Episode 29 - The Unbeatable Mind of Mark Divine

People are logging their food journals in either MyFitnessPal and/or Wodify, and then this time, instead of just doing Paleo or just doing one, we actually offered four different tracks or nutrition tracks, one being Whole 30, the other being RP Strength, one being ETP and a fourth one being a program that we generated ourselves. Got a ton of interest in this. Seventy-five people signed up, generated about $7,200 in revenue.

We're going to kick some of that back into prizes from Lululemon and a bunch of other cool things, but I think this is something that you all should think about doing and look at. The InBody is a piece of machinery that will definitely add value to what you give to your clients and will pay for itself if used wisely. That's it for now, and we'll talk soon. Thanks.

If you're a coach, listening to Mark Divine is super valuable because you're going to learn a lot of stuff about coaching mindset, especially like arousal state and flow and how to incorporate visualization and mental practice into training athletes. If you're a box owner, this is going to be super valuable because Mark is going to talk about the incorporation of yoga into a box.

When I'm talking about the stratified model to a lot of affiliates, one of the things that they see the value of but have trouble incorporating into their business is yoga. A lot of people want to bring yoga into their gym. They see the value of it, but they have a hard time getting their athletes to the value mostly because of the foo-foo imagery of like Lululemon and spandex and sweaty yoga.

Mark's yoga is different, and Mark understands the value of training the mind of using warrior-type moves and language when talking about yoga and also stripping off, you know, all the foo-foo stuff and actually getting down to business using the parts that are most important. Mark has a great new book called "Kokoro Yoga," there's a link to it in the show notes that you should definitely pick up. And in this episode we're going to talk about box breathing.

We're going to talk about the flow state and just practical application that you can use in everyday life. Mark and I are definitely not Lululemon-type guys. We're only going to do things that are practical. We're also both in our forties and we know that we don't have time to do anything that doesn't actually work. You're going to get a lot of value from this episode and just listening to Mark is kind of a hoot. So enjoy. Mark Divine , welcome to Two-Brain Radio.

So when I go for the CrossFit Games in two years, it'll be as the youngest 55-year-old . I remember, by the way, not to get too sidetracked, but I did take a run at it and I missed the Games by one slot when I was 49, turning to 50. I injured my back, which took me out of the running for the last couple of years. At any rate, that was a little sidebar for you CrossFitters that t hose old guys still like to compete.

But a nyways, so I was—back to the more interesting question, I was in New York working as a CPA and I was just kind of miserable, even though it was considered a fantastic job by all external extrinsic measures, you know, my family and my peers a nd the paycheck and all that kind of stuff. I was a r ockstar and heading in the right direction, but I was not happy, wasn't feeling motivated.

In fact, my motivation was waning e very day, a nd one of the bigger challenges that I had, which has largely been, for a lot of us, has been solved by Coach Glassman, was I didn't have any way to physically train, to develop myself. You know, there was no way I can be involved in a organized sport in a professional job. And so, you know, I took up a martial art, which was cool. And so I started, you know, that was my functional training.

Well, the martial art included meditation, so Zen meditation, I did, you know, at least 20 minutes a day, 45 minutes on Thursday and before and after every karate class, which I did after work and before I went to NYU business school, which is down near the World Trade Center.

And Chris, I tell you what, to make a long story short, I went from being kind of this quote unquote "normal" kid to where all of a sudden I was having these really cool, you know, kind of peak experiences in flow states and I was just tapping into some part of me that I didn't even know existed and I didn't know how to tap into before.

And it was kind of this combination of hard training with soft, you know, mental training through Zen and through, you know, some of the training that the grand master was providing me, which was very Eastern in nature. It didn't exist in Western sports or culture. And so it kind of cracked me wide open. And what came out was a lot of clarity that I was misplaced in this business. I wasn't meant for it at this time in my life.

I wasn't meant to go back to the family business, which was what I was being groomed for, that a lot of my beliefs and judgments and things that I thought were flat-out wrong for me. And so I had to reconstruct my brain. Basically I had to rewire what I thought, how I thought, what my beliefs were, I had to rout out dysfunctional and limiting beliefs. And through that process I decided that I was meant to be a warrior and a leader and I wanted to lead real people, real men in real situations.

And because I was an athlete, you know, competitive swimmer, rower, triathlete and martial artist, you know, I wanted to be challenged physically because I understood how challenge really grows you as a human being and shying from challenge you atrophies you, so I wanted the most severe challenge that I could find in the world. And that led me to the Navy SEALs.

So, you know, long story short, I basically blasted out of New York, left it all behind to the, you know, severe chagrin of my parents and they just thought I was nuts and throwing everything away. And I joined the SEALs as an officer in 1991, went through Class 170. I loved it so much and I learned so many skills for mental development, mental control, that I ended up being honor man number-one grad of my class and had a neat, neat career.

So I spent a little less than 10 years in active duty and another 11 years as a reserve duty, retired as a commander from the Navy and the SEAL program in 2011. And, you know, because I was a reserve officer, I was able to get back into business. And so in my business, entrepreneurial career/part-time SEAL career, I've launche about five or six different businesses and had some success there. And you know, an equal number of failures as you point out in your work, you know, learning every day.

But trying to now apply everything I've learned in my life to give back and to teach other people how to be more resilient, how to develop mental clarity, focus, concentration, how to develop what I call integrated awareness and Kokoro spirit, or whole mind spirit. Hope that wasn't too long.

And then, you know, they'd wait until the guy walked away and crack up. What led to—.

