Finding the Greener Grass of Purpose: Dale and Brian Karmie

Sometimes the greener grass isn’t somewhere else — it’s something you build. In this episode, brothers Dale and Brian Karmie share how their search for meaningful work led them to launch ForeverLawn, now a leader in the synthetic turf industry.

Their journey hasn’t been without deep hardship, including the devastating loss of Dale’s daughter. Yet through every crucible, they’ve remained grounded in faith, committed to purpose, and driven to create opportunities that impact others. Their story is a powerful reminder that purpose can grow in any field — and in any season — if you’re willing to pursue it.

To learn more about Dale and Brian Karmie and their business, visit foreverlawn.com

Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

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Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I'm Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.
Mark Divine:
Everyone who shows up is physically prepared or else they wouldn't be there. And they're cognitively prepared. Their IQ, they passed a battery of tests and everything. But it's mental and emotional resiliency and your capacity to be an exceptional teammate that will determine whether you get through. Those are tough to measure, right? They're tough to measure. And they can only be exposed in the crucible.
Gary Schneeberger:
That's our guest this week, Mark Divine, discussing what his Navy SEAL training taught him about unlocking human potential through integrated training and mental toughness, leadership, and physical readiness. It's led him to create the Unbeatable Mind System, a framework that integrates physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual development that he now teaches to clients that include the next generation of SEALs.
Warwick Fairfax:
So Mark, it's wonderful to have you here on the podcast. Really appreciate you being on. And just before we get started, I want to read a brief bio, which is, I got to say, very impressive. Dr. Mark Divine, PhD, is a retired Navy SEAL commander, New York Times bestselling author, founder and CEO of SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, founder of Multiple Million Dollar Businesses, lifetime martial artist, ashtanga yoga teacher, and host of The Unbeatable Mind Podcast, which was recently rated a number one health podcast, and number 30 overall on iTunes, which is truly impressive.
And just to give folks some background, Mark has written a number of incredible books. We're going to talk a bit about his latest book Uncommon: Simple Practices for an Extraordinary Life, but there are others. And these are incredible titles, Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Metal Toughness to Succeed in Elite Level, The Way of the SEAL: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed. I love this title, Staring Down the Wolf: 7 Leadership Commitments that Forge Elite Teams. I mean, that is... What a title. 8 Weeks to SEALFIT: A Navy SEAL's Guide to Unconventional Training for Physical and Mental Toughness. And Kokoro Yoga: Maximize Your Human Potential to Develop the Spirit of a Warrior.
So I mean, every one of these titles are amazing. We'll get to Uncommon here in a bit. But tell us, Mark, a bit about your backstory. From what I understand, you grew up in a very small town in upstate New York, and your path was going on a certain trajectory, I think, from where you grew up. So talk about what was life like for young Mark and where was your life headed? What was the trajectory that was sort of, I don't know about mapped out for you, but kind of there was a trajectory in place perhaps.
Mark Divine:
Yeah. First, Warwick, thanks for having me on this show. I really appreciate it. It's great to meet you. I'll try to do the condensed version of this story. I can tell it in 45 minutes or five minutes. We'll try the five minute version. Yeah, so upstate New York, Barneveld, 375 people. And that was a little isolating, you might say. But there's a lot of good there too. Just beautiful surroundings, so I got to spend a lot of time outside. And this is pre-internet, pre-cell phones, as you know, we grew up and we had to be creative. And that was good for me because inside the home was a little bit turbulent. My father was pretty much a raging alcoholic and abusive. And my mom, the classic codependent, and I love them to death and forgive them for everything, but it really shut me down.
So I found a lot of solace being out in nature. And that played into me being an endurance athlete because I used to run like a billy goat up and down the Adirondack Mountains. And that was how I found a little bit of peace. Well, I became a pretty good competitive swimmer and I was academically... When that happens, when you grow up in traumatic situations, obviously, then you seek validation externally. So I of course did that as an overachiever. And that was good because that led me to a good university, Colgate University. I was recruited to swim competitively there.
So I did that routine, never once questioning who Mark really is, right? We didn't have that in our cultures, right? Maybe today we do, but you and I growing up, we didn't have mechanisms to question things very well. You just followed the song that was playing in the background. Well, the song that was playing in my background was my... We're a business family. Divines had a business that's over 100 years old, one of the legacy family businesses that survived World War I and World War II, and the boys went back and ran the family business. Well, because I was smart and went to Colgate, I thought, "Well, at least I can try something else en route to that, maybe put some money in the bank." And I followed some of my friends down to New York, got a job with Coopers & Lybrand, which is now Pricewaterhouse, PWC. And it was a program where they sent us to NYU to get our MBA, or MS in accounting, but then I got my MBA.
So I was off to the races, going to climb the corporate ladder, had a great job, was going to be an NBA CPA and all that. Well, what changed for me, the inflection point for me was I got into a martial arts program. I was looking for something additional that was more than sports to help me grow, to help me open up, to help me figure out what the hell was going on. And I had some experience from a college roommate where I watched him evolve through a martial art. I said, "Huh, there's something there." Well, when the student's ready, the teacher or the teachers will appear. And I walked into this studio called World Seido Headquarters. Seido means the Art of Sincerity.
And the grand master was a Japanese man who was very famous in Japan and he was unique. He was my first true mentor, even a father figure. And what was really unique about him was he was the full money, right? He was an integrated human being, body, mind, soul. And he acted and presented completely different than any other human being I'd ever come across in my life. And I was just absolutely floored and I wanted to taste that. And I found out that he led a Zen class. So not only was he the founder of this martial arts school, had all these incredible powers, I could tell you stories about some of the things I saw him do that you would not believe, right? Not believe. But that, again, inspired me. It showed me that the human being was capable of so much more than we'd been led to believe.
