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Men’s Journal’s Everyday Warrior With Mike Sarraille is a podcast that inspires individuals to live more fulfilling lives by having conversations with disrupters and high performers from all walks of life. In episode 46, we spoke to Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL. After 13 deployments, serving as the officer in charge of training for a specialized command and dedicating much of his 20-year military career to understanding and promoting optimal performance, Diviney is a subject matter expert. You could say he wrote the book on it—because he did. He’s the author of the 2021 bestseller The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance, which breaks down why people and high-performing teams succeed in stressful, challenging, and uncertain situations. In this episode, Diviney sits down with Mike Sarraille to discuss how we can all strive for optimal performance in our daily lives.

Listen to the full episode above (scroll down for the transcript) and see more from this series below.

This interview has not been edited for length or clarity.

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Mike Sarraille:
And welcome back to the Men’s Journal EveryDay Warrior. I’m your host, Mike Sarraille. We are joined by Rich Diviney. Guys, if we seen chummy, it’s because I’ve known Rich since I think 2009.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah, yeah. 2009.

Mike Sarraille:
2009. So Rich is also a Navy Seal. Much more experienced than I had correct me if I’m wrong, 20 plus years. 13 total deployments. 11 were two Iraq in Afghanistan. Yeah, just about. So you had the heyday as I referred to. Not that I’m chopped liver but

Rich Diviney :
No, and I know people can get, when you hear the word heyday, people are like, well, what the hell does that mean? But yeah, we were doing what we were trained to do, which is what anybody always wants to do when they join

Mike Sarraille:
It. It’s funny, it’s either heyday of we were doing what we were supposed to do, or for some people that’s like, that may mean hell Yeah. It was their, oh yeah,

Rich Diviney :
Hell. Oh yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Because I think even those of us who had an overall positive experience, there’s nothing positive about war. It just, how you say, war sucks for everybody. So you’re always going to have those down times because you’re at war, right? Yeah. I dunno. That’s just the way it is. I always joke, we’re kind of, those of us who’ve actually experienced it are actually pacifists at this point, and not pacifists in the sense that we don’t believe that there are bad people out there, and we don’t believe that we shouldn’t go to war at some points. But I think most of us understand that the decision to do something like that has to be taken into real consideration because of the lives that are going to be.

Mike Sarraille:
That statement is there. There’s hypocrisy in that statement. And let me explain that because let’s do, I had no problem, and I know you had no problem. And the boys we served with, and first off, we were both officers guys. We had a very, very specific role. We weren’t kicking down doors unless we needed to, but we had a very specific role for the place that we served. And it was to make sure that the guys had every asset at their disposal. It was command and control. It was making sure that timelines are met again, assets are in place. But I had no problem going forward, and I actually wanted to go forward. But now that I’m older and at that time to reflect, it really scares me. And in given the current state of affairs, I mean, I would get violent again. And I want to be careful in my statements. If I had to watch my son go to war, I would be pissed beyond means, and I would, people internally within the United States would pay for that in my eyes. But I think there would be a great reset, and war would not be as frequent if we put a cap on, if there was a universal agreement amongst all nations that only 35 plus year olds go to war. They never would be like, whoa, whoa, let’s come.

Rich Diviney :
Let’s do a debate, maybe, or, yeah, or it’s game of chess or something like that. Yeah. No, you’re right. I think mean it’s all contextual. We were obviously at a time, it was post nine 11, all everybody was fired up. I mean, we even look at the administration back then. I’ve often thought there was always a lot of criticism in terms of what the administration did, but well, certainly, maybe not for Afghanistan, but certainly for Iraq. And I’m someone who spent more time in Iraq than Afghanistan. So I can honestly say I echoed some of my confusion as to why we were there. But people don’t understand the burden of leadership. And George Bush at the time came into the administration as a wanting to be outside an economic president, a domestic president. Really, that was his goal. And suddenly, one of the greatest terror attacks in history happens on his watch. And only someone who’s had that burden of leadership can understand the concern, the stress, the fear that not ever happened again. And so decisions are made in that context. And sometimes, oftentimes it’s looked at quite differently in hindsight, but hindsight, you always have a lot more optic, a lot more information. So you do what you do the best you can do. And

Mike Sarraille:
That’s why they called hindsight. That’s right. Yeah. It’s always 2020. Did you have all the information at that time? So I had the privilege of, let’s see, it would’ve been 2016, had the pleasure of sitting next to him at a Texas Rangers game. And I also met him in the Oval Office for Michael Mansour’s. Yep. Medal of Honor. And I’ll tell you what, he made Miss Monsour feel like the only woman on Earth. Yeah. On that day. Oh, yeah. And then there’s Dick Chaney was called as Ice in the freaking Corner. And I’m just like,

Rich Diviney :
I had a similar experience. I don’t know if he knew this, but his last day in office, or one of his last days in office, he flew out here. He flew out here to help commission the George HW Bush carrier. And after that came over to the SEAL teams. I was SEAL Team 10 XO at the time, XO Opso, I can’t remember. But he decided to make a trip. So he came to visit Seal Team 10, and we hosted him, and it was him, Dick Cheney and Condo Lisa Rice. And so all of them came in, and I tell you yeah, Dick Cheney was cold as ice. Definitely not that didn’t say much. Condole Rice was as brilliant as everybody. She’s awesome. Think she is. She’s awesome. Just wonderful. I mean, he took time with everybody. He really did. He was gracious. He was grateful. There was zero arrogance, zero almost zero presidential ness.

Rich Diviney :
He just felt like one of the guys. But I have to say, I’m, I’m just going to fast forward to when I got to meet President Obama at really much dire circumstances when we were actually going to accept the bodies from extortion where there at Dover. And he showed up and he showed up at 8:00 AM that morning. He spent personal time with every single family member. And I think we might have talked about this in one of our other podcast discussions, but every single family member took time. Then we went out and we received the ceremony where they walked the caskets in from the C 17. This was a big hangar. The C 17 was pulled up the president and all the joint chiefs were there all the Army, Navy, air Force Joint Chiefs, so a lot of dignitaries all the military. And they all stood in line at attention.

Rich Diviney :
It was an August day in Baltimore, so sweltering. And that guy stood at attention straighter than anyone out there, and they brought all, every coffin in. There wasn’t enough. The C 17 wasn’t big enough for all of the coffin, so they had to stop in the middle, ch pull up a new C 17 and continue doing that. And so he was there all day. And the final story on that is the spouse I was repre representing well, Matt had what, three or four children, I think. But his eldest hadn’t been able to get there. But we had been told he was on his way. He still wasn’t there. After we did the ceremony, everything was over. I got word that he was about 20 minutes out. President Obama said, I’m staying. Went back into his trailer, took some calls, waited till Matt’s son came, had special time with his son, and then left. So this is the president of the United States taking his entire day to be with people, to cry with them to. And so I saw the same level of humility and empathy and care in President Obama as I did in President Bush. And I thought that if you want to see anything in a commander in chief who’s sending ostensibly sending you to war, that then makes you feel really good. So

Mike Sarraille:
Those were two great back-to-back presidents. They were, yes. They were different domestic policies. Yes. Yeah. Different international views, but great presidents. And in, I can only imagine, I know with President Bush, you could see the loss of life weighs on him. And he’s been relatively out of the limelight. And that speaks to his character and as well as President Obama. And President Obama, as we know, and I’ve said it before, I think I said it on the Rogan Podcast, was very aggressive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. During

Rich Diviney :
Ontario, he was actually our most aggressive president when he came to us. When it came to special operations, our most aggressive again, we can get into the typical nature of how conservatives and liberals kind of tend to look at foreign policy. But the, the funny thing is the spec ops, it’s always been known as the darlings of the Democrats. Special operations, because they’re low yield, low intensity, they’re they’re quick. They’re fast. So he was very aggressive with

Mike Sarraille:
Us. And this is happening to President Biden right now. Is every single word comes out of his mouth. The conservative side had just written him apart. Yes. Yeah. Well, you look at President Bush who had a, let’s say, tendency to stumble on his words, not out of a lack of intelligence or articulation whatsoever, but they would just jump all over. Oh, yeah. So yeah, it’s funny. It’s whatever way it’s swings at the

Rich Diviney :
Time, whatever, whoever your horse is in the office right there, you’re going to either back or beat. I guess

Mike Sarraille:
There’s a point, and this comes down to just, in my opinion, maturity. Whoever wins the election, here’s what you should say that night. Please do a freaking good job. Yes. Please do a great job regardless of which way you swing. Yes. Left or do a good job.

Rich Diviney :
Well, listen, I think you agree, and I think most of our, it’s funny, I just read a statistic. I think I heard a statistic that the far the percentage of far is about 7%. The percentage of far left is about 7%, which means that’s only about tops 15%. The rest of us are all in the middle. And we

Mike Sarraille:
Could vary varying degrees.

Rich Diviney :
In varying degrees. We could say I’m a little bit more right than I am left. But the majority of us look at policy and look at the benefit of the yin and yang of this nation. And I’m someone who certainly can look at, and in many cases hope and sometimes vote for different parties. So we get a little bit of a different flavor coming in there. And I think that’s the beauty of the nation. That’s what the founding fathers really wanted. I mean, the democracy was always going to be hard. And it was always about understanding how to give people the opportunity that they need, which is a problem. I I was just another thing. I was realizing the founding fathers years ago we have to remember that it is written that we have the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness. And I think a lot of people,

Mike Sarraille:
This is where you break down the lane of opportunity. Yes. Opportunity. If you’re willing to pay the price.

