Ep. #534: Mark Divine on Unlocking Your Leadership Potential, Navy SEAL Style

Mike: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews, and thank you for being here with me. And this episode is going to be about leadership, which is something that may sound glamorous, but is actually far different from what most people imagine. Leadership is hard work. It takes brains.

It takes grit. It takes perseverance, you have to really work to earn the trust and respect of the people on your team, and you have to do more than just learn new skills to become a good leader. You have to become a better person, you have to work on yourself, you have to overcome the mental hurdles that are…

holding you back, and that often includes, that almost always includes, deeply ingrained negative behaviors and emotions that make it impossible to really become a competent leader. Luckily though, No matter what your previous experiences have been like, you can become a better leader. And who better to learn from than Mark Devine, today’s guest, who is releasing a new book on March 3rd.

I’m not sure when exactly it’s going to go up. It’s going to go up in the next few days or so. I’m recording this on the 25th and Mark’s book comes out on March 3rd and it is called Staring Down the Wolf, Seven Leadership Commitments that Forge Elite Teams, and it’s a book on leadership, of course. Now, why should you listen to Mark?

Well, in case you’re not familiar with him, he is a master in mental toughness and leadership. He is someone we can all learn from because he’s not just a New York Times best selling author and creator of several. multi million dollar businesses and brands, including SealFit, you’ve probably heard of that, as well as Unbeatable Mind.

Mark was also a Navy SEAL for 20 years, where he honed his leadership abilities, which helped him climb to the rank of commander before he retired. So it goes without saying that Mark is not just talking the talk. This man has walked the walk for a long time now, and in this episode, we talk about how Leading a team in the civilian world is quite different than when he was in the Navy.

That was a tough lesson for him to learn. He thought he had his shit together because he was a badass SEAL commander and he was used to leading some of the most elite soldiers in the world. And then he gets out into the business world, he gets into his civilian life after the Navy, and falls on his face.

Why? We also talk about some of the hard lessons he learned in this period, particularly from his first major business failure. We talk about some common leadership problems out there, like internal biases and a lack of emotional awareness, as well as different stages of leadership development that we go through.

and the importance of really focusing on what he calls vertical growth and mastering yourself. And we even talk a little bit about book publishing, meditation, and spirituality. So if you want to become a better leader or maybe even just a more well rounded person who is more capable of serving the causes that you care about, then Definitely give this episode a listen now before we get to the show, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural.

evidence based health and fitness supplements including protein powders and protein bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and dose in every product of mine is backed by peer reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100 percent transparent, no proprietary blends, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored.

To check it out just head over to legionathletics. com And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20 percent on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase, then you will get double reward points on your entire order, which is essentially getting 10 percent cash back in rewards points.

So again, that URL is legionathletics. com. And if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Mr. Divine, it’s been a while since we’ve emailed a little bit back and forth, but it’s been a while since we’ve spoken on the podcast.

So thanks for taking the time to come back.

Mark: Yeah. I appreciate it, Mike. It’s been a while and super stoked to, uh, to chat with you here.

Mike: Yeah. I’m excited to hear about your newest book that is coming out. We were just chatting offline. If you were wondering, uh, because Mark, you have a few. Popular books. And we’ve discussed Amazon stuff over a couple of years now.

And so it’s, I like staying in touch with other people who are doing something similar because there aren’t that many of us, at least in our space, you find more like people who have self published books in fiction and at least gotten anywhere with it.

Mark: So yeah, you have to have a platform for the self publish process to really fly.

If you do it and it’s working, then it can be really lucrative. And like we were just talking about earlier, you get to update your stuff. So your content isn’t fixed in time. And when you have a better idea or you’re, you know, you evolve, then you can go back and pull the old stuff down and tweak it, which is kind of nice.

You can’t do that with a major publish work.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, that’s something I’ve done. Quite a bit with my books and you can do it with a traditional publisher, but it’s a whole process. It’s not guaranteed. Like you have to sell them on why they should care.

Mark: That’s right. I did that with the way of the seal.

They actually bought the idea of doing a fifth anniversary edition. I added two new chapters and got to edit a bunch of stuff that I didn’t like out of it. But you’re right. It was a big rigmarole process.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Whereas with self publishing,

Mark: I think, you know, the Holy grail, and this is kind of cool to see you get on this way with Simon Schuster with your next book is to have a little bit of both.

Right. So I’ve got a couple of major publishers and this new one that we can talk about in a bit staring down the wolf is, is, um, put out by Macmillan St. Martin’s imprint. There’s just something about the energy of putting out a book like that and everyone driving toward getting on the New York Times bestseller list and the professional kind of juice that you get from that, the respect is, is powerful.

And that can drive a lot of awareness for your self published books, which will earn all the money because you don’t really earn that much money on these. Traditional published books.

Mike: Totally. Yeah. I’ve just started the process with Simon and Schuster. And so far it also, it looks like it’s going to be fun to work with.

So the editor who I’m working with is what I like is so far, she has, she has good ideas, like developmental editing.

Mark: Yeah, they should help improve the book through the process.

Mike: Absolutely. Whereas I’ve worked with some really good editors on my self published stuff and have no complaints. And in one case, for example, I’ve worked with a woman who came from, she was a senior editor at a number of big publishing houses and she was very good, very professional.

And I enjoyed working with her and I’m working with another freelance editor on a self publishing project that I’m finishing right now. Again, very good, very technically proficient, but my only. Critique if I had one was just on the developmental side. I like if someone can challenge me and yeah, me too, you know, really like from a conceptual standpoint saying, Hey, this idea needs to be reworked or this needs more details.

Or maybe if we were to rearrange the flow of, of this argument, it would be more compelling stuff like that is I’m enjoying that with the woman I’m working with.

Mark: Yeah, it’s interesting you said that I just hadn’t really thought of that, but I’ve had a similar experience and I think the difference is the big publishing houses have skin in the game and they take ownership or co ownership of the project.

So they’re going to push and prod and evolve it through that whole process. Whereas if you go out and hire someone. They’re basically going to edit what you write and maybe refine some of the verbology, but you’re not going to get any, um, book doctoring at all.

Mike: Yeah, you know, you can get some, but I think you’re right.

It’s just that point of skin in the game. Because it’s not only does the company have skin in the game, but the individual does. I mean, the editors are entrusted with a lot of money and you know, they have to sell their higher ups on why they should give you a portion of the money allotted to them. And so they very much personally have skin in the game.

