107: Lessons From Navy Seals - Betsy Pake

107: Lessons From Navy Seals

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Hello
PODCAST

I became obsessed with a book over the weekend called Living With A Seal by Jesse Itzler.  

Today I share a little bit about what I read that intrigued me so much and I share 4 habits of Navy Seals that finish their training.  Many men try, but they don’t all complete the training and graduate. We’ve heard the stories about how hard it is and how many obstacles are in the way to completing a training like that, but have you ever wondered what makes the difference?

There are four main habits and I share them on today’s podcast and how you can implement them into your own life!

Today’s show is great for anyone who wants to learn to push themselves a bit, find their limits or begin to think differently about what they are capable of.

Thanks for listening and sharing with your friends!

See you next week,

Betsy

Transcript:

Hey everybody, welcome to the show this week, I wanted to share with you something that I love that I found in last week and tell you a little story of some research that I actually shared in a series of

Facebook posts last year, but I

think it

brought it all back to me when I found this book that I’m going to share with you. And so anyway, let me just explain.

Alright, so

if you are familiar with Spanx,

underwear, the Michael Jordan of underwear,

then you know, or you may know who Sara Blakely is. Now her story is really incredible. And she’s the one that started Spanx. And she started it like with nothing, she doesn’t have any investors and she created this billion dollar company. So I really love her and I love I follow her on Instagram. I know here I am with Instagram again, I’m almost as obsessed. It feels like on the podcast with Instagram as I am with the beach, but but I digress. So she’s on Instagram, and she just shares like she has just a happy demeanor. So somebody else that’s running a billion dollar company may be very serious. And they may be very serious about their family and very, you know, like that’s how I imagine it, but she’s not she just has a lot of fun with life. And and I’ve seen her speak live and she talks about when she was young about her dad gave her a tape of a speech by Wayne Dyer. Now if you know who Dr. Dyer is really incredible man, and he shared just just so much wisdom. You can find his books or look him up. He has a great Instagram with lots of quotes and stuff like that. That’s probably run by his estate. Okay. But my point here is that I really love Sara Blakely. And about a week ago, a listener and friend sent me a message and said, You’ll really love this podcast and it was actually a podcast by Rich roll. And he had on a guy named Jesse at slur now Jesse was on there promoting a new book, and his book was called Living with the monks. Okay, so I listened to the whole interview and it was really good if you want to look that up. But I got really obsessed with Jessie like, here’s the super interesting guy. Also a billionaire started out as like a rapper, and like, made his way through ended up building this huge company called Marquis jets and then sold that he owns Zico, coconut water, he’s married to Sara Blakely. So all of a sudden, like, Oh my god, like I love this guy, like he’s just super interesting thinks totally different. So listen to that interview, if you’re interested in any of that. But here’s where it comes down to. And here’s where I found the thing I love. So he was promoting a book called Living with the monks, which is where he goes and lives with monks for 30 days and then shares a bunch of stuff. So when I looked it up on Amazon, because I read a lot of books, and I’m cheap because I read a lot of books. I saw that he had another book that came out like two or three years ago called Living with a seal. So living with a seal by Jesse Metzler. And that book was only like six bucks. And the new book was like 19 bucks. I was like, I’ll get the cheaper book first and see if I like it. Plus, I like seal stories, right like that. I am intrigued. So I bought this book, y’all. I read a lot of books. And I feel like I read a lot of like, kind of heavy books, maybe like, I’ve been reading The Autobiography of a Yogi, you know, the book of joy by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, you know, tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss, I mean some bigger books, right. And so I really liked this $6 little book called Living with a seal and I thought This will be fun, I’ll read it, maybe it’ll be something like a little whimsical to read for the weekend. I read it in like two nights. Like the only reason I stopped reading it the first night is because I couldn’t keep my eyeballs open. But it’s so funny. It’s so full of good stories. And if you’re my age at all, and you remember like the wrappers, he talks

a lot kind of flashing back to his journey.