Anyways, I found out about the Zen class and here he is, he's a Zen master masquerading as a karate instructor, and he let me into the Zen class. So at the right page of 21, I started meditation and I never stopped because I found it... Partly because I trusted him so much and I had that container where if I just do what he says, I really believe that it's going to work. And that's really important to have a teacher who has a credible path, Zen being a credible path, for mental and emotional development. And that's what happened, but it happened at a very rapid pace because I was training so hard and so committed. It completely cracked my mind wide open, back to your origin story question, to where suddenly I had these experiences, right?
At first, I was able to settle my mind and focus and concentrate. And then I had this experience of distancing where I became the observer of my thoughts and emotions instead of thinking I am my thoughts and emotions. And that's when I could see that the story that I had been spoonfed growing up in this family and in this culture and everything wasn't my story. It was a story. So for the first time in my life, I started to ask questions, and that led to the dangerous question, "Who am I really?" And that completely changed my life.
Warwick Fairfax:
That was a game changer. And talk a bit about that because you would obviously know this very well, but we often think of the outward journey, but in some senses, the scarier, more important journey is the journey within, who are we? Why are we here?
Mark Divine:
Yeah, it's the most important journey. And the sooner you can get to that, then the sooner you can transform your life. Transformation does not come from the outside, right? That's the world duality of creation and that's where you're supposed to express your inner creativity. But if you're blocked from it, then you're going to be expressing it in ways that'll ultimately trap you. And that's what would have happened with me. So Nakamura taught me how to just slow down and be comfortable sitting in stillness. And it's in stillness that your creative expression and how you're supposed to be in the world is revealed to you. So how that worked for me is once I... You have to be very patient when you start with meditation. There's a lot of people don't succeed because they think it's going to be like I go to the gym and if I work out for three months, I'm going to lose some weight and see some six pack abs. Well, maybe three, maybe six months, maybe a year, and you will.
But with meditation, you don't have objective measures of progress, right? They're subjective. And we're not even taught to know what to look for. What I experienced was this growing sense of ability to just sit there with my thoughts. And at first at a distance where they weren't disturbing me, I didn't need to grab onto them and ride them and create some drama. But even then in abeyance where there was no thinking, but I was completely present and I used the term witnessing, which I later learned was a pretty common term for that experience. And it was in the witnessing moments where I kept getting this sensation bubbling up, and I would say bubbling up from my heart region, that I was a warrior and I was meant to be a warrior.
So I started to have a midlife crisis at 22 years old because I'm like, "How the heck am I supposed to be a warrior if I'm a CPA? That doesn't seem..." I'm not saying there aren't warrior CPAs out there. There probably are, but it didn't seem like the way I was supposed to be a warrior. So then I turned my question around to that. It's like, "If I'm supposed to be a warrior, then how?" And mind you, I wasn't thinking military, right? My father had a very distasteful experience with the military and so he kind of passed that down to me, like military is for people who can't get a real job, for low lives. And he was actually told by a judge, "Because you drove your car into the fraternity house drunk, you can either A, go to jail or B, join the army." He goes, "B, I'll choose B." So he didn't have a great experience with the military.
At any rate, so synchronicity happens when you are asking the right questions and you're not blocking the answers and you're starting to entertain them. So I'm entertaining this idea that I'm a warrior. "How am I supposed to be a warrior?" And then I'm walking home from work in reverie one day pondering this idea and I literally stumble across the Navy recruiting station and there's a poster there and the top of the poster said, "Be someone special." Now that caught my attention because I didn't feel very special based upon how I grew up. But it had Navy SEALs doing really cool shit. And it didn't say anything about the SEALs. It was just a bait and switch poster for the recruiters. But I looked at that, said, "Whoever they are, that's how I'm supposed to be a warrior."
Then long story short, all sorts of cool things happened with me practicing different things like visualization. I ended up getting one of two slots from the civilian world to go to Officer Candidate School to get commissioned and with a direct route to BUD/S, basic underwater demolition SEAL training after that. And so I left New York behind in 1989 with my MBA, my CPA, my first degree black belt in karate, and $100,000 job in 1989, I walked away from it all to be a Navy SEAL. I went through Navy SEAL training in 1990 and completely changed my life. And I guess I feel very fortunate to have discovered my path at such a young age. And it's one of the things I'm very passionate about helping others try to uncover and discover and get aligned because it is the most important thing in your life, I think.
Warwick Fairfax:
So can you imagine an alternate universe, your roommate didn't talk to you about meditation and that dojo that you walked past. And I think of that quote by Thoreau when he talks about people living lives of quiet desperation, that could have been you.
Mark Divine:
That could have been me.
Warwick Fairfax:
Gone back to upstate New York and work for decades in the family of business thinking, "Is this all there is?" I mean, you ever think about that could have been you?
Mark Divine:
Right. And I would have been a fraction of the man that I am today and the whole thing would have been a crucible, right? Because I would have been misaligned and yet not having any understanding of what was wrong, right? So that's where that anxiety builds over years and years and people turn to alcohol, and I would have turned to alcohol because that was the go to for my family. I'm not sure I'd be around today. That's how important it is.
If you don't align with your truth, and that is that underlying overarching reason that you incarnated, which is going to then expose the lessons you're meant to learn as an evolutionary being, then you're just going to have bigger and bigger challenges because the universe is going to try to right you, try to steer the back. And the further off course you get, the more and more challenging it gets, right? This is why people have major breakdowns and life and death accidents and cancer and all that. So the sooner that you can do the inner work, like you said, then the better off you're going to be because you can get on the right track.