But we were always gone, you know, 11 months out of the year, you know, we were gone, and I was in like 45 different countries during that timeframe and there was no way I could really, really stay engaged with a martial art. And I really missed that. And so when I got off active duty, I tried to look for another martial art here in San Diego and I just couldn't find anything that came remotely close to what I was looking for.

And what I was looking for is one that had an equal emphasis on mental and spiritual development as the physical, you know, which was similar to my formative experience. And so I ended up getting into yoga, right. And again, I first approached yoga is hey, this is like a martial art. Then I soon learned, mainly through my own reading and research and searching out mentors, that it was a vast personal-development system.

You know, science of the mind really is what yoga is and the physical aspect of yoga was the least of the many aspects of yoga. So I started deep training in yoga in about 1999. And for many years that kind of became my fitness. I was doing Ashtanga yoga probably like five times a week and then I would go to the gym a couple times a week.

And what I found is that yoga is, even though it's a phenomenal program for developing durability and also mental acuity, you know, focusing, concentration, that type of thing, it really was a poor substitute for fitness. And once again, for the second time in my life, I felt myself getting weaker. And so I said, "Oh , I need to do less yoga and more fitness." And that was right around the time I met Coach Glassman.

And so I ended up going to a CrossFit cert with Coach Glassman and Greg, is where I met Greg Aumondson and Castro of course, out at the Colorado Police Academy; this is 2006, I think, maybe 2007, I don't know. At any rate, so I started taking up CrossFit and now I'm, you know, kind of coddling together a CrossFit membership or doing it on my own in the gym and my yoga. And then I also found another martial art that I really started to enjoy, so now I was doing three things.

And I was paying for three memberships and I was juggling three different schedules and I was like, this is unsustainable. I really want to develop a way to kind of integrate these into one thing. And so I said, well, let me start my own CrossFit gym. And through that, A, I'll have my own place to train, you know, I'm very selfish in that regard, I was like, OK, I want to start my own gym so I can go there every day to train instead of someone else's place.

But I want then to start offering yoga and some of the training that I had learned through the martial arts and yoga. So the affiliate became US CrossFit, which is, you know, mark one model affiliate, but we just never tried to grow it. You know, it's like always been around 60 or 70 members.

You know, we just kind of let people come and train with us, like a private training club almost where we then use it as a laboratory to develop the protocols that became SEALFIT and then Kokoro Yoga and then "Unbeatable Mind" as well. So, it's co-located at the SEALFIT training center here in Encinitas, is where I am right now. And we kinda integrate best practices from CrossFit, from yoga and from martial arts, I guess, or warrior traditions.

And then we have a working-out program and a working-in program. The working out is called the SEALFIT operator workout program. And then we train people that through online training and then also these academies. And then the crucible training, the Kokoro camp that you referenced, is our test, right? That's like hell week for the SEALs. That's our test. And then we train Unbeatable Mind through an online program and through seminars.

And that's really kind of, you know, if you talk about—I referenced the five mountains, if you want to look at development as an integrated model, we develop physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally, spiritually.

Well, SEALFIT really focuses on the physical, mental part, forging mental toughness, making you more resilient through an arduous functional fitness program kind of based on an integration of Navy SEAL training and CrossFit, and Unbeatable Mind approaches development from the mental, emotional, intuitive and spiritual mountains. And so it doesn't require CrossFit or SEALFIT , although a lot of people who start in Unbeatable Mind end up gravitating to those functional programs.

And so I thought, and I believe this was a good idea, that by breaking off Unbeatable Mind and approaching, you know, corporate professionals, CEOs, entrepreneurs and others with that approach, and also, you know, a lot of athletes have their own training regimen and they don't, you know, they can pick up some pointers from SEALFIT, but SEALFIT training is not for everybody, really.

It's general training designed to get you as fit like a Navy SEAL would be over a course of a lifetime of operating. And it requires two hours of training time, you know, on any given day. You know, when we were SEALs, we were training at least three hours a day. And then a lot of times our work was also physical. So our capacity for stamina was enormous.

And so that's one of the key things that we develop with SEALFIT is just enormous stamina as well as the work capacity of the CrossFit, you know, that would help us with a firefight, like that intense, you know, kind of like, holy shit, I'm in the game, I got to put out, redline it, you know, and I've got to do it longer than the enemy. That's what CrossFit is good for.

But CrossFit is not good for, you know, helping me with that 20-mile walk or ruck with, you know, 85 pounds on my back or hauling a buddy out of, you know, running with a mile, you know, to the helicopter, right? Or swimming five miles in the ocean after locking out of the submarine. And you know, that doesn't really do much for me. So SEALFIT is very, you know, designed toward that long, you know, endurance, stamina, you know, kind of athleticism. So it requires a lot of mental fortitude.

That's why we train the mind and the body together with SEALFIT. But that kind of eliminates 99% of the population and I really wanted to be able to impact more people. So I spun out Unbeatable actually into a separate company, a separate program so that we could, you know, approach other people with it.

If you've prepared but haven't done the emotional work or you haven't experienced an emotional challenge or let's say, you know, things came easy to you in life—like this happens a lot with all-star athletes, then the test ends up being emotional, because in Kokoro camp, you're not going to be an all star, and we'll make sure of that. And so emotional mountain or emotional, you know, failure could be really what holds you back and where that could be your breakthrough moment.