Rich Diviney :
That’s right. Yeah. The pursuit. So people don’t deserve, we don’t have a right to happiness here in this nation. We have the right to pursue happiness. And that means that, and I think that’s been forgotten. I think this idea of entitlement and say we deserve certain things because we’re Americans. I just think we have such an opportunity here. Every single person, there are admittedly people who start, I was going to say the top of Everest. Some people start right at the 10 feet from the tip, and some people start, and they’re not even in Nepal. So starting point’s always different. But we do have, it’s a land of opportunity, and it always will be.

Mike Sarraille:
It’s amazing when I’m all about perspective. And I think we’ve been comfortable for so long that we don’t lack perspective. We lack a healthy perspective in my eyes. So everyone is entitled. Everyone has different experience. Everyone is entitled to their perspectives. But we’ve endured comfort for so long that it has morphed into a degree of entitlement. Yes.

Rich Diviney :
Well, and this is the entitlement, the advantage of something that you and I have been through. I was having breakfast with a good

Mike Sarraille:
Friend, being in a third world country for so long.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. A good friend of ours who I will, he’ll remain nameless, but he was one of the biggest, the hardest, most badass operators that we’ve ever known. Just a solid dude through and through. And he and I were having breakfast the other day, and of course he’s been retired for a while. And he was saying, he’s like, listen. And he would describe himself as right-leaning, not an extremist, but he said, I’m so grateful to have gone the places I’ve gone because I’ve gotten to see how great this country is because I’ve seen what it’s like other places. We don’t have, people don’t have what we have here. And I think that what we’re seeing a lot in America is people who don’t have that perspective, they’ve only seen, they’ve only known here. And they don’t realize that, hey, there’s a reason why so many people from other parts of the world want to come here. And there’s also a reason why when they do, they kick ass. Because we have the ability to do it. I mean, it’s a beautiful place. I am a true, true patriot and proud to be an American but I’m not blind. Not a blind patriot.

Mike Sarraille:
So you’ve met Naira, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So Nas, for the listeners one of our, I call them media team with a number, but it’s my running joke, they’ve owned it. But she’s from Brazil born in Spain, then moved to Brazil. So she got dual assistantship. And she said, she’s like, Americans wine so much. And I had no, I’m like, yeah, I don’t know where to go with that. Yeah. I’m not saying you’re wrong. You’re absolutely right. I just don’t know how to respond to that. But she has a different perspective on Brazil. Poverty is at a different level, but yeah. I’m not kidding. So I was late. You were here on time. I, I’ll do pushups afterwards. So I had to run home because I, I’ve been on the road all day in dealing with things and faxing things, but I smelt because I worked out this morning. I’m like, I got a shower before I come see you. And there was no hot water in the apartment. I’m staying. And I start cursing. I’m like, this is bullshit. And then all of a sudden I remember back to Everest watching the kids along the trails hiking through the Everest National Forest, and they’re bathing in 40 to five degree water. And I’m like, oh my God, I’m such a bitch. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve gotten so comfortable that a cold shower.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. It’s why, Hey, a daily practice. Everybody should be at multiple times a day. We should ask ourselves, what am I grateful for? We should put our lives in perspective because we can complain. I got on the phone with a buddy the other day, and he was like there was some shuffling or whatever when we were starting up our conversation. I was like, what’s going on? I was like, God, this damn AirPod not connecting. It’s just so frustrating. I was like, yeah, the struggle’s real man. The struggle’s real. And we both started dying laughing because we realized these are just insanely <laugh>, asinine, pro quote problems. We’re lucky to have them. And so what am I grateful for? And honestly, wellbeing in any form is what we should be grateful for.

Mike Sarraille:
The practice of gratitude. And I need to do more of it. I haven’t tried it in the morning. I’ve heard morning affirmations and morning gratitude is extremely powerful. I do say something when I get up, well, when I do my little feet rotations because of therap metal in there, but today’s going to be tougher. And that’s what I’m here for. And I go, that goes to the no easy day for sure, for the seal teams. Is that the only easy day was yesterday? The simplicity, when everything is in abundance that entitlement sets in. But I do remember back to deployments when you had your, how sometimes our rooms were not, what is this? Probably eight by eight.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. Something like that.

Mike Sarraille:
Sometimes our rooms were smaller than this. The walls were that ply. Plywood walls. You had a twin mattress, which when’s the last time you swept in a Yeah. Or acot. But when’s the last time you’ve slept on a twin bed?

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. Yeah. It’s been a

Mike Sarraille:
While. And you had your whoopy, your one pillow, and you just loved it. Yeah.

Rich Diviney :
And you actually visualize you, when you’re out on those long ops, you’re like, well, I can’t wait to get back to my cot. Right? Yeah. Your little world, it’s all perspective. But again, that’s why when we’re in abundance, it’s one of the most important thing reasons why we should always seek out challenge, I believe, and struggle. And it doesn’t just be physical is only one aspect. It should be other types of challenge helping other people going out and doing things for people. Those are challenges where you’re actually helping and doing good, and it’s going to fulfill you in ways that you know, otherwise couldn’t imagine. But these are all pursuits. And I think we’re all on this journey. And I think even I forget to be grateful once in a while. I tend to, I get to work from home. So I see my kids every day, see my wife every day. So every day I wake up and I can see them and I can walk them out while they’re going to school. That’s my gratitude practice. But we have to find it.

Mike Sarraille:
Well, 20 years.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. 20

Mike Sarraille:
Years ago before that was not right. Was not like that. Well, we were gone. What was the average? Something like 320 days out of the year? Something like that or something. Okay. Yeah. We didn’t have that luxury.

Rich Diviney :
No. Yeah. That’s the sacrifice right there. It’s not should you be able to make it home, which some of us didn’t. Right. The sacrifice on both ends is you miss your family or miss your family misses you. And even today’s military, there’s nothing going on right now. So our military is not really doing much, but they’re still leaving their homes. They’re leaving their loved ones to go out and patrol and be out there. And that is a

Mike Sarraille:
Sacrifice. I ran into some boys today that are active and they were at a I fly tunnel. Oh, good. And they’re just like, heads down, flying, sit, flying. They’re like, God, you guys are so much better than our generation. That skydiving training’s better. They’re probably better shooters. Yeah. Cause they’re shooting more consistently, even though they lack the combat experience, they’ll learn that real freaking quick. I did, as you say, the pursuit of chall of challenge, both mental and physically to promote growth. Someone asked me recently, they’re like, when are you going to stop chasing things? And they didn’t say it as a compliment. And I sat back and I’m like, I know where you’re going with this, but I’m going to give you a response that you’re not going to, I’m never going to stop chasing anything. Right. And when my wife married me, she sort of knew this about me, you should always accomplish something. Then what’s the next horizon? Yeah. You said something on one of her previous podcasts from a mentor of yours. He said, celebrate, wait, mourn your losses as quickly as you mourn your

Rich Diviney :
Successes. This is the two. This is our,

Mike Sarraille:
The

Rich Diviney :
Two minute rule. The two minute rule from our ceo. Right. Both of our CEOs.

Mike Sarraille:
So this is a former mentor,

Rich Diviney :
Former mentor, both phenomenal. One of our cos there at our command we were at. And he used to say it was the two minute rule that his grandfather taught him. And that was, when something bad happens, take two minutes and morning kicked the dirt. Swear, do whatever you want. Feel sorry for yourself. And after two minutes, after 120 seconds, get back to work. And then when something good happens, same thing. Pat yourself on the back, rest on your laurels. Feel good. Do whatever you need to do. After two minutes, get back to your thing. And I would say that the two minute rule, and I talk about the two minute rule a lot in terms of the practice of resilience. But what we have to understand is it is a practice, and it is something you can do with little tragedies because there are things in life that happen that are going to take a lot more than two minutes to recover from.

Rich Diviney :
And there are great things that happen that we want to spend a lot more, two minute than two minutes celebrating. But it puts you into this mindset of getting back to baseline, getting back to work. Because to mourn, to kick the dirt, to stay low, it only means your baseline’s going to slowly decrease. Because once you get hit again, you haven’t gotten back to baseline. So you’re just going to go lower than you were. And if you go too high, that’s when complacency, complacency sets in and you start making mistakes. And complacency is you an even worse enemy than I guess sorrow. Because complacency is arrogance. And then you’re going to miss stuff. So yeah, it was a great practice and it’s a great way to practice resilience, and I would recommend anybody, but use it for those little tragedies, the traffic jam, the spat with a coworker, whatever that is, that you can get over in two minutes so that when the big stuff hits, you at least have some of that muscle built. It’s a good thing to do.

Mike Sarraille:
I think this is a good pivot point. So for the listeners, rich Divinity has become known as the attributes guy, which is not the worst sort of title. No. You can be the soft pillow guy or whatever, right? Yeah, no, you’re the attributes guy. So born in Indiana, is that correct? Connecticut, actually. Connecticut,

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. Went to school in Indiana.

Mike Sarraille:
Purdue. Purdue, yeah. And then you wanted to be a pilot, learned about Navy Seals. There was an attraction a seduction there. You’re like, Ooh, do I have what it takes to do that? Yeah. Ended up becoming a SEAL officer served with the conventional team, served a jsoc, but eventually you were tasked with revamping the selection process for a organization for

Rich Diviney :
Our specialized command.

