Self-Discipline
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Navy SEAL Self-Discipline: How to Develop the Mindset, Mental Toughness and Self-Discipline of a U.S. Navy SEAL
By Dominic Mann
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Table of Contents
Navy SEAL Self-Discipline: How to Develop the Mindset, Mental Toughness and Self-Discipline of a U.S. Navy SEAL
Table of Contents
Introduction — Operate at the edge of what’s possible
Navy SEAL Principle #1: You are responsible for absolutely everything
Navy SEAL Principle #2: He who has a why can bear almost any how
Navy SEAL Principle #3: Create a mental trigger to get through the direst situations
Navy SEAL Principle #4: Systems, processes, and discipline equals freedom
Navy SEAL Principle #5: The 4 keys to mental toughness
Mental Toughness Pillar #1: Set Goals Like a Navy SEAL
Mental Toughness Pillar #2: Mentally Prepare Like a Navy SEAL
Mental Toughness Pillar #3: Master Your Self-Talk
Mental Toughness Pillar #4: Arousal Control
Navy SEAL Principle #6; The 3 components of resilience
Forge Strength through Purpose, Teamwork, and Challenge
Navy SEAL Principle #7: The 40% rule
The SEAL Cheat Sheet
Introduction
“Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
— Navy SEAL motto
“Do today what others won’t; do tomorrow what others can’t.”
— Mark Divine, retired Navy SEAL
***
OPERATE AT THE EDGE OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE
Navy SEALs operate at the edge of what’s possible.
They are constantly pushing their limits—both mental and physical.
Heck, they’ve even made a motto of it: “The only easy day was yesterday,” SEALs tell themselves (and SEAL instructors shout at trainees). It’s something SEALs live by.
But… it’s not the only thing they live by.
Navy SEALs have a culture of ruthless efficiency. Of lethal effectiveness. And—most importantly—of relentless self-discipline.
And, like all of the great warrior cultures of the past—from the Samurais to the Spartans—U.S. Navy SEALs reinforce these warrior values with an unspoken set of principles they live by.
Now, ask yourself:
What could you do with an unwavering level of self-discipline?
What could you do with the unrelenting, gritty self-discipline of a U.S. Navy SEAL?
How would your life look?
What could you achieve?
***
Navy SEAL training is the toughest on earth.
SEAL trainees go through a grueling six months of BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training before graduating as a Navy SEAL.
But… it’s not as simple as that.
Up to 80 percent quit before successfully graduating as a Navy SEAL.
Only the best of the best get through. The toughest of the tough. Only those with unimaginable mental toughness and sheer grit.
During the toughest, most difficult parts of SEAL training, instructors often shout:
“We’re not going to stop until we get at least one quitter.”
And they’re not kidding.
That leads us to only one question:
What are the traits of the toughest, deadliest Navy SEALs?
The ones that make it through the most grueling six months of training on earth?
That don’t quit?
That claw their way through the toughest challenge of their entire lives?
… How do they do it?
Well, you’re about to discover how.
To internalize the 7 principles Navy SEALs live by, read on.
To equip yourself with the techniques Navy SEALs use to not only endure but conquer the toughest situations imaginable, read on.
To apply the Navy SEAL ethos to your own life with spectacular results, read on.
It’s 10 percent physical strength…
… and 90 percent mental strength.
“It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around.”
― Orson Scott Card, Earth Awakens
Navy SEAL Principle #1: You are responsible for absolutely everything
THE PRINCIPLE
“There is no one else to blame.”
— Jocko Willink, former U.S. Navy SEAL
Everything is your fault. It sounds terribly harsh—heck, it’s probably not even true—but that is the foundational attitude of a Navy SEAL. They take absolute responsibility for everything. There’s no blaming. There’s no complaining.
This attitude is essential to dominating life and conquering your goals (and any obstacles you meet) like a Navy SEAL. The first step to working toward your goals is first accepting that the responsibility rests squarely on your shoulders—and yours alone.