And a lot of people express like a spiritual epiphany or breakthrough, right? You know, we teach people how to deliberately access a flow state, like the skills that we've developed and that I teach are able to get anyone ,warrior athlete or executive , to click over into a flow state at will. And this is one of the things that we test in Kokoro camp, and some people experience being in flow for like 12 hours, which is pretty extraordinary.

And finding a lot of joy in the most painful parts of the camp. So it's cool. It's hard to say, Chris, where someone's going to, you know, meet themselves for the first time, because everyone is at a different place developmentally when they enter the program.

When the challenge starts to slightly exceed your skill level, it's experienced as kind of a manipulation of time, of you know, of getting out of your thinking, rational mind and having competence, a high degree of competence just literally flow out of you. And that's where the term flow came from. So, you know, we call it unconscious competence.

When you're conscious of your competence, you're not in a flow state, but when you're unconscious of your competence and it's coming out of you and you're winning, you're doing the skills at a high degree of efficiency and effectiveness, and you're not having to think about it, right? That's a flow state, right. In the sports world they call it being in the zone. But most people just think that this, you know, it happens when the conditions are right.

And if you could imagine a Navy SEAL, you know, we don't want to go into a firefight and hope that the conditions are right for us to be in a flow state so that we can dominate the enemy. We have to set the conditions to be right so that we can enter the flow state at will when we need to.

And so there's a few techniques that we teach that include the, you know, different ways to use your breath and your mind and how to have a really micro- task orientation that kind of neck you down to the now so to speak, that allow you to kind of step over into the flow state when you need to.

Of course the perceiving mind is more associated with the right hemispheric thinking and active thought or rational thought is associated with left hemispheric thinking. But it's a little bit more complicated than that. So yeah, let's say you are watching or you're surfing a wave and you're just like, this is amazing. You know, you've got the skills, you're on the wave and you don't have to think about the wave.

You don't have to think about your position on the board, your body is just reacting and responding, you know, intuitively, naturally. And that's experienced as a flow state. And what I mean, what that kind of feels like its right here, right now there's nothing else, right? There is no active thought of anything but you're fully present, fully aware, and it's not like you're a catatonic zombie, you actually are more present, more aware.

And it might be important now to point out that any time that you are thinking, your mind is in a past or a future state, right? You can't think active—and you know, and the way that we use the term here in the West, you can't be rationally thinking, like planning, communicating and whatnot without your mind being somewhat in the future or the past. And so you're not going to be really in a flow state, necessarily. You can be close, right?

You can experience tapping into it, but as long as you're thinking, as long as your rational mind is spending time dwelling in that future or past state, you're not going to be in flow. Flow is found in present-moment awareness. Right now. You're not having to linger or dwell in a future or past state.

And so like in my book, "Kokoro Yoga," which just came out a couple of weeks ago, I talk about the movement of Kokoro yoga as any functional movement to include traditional yoga asanas or poses as well as the functional movements of CrossFit and SEALFIT or a martial art, you know, kind of combat conditioning where we're like, punching, kicking. So it's how you perform the movement that's important. So yoga is—because of the asana, is slow and methodical.

It's easier for us to perform with an internal focus versus an external focus. It's easier for us to perform it with a keen awareness of our breath, you know, so that we inhale at the right moments and we exhale at the right moments, moving and integrating the breath with the movement. So that's a great place to start.

But the more skilled you get at moving with internal awareness versus external and linking the breath to the movement, the more we can bring that into the harder styles of training such as CrossFit or maybe a harder martial art. But at the same time, you can find the flow state, you can use both as a way to train the body-mind system.

And that skill could be, again, it could be a physical skill like skateboarding or surfing or CrossFit or it can be a different skill like art or music, right? Something like that. Or just being a master at whatever it is. Like, if you're a master teacher, you're in a flow state when you're giving a lecture or something like that. So what we found is, you know—here's the Holy Grail, Chris.

If you have a skill that you want to master because you're a performer and you can master the mental skills that unlock flow state at will while you're performing or just training, now, you can begin to accelerate your development and enhance your performance because it takes some of the guesswork out of whether you're going to have a game day, you know, a top, peak-performance day.

That's why in my book "Kokoro Yoga" my subtitle is "Maximize Your Human Potential and Develop the Spirit of the Warrior" because these skills allow us to take control over the inner domain where we experience flow. You know, you don't experience flow outside your body, you experience it inside it. And so we take control of the inner domain and we learn to develop it so that we can tap into those powers, you know, all day long if we want to or whenever we need to.

Now granted, initially, you know, it takes time to develop this. So you know, there's a back and forth or there's an in and out so to speak. You know, you might be in a flow state and then you lose it, but the more you train, the more you can access it and maintain it, right? And then leave it when you need to. If you need to go back into planning mode.

It's like going back to the huddle if you're a football player, you're going to click out of it and then back into it when you go back into the lineup. So that's, you know, what we kind of try to teach, you know, cause a lot of our folks who come to SEALFIT are not just CrossFitters and SEALs but also like surgeons and you know, peak performers and business entrepreneurs and surgeons and they need to be able to use these skills for performance, you know, in their game so to speak.

And they're really helpful, you know, and like I said, they're not esoteric weird things we're talking about, you know, we're talking about breath control and curating your thoughts and directing them toward powerful, you know , outcomes, you know, being able to maintain imagery and cultivate the imagery for the outcome you desire and to be able to access that imagery for the flow state.