Okay, so that’s my first thing that I want to share with you is that this book is really good and really funny. And he’s somebody if you’re, you know, we talk a lot about flow and in going with intention, and I also have this, this more masculine energy that is an action oriented energy. And so this book kind of fed into that part of me and so I really, really liked it and it made me you know, the past month or so, I’ve been on a journey of coming back into my workouts, my hard workouts that I used to do, and you know, I used to own a CrossFit

gym and I’ve competed

with weightlifting with the snatch and the clean and jerk. So anyway, it brought me back like where I was like, Oh, this book living with a seal obviously is all about like this physical, pushing yourself to your limits. And when you push yourself to a certain limit mentally, because you’re you’re pushing yourself in that way physically, it pushes your brain mentally and then you believe you can do other things I have always felt and when I owned my CrossFit gym, I used to tell people that all the time, I have always felt that if you want to really push yourself, mentally, you want to see what you can do get in the gym and do it physically, because that’s how you can see. It’s just a much more tangible way to push yourself in that way. So anyway, I really love that. So this is a great book. But as I was reading it, and he’s talking about these 30 days with this seal, and he just called him the seal. And then I guess a year or so after it came out, this seal allowed Jesse to tell who he was. So his name, the seal that’s in the book that pushes him It’s crazy, crazy, good and wonderful stories. His name is David Goggins. So now if you look up, David Goggins, and he has like a great Instagram and Facebook page, where he just posts some really thoughtful stuff, he is all out. So if, if you could think of like super flowy, like go, nope, take the opposite of that. He is like, push, push, push, push, push, but that’s what makes him feel aligned. Right? Clearly, that’s what makes him feel like in flow is to be pushing. And so

as I’ve been reading more stuff, I got sort of obsessed with him, right. So I started reading everything listening to every interview with him, and, you know, looking up every post and reading through it, and just, I really liked the energy of it, it just was such a difference from just a lot of the stuff I have been reading and doing and thinking about, and it just felt good. So it brought me to today’s podcast, which is I want to talk about debt, about a series of Facebook posts that I did last year is when I shared it originally, but it’s really something that I learned in an NLP course, where we were talking about this actual study. Okay, so what it is, is that the Navy actually did a study to find out the differences between the the guys that went into the Navy SEAL program, and started the training compared to the ones that finished the training, right? So if you think about the navy seals, like they’re the best of the best, like those guys are badass is right. And so I believe that they’re badass is that go into the training even right? I mean, they’re still picking the people that even are allowed to go into the Navy SEALs school are like the super smartest, the physically fit, like you have to meet all kinds of requirements and stringent tests and all kinds of things just to get to the starting line. But then I’m spoke, I suppose they did this study, because it costs a lot of money, right? So to figure out like, we’re putting people through this, what is the difference between the people that go through that start this and actually finish it, compared to the people that start it and and have to bow that hat that quit? Or, you know, get hurt or whatever it is, what is the difference? So they identified four things, and I want to share those things with you. Because I believe it can actually help us in our everyday life. And, and maybe it’ll also speak to your fascination with All Things navy seal and being pushed to the physical limit. So the first habit is that they focus on the right now. So, you know, typically, when we think about goal setting, we think about longer term goals, right? What we’re going to accomplish this month or this quarter, or many times in a year, right what your resolutions are for the year. But what made the difference with this seals is that they focused on right now. So they were able to narrow those focus their focus. So they didn’t see anything in their immediate future only right that moment. So they weren’t thinking about what tomorrow is going to be like, they weren’t thinking about finishing the training. They weren’t thinking about their life after they weren’t thinking about anything before. They weren’t worried about anything. But the moment like I have to take five more steps until I get to the next hill, I have to take seven more steps until I reach the water. So they were just thinking about what was directly in front of them. And so if you do the job directly in front of you, and you do it with excellence, you don’t worry about what’s going to happen later. So when I was reading the book, living with a seal, that was one of the things that kept coming up for me is this David Goggins the seal was very focused on excellence. It wasn’t about completing 100 pushups. It was about completing 100 push ups perfectly. It was about being aware of where you were at that moment, so it wasn’t thinking about finishing. It was thinking about doing each one with excellence with with perfection as close as you could get to perfection. And so it reminds me sometime of if you’re a crossfitter, or you do some kind of endurance training, or any kind of training where you’re pushing yourself, it reminds me of that when I’m doing a really hard CrossFit WOD. That’s what I’m thinking about, I’m really just thinking about, I gotta get through this set, right, and then I got to get through the next set, I don’t think about what’s two or three exercises later, I just worry about that one thing. years ago, I ran a marathon, and I am not a runner. So I am not a runner at all, I don’t look like

