Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine

What this episode is about

Mark Divine, an elite leadership coach and former Navy SEAL commander, emphasizes the importance of mental toughness, discipline, and breath control in achieving optimal performance and resilience. Through his experience and programs, he aims to transform lives by advocating a leadership style that prioritizes empowerment and focus, encouraging individuals to confront challenges fearlessly and cultivate a warrior mindset.

Key takeaways

• The best leaders hire well and isolate themselves—think less, empower more.
• Mental toughness isn’t just grit; it’s mastering breath and presence in chaos.
• Success often requires a shift from inherited narratives to self-defined stories.
• True strength blends discipline with vulnerability; power isn't just physical.
• From Navy SEALs to CEOs: resilience training redefines leadership across all fields.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Tommy Mello (Host) · 8 min speaking
• Mark Divine (Guest) · 12 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Navy SEAL, Unbeatable Mind, NYU Stern Business, Coopers and Lyman
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Kakoro, Navy SEAL
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Unbeatable Mind, Kakoro
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Navy SEAL

Notable quotes from "Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine"

• Toughness, he embodies it. You're not willing to give it all, then do not continue. From Navy Seal commander to elite leadership coach, don't ever give up. Ever. He's the…

  about Navy SEAL · at 0:14

• And I wasn't really happy at the time either. And yet here I was in this great career, right? I was getting my MBA at NYU Stern Business. I was getting my CPA, working for Coopers and Lyman, which is now Pricewaters Cooper.

  about NYU Stern Business · at 2:50

• Hired me to mentor Navy Seal candidates right across the country who are coming into the Navy. Right. And so Sealit is a training system for physical mental toughness. And we used to have 30-day live-inmies.

  about Sealfit · at 4:32

• In your book title. Kakoro is I would put that practice more in the spiritual mountain. Kakoro means heart and mind merged into your actions. It also means whole mind. My real…

  about Kakoro · at 5:20

• That's Kakoro. In your other book, Unbeatable Mind, you talk about the four big skills for mental toughness. Can you walk us through those and why they're important? These skills are like your.

  about Unbeatable Mind · at 6:17

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Books & papers

• Unbeatable Mind — Book · Primary recommendation · 2 mentions · first at 0:25
  One of the guest's bestselling books, discussed as part of his teachings on mental toughness and leadership.

Companies & orgs

• Sealfit — Company · Business focus · 2 mentions
  Founded by the guest, it's a training system for physical and mental toughness, mentioned as part of his post-military career.
• Coopers and Lyman — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 2:57
  Mentioned as part of the guest's early career before his military service.
  Career, right? I was getting my MBA at NYU Stern Business. I was getting my CPA, working for Coopers and Lyman, which is now Pricewaters Cooper.
• Pricewaters Cooper — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 2:59
  Mentioned as the current name of the company the guest worked for before joining the Navy Seals.
  Career, right? I was getting my MBA at NYU Stern Business. I was getting my CPA, working for Coopers and Lyman, which is now Pricewaters Cooper.

Concepts & topics

• Navy SEAL — Concept · Core topic · 4 mentions · first at 0:18
  Central to the discussion about mental toughness and leadership, as the guest's background is as a Navy Seal commander.
• Kakoro — Concept · Framework · 3 mentions · first at 5:12
  A concept introduced by the guest, representing a holistic approach to living where heart and mind are merged into actions.

Places & events

• NYU Stern Business — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 2:54
  Mentioned as part of the guest's educational background before joining the Navy Seals.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 To me, uh, the best leader is one who, um, just gets out of the way, higher really well, then get out of the way. Grounded, focused, fearless. Our guest today doesn't just teach mental toughness, he embodies it. You're not willing to give it all, then do not continue. From Navy Seal commander to elite leadership coach, don't ever give up. Ever. He's the founder of Sealfitit, Unbeatable Mind, and the Veterans Integration Program. Transforming thousands of lives through the power of discipline, mindset, and breath control.

0:33 You know, every day I kick ass, go to bed, and then I do it again tomorrow. And you don't let anything else distract you. As the host of the Mark Divine Show, thanks so much for joining me today. He's interviewed some of the world's top thinkers, athletes, and military leaders. As a certified yoga and meditation teacher, he's proven that true strength isn't just about power. It's about presence. He's coached CEOs, military leaders, and athletes to master breath control and achieve maximum performance in their daily lives. Most of the time, Villa will breathe through your nose, which keeps you controlled.

1:05 Prepare yourself. This conversation will challenge the way you think about leadership, resilience, and the warrior mindset. Today, we're here in California with Mark Divine. I really appreciate the time today. Mark, talk to me a little bit about uh what you're doing these days and what got you started. When I went in the SEALs, I was 25 years old. The four years before that, I was in New York City getting my MBA in CPA. But the one thing that was really unique for me was I'd gotten into a martial art, right? And I had a a sensei or was actually the founder of this whole school was really into Zen meditation.

