S6E3 Health: Craig Weller Applying An Elite Special Force Mindset to Life...

So I wanted to share, I have the launch of my 12 week entrepreneur mastermind coming up the 15th of August. This is where we dive into everything from how you can recognize and overcome your limiting beliefs and self sabotage, how you can truly and deeply feel like you are enough.

In ideally every area of your life and also how we can look at how we can optimize our health, how we can optimize our relationships, our habits, our productivity, we dive into so much stuff together with like-minded entrepreneurs. So if you're interested, you can fill out an application. Uh, also have the link to that in the show notes. I look forward to hearing from you hearing where you're coming from, goals, what you want your life to look like.

And it would be a privilege to get to work with you. All right. Now let's jump back into the show. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman. I have the pleasure of having Craig Weller on. He served in Naval special operations as a special warfare combat crewman or SWICK and then spent nearly two years on the high threat protection team for US ambassadors to Baghdad in Iraq.

He has done a bunch of security roles around the world, including Kenya, Central America, South Sudan. Since then the past decade he's spent studying and teaching peak performance, his program and his book Building the Elite has achieved a 90% success rate in passing the selection test for special operations. So this is somebody who knows fitness. He knows performance, you knows peak performance, systems and the underlying mindset behind it inside and out.

And I'm really excited for this conversation. So welcome to the show here, Craig.

So I wanna start there and talk about that background and how in schooling you developed your learning and love for training and ended up getting into special operations.

But I was a smart kid. I was a really good reader and I knew that I could figure this out. I wanted to be strong. I was a teenage boy. I wanted to be stronger. I wanted to be athletic. And I knew that it was a puzzle I could solve. And this was right around the time that Amazon was becoming a thing. So I used my lawn mowing money or whatever, and I just went through my entire Amazon list and bought all of them.

I had this massive Tupperware box of books, and read pretty much constantly and figured out how to become physically stronger, how nutrition worked, how to eat. And within a couple of years I was really physically strong and fit and capable. But, through what I was learning, I also realized that strength was a lot more than how much you can deadlift. That, physicality on its own doesn't matter that much. It's just a byproduct really of strength as a whole.

So I wanted to learn more about the mental and emotional side of strength and doing that. You can't stop at a book. You can't stop at the concept or just the words. It had to be an experience that I lived. So I looked to the military and the special operations world.

And when I was still 17, I enlisted in the Navy with the goal of volunteering for special operations selection, because I wanted to do something that made me hit bottom and learn what strength was not just on the physical side, but on the mental and emotional side.

But I was teaching myself and back then, this was before even YouTube was really a thing. So I had a printout of the swimming stroke and I'd look at the pictures of what the stroke was supposed to look like and try to figure that out. So I, it was terrible. I did not learn well, and it turns out I was just bad at it. Like I just did not have an instinctive sense for swimming. So join the Navy, go to bootcamp, volunteer for special operations.

Take the first screening test where you have to do the minimal physical standards, like pass a 500 yard swim, pushups, pullups, run. And I failed to swim in two laps. They didn't even let me try. I made it maybe at two minutes in and they tapped me on the top of the head as I hit the wall to turn around they're like, get outta the water. You're not gonna make it.

But I, I failed so fast that I had time to catch stroke development, the swimming lesson that was happening on the other side of the building, cause they had just gotten started. And so that became my new strategy. I'd fail that test so fast that I'd get a swimming lesson, learn what I could and go back and on my final try, my third try. I passed the swim by seven seconds, just squeaked down to the line.

And it was completely wrecked physically and made it through all the other stuff, the pushups and pullups. And that started me in the special operations pipeline, which meant from there it staircased upward pretty fast and starting at three o'clock in the morning each day I'd go and do these special programs workouts. And within a few weeks where the furthest I'd swam was 500 yards. And then a thousand meter, we started measuring it meters.