Mike Sarraille:
During that time, you developed. Well, I mean, if somebody tasked me with that, I would’ve been like, I don’t, okay, I’ve got to start doing research. I,

Rich Diviney :
So what was going on, and you may remember this was that we had for years not been able to, so at that particular command, just to give the audience a background, we would take applicants from all the rest of the steel teams. And these applicants would, they’d have to have experience. So it was at least five years of seal, had to have glowing recommendations, have to have glowing fit, fitness reports, kind of the top candidates, top applicants would to, you could only be the top applicant if you wanted to apply. And they’d apply and they’d come to our selection, which is a nine month selection process, 50% attrition rate, which means 50% of these top dudes were not making it. And for years, the reasons why guys weren’t making it that we were giving were things like, well, the guy couldn’t do cqc or they couldn’t shoot very well, or couldn’t skydive whatever it was. And this didn’t make sense because these are skill, these guys are experienced dudes. They cleared more houses than most people. So it was disingenuous for the person, for the candidate. It felt disingenuous for us as the cadre. And then leadership began to say, Hey, what the hell is going on down there? Why can’t did that person not make it and give me an explanation better than he couldn’t cut it.

Mike Sarraille:
So it’s safe to say we couldn’t articulate,

Rich Diviney :
We couldn’t articulate. I was tasked with articulating my rco said, rich, I need you to atta. I need you to try to articulate what we have going on. And this is when I really started dive into performance. I really said, okay, when we see performance, what are we looking at? And that’s when I began to see, hey, this is not just the visible skills looking for more than these visible skills. There’s these hidden qualities, these hidden traits that we’re looking for that define whether or not someone has what it takes to do the job. And I was

Mike Sarraille:
Higher probability.

Rich Diviney :
Higher probability. I was reminded of a story. This story I heard happened before I went to SEAL training or went to buds. And I went back in 96. And so this happened before I did, but before I went. But back then, one of the first things you had to do when you showed up to Buds was, and just for the audience, I’m sure they know because they’ve been listening to you for a while, but basic underwater demolitions, <affirmative> slash seal training, six months long, San Diego, California. First thing you had to do back then was you had to swim 50 meters. So jump in a pool, swim 25 meters to one end, 25 meters to the other end. The story goes that this kid shows up, it’s his turn to jump in the pool. He jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom, he starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, and then walks across the bottom pool to the other end comes up, he’s gasping for air, nearly drowning.

Rich Diviney :
And the instructor looks at him and says, what the hell are you doing? And the kid who’s still getting his breath looks at the instructor and says, I’m sorry, instructor. I don’t know how to swim. And he start to pause us for a second and looks at the kid and says, that’s okay. We can teach you how to swim. So why did the instructor say that? The instructor said that because he knew that if this kid had the attributes, the qualities, the balls, whatever you want to call it, to show up to Navy SEAL training without knowing how to swim, he had everything inside of them and him that we needed for him to be a Navy seal. Teaching him to swim the skill was the easy part. So I began to separate this idea between skills and attributes, and we began to say, Hey, we are in fact looking for attributes, what attributes we’re looking for. That was then the journey. And I put together committees around the command. I said, okay, what are we looking for?

Mike Sarraille:
What makes our best

Rich Diviney :
Operators, what makes our best operators? And I got lists back from, did

Mike Sarraille:
You ever ask what makes our worst operators? Did you guys ever reverse

Rich Diviney :
Engineer? No, because I was so focused on <laugh> one side of it. That would’ve been a good question. It’d be a great question. Cause

Mike Sarraille:
Basically the opposite of that is That’s

Rich Diviney :
Right. Yeah. But even just the best operators we got, I, I remember getting about a hundred hundred 20 things back. And of course then I started culling ’em, culling ’em out, and I had to separate skills from attributes because sometimes a lot of times we conflate the two. Okay.

Mike Sarraille:
And this 90% of people, if not more, would not be able to define

Rich Diviney :
The difference. Yes. So let me define the difference for everybody. The difference is skills are not inherent to our nature. None of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball or shoot a gun. We’re trained to do those things. We we’re taught to do those things. Skills, direct our behavior in known specific environments. So here’s how and when to throw a ball. Here’s how and when to ride a bike or shoot again, because they’re visible. You can see them. They’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can put scores around them, you can put stats around them. You can see how well anybody does, anyone of those. You can put them on resumes. What skills don’t tell us however, is how we’re going to perform and stress, challenge and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill.

Rich Diviney :
So this is when we lean on our attributes. Attributes are innate, okay? All of us are born with levels of patience, situation, awareness, adaptability, resilience. Now, we can certainly develop those things over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children, which means there’s a nature nurture element to attributes. Attributes don’t direct our behavior. They inform our behavior. So in other words, they tell us how we’re going to show up. My son’s levels of perseverance and resilience inform the way he showed up when he was learning this skill of riding a bike. And he was falling off a dozen times, doing so, right? And then because they’re hidden in the background, they’re very difficult to assess, measure, and test you. They’re hard to see. They’re the most visible during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty, which is when they come to the fore, right?

Rich Diviney :
But when it comes to performance, if we’re making the mistake of judging performance only on these visible skills, we are missing a huge part of the performance picture. And oftentimes we’re looking only at the things that people need when things are going great. But we know, and the teams we served on, high performing teams are the teams that perform not only when things are going great, but also when things are going sideways, when things are not going great, those are teams that are built on attributes. And so we began to collect and say, okay, what are the attributes that are required to be part of this command? I took, and by the way, just so quick, again, for the audience, so if you want to separate, if you want, decide whether or not it’s a skill or an attribute, all you have to do is ask yourself one question, can I teach it or can I be taught? If the answer is yes, it’s probably a skill. If the answer is no, it’s probably an attribute. So the example for that would be someone tells you, and I’m like, Hey, I want to learn how to shoot a pistol.

Mike Sarraille:
Oh yeah,

Rich Diviney :
Done. We can take someone out to the range and teach ’em how to do that in two hours. That’s a skill. Someone says, or Mike, you say to me, Hey Rich, I want to learn how to be more patient. Okay, I can’t teach you how to be more patient. Right? That’s an attribute. So an attribute has to be self-developed and it’s internal and it’s harder to do. And so that’s how you tell. And so what we did is I took that 120 things, called away the skills, took the synonyms and got ’em, came up with 36 attributes that we were looking for. And then we didn’t have to change training at all. Our training was perfect the way it was. Now, we just looked at the environment differently. When we saw a guy entering a room not able to clear the corner or keep up with the information or do whatever, we’d say, Hey, that’s not necessarily because they’re a bad shot.

Rich Diviney :
It’s because they don’t necessarily have enough situation awareness. They don’t have enough adaptability, don’t have enough of this or don’t have that enough of that. So it changed the game in the way we were able to select. And then when I got out of the Navy, I recognized that organizations and teams were making the same mistakes. <laugh>, right? They were putting together dream teams based on resumes that were kick ass. And everybody, this guy had a gal, the best grades, best skill or whatever. And then they were putting these people together and the teams were toxic. And I said, well, you’re not

Mike Sarraille:
Lacked the attribute for teamwork.

Rich Diviney :
They lacked the, yeah, well, they put a dream team together based on skills, best this, best that best. That’s not going to make the engine run properly. A things that cause interhuman interaction, especially during times of stress, challenge, uncertainty, are attributes, not skills.

Mike Sarraille:
So eventually in, and we see the same thing. Running a SEAL team or trying to build a SEAL team is no different than running or trying to build a team in investment banking or manufacturing or marketing or whatever it may be. So you eventually wrote the book, the attributes, the 20, I’m sorry, 25. Yeah,

Rich Diviney :
The 25 hidden Drivers, drivers of Optimal Performance.

Mike Sarraille:
You use a word that is often conflated as well between optimal and peak. Yes. Yeah. And love how you explained this, because when you explained it, because we used to say, Hey, we’re all about peak performance when we were completely wrong. Not that it’s not relevant to what we did, but because of the nature of our work, you had to be ready to go at any time. And that could be across a five year career. So peak performance is not going to be as optimal.

Rich Diviney :
Well, peak is just a point. Peak is an apex.

Mike Sarraille:
That’s all it is. Like an athlete playing on Saturday

Rich Diviney :
And Peak is there. There’s only one place he can go from an apex, and that’s down, right? But you’re right, the athlete, the football player, the professional football player spends his entire week planning and prepping and scheduling so that he may peak for three hours on Sunday. We don’t get to do that, nor does nor do most human beings, most professions. And so what optimal performance allows us to do is a defined performance as an umbrella. Optimal performance is, I’m going to do the very best I can in the moment, whatever the best looks like in that moment. So the best sometimes can look like peak and it’s flow states and everything’s clicking. It’s awesome. But our best might be in at that. At one point. I’m just head down nagging it out, going step by step because it’s all I have right now. And it’s gritty and it’s ugly and it’s hard and it’s dirty.

