On today’s episode of Acta Non Verba Rich Diviney shares how his experience as a Navy SEALS Officer showed him the power of leaning into your inherent abilities in order to overcome Adversity. Listen in as Rich and I explore the definition of grit and how to use it as a tool for success, how to find your own level of optimal performance, and why the capacity to pivot is essential for facing uncertain situations.
Rich Diviney draws upon 20+ years of experience as a Navy SEAL Officer where he completed more than 13 overseas deployments – 11 of which were to Iraq and Afghanistan. Through his career, he has achieved multiple leadership positions – to include the Commanding Officer of a Navy SEAL Command.
Since retirement in early 2017, Rich has worked as a speaker, facilitator, and consultant with the Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute and Simon Sinek Inc.
You can learn more about Rich and his work here: https://theattributes.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:26
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words. Instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson.
00:56
my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Rich DeVinney is a retired Navy SEAL commander and expert on optimal performance, high performing teams and leadership. In a career spanning more than 20 years, he completed more than 13 overseas deployments. Since his retirement in early 2017, he has worked as a speaker, facilitator and consultant. In January, 2021, his incredible book, The Attributes 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance was released. It’s revolutionizing.
01:24
how corporations, companies, and teams are looking at performance and leadership in the real world. If you haven’t heard him, you can listen to him here, obviously, but check him out on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Ed Myled’s incredible podcast, and Rich Roll to name a few. To learn more specifically about Rich and his incredible work, go to theattributes.com to check out his free attributes assessment tool that measures the essential components of grid, mental acuity, and drive. Rich, thank you so much for being here. I should have just hit record when we first started because we had some gold already.
01:53
but thank you so much for your time. You’re a very popular man. A lot of people are trying to get ahold of you. So thank you for giving us your attention for the next hour or so. Well, thank you, Marcus. I’m honored to be here and excited for our conversation. So thanks for having me. Your book, The Attributes, 25 Drivers of Optimal Performance are incredible. And there’s a lot of things on here that we can go into. And I wanna respect you by asking some unique questions if I can to the best of my ability. When you were growing up, you were a water rat.
02:20
Is there a philosophy or even a religion that impacted you at an early age that you really think may have actually contributed to some of the skills such as the attributes that you currently have? Oh man, what a great first question. I grew up as a Catholic kid going to Catholic school when I was an altar boy and what I would say is that that upbringing, while really nice, probably shaped me but not in the way people think.
02:47
It shaped me because it caused me to start asking questions about my environment and questions about life and questions about things that oftentimes the priests and nuns at my school did not have satisfactory answers for me about. And it didn’t make me feel any animosity towards the faith or any religion whatsoever. But what it did do was highlight the fact that I think I am a natural.
03:16
skeptic in a good way. And I’m constantly asking the question, why, how, what, where, who. That was the first indication of my desire to really dive deep into elemental things. And I’m very fascinated with going down to the atomic level of things, because I think if you do that, you provide a clarity that can then be transferred and transposed into any facet of life. That was the impetus of my…
03:44
curiosity and open-mindedness as I move through my career. I love that idea because like you said, if we’re continually questioned, it’s not that we disrespect what we’re questioning, but if we understand why and we have this overarching truth, again, we can put that anywhere. Guru and Anasanto, Bruce Lee’s protege says that if I teach you one punch, you learn one punch. But if I teach you a concept, I teach you a thousand punches. And then like you said, now you can frame that in any capacity, whether it be grit, whether it be leadership, what have you, and it serves you in any arena that you enter. Yeah, well, and it’s funny because a lot of the
04:14
criticism I’ve read and heard about education is that oftentimes education is focused on teaching people what to think versus how to think and I see it my boys are natural skeptics as well so it’s funny I my teenagers turn it on me right they ask me they ask me tough questions or why this or why that and I’m like what because I said so but I recognize because I said so is not good enough so I think as humans it really behooves us to start to ask more questions
04:42
not only of the world, but also of ourselves, because I think introspection is one of the most powerful processes one can have in self-discovery and development of wisdom and knowledge and education. And think about an idea and ask yourself how you feel about it, and then maybe place yourself inside perspectives and outside perspectives. Just introspection is huge, I believe. I agree, and it helps you straw man any theory that you have or any belief system that you may or may not want to adhere to.
05:11
Again, being aware of cognitive bias is the beginnings of not being victimized by it. It’s easy to be insulated, again, by the people, our circles, the things that we see, whether it be in the news, online, et cetera. What is a belief that you had, maybe even when you were in the SEALs, that now that you’ve been out may have turned out to be untrue in certain capacities for you? In the military, you are, I’m not going to say forced, you’re in a very known and conditioned environment.