I think a thousand meters, like one workout one morning was 2000 meter warmup go and that was just the start of it. And so I was torturing myself in the water, just flailing to keep up. And the advice that I had was usually not at all technical. It was just try harder, just put out more, just get your heart stronger. So I got really fit and I got really good at swimming terribly. Like I had a lot of endurance for doing this thing really inefficiently.

And it was bad enough I'd black out briefly in the water. Sometimes there were times when my friends would have to grab me by the wrists and drag me out of the pool, cuz I couldn't get out of the pool under my own power anymore. Cause I was so depleted. I lived on the fifth floor of a barracks and after some of the workouts I'd go home, and I couldn't make it up the stairs all at once.

I'd have to climb a flight of stairs and then just sit on the floor for a bit, think about my life, maybe the next flight of stairs, regain some more energy. And I it'd take me a while to make it to the fifth floor. And then I just collapsed for a bit. But I wasn't gonna quit. I decided I was either gonna leave on a stretcher or I was gonna make it.

And so I walk that line, like it was close quite a few times, but by the time I made it say a year, and some into that process, I was through all the prep training kind of stuff. I was fortunate in a way, and that I had a couple long delays where I had to sit in these holding programs, where all I did was work out and basically take physical beatings all day because it made me really fit.

It was torture along the process, but it gave me the fitness that I needed to handle each stage as it came, because I was compensating for a lack of skill with just sheer effort. And then I was two weeks or so from graduating my first selection course and by that point, 50 of us had started, 15 of us were left and my swim buddy, and I failed a time swim by it. We had 45 minutes to make it. It was an open water swim. And full uniform. So boots and camouflage uniform.

And we made it in 46 0 2 and the cutoff was 45. So we went to review board and we got rolled out, which means we didn't get kicked out of the program cause we were far enough along. They knew we weren't gonna quit. We had the mental raw material. We just needed to learn how to swim better. So I had to start over and before I could start over they tried an experiment with us.

And I was again, lucky that it went this way, where I was a SWIC student, special warfare combat and crewman, but they sent me to the other side of the schoolhouse to the buds pipeline or the seal training pipeline. And they put me and my swim buddy into this program called the brown shirt rollbacks, which is for normally for bud students or seal training students who have made it past hell week. They know they're gonna, they're not gonna quit. They have that part.

But then they have a technical issue. They fail a run or a swim, or they get injured and they go into the brown shirt program. And I had four months there before my next class would start before my next switch selection course started. And it was there that I had the first performance coaching of my time in the Navy. And the first day in the water with the seal instructors who ran this program, they watched me swim. I got out of the water and the guy's like, where are you from?

I told him South Dakota. He's like, so this is your parents' fault. Like if they had raised you in Florida or California, somewhere with water, you probably know this. Instead of telling me to try harder, he gave me a lot of specific things to do better, specific mental models, like roll your torso like this, balance your plane in the water like this, bend your arm, turn your head, do all these measurable actionable things that made my stroke better.

And then he would sit at the end of the lap lane cuz he was coaching everyone. And every time I hit the wall, if I was doing something wrong, I'd get immediate feedback, like do this thing better. And within six weeks, I had been like practicing all this stuff and my swimming was getting better and better. And the guy who ran the program made me retake the swim test that I had failed when I got rolled out. I'd failed it by one minute. When I retook it, six weeks later, I passed it by over 10.

Cause I'd improved that much, that fast. Because I had actual coaching and I still had at that point two and a half months to go to keep getting better. And that was a huge turning point for me in understanding that it's not just about trying harder it's about trying better and having effective skill development. And that was one of the main things that I brought into coaching and training other people from there on.

You need effort, obviously you have to try hard, but that on its own isn't necessarily enough. You have to have a good practice model as well. And so from there, yeah, I went I spent another couple months in the brown shirt program. and it was like brown shirts on its own was like physically the toughest thing I've ever done, because it was just every physical evolution from buds, like a timed run, time, swim, whatever every day, anything that a class was doing.