So a lot of this stuff, you can find it in sports performance , but usually they teach it as a way to kind of get ready for the game. But what we do is we practice it every day so that it's with you all the time. You know what I mean? It becomes a major arrow in your quiver.

win.He's winning in his mind before the battle, but then when the battle strikes, right, he is all action, but he's, you know, he's flowing with that effortless perfection and that shibumi, and then when he's done, he's back on the bench or he's got that thousand-mile stare, you know, and the SEALs have the same thing, and they're just regenerating and their soft gaze is just absorbing information and they're getting ready for the next firefight.

And the arousal control is about settling down and reenergizing, preparing for the next battle, you know, so think about that as a CrossFit—the way I do this when I do my kind of CrossFit WODs is, you know, any time that I have an interval that's like my gold interval, let's say it's Fran, for instance. And I'm going to do 21 thrusters unbroken.

And then I'm going to put the bar down and before jumping on the pull-up bar, you know, because I'm 52 years old, so I'm going to take a little bit of a break, but it's not much. It literally is going to be one breath.

But in that one breath, right, I'm not just going "whew," right, I'm putting the bar down and I'm like activating my parasympathetic nervous system with that breath and I'm resetting my mind and I'm reestablishing my positive intention and I'm revisiting my image of success and then I look at that bar, jump up on it and bang out 21 pull-ups.

And so those brief moments where I'll reset and ensure that I'm kind of in the right mindset throughout that WOD, whenever I do that I have a significantly better performance than if I just try to bang it out, you know what I mean? Maybe that, you know, Fran is probably not the best example because it's such a short workout, but the longer workouts , let's say you're doing Ava, or you know, or Murph, right? There's more time to, let's say you do Murph segmented, right?

And you're going to do 10 pull-ups, 20 push-ups and 30 air squats, and after every one of those rounds, right, you're going to pause and take five deep breaths doing this, you know, the same internal reset that I'm talking about. And then, you know, just launch into the next set with your hair on fire, and your performance has a significant, you know, enhancement when you approach it this way.

To me that's a side effect. At any rate, so—or, they think of yoga as kind of somehow related to Hinduism because a lot of that cultural context was brought over with yoga and it's still there in a lot of ways. So, you know, saying namaste and chanting after class and all that. So I just, you know, I experience such profound benefit from yoga that I immediately decided, you know, like, warriors are very practical. If something works, then we make it work. You know, it's kind of like Zen.

Zen in the martial arts was used as a mental-development tool. But Zen comes from Buddhism. But it doesn't mean martial artists are Buddhists. They're like, I use Zen because it works. It's the same thing, Zen and yoga the same. Yoga is a mental development. It's a mental, emotional, spiritual-development tool. The physical part is almost secondary. It's good for the benefits of spinal health and flexibility and detoxification.

But ultimately it's to prepare your body so that you can concentrate and then develop greater self-awareness and then develop the ability to meditate and then take that meditation and focus it on yourself so you can elevate yourself to higher levels of consciousness. That's what yoga is about. And so let me answer your question directly because I went off on a little tangent there.

I had been doing yoga for five or six years and of course the martial arts for much longer than that, maybe like 20 years. By the time I got called back to Iraq as a reserve officer in 2004 and I'm flying over—actually my first airline yoga session was flying into Baghdad. There were only two other people on the plane. It was a Marine general and his aide. And I'm sitting there and I was nervous as hell, you know, I was a reserve officer.

I hadn't been with an active, you know, shooting SEAL platoon in years. I didn't, you know, they just said, OK, Mark, you gotta be over here, here's your plane ticket, go down, check out your weapon, get some gear. And you know, I didn't have time to go to the range and have a team to run through drills with. And so I was kinda out of my element, which is kind of weird to say because Navy SEALs are never supposed to be out of their element, but I felt it. I didn't feel locked on.

And so here I am, flying into Baghdad, and I just heard a story about some guy getting shot through the ass as he flew out of Baghdad a couple of weeks ago and dying, some Australian guy. And a good friend of mine was burned and hung up from a bridge in Fallujah, guy named Scott Helvenston, that happened in April, four guys from Blackwater, and so I'm have all these images going through my mind going, "Holy shit, what am I getting into here?" You know?

And so I just got up and started doing yoga in the back of the plane, as a C130, and I did about an hour of asanas and I did some breathing and I thought it was really cool cause the general and the aide , you know, they saw what I was doing and they didn't smile. They didn't do anything. They just looked back at their work and said, you know—I don't know what was going through in their mind, maybe they thought it was weird, but they didn't say anything.

And then I got to Baghdad and, you know, hooked up with SEAL Team One and I was doing my job and working long hours, and you know, there was no time to get to a gym. There was no gym, really, for me on base, you had to go across like a combat movement to get to any kind of gym over Camp Victory. And we were not near the main Army groups. The soft guys were kind of at this palace compound that Hussein had.

So what happens after a few days of kind of doing the run around the lake and you know, what the other guys are doing, I said, you know, this is not going to be enough for me. So I found a spot near—behind this kind of lake house that was all pockmarked with, you know, gunfire, and it was just kind of a disaster, but had this kind of weird quietude to it. And I found this old, empty pool around the lake.

You could see Hussein's palace across the lake and up the hill and the Special Forces guys were camped on there. And so I just started doing what I called warrior yoga, and it was kind of like I took everything I'd learned and I stripped anything that didn't belong in a war zone out of it, you know. So I did breath-control practice and then I did standing poses and then I said, OK, this is also my workout. So then I did like a 20-minute WOD, body-weight only, you know, burpees and jumping jacks.

And you know, whatever; I changed it up, I use constantly varied functional fitness done at high intensity for that part, but I didn't have barbells or anything like that. And then I would go to seated poses, and when I finished, I would do a concentration exercise and then I would visualize myself safely at home with my family. And the weirdest thing happened, Chris.