If they pay you a bunch of money for a book that flops, they might just get fired. Right. I mean, right. Honestly. So anyways, not exactly what we’re here to talk about, but it’s a, it’s a segue, it’s, it’s book stuff. So, well, you know, and

Mark: I can’t imagine that a lot of your listeners aren’t already thinking about or in, you know, somewhere in the process or already have books out there because you know, it’s, it’s in the meat, you know, the, everybody is being encouraged.

If you’re. A solopreneur or trying to become a content person or a thought leader, you know, you got to have a book and self publishing is so important or so easy, I should say. And there are pros and cons to that, right? Because there’s a lot of crap out there too. I mean, like a million books published every year.

Mike: Yeah. And I would say I get asked a fair amount. About this subject. So I guess you’re, you’re right. There probably a number of people listening who are enjoying this initial tangent, but my basic advice to people is if they’re just starting out and they don’t have anything much in the way of a following or a platform, just self publish.

And yes, there are a million books a year is the number that I wouldn’t be surprised. There are many, many, many, many books that get self published every. Year, but if you can do a good job, so let’s just say most of those books are shit, they go nowhere, but it’s immediately obvious that they’re shit. They have shit covers, shit titles and shit reviews.

It’s a dead, it’s a nothing. It’s not even competition. It’s actually, I wouldn’t even say it registers as noise. It’s like some dust on the ground and to mix metaphors. But so if you can just get above that a good cover. A good title and get off the ground with some good reviews. You’re already way ahead of most of the people who you would think that you have to compete with who are actually not competition at all.

And then on top of that, if you can write a book that people like, if you can write a book that people Talk about that’s the key, a book that someone’s going to text their friend and say, Hey, I’m reading this book. I really like this or share quotes on social media of something like that. Then you can do it.

You can do well as a self published author, you can prove yourself. So then if you want to level up, so to speak with a traditional publisher and really go for the extra cache and the extra attention that comes with having like a New York times bestselling book, for example, you have some leverage, you’re bringing something.

proven to the table as opposed to kind of begging for a book deal. Yeah, you know, at first hand. So let’s segue speaking of books into this newest book of yours. That’s coming out. Oh, I thought it was, no, sorry. I got the date wrong. So it’s coming out in a couple of weeks, actually 3rd of March.

Mark: It’s coming out March 2nd. So we’re in that big kind of pre order push and first week of sales push our goal is to sell 5, 000 copies leadership category books. You know, our Tough to get on the best solo list, but we think we have got a good chance. You know, it’s got a pretty big, decent size following, I should say. And if we hit the right triggers levers, you know, we should do that.

You and I know that’s just a game. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It’s a long haul and whether the book impacts people positively, that counts. Totally.

Mike: Totally. Yeah, no, I understand. So I guess just quickly for people who want to just get right to buying the book, if, uh, or if they can just keep this in mind in our discussion, they can just go to staring down the wolf.

com and then there’s a pre order a link to pre order it there. And you have a bunch of bonuses and.

Mark: Yeah, that’s kind of fun too. You know, we’re thinking about these bonuses and one of my friends is Ryan holiday and we’ve shared podcasts and stories and he’s helped me out with some projects and I loved, you know, his recent.

Book launch for stillness is the key, which is a great book. And one of the things he did was offer like, Hey, if you’re going to buy a lot of books, then I’ll come and do a talk for your company. I was like, Hey, that’s a great idea. So we offered that, you know, for anyone who buys a thousand books, like to say they have a large organization, then I’ll come and do a keynote.

Yeah. Which is great or training even for a day or a half day. And normally that’s 35, 000 or more with travel and you know, when you buy the books, it’s like 14, 000. So it’s a pretty good deal. Totally. Yeah. Stuff like that. I mean, not many people would take me up. And then I think we’ve had two. Yeah. It’s still like,

Mike: Hey, that’s a lot of books.

That’s great, man. That’s super exciting actually.

Mark: It is, but you can get signed copies and you know, for people who wanted to buy a smaller number for their team, let’s say a hundred, then I do zoom training. There’s all sorts of fun. Cool things that we offer. Yeah. These are all my team’s ideas. I was like, at first I was like, I’m going to be running around the country doing keynotes and these zoom calls, but

Mike: do you want to hit the list or not, man?

That’s right. You got to do that stuff, right? You willing to pay the price? Are you trying to bargain over it? Yeah. So let’s talk about this book. So why this book and why now? Why did you decide to write it?

Mark: Like most book projects, it was a little bit labyrinthine, the process, I was working on a manuscript that I still have on my, on the shelf now, and it’s called uncommon.

And essentially, it’s like the sequel to unbeatable mind for, you know, young leaders to really radar lock on their future, uh, their purpose, and then use all the tools that we’ve been developing an unreal mind to just, you know, just dominate. And it’s kind of like the book, but if you were to say, Hey, if I had that knowledge when I was, okay.

In my twenties and just launching or even thirties, for gosh sakes, I would have been way ahead of the game at any rate. So I was about 80 percent done with that. My publisher from St martin’s who published a couple of the books of mine, eight weeks to seal fit and core yoga, which are like training manual books.

But they would still fit was in New York times bestseller. Great job and it sold a ton of copies. He wanted me to do a book on leadership from kind of the Navy SEAL leader perspective. And I was like, first, I was hesitant because, you know, I’ve got teammates who do that. And what more can I add to that discussion?

And the way the SEAL has some of that stuff in it, that’s my other book. And so I just kind of told him, let me think about it and I’ll get back to you on it. And so you know this, but I don’t think your listeners do, but one of the kind of angles I have are not angles, but kind of main themes for me is that yes, I’m a Navy SEAL commander retired and I’ve been entrepreneur.

But I’m really a trainer at heart, and I’m a trainer who eats his own dog food, meaning I have a very disciplined daily practice of my physical exercise, somatic movement, breath work, meditation, and visualization, right? And I talk about these at length in my Unbeatable Mind book, but it’s worked for me since I started Zen training when I was 21.

Four years before I joined the seals. And so I have this daily practice. And so I spend a couple of weeks just kind of meditating on this whole project that St. Martin’s asked me to do, and imagining it and asking myself the right questions like this project need to be done, or is this just another, you know, quick money hit for those, you know, for St.

Martin’s? How can I add value to the conversation around leadership and how can I help people? I reflected upon my own leadership journey, and I recognized That this might be surprising to you, but that first of all, that the team is everything in the SEAL teams. The individual leader was important, but it wasn’t the main thing.