And then chief nav would fill in other workouts to F. Because you were throughout the day. So it was just an entire day of basically working out as hard as you possibly can for 90 minutes to two hours at a time over and over until the day was over. So I did that and then went back to SWIC selection. went through that. Graduated finally. And then went to a team and started doing like operational stuff and coaching other people.

But yeah, along the way I saw because of how much time it took me, I saw literally thousands of people attempt these programs. All of them could swim better than I could, and thousands of them quit or failed. And so I became really curious about what it was that made that difference. Like it wasn't just physical skill, it wasn't just being good at something. There was a mental piece there where people who could have made it in the physical sense, just gave up mentally and walked away.

And I became really interested in what that was, what those mental factors were that made the difference that allowed, like some kid from the middle of nowhere, like me who couldn't swim to make it through. There were plenty of guys that could barely hit the minimal standard on pullups or they were the self-described fat kids who were almost dying the entire time to just barely keep up with the back of the pack on the run. And those fat kids would still be there like six months later.

They'd be graduating and the guys who were college athletes, they've been triathletes, water polo players, people with exceptional physical backgrounds, they quit and went away and I wanted to know what made that difference. And that's basically been the last 10 to 15 years of my life, figuring that out and then teaching it to people.

Which means if something bad happens, you're not gonna think about it and just turn it over your head over and over, and just sit with your misery. And then the other part is high conscientiousness, which is people who do the right thing when the right thing is hard. They tend to be on time for things. They tend to do the extra work. They think stuff ahead, or they think through things in advance. So they consider not just the first order effect, but the second and third order effect.

So if I do this to solve this problem right now, what does it do in the future? What's the result of that and the result of that. And they think stuff through, and they're not the forgetful ones who show up without some of their gear or they show up late or they're unprepared because they decided they'd rather go to bed. They're very self disciplined and they're good at delayed gratification and impulse inhibition. From there an internal locus of control.

Is an extremely important thing, which means you view yourself as an active participant in the world. You're not a passive bystander. The world doesn't happen to you. You're responsible for your own path and what you're doing, and you don't need external motivation to get you through what you're doing. Because this is where a lot of good athletes fail. They're used to external reward and external encouragement where they win the race or whatever and someone tells 'em what a great job they did.

And then there's a benefit to it. Like something in their life gets better because they just won the race. And in selection, there's no positive feedback. The goal posts constantly move and it doesn't matter how fast you just were because the next thing is gonna suck anyway. You're basically playing for a tie the whole time. You can't win. You can't perform your way out of being cold, wet, and sandy. You're sleep deprived. You're going to have to suffer no matter how good you are.

And. People who have had really good athletic backgrounds where things have always come naturally to them. And they've always been rewarded for that kind of struggle there because they're used to that reward and that positive feedback. And then when that positive feedback is taken away, when no one's telling you how good you are, or trying to motivate you and tell you to try harder and keep going or whatever. When the only voice left that is telling you to keep going is the one in your own head.

Some people have not developed that and they need that external encouragement to tell them that they're okay and they should keep going. And you won't have that there. The only thing left is your own voice. And so if you don't have that internal locus of control, you're gonna start to question yourself. And usually people just opt themselves out. Statistically it's interesting because the attrition rates in these courses are really high.

My first SWIC class, by the time I got rolled out, there were 13 left outta the 50 that started. So on average, anywhere from say 65 on the low end to 90% on the high end are not gonna make it. But if you look at the stats, they generally don't make it because of... it's not because of performance failures or because of physical injuries. They're not breaking their legs. They're not getting hurt. And they're not beating the time standards, like even me as a terrible swimmer.

And when I finally failed to swim, I just got rolled back and then they're like, you're not gonna quit. We'll find out. And they just had me learn to swim better and keep going. So the reason people quit is voluntary withdrawal. Or we call it in the Navy's a drop on request where people they volunteered their way in and they volunteered their way out. They just say, I'm not going to do this anymore. And they leave. And that's where they lose that internal drive.