I mean, after about a few weeks of doing this, I did it every day, I started to feel really, really strong and powerful and certain, you know, that I was going to be safe in in this combat stint.

And, when I got home—and I also had such clarity, it was like another period of my life, like I kind of had when I was in my twenties and decided to be a SEAL, at this point, I decided that I was going to go home and create this program and start to teach other SEALs and soft candidates, you know, this methodology that I was starting to explore, you know, which I now call integrated training.

So at the time I was getting my doctorate in leadership at the University of San Diego and teaching there and I went home and literally quit my job and left the doctorate and started SEALFIT , US CrossFit and then SEALFIT. And then the rest is kinda history.

Not really out there; I'm being facetious. I was very highly respected, it just wasn't their thing at the time. But when I started, SEALFIT , you know, the young SEAL candidates started to train with us because that's who I was initially marketing to with the Kokoro camp. And then I launched a 30-day live-in academy, the Immersion Academy. And so for two years I did these 30-day academies four times a year. And I was, you know, head instructor.

Well, you know, I couldn't do 12 hours a day of log PT, you know, and the hard physical training. So I began to teach them this warrior yoga and I began to break it down and I would take the fu out of the kung fu by, you know, I just stripped anything, like I said earlier, anything that didn't make sense to the warrior, I took it out. So there's no Sanskrit words, you know, there's no Sanskrit at all actually. There's no chanting, there's no reference to the metaphysics of it.

It's all very practical. Now in the book, I get into the metaphysics a little bit, but really it's meant to be a practical science of mental and physical and emotional development and spiritual development that is personalizable, meaning it's not for group training. Yoga is not meant to be grouper-cize.

It's meant to say, OK, if I'm a warrior and I'm experiencing excessive combat-related stress, then I'm going to take this breathing exercise and this series of calming poses and this visualization and put them together as building blocks. And I'm going to do that until I feel whole again. And then I'm going to move on to something else. If I'm a CrossFitter, then I would do something different.

You know, I've got something called the hip mobility drill, which is basically a series of standing and supine poses which are designed to kind of get your hips back into alignment and healthy after a really intense WOD. So I've broken it down into really modular form so that it can be done in anywhere from five minutes up until, you know, if you want an hour-and-a-half kickass workout, then we got that, too.

But if it's just a five-minute kind of reset, bring yourself back into balance, then that's appropriate. And you can do your own training in the morning routine or an evening routine before a workout, after workout or any time, really. And you don't need a yoga studio with Kokoro yoga,

So you're going to have somebody who knows the postures and how to link them together and stuff like that. And so that's a teacher. So you want to make sure that you can get the movements down, but don't get stuck thinking that you have to go to the studio to do your yoga once you learn the movements. What happened to me is once I learned some movements, you know, I started doing it at home and I used a couple of videotapes to kind of help me.

So we have support like that, our Kokoro yoga, and we have a 30-day challenge right now, which people are going through, which we offered for free with the launch of the book. And then that's gonna roll into our Kokoro online program where we have videos of me teaching, you know, SEAL candidates and teaching other folks here, videos of myself and Catherine , my stepdaughter, who helped with the book and co-uthored it.

Basically, you know, teaching these drills, teaching different visualization and meditations and breath training. So you kind of do it on your own. It's a do-it-yourself program. But let's say now you're really getting into it and—this is like Greg Amundson, you mentioned him. Greg's one of my best friends, really good guy. And he got into yoga after experiencing it in a Kokoro camp, cause we do a yoga—you know, let me make something clear.

For years I was calling my program Warrior Yoga, but I had to change the name to Kokoro Yoga and that's what the book and the program is now titled because I was treading on someone's trademark inadvertently and I obviously wasn't going to continue to do that, so I couldn't—he wouldn't license it to me or anything like that. So now I had to leave behind my pet name, Warrior Yoga and move to Kokoro Yoga. So I like that too, though. It's growing on me.

At any rate, Greg experienced Kokoro Yoga at Kokoro camp; it just blew him away. And so he started training and he was like, "OK, I went to a studio, now what's next?" And I said, "Well, if you're really into this, and it's really sparked something in you, then you need to find a mentor and go get some training." And so with yoga, you know, unless you have a guru-type teacher in your neighborhood like I was very fortunate to have the first American certified in Ashtanga yoga here in my hometown.

And so he became my mentor. But when I stopped training with him, I had to find another mentor and I found it in Gary Kraskow, who's the founder of American Viniyoga, and it just so happens he was also a C olgate grad a s I was. So we became good friends and I attended 500 hours of training with Gary. And now my stepdaughter i s doing the same and Greg h as u nderwent a 200-hour program, now he's looking at doing another 500.

So, you know, this t raining's extensive, but it really does require a lot of work. But the average person, you know, it's like CrossFit, you don't need, you don't need to go through 200 hours of training to do Kokoro yoga. You can literally read the book and do it, you know, just pick up the sequences or watch a video and do it and you get 99% of the benefits, you know, the key is just doing it routinely. Once a week isn't gonna do much for you.

You know, cause you have to look at it as moving meditation, concentration and breath work all in one. You know a lot like Tai Chi or Chigong and that's, you know, good yoga is done like that where it becomes a daily personal practice of curating and cultivating your inner domain. And it's really not so much about the physical benefits. Those physical benefits you do get from yoga are flexibility and durability. You want those, those are certainly very helpful, especially for the CrossFitter.