a runner, like running was not my thing. But I was I

had wanted to run a marathon. And I remember running and only worrying about that mile. I remember training runs where we would run like 22 miles. And in the beginning, people would be talking, oh, my God, it’s 22 miles. And I remember thinking like, No, I just got to get to this next turn. Now I just got to get to the next straightaway. Now I got to get, like just breaking it down and chunking it down. So the next and the next and the next. And so only worrying about like that one foot and then the next foot like superduper, narrow focus. So today, don’t get overwhelmed by the big picture. Instead, focus on what’s immediately in front of you, and do that thing with excellence. Okay, the second habit was they imagine how good it will feel. So, you know, we all have had experiences in the past where we’ve succeeded, right, where we’ve done things that are amazing, we’ve had a victory and in the seals have to right, they’ve completed missions or pushed themselves successfully believe beyond the limits of what they thought they could. And so we know how this feels, not just emotionally, but how it feels in your body. Now, we’ve talked about all of the senses in that in Episode 100, when we talked about NLP, about neuro linguistic programming, we talked about how to feel all of the senses in your body. So you know, when you’ve succeeded at something, how that feels. Now, maybe you’re at work. And so it’s not a physical thing that you’re pushing towards. But you know how it feels when you come up with a really great idea. Or you finish a project or you do that spreadsheet you’ve had to do, and you know what it feels like in your body, it feels relief, right? Your shoulders probably relax a little bit and you feel better. And I mean, think about a time where you were really, really, really on top of the world, right? How did you stand? How do you hold your shoulders? Where do you think your eyes were focused? But now I want you to think of failure. Like the worst thing that’s happened? Where was your body at those times? Where did your eyes go? When you’re defeated? And you’re beat up? What do your shoulders do? Do you see the difference? So the seals that were successful in completing the training had a habit of remembering how good it felt to succeed. Well, they were struggling. So in the middle of the struggle, they remembered what it felt like, and they intuitively changed their body language to match success. What happens when you change your body language, it starts to change your brain, right? So you can use this today by noticing every time you do something that feels good. Every time you check off a box, or you finish something that you’ve been working on, celebrate it in your head. And when you do this over and over again, you’re providing your brain with extra experiences of success. And this makes it easier for you to remember that feeling when you need it. Now, I noticed this also, when I was working with my weight loss clients, right, they thought about success before they ate. That’s what the successful ones did. They thought about what it would be feel what it would actually feel like to eat the thing they were about to eat. If it was something healthy. They thought about how good that would be. If it was something unhealthy. They thought about other times, they’d eaten something unhealthy, and it started to influence the choices that they made at mealtime. So think about that, before you do something. Think about your success and how you’ll feel when it’s done. All right, the third habit when all else fails, breathe deeply. When I’m working with a one on one client on a video conference, I can start to tell when they’re getting stressed. Right? I mean, you know, even when you’re talking to somebody, your eyes kind of darting around, their breathing gets really shallow. It is a normal reaction. Because inside our brain is going no No, no stop. Right? If I’m working with somebody one on one. And I’m challenging something they’re saying or a belief system that they’ve always thought that they’ve had, and I start to challenge it their brains like ha This feels dangerous. conserve all resources and be prepared to run rate. It’s your amygdala, right and I’ve talked about this on this subject and wrote about it in my book, but your brains amazing Lead determines when it’s all gone bad. And it’s time to panic. So that little piece of your brain says, look, we’re done, this is bad. Now you can sneak past this reaction. by flooding your body with oxygen, it actually changes the chemistry of your body and it calms down your amygdala. So navy seals are actually taught to do this in a really specific way. But I think breathing deep, the I mean, you cannot go wrong, right. So you don’t have to do it in a particular pattern or a special way. But