In his book, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, former U.S. Navy SEAL Jocko Willink writes the following.
“On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.”
THE ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAY
In the past, the fact that you are responsible for (almost) everything in your life was obvious truth. But in today's sue-happy safe-space culture, shrugging off responsibility for something you did is the norm. You fell off a ladder? Let's sue the company that made it! You stubbed your toe? Let’s sue the tiler! No. That is a loser mindset.
The way of the Navy SEAL is to take absolute responsibility for everything. Even the things that are not their fault—because they know what they are responsible for is how they react to any given situation, and that's everything.
What you need to do—and what Navy SEALs do—is take ownership of absolutely everything.
Now, let's take a look at a few examples from my own life.
Just a couple of days ago, I was on a quick bus trip from a nearby university where I go to the gym each morning. Apparently, it was exam time because all I could hear were students complaining about their exams. The victim/loser mindset was through the roof. None of them were taking the slightest responsibility for what was clearly on them. You could hear them telling each other, "I didn't expect that question!!", "Me neither!", "This course sucks", "I know right!", "I have the most awful professor ever, it's so unfair", "Do you remember that question? What the hell, right?", "It's so hard", and so on.
You might be thinking, well, they're just university students, surely people grow out of that, right?
No. Not true in the slightest. For 99 percent of people, it continues for the rest of their life. "I have the worst boss ever!", "What the hell, I should have got that promotion!", "
My salary sucks, why won't they increase it?", "The government is so terrible, my pension is so small I can't afford anything", and so on.
You will never catch a Navy SEAL so much as thinking anything like that. They take complete responsibility for everything in their life. They know it's all on them—even the things that, at first, appear to be somebody (or something) else's fault.
If a Navy SEAL wants (or needs) to do something—whether it be on the battlefield or in their personal life—they just do it. They find a way, no matter how hard. They know that they and they alone are the one responsible for bringing about the desired outcome. You’ll hear no whining, complaining, excuses, or refusal to take responsibility.
You want to start eating good, hitting the gym, and getting into shape? Great! But that is 110 percent your responsibility. You can't blame anyone else but yourself if you fail to actualize that goal. It's not your gym's fault. It's not your family's fault (you wouldn't believe how many people say that because they have a family they can't do anything else, and that's their go-to excuse for everything). None of that. It is your responsibility.
As the great Earl Nightingale once said, "We are all self-made, but only the successful will admit it."
I used to know somebody that would tell me how "lucky" I was to be able to have the time to go to the gym. He would say that he was too busy studying for university to go to the gym and get in shape. Yet this guy would tag me in all these garbage Facebook posts, jokes, and memes. He spent hours a day on Facebook, not to mention all these YouTube videos he would send me and TV shows he said I should watch (I didn't). Yet he somehow had the audacity to complain about not having time to the gym.
As the title of the aforementioned book by Jocko Willink suggests, you need to take extreme ownership of your life. You must accept full responsibility for everything, whether you like it or not.
THE ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAY
You are responsible for absolutely everything. If you want something—whether it be to start a business, get in shape, climb the corporate ladder, or anything else—you must take complete ownership of your situation and develop (and act upon) a plan to win.
Navy SEAL Principle #2: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how
THE PRINCIPLE
"The vicious beauty of Hell Week is that you either survive or fail, you endure or you quit, you do—or you do not."
— Eric Greitens, former Navy SEAL
Training to become a Navy SEAL is tough. So tough, in fact, that only around 10–20 percent of the men who sign up end up graduating (i.e. officially become a Navy SEAL). 8–9 out of 10 give up. That leads to the question, what is it that the successful ones have in common? How do they manage to push through when others fail?
To find the answer, let's take a look at the toughest, most mentally and physically challenging part of SEAL training (i.e. BUD/S). This torturous period of training is affectionately known as "Hell Week".
The infamous Hell Week is a week-long period of continuous tests and drills. Everything from being chest-deep in the freezing cold Pacific Ocean at midnight, to running more than 200 miles, to doing physical training for more than 20 hours per day.