Warwick Fairfax:
You have sort of an amazing, amazing journey, that journey of self-discovery and just turning your back. I'm sure at the time you probably had friends and family saying, "You're doing what? You were influenced by who? And you're going to go in the, say it ain't so, military? You're selling out everything we as a family believe in."
Mark Divine:
Yeah. Everything, right? I was throwing everything away. I was walking away from the family, turning my back in the family. My dad sent me a letter and said, "Get the rocks out of your head." All right. So I just had to stay the path and know that eventually they would see, and they did. And they actually came to my graduation. I graduated number one in my class. That's kind of the part of the story of what led me to what I do today is like, I learned so much from Nakamura over those four years and I wanted to continue that. So I continued using the skills, right? Every day, meditation, breath work, the visualization that I first learned from my college swim coach, who was a real pioneer in sports psychology. And I started to teach them to my small team during SEAL training, because you have what's called a boat crew. So I had six other guys with me.
We formed up right before Hell Week when things started to shake out and like 40 people had already quit the class out of 180. And then we went through Hell Week and we were so locked on because I began to teach them these skills that we became indomitable. And we actually secured Hell Week early by six hours and got nice and dry, and we watched the class get hammered for an extra six hours. And then all six of us, seven of us sailed through training. And the end of training, nine months, there were only 19 of us left of the 180 and seven of them were me and my team. So that had such a profound impact on me like, "Okay, I think I want to continue to develop these ideas and then made me someday teach them." And that's exactly what I did.
So when I got off active duty in 1997 or so, I started a company called NavySeals.com. I actually started two companies, right? I was an overachiever. I started the Coronado Brewing Company, which it's a pretty good size microbrewery now. And I got out of that about five years later because my partners were my brothers-in-laws and that didn't go so well, as you can imagine. But I started NavySeals.com and through that, I bought that domain for like $35.
Gary Schneeberger:
Oh my gosh.
Mark Divine:
I know. Thinking-
Gary Schneeberger:
That's crazy.
Mark Divine:
... if someone's going to do this, but it should probably be a SEAL. That was my naive thinking. The Navy later on didn't love that I owned it, but they often didn't offer to buy it from me either. They tried to take it from me. I said, "No, that's not how this is going to work." Anyways, so with that platform, I was selling gear, so we had e-commerce. And then I had forums back in the early days of the internet, remember forums? So we had all these training forums and I was giving guidance to include everything I'd learned from Nakamura, nutrition, health, training. And that led to me getting hired by the Navy to mentor Navy SEALs nationwide on a government contract.
Now, this is another one of my crucibles where I had that contract for a year and we just absolutely performed brilliantly. We took the pass rate on the screening test from 30% up to over 87%. We helped improve the quality of the recruit SEALs coming into SEAL training, which over time improved the throughput because we were trying to get more SEALs into the force. But the contract got literally stolen right out from under me by Blackwater USA. You've probably heard of that company.
Warwick Fairfax:
Right.
Mark Divine:
Yeah. They were the yeehaws running around Iraq, killing innocent-
Gary Schneeberger:
Erik Prince.
Mark Divine:
Right, Erik Prince.
Gary Schneeberger:
Erik Prince the owner.
Mark Divine:
He wanted that contract so badly for the PR value because it was a very high profile mentoring Navy SEAL candidates. Anyways, took a $10 million contract, ripped it right out for me. And everyone's saying, "Mark, you got to fight that. That was fraud." And it was. And I said, "No, I'm not going to fight that." I went back to the meditation bench and started asking those questions again. And the answer that came to me is, "You know what? You don't want one client in the US government telling you what you can't do," because they were telling me I can't do the inner domain stuff, "You can't teach these kids visualization, breath work, meditation. You can't do that because we don't have any evidence that it works. What we want you to do is just take them to the pool and beat the shit out of them, make them tough." And we could do that too, but that was not the whole package.
So I decided to launch a business that really kind of sprung out of NavySeals.com and I called it SEALFIT. And I launched a program where these students could come live with me for 30 days at a really cool training center I developed in Encinitas, California that looked like a mini BUD/S compound, mini Navy SEAL training. We trained every morning, every day from like 5:00 AM to 8:00 or 9:00 or 10:00, sometimes around the clock every single weekend. We had one day off in 30 days. And that was my Petri dish. And out of that, I developed the 8 Weeks to SEALFIT training regimen, and that book became a New York Times bestseller, and it was used by a lot of the military and law enforcement first responders. And then also the Unbeatable Mind Model, which was all the training of the inner domain. And I wrote a book about that, and then that became a separate company later on. It was an incredibly creative period in my life, and just really extraordinary.
And by the way, I'll end this piece on this, the students that I trained have a 90% success rate getting through Navy SEAL training. It's like upside down from the average Navy SEAL. And they're really... If you get to the front door of BUD/S, you are prepared, right, supposedly. But 90% fail. And the students that I trained, they would get to BUD/S and thrive with a smile on their face and 90% would succeed, which is cool. So the Navy kind of started to take notice and now they're integrating these principles and training into the BUD/S program along with the Air Force and some other special ops programs.
Warwick Fairfax:
I mean, it's amazing what you're saying because one of the things you write about is in your BUD/S class, you mentioned out of 185 candidates, 19 graduated. That's a pretty low percentage, but it may be normal. And as you mentioned, you finished first, but it seems like, as you were saying, I mean, I'm sure everybody that goes in there must be supremely fit athletes, just walking in. So that's a given, otherwise you wouldn't even enter the doorway. But it's that mental toughness. And you give one example of you were at the bottom of the pool and some instructor that I guess was nicknamed Dr. Evil, which I guess kind of says it all, but talk about what you did because a lot of people wouldn't have got out of that dilemma that you're in. But it was your mental toughness that would have enabled you to survive that test.