No, one's telling them to stay there and eventually they're not telling themselves to stay there either and they just go away. Another part that's a prerequisite is a growth mindset. Without that you're pretty much stuck. So if people don't embrace effort and struggle as a necessary part of the process and see that struggle or see failure as an opportunity to learn and become better they're probably not gonna make it very far at all.

If someone has more of a fixed mindset where they see their immediate performance as a reflection of who they are and an inalterable aspect of who they are as a person Then they're more likely to break because they see any kind of failure as just a permanent personal and pervasive issue. And they don't see that they can improve it, that they can get better. They just see it as you failed. You struggled, you suck, you, you don't have it, you should go away.

And those are another, that's another sort of personality type that just doesn't last long at all. There are obviously physical prerequisites and athletic background is pretty important, but a lot of that is learnable. As long as you have the mental side to keep going through a difficult process, a lot of people can manage physically. Their mind has to be able to go along for the ride.

And once you have that self awareness or you're capable of that, it's called self distance perspective, taking from there, you can start consciously managing your self talk as sort of a feedback loop where you know, that certain things are going to be toxic and certain things are going to be beneficial. Generally negative self-talk becomes a downward spiral. If you're saying this sucks, I hated this sucks. I can't make it. I wanna quit. This sucks. You'll tear yourself apart.

The same with rumination. If you just can't stop fixating on a problem that you can't immediately solve that becomes toxic as well. It's just a form of anxiety, basically. So it starts with being aware of your self talk and your emotional states and your ability to regulate them and then controlling your self talk because you can't directly control your emotional states, but you can control your thoughts to some extent. You can at least redirect them. And thoughts make feelings eventually.

The feelings that we have aren't the direct result of an event. They're the result of how we interpret that event, the story that we tell ourselves about it. So you can learn to tell yourself a better story in the face of these different events. And then you apply that through increasingly difficult or stressful situations. Like you referenced, the stress inoculation thing.

It's basically that where at first you learn or master this skill in a low complexity, like a simple, easy non stress setting. Just the ability to sit there.

And sense into your own emotional state, the physical sensations in your body, what your self talk is, and then eventually regulate those things like steer the direction of your self talk, change your internal dialogue, if it drifts in an undesirable direction and to do that, just sitting in your living room or whatever, like in an easy environment. And then as you go through training, you start doing that in progressively more challenging setting.

So you're taking the same skill that you mastered in a low stress setting. Like the ability to regulate your self talk and your internal dialogue. And then you're doing that while you're a little bit more miserable and a little bit more miserable, and you do things that make it harder and harder to do that. We were talking about having kids. It's another kind of an example of that.

There are a lot of skills you probably took for granted, like your ability to feed yourself or manage your time or not snap at your partner when you're stressed out and something bad happens. And then you add a baby to that mix. And suddenly it's hard to get a good meal in. It's hard to control your emotional responses when you're stressed out at three in the morning. And you want to snap at somebody.

So it's the same skills that you had before, but now you're applying them in a different, more challenging setting. And so you do that across the training process and you just ramp it up and get, make it more and more difficult and realistic. And one of the ways we do that, is through open ended workouts, which is one of the main stressors that people have in selection.

And it's one of those things that divides or can really hit good athletes hard because good athletes always knew what they were gonna do. And they knew when it was gonna end. If you're a runner, you run this mile and then the Mile's over and you get to go have a snack. Yeah. But in selection that never happened. It's like, you'll run the mile. You'll be, you'll completely wreck yourself running that far. And then they say do it again. But first wet and sandy burpees for an hour.

And then you're gonna go run it again. And if you don't hit the same time, then we're gonna torture you some more. So the goal post always move. You never know how long it's gonna last or what's coming next. And that ambiguity is a huge stressor because it takes away your sense of predictability and control. And our stress response is heavily driven by that perception of predictability and control.