Rich Diviney :
And I will tell you, you and I, in seal training and surf torture, there was nothing peak about our performance. We were just doing the best we very could in the moment. And that best was just not quitting. That was our best in the moment. So optimal performance allows us two things. First of all, it allows us to pat ourselves on the back when we are just struggling and we’re just going step by step and it’s dirty and it’s gritty. I mean, how many ops did we do, Mike, that you came back and we were like, holy crap, that was ugly. Pretty much every that, just every single one. And it was like, but we got the job done. So it’s nothing peak about it. So it allows us to pat ourselves on the back, but really more importantly allows us to do what I call property proper energy management.

Rich Diviney :
I don’t need to be peak when I’m driving the grocery store. I can be modulating my energy appropriate to what I need in the moment. And another myth I always bust when I speak to groups and crowds is the myth of Navy Seals. You see on TV and movies of a group of seals going before they go on a mission and they’re huddling up like an athletic team in their hoorahing, and they’re high fiving, they’re rah rahing to the helicopter. Doesn’t happen like that. In fact, and I know this, most of the time we were in helicopters flying into combat and guys were napping, okay, guys were asleep. And now you and I didn’t get to sleep because we were on the radio. Cause we were the officers and we had to listen to the pilots, but they were <laugh>, poor

Mike Sarraille:
Us, poor us,

Rich Diviney :
But guys were sleeping. Why were they sleeping? Because they didn’t know. We didn’t know what was coming. We didn’t know how long we were going to be out there. We didn’t know what was required. We’re not going to waste an ounce of energy we didn’t need. So optimal performance allows us to run that bandwidth and perform peak when we need to befo peak, recover when we need to recover, modulate when we need to modulate, but also when it’s just tough and gritty and it’s hard. We’re just, we’re just taking the next step. And this translates into every aspect of life. I mean, you talk to cancer survivors, you talk about chemo, and they say, yes, when it was time for chemo, I was just getting through hour by hour, and it was sucky and it’s shitty and all stuff. And they were performing optimally. And I think that’s the key.

Mike Sarraille:
So you broke these attributes down into buckets. Yeah. First off, you, no, you’re not going to give away the book. There’s no way you can give away the book and it’s

Rich Diviney :
Too dense, I think

Mike Sarraille:
In 20 minutes. But I, I’m going to tell people, you got to go pick up the attributes. Funny enough, we reconnected, I think it was like three or four years that we hadn’t talked. And I was writing the book, the talent where you were writing the book, the attributes. And they were so similar except you took a very, very deep look into the attributes and wrote it in a way that people can dissect every role within their company to determine what attributes are necessary. And we advocated for that. But we didn’t go in depth. You ended up I, I’d said, Hey, then let me interview you for the book. But give me the buckets in just a quick overview of what attributes are in those buckets and why.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. So I talk about the 25 attributes. There are more attributes than 25. In fact, the work we do with organizations now, we have about a list of 40, 45 attributes. But the 25 I wrote about were the ones I felt were the 25 attributes for optimal performance. And so the five categories are these. So grit, mental acuity, drive, leadership, and team ability, grit. A lot of people think of grit as its own attribute. It’s not, okay. Grit is a, first of all, grit can be described as your ability to push and power through those more acute challenges that’s have think of grit. And it’s a combination of things blended and catalyzed and stood together. In fact, Angela Duckworth wrote a great book called Grit. Grit. And she basically said the same thing. It’s not just one thing. So the four attributes required that makeup, grit are courage, perseverance, adaptability, and resilience.

Rich Diviney :
Then we have mental acuity, the attributes that describe how our brain processes the world. These are really cool and unique. And we could spend a whole hour on this because we want to talk about the seal minds. This is where it all starts. But how we process the world situation awareness. What are we noticing about how much do we notice about our environment, our levels of vigilance? Okay? Obviously seals, we notice a lot more. I was just in New York City last week, and I walk around New York City, I notice everything. I notice dark alleys, notice people’s hands. I notice cars. I notice everything. Sometimes that can translate into vigilance.

Mike Sarraille:
Vigilance, which

Rich Diviney :
Be, could be source of PTSD in some of, yes. So too much or too little of any of these things are bad. So you want to have a happy medium where you need. But situation awareness, compartmentalization, the ability to chunk an environment into meaningful elements and focus on what needs to be focused on and block out everything else. The single most important element to make it through seal training, by the way, that is a single most important attribute that every single.

Mike Sarraille:
Why is that?

Rich Diviney :
Because seal training is so tough that the individual who can’t effectively compartmentalize will not make it through. That’s the individual who starts hell week on Monday and thinks of Friday, who can’t say, Hey, I’m just, who sits in the surf zone and focuses on their pain and can’t, how long have I been here? Whereas you and I sat in the surf zone and be things like, oh, I’m just get the count to 10. Or, oh, okay, well, my muscles feel better now. Or I remember thinking, well, I’m going to be free. I’m going to be doing pushups soon and I’ll be super hot. So I’m just going to enjoy the cold while I’m at. I mean, that type of compartment locations, right? Some people are really good at that. Some people aren’t as good at that. Some people are too good at that. And seals fall into this category as well. If we compartmentalize too much, that can also lead to compartmentalizing emotions, compartmentalizing things. There’s

Mike Sarraille:
A dichotomy to all of, there’s

Rich Diviney :
A dichotomy to all of it. So that’s compartment task switching. How effectively are we to ship switch our focus points between categories and context in our environment? So switch from the email to the phone call to the conversation to that. This can be confused with multitasking, but we all know multitasking is

Mike Sarraille:
Meant, right? It’s be bullshit. The

Rich Diviney :
Conscious

Mike Sarraille:
Mind, not even a computer

Rich Diviney :
Tasking, the conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time. Now, neuroscientists will say that you can maintain a slight focus on another thing but it’s really just one thing at a time, which means that if you’re listening to the podcast while driving your car, the reason why you’re able to is because you’re not thinking about driving your car. But if someone swerves in front of you right now, and you have to take evasive maneuvers, you’ll have to rewind the last 15 seconds of the podcast.

Mike Sarraille:
And I’m going to replay this because Jordan, yeah, my wife. Yeah, she’s like men because she can tell when I’m on the phone with, yeah. And she’s like, men, she’s like, women just multitask and men cannot. I’m like, actually, that’s not true.

Rich Diviney :
They don’t melt a death. But women have been found, and again, I’m not going to put any gender definitions on this, but I’ve heard holistically, for the most part, women can

Mike Sarraille:
Task,

Rich Diviney :
Can task switch better than men. And part of that, if you take, I’ve talked to some evolutionary biologists about that. If you take that all the way back to our roots, because the men in the tribe were focused on hunting, and what do you have to do in hunting? You have to really focus in on something and do it. Whereas the women hunters and gatherers, they have to maintain an awareness and they have to switch from picking the right berry to doing this to the kids

Mike Sarraille:
To run in the village to

Rich Diviney :
Run. So task switching

Mike Sarraille:
Is evolutionary in a way. It’s

Rich Diviney :
Evolutionary way. Again, we’ve gone to a point where it can be argued that there’s no difference. But if we hear people say that, I don’t necessarily disagree. And then we have learnability the ability to upload and metabolize this stuff in your system. So the people are high on learnability are the people who you tell them how to do or show them how to do something once and they got it. And I know people like this. I am not one of these people, when I was in our commands selection, I was the guy who had to stay after and review my material. I’d walk the kill house just to visualize what I wanted to. I made the same mistakes a couple times. So if you’re a little bit lower, sometimes it takes you harder. It takes,

Mike Sarraille:
Yeah, I was the first time every time on everything. That’s

Rich Diviney :
Nice. <laugh>, screw you anyway. Yeah, you adjust there. But there are some guy, there are some folks who are like that. Again, you can’t judge yourself on these.

Mike Sarraille:
You would’ve seen those for those where things did not come as easy because of the iterations and the repetition that they had to undergo sometimes that they ended up one year, two years, five years down the line to be actually the more skilled

Rich Diviney :
At 100%. And even those who tended for things to come easy didn’t always have that advantage. Because the beauty of the training that we put guys through is actually, we throw guys into uncertainty. And uncertainty changes a game for everybody. Because now you, it’s no longer you are doing a rote skill anymore. You are actually, every time you’re figuring out a new environment and you’re thinking through every room, you’re thinking through every scenario, and you’re training your brain into, in a system of thinking that is different than just, I’m going in here. I’m turning right, and I’m shooting. And that’s the beauty of what we do. That’s why I thought, I mean, I’m so grateful that we went where we went because the level of C Q C that we did, I thought was just unparalleled in our ability to see this stuff so viscerally and to, and practice and train on it in such a high stakes level. I mean, I’m so grateful. I really am. And I’m grateful that

Mike Sarraille:
I was such a rapid rate at such a rapid, it’s such a high to

Rich Diviney :
Such high bar to in an environment that’s highly dangerous. You’re shooting the high fire around other people.

Mike Sarraille:
And of course, as I’m saying that, I’m referring to the boys.

Rich Diviney :
Well, yeah. But again, even the boys will, I mean, we as officers had to do it. I mean, if the officers as an officer, you had to pass that course, right? Yeah. Certainly you and I did not get to the levels of the guys, of the boys, the guys that we led.

Mike Sarraille:
They got 10,000 hours.

Rich Diviney :
But it’s funny, I was talking about to another couple friends of mine, guys who I served with and fought with and enlisted guys, and I have lunch with them in coffee. And we talk about this and the difference. And one of the things that as an officer, I did much better than they was a different level of task switching. I could manage the environment. I remember you, and you did this. I had a head, I had a headset on. I had the air assets, I had my troop chief. I had four or five different networks coming into my system, all of which I had to organize. And I was good at it, and I liked it. And I remember one of <laugh>, I won’t say his name this guy, but I remember we did a, a quick story on accountability. I know we’re shooting the gun.