05:41
inside of which you actually need to think a certain way. To do the military mission and the military role, you have to approach it with a very specific mindset that in some cases, not all, in some cases can feel quite myopic. Oh, by the way, I appreciated that about the military because I was able to, especially as I became more senior and was in there for a while, recognize it so that I might appreciate it.
06:06
But then in getting out, I also recognized the ability to open the aperture and the latitude that I had to open the aperture because sometimes you just don’t have that latitude based depending on what you’re doing. And so I think that’s a lot of what I’ve been able to learn and grow from and about since the military has been because of that. I’ve been able to proactively see life from a much different perspective. That’s been really fun and fascinating.
06:36
I was in the military as you know, but I was only in for three years. I never got to deploy because of my injury, but being in that environment, like you said, you don’t have the luxury of some of the capacities to open the aperture and see what else is out there. And in the book, you talk about the fact that you were able to sort of imitate a competitive nature when necessary or when you deemed it appropriate, yet your true nature you felt wasn’t competitive, which I think comes back to what you were saying before about this question of why. Yeah. Helping you see that if you’re competitive, you wouldn’t ask why.
07:05
And the SEAL teams specifically allowed for more of that non-competitiveness than maybe other parts of the military. And the SEAL teams, to have both is a very powerful dichotomy, right? Because you have certain guys who are very competitive and the competitive mind can immediately start to lay down rules, conditions, and boundaries inside of which one can say, this is how we win. Okay? That’s a very, very cool and powerful advantage. Okay? But then you have a guy like me who…
07:33
doesn’t like rules, doesn’t like conditions and ask the question, how can we do it differently? How can we go around? How can we bend this rule, do whatever? And that’s powerful too, because a mission, depending on what it is, it may require running straight up the line, and inside of which those rules and conditions apply, you have to kind of, it’s a win mentality. Or it might be like, no, no, the best thing is to think completely different about it, right? Differently about it and disrupt and come in in a way that no one ever thought.
07:59
And I think both polarities are really powerful and enjoyed by special operations teams. Not all businesses, not all military units get to have that. Sometimes the competitiveness, well, in sports, man, I mean, you’d better be competitive. I was never big in sports, right? And I recognize now why, because I didn’t really care if we won or lost, right? I enjoyed lacrosse, which I played because I love the stick work. I love the teamwork. I love the intricacy of the game. You know, whether or not we won or lost really didn’t move me very much. And that was an interesting.
08:29
revelation, but you can see the advantages and disadvantages of the competitive versus non-competitive mind. And I also believe when I was in, you would have like a young guy, a PT stud that would come in at 20, run, rock, pull up, swim better than everybody else. But yet these other attributes, the resilience, he was used to that sort of adversity. But then if you put him in a situation where it’s like, here’s a handbook, we’re going to work on near ambushes. And now he’s like, well, this is difficult for me. And then they just kind of come apart at the seams. So
08:57
This is why it’s so important to have that. And you even mentioned kind of like what you were leading to, that dynamic subordination where it’s important to have the capacity, especially in today’s business. If you have a CEO and he’s like, this is how it is, or a CEO and a COO or C-suite executives, and they’re just kind of disseminating information, but yet they’re not able to hear what’s going on in the frontline. They don’t know what’s going on at the ground level with that client or with that customer. It’s impossible for them to actually really.
09:23
not only know what’s truly going on, but then maybe even suspend that disbelief and say, how do we do this differently? How do we adequate our current business model to revolutionize and disrupt what’s going on in the industry? Yeah, athletics and sports, there’s so many advantages to athletics and sports, I think growing up and being a part of them. And I believe that most of them, understanding win, lose, understanding competition, understand that not everybody gets a trophy are parts of those advantages.
09:49
But I believe a lot of the advantage of sports actually have very little to do with the skills that are executed on a field, right? It’s about those other things. The thing about athletics and being in shape and fitness overall, it’s actually only one facet of adversity, right? And it’s oftentimes pretty certain, known and conditioned. In other words, you understand it and it’s easily…
10:13
understood and manipulated and in some cases achieved. But you know, obviously I’m not saying it’s easy to get in super shape, but we found in the, in SEAL training was quite often the, the super athletes would show up who were, they could be division one athletes or whatever, or even Olympians show up and they quit. And the thought was because athletics is all about getting used to performing at peak, right? That’s the performance and you have to in athletics, you have to be able to set yourself up so that when you are conducting the job.
