. Well, rich, I know we could talk for hours here, but I want to let people know where they can get your new book, where they can find you and follow you and any kind of final, final parting words for us here. Absolutely. Well, the best and easiest way is the attributes.com. That's our website. So the attributes.com, all one word.com. You can, you can see, you can get our assessments, you can get our workshops, you can get the books there as well. Both books are obviously on Amazon as well. So you can get those there. And you can follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram and find me there too. But, but yeah, the attributes.com is the best place kind of the one stop place. So and I can, well, I'll give you the link too. So you can put in the show notes too. Amazing. Amazing. Any, any final parting words of advice here for, for people? Well, I would just say this, I mean, I get excited about this stuff for two reasons. A, because, you know, mastering uncertainty is something that obviously if you practice and you get good at, you will be better when uncertainty hits you without warning, which always happens. Okay, that's just, that's just life. However, the really the true power of this stuff and what gets me really excited is kind of I alluded to it, alluded to it at the beginning of the conversation is that when you get really good at this, you begin deliberately stepping into uncertainty, challenge and stress. And this is where all of our potential is all of our potential, all of our evolution, all of our growth lies outside our comfort zone. And so if you get really good at this and you're starting to deliberately step outside more and more, you're going to find yourself always exploring your potential, always growing, always evolving. And that's a really exciting place to be. Boom, that was perfect. Love it. The attributes.com, check it out. Follow Rich, he's amazing. Thank you so much. And we'll have to do it again in another year or two. We will, brother. As soon as the next book comes out, it comes out, I'll come back. So let's do it. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me if you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at peak performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B U Y peak performance.com. We just released a brand new grass fed beef protein isolate. This is my favorite new protein powder, because it's great for muscle building and recovering and all that kind of stuff. 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