It was all about the team. And that’s why we call it the teams. So this book is actually about developing and leading teams as opposed to like traditional, I’m a leader, go kick ass and take names, you know, and leadership strategies and tactics kind of things. So it’s about teams. And then I recognize that when I was in the SEAL teams, it was actually pretty easy for me to.

Organize and conduct missions with a team that operated like at an elite level and we just dominated. But when I got out into the civilian world and became an entrepreneur, how it was so much harder, like, and I never really could put my finger on it, but I had like failure after failure after failure, you know, kind of like failing my way towards success.

But it took me a long time to develop the leadership capacity. With my team, my current team, get to where now I feel like I have the same energy and alignment and eliteness as I did in the SEAL teams. Leading when I was 25. And I recognize that that’s because the SEALs, the organization of the SEALs, the culture and the structure are kind of like made for you or done for you already.

And all you gotta do is come and just be a badass and plug into that and everything’s already done for you. You don’t have to build culture, you don’t have to build the structure of the organization or the team. You just have to work on yourself. Not true for anybody in the real world. Right, Mike? I mean, if only you’ve had to write it, can you imagine if you could just do what you do and just plug into an elite seal team every day and I’ll have all the energy of that structure, it would be miraculously easy compared to the way it really is.

And this came out in my meditation. That was part of it. Leading in the civilian world. It’s still all about the team, but the team is really hard to develop and to align to operate in an elite level. But I had learned some things both from my days in the SEALs as well as the, you know, multiple organizations that I built in the entrepreneurial realm that there are certain principles that are really growth principles.

That if you apply these principles to yourself as a practice every day, daily, monthly, weekly, and with your team, then together, you as a leader and your team, which means that a lot of times you’re the teammate and someone else is leading, so it’s kind of a, this idea we had in the SEAL teams that Everyone’s ready to lead, ready to follow and never quit.

It doesn’t matter what role you’re in or what your rank is. So a team is like that. Everyone’s leading. Everyone’s following. You’ll never quit. But it takes a serious commitment to growing together. And so that’s the second major theme is that your team is your major growth stimulator, so to speak. It’s the Petri dish for you to grow, to be the highest and best version of yourself as a human being.

Tap that unlimited potential or what we call 20X potential. You’re not going to do it just by. You know, thinking you’re perfect or doing your own little routine and then coming in and dropping all your shit all over the team every day. So that brings me to the third major theme that I had this aha moments, you know, sitting on that meditation bench was that one of the major obstacles for leaders to be able to do what I just said, which is show up and grow with and through their team to dominate whatever their personal battlefield is, is the emotional.

Development or lack of emotional awareness of every individual leader and and one of the things that I’ve learned painfully over the years is that no matter how freaking smart you are, I am no matter how talented I might be, I’m never gonna have the success that I could have. If I don’t eradicate my negative conditioning and my biases and you know, what the, you know, the psychology profession would call your shadow.

And so this book, you know, it literally came out of me where I was like, Oh my God, this is it. The next frontier for leadership development is to develop the team vertically, meaning to grow their awareness and tap more potential, all that being side of the team. And the way to do that as a leader is to develop emotionally mature leadership.

And that was my journey is like all these disasters I had were because I had some, you know, when I say emotion, I’m not talking about all the, I’m talking about negative conditioning that is reactionary based upon like some childhood trauma or bias that could be baked into you because. You just don’t see it.

You know, we all have biases that we just don’t understand that they’re there, but everyone else sees them. Or masks of perfection or subtle fear of success or failure. These things are all like the, the really soft, you know, you might even call them just subconscious programming, but it’s all related to emotional patterns that are developed at a very early age in the first 20, 21 years of our lives.

And if you don’t address those, like I said, you might be wealthy. You could even be president of the United States. But still be an

asshole, so to speak, just saying there’s a possibility.

Mike: Stranger things have happened. And so what, what was that like for you specifically? You mentioned this shadow, like for you, how did you have to change going from when you were in the teams and you’re like, this is easy. I, you know, we dominate to then getting out as an entrepreneur and probably going, Whoa, wait a minute.

What, why is this not working?

Mark: The first business that I started. Off active duty was a brewing company, Coronado Brewing Company, micro Brewery Restaurant in Coronado, California. I literally came off active duty as a senior lieutenant or lieutenant commander and you know, I put my freaking night vision on and put the weapon at my shoulder and just was like a sniper.

Taken down targets every day. And I’m like, I am going to find a way or make a way to get this restaurant successful. Open the door, get the brewing operations. So I was just like, game on tactically. Nailing it right raised a million and a half dollars got the doors open, you know, a year after conceiving it and we were like all systems go, I thought, but I, my partner was my brother in law and I was newly married about a married one year into my marriage at that time and so I didn’t really know him that well, but he seemed, you know, successful.

He’s running another restaurant. He wanted to do a bar together. But I convinced him that we, you know, the Micro Brewery restaurant was right. I mean, there were only like four breweries in San Diego at the time, and now there’s like 400, I think it seems like we were early in the game. This is 1996. So anyways, you know, I just made this assumption back to this bias that I had.

I made this assumption that he would be, you know, a team player just like I had in the SEAL teams. And so, you know, I didn’t really do anything to vet him besides, you know, thinking, well, this guy’s smart. He kind of knows what he’s doing. I guess that’s enough. And so he became my partner 50 50 then about six or seven months into it.

Suddenly, he kind of declares to me one day that, He’s going to bring his brother into the deal and my shadow side right then didn’t protest or I didn’t protest because one of my shadow aspects was kind of codependence and thinking everything’s going to work out and, and thinking, you know, if someone says there’s a good reason, I tended to believe people, right?

I believe people’s bullshit and I trust people to a fault. You know, and that worked fine in the SEAL teams, but in the civilian world, you know, you got to trust research, you know, validate, verify,

Mike: trust, but verify. Thank you.

Mark: Exactly. He brings his brother in and next thing you know, I’m diluted down to 33%, which after all the investors we brought in, which I did all the work, by the way, Mike, I mean, I raised all that money and, um, put my own skin in the game, my own money and liquidated my IRA and these two guys.

Reneged on their commitment to put cash into the business. And then they reneged on their commitment to work full time in the business. And you can see where this is going. It started the head South a few months after that. So, you know, that’s kind of an opening salvo where like, I went from hero to zero as a leader, you know, one moment.