But I would encourage everyone to look at it as your mental training; mental, emotional, spiritual training. And then what you do is you get good at that. Like we were talking about earlier, you're good at that, then you begin to access flow when you need to, and then you begin to bring that inner focus to your physical training in your CrossFit or SEALFIT-type workout. And the experience just becomes that much more joyous.

And you know, you detach your ego from it and you become much more connected to your teammates and your whole life changes. It's very cool.

We talk about how to, you know, develop an ethos around mastery and service, which are the warrior disciplines that come out of the yogic path, at least as we define it. And so it's important to understand all that so that you have the proper orientation to the training. And then, I agree with you, Chris, it can be hard to learn some of the poses alone, but you know, don't think that you have to like wrap your foot around your head to do Kokoro Yoga.

Twenty poses, very simple, are all you really need. And so, you know, just doing five minutes of sun salutation, which anybody can do, I mean my dog does them basically every day. It's not hard, but doing it with the right mental attitude and focus is important. And breath, knowing how to do the breathing and then linking the breath to the movement and all that, that's important. That's what makes Kokoro yoga so different.

So, you know, unless again, unless you want it to be a workout, it shouldn't feel like a workout of your physical body. Cause if it does, then you're too much externally focused. Having said that, you know, like I said, a lot of times I will do a hard-hitting, fighting or fit warrior sequence, but I'll have an equal amount of internal, you know, development either before or after we do that sweat-fest part of it. Right?

So we kind of bracket that and make sure you get your fitness needs met and the functional movement needs met. But we don't do it at the expense of, you know, being in the inner space, so to speak.

So I don't think I completely answered your question, but I wanted to get a point across that, you know, kind of learning why you're doing something is really important before you just launch into it because it'll increase your ability to stay in the game because you understand kind of what process you're going through. And then , online videos, there's a ton of great yoga videos.

You know, we're modeling our Kokoro yoga online after kind of like Yoga Glow, it's going to be like $19 a month and you'll be able to get several new yoga sequences and all sorts of shorter videos that will be guided meditations and visualization stuff, both for helping with athletic performance or anything really in life. And then in-person training is invaluable.

So we have, Greg and I are launching a one- and a two-day seminar into the CrossFit community, which will be kind of like our version of a speciality cert, that's coming this fall, we'll probably do the first one at Greg's box up in Santa Cruz and then we're going to be certifying teachers. So the teacher-training program, our first teacher-training course, is in August this year. It's 200 hours of training.

And so we're gonna certify those who have some familiarity with yoga or it could be, you know, you could become that from complete scratch. But if you want to teach your CrossFit box this stuff, then you c ome t o the teacher training, get certified. So that's how you kind of go deeper into the process from our perspective. Or just finding a yoga studio and a teacher in your hometown where you can start doing the work.

They're done in a more dynamic kind of form, as part of your warm-up , and then you go through your CrossFit workout. But in the CrossFit workout, again, the difference is the Kokoro Yoga approach to your CrossFit WOD is, you know, I would say it's the same as the SEALFIT approaches. Now, don't worry so much about, you know, how much better you are than everyone else.

The time you're going to put on the board, you know, do the training with more awareness, some more awareness on your breath, more awareness of your body in space and how it's moving, more awareness of your teammates. So use that time to cultivate your mental, emotional and intuitive self as opposed to your egoic self , right? Just slamming through the workout and gloating about your score. And so that's yoga. That's yoga.

And then after the workout, you pause, everyone comes together, you know, you take care of the team gear and then your personal gear, you clean up and then you go through another five, or if you have time, 10-minute post-WOD recovery sequence. You know, like the hip mobility drill I referenced earlier. And if you plan your time properly, there's plenty of time for that.

That's Kokoro Yoga. Now, it's also nice to have a longer just yoga-centric, I mean, asana-centric yoga class, a few times a week. And I recommend, you know, if you're following the CrossFit protocol three days on, one day off, that one day off I would do yoga because again, yoga is about recovery, active recovery, and you'll get more benefit out of doing active recovery in that off day than just doing nothing, you know, sitting on the couch or not doing anything.

You know, or if you're on a three day, like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine, then do yoga on Tuesday and Thursday, but do at least one hour to hour and 15 minute, you know, longer asana practice a week.

And, it might be an outside person who teaches that or you recommend folks to go to a specific studio you do kind of a partnership with, or if you're the box owner or a senior student who's just really into this, you know, you get certified by us and then you teach it yourself and everyone knows that it's an athletic approach to yoga and you know, you don't have to worry about people being turned off by all that other stuff.

So if you just train the body and don't approach mental development, then you eventually, you know, the athletes are gonna hit a sticking point and they're going to experience frustration, burnout and injury, and injuries are prevalent in CrossFit. It's one of the primary critiques of the whole system is that people, you know, come in and get coached up in you know, 24 hours or two days, some more like 16 hours, and then they go back to their box and then get people injured.

And, you know, there's some validity to that. But if we take an approach of, hey, you know, let's slow down and let's learn how to master our own inner game and then as a coach with that mastery, because we already have, you know, pretty significant mental skills in our own development that led us to be wanting to be a coach. And so it doesn't take a ton of time to learn the Unbeatable Mind principles that I teach and you know, other of the Kokoro Yoga-type stuff.

Then, you know, you've gotta be working on yourself for that authenticity. And as you work on yourself, you begin to gain more confidence in teaching it, right? Cause you experience it. So a lot of people, they feel awkward with teaching breathing before class. And so I just, you know, with my coaches, I just work with them and say , "Listen, this isn't weird, right? This is breathing. If you don't breathe, you know, you die.