Mark Divine:
Right. So first off, you're right. Everyone who shows up is physically prepared or else they wouldn't be there. And they're cognitively prepared. Their IQ, they passed a battery of tests and everything. But it's mental and emotional resiliency and your capacity to be an exceptional teammate that will determine whether you get through. Those are tough to measure, right? They're tough to measure. And they can only be exposed in the crucible. BUD/S in itself is a crucible. But then there's many crucibles along the way, Hell Week being the most famous. So Hell Week is six days of nonstop training, around the clock, no sleep.
So give you examples, we had 185. By the time we got the Hell Week, which seven weeks into our training, we had already lost 40, so we're down about 140, 145. And when we got out of Hell Week, we had about 45. And then those 45 whittled down to 19 by the end of the training, which was another five months. Anyways, so this particular incident was another crucible. It's called pool competency, right? So it's designed to test your ability to control your mind and your emotions in one of the most dangerous situations that you can be, which is underwater cut off from an air supply.
So they literally, you go down with a regulator and tanks on your back and it's an old system they use intentionally because it has these two hoses they call it a double hose system. So you get down to the bottom of the deep end of this pool, the combat training tank, which is Navy SEAL speak for pool, and you just kind of hang out, and then suddenly you get attacked, and you get attacked by a Dr. Evil type character, and he literally beats the shit out of you underwater, rips all your gear off, your face mask, your fins, your weight belt, and he rips your tanks off, and then he takes that double hose and he ties into a knot and cuts off all potential for any air. And you just got to wait patiently for him to finish messing with you.
And then when he's done messing with you, a minute or minute and a half into this thing, you've got to find your gear and you got to don your equipment, you got to don it in the right order. And the right order isn't to go for the air first, it's to get your mask on so you can see. And then you go start to work on the tanks, and you try to get this knot undone. And boy, it is not easy, so to speak, to undo a knot underwater when you have all that anxiety of now you're two and a half, three minutes of holding your breath.
So for me, I found it to be much easier than most as a result of the training I had done because my mind was really calm and I had a mantra to maintain that calmness. And I'd been practicing breath work for now five years, so I had a really good lung capacity. And I also could tell when air was really necessary versus just the natural inclination to think, "Oh, I need to breathe." So I was able to hold my breath for a while. But it was the calmness under pressure that was really that made the difference. I literally had to get my foot up there and yank on this regulator. Finally, a little pop of bubble, a couple bubbles came out, a little stream. So instead of keep working, I just put the whole thing in my mouth and let it fill my mouth up and then I swallowed that into my lungs, gave me another 30 seconds.
So those are the types of crucibles that the SEALs would curate for you in a very controlled environment. This is dangerous work, mind you, but they had safety swimmers and people do shallow water blackouts and they'd get them out and they revive them. And I don't think they've had anyone die in that particular evolution. I mean, students have died at BUD/S before because it's extremely dangerous training.
But this is one way, Warwick, that I think that we can talk about crucibles being really beneficial for growth. I have a section in my book, The Way of the Seal, I say, "Bring the challenge to you before it comes to you on its own." So you can do things to curate a safe crucible experience that will give you a tremendous amount of mental, emotional resiliency, a deep awareness and appreciation for what you're really capable of. And as you're enduring the crucible, because you've selected and committed to endure the crucible, you have a growing insight and awareness that question who you really are.
Which is one of the things we did at SEALFIT, we created these 50 hour, 24 hour and 12 hour crucibles, and they were nonstop trainings. So the 50 hour one was world famous because people come from all over the place for it, to get this experience of what is it like to train the hardest training in the world for 50 hours nonstop, no sleep. And the students say there's kind of life before that experience and life after because life after everything that seemed hard is now not hard, right? Things that really used to stress them out, now they have a great distance from and a perspective that that's not a big deal. And that's the benefit of the crucible, right? That's the beyond the crucial. Beyond it, you see, "Oh, it actually was necessary." It was very useful and beneficial, albeit painful, but you have a great sense of gratitude for it.
Gary Schneeberger:
You've just talked, Mark, about just general crucible experiences. The folks who are listening and watching this right now who are not going to go through Navy SEAL training, but how they can apply what you know, what you've learned, what you've practiced. And there's something that you said that I think fits in here for everybody who's listening and viewing. And you said this, "The way you do anything is the way you do everything." How does that apply to average "everyday" crucibles that we go through as it's applied to your own life? You learn that through the experiences you've talked about, but that applies to all of us in our own realms, right?
Mark Divine:
Well, I first heard that in the SEALs, we were fond of saying that, and it was really about paying attention to detail. So if you were someone who didn't really pay attention to their gear and you didn't think it was a big deal because maybe you'd already taped up your gear a couple weeks ago, you didn't need to tape it up for stealthiness this time, or you didn't clean it from yesterday. Well, eventually your gear will fail you. But the reality is, if you're shortchanging your own gear, then where else are you shortchanging your life?
So later on, as I developed an awareness, I took that meaning of the way you do anything is the way you do everything, to be much more about awareness and presence, right? So when you develop greater awareness, which is synonymous with greater presence, then everything, every moment, every interaction, everything you do, you put your full attention to. And because you're giving your full attention, you're giving it everything that you have. And the results that accrue from this are extraordinary because you're not throwing your energy around and thinking you're getting further ahead by multitasking because you're not.
You're not focusing on the wrong things because with growing awareness, you're able to see what's the right thing to focus on. You stop taking on so many commitments because you realize how bogged down and contracted you get when you over commit and you've got too many things, too many resentments that you took this project on or that project or this didn't work or that didn't work. You're not able to let that shit go, because we have claw marks on things that we start and don't want to let go of, to include our businesses or family businesses. So we want to develop this capacity to be very present and discerning with where we put our attention and with the people and the tasks that we take on.