It’s easy to form a team, like a pickup, you know, kind of like an NFL draft in the seals. Everyone wanted to work for me cause I was a great leader and I was easy to get along with and I took care of my teammates and you know, I did a lot of things right and I was able to just really do a good job and then I get out of this, out of the seals and my first business is just complete disaster and it’s just because I didn’t have the emotional awareness and lacked some of the, you know, sometimes the courage to.

Do the right thing, you know, in spite of the consequences to have those critical conversations, which are so hard to do that we sweep them under the rugs stuff that is just actually really common in everyday business that can trip you up big time. That was my first experience of getting tripped up. I mean, it was magnified obviously because the family involvement and you know, we ended up getting into this freaking lawyers, guns and money brawl for the ownership of the business with your brother in law with my two brothers in law, right?

I have brothers in law, my wife’s brothers. And then her parents, you know, the father is a former Marine who really loved me and supported me and knew that I was doing everything to protect the shareholders. And then the mother came down on the side of the brothers and that split the family up and they actually got divorced and that thing was a shit show.

So, and I still. Could have put my seal goggles back on and fought my way through it. You know, we were winning the legal battles. We were winning the proxy battles for control of the business, but I was losing on the home front because my wife was just, they were just torturing her. These two guys were just real jerks and they were torturing her trying to get her to divorce me basically.

And they had this scorched earth policy, both at the business and at the personal level that made it really hard. And I was afraid that, you know, I’d lose my wife and, you know, everything would fall apart. Like the parents, you know, had fallen apart. And so Sandy, my wife just begged me, said, you know, this isn’t worth it.

You know, this is what owning your own business is like. I don’t want any part of it. And so I ended up selling my interests to these two jerks and walked away. You know, the business is still. Thriving to this day, but I like to take credit for it because I handed over a 10 million profitable business and all they had to do is not fuck it up, you know?

Mike: Yeah, that’s an expensive lesson to learn. And I, you know, I can relate to it. Unfortunately, my situation wasn’t, the outcome was a bit different. And it sounds like you didn’t, did you have, you know, proper agreements in play, contracts, for example, or was it?

Mark: Did not have buy sell agreement, anything like that.

And again, that was codependence. I just didn’t. No, and didn’t think I needed to, right? So that was.

Mike: I know so many successful business people who have stories just like that. And I have my own similar story. It’s just, it’s kind of ironic though, that, you know, I look at it and go, and I look back and see some key.

Mistakes that I made very similar, uh, kind of naive and just assuming the best kind of thing and not really looking at like what’s right in front of me and playing that out into the future and being like, okay, where is this likely to go? And really trying to quote unquote, do the right thing and make it work as opposed to eventually realizing like, Oh no, this is, this just needs to end.

Like this is not going to work. And you know, I’ve, I’ve seen it a number of times. But you learn the lesson and then you don’t repeat the mistake. That’s the key, right?

Mark: Well, and that’s part of why I wanted to write this book. It’s like, yeah, I had to get smacked down another five or six times. You know, I’ve had, you know, another huge business stolen from me by Blackwater, which is a billion dollar company.

You know, I entered into other agreements with people. I just ended up, I should never have trusted to begin with. And every one of these decisions that I made. To get into one of these deals or that, you know, to turn left instead of right, I can trace back to some sort of bias or reactionary conditioning that the way my mind was working then told me it was a good idea or wouldn’t take another action that was a better idea.

So yeah, one way to deal with that is just to learn from the school of hard knocks and that’s the traditional way. Another way is to have someone point this stuff out. And be like, watch out. Here’s the trap, right? Here’s the trap. If you don’t stare down, I want to explain what the title is all about in a second.

But if you don’t stare down your fear in this area, then you could fall in this trap and you’re going to lose trust, the trust of your teammate. If you don’t stare down your wolf in this area, then you’re going to lose respect and, you know, trust and respect. Are the glue that really hold a good team together and things start to fall apart quickly.

So the book is titled staring down the wolf, seven leadership commitments that forge elite teams. The commitments are, and the first three are really foundational is courage followed by trust and then respect. And so instead of those things just being things that may happen to you once in a while, I look at them as practices, like things that we cultivate as a leader and as a teammate.

To actively cultivate courageous behavior, actively cultivate trustworthiness so that you’re trusted at work and that trust bond never breaks down amongst the team. And to practice respectfulness so that you are respected, you respect others, you respect yourself. And those three are foundational. And then from there, I already talked about this, but we look at, we’re deeply committed to our What I call vertical growth, which means the being aspect of who we are, as opposed to just horizontal growth, which is just doing things better.

We want to do things better, but we want to do things better from a higher and higher stage of development or expanded sense of self and awareness. And that’s what vertical growth is. So staring down the wolf has you do that.

Mike: Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre workout and post workout supplements.

fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100 percent transparent, there are no proprietary blends, and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check Everything out just head over to legionathletics.

com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20 percent on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That’s essentially 10 percent cash back in rewards points.

So again, the URL is legionathletics. com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. And why, why do you say it might be obvious to you, but for people listening, why is that a key? I think that’s just a point that’s worth discussing a little bit more about.

Cause I totally agree, but like, what do you mean by that? Exactly.

Mark: All of my training, even in the seals was. Horizontal development, learning new skills, and even, you know, leadership training up to date, you know, falling down in business is like, Oh, that didn’t work. So let me develop, let me figure this out.

And you might grow a little bit, but if you don’t have a roadmap for where that growth is leading, it may not land. Right. And so people can get stuck. And so what I’ve learned through developmental psychology is that, you know, you can unstick yourself if you are aware of the developmental roadmaps. And so I offer a developmental roadmap in the first.

In the introduction, we call it the plateaus and I’ve been using it with my clients now for years. And our premise is that if you’re stuck at, let’s say a second stage protector, you know, and a second stage protector is a huge swath of our society. That’s like law enforcement, military bureaucrats. People are protecting deeply religious people.

Again, there’s nothing bad about any of that, but the mindset is that the stage of development is to protect status quo. The past is better than the future or my. Tribe, my religion, my country even is better than yours, right? And you can see that playing out in a lot of language, you know, around politics, you know, especially on the kind of the Republican conservative side, you see it played out in conversations in the office, right?

Some people are protectors while others are more in survival mode, which is the first plateau or others, you know, the entrepreneur, the business owner is always the third plateau or higher. That’s the achiever. The fourth plateau is the equalizer. That’s someone who really wants, you know, getting more and more world centric, has great capacity and care and concern, but can still have shadow that holds them back in the sense that they might demonize others or think anyone who’s not at their level is less than them.