And if you don't breathe in the workout, you know, you flail , you know, you flame out. And so what more natural thing could there be then to sit down and breathe properly to prepare for the workout and to clear your mind, you know. Warriors have been doing that since the dawn of time and Navy SEALs do it before a mission , so why not do it before your CrossFit WOD?" And they're like, "Yeah, I get it. Totally." And so, you know, it's become a really expected and nice part of our training here.

And you know, every once in a while I noticed that we get away from it and I have to talk to the coach and say, hey, why aren't we doing our breathing and our post-WOD mobility drills, yoga, mobility drills? So I think, you know, I kind of lost sight of the purpose of this question. But bringing the mental game into the physical and looking at them as part and parcel of the same process I think is really important. And I think that's the next level.

It's like the next generation of athletic development. You know, it's not like you've got a mental coach and you've got a CrossFit coach or a physical coach. They really should be trained together. It's an amazing environment to train the physical, mental and emotional all in one package in one place.

And so, you know, this is a different attitude, you know, so part of Unbeatable Mind training is attitudinal, right? Getting the right disciplines and mindset so you can live a life of excellence. You can earn your tribe and their respect every day. You can be, you know, committed to self-mastery in service at the same time. And once you have that attitude, then the training of the mind, body, spirit system on a daily basis becomes natural and mandatory. Right?

You don't ever leave it behind because it's critical to your success.

So keep it simple, Sally, and do your practice every day, but you don't have to do an hour of yoga every day or an hour of asana, I should say, which are the movements. You can bring yoga into your workout, the way you wake up in the morning and beginning with gratitude and positivity and what I call the morning ritual, which I outline in the Kokoro Yoga book, and breathing and visualizing. That's yoga, right?

We break it down into spot drills and, you know, shorter sequences so that people can—it's like no-excuses yoga. You know what I mean? There's no reason you can't do it because you know, you just weave it into your day.

And when it comes to business and how I structure my business, I look at what Richard Branson does and I ask myself, what would Richard do? You know, so they become my kind of mental board of advisers. I'm a friend of Joe De Sena of Spartan race, so sometimes I ask myself, what would Joe do, you know? Another functional-fitness business. So there's three that I really highly regard and I think they're doing a great job and they got a great mindset and they're very focused on their main things.

I think ultimately that's probably one of the key things that I've learned from all these people is that, you know, we all have a main thing and when we deviate from it, that's when things start to fall apart. And so figure out what your main thing is and then your main thing should be to keep the main thing the main thing, and I credit that statement to Stephen Covey. I wish I'd come up with that on my own, but it's so cool. Like your main thing is to keep your main thing.

The main thing for me, my main thing is to get in front of people to teach them how to unlock their potential, how to maximize their potential using integrated training. And I do that through Kokoro Yoga, through Unbeatable Mind and through SEALFIT. And I might do it through other, you know, other contextual methods down the road.

And I'm working on a kids program or a youth program for Unbeatable Mind cause I think, you know, the next generation is probably going to have greater success than our generation, Chris, in solving some of the world's problems, which have to be dealt with kind of one person at a time. You know, every person who can kind of improve themselves and set themselves on a path of self-mastery and service to others will have kind of a ripple effect across the world.

And so, you know, that's my main thing, is to send ripples across the world and try to improve individuals which then will improve their families and then that'll improve their communities, improve their countries, and then improve the world at large.

But those businesses are across a wide swath of industries. So it's very interesting how he's developed it, and he's very clear about his personal brand and the Burgeon brand. So yeah, there's part of me that is a businessman, but my business is to develop people. And so, you know, I try not to steer or veer too far away from training and developing a new concepts for how to access and train people. You know what I mean? And in that regard, I have to basically do it myself.

I have to maintain my own training, you know, like that's why Greg and I really get each other, it's like we're warriors, and warriors don't veer too far away from their training ground.

I've been asked to do a ton of speaking engagements over the last year and I've really kind of put a kibosh on them by just jacking up my price by saying, you know what, I'd love to come help you, but you know, if it's going to take me away from the grinder or taking me away from teaching, you know , other students of mine, then I gotta justify it somehow. You know what I mean? I can't be on a plane.

And I learned this from my first mentor, Tadashi Nakamura, you know, he has hundred, probably a half a million or more students around the world, and you know, he's not on the plane running around the world giving speeches or checking in on them, he's right at his headquarters in Manhattan teaching his classes, you know, during the week. And the guy is 65 years old or so, and he's right there, right in the center of it and people come to him.

And so I'm kind of modeling after that, I've got my center here in San Diego and people come and visit us all the time and we love people to come visit and hop into the workout on the grinder or a CrossFit class or Kokoro yoga, come to a seminar, come to one of our 20-Xs or academies, our Kokoro camp and I'm there, you know, 90% chance I'll meet you and I'll be giving a class or two or a lot of them.

But, so I've got to eat my own dog food and continue to develop myself so that I can continue to develop new concepts and ways to train people. And then my business structures will help expand the reach so then more people can—so that's the Richard Branson approach. Richard mentally helping me impact, you know, a million people and then 10 million and then 100 million, you know, hopefully. Knock on wood.

And so when you have them starting to dialogue and you know, talking about what it means to feed the Courage Wolf, then all of a sudden a culture starts to develop, either in the family or in the classroom around positivity and respect, right?