And when people are used to having that and they have to rely on the external world, dictating their sense of predictability and control, then suddenly the external world takes that away and it's chaotic. And then their stress responses maxed out and they fall into a threat based response rather than a challenge based response. And as long as I have to becomes an important pace that you have to become familiar. And at first, when you have people do that, it's really difficult.

Their brain will naturally downregulate their ability, like their ability to produce power, their sense of fatigue and effort, all change because ambiguity is scary and your brain is trying to keep you safe. So when you practice open ended stuff for long enough, you become more familiar in that territory. And as long as I have to becomes a more familiar pace that you're more capable of you become better at it.

You can hold a stronger pace or a faster pace for longer because it's a known quantity. And as you're doing that, like the thing that we're practicing with people is having them pay attention to their self talk and their use of specific mental skills that they employ to get through these workouts. Cuz when you say you just ran five, one mile VPs, as hard as you could and they were terrible, but now they're over and you can move on with your life.

And then the next thing you see is a thing that says, go do it again, or at least run one mile again and you have to hit this time cutoff. That's hard physically, but it's even worse mentally most of the time. And that's what we're really looking for because the physiological adaptations only lasts along, for many workout, depending on the energy systems and stuff, the adaptations you make from that workout are gonna last a couple of weeks at most, unless they're reinforced by other training.

But the mental skills that you're developing, the mental patterns that you're reinforcing can last forever. Another factor is your stress mindset, which is basically how you perceive your stress response. And that can go one of two ways. It's either that your stress response is debilitating in that it's something that hinders you. It's bad and you should avoid it.

Or your stress response is enhancing in that when you feel your body ramp up to meet a challenge, your stress response that's doing that is helping you to meet that challenge and that you should embrace that stress response because it's benefiting you. And there's a big divide in the special operations world and with people coping with challenges in general, in how their stress mindset helps them meet those challenges.

People with stress as enhancing mindset tend to actually have a stronger stress response acutely in the moment in the face of a challenge when they're doing something hard. But that stress response also drops away really quickly and goes back to baseline and they can recover and rest as soon as the challenge is over.

Where people who have a stress is debilitating mindset, and they think that their stress response, when they feel their heart rate increase or respiration rate increase, they feel things starting to move faster, when they try to avoid that their acute stress response will often be lower. Which also means that they're less engaged, they're less capable of meeting that challenge, but then that stress response doesn't go away as quickly either.

So once the event has passed, they still have higher baseline catecholamines like adrenaline or they have higher cortisol levels. Basically they have higher baseline anxiety. They're less variable in their response. Where someone with the stress is enhancing mindset. They'll have a really targeted, hard hitting response. They'll engage really well. And then they drop away and recover quickly. And one of the ways you can manage that is just paying attention to yourself talk.

And when you feel yourself ramping up, in the face of a stressor, like you're about to go do public speaking, for example. People will feel themselves get really anxious right before they go do public speaking. Think about how you frame that stress response and the frame for the stress as enhancing response is I'm excited. Not, I'm scared. I'm anxious. I'm terrified. I'm gonna throw up, tell yourself I am excited because that same physiological basis could mean either one.

It could mean you're excited. You're ready for the challenge. You're ramped up. You're ready to go. Or it could mean things are bad and things are breaking and I'm gonna throw up on my shoes in front of all these people.

But I think it's so fascinating, what you're talking about that then you actually have the restorative aspect of that and it levels off, which is what you want. You don't wanna be sympathetically overactivated all the time, which is unfortunately what so many people find themselves in. And so I think it's interesting you're actually more effective in the moment. And then you're better able to recover after that.

So instead of thinking about that six months, you think about what it takes to get through the day. And if that's a lot, then you think about what it takes to get to the next meal. You make it to breakfast and that's all you care about. And then you make it to lunch. And that's the only thing in your world. And if it gets really bad, then you make it smaller. And you make it to the next pushup. You do the next sprint up the Sandburn you do the next round of burpees. You do this one, burpee.