On top of all that, they only get between two to four hours of sleep, five at most—yes, you read that right. And that only comes near the end of the week. It's said that the men eat up to 7,000 calories a day and still lose weight.
Contemplating the traits of the kind of men that get through Hell Week, former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens writes:
“Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the "fist" of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others, to dedicate themselves to a higher purpose.” (Source: An Inside Look at the SEAL Sensibility from Wall Street Journal.)
They dedicate themselves to a higher purpose. As Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
Indeed, it is those that have a burning desire to be SEALs that get through Hell Week. In fact, BUD/S Instructors have observed that the only true predictor of those who will ultimately succeed is how bad they want it. Those who want it the most are the ones that persevere and graduate as a Navy SEALs. Some instructors even claim that you can see the burning desire in their eyes!
So what does this mean for you?
Let's take a look…
APPLICATION
“You have to want to win. You have to want to win so badly, losing is not even a possibility for you. If you feel that way, there is no obstacle the instructors can put in front of you that you won’t figure out how to get past.”
— Rorke Denver, former U.S. Navy SEAL commander
Define your life mission.
What is the ONE thing you want to achieve in life?
It could be something as simple as becoming the go-to/highest paid expert in your industry or starting a $10,000 a month online business. Or it could be as big as solving world hunger or conquering the globe. Either way, it needs to be something that ignites within you a burning desire. An obsession. Something that gets you out of bed of a morning and makes you not want to go to bed of an evening.
When it comes to Hell Week, it’s not the strongest or toughest men that get through. Nor is it the men with the biggest muscles or the most tattoos. Rather, it’s the men that have a burning desire to become a Navy SEAL. The men that want it more than anybody else. The men that want it so badly that they’re willing to claw their way through anything—no matter how painful or difficult—to achieve that goal.
In the aforementioned article by Eric Greitens, he also notes the type of men that do not make it through Hell Week. For example, “the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, [...] and the look-at-me former athletes who [...] have never been pushed beyond the envelope of their talent to the core of their character.”
Instead, Greitens observes that some of the men who initially “seemed impossibly weak”, “puked on runs”, “had trouble with pull-ups”, “were visibly afraid [...] to the point of shaking”, and, “were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean,” somehow made it while other big tough guys did not.
And, according to Greitens, the only difference between those that made it and those that did not was how bad they wanted it. It all comes down to that choice. Do you quit (which, in Hell Week, is done by ringing a big bell they have there for you), or do you persevere in the face of incomprehensible pain and hardship?
When you have an overarching "why"—a massive, awe-inspiring goal—doing the hard things necessary to achieve your dream become so much easier.
If your goal is to upend an entire industry (and assuming you have a burning desire to achieve that goal), suddenly, getting up at 3:00 A.M. to build your business and put in the work doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
And when it comes to becoming a Navy SEAL, well... there's not many goals that are more challenging and seemingly impossible.
In the book Fearless, Eric Blehm tells "the heroic story of one Navy SEAL's sacrifice in the hunt for Osama bin Laden". Adam Brown, the SEAL Team Six operator whose life is chronicled in the biography, faced immense obstacles. He was a college dropout, addicted to hard drugs, and eventually even landed in jail. By anyone's standards, he was in a terrible situation with seemingly no way out.
So what was it that turned his life around? (Hint: It's Navy SEAL Principle #2: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.)
He found an awe-inspiring mission of which he had a burning desire for. Not one of those tiny "S.M.A.R.T." goals. But a seemingly impossible goal. As Eric Blehm writes in Brown's biography, Fearless:
“Modest, conventional expecta
tions weren't enough to lure Adam Brown away from the power of drug addiction that ensnared him. Instead, the college dropout already in his mid-twenties found only the big, near-impossible dream of being a Navy SEAL captivating enough to consistently draw him to different choices.”
THE ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAY
“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.”
— Eric Thomas
Pursue a mission.
Make a massive, awe-inspiring goal—a “higher purpose”—that ignites within you an unquenchable burning desire.