just think when something is happening or something, you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, or you’re starting to get, you know, overwhelmed with people, sometimes they think, well, I’ll feel like a panic. But it can just be confusion, when I start to I’m doing something at work. And I’m starting to get like confused, that is a moment of overwhelm. So just start to breathe really deep. And how the hell does seals do it, is they inhale really deep for six seconds. And remember, if your hand is on your belly button, right, I want your your hand to be moving out, because I want you filling up your lungs all the way. So not shallow breathing up high, I want you breathing so that your hand would move out. So breathing deeply for six counts, and then you hold it for two counts. And then you exhale for six counts, totally emptying those lungs. So this six to six breaths. If you do it three times in a row, you’ll lower your blood pressure, you’ll flood your brain with oxygen, and you’ll increase your ability to react using your conscious brain and not your unconscious reactionary brain. Now, if you can learn to do this three times a day, you can more easily accomplish just about every other thing on your list with a much more sound mind and with objective thought. So try it, set the alarm on your phone for three times a day, and then just hit it six to six, six to six, six to six. Don’t wait until you’re stressed schedule it in. And then when you do get stressed, you’ll jump right into it out of habit just like the navy seals. When I ran my first in my only marathon, it was two laps around the island of Bermuda.

So it rained,

it got really hot, and then it rained some more than apparently that’s a really normal day in Bermuda. But around mile 14,

I lost a toenail.

So my socks were soaking wet. My feet were sliding around inside my shoes, I had blisters everywhere. And then out of the bushes. At least it seemed like she jumped out of the bushes. This woman came running at me with a little kit with band aids and neosporin. And she bent down. And I remember I just stopped and it was kind of a weird moment because I didn’t know who she was, or where she came from. I think she was angel sent from the bushes. But she bent down she took my shoe off. She threw my toenail like to the side of the road, and then bandaged me up. And as she was putting my shoe back on, I said to her, my foot hurts so much. And then she looked at me and she was super smiley, and she said the other one looks great. Now at this point, I’m like tired. I mean, I am not a runner, right. But I had this crazy idea. I wanted to run a marathon, I’m in pain. I’m feeling very, very alone. This moment. I was running the thing all by myself. And so I figured like maybe this Miche didn’t hear me. So I said it again, like a little bit louder. And I said, My foot hurts so much. And I gave her a really extra hard. I stare glare. And she looked at me and said the other

one looks great.

Now go. And so I did go but mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. Because I was like in the middle of Bermuda and there was like chickens everywhere. And I just wanted to go sit down. And I figured that had to happen at the end of the race and I just wanted to get there. But habit number four of the Navy SEALs is to cheer yourself on. Now clearly, I am not a seal. I needed this random angel from the bushes to come and cheer me on. But the Navy SEALs who were successful had this habit of hearing their own voice say you can do it, your other foot looks great. They focused on what was happening that was good in that moment. Not the things that were hard or painful because there were always things in in the SEAL training that were hard or painful. But they focused on the thing that felt good. Now this habit is not about being reasonable at all. It’s about being successful. They told themselves whatever they needed to hear to make it through. So they ignored the bad even if it was their toenails falling off even if it was their like foot falling off. Right I mean, you know the Navy SEALs will go through with broken bones with all kinds of things because they’re hyper focused on the good even while they’re in exhaustion. Or they’re in pain. So, those are the four habits of successful navy seals. You can try them for yourself. Focus on right now. Imagine how good it’s going to feel. When all else fails. Breathe deeply and

cheer yourself on.

Now remember, you can be the hero of your own life, and you can live

a big life. See you guys next week.

Thanks so much for listening. Remember, you can find me all over social media at Betsy Pake. And, as always, here’s a little message from my husband.

That’s it.

HI, I'M YOUR HOST

Meet Betsy!

I'm Betsy Pake!

*Ocean obsessed

*Probably hanging out with my dogs

*Optimist

*Deep thinker

Hey There!

About Betsy

Hi I’m Betsy and I’m a subconscious change expert.
By day you can find me digging deep into the unconscious beliefs and identity of my clients so they can move past self-sabotage and lack of confidence and gain traction in their career and life.