It makes your world smaller and smaller. It becomes like the meditative practice of just being emotionally or mentally present in the moment. and not thinking about past or future, you just do the thing that's right in front of you and that's it. And we have them practice that skill and feedback themselves. Evaluate themselves afterward on how they did at that skill in that moment when it really sucked.

And we practiced that over time as they master it at a given level of stress, we increase the stressor until we've more or less fully replicated the main stressors that they'll have in selection we don't torture them. They're not gonna do anything for six months, but we'll have specific workouts that simulate the selection environment and they carry out not just the physicals part, but the mental part.

Compartmentalization is the other one I mentioned, which is recognizing something bad or negative, and then just setting it aside and putting it in a box and not worrying about it because it's counterproductive or not helpful in that particular moment. It's not hiding from what you're feeling, but it's recognizing that you don't have to defend it or do anything about it. You don't have to have an opinion about it. It can just be. And that's one of the things good athletes learn.

Running coaches like Steve Magnus, call it the calm conversations with yourself. Say you're running and you're running as fast as you can for a long time and it's miserable. Good athletes learn to recognize and accept that without reacting to it or doing anything about it. That feeling just becomes your companion. You don't take an opinion of it. You don't have to react or freak out about it. It's just there and you learn to see objectively.

And that's one of the things that people are learning as they become good athletes, to accept that discomfort without reacting to it. Like you can feel the itch without having to scratch and good special operators develop that as well to where the physiological feedback that you feel when you're really tired or in a ton of physical stress, it just becomes a signpost. It becomes a road marker, but it doesn't have to be a stop sign. It's just there.

There's a South African guy, Tim Noakes, who came up with it's called central governor theory. He points out that if you watch even high level Olympic athletes finish a marathon, the first place guy comes across. Second guy place crosses the line, and then you'll notice the second place guy is still running around and celebrating he's done, which means he had something left when he finished. He didn't collapse at the finish line, which means he held something in reserve.

That he could have used, but there was something else in his brain that kept him from using that. And part of what you're learning in this process. And part of what we try to teach people is to use that if you need it to use what's left in your body so that you really have nothing left, like so that you really can put out everything that you have and everything that you need to survive in some of these situations.

You're like operating at the edge of this ability, but you take it having the experience that you have, you can take those same things and go, oh, I actually have a mental barrier here. Like at what point do I normally snap at my wife? Or you. Wanna just go crazy on my kid cuz it's, three in the morning at what point is that? And where's that barrier. And can I just segment it farther? Can I just go, let me get another minute. Let me get another 10 minutes, before.

And I remember when my kids were in the middle of the night, I was literally count down from 60

And I think that's just so fascinating. I'm curious for you, what are the practices that you do? I mean, even right now, as a parent, what does that actually look like? Where you can take this and transition it into just your everyday life?

It means you directly engage with the challenge and it falls hand in hand with the stress is enhancing mindset in that people who engage in active coping generally have a higher acute stress response in the face of a challenge. But then they solve the problem and because the problem's been solved, they then drop to a more restful restorative, low anxiety baseline, where passive coping is making problems go away by avoiding or ignoring them.

And as you could imagine, that can have knock on effects where your problems don't actually go away because you didn't fix them. You tried to avoid them. So, stress tends to accumulate and people who engage in passive coping tend to have higher baseline cortisol, higher baseline anxiety. Passive coping can have, what's called an ironic effect, where the solution to the problem makes the problem worse because you avoided the problem or you ignored it.

Now the problem is compounded and now you have a bigger problem to deal with. And if you continue with the passive coping strategy that problem's just gonna keep getting bigger and it becomes worse. So your coping strategy is the opposite and it makes your problems worse. So things like food prep, like it's important to keep eating well, as you go through this.

This is, I think, a way that people can break themselves in stressful times because they resort to junk food and it becomes this sort of downward spiral where you feel worse physically, which means you feel worse mentally. And, emotionally, because you're eating junk, and then because you feel worse, then you care even less and then you just rely on a frozen pizza or whatever it takes to get through the day. And so I try to avoid that.