Rich Diviney :
Accountability is one of the leadership attributes. Quick story on accountability. I was out there in Iraq with Hank from the book. It was our, and Hank and I were out there, and if you get to pick up the book, you’ll read about Hank one of the most phenomenal operators ever, and Hank. And it was a very kinetic, very busy deployment. And we were at one point having lunch, I think, and we were talking about leadership, and we looked at each other and we said, if we always say we’re responsible for growing new leaders, we’re responsible for that. Well, if we don’t walk the talk, then we’re full of shit. We need to do something. So we decided we’re going to send the troop out on a mission without us. We were going to say, Hey, we’re going to sit in the jock and send the troop out on a mission. So we picked a couple of the troop a couple of team leaders. The troop chief. Yeah, a couple of

Mike Sarraille:
Team, the two that would ascend to your position.

Rich Diviney :
So one team leader took the GFC position, one team leader took the troop chief position. We sent them out. We picked fairly what we thought was a benign, kind of a easy target. Of course, they go out there and you just start slaying it, right? It’s like Al Qaeda.

Mike Sarraille:
It wasn’t

Rich Diviney :
Benign. It wasn’t benign at all. And so Harry and I are just like, or <inaudible> were just, we were like, God damnit, we’re missing the thing. But at one point, this is going on. Of course they’re doing great, but we look at each other and we’re like, and of course we were working for at the time, a Delta commander. I was working directly for him and he was looking at us, okay, what are you guys doing here? But I remember looking at Hank and us looking at each other and saying, if this goes sideways, we’re done. We’re done. Because we knew we had this. We were accountable no matter what. Of course, they did great. They came back and the one team leader, I’ll tell you his name after this, but he comes back, he takes his headset and he throws it at me when he gets in the truck, he’s like,

Mike Sarraille:
I’m never doing that shit again. That sucked. I don’t know how you

Rich Diviney :
Do that. And we were just laughing about it, but it was very validating because that job was something I was really good at. And so when we talk about enlisted an officer in those environments, the best teams in that command or any command weren’t the teams that separated each other and made those distinctions other than joking around. The best teams were the teams that really honored and respected what everybody brought to the team. And I know every team I served with, they looked at me and said, Hey, rich brings something to this equation that we need and I can’t do. And they’re grateful for it. And I would look at my guys and be like, man, they do stuff that I can’t do any, but it’s funny. So we joke about that. But what makes a great team is the officer’s bringing exactly what the officer needs to bring and not stepping in the way of the enlisted guy and the enlist guy, bringing whatever they need to bring and not stepping in the way and just you’re synergized and rank goes out the window. You’re there more on responsibility versus rank

Mike Sarraille:
To include the support roles to when you treated them with such respect for what they brought to the table. It was a different environment. Amazing.

Rich Diviney :
Well, I remember. So the most important, I always say the most, the three most important words you can ever say as a leader to the people in your span of care are, I need you. All right? Because what you do in that point is you show them, first of all, you can’t do what they do. You appreciate what they bring. They bring a unique value to the team, organization, and you also immediately open up a space for them to contribute, right? Because as soon as I say I need you, suddenly someone says, okay, well, I’m going to contribute because he needs me. And that’s really important. And not many leaders do that. But I should say, not many people in charge do that. All leaders do that, right? But not many people in charge do that.

Mike Sarraille:
So I think here’s the fear of today’s environment. It’s just if you tell somebody I need you, they said, oh, really? I would like a pay raise. <laugh> not in

Rich Diviney :
The military. That happens,

Mike Sarraille:
Not in the military. So hey, that is the one thing about the military is pay is never an issue. Never. Yeah. Never brought up. Other than the fact I thought the guys that did what they did, should on any other level, be paid a lot more.

Rich Diviney :
I do. I tempo. I think the guys that you and I served with got paid a lot, right? I think there other guys probably there was other guys who probably needed a little bit more love. I think more military folks need.

Mike Sarraille:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ll never hear me,

Rich Diviney :
But most of the guys I know, guys I served at the enlisted guys said, yeah, we do pretty well. They were pretty pleased with what they were getting. But holistically there should be somewhat of a hierarchy of pay for the amount of risk. I mean, look at those guys. Look at those folks on the flight

Mike Sarraille:
Deck. Not only risk, but the amount of mastery.

Rich Diviney :
And mastery. Yes.

Mike Sarraille:
So here’s one tactic I’ve utilized in one. Both you and I have been a product of some great mes, and one of the things that people overlook is when they think of mentorship, they think of a hierarchy. Here’s my boss. He’s mentoring me. Some of the greatest mentorship I’ve ever had, and we were not peers, we were close. But yeah, in the hierarchy, you were higher than me, is the peer mentorship is the horizontal mentorship from when you’re in a troupe. Yeah, there’s a hierarchy. But I considered those guys peers. At the end of the day, at the the day, I’m ultimately responsible for good or bad calls, but great mentorship, and I’ve taken all these breadcrumbs from these different mens and I’ve created my own system. And that’s what leadership is. One. There is no original leadership principles. There’s, it’s all passed down oral history at this point.

Rich Diviney :
You’re right. And you and I have also said that leadership is not a position, it’s a behavior. So there’s a difference between being in charge and being a leader. And you get to say, Hey, I’m in charge. You get to self designate, but you don’t get to self designate as a leader. You and I were officers in the military, in the Navy, we were in charge of every mission we were on, whether or not we were a leader, okay? And you and I were always in charge of something, whether or not we were a leader, dependent on the people in our span of care and how they looked at us. So calling yourself a leader is calling yourself goodlooking or funny. You don’t get to choose other people decide whether or not or funny, okay? Other people decide whether or not you are a leader.

Rich Diviney :
Other people decide whether or not they want to follow you, and they do. So based on the way you behave. And I know we saw so many examples. You and I had some great mentors, but we also had what I call reverse mentors, which are the people who were so horrible that we looked at and we said, we will never be like that. And I remember there were times where I’d look at the person in a hierarchical position above me and say, I wouldn’t follow that person anywhere. And I’d look over there to the right and the person who was in no hierarchical position whatsoever, and I’d say, I would follow that person to hell and back. And it’s because of the way they behaved. So leadership comes from behavior, and it’s a designation that other people give you.

Mike Sarraille:
I want to get to my original point, but one of the things too that I posted something on, well, no, no, no, no. I gave a speech and I used the phrase, and I talk to you, talk about you a lot in my speeches, and they say, rich, if any asked me a question and I remember you did this on a LinkedIn live, you’re like, Hey Mike, do you consider yourself a good leader? And I’m like, ah, I’d like to think I was a good leader. He’s like, you don’t get to choose or make that decision on

Rich Diviney :
Good spot tonight.

Mike Sarraille:
I think I’m in the secret chat. I’m like, Hey, after this fucking find me, I’m going to punch you in the face. But no, no, no, it’s right. So I said that and somebody posted a picture of me and said, you don’t get to choose if you’re a good leader or not. Your people do. And some former military guy hater, the keyboard coward just went off. He’s like, that’s not true, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when he circled back, and if you read like, no, you just said that basically it’s leadership is based off behavior and trust in genuine trust. But one of the things I do for my, I don’t want to call ’em youngins, but young leaders that we did with Naira and Michelle and Will is on day one, is we tell ’em, Hey, we need you to understand one thing. You are a leader within this organization.

Mike Sarraille:
You have different perspectives, different experiences. You may not be leading a team anytime soon. You’ve got to learn to become a good follower in order to become a good leader of what I mean by that, and I explain it, but if you treat a boy like a man, usually the behavior you start to curate and see is a higher level of maturity in this. It tends to step up, and this is one of the things I see see in the regular military is they don’t treat those 18 year olds Marines and soldiers like men and continue, yeah, they’re going to fuck up. They’re 18, dude, but continue to reinforce and drive those points home that when they do get in trouble, you explain to ’em why they’re the military’s going to take a pound of flesh, what they should learn from it, what attributes in behaviors they need to demonstrate in order to show that they’ve truly learned from that experience and that they’re better for it. So I want to get back into it. So you have the drive attributes.

Rich Diviney :
So yeah, attributes. So categories. So we have the grit, mental acuity. Now the drive, drive can be described as the ability to pursue those longer term challenges and objectives. What makes up the driven person? Those are discipline cunning in narcissism. Yes, narcissism. That is an attribute if used

Mike Sarraille:
Positively. And let’s hit narcissism because a lot of people, oh, I’m not a narcissist.

Rich Diviney :
We all are. And here’s why. Because narcissist, so narcissistic personality disorder, it’s a disorder. It’s outlined in the DSM four. And in DSM four, you’ll find a couple pages on it and there’ll be nine sentences, nine criterion by which the physician looks at and says, okay, if the patient fits, I think five or more of these, the patient is considered disordered. So I bought a copy of the DSM four, of course, and so our DSM five, and I said, okay. I started to look at these sentences, and as I read these sentences, I certainly didn’t have five or more, but I also wasn’t innocent of everything I was reading. So I was like, okay, wait a second. Let me think about this for a second. Why did I become a Navy SEAL in the first place? And I really asked myself, and as you know, whenever you write a book, there’s a lot of self-reflection and you want to do it honestly.