1:40 And so here at 21, I'm learning how to meditate, which is basically mental training, right? Um, we were using concentration training to develop focus and awareness like all this stuff. A lot of that work really is what led me to the SEAL teams because it basically changed the way my mind worked. Right. So you you got a master's degree and a CPA before entering before. Yeah. Yeah. And I had no interest in the military when I was in my early 20s. Like I I came up, you know, from the family where that was kind of taboo. Like you didn't you you went in the military if you couldn't figure anything else out in life, you know. But um sitting on the meditation bench developed this um this like mental clarity right and and so what happened for me and my experience was that I developed like this little spaciousness in my mind right whereas before meditation I was completely merged in my thoughts right I believed

2:32 my thoughts um I developed this kind of like opening this aperture this spaciousness and I could actually observe my thoughts metacognally or from a distance I grew up in a really kind of negative family, a lot of uh you know, a lot of programming that just wasn't serving me. And I wasn't really happy at the time either. And yet here I was in this great career, right? I was getting my MBA at NYU Stern Business. I was getting my CPA, working for Coopers and Lyman, which is now Pricewaters Cooper. Everything was green light go from the outside perspective, but inside I was like, "This isn't working for me." And I started to question the storyline that I was living. And what I saw, Tommy, was that that story wasn't my story. It was someone else's story. So anyways, fast forward, I find myself in SEAL training in 1989.

3:21 And um my Buds Glass, 185 kids, hardcore young men, and I was put together with a team of uh six others. We call it a boat crew. They're trying to create and sew the most intense chaos and inject fear into the team and into the um into the class. They want to see how you're going to react. And most people are reacting you know, not well, right? And so when this started happening, literally on the first day, everyone else was just reacting and they're usually reacting with the wrong actions, right? Things that were leading them, you know, down down the wrong path. It's going to take more time or they're just going to [ __ ] it up. So, I automatically just kind of assumed this coach role, right, while I was there. I was a little bit older.

4:07 Yeah. And uh we just started to see extraordinary results and I found how valuable the breath work was, the meditation, the visualization, the radical focusing and I started to build these things into a like a teachable system. Um, so through navy seal.com, I started to mentor other Navy Seal candidates and other special ops candidates and I began to teach them this stuff that led to a nationwide contract from the Navy where the Navy hired me to mentor Navy Seal candidates right across the country who are coming into the Navy. Right. And so Sealit is a is a training system for physical mental toughness. And we used to have 30-day live-inmies.

4:45 What kind of training? Anything you can imagine. So hardcore functional fitness. So we developed something called the seal fit operator workouts which combined you know like power lifts with Olympic lifts with functional fitness crossfit style workouts rocking running and uh we learned so much like it was an incredible growth spurt for me and out of that period I think we that those lasted maybe four or five years I ended up with three entire training programs three bestselling books right my Kakoro yoga 8 weeks of seal fit and unbeat mind tell us what the word kakor Koro means in your book title. Kakoro is um I would put that practice more in the uh spiritual mountain. Kakoro means heart and mind merged into your actions. It also means whole mind. My real passion is integrated development to bring whole mind or holistic you know approach um to living into the world. And so what is whole mind? What is kakoro? It's where

5:46 your body is your mind. like you don't live from here up. You have complete access to the intelligence of your heart, your gut, your biome, you know, your entire interic nervous system. Um, you're able to experience what I call simultaneous mind, which is where you have complete contextual broadbased perspective awareness while simultaneously are able to radically focus on what it is you're focusing on. That's Kakoro. In your other book, Unbeatable Mind, you talk about the four big skills for mental toughness. Can you walk us through those and why they're important? These skills are like your money. If you can master these as a daily practice, right, it'll bring you absolute clarity. So, the first one is is breath control, right? So, breath control is how you maintain a calm mind and a calm body, right? And so that non-reactionary experience that I was having in the seals, it's because of the

6:49 box breathing. Yep. Because you know, freaking grenade would go off and I'd be like inhale, exhale, no reaction, still calm, but I'm able to now respond instead of like freak out. The second skill, Tommy, is mental management. So where are you putting your mind and is it the right thing? Right? And and then the correlary to that is what's the quality of the thoughts of the thinking. Right? So in order to do that you have to be calm and you have to be able to create a little space and to be able to observe your thoughts. The third skill is um mental imagery. So we use visualization in a past orientation to clean up [ __ ] So, you know, heal from traumas or any anything could a shoulda, would right? We clean that [ __ ] up. The other visualization um is to develop a future view of your desired end state in life. The closer you get to your vision, the more capable you are. The fourth one is radical

7:54 focusing today. You have one thing you're going to do today. That's the most important thing. Yep. you your schedule might be still full, but there's one thing that you got to do that's going to move the dial. So, what do you think most people are lacking when it comes to mental toughness? They're lacking the mental skill to be able to manage and control their thoughts and so they let negative negative thinking just dominate and excessive chatter. So, they can't get quiet inside. And I think that's the key. And and the correlary to that is they can't manage their emotions.