So this is where the warriors principle of simplicity comes in. And I think everyone who's been through a very challenging crucible has It was this experience like, "Wow, life is precious. I don't need to keep on putting points on the board and I don't need to keep on taking on new commitments and distracting myself because everything I have is right here, right now, right in front of me. Everything I need, I mean, is right here right now, right in front of me." And people on their deathbed, they don't go back and say, "I wish I had started more businesses and put more money in the bank." They say is, "I wish I'd spent more time with my family."
Warwick Fairfax:
I want to talk a bit about your latest book, Uncommon. And one of the things I love how you start that book is you have a whole series of statements about what common is. And there's a twist to this after you read it. So you state, "Common is going to business school because dad approves, though your dream is to be a Navy SEAL or become a digital nomad. Common is continuing to eat crappy food because you don't have the time to prepare healthy meals. Common is knowing your relationship isn't going to last but not having the courage to end it. Common is blowing off studying for the kegger, you'll make up the studying the next day. Common is blaming your parents for your less savory qualities rather than taking control of your mind and life to change things for the better. Common is dreaming about becoming an uber successful entrepreneur during your 9:00 to 5:00, yet not taking definitive daily action towards the goal. Common is keeping your mouth shut when you see abuse or injustice because you're afraid to take action. Common is knowing there's an entrepreneur, warrior, artist, teacher, or influencer inside you, that you're too paralyzed by imposter syndrome to pursue it."
And what's amazing after you read it is you say basically, "That was me." And you basically make this statement, which I love, saying is you don't want to be common. You want to lead an uncommon life. And you get to several categories. So talk about, and this is really another way of looking at your whole life's work in a sense, talk about why you don't want to lead that common life. You could have led a common life based on the family business and all that. That would have been Coopers & Lybrand. So talk about what a common life is and why you do not want to lead a common life.
Mark Divine:
Well, first of all, it's not meant to be a judgment, right? Because most people live a common life. What I'm trying to do is distinguish between taking radical responsibility for living the life that you're meant to live. And as I mentioned earlier, our culture does not... And I have Western culture, so Australia, America, probably Europe, structurally, governmental society, systems, and you were part of the media, you know this, it wouldn't be very profitable if everyone was running around free, not needing anybody or anything, not needing any government to control them, not being susceptible to any marketing or subliminal programming or political manipulation. Because ultimately, common is the normal human condition, just living your life.
But that's suffering. I mean, Buddhism tells us that living just the everyday reality and taking it to be real, what they call the dream state, taking it to be real, is the root of suffering. So in that regard, everyone living a common life is living a life of quiet desperation, but they're masking it over and they're drowning with entertainment and constant distraction. But at a deep level, there's this fear and anxiety because they're trying to prop up this ego that says that I am important. I'm special. And yet they're not feeling it. They're not feeling worthy. There's so much shame baked into our culture and that needs to be worked through.
So the first kind of phase of waking up to your uncommonness is to recognize that if you're not training your mind, the world's training it for you, someone's training you for you. And the results will speak for yourself. From the moment you open your eyes as a baby, your mind is being trained and conditioned and formed and shaped, just like molding a piece of clay. But you don't have any agency in that. But you do as an adult, but people they don't claim that agency. They continue to let the mind be conditioned by everything around them. And they get so encrusted or reified into this identity of theirs that they can't see beyond it. And that's common.
So the idea of being uncommon is to wake up from that reality and say, "Screw that. I am going to take charge of gaining clarity on who I am and what I'm supposed to do about it on this plane and to be free." Right? The human spirit craves freedom. It's a constant movement toward freedom inwardly, while outwardly, we constantly move toward further entrapping ourselves. But we are the prison guards of our own prison. And the key is through our mind. So we have to start by training your mind. And in the book, I break it into five sections and I call them the five mountains. These are the five human experience domains that we need to train and then reintegrate to bring them all together into one experience, physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual. And I use the term Kokoro, which means heart, mind, merged into actions.
And the reason I start with physical mountain is that my experience is the body and the mind are not two separate things. It's one thing, right? And so if you try to train your mind without bringing your body into the equation, like they do in the martial arts or traditional yoga, then you're cutting yourself off, you're going to have a disembodied mental development, which is more likely to be enhancing your egoic structures rather than breaking them down. So we've got to get the body really healthy and move the body and develop the ability to control our arousal response to get out of this hyper aroused state of fight or flight that we're all kind of trapped in so that your embodied mind is capable of now going deeper into the inner work through the meditative processes.
And then as we go through the meditative processes and we begin to separate from our thoughts and emotions, we begin to see the patterns that have been driving our reactive behavior, and we begin to objectify those patterns and work on them. We call that emotional development. And a lot of those patterns are trauma informed, meaning that they come from a very young age, or even multi-generational, like alcoholism and the rage of my father's side of the family. So now we're working on the physical, mental, and emotional to try to really, really sharpen our mind, open our mind, use our whole mind to include heart and belly mind. You have neurons, your heart is a brain and your gut is a brain, your entire body, entire nervous system, is part of your brain system. So you bring that online through these training methodologies.
Then it's like opening the aperture on a camera. You begin to perceive more. You stop identifying with the objective so much because the subjective experience becomes richer and richer for you. And your identity shifts from, "I am this body named Mark who has this degree and that degree and was a Navy SEAL," to, "I am, period." Non-personal, total pure subjectivity, "I am." That's what the eye is. But also nested within that bigger eye, that witnessing eye, is this idea that Mark came about and has this mission and is going to fulfill this mission, and so we're going to take care of the body. We're not going to leave it behind in our spiritual or whatever you want to call this awakening journey. We're going to actually bring it along with us and we're going to reenter the world as an uncommon being who's fully awake, fully aware, fully embodied.
