#235 Rich Diviney – Navy SEAL Commander on the 25 Attributes of Optimal Performance

Big Ideas 

• Rich Diviney grew up wanting to be a navy pilot but after learning about the Navy SEAL teams after the first Gulf War, he knew that was what he wanted to do. Rich Diviney spent more than 20 years as a Navy SEAL Officer garnering multiple leadership positions including the Commanding Officer of a Navy SEAL Command.

“Because of the humility of the process, most guys come out of that process with an increased humility because you can be as badass as you want but when you start thinking about war and combats the bullet doesn’t care who you are” 

• Rich’s book, The Attributes, dives into 25 hidden attributes of optimal performance. Rich says that his true passion is decoding human behavior and how people do remarkable things. This passion stemmed from his personal experience, going through BUDS and seeing the all star people in his circle, wondering what qualities and traits got him there. 

“Real life is optimal performance. Optimal performance is how can I do the best I can in the moment with what I got, whatever that looks like” 

• Rich has continued to put himself out of his comfort zone since leaving the SEAL team and he believes that saying yes and embracing uncomfortability is what will allow us to grow as human beings. 

“How can we continuously seek our edges and explore our potential to the next edge and do it again and again. That’s how we evolve. That’s how we’ve gone from cave dwellers to space explorers” 

• The book, The Attributes, is not just for Navy SEAL team personality types. Rich wanted to make sure that he wrote a book that was long standing and could be applied to everyday life and situations. We can all learn more about our strengths and weaknesses and how we can develop these. 

“If you start thinking about attributes in terms of, this is what is driving my behavior, once I’m behaving, that might be a skill, but this is driving my behavior then you start to understand how someone shows up” 

3:31 Non-Negotiables 

From a personal side, Rich says his everyday non-negotiables are to hug and kiss his wife and kids. From a health side, Rich tries to do something that gets his pulse rate up and elevated and gets outside everyday. 

4:55 Being a Navy Seal with a Non-Competitive Mindset 

In Rich’s book, The Attributes, he explains how he realized his non-competitive nature when he was playing sports in high school. 

“There were aspects of the game and competition that I loved but when it came to winning or losing I wasn’t emotionally moved either way” 

This non-competitive nature was a worry for Rich as he entered into Navy Seal training but he soon realized that the training favors neither the competitive nor the non competitive person. Rich says the proof of this was in the two awards at the end of BUDS (basic underwater demolition/SEAL training): The Honorman which was an award that was for the highest performer and the Fire and the Gut award which was awarded to the person who displayed the most grit and resilience. 

“One of the things I really loved about the training course was it was so binary and so pure. It didn’t care who you were, it didn’t care where you came from, it didn’t care if you were an all star athlete or a valedictorian. All it did was take a bunch of dudes and say hey, we’re going to through you in this environment and if you have what it takes you have what it takes” 

9:13 Inspiration for His Book – The Attributes

Rich says that his true passion is decoding human behavior and how people do remarkable things. This passion stemmed from his personal experience, going through BUDS and seeing the all star people in his circle, wondering what qualities and traits got him there. 

“We all had this tendency to try and throw ourselves into environments where we were surrounded by people we thought were better than us so that it brought up our game” 

Rich decided he would write a book that helped deconstruct this behavior and was a long game book that readers could revisit often. 

“Sometimes the environment requires competitiveness so sometimes I have to force myself and say now is the time to compete” 

12:13 Doing the Remarkable 

Many few people attempt to join the Navy Seals let alone are very successful at it like Rich. Rich says that he grew up wanting to be a navy pilot but he learned about the Seal team after the first Gulf War. He loved that the Seals were water based and that they experienced so many different environments. 

“The saying in the teams is ‘the enemy will never be stupid enough or brave enough to follow you into the water so when it doubt go there.’ The audacity of making a hostile environment your safe place, I thought was pretty cool” 

Rich says you never think of yourself as remarkable in Seal training because of the intense difficulty, but afterwards is when it becomes remarkable to look back on. 

“Because of the humility of the process, most guys come out of that process with an increased humility because you can be as badass as you want but when you start thinking about war and combats the bullet doesn’t care who you are” 

16:35 Taking Training into His Own Hands

Prior to training, Rich had never run extensively on soft sand and the first time he did at Seal training he was ‘a mess’. Knowing that he couldn’t have this continue throughout training, Rich took the weekends that the trainees had off after wildly intense training during the week, and practiced running in the soft sand in his boots. 