8:29 Right? And so they let um you know fear and kind of negativity and doubt enter. Right? And mental toughness and emotional resiliency are really kind of two sides of the same coin. Mental toughness is like okay, you know, like we talked about Gogggins and Jaco, right? It's like extreme discipline, right? You can you can you can have a mind that's like a steel trap and just radically focused, but if you aren't emotionally mature, right, eventually you're going to burn out or eventually you're going to drop a grenade on your own project. And so just just by doing physical training, you're also training your mind. Yeah. You're also training your emotional awareness or you have the opportunity to to access and to understand your intuitional, you know, guidance. Um gratitude, right? That's training your positivity and your optimism. And then you begin your box breathing. Now you're training arousal

9:22 control. You're training concentration. You're training attention control. You're training mindfulness. At the end of your box breathing, you're doing your visualization. Over time, as you do this work, you're becoming much more aware of um emotional patterns that aren't serving you. Right? And that's where the like the emotional mountain, I said five mountains physical mental emotional intuitional, and spiritual. The emotional one is the one that's most challenging for individuals because we're dealing with like childhood trauma, you know, stuff like that. Why had you decided to do a PhD? I'm curious. I thought about either a second master's degree or a PhD, but I would wait until you want to free up some time, you know, when your time frees up. But I started mine when I was, you know, 58. Yeah. And um I wanted to change you know the p perception in my line of work is is important right how people perceive me

10:15 and so people always perceive me as the Navy Seal mental toughness leadership guy right and I was the OG to kind of create a business around that and um and now we have a lot of other SEALs who were involved in that stuff right and more coming in every day you know what I mean so and and frankly it's you know it's part of my past right I don't want to spend the rest of my life talking about Navy Seal [ __ ] Mhm. I'm very proud of it. I love the teams. Got a lot out of it. I helped a lot of guys, but I'm I'm really about developing people to be the best version of themselves.

10:52 So, and I want to get in also uh leadership development and corporate work. And we do a lot of work with corporations, but you know, to do it right, you need to have that validation of, you know, doctorate. Where do you even start to train a leader? Like what what what is the what's the path? Leadership development um we call it vertical is it's really about changing who you are. Mhm. Not what you know cuz like you know you said like you hire for character and uh you train train the skills. Same thing at every level of of development that you reach. You know the skills are going to be that you have are going to be more effective and you're going to have access to to new and more skills. those horizontal skills. So for leadership development um it's about evolving your sense of self. It's about evolving your character. It's about becoming more focused, more aware, uh increasing the aperture on your

11:44 perspective of what you include and what you respect. To me, uh the best leader is one who um just gets out of the way and learns to trust but of course verify, right? So leader will set the strategy and the vision and like you know what you've done with your company be an exceptional hireer right hire really well but then then get out of the way you go to work to grow and the work then becomes enjoyable you know I I try to get these my team to work on themselves as much as possible that's good then you know a lot of my the team has a high IQ right it's getting their EQ the way they view themselves. You know, realize how you're talking to people. How do you make people feel, right? But this new chapter that I'm going to, it's so hard for me because I'm no longer the one doing the work. And it's just it's it's a weird position to be in. But as I started to manifest who I would need to become, it

12:43 was not the guy doing the work. No, can't be. But you can build into the culture the um the mechanisms for that kind of growth. Yeah. You know what I mean? I think that you can you can process eyes the growth opportunity. Well, yeah, that that's the thing too is like uh I'm really focused right now on on it's like I sometimes I have to travel just to get out of their hair like you said. Get out of the way. Yeah. Like sometimes I've caught myself walking in their office unannounced and they're busy. They they working on stuff like you know the got a minute manager type stuff. Yeah. So I'm working on it.

13:20 You know, I talk a lot about winning together, like my team, like I my my second book was called Elevate. Build a business where everybody wins. Nice. You talk about winning together and uh and let the team be the hero. Talk to me a little bit about that. You're nobody without your team. Your team is the company, right? Without your team, no company. Um and so it goes back to kind of like egoic leadership thinking that you have to be the one that solves all the problems. Yep. That's a big mistake. Yeah. You have to be the one with all the great ideas and you have to be right all the time. And there's nothing that shuts a team down more than those things.