It's called a decrementalism trap where small downward deviations from a standard are normalized over and over to where like, well, I slipped up a little yesterday. A little bit yesterday, but nothing terrible happened. So I can do a little worse than that. And probably nothing else bad is gonna happen. I just keep sliding downward. I try to interrupt that cycle and drag myself through doing the hard thing today. So that tomorrow is as easy as I can make it. So we have food prepped.

I've caught up on all my work. I've taken care of all the little errands and chores that I needed to do today because if I slack today, then tomorrow. The weight's gonna be unmanageable. It's going to be too much.

Yeah. I know that just gonna be worse down the road and that's what you're talking about. So you're going like, okay. Active coping. I'm gonna bring myself into this moment. We're gonna sort it out and it will be better because I move towards connection in this moment. So I love that.

And one of the things that's really big in, in the special operations world is the idea that leadership brings additional responsibility, not more privilege, and that you lead from the front. It's kind of cliche thing, but never asked someone to do anything that you wouldn't do yourself or you haven't done yourself already. So there are little ways that's implemented. For instance, in a team you want to be the last person to eat. You want carry the most weight.

You want to compensate basically like you wanna do work so that the people you're with have it a little bit easier so that you're making their life easier. So the way I saw that play out there was a seal team guy that we worked with in one of our deployments and we were in. We were joined with them, so our workups were shared a little bit. And at the time the SWIC guy that was in charge of our unit sucked. And he was the sort of guy who would take extra privilege for himself.

So we were working in the Philippines tracking called high value targets, like trying to catch people who were involved in like, the guy who bombed the Bali night club was one of our targets. And so we would launch or hoist our boats onto a Navy ship. And they would take us a couple hundred miles in any direction. And then we'd drop our boats and go track people down. And the ship that we were on, the living conditions were terrible.

The berthing that we had was at the very bottom of the ship, the air conditioning didn't work. It was like 120 degrees down there. It was just a sweat lodge. No one could sleep. So we would sometimes go up and try to sleep on the deck of the ship at night which would give us a couple hours of sleep before the sun came out, because we usually worked at night as well. And then our chief, the guy who was in charge of us found himself his own private berthing that had air conditioning.

That was nice that had a mattress without too many stains on it. And then he would go and eat in the chief's mess or the officer's mess, where they had like good food and a little guy pushed a little trolley cart of desserts around and stuff. And we'd just leave us on our own. We'd be stuck down in this terrible berthing sweating to death. We'd go eat the terrible food that was in the what's called the galley where they served it.

And then we, for one of the missions we were doing, we picked up a seal team cause we needed a whole assault team with us. And this guy, he was in charge of the seals and they came down to the berthing we had. With this terrible smelly sweat lodge we were in and they started sorting out their stuff. And Dan who's an officer threw his bag on a rack next to mine.

And our chief was like, Hey Lieutenant you might be more comfortable up in we have a, another berthing that's for, the chiefs and the officers. And you probably, maybe these guys want the extra room. They probably like the space and you'll be more comfortable up there. And he's like F$#! that! He just told him to go F$#! Himself, I'm staying right here. So the idea was, if we were doing something miserable, he was doing something miserable.

And then we were lining up for food in the galley, the terrible, like basically prison food. We were always last in line cause we were always busy doing stuff. We'd catch the very end of when meals were served and we heard people bumping around behind us. I looked behind me and Lieutenant was back there with his seals. And he was at the very end of the line with his lunch tray and he was eating with us because that's what you do. That's his principle of leadership.

He was eating the same crappy food we did and he didn't eat until all of us had eaten and that kind of thing inspires. First, everyone becomes that person. They wanna be that person and do as much as they can for the team. And then it also inspires a sense of loyalty. Like we would've done anything for Dan or with Dan that we needed to do. And so now with the baby, I try to follow some of those principles and my mother-in-law is here a lot helping with the baby.