Rich Diviney :
And I did. I interrogated myself honestly. Of course, I was a patriot. Of course. I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to be a pilot since I was six years old. Why though, did I choose Navy Seals? Ultimately, it’s because I wanted to see if I could be a badass. I wanted to see if I could do something very few people could do. I started asking my team guy buddies, my seal buddies, the same question, and ultimately it said the same thing. Yes, I wanted to be a badass. So then I looked up the definition of narcissism, the elemental, because me, I’m about semantics. I’m about the elemental definitions of stuff. Elemental definition of narcissism is the desire to stand out, be adored, and be recognized. That’s what it is. Every single human being on the planet at some point in their lives wants to stand out, be adored, and be recognized.

Rich Diviney :
And in fact, we’re neurologically rewarded when it happens. The infant who’s being adored by their parents gets bursts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin feels good. Okay? Feels good when we’re adored. Feels good when we’re recognized. So ultimately, a little bit of narcissism is the impetus and can be the impetus to some of our most audacious goals. Why else would someone want to be the top salesperson? Top athlete, top teacher, top navy seal, top author, whatever top actor. It’s because we want to be a little bit of spec, be a little spec, bit special. So the antidote to your narcissism getting too much is to surround yourself with trusted people who tell you the truth when you need to hear the truth. The classic malignant narcissist can be spotted immediately by looking at the people around them. They are always surrounded by the yes men. The men, people who bend the knee, people who put them on a pedestal.

Rich Diviney :
And by the way, those groups are often transient. In other words, someone can’t bend the knee for too long. So eventually one of those people will leave that group. Soon as that happens, that person becomes enemy number one to that narcissist happens every time. That’s how it works. If we look at the people around us and we say, Hey, the people, I’m not the center of attention all the time. I’m not on a pedestal. The people around me tell me when I’m screwed up. They tell me when I’m getting out over my skis. You are in a good position to effectively metabolize those slight narcissistic, audacious goals, which are all good. And that’s how we have to look at it. So it is a driver

Mike Sarraille:
That right there, how you just laid that out, I think here’s one of the biggest, let me put it to you this way. Yeah. One of the things we don’t teach our kids are the elemental definitions of all these attributes. There is no education for our lower elementary schools where they break down leadership, leadership development, right? Performance and behavior. And that is the biggest missed opportunity sometimes.

Rich Diviney :
Well, and I would almost would say Mike, was because I’ve thought about, we’ve had a lot of schools reach out to us with wanting curriculum, and man, we’re so excited to talk to these folks. Too many hurdles. Well, it, first of all, there’s too many too. I always say it’s a Russian proverb. If you chase two rabbits, both we’ll escape. And so you can’t have too many rabbits you’re chasing. And so the intent is to do this stuff, but one of the reasons why we need to take it slow is because we’re working on some stuff for high school and college right now. The reason is because when we are kids from the time of birth till about 22, really 25, but 22, you’re almost there. Your plastic frontal lobe is still not fully formed you the most. Your brain is the most plastic. You’re absorbing everything.

Rich Diviney :
You’re like a sponge. And so what I didn’t want to do for our kids was to have them begin to label themselves. In other words, I don’t want to tell a kid, oh, you’re a little bit low on adaptability. Ultimately, what we want to do for our kids is develop habits of introspection so that they begin to say, as young kids, let me think about this. Let me think about how I performed. How do I do? Okay, can I do better? What about this? I mean, the more we can say what up, the more we can get into our heads, and the more we can interrogate our own performance in an effective way, ask better questions, the better off our kids will be. So I think that’s the education we’re missing, is teaching kids to think versus teaching kids the facts or what we think the facts are.

Mike Sarraille:
Again, it comes back to semantics. You simply lay it out as not this is a weakness, but rather this is one of your areas or opportunities for growth, and here’s what you can do

Rich Diviney :
About, or don’t even think of that. Say, Hey, try some new stuff to explore that further. Right? Yeah. If you didn’t feel like you were very adaptable on that one, well go try something else and see, because that can be contextual as well. So a buddy of mine, you’ve met him, Dan Coyle talent.

Mike Sarraille:
Yeah, yeah, Dan. Yeah. We interviewed him together on LinkedIn. That’s

Rich Diviney :
Right. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. It’s a wonderful guy. I remember asking him when I first met him after he’d put out the talent code, I said maybe it was my wife. What’s a great way to look for help your kids explore talent? And he said, I don’t think you should, should just throw as many things in front of their windshield as possible

Mike Sarraille:
And help men ’em after.

Rich Diviney :
Just keep throwing things in front of their windshield and just see what happens. Because sometimes they’ll wipe ’em away. Sometimes they’ll stick whatever, throw as much in front of their windshield as possible and let them start sorting themselves out and give them a place to, a space to be, a place to love. Great book called Range.

Mike Sarraille:
I need David Epstein.

Rich Diviney :
David Epstein started to take, to deconstruct this whole business of kids should start early and pick one thing. It’s

Mike Sarraille:
Basically the Tiger Woods versus the Roger Federer. And if they don’t know the difference, tiger was bred to be a golfer. Yes. Roger. Roger Federer basically did almost every sport imaginable within his culture until I think he finally committed to tennis around 13 or 14. Something like

Rich Diviney :
That. Yeah, something like that. And again, both successful, but again, we’re talking about two athletes

Mike Sarraille:
Balanced, <laugh>,

Rich Diviney :
Balanced question, different story. But listen, the high percent of us are not going to go into professional sports. The high percent of us are going to go into life and have to figure it out. And what better position to be to figure shit out?

Mike Sarraille:
As a generalist? As

Rich Diviney :
A generalist, that’s what you want to be. So now you have tons of perspective from which to draw. It’s just, yeah.

Mike Sarraille:
And that’s why I’m biased towards hiring veterans who have a lot of experience under their belt. Because again, they’ve seen different environments, they’ve seen different types of uncertainty. They’re almost unflappable in a lot of ways. I want to hit the two more buckets, and then I want to get to two questions before. So then leadership attributes, leadership attribute, and one of my favorites is empathy. But go ahead

Rich Diviney :
Again. So one of the attributes that allow others to designate you a great leader, empathy, accountability, authenticity, decisiveness, and

Mike Sarraille:
Authenticity.

Rich Diviney :
No, I said authenticity. What’s the

Mike Sarraille:
Last? Accountability.

Rich Diviney :
Accountability. Yes. Yeah. Right. Selflessness. Sorry. Selflessness. Authenticity, accountability, decisiveness. And then team teamability. What are the attributes that allow you to be a great teammate? Again, you don’t get to call yourself a great teammate. Other people call you a great teammate. Those attributes are integrity. Interesting about integrity, and people can read about it in the book. Integrity is subjective to the group. What do the right thing for a Cub Scout T troop? It’s going to look different than do the right thing for an ISIS

Mike Sarraille:
Or isis. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Diviney :
And I always say, this is a very controversial example, but the Cub Scout who steals $5 from his fellow Cub Scout and the ISIS person who drives the truck into the suicide truck, into the target, who’s living more in integrity out of those two people, isis,

Mike Sarraille:
Remember, it’s the ISIS on their scale, on their

Rich Diviney :
Scale, on their scale. So you have to sort that out in your team. Integrity humility, conscientiousness, and humor are the four attributes for ability. So

Mike Sarraille:
You talk about empathy on a dimmer switch. Yeah. And I loved this explanation. Why don’t you dive into that just really

Rich Diviney :
Quickly. Yeah. So empathy. So the thing about empathy and just to level the playing field for everybody all of us have all of these attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each, right? So if you take adaptability and 10 is high and one is low, you and I would probably be about a level eight, which means the environment changes around us outside of our control. It’s fairly easy for us to go with the flow and roll with someone else might be a level three. Same thing happens to them. It’s difficult for them to do it. No judgment there. It’s just how we are empathy’s the same way. And by the way, you don’t have to, it’s not required that you be high on all this stuff. In fact, your job, whatever, you’re, the niche you’re in may in fact not require you to be high.

Rich Diviney :
So the standup comic shouldn’t be high on empathy because how can you find funny at a funeral if you’re too empathetic? The Navy seal, I believe, needs to, needs to not be too high on empathy, but have it on a DI switch. And what I mean by that is we are in the position, I say the Navy abc, I can plug in any special operator, any war fighter, any warrior in there. You’re often in the position of providing a lethal force to an enemy. And then within a split second, caring for the kids, the women and children that just witnessed that act, right? So you’re shifting from deadly to caring in almost a millisecond. And so the healthiest warriors, or I shouldn’t say that, the truest true warriors you and I saw, cause I would not qualify those people who can’t do this as warriors.