And so that’s, they’re not really equal there. Everyone’s equal except for them, so that’s the shadow side of that. This is the fifth plateau that we want to get to. And the fifth plateau, Mike, is integrated, whole minded, world centric leader. And, you know, research shows that about 5 percent of humanity is there, so it’s not a very big group.

But my premise is that we, as leaders, need to get there. And so we need to get whatever’s holding us back from living at that… Fifth Plateau out of the way and the biggest thing that’s in a way is ourselves are biases in our shadows because we can’t take the perspective of the world centric leader and we haven’t trained our mind to access whole mind thinking, which is heart, mind, belly, mind, intuition.

And also opening up the brain. So is accessing whole mind and you’re making decisions from more of an awakened awareness perspective, as opposed to just, you know, mentally barbell shrugging your way through, you know, a decision process. So all of that is very doable.

Mike: And what is that perspective at the top?

Mark: The best way I can describe it is you have the perspective that everyone is interconnected, interrelated. All sentient beings have value. Mother earth is crucial to our. Survival both individually and as a species and so you’re going to make decisions that are like multi nuanced and so conscious capitalism is pointing toward this you make a decision that is good for is not going to do any harm to the environment is going to be either benefit or at least not do any harm to the global commons and other people and.

You’re thinking through the second, third order consequences of the decision, and you’re willing to make a very painful decision that might be unpopular because you know it’s the right thing to do. And so you step out of your ego and into something else.

Mike: Or a decision that’s against your self interest.

That’s another key in that one. I think it’s probably harder than something that it’s the Maybe is going to result in, let’s say a fair amount of backlash from other people, but maybe you don’t care about that because you know, it’s right. And you just kind of shrug off the criticisms. But when it comes down though, really, this is not in my, let’s say money.

Like this is not in my, this decision is not in my financial best interests, but it’s the right decision. And it’s not going to. Cause a catastrophe in my finance, you know, I mean, stuff like that. I mean, I totally agree with what you’re saying.

Mark: The fifth plateau also tends to be where people start to think, you know, that cliche where I’m a spiritual being having a human existence is supposed to be like, I’m just a human.

That’s here to stake my claim and carve out as much as I can for me and my family and leave a legacy. Yeah, yeah. Right. Consume and engulf everything. That’s right. And so that model isn’t faring too well, and it’s created a lot of imbalance, right? In our, like, income inequality is one way that it shows up in imbalance.

It’s showed up in imbalance in the earth. Everything I think will come back into balance. Like I’m not a, you know, I don’t have a negative view of. The future of humanity actually have a very positive view, but I think it’s just out of balance. So it’ll come back into balance. And I’d like to kind of guide that conversation with people who are willing to listen is like, well, here’s a way that it can come back into balance.

Let’s develop ourselves. And when I say vertically developed, but I mean developing your awareness, your consciousness, your, your perspectives, your, the internal stuff, as opposed to like the doing stuff, which is horizontal. It’s like, if I,

Mike: which comes from the internal, that’s right. Doing stuff,

working on that to the level of mastery will have a spillover effect of helping evolve the internal, but you can still get stuck if you don’t work on the shadow aspect, because the emotional piece will just lock you in.

You know, this is borne out by the fact that you could have like an enlightened master, you know, who fails because they, you know, has a great fall because, you know, he’s sleeping with his students or, you know, he just. Is a rager everyone’s, you know, just stops working for him. You know what I mean? And I’ve seen great examples of this where people are one dimensional in the way they develop and including in the spiritual world.

So the fifth plateau leader, male or female is willing to work on their shit, right? And as deeply cares about what we would call spiritual and I’m not talking about religion but spiritual matters or things that tend to be kind of put in that category and that is like the interconnectedness of all things, you know, believing that all sentient beings have a place and we’re not going to like, so that means like species degradation is a real problem, you know, they really care about other beings, right?

So. You know, that may play out in a way that you want to be more active, or at least you orient your company to do no harm. Or maybe there’s a nonprofit division you start that helps, you know, with climate research or that could play out in a whole bunch of ways that when you get to that fifth plateau, you and your team can’t sit around and do nothing anymore.

It’s just too important to you. So you take action and you serve, right? And so this idea can be summed up in like two statements, master yourself and your team so that you can serve humanity through your business or through your organization. That’s great.

And it’s a concept I totally agree with and I’m moving my company Legion, for example, like we are switching over to eco friendly recycled plastic.

We’re going to be working with, and you know, I actually, I like the idea of offering bags as well that people can like, so if someone wants to buy a plastic tub and then there can be refill bags. I’m not sure how many people want to take me up on it, but I’m curious to try it because that’s even more environmentally friendly.

Um, and I’m partnering up with, I mean, I do a charity week every month where I give a portion of, of sales to charities, mostly kids and stuff related to kids and veterans, which I’m going to keep in, but I also want to have a more. Long term partnership with the charity. And we have a few, we’ve narrowed it down to a few working to just clean up the environment.

And I think plastic in the ocean is a good place to start. It’s obviously a problem. And there are some organizations doing good things about it. And, uh, so I totally agree with what you’re saying and I’m putting my money where my mouth is because I could just not do those things and take some more money out of my business and buy some, consume some more trinkets, but I don’t do that because it’s a point of, I guess the word could just be responsibility.

I feel like I would feel bad if I did that every day, it would weigh on me a little bit and I would just know that I’m not doing what I should be doing. And given my outward positions on stuff related to morality and ethics, it would make me a hypocrite. And if there’s one type of person that people despise the most, it’s a hypocrite.

And that applies to, I think, I would despise myself. It would get there. If I were to live too hypocritically, eventually I would just hate myself. And so, no, I love it. I think that This is a discussion I’ve had with friends of mine, other people in business that look, even if you look back on the history of capitalism, turn of the century, robber baron age, you had a handful of people that controlled.

Inequality was even worse back then than it is now. Cause you had a lot of people who had literally nothing starving below subsistence level. You had Carnegie with the equivalent of 300 billion in today’s, but you had people literally. Dying in his steel mills because he just didn’t really bother to come up with new ways to keep them safe.

And so I remember a statistic at its peak, the percentage of people getting killed or maimed I think it was over the course of a year. Like if you worked in his steel mills for a year, the chances of one to three years, something like that, chances were about 50 percent that you were going to be maimed or just die.

Yeah. And that was at its worst. Right. Yeah, and he’s off in Scotland, though, with the equivalent of literally hundreds of billions of dollars, and he has Frick running his operation. It became so outrageous. It was an actual joke. And Rockefeller was better to his people, but he was a huge cocksucker to everyone else in business, and he Lied, cheated and stealed.