“What I realized about myself in that process was that I was driven enough to do what I had to do, do what it took to make it through” 

Rich says that if the Seal trainee coming out of BUDS can say that they have a pon ponderous of any one thing, it’s confidence. 

19:09 System of Training 

Rich describes the training as being thrown into deep, challenging, uncertainty, and stress and being asked to make it through. He says that experiences like this are invaluable for any person to experience because you can translate it to any environment or obstacle. 

“That’s what this training does, is it allows you to in the deepest moments of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, calm yourself and begin working the problem.” 

Rich compares 2020 as ‘all of our own BUDS’, saying that the only difference between 2020 and Seal training was that no one volunteered to be there yet we all were forced to power through the uncertainty, stress, and challenges.

“Anybody who takes the time to look back and autopsy that, autopsy their behavior and where they did things great where they did things not so great, those are lessons that can be applied” 

23:03 Developing the Attributes 

Rich’s book, The Attributes, dives into 25 hidden attributes of optimal performance. Rich describes when he was in the Seal team and was running assessment selection in training for one of the specialized commands. In this command, they were taking experienced Spec operators and putting them through a 9 month process and whether or not they made it through would decide whether or not they were fit to serve at the unit. Rich says they were only getting a 50% attrition rate and they were at a loss of articulating why 50% of these extremely experienced men were not making it through the program. Rich took a further look at what skills and attributes were contributing to this problem. 

Rich describes the difference of skills and attributes as: 

• Skills are not inherent to our nature. We learn them, can be taught them, they are easy to measure, and they direct our behavior. 
• Attributes are inherent to our nature. We are all born with some levels of qualities and they inform, rather than direct, our behavior. 

“If you start thinking about attributes in terms of, this is what is driving my behavior, once I’m behaving, that might be a skill, but this is driving my behavior then you start to understand how someone shows up” 

Originally, Rich and his team came up with about 36 attributes that they were looking for which helped them to understand why some men weren’t making it through the program and identifying the dark horses in the program that weren’t obviously skilled but had the attributes. 

When writing the book, Rich wanted to write a book that was relatable and about the reader and so Rich looked beyond Seal training and narrowed down the attributes that are most important for everyday performance 

29:02 Uncovering Himself Through Writing 

Rich says that writing the book uncovered how the attributes applied to him, which he had never taken the time to consider since he was looking at how it applied to others in his job. 

“Anybody who is interested in writing, my first piece of advice is start writing because as soon as you start writing, you get what you’re thinking down on page and that clears your head and suddenly ideas pop up” 

30:51 Dormant Attributes 

Rich describes dormant attributes as attributes that you may have high levels of but you never knew you had because you’ve never been in an environment that reveals that attribute. 

“For anybody who is interested in their dormant attributes, any story in your life that you can think of or recall, that ends with the sentence ‘I never knew I had it in me’, is an example of a dormant attribute” 

35:33 Practice Reps 

Rich describes the ‘dance’ as a dynamic synchronization between skills and attributes. 

Using athletics as an example, Rich says: 

“A lot of people can probably throw a football the same way Tom Brady can throw a football but there’s a lot more to Tom Brady on that football field than throwing the football” 

First you have to make sure you have the skills then practicing being in that environment

37:32 Turning Fear into Courage

Rich says that fear is a requirement to survive the human experience. 

“Do not follow someone who is fearless because that means they’re not listening to the cues that are telling them to slow down or think twice or take a step in a different direction” 

Fear is the combination of anxiety plus uncertainty. Rich describes the difference neurological paths that deciding between fight or flight can cause. 

“This is a common misconception is that dopamine only comes at the completion of a goal, no, it comes every time we step into fear”

While we do get dopamine every time we step into our fear, sometimes stepping back and retreating is the correct answer for the situation. 

“The special operations community, the police community, the firefighting community, the first responder community, all these people who serve in stressful situations and under duress, all these people are people who have decidedly acted to step into their fear” 

43:23 Visualization 

Rich says he has always been fascinated with visualization and him and his team began to study it. When you are actively visualizing, putting yourself in the moment and imagining all of the senses that would take place, your brain doesn’t see the difference between that and reality. 

“The key is to try and do it in an area where you can actually get really in depth in it, you want to be able to hear, feel, smell, everything around it and begin to illicit those chemicals” 

Rich uses visualization for both training and relaxation. 

46:25 Deep Thinking 

Sean asks Rich how much time he spends on his deep thinking process and Rich says he really believes that introspection is one of the most necessary factors in self improvement. He talks about his memories of road tripping as a child