10:42
you are at peak. SEAL life is almost the opposite. You know, you hope you’re at peak, that’s the hope. But oftentimes you might be at zero or less than zero and you still have to perform. Certainly SEAL training takes you down to sub-zero and says what can you do here. So I think it’s important for people to understand the differences and what are some of the advantages that can be drawn from athletics, both in terms of understanding skills and mastering something.
11:08
but then also adversity and the differences in that as well. There’s certain and known adversity, and then there’s uncertain and unknown adversity. There’s a big difference in how we handle both. I love how you talk about that because when you’re talking about these attributes, grit is a part of that, but it’s not the only thing. And when you go to the attributes.com, you have that tool. And when I took that assessment, I seem to think that I’m moderately resistant.
11:35
But then one of the things that you put in there that really kind of turned the tables was this idea of adaptability. The ability, the capacity to pivot and see what’s going to happen when the unknown hits you. And then even when you get back to that baseline, now what happens when this other thing happens? Oh, and then when you put the other adversity on top of it, you’ve got these layers of it to where you have to have these things before you get to the battlefield or otherwise it’s gonna be hard to figure it out in the heat of it. Yeah, there’s a term in the military environment, which I’m sure you’re familiar with called VUCA.
12:03
It’s, and it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And the idea is that you design your training and your education, everything around being able to operate in VUCA environments. That, and that’s really specifically what special operators do, seals, green braids, or any of them. Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments are attribute centric environments. Because just like I say in the book, it’s difficult, if not impossible to apply a known skill.
12:31
to an unknown environment, okay, which is when we start leaning on our attributes. So I think the SEAL training in any type of environment that helps develop and tease out these attributes allow you to become better at those. I always kind of nicknamed SEALs. I felt like we were, our real job was to be masters of uncertainty because we had to basically develop all the tools on the attributes so that we could drop into anywhere, any environment and regardless of how confusing or uncertain it was, we just had to figure it out, start moving through. And I think SEAL training,
13:00
weeds the folks out who somehow don’t have a natural tendency to do that. Right. I don’t know how I got it because you can’t get through SEAL training unless you’re able to effectively manage all of this uncertainty and misery and all this stuff. And that just gets hyperdeveloped in a career. And then of course, it’s immensely valuable when you actually get into combat because that’s exactly what it is. It’s interesting too to me because there are situations and I was not at the…
13:27
level that you were in the military clearly, but when I was in infantry school, when they would give us training, sometimes it would smoke you. I would notice that there would be guys next to me, especially younger guys, because I was 38 when I got in. And the younger guys mentally would resist. They didn’t want to do it. They were pissed off. They were angry. They were tired. They were hungry. And that made it hard for them to do what was asked of them, whether it be burpees or running or a ruck. But for me, I just tried to let go of resistance and get myself directly to this drill instructor, this drill sergeant, this captain, whoever it was.
13:57
and do what they’re asking me to do. And that allowed that mental resilience to not only foster, but that resistance to go away. And that was the first step in being able to just keep going as opposed to dragging your feet and making it worse than what it really is, or making it bigger than what it really is. If you just take into consideration that this is just a physical activity, just go through it and you’re, you’re going to get through it if you don’t resist it. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And pretty much all military training, regardless of what level is really.
14:23
designed to tease out those attributes. A, the grid attributes, but also the mental acuity attributes. Because what you’re talking about is a mental acuity drill. It’s the ability to effectively compartmentalize task switch and understand, okay, in this moment, what is it that I have to actually worry about and focus on? That’s really key when you’re in deep challenge, stress and uncertainty is to ask yourself, okay, what in this moment can I control? All right? And then when you pick it, you move to it. Whatever that is, whatever that is.
14:52
It could be like a couple days. Hey, I’m just going to get to the next couple of days. It could be, I’m getting to the next meal. It could be, I’m just going to wait to the next 10 seconds. Okay, because that’s all I got. Or I’m going to take the next step because that’s all I got. It modulates based on the subjective perspective of the individual. But anybody who’s able to do that will find themselves able to better, more effectively walk through, step through uncertainty, challenge, and stress versus someone who is unable to do that. The coup de grace, kind of the crucible of SEAL training is hell weak.
15:23
BUDS, basic underwater demolition, SEAL training. That’s basic SEAL training where a sailor goes through six months and becomes a Navy SEAL. Week five of that is called Hell Week. Hell Week has existed since day one, since Draper Coughlin first put the first NCDUs through training. And you start on a Sunday afternoon, that’s when they kind of start you, they break you out of your tents and start screwing with you. And you go all the way till Friday, of the Friday afternoon of that week.