He did anything it took to win to the detriment probably of the system on the whole. And, but imagine if those people just weren’t such fuckheads. Imagine if they honestly imagine if they, I mean, they did. We can, we can honestly thank them for a lot of our modern society. I mean, they did industrialize the entire country.

So yeah, they could stand on that, but they didn’t have to do it with so much destruction. It could have been done so much more constructively. And ironically, if they would have done that, it would have changed the course of history, probably because Marx’s ideas probably wouldn’t have caught on as much as they, it would have been capitalism would have become almost a realized utopia.

And it’s an amazing things. And I’m 100 percent behind capitalism, raise more people out of poverty than at any point in history.

Mark: Uh, and it continues to do so. Absolutely. So if capitalism had co evolved with compassion, We would not have these problems, right?

Mike: And if you had people naturally like, you know, yeah, I guess Carnegie, I guess I don’t need another 10 billion.

I’m going to invest in my plants. So people are a bit safer. I’m not going to ask my people to work. I think, uh, I think for them to get one day off a week was like this big win. You know what I mean? Like I’m going to care. I’m going to a little bit more about these people and not just completely abuse them and treat them as wage slaves.

It’s just ironic when you look back on it in the context of what you’re saying.

Mark: Right. You know, not a lot has changed. I should say a lot has changed. But when it comes to education and development of the leader or develop, you know, personal development, you know, we had kind of the first wave started with Napoleon Hill.

And think and grow rich, right, which I’m sure most people listening have read that. And if you haven’t, you should because it’s where it all started. And that’s that kind of like everything that we’ve had up until the last few years was kind of riding on that, you know, Tony Robbins stuff and Jim Rohn’s and, and so, and it was really helpful.

There wasn’t much in that path that was going to unlock someone from a paradigmatic, you know, Stuck point at the second or third plateau or first plateau of survival mode, right? Someone’s in a survival mode situation, don’t really have time to even to read, think and grow rich, you know, or they just don’t have the energy right to really evolve.

And so that’s a big problem. There’s a lot of people in business who are. Even entrepreneurs are in survival mode and so development just kind of stops. And my point here is that there hasn’t been any real discussion and training around emotional and spiritual development or integration in the business world.

Like you’ve had some of that come from yoga and that, you know, the Tibetan Buddhist traditions and some other kind of maybe esoteric traditions. I got my start in Zen training and Zen training in those traditions, even though they Do address emotional development, emotional awareness. There’s not many skillful teachers who teach it.

So that’s left to the Western psychology and the entire paradigm around development in Western psychology is if you’re broken, if things fall apart. Then you go see a therapist and they, and they put you back together. They, you know, the psychologist will give you some Adderall or something like that.

And so it’s not considered to be a developmental path. It’s considered to be a path of temporary fixing you if something goes off the rail. And as you know, Mike, very, very few men. Even consider it to be legitimate. My dad used to just laugh at the idea. When I married a therapist, you know, he just used to razz her all the time.

It was kind of sad because, boy, could he have used some of that therapy? A lot of it, right? So my point here in this rant is, we didn’t have any model for emotional, spiritual, intuitive development. In leadership until now, and this book is an example of how this model plays out and unbeatable mind company were doing this vertical development covering what we call the five mountains of physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and Kokoro or hurt mind and these seven commitments, you know, that forge elite teams.

These are all things that are developed at a team level. Through not just by sitting around and doing role plays, but by through really deep vulnerable exposure to your teammates strengths and weaknesses and getting very uncomfortable in situations that are, you know, that you’re not used to and then having to basically drop all the masks and to begin to look at what are the fears that are holding you back, what are the reactionary shadow that’s causing your team to respond or react to you a certain way so that you can just Start to unstuck yourself and evolve to that fifth plateau kind of perspective and then just thrive with your team.

Mike: And I’m assuming that’s what the title is alluding to staring down the wolf and the wolf is, is the stuff you don’t want to look at.

Mark: Yeah. Funny story there. Like I originally, the title of the book was the subtitle seven commitments that forge elite teams, which, you know, it’s fairly vanilla, but it would have worked.

Mike: It’s not sexy enough. It’s not sexy. And we were actually, this reminds me of, I said, spoken. So Jordan Pearson, before he really blew up, how did I get this? I was in his Patrion. It was at a certain level. If you did that, you got a Skype chat with him, right? And so this was after his book had come out and he doesn’t offer this anymore.

By the time he did, and I had spoken to him, we ended up just talking about book stuff, actually, because he was just kind of curious. He’s like, Oh, someone who writes books. That’s interesting. So with his title, this makes me think of it because I was like, Jordan, if you’re going to do another book, dude, it needs to be clean your room.

Like, and then what you have now is you have something like that for the subtitle, but that’s it, man. You’re that’s your meme. That’s your whole identity. It’s like McRaven’s make your bed. So I think it’s a good call that you’re like, I need to add a little bit of edge and you tell you it’s something that grabs your attention.

Mark: Well, just like I was inside the bottle and not be able to read the label. It was my editor came and. Said, you know what, because I had sent him the copies of my other books so he could get a sense for kind of what I’d done in the past. So make sure there wasn’t any overlap. And my Unbeatable Mind book, my self published book, has a really cool picture on the cover of me staring at a wolf.

And, you know, it’s clear that in there, I make a clear… Fairly soon in the book that, you know, one of my themes is that in order to eradicate negative conditioning, you’ve got to starve it. You mean you got to stop focusing on it. It’s not the panacea, right? But it is the starting point. So we have a process, a mental process to basically, you know, zap or eliminate negative self talk.

negative emotional patterns, you know, and then refocus on positive. So you starve the fear wolf, which is the negative wolf. And the native American story says that the negative wolf, the fear wolf lives in your head. So it’s your mind’s negativity bias. And we are now known to have five times as many negative thoughts on a daily basis as we do positive.

So that’s the fear wolf. And then the courage wolf lives in your heart. And so courage actually means. Heart core is a French word that means heart. So the courage will make sense that the courage wolf is in your heart. And that means that like, if you’re making a heartfelt decision, that’s courageous. It takes courage.

Cause like we said earlier, fifth plateau leader, if you’re making a decision from the heart, sometimes it’s not what your mind wants you to do. And there could be a really good reason that your clever mind says to go a different way, but your heart says to go this way and you know, that’s the right way.