14:02 So to make the team a hero, I like to say the team is the new leader, right? You do things together that create incredible intimacy. Right? Now this is challenging for a lot of Americans and American executives, right? For instance, in my company, and we teach this to our client companies, we box breathe before we start any meeting together, right? So, I might do 10 rounds of box breathing. Everyone's sitting in silence, eyes closed, and now what you're doing is like everyone's kind of like creating this resonance, this field of like real real kind of deep connection. That's an example of a way to bring, you know, to create a community of practice with your team where everyone is doing some of similar things together that are really breaking down the barriers and and softening that ego grip. And then what happens is we get into this more contextual right brain uh like energetic field. We

14:56 develop these practices so that the team becomes the main thing and you're and you're showing up so you don't let your teammates down, right? you're doing the work, so you don't let your teammates down. We talked about, you know, exercise and um and reading, right? So, it'd be unfathomable to me like if my leadership team wasn't taking care of themselves physically, wasn't doing things to grow, right? Even in the SEAL teams, even after all that training, it takes a takes a platoon or a troop probably a good, you know, good six months, sometimes a year to really create this kind of this this energetic flow state where the team is just they don't even need to talk. They're just, you know, they're just firing an all ceiling. I love it. Um, six months to a year to master these techniques. Yeah.

15:46 And what what uh we talked about a lot of stuff. Yeah, we sure did. And I uh the one thing I like to finish off is give you the mic, let you tell the audience whatever. Maybe we didn't talk about something. So, I'll let you close us out. No, thanks, man. First of all, I appreciate you doing this. Yeah, it was great. Great to meet you. Yeah, fantastic. Um, talked a little bit about like the state of affairs in the world. Um, I think a lot of people do themselves a great disservice by wigging out, by stressing out about the future.

16:17 And we have this kind of this this idea that there is a world out there and there's not one world. There's 8 billion worlds. Everybody's everybody's world is different. Yeah. So stop fretting about the world out there and worry about your world. And the best way to start worrying about your world and taking control of your world is by is through a practice of learning how to win in your mind before you step out into that world. Everyone's dancing around trauma thinking that they don't have it right. They're they're they're bringing their child self, male adapted child self into their relationships. So get over yourself and get get some freaking emotional healing going. It's critical if you want to go to the next level. That's what's holding you back. If someone wants to reach out to you, you've got a podcast obviously. Uh where do they find the podcast? That's Mark Divine Show. Just search for it wherever podcasts are

17:20 found. Spotify, um Apple, and uh if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to do that? Uh my my website markdivine.com has a lot of information there and and you can reach out to me at info@markdevine.com directly. I'm on social media, of course. Just search for Mark Markivine. Divine. Yeah. And unbeatablemind.com is the training that we're talking about. We do work with executives and organizations and that's a good place if you want to tap into some of this training. Yeah, this was amazing. I really appreciate the time today, Mark.

17:52 And uh a great podcast. Thanks very much. Thank you. Hya. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Like always, we're going to close it out with the Tommy truth, which is a little slice of wisdom from me to you that can help guide you in whatever you're striving towards right now. When it comes to mental health, clarity, the mindset, working out, eating right, I didn't have any idea the effect it would have on success. When I started focusing on me and really doing the right things when it comes to my habits, whether that's cold plunge, getting in the sauna, working out harder, long walks, reflection, day by day, night by night, over and over, and staying committed to myself, it changed everything. I became a morning person. I started doing the hard things first. I started enjoying each and every day like it was a fun token. I started really to look at my life like I was made to be here. The

18:42 chance of me are 1 in400 trillion that I made to be on this earth. And I'm taking advantage of each and every day. And I feel like a bull. I can take on anything. And I'm ready. Whatever you throw at me. My mind is clear. I'm focused. And I'm ready to take on the world. And I'm very, very excited because this is the first time in my life I felt that I'm invincible. And that's it guys. We'll talk to you next week.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine"?

Tommy Mello (Host), Mark Divine (Guest).

What is "Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine" about?

Mark Divine, an elite leadership coach and former Navy SEAL commander, emphasizes the importance of mental toughness, discipline, and breath control in achieving optimal performance and resilience. Through his experience and programs, he aims to transform lives by advocating a leadership style that prioritizes empowerment and focus, encouraging individuals to confront challenges fearlessly and…

What is mentioned in this Tommy Mello episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Navy SEAL, Sealfit, Unbeatable Mind, Kakoro, NYU Stern Business, Coopers and Lyman. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Elite Mindset Mastery: 4 Skills with Leadership Coach Mark Divine"?

The episode runs 19 min; the transcript is about 3,464 words in 25 timestamped sections.

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