15:48
And throughout that whole time, throughout that whole six and a half, seven days, you only sleep for about two and a half hours for the whole time. And you’re constantly doing, you know, running with boats in your heads, you know, exercising with telephone poles, freezing, you’re cold, wet, tired, hungry, sandy, it sucks. You get most quitters during Hell Week. Well, there’s a truism that’s known in SEAL training during Hell Week, and that is if you think about Friday on Monday, you will quit.
16:11
And they’ve done exit interviews with guys who haven’t made it. And a lot of it, I haven’t seen a lot of that data, the guys who’ve done it, I’ve talked to here and there, but a lot of the commentary from guys who do quit are, you know, you hear things like, well, we were having this done to me and I started thinking about what we had to do next. Or I started thinking about like what was coming up tomorrow. I started thinking about, I had four more days of this, right. And I couldn’t take it. You tried to eat the whole elephant is what you did, you know? And so the idea is to chunk it down to pieces so that you might march through it. It’s easier said than done.
16:41
sometimes and some of us are a little bit more naturally able to do it than others, but it can be practiced. That’s the thing about it too. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. These attributes in an environment like that, is it possible to have an attribute that’s sort of like in its very early infancy? Can it come out and come to complete adulthood, so to speak, in the middle of a, say, hell week or does it take longer or does it just depend on the individual and the environment? I’m sure that it’s nature versus nurture in some capacities, but what would that look like?
17:09
I talk about what I call dormant attributes in the book. I think what you’re talking about would describe a dormant attribute. So just for everybody’s, just to make everybody feel okay, okay, all of us have all the attributes, right? We’re all born with all of them. Now the difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. Okay, so for example, if we take adaptability and 10 is high and one is low, I might be a level eight on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me without my outside my control, it’s fairly easy for me to just go with the flow to just roll with
17:39
Someone else might be a level three, unadaptably, which means when the environment changes outside their control, it’s not very easy for them to roll with it or go with the flow, okay? Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, okay? To judge it would be like judging our hair color. It’s ridiculous, it’s just how we show up. And all of us have a different set in terms of where we fall. But then we go into situations and environments, and we may in fact have what are called dormant attributes. In other words, we may not understand or know that we have a lot of one attribute because we’ve never been put into a situation that’s tested or teased that out.
18:08
So something like Hell Week could certainly tease out some attributes. It probably did for me. I’d have to really explore what it you know, which ones it did probably several because you’ll because Hell Week because SEAL training is so intense, you go through the experience and then suddenly you’re performing or you’re doing your acting and you’re like, Oh my gosh, you know, I didn’t know. So anybody who has a story in their lives that can end with the phrase, I didn’t know I had it in me is likely a story of someone’s dormant attribute coming to the force.
18:35
we all have certain levels. Certainly nature and nurture environment and situation can develop attributes. So if someone, for example, if a child, for example, is naturally low on adaptability, but they’re a military brat, which is a slang for saying they’re just they have parents who are in the military, which means they’re going to move around a lot. Okay. That child in the conduct of moving around five or 10 times during childhood and swapping schools and meeting new friends, may in fact likely develop adaptability because of that environment.
19:04
But the opposite might be true too. That child might struggle the whole time because they’re low on adaptability. So it really depends on what happens. It depends on the individual. Certainly environment can help though develop. And because we’re so plastic when we’re young, those experiences we have when we’re young do a lot to forge some of this stuff all the way up until we’re in our 20s. Yeah, I think that’s a great point. And there’s also something that you talk about that I love, which is this notion of optimal performance as opposed to.
19:32
peak performance and when I coach people and individuals and companies, it’s the same thing where they have to understand that you describe it as the peak. You may work your ass off to get to this point, but it’s very short-lived and there’s no other place to go but downhill once you’ve hit that peak. Optimal or I even say sometimes the best possible behavior at that time, appropriate behavior perhaps is the way to go with it when you’re in the middle of it. How can we find the place where optimal performance is for us at that time? And then the other part is…
20:01
This optimal performance is what allows it to be sustainable, allows us to continue on that path. Yeah, well, and I think the idea would be we can, optimal performance is for all the time, because optimal can look like peak. Optimal performance is doing the best I can in the moment, whatever the best looks like in the moment, okay? That may at times look like peak and it’s flow states and things are clicking and you or you might prepare. Like again, peak oftentimes has to be scheduled and prepared for and planned, right? The athlete does this all the time.
20:31
We can do this as someone in business. I’m going to give a presentation. I’m going to just plan and prepare so that I peak when I’m giving that presentation. Nothing wrong with that. It should be encouraged. Optimal allows us to explain all performance and it allows us to not only explain all performance, it allows us to start not feeling bad. In fact, not only not being bad, but patting ourselves on the back for those times when we’re at zero, we have almost nothing and all we got is taking one step.