And so anyways. They said, hey, let’s call the book staring on the walls and I was like, that is really cool idea, but it did cause me to step back and be like, okay, if that’s the case, then I can’t just profile these seven commitments and and how, you know, how great I am at doing this myself. I actually have to.

Now talk about staring down the wolf, like how did I stare down my wolf of fear and what were the obstacles that I had to clear up in order for me personally to display efficacy with that commitment of say, courage, trust, respect, growth, you know, excellence, resiliency and alignment, which are the seven commitments.

So the book is kind of this yin yang. I have these stories of these great special ops leaders like McRaven and McChrystal and Olson who just really cool stories that most people don’t know much about, you know, demonstrating these qualities of courage, trust, commitment, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then I look at a story from me in the civilian world like the Coronado Brewing Company one and how I basically fell on my sword because I failed.

I wasn’t courageous, or I breached trust, or I lost respect, or, you know, someone lost respect in me, that kind of thing. So it became my most vulnerable book, you know, and I reveal things in here that take me out of the realm of, Hey, I’m the perfect, badass Navy SEAL commander turned entrepreneur turned author, and I do everything right.

And you can learn from me to like, you know, Oh, by the way, I’m actually Just as fucked up as you are, maybe the only difference is I’m willing to admit it and, and

Mike: work like hell to work and work to overcome it. Totally. Yeah. And I can appreciate that. You know, I, I understand it can be, it’s just uncomfortable.

It can be uncomfortable to, I mean, I, speaking for myself, I mean, I guess I don’t really think Think about, but if I were to sit down and really be and really go, okay, let’s lay it all out there. What are the things that, uh, just going to, just going to make me look bad, but, uh, you know, but there’s value in that.

Mark: There is value. People learn from it and they trust you more. I think, I mean, there might be some people who are turned off.

Mike: Sure. But if you’re doing a good job, at least as far as marketing goes, you turn some people on and you turn some people off. If you are just in the middle and people go in, whatever, then those ideas don’t catch on.

Mark: I. I believe that people are way smarter than we give them credit for and that people crave authenticity these days. They can see through your bullshit. And so if you lead with the bullshit, then you, you might win some people over, but you’re going to turn a lot of people

Mike: off. And that’s, that’s almost like a meta trend that we see happening.

I think so.

Mark: Yeah.

Mike: We see it certainly in politics. Quick question. So what is spirituality to you? I’m just curious. You say the word, but what does that mean to you? Like, what are your ideas?

Mark: You know, first I was a growing up. I didn’t really know what it meant. And I was brought up, you know, a Christian family, Episcopalian to be specific.

And so I learned all that kind of stuff around Jesus. And, and I, you know, I think Jesus is an incredible human or, you know, whatever. And I learned a lot and he, he’s done. That religion has brought a lot of goodness and as well as pain to the world, just like they all have. And so I kind of got turned off around religion in my late teens and early 20s.

But then when I found Zen training, even though it comes from Buddhism, it wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught in a religious context. It was basically. Uh, something we did to master our martial arts training, my martial arts training. So Zen and the martial arts, non sectarian, right, or non religious sectarian.

So when I began my Zen training, I also began a deep study of, you know, what you would call spirituality from the Zen, which then led me to yoga. Amazing, you know, gift to humanity is yoga, which is the science of the mind. It’s ported over to the United States as stretchy, bendy, sweaty stuff, but it’s not right.

If you read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, you get the sense for the profundity of the, you know, what the yogis were teaching and Buddhism all came out of yoga. And so then my journey led me more recently in the last few years to Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, Zajin traditions, the essence traditions. And what they all teach or what my insights have been is that we truly are, you know, we have this deep spiritual essence to us that is timeless and vast and beyond our egos, sense of personality, meaning that, you know, mark as.

Other people might identify me, Mark Navy Seal, author, entrepreneur. This spiritual essence of mine is beyond that. And that through a practice of introspection or what Socrates called self examination or self awareness, which is what all these internal practices are about, you can kind of reveal that aspects.

Of yourself to yourself. And then that becomes your primary focal point or seat of operation, your base of mental operations and everything up until that point, your base of operations is essentially your thinking mind. You think that you are what you’re thinking. You think that you are your stories. You think that you are your emotions, you think that you are this body, and the things that have happened, and the decisions you’ve made in your life.

Mike: And the, and the stuff you’ve consumed, the stuff you’ve acquired.

Mark: Right, and everything you’ve consumed, right, and you think that’s the only thing. To me, spirituality is… Or being a spiritual person is doing, you know, having a practice in it. You know, every individual human is going to have a different practice or type of practice.

For some, it’s just being in nature. For others, it might be like surfing that has led them here or at least open the door for them. And for me, it was Zen through my martial arts, which led me to a deep practice of meditation since 1985 that I continue to this day. And it’s, it changed everything. It changed, it literally, as we now know about meditation, it changed the structure of my brain.

It opened up my heart, which now we know is part of your brain system. It opened up my intuition. It allowed me to be way more eventually courageous and spontaneous and happy and even humorous and creative. And I get to develop the concentrative power. So like literally write two books at once and to build multimillion dollar businesses.

All that came in my opinion, partly I, yeah, I had a good brain, you know, and I have a decent IQ, but nothing extraordinary. You know what I mean? Most of that. That was all a result of the meditation. And it also led me to a deep feeling that there’s way more going on in this life than the identity of Mark Devine in this physical body, and that there was a deep purpose for me to be on this planet, and that a sense of urgency to align with that purpose.

And so that’s where all these books and this work has come from. It’s like, once I figured out that purpose or it was revealed to me, then I had a really intense sense of urgency to continue to improve myself, to master myself so that I could serve others along in alignment, I should say, with that purpose.

So that’s a long winded way of answering your question. But spirituality is sort of like that. It has nothing to do with religion at all.

Mike: Yeah. I was just curious. Have you looked into the research? I believe it’s a team. It’s a few people based out of UVA in reincarnation.

Mark: Yeah. I’ve read a lot of that stuff.

I don’t know if I’ve seen that but.

Mike: It started with Ian Stevenson and then I believe Jim Tucker heads up the team.

Mark: They pretty much proven reincarnation. I mean, it’s very hard to poke any holes in their research.

Mike: Oh, I mean, they have. Thousands. They have over 3000 cases documented all around the world.

And, and Stevenson’s work in particular, I mean he was published in the most prestigious journals. It was real science. It wasn’t Quackery as of, I don’t know, eight months ago when I was reading about it and watching videos and stuff. So it was over 3000 documented cases, mostly with children, but I believe it was half of them were solved.