And the experience is one of great care and concern for all beings, world-centric care and concern, compassion, open mind, open-heartedness, great clarity around why you're here and what you're meant to do about it. And fear begins to just slip away. Fear and anxiety slip away. So you end up being much calmer. I'm not saying you don't experience all the emotions. Of course you do, but you don't get convinced by them. You don't get caught up in them.
Warwick Fairfax:
I really find this sort of fascinating is that it almost to me, and I'd love you to hear your thoughts, is the ultimate SEAL journey is the journey within. That is the hardest, toughest, it's a lifelong journey. It's easy to tap out at any one point, right? "I've had enough. I'm giving up."
Mark Divine:
Yeah, you're right. I think a lot of people do tap out because I remember in going to a retreat once and the instructor is like, "Yeah, the mind's a dangerous place to go. Don't go in there alone." A lot of people are a little afraid of going in there and seeing what they're going to find because they're going to unroot some unpleasant things and they know that. I went to a seven day kind of emotional development retreat, they took your phone and you had no distractions. They didn't even want you to work out because they didn't want you to stir up all your patterns all the time from distraction, of hiding. And it was pretty extraordinary. But I remember being nervous like, "Do I really want to do this? I'm going to discover who I really am at an inner emotional level. I mean, that's going to be ugly." But it's necessary work, right? And men have trouble with that because they think, "Well, emotions are soft underbelly. We don't go there."
But I think in this world that we're heading into this VUCA world with AI and who knows what's coming even in the next five years, I think the most important thing for all of us, leaders, whether you think you're a leader or not, first of all, everyone's a leader because you have to lead yourself, the most important skill to develop is the ability to sit in silence and to tap into your intuition and in your intuition also lies your creativity. It's an inside game. Creativity and intuition is an inside game. And we don't know if AI will have intuition, but right now it's looking like AI can take everything that their left brain cognitive functions used to do okay and do it better. So what are you going to be left with? Like what's the most human part of you? That beingness that you talked about instead of the doing this. If the doingness is handled by a robot or AI, unless you go into some trade, which is more and more common, the most important work for you is to figure out who are you really? And to bring your gift into the world.
Like you said, I 100% agree with you, Warwick, that everyone has a unique kind of genetic/soul blueprint. There's not a single human that is the same. You might have some twins who look the same, but we know they're all radically different. And part of that is karmic, rebirth energy. Part of that is probably all the conditioning and the actual genetic makeup and DNA. But then there's the part which is actually being driven by that inner voice, that silent inner voice. But if you don't slow down and still yourself to be able to hear that and you crowd it out, then you're going to be much more susceptible to all that imprinting and training and pressure from the outside in the form of friends, family, social media, whatnot, just pulling you in all sorts of directions that aren't good for you.
Warwick Fairfax:
What you're saying is so profound, is that you've got to quiet all the negative voices, whether it's internal or external, because until you do that, you can't hear those whispers. I think in the Old Testament talks about the still small voice of God, that quiet whisper. With all the yelling, you're going to miss it, but you've got to quiet all those voices to be able to hear that eternal whisper that kind of points you forward. And yes, one of the things you're talking about, which I think is so true, certainly as men you're taught to not be vulnerable, vulnerable is weakness, but when you can find friends who you can be vulnerable with and they still like you and says, "Well, okay, I did dumb stuff and I've made mistakes and you're loved unconditionally for who you are," that is sort of a game changer when you find your tribe, you find your team, maybe in your case, your sort of boat crew, in a sense. And I've certainly found that helpful.
But it's hard because again, from my faith perspective, we talk about this dark and light, and most religious traditions talk about that. So like one example for me is, I was privileged to go to Harvard Business School where I'm thinking after my spectacular failure, I can't go to reunion. They'll laugh at me. "Oh yeah, Warwick Fairfax, the guy who blew his upbringing and $2 billion failure," and I just thought that was going to happen, that was the truth, the lies I was hearing. So eventually, a number of years later, I went to a reunion and they weren't like that at all.
Mark Divine:
Of course.
Warwick Fairfax:
Then about five, 10 years ago, I forget how long it was, a friend of mine said, "Hey, Warwick, we've got a number of people in your graduating class of '87. They're going to be talking about some of the challenges and resilience. We'd like you to do five, seven minute talk." And I mentioned that and people couldn't have been more affirming. These are people at the time that sort of maybe late 50s, early 60s, they're either retired or at the pinnacle of their professional careers, CEOs, very successful people, and yet there was acceptance, not judgment. And had all sorts of different cross-sections, probably different beliefs. But from my perspective, the enemy, the lies say, "Oh, you will be rejected if you're vulnerable." And sometimes you will be, but not as often as we think.
So to me, one of the keys I love to hear your thoughts is as you're trying to do this internal voyage of discovery, I'm a great believer that therapy can absolutely be helpful, but you also want to find what we call a team of fellow travelers, people that will be in there with you, that they know you, and they accept you for who you are. Does that make sense? What's your experience?
Mark Divine:
I 100% agree. It's very difficult to do emotional growth alone because it's all about relational. Of course, the first relationship is with yourself. So the deepest work is on your own worthiness. To root out the fears and anxieties that you weren't good enough or worthy or loved. And these happen at a very young age, before object permanence even is developed in the brain. Your mom leaving the room and maybe have an argument with her husband, I mean, that's like death to a child and they take it 100% personally. First of all, the mother isn't in the other room. The mother just disappears because they don't have object permanence. They don't know if she's permanent. So then if she reappears later, that's great for the kid, but for a while she's gone. Might as well be dead. And then to have the trauma of them arguing, right? The kid doesn't have the faculties to say, "Well, it's not my fault. It's not me."