And so I'll cook dinner for my wife and her mom and I give them dinner and I hold the baby while they eat. And I wait for them to eat while it's still hot. I try to have them eat dinner in peace while I take care of the baby. And then one of them, whoever's done first, will take the baby from me. And then I go and eat and I try to do little things like that, where I carry the weight in ways that I can come up with to make their lives easier.

And what that does in turn is they in the same way that when we had that example from Lieutenant, we all started doing that too. Now my wife and her mother-in-law kind of act the same way and it becomes this shuffle of no, it's okay. You eat first, I'll take the baby. And everyone tries to take care of each other. And, in following that principle of where we just try to proactively help each other out as much as we can. We haven't had any major conflicts.

And I know I've heard from friends who have had kids where they've never had more marital stress. They've never felt or said such terrible things toward their partners than they have in their first couple of months and having a kid. And sort of following some of those principles of trying to take care of each other proactively. I try to take care of my wife before I take care of myself and she does the same thing with me.

I think that's helped a lot in managing this additional stressor of a newborn baby and in keeping our relationship mostly intact from being too stressed out by it.

Yeah. Or at least minimize let's put it that way. yeah.

Once you have the money you need to not be anxious, it doesn't help a lot more like adding more. Something that I've seen with like the special ops people I've worked with and people I've coached over 20 years almost is that comfort and happiness rarely exist at the same time. Usually if we look back at the moments in which we felt the most happiness or the most joy in what we were doing the most gratitude, it probably was not a time when we were extremely comfortable.

Wasn't a moment that was immediately preceded by a lot of comfort. And in a lot of cases, we're trading one for the other. And I think it's really common for people to trade happiness in exchange for comfort. They give up some amount of happiness. They give up some amount of fulfillment a sense of engagement with their life in order to remain comfortable. And eventually people can build themselves a nest that becomes a trap where you have a lot of comfort, but you don't have a lot of happiness.

And I think it's important to be aware of that trade that often they have to be exchanged and that if you're trying to do more fulfilling things in your life, if you're trying to put more days between the years and have things that you'll look back on and really cherish you might have to give up some comfort to do that. I mean, that goes along with, I had another guest on John Coyle. I don't think it'll come out before, before yours, but little sneak peak. He talks about that.

Like chronoception essentially like our perception of time and how it's the memories are stored in our brain. And essentially that's what happens in those traumatic events where you, your brain slices, maybe 20 times a second. It's taking those snapshots to store that memory, but you can use that on a positive side to essentially incorporate some of these things like risk and physical effort and mental effort.

Those are the things that actually can slice the time more finely to actually bring about happiness and fulfillment and that sense of freedom and things. But we, like you said, typically go towards the comfort side of things and we go this. What I'm, told is supposed to make me happy and it actually doesn't. And so I'm very glad you brought that up. And it is a really important thing to be considering. Like, am I comfortable right now? Or is there something that I can do differently?

And it's not saying one or the other is good or bad it's going, what's my intention. And let's be intentional about the choice that I wanna make. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And that I'm gonna look for that episode too, with that other guy. Super good.

There articles on the mental skills that people use in special operations selection, but that are applicable in any aspect of life if you're trying to do hard things. Basically a lot of the mental skill stuff that we talk about is really important. It's universal. And then the other, the only real social media presence we have is on Instagram. And it's just Building the Elite is our account there. And between those two things, you'll be able to find everything.

Our book is available through our website. If possible, buy it there. So you don't have to help Jeff Bezos buy another yacht for his yacht. But it's also on Amazon and a Kindle version that you can get anywhere in the world. And yeah, between a book and the website. That's I think that's pretty much everything people would need.

I mean, all the things that we talked about and so much more about the models that are used from these like absolute elite, best of what they do, and then how they handle these different situations and how you can take it into your life. And I, bought the book as well to go on. I have nothing to do with special forces, but the models and the frameworks are so great. So definitely check 'em out. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. It was very informative conversation.