20:56
during your injury as you’re going through your situation, you were in many, many moments. And I’ve talked to veterans who, you know, one of my best friends who I talk about in the book, who lost his legs, talk about, hey, like there were days I was living minute to minute. I mean, I was going minute by minute, right? There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s movement. That is optimal performance. That’s doing the best you can in the moment. And I think optimal performance allows us to start understanding performance holistically from a healthier, more responsible way. It allows us to start modulating, right? Because again, I don’t need to be
21:25
at my peak when I’m driving to the grocery store. So why I can I can actually modulate a little bit. So I’m saving up a little energy, it allows us to really begin to understand performance at a realistic level. And then I think more effectively plan our peaks and say, okay, here’s where I want to peak, here’s where I want to be. But most importantly, what optimal performance allows us to do is understand that no matter what happens, I will perform, okay, I will be able to do something, okay. That I think is the definition of true confidence is someone can say, hey,
21:54
no matter what happens, no matter how the situation might go or deteriorate, I know that I will work through it. It may not be pretty. Okay. It may be decidedly ugly, but a phrase in the teams is like we’ve found sometimes finished missions like, Oh my gosh, that was really pretty ugly. That you know, that was that did not look good. Okay, but we got it done. We got the mission done. So that’s perfectly okay. And we just have to recognize that. Did you speak a little bit to flow states? Because when people think optimal performance, they think flow states and you’re also talking about the necessity of practice and
22:23
perhaps even visualization, you talk about even floating as a form of detachment to create this capacity to have better visualization. Could you talk a little bit about those things? Flow states are really can be described as any state where someone feels like they’re completely in the zone, everything’s clicking. And so a couple of my good friends have written about this, Stephen Kotler is one of them, who wrote a great book called Rise of Superman, talking about flow states and this idea where you’re in an active state, but it’s teetering where you’re
22:53
experiencing something that is just hard enough that it’s giving you there’s a challenge and there’s focus but not too hard to be overwhelming. And it’s almost like time disappears and you’re able to perform in ways that are just really remarkable at the time. And Steven will talk about how the neurochemistry that’s created during flow states actually allows people to perform even better, almost superhuman in some cases, which is really cool. The problem with flow states are that they’re somewhat fleeting and they’re a little bit difficult to attain, right? So they’re not all the time.
23:22
So that’s one thing I think understanding what flow states are and understand that flow states most often are going to be achieved when there’s elements of skill involved that’s been mastered, right? Someone’s surfing a wave or even in a gunfight, there’s elements of those skills that you’re conducting that are already relegated to the unconscious mind. So that’s flow states. But in terms of the flow tanks and the stuff we were doing in terms of the mind, the idea is to attempt to create a working relationship with your brain.
23:51
the conscious ability we have to affect our physiology. Sometimes we feel like we’re just in react mode, right? Where the environment happens and we wreck. And oftentimes, if we let that be the case, that’s the case, right? Something’s gonna happen, it’s gonna come into our nervous system, we’re just gonna feel how we feel. But we can in fact start to affect our physiology more than we often perceive. And that goes to our sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system. It goes to the idea that through visualization, you can in fact generate
24:20
biochemistry and neurochemistry. I talk about visualizing it when my kids were young, they used to take naps on my chest. I’d be laying on the couch and they’d just take naps there. What a wonderful, loving, awesome experience. And I remember feeling that. And to this day, I can visualize that and begin to generate some of those same neurochemicals, neurobiology, because our brains, during active visualization, don’t necessarily know the difference between if it’s really happening or if it’s just happening in our brain, which means you’re affecting chemicals.
24:48
which means we can begin to more actively change our state from happy to sad, from sad to happy or whatever, from excited to angry or vice versa. But to understand that and understand that we can develop that relationship with our brain and our nervous system really begins to empower people in any performance realm. That was part one of my interview with Rich DeVinney, a retired Navy SEALs officer with over 20 years of experience. He’s also a speaker, facilitator, consultant.
25:17
and author of the groundbreaking book, The Attributes, 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. You can hear part two of the interview on the next episode of Octanon Verba, where Rich discusses how much human beings truly control and how that impacts our ability to overcome adversity and lead others. Rich and I also discuss the difference between being proactive and reactive, how to ask the right questions, what it means to practice resilience
25:48
and how to hold yourself accountable for the decisions that you make. You can find out more about Rich in his book at theattributes.com.