And so you don't get into bitterness or fights, you know, and any time something starts to devolve into negative territory, you know, either one of the students or the teacher can be like, hey, remember, we're going to feed the Courage Wolf, and the Courage Wolf exists in your heart, so let's connect with that energy. Let's, you know, you can have—also the use of mantras. I wouldn't use the term "mantra," but we can call them power statements.

You know, so we can use power statements, like, "I've got this," you know, "easy day," stuff like that. Things that we use in Unbeatable Mind. So now we're talking about starting to teach them internal dialogue, how to hone your internal dialogue for positive effect as opposed to letting your negative internal dialogue defeat you. And then box breathing is another one. Like super powerful for adults, but great for kids, too.

And so just teaching them to sit and breathe in a real simple like four by four by four by four. That's why we call it a box. You inhale, hold your breath, exhale, hold your breath, four count in, hold four, four count out, hold four. And if they struggle with the exhale hold, it's probably a good idea actually to do like four, four, four, one. You know what I mean?

There's been tons of studies with meditation in school, TM World has done lots of studies, just five minutes of silence a day where the kids are connecting with their breath and clearing their mind has an extraordinary effect on grades. Bullying goes down and is eliminated. And the whole culture of the educational institution or the, you know, whatever unit or structure you're in, starts to change.

So those are three of what I call the big four skills, or two of the big four skills, positivity and breath control. And the third is imagery. And that's also easy; kids have a tremendous imagination. So structured imagery is another way you can work with them and getting them to see different outcomes, to see themselves as successful and powerful, to help them envision themselves helps their self-esteem.

And then the fourth skill is task orientation and goal setting, which, you know, you can't shake a stick at that, you know, just teaching kids how to set goals and to drive toward those goals. And then when the going gets tough to be able to focus on shorter tasks, microtasks and develop them by accomplishing smaller tasks that are linked to the larger tasks that are linked to the goal.

These are all incredible life skills for anyone, but I want to be able to teach them, as do you, it sounds like, to the younger set, you know, and I'm going to start with teens, probably 13 to 18, 17. And then, you know, kind of explore how to get it into even younger populations.

"Unbeatable Mind" book is where I kind of talk through all this philosophy and you know, I'm a CrossFitter and you know, I don't talk a lot about the athletic world in there, but I think you'll be able to find really easy to translate into it and box breathing is described in there and the witness process, positivity, you know, goal setting, micro goals, developing a personal ethos. It's all in there. And it's really, really cool and I think it's very helpful.

And so that, like I said when I was talking about the Kokoro Yoga book, first, you know, get a sense for what it is that you need to do. You don't have to master it, but just get a sense for what it is. And the you can start practicing the stuff yourself, and as you practice it, you're going to find out what works and what doesn't, and then, you can, you know, once you start to practice and feel the benefits, then you can more authentically transmit it to your students. Right?

It's really difficult to teach mental toughness and, you know, emotional control and these things to students unless you're doing it yourself, right? It's gotta be authentic. It's got to come from direct experience, in my opinion, otherwise it just formulaic and it falls on deaf ears. So read the book "Unbeatable Mind," read "Kokoro Yoga," you know, I would start with "Unbeatable Mind" and go to "Kokoro Yoga" if you really want to teach it.

If you just want to get into yoga, start with "Kokoro Yoga." And then you know, reach out for training, you know, either from us or you know, somebody else.

I talked about that a little bit on the last podcast. Basically what I'm going to do is drive around in the car with these guys and just be an Uncle Jesse figure. I'm going to talk to box owners who are considering selling and I'm going to talk to box owners who are considering buying up other gyms and looking for ways that this partnership could benefit both.

So if you're a coach who opened a gym in hopes of making a better living for himself and have now discovered that business is not really your passion, that you'd like to just get back to coaching, this might be a model that's interesting to you. I'm going to be recording some of these conversations. I'm going to be talking to people on both sides of the equation and people who aren't involved at all. And I think that's going to make for a really interesting discussion.

It might turn into a podcast episode if anything funny gets said. In the meantime, if you're thinking about what questions you should be asking, I want you to start by asking yourself, "Am I really doing that well?" A lot of the times when I get on calls with people and they overestimate how well they're actually doing, and I think this is a problem of context.

We spend a lot of time talking to other affiliate owners and finding out what they're doing right, but we never really ask them "How well are you doing? How much are you working?" And instead, we've started to romance this notion of the grind, or the hustle. And you know, some of this stuff comes from our heroes like Gary Vaynerchuk, guys that I really like, and they're talking about hustling, hustling, hustling.

But I wrote an article called "The Hustle Is a Lie," because what's really important here is progress. Not just work, not busy-ness, but business. It doesn't matter if you're working 18 hours a day if your business is no better off than it was a year ago. It doesn't matter if you just achieved your L4 if you can't afford to put food on the table or if your business isn't making progress. And again, we come back to this dichotomy of being a good coach versus being a good business owner.

So I want you to seriously assess how well your business is doing. I've got a free tool for that called the Gym Check-up on twobrainbusiness.com, I'll put the link in the show notes below. Take an objective look. I'm not going to spam you, and at the end of it, if it suddenly becomes really clear, you can easily just book a free consultation where we'll talk about your biggest problem on the phone. There's no hassle. I'm not a salesman, and I'm just eager to help you guys out.

So try the Gym Check-up up out, get an objective assessment of where your business is, then book a free call, or just send me an email with your question and we'll get to them in the Q and A episode coming up next week. Thanks for listening. Have a great week. Grow your business, grow your mind.