Anyway, so there's not a single human that doesn't grow up with trauma. And it's like my first litmus test when I work with the climate is if they say, "Yeah, I had a perfect childhood." And I'm like, "Mm-hmm. We got a lot of work to do here." These fears and anxieties come with us, and so we got to work on that first. But boy, it's like magnified 10 times over if you can do that in a trusted environment with a small group, not a large group, but a small group of committed fellow journey people. We call that a community of practice. And I find that men tend to work really well in men's groups because there's some things they don't think they can really share fully and openly with women around. But it doesn't have to be. It can be mixed groups that works well too.
And I see more and more of these coming. In fact, I'm part of one that's out of Canada called Longship, which is bringing people together in small teams, very similar to what we did at BUD/S and with the SEALs, like a small team, eight people, probably a good number, and you meet once a month and you have a system and protocol and rules for discussing these really hard things that are going on in our lives and it's a safe place. And what's said there stays there. And I think that's an extremely powerful way to really develop emotional awareness and do some trauma healing. Of course, if you can support that with effective therapy, if you could find a really good therapist, that's also really important. I call it emotional coaching. I asked my clients, these guys that are written, said, "You have no problem getting a fitness coach or a nutritional coach or an executive coach. Why don't you get an emotional coach?" And of course they're like, "Because that would mean I'm broken." I said, "No, no, you're not broken. You're human."
Warwick Fairfax:
One of the things we say a lot at Beyond the Crucible is we believe in leading a life of significance, which we define as a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. So it's our perspective. I think most major religions would agree with this is that just a hedonistic, "It's all about me and life and success and money and power," I don't know any major religion that believes that will lead toward spirituality, will lead to happiness, long-term fulfillment because humans aren't designed that way. You may not like how we were designed, but it is what it is. You can't alter our fundamental spiritual DNA. We yearn to have a purpose beyond ourselves that somehow helps others and joy and fulfillment come from there. So talk a bit about that, because I imagine you probably dwell on those areas too about life's purpose.
Mark Divine:
Sure. Big time. What's coming up for me is a lot of folks I've worked with are stuck in this idea of legacy, right? And I heard that a little bit with some of your earlier thinking about the family dynasty and whatnot. And the problem with legacy is you're putting your worth on something external objective that you have created or grown or that you're proud of and you're going to get the name on the medical school or the whatever, and people are going to remember you. Well, they won't. They'll know there's a name, but it won't be about you. So all of that serves to strengthen the egoic structure, strengthen your ego.
Whereas service, the idea of your purpose is in service in a unique way, right? And you can use the Ikigai model to help you like, "Okay, what are my most powerful skills? What am I good at? What am I not good at? What do I love? What do I hate? What does the world need?" And then you can begin to zero in on how you can serve. But again, the most important part is not what you do, but who you are.
So I like to use the idea of archetypes. So when I was meditating in the 20s with Nakamura, I didn't have this sense that I was meant to be a Navy SEAL when I was sitting on the meditation bench. That's doing. I had the sense that I was a warrior. That's being. And so the warrior became my dominant archetype, and it's not dominant anymore, but it's still there. It's a close second or third. So everyone's got a couple dominant archetypes. It's really helpful to discern, to uncover those. You can use the Yungian archetypes as an example, or the Enneagram, just online take an Enneagram test and you can find, oh, you're a joker or you're a warrior or you're an alchemist or whatever, a sage. Great. That's a pointer for you. That's how you're supposed to serve. Find something within that energy to allow you to serve and then get your ego out of it.
Gary Schneeberger:
Well, that sounds you heard folks is the captain has turned on the fast and seatbelt sign indicating we've begun our dissent to land the plane on this conversation. Before we do that though, I would be remiss, Mark, if I did not give you the chance to let listeners and viewers know how they can find out more about you and the services you offer through the worldwide web.
Mark Divine:
Thanks so much. Appreciate that. My website is markdivine.com. So you can find pretty much all my training and books and everything there. The podcast is now called The Mark Divine Show. I might change it back to Unbeatable Mind. And I do a lot of great interviews, but mostly I'm starting to do more teaching, just me like teaching one directional. The program, Unbeatable Mind, we work with organizations and corporations and we have some phenomenal tribe and community. Information for that is at unbeatablemind.com. And thanks for letting me share and having the conversation here today. It's been awesome.
Gary Schneeberger:
We're almost done. Warwick always has the right of last question or two. So Warwick, I will flip it back to you to truly land the plane on our conversation today.
Warwick Fairfax:
Well, again, Mark, thank you for being here and just what a wonderful conversation. There might be somebody here today that maybe they might feel like today is their worst day. They're thinking of maybe tapping out in one way or the other, even if it's just like, "I'm just going to hide under the covers and just give up on life. I'm just going to wile away the next few decades." What would a word of hope be for somebody that might feel like today is maybe their worst day?
Mark Divine:
Well, metaphor, imagine that you lived in a country, maybe like England where it was cloudy all the time and you lived at the base of a mountain, it's always cloudy, always raining, always depressing. And that's what your life feels like right now. But one day you get inspired to climb that mountain and you climb up and all of a sudden you break through the clouds, you're like, "Holy shit, the sun up here. This has always been here. I've just never seen it because I didn't climb high enough." So recognize that the sun is always there, right?