Rich Diviney :
But the true warriors are those who can have that empathy on a dimmer switch. Now, the best leaders also do this because too much empathy as a leader can be detrimental, right? They’ll walk all over you. And plus, by the way, if you have too much empathy, oftentimes it’ll be perceived. You may be favoring a group. If I’m so caring about how this person feels, well, what about how this group feels? Right? So you have to have it on a switch. Sometimes you have to dial it up, sometimes you have to dial it down. You have to really be very nuanced with empathy as a leader. So I think the lessons we learned as warriors, having that dimmer switch are the same lessons that translate into leadership or being effectively in charge. However, you want to say that

Mike Sarraille:
You tell a story about authenticity. You had one boss, which at first glance a lot of people would be like, that guy’s grumpy. Yeah, he’s negative, but you’re like, no, that’s authentically himself. Guy turned out to be very one of good

Rich Diviney :
Leaders. Leaders, yeah. One of my best leaders, I first met him, he was at a change of command, met him, he was grumpy. He was asking me tough questions. I was like, oh my God, two minutes. I was like, this is going to be a rough two years. But then couple weeks in, found out, he’s like, he’s like that everyone, whether it was enlisted, whether it was officer, whether it was senior leaders, whether it was whatever, he was always the same way, which was authentic, which means it was consistent, which meant we could trust it and we could trust him. We could trust the way he was going to be, which is a huge part of building trust. So we began to understand him. And oh, by the way, his tough questions were always good questions. So it just made us better. Turned out to be one of my best leaders. I enjoyed working for him.

Mike Sarraille:
So humor seems like an odd one for probably a lot of people. I haven’t read the book now. I totally understand it. But humor with regards to team ability, that seems more of a individual trait than it does relating to being a good team member. Humor

Rich Diviney :
Is wonderful individually, obviously, there’s so many benefits to it, but what we have to understand is that laughing, involuntary response. And when we laugh, we generate again, neurologically and neurobiologically. We create three chemicals. Dopamine, everybody knows dopamine, often mistaken as the reward chemical. It’s in fact a motivation. Chemical tells us this is good, keep doing this. So we get dopamine very powerful. We get endorphins, endorphins, mascar, pain. That’s runners high. In the late sixties, early seventies, neurosciences were studying the brains of drug addicts. They found in human brains, opiate receptors. That’s really weird. Why the hell does do human brains have opiate receptors? It’s because we make our own opiates. They’re called endorphins, right? We are endurance creatures go the long haul for the hunt, for the food runner’s side, we get endorphins, masks are pain. Then finally we get oxytocin, a neuro hormone, which means it affects both the body and the brain.

Rich Diviney :
Bonding, binding, chemical. We get huge doses of in physical contact with other human beings, our pets, physical contact there acts of kindness and generosity. It basically tells us we’re in this together. It bonds us and binds us. So when we laugh involuntarily like sneezing, we get all three of those. We get burst with three of those, and we get, this is why laughter binds people. It bonds people. It’s why it’s one of the most desired qualities when looking for a partner. Because if you can make someone laugh, you can make your partner laugh. It says, I’m going to pull you through this. I’ll be there. So when it comes to teaming, again, the humor attribute does not necessarily, you have to be the class clown, just you have to be able to laugh with the class clown. But we have to honor those class clowns, those people, we had them in our pursuits and troops. There was always those one or two people that were always the guys who made the stupid, funny, hilarious jokes at the wrong time. And we would all be crying because we’d laughing so hard. We need that shit. We really do. It’s one of the things I miss most about the teams is the laughing. Because the humor, I think we learn it in buds. I really do.

Mike Sarraille:
Oh, it is powerful in buds is one thing. When you’re going through hell, when people are putting you through physical, let’s call it punishment for what he does, but to be in a firefight, surrounded, outgunned, and one of your guys makes a joke to where everyone’s laughing, and it’s almost like this reset, and the team looks at each other and says, Hey, we’re in a bad situation, but we’re good. Are we good here? Yeah. All right. You bring the five.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. So there’s also a biological reason for that too because the courage, so I talk about courage. Courage when we are afraid. Is

Mike Sarraille:
That your Connecticut coming out right there?

Rich Diviney :
<laugh>? What?

Mike Sarraille:
Courage

Rich Diviney :
Is how? Courage. Courage. Well,

Mike Sarraille:
I don’t know it. It’s your eastern accent.

Rich Diviney :
I didn’t think I had one, but yeah. Okay, sure, sure.

Mike Sarraille:
The wolf is on the wolf. Yeah. <laugh>

Rich Diviney :
Not, but it’s not still as north as Boston.

Mike Sarraille:
No, it’s not. No, it’s not.

Rich Diviney :
So courage. When we get afraid, okay, our brains are autonomic arousal rises, and we starting to, our frontal lobe is starting to go offline. Our limbic system started to kick up. Our amygdala is kicking in. We are offered two choices, flight or fight. People think freeze is a choice. It’s actually not an oscillation between the two. Okay? Bottom line is we can choose either one before we’re an autonomic, full automo overload, and then our body chooses without snowing. But until that point, we can choose either one. When we choose to fight, I e step into our fear. Our body rewards us with dopamine. It’s a switch. It’s a specific courage switch in our brain, and we get a dopamine reward for it. So when we step into our fear, we get a dopamine reward. This is why when we do something that scares us, we feel good.

Rich Diviney :
Okay? Think about this for a second. When you’re in a sticky situation and you’re fearful and shit’s going down, someone cracks a joke, and you genuinely laugh, genuinely laugh, you suddenly got dopamine. It’s a hack into courage. And anybody who might have, they might be listening who’s been afraid of something, they’ve been truly kind of genuinely fearful, and they’ve had the opportunity to laugh in a genuine way at something, we’ll know, their fear went away for a second because we just got a dopamine hit. So this type of behavior, this humor pulls people through gun fight. One of our mutual friends told me that they were in a helicopter on the way back from a mission, and they were all flying, and the helicopter began to crash, began to go down, and they’re all sitting in there, what the hell’s going on? And one of the dudes looks at all the other dudes and says, well, I guess we’re not going to have to clean our weapons tonight. And they all burst out laughing. I mean, this is what happens. And suddenly you’re okay. Now I can solve problems, I can do whatever, but at least I feel good. So I mean, who wouldn’t want to die laughing? I mean, if you’re going to die somehow, you might as well die laughing, right? But that’s what it does. It pulls us through. It’s why it’s such a team ability attribute

Mike Sarraille:
Powerful. Yeah. Well, here’s what I’m going to do for the listeners, because I know this one is going to pull people in this what they want more, and they should, because if you understand these more, you can under, or you can do a self-assessment. Yeah. And one, you have an assessment on your website, which is

Rich Diviney :
Yeah, the one right now, it’s Grit, mental acu, and Drive. We’re starting to upgrade it, but you can still get there. You can still go there and do the three for free and get some scores on grit, mental acu, and drive. We’re going to have leadership and Tim Ability out soon. That’ll be a 360 assessment, but you can get a little bit of a clue on where do you default.

Mike Sarraille:
But the website website is the attributes.com com. Yeah. Okay. And when you go to the top menu bar, it says, take the attributes assessment. Yeah.

Rich Diviney :
It’s all there. And you can get all the, how

Mike Sarraille:
Long does it take people to,

Rich Diviney :
I mean if you want to take the grit one, each one is going to take you probably about 10 minutes.

Mike Sarraille:
So yeah, 10, 40 minutes and all.

Rich Diviney :
Yeah. Okay. If that 40 minutes would be long. Yeah.

Mike Sarraille:
So what are one of the biggest missed opportunities is for everyone, and I didn’t learn this until only a few years ago, is actually stopping to take a self-assessment because I guarantee, are you the same person you were last month, right? No. Right. I was not the same person when I was leading a troop. Definitely not the same person I was when I was in the NBA program. And now after four years in business and having a couple failures under my belt, and I’m not the same person. So taking a personal assessment is one of the most powerful things, and you should be doing it. If you can’t do it on a monthly basis, do it on a quarterly, if not biannually basis. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. So I’m going to have you back to talk about each of the buckets. And for those, I only want to do 30 minutes.

Mike Sarraille:
Yeah. And again, still, guys, even if he explains each of the buckets for 30 minutes, you’re not getting the book go by the book. Mine is covered in highlighter in tabs, and I’ve actually taken a lot of what you talked about and put it into my own speeches, my keynote, supporting with companies as part of the leadership and then talent selection as well. We do end this podcast with a few questions and this, so we’ll jump right in. And looking for a little vulnerability here too, is yeah. What is the hardest decision or biggest regret you’ve ever had to make or have to date?

Rich Diviney :
Oh gosh. Hardest decision. Biggest regret. I stay away from the word regret because I always feel like it’s a learning

Mike Sarraille:
Lesson.

Rich Diviney :
I feel like my life wouldn’t be where it is had I not made the mistakes I did. So I don’t regret much. Hardest decisions would probably be, especially from a work, would be that I turned around on three operations. Out of the hundreds I’ve done, we had to turn around and we turned around because I had to made the decision to, because I was not feeling like everything was lining up in place and there wasn’t anything catastrophic that was happening in the moment, but I just felt like things weren’t lining up in a way that to was going to induce success. I kind of had that old 2020 after action where guys look as like, well, they saw this and they saw this, and they saw all these little things. So yes, that’s always hard, especially at the level you and I play. And I remember the very first mission I went on at the command, you and I were at very specialized.

Rich Diviney :
Elite command takes years to get there. It was the very first mission I was on in Afghanistan as a troop commander. And I turned around on him, and guy in charge was a ranger back at the Jock. And I remember calling him on the radio and said, Hey, we’re coming back. Rtb. Yeah, we’re rtb. And there was kind of pause, what? Really? And I was like, yeah, we are. Hardest thing I had to make. Some of the guys were pissed every time I did it. Some of the guys were pissed. Luckily I had leadership that both in the troop chief and the team leaders, they were, no, they thought it was the right thing too. It was as well. But it’s always hard. It’s always to do that. And you don’t necessarily get a recognition that you did the right thing because you’re doing it because you’re preventing something from happen. So those are always hard decisions to do.