So for people listening, wonder what, what that means. So I mean, there was a kid, let’s say in India who says that in their last life, They lived in Chicago and their name, this was their name, and this was their wife, and they had two kids, and this is how they died. The researchers go and find that person and check out the details, and yes, it checks out.

And so please tell me how literally a five year old kid in the, uh, hinterlands of India. Like, please explain right now, somebody could say, well, there are many potential explanations for that. And I would say, yeah, that’s true. There are, but if they don’t at least incorporate some of what you’re talking about, I just go, yeah, you know, if you try to stick strictly to genetics, go well, somehow, some way there’s.

The DNA is communicating cross continent. It pollinated over, you know what I mean? It starts to get a bit where you’re like, uh, yeah, maybe we should apply a little bit of a comms raising here. And maybe there is something more going on just to the point that you’re saying, whether you buy it as. I mean, it’s circumstantial evidence, obviously, and it doesn’t, Oh, it’s not open and shut case, but it’s strong circumstantial evidence that should at least give people pause.

And there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of very compelling stories like that. Again, it’s a team of people. Jim Tucker, I believe is the name. He’s written books. He started with Ian Stevenson. They have thousands of case studies been published in name of prestigious journal. They’ve been published.

I found that stuff fascinating.

Mark: I think it’s fascinating too. And I love that they’ve done that. Like it really. To validate such a.

Mike: I would like to see more research. Maybe I’ll look into funding some of it myself. I’m funding research on like how to gain more muscle and lose fat. Hey, it’s my money.

Mark: Do with it what you want.

But you know what? I’m an avid reader of yoga texts and you know, at least two deep meditation retreats a year with, you know, really, really Talented teachers, you know, who’ve been doing this for 40 or 50 years. And it’s just well known in the meditation community lexicon that one of the skills that can develop through an advanced meditative states.

is to be able to see your past lives. And so many yogis talk about this in their writings, being able to, even a Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the people that got me started in yoga. This is after he passed away, but I live right down the street from Yogananda self realization fellowship. And he had a, he was one of the first yogis to come to America and really introduced the spiritual yoga.

The idea that. Yoga is the philosophy of the mind, mental development. Anyways, he talks about, you know, his past lives in an autobiography. And there’s a biography written by one of his top students that talked about, you know, Yogananda talking or telling him about who he was in past lives and like…

William the Conqueror was one of them. It was fascinating and it turns out that William the Conqueror was a great poet and Yogananda was a great poet and actually William the Conqueror was not like this bad Conqueror dude. That was kind of a historical, you know, reinterpretation. He was actually quite a benevolent leader.

It’s fascinating. And then one of my favorite Prayers or, you know, writings, things that are written that have a spiritual quality to them, a high spiritual quality to it is the Saint Francis prayer and everyone attributes the Saint Francis prayer to Saint Francis, but Yogananda says that actually he wrote that when he was William the Conqueror and Saint Francis, you know, picked up on it, right?

It’s so fascinating. You know what I mean? I’m just going off on a tangent here, but like this stuff is not Like, I don’t question it at all anymore either. I didn’t question it well before the research came out, kind of in the western world. But I think it’s very helpful for people, because they can get a sense that maybe there is more that going on than just this, what’s right in front of me right here today, now.

Maybe I… Should be thinking about decisions that have, that impact the earth and impact other beings and have more, you know, maybe operate from more of a spiritual centric, emotionally mature centric way.

Mike: Here’s an idea. Let’s say reincarnation is a thing. So what if what you’re doing now is just what you come back to.

So if you just shit a little bit more in the world and then you just have to come back and live your own shit.

Mark: Yeah, which is essentially the law of karma, right? The law of cause and effect. You have an opportunity in this lifetime to burn off past karma, negative karma, and to not create future negative karma.

So why wouldn’t you take that opportunity, you know? If you knew you were going to come back.

Mike: It just makes for a better life too. Even if that’s not the case. And I understand I probably have a fair amount of Christians listening. I don’t mean this to be, I mean, this discussion to be offensive. So if that’s the case and we get to go on to that type of afterlife, well then still, when you’re here, of course you can have, I guess living that way would be, I think very much in accordance with the Bible anyway, but you’re also personally just going to have a better life.

Mark: Well, I think so. In early Christianity, before Nicene commissioned everything, they believed in reincarnation and karma. And these things were not uncommon, right? They just kind of got suppressed because they weren’t really beneficial for the church.

Mike: Yeah, I believe you can find those ideas in some of the apocryphal Gospels.

Like I believe, what is it? I think it’s St. Thomas. There you find some of those ideas there, but Hey, well, I think we can wrap this up again. I really appreciate you taking the time and for people who want to pick up this new book, it is staring down the wolf. Is it best just for anybody who’s willing to go to the extra mile?

Is it best for them to buy from a bookstore? If you’re really trying to push for the NYT or does it not matter? I don’t actually know that where that stands now.

Mark: You can’t buy it from a bookstore until March 2nd, but you can preorder, you can preorder online bookstore, right? Like bn. com order, right? Or Amazon, or you can preorder through our website, but the website is going to point you back to Amazon and then say, come back with a receipt if you want one of these special offers.

So that that’s how that would work.

Mike: Okay, good. Well, that’s the best place to go. And so it’s staring down the wolf. com and let’s see, it’s the 25th today. I’ll rush to get this up as soon as possible. So.

Mark: Appreciate that. Great conversation.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Anything else you want to let people know about where they can find the rest of your work?

Anything new and exciting you have coming up?

Mark: Yeah. So thanks for asking. My personal website is markdivine. com and there you can find all the social channels and um, also my podcast, which is nearing 20 million downloads is Mark Devine’s Unveiled Mind. Podcast and that’s available at iTunes and all the normal podcasting places.

And then if anyone listening was really intrigued with the training that we’re addressing, that vertical development team building, then unbeatable mind. com is the website for the corporate training. And we have a really cool certification program. We got close to 500 coaches in various stages of getting certified.

And our goal is to have 10, 000 certified coaches, you know, in the next 10 years out teaching and developing. People in this way that we talked about today.

Mike: That’s awesome. I love it. Well, thanks again for taking the time, Mark. It was a great discussion. I look forward to the next one.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks so much, Mike.

It’s been an honor. Appreciate it.

Mike: All right. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever? You are listening from, because those reviews, not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well.

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com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself, and I’m always. Looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.