Your witness, your awareness, your relationship with God, whatever, however you want to talk about it is always there. And the part of you that is feeling like shit is the ego. And they both exist side by side or one nested within the other. So to turn toward the witness and the way to do that is to just sit quietly. And in that immediacy of that moment of being sitting there quietly, you can get the sense that everything is okay and you're having a moment. So don't fight the moment, just let the moment be. Don't mess with it. Just know that you are not that. You are way more than that.
Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I've been in the communications business long enough to know when the final word's been spoken on the subject and our guest today, Mark Divine, has indeed spoken it. And he's spoken it the way he's spoken pretty much everything in this episode, with a real catchy calm, I'll call it. It's hard to listen to him talk without feeling like, "Huh."
Well, Warwick, we just had a really interesting conversation with our guest, Mark Divine, and there's a whole lot of stuff that we could pull from that were takeaways. Let's try to pull it down to what's the one takeaway that you hope listeners and viewers get from our conversation with Mark?
Warwick Fairfax:
Mark was a fascinating person, grows up in a small town in upstate New York and has a pretty challenging upbringing. There was some alcoholism and some different things in his family. And he also grew up in a family business background. I think it was generational, like me in a sense. Listeners, I also grew up in a generational family business in Australia. And he was on track to be a CPA, MBA at Coopers & Lybrand, that's a big accounting firm. So his life changes when he walks past this dojo, this martial arts place where he learns meditation. He does this inner journey that he ends up becoming a Navy SEAL and top of his class, number one out of 185 candidates, and now has this whole business movement with SEALFIT, Unbeatable Mind. He's written many books, including his most recent book, Uncommon: Simple Practices for an Extraordinary Life.
And to me, the one takeaway is being a SEAL and graduating through BUD/S is tough, but the toughest journey for him was the inner journey, not the external journey. So he spent his life really understanding who he is, what his passions are, his gifting. It's incredible. He talks in his book Uncommon about themes that we talk about. It's sort of a Japanese construct called the Ikigai chart. Basically it looks at what do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? And obviously what will they pay for? And the center of all of that. And we talk about that in similar fashion. What is your gifting? We're all inherently wired by God a certain way. What is your passions and beliefs? What do you love to do? How will this serve the world and lead to a life of significance and life on purpose dedicated to serving others?
So we talk about a lot of the same things, maybe in different language, but there's commonality. So I think one of the things that Mark is saying is, you first got to quiet the mind and the soul, just calm your spirit, calm the external voices, the internal voices that are not helpful to begin to hear your own soul, your own spirit about what is it that you want to do. If he hadn't done the soul work, I think he wouldn't have been at a point where walking past that Navy recruiting center that he didn't say, "You know what? This whole warrior motif really seems to be me. And I feel like this is the next step." I'm not sure he knew where that was going to lead precisely. I don't know that he even knew it was going to lead to being a Navy SEAL. Still less all the books that he's written and the work that he's done, which is incredible.
But it's really one of the things he really gets at is just the journey within is the ultimate journey. And we talk about this too, the journey of becoming, not just the external climbing up the ladder. It's like it's sort of meaningless because it doesn't lead to joy and fulfillment. It's that journey within to discover, "What is my purpose? Who am I? Who do I want to be?" He was fortunate to discover that in his 20s, or at least begin on the journey. I, with the family of business, failed when I was in my late 20s and age 30. It took me a few years to begin the journey, but I've also been on that journey for quite a lot of years now. And really, that is the key journey of life. It's the journey within. It's a journey to become, from my perspective, who God intended you to be. It's not the external climb, the corporate ladder. It's not wrong, but the greatest journey, the greatest challenge, the ultimate challenge is the journey within.
That's what Mark Divine has spent a lifetime in, teaching and training others to calm their spirits and to really get in touch with, from my perspective, their divine purpose. Because it's in doing that that your heart begins to sing. It's in doing that, that your life goes from a Thoreau-like world of quiet desperation, a black and white world to a life of full color, living color, if you will, where it doesn't mean you don't have challenges, but you're excited about life, you feel like you're making a difference and then you feel like life has purpose. And yes, you'll have moments of exasperation.
But yet overall, there's a sense of just calmness and a sense of, "I know who I am, I know why I'm here, at least in some sense, and I'm grateful for the journey that I'm on." And you're just living every day with some degree of joy and fulfillment. It doesn't mean there aren't speed bumps. But there's this sense of overall tranquility, even when there are speed bumps that, "I have some idea of why I'm here and I'm using the gifting that I have for a higher purpose." So there's definitely, I felt like there was some commonality between Mark's thinking and writing and what we do here. So it was a fascinating conversation.
Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. And he was one of the most soft-spoken, quiet, calm people we've ever interviewed. In fact, when we're on this side and recording, if we're talking like right now, the box around me is lit up because I'm talking, his box went unlit up so many times. He would speak and then he'd stop. He'd think, his light would go off. I mean, he was just so calm. He really exudes that. I mean, you talked about not wanting a life of quiet desperation. Mark Divine's living a life of quiet erudition. I mean, he really is quietly helping people significantly. And I think that is admirable.
Warwick Fairfax:
It's so true. A frenzied, panic filled spirit is not a good one. A good spirit is one of calmness and joy and a sense of, "I know who I am and I'm doing what I feel called to do." That provides a tranquility of soul and who doesn't want that kind of tranquil soul where there's almost a calm joy. And Mark Divine has it.
Gary Schneeberger:
All right, there we go. We know your crucible experiences, folks, are tough. They can be world rattlers. But we also know this, and Mark talked about it in his life, Warwick's talked about it many times on the show, they're not the end of your story. Your crucibles are not the end of the story. In fact, if you learn the lessons of those crucibles and you apply them as you move forward, it can lead you down the path to the greatest destination you could ever reach, and that destination is a life of significance.
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