Mike Sarraille:
Yeah. I rarely tell war stories, but funny enough, we released, Sean White came on and he talked about this. And again, interviewing Sean White, you just think this guy is fearless, has no risk assessment. And I was absolutely, absolutely wrong how calculated he was. And he said, of course, the public doesn’t know this. But there were so many days in, so competitions where I didn’t go for the mc twist. Yeah. Seven 20, where I went for a lesser trick because things did not feel like he up. It wasn’t lining up. I remember my commanding officer, who’s one of my greatest mens, we were going to a target and probably two kilometers from the target five Eddie mc batons literally walked into the patrol and were reported as Eagles returning to the patrol by sr. And I’m like, wait, Eagles never left the patrol. And then all of a sudden, a firefight with the front element breaks out, hand grenades were thrown, our guys were okay.

Mike Sarraille:
They eliminated the enemy. But literally almost two minutes after it happened, because we were going to mop up and collect everything there, I said, Hey, we’re going to RTB after we clean up here. And I didn’t even call to find out what was going on, the objective. Right. And of course, my, I commanded officer, he said, Hey, why did you make that call? You could have continued on. And I said it didn’t feel right After that, my guys guys were very focused on what had just happened, because that was, it was a close contact situation. And he’s like, okay. He’s like, well, you could have talked to ISR and see if there was any movement on the target. And I said, yeah, you’re actually right. I could have done that, and I didn’t do that. He’s like, well, the people left the target but he tried to get me to think a little more critically and use it. But I just had that feeling. I’m like, yeah, no, we’re done here. Yeah, yeah, we’re done

Rich Diviney :
Here. Tough decisions.

Mike Sarraille:
And you’re always a fear of people are going to, they’re always going to talk. Oh, I

Rich Diviney :
Mean, yeah. If you’re a true leader, I mean, you have to accept that you’re not going to, you got to get

Mike Sarraille:
Comfortable with

Rich Diviney :
That. I mean, yeah, they’re going to be people who don’t like what you’re doing. Our kids, our kids aren’t always going to love us <laugh>. Right? We’re, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to take decisions that they don’t agree with. Same thing with leadership.

Mike Sarraille:
There is, well, all my guys are upset at me because all your guys are upset at you does not mean you’re necessarily wrong. No. It means that the mob mentality could have started. Right. And if you made the right decision for your people, not best decision, if you made the right decision for your people in the organization, then you should feel 100%. Yeah. And so similar, what are those three key tenets, those non-negotiables? Yeah. For you, that have led to the majority of your success, those things that you’ve helped dear and follow those principles or traits?

Rich Diviney :
I’ve always put my identity as husband and father as number one. That’s always number one for me. And that keeps me grounded, right? Because whatever endeavor I do, I know I have that to fall back on. And I’ve always focused on that. So I think identity has a lot to do with it. And if you can ground yourself in an identity that’s real and meaningful, this is how you can transfer through different identities that you’re just exploring. And you’ll be fine, because you always have this grounding one. So that’s one. The other one, I think I only have two, because the other one is massively important. I think the secret to success is delayed gratification and the ability to not get something, and to be able to be patient, and the ability to work hard and the ability to say, Hey, I don’t need this right now. I’m going to wait for it and I’m going to make small goals in the meantime, but I, I’m okay. I’m okay. And there’s no jealousy, there’s no wanting, there’s there. You’re just chunking it out. You’re walking the walk. And the people I’ve seen who can’t delay gratification typically,

Mike Sarraille:
Which is 90% of America, which

Rich Diviney :
Is 90 America, well, social media doesn’t help, right? I mean, because it’s all dopamine. But this is, so, I guess the caveat to that is can you, there’s a science behind creating dopamine reward in the struggle. So you begin to enjoy the struggle in a way that you get rewarded for it. But ultimately it’s delayed gratification. If you can delay gratification, you will be successful.

Mike Sarraille:
To our conversation of skills and attributes, I would very much view delayed gratification as a, yeah,

Rich Diviney :
I’d have to. I’ve

Mike Sarraille:
Thought about, it’s the marsh, the marshmallow experiment where they test the kids. Yeah. There’s kids that, yeah,

Rich Diviney :
It’s going to be a combination of attributes. I haven’t put together what that combination is part one of it. It’s a bucket. It’s a bucket. And I think patients might be in there, but I’m not sure yet. So I have to do some,

Mike Sarraille:
Oh, it’s got to be

Rich Diviney :
Undoubted. But there’s some real impatient people who are also successful. So I’d have to really think about how those play off of each other. Yeah. I dunno. It’s a another conversation.

Mike Sarraille:
That’s a, okay. Yeah. So always identified as a husband and a father. Yep. That’s your grounding. Yeah. And then two de delayed, de delayed gratification. Yeah, that’s a big one. When all this said and done, and hopefully that’s 40 years, 50 years from now for you and we talk about legacy, you call it the irony of leadership. I call it the legacy of leadership. Yeah. What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want Rich Divinity to be known for?

Rich Diviney :
Well, bottom line great. Father and father. Father. I mean, if that’s all it says on my tombstone, I’m fine. But in addition to that, I would love for people to have been helped and been able to explore their own potential through maybe some of the distinctions I’ve given them or helped them, or not even given them, helped them recognize I think breaking down performance, success and success to very elemental human things can give people the tools to succeed. And I think having gone around the world, you see people all the time, and you run into people, especially kids. And I’ve always wondered when I see some of these kids out there who are just beautiful children who are just doing their thing and really smart and really, and I say to myself, I wonder if they have the resources, if they’ll be able to achieve their potential. And if I can give a little bit of peace to that to other people so that they can maybe explore their potential as well. That’s a cool legacy. I

Mike Sarraille:
Think. Well, on your way to doing that, and the impact you’re going to have is massive. I know your book impact me. It made me well, it helped me do assess, yeah, the last 20 years of my life. And for that, I’m thankful, rich, you are coming back on one year contributor for the Men General. Every day, while you’re written some great articles, you’re about to release some more. You’ve got some in the bucket, we will have you back on for all those again, you can pick up the book, the Attributes at Amazon 30,000 copies at this point. That’s usually picking up steam, picking up steam which is many, much a lot more copies than I’ve sold with the talent war. But also

Rich Diviney :
A good book, by

Mike Sarraille:
The way. Hey, go pick up the attributes. Go check out the website. And for the companies, I want to bring Rich in again, just go to the attributes.com go to the contact us, and you can contact him that way. Rich, thanks for coming in, man. Thanks, brother.

Rich Diviney :
Great to be here,

Mike Sarraille:
Guys. We’ll be back with another episode of the Men’s Journal Everyday Warrior podcast. Until next time, be good.

Source

As his passion grew, he began advocating for a healthy lifestyle through running and wanted to see more Filipinos engage into a healthy regime. Then he decided to start a group Pinoy Park Runners and Mananakbo Australia in 2021.

“When you see them improve their health, improve their physique and you know their self-confidence.

Top benefits of running:

• Improve cardiovascular system
• Reduce the risk of heart attack
• Improve stress level
• Manage blood pressure within normal range
• reduce the risk of diabetes
• Improves bone density
• Helps maintain a healthy weight and helps weight loss

Source

Aerobics videos, leg warmers and all made Jane Fonda a millionaire in the 1980s. Exercise videos continue to be big money makers as they shift from cassette tapes to online streaming services.

As it turns out, the practicality of exercising at home and the anxiety and insecurities that plague out-of-shape fitness seekers are still alive and well today. The sense of community gym goers have come to rely on was shattered during the covid pandemic; many depend on self-discipline and working out solo as part of their fitness routine. 

Though fitness videos are nothing new in the YouTube era, where personalities like Chloe Ting, Emi Wong and Yoga with Adrien have cultivated massive followings with their play-by-play fitness tutorials, subscription services are jumping on the trend. 

One of the first to adopt the model was Paleton, which launched a series of subscription-based fitness classes ranging from HIIT workouts to yoga and pilates after seeing a decline in sales of their spinning bikes. According to market research, the online fitness industry tipped over the US$5 billion mark in 2019 and is projected to grow by 30 per cent by 2026.

Seeing the potential of a new generation of fitness enthusiasts looking to get their workout in without leaving their living rooms, the likes of Apple and, most recently, Netflix have launched their versions of fitness tutorials. 

Apple Fitness+, available in 21 countries, combines guided workout videos with the brand’s fitness-tracking capabilities. The Fitness+ platform is said to be home to the world’s most extensive collection of 4K Ultra HD fitness and wellness content and is designed to help Apple users stay fit anywhere and on the go. 

Together with the Apple Watch, users can personalise goals and see their fitness metrics like heart rate and calories burnt in real time. 

More recently, Netflix launched a series of workout videos in collaboration with Nike. The Nike Training Club series includes everything from core training to fitness basics and yoga sessions. The series offers more than 30 hours of fitness content led by Nike’s global trainers, including Kirsty Godso and Betina Gozo.

Amazon has also created a series of free fitness videos available to its Prime subscribers. Amazon Prime’s videos include everything from cardio classes to guided meditation sessions.

Also see: How to make the most of the sleep data on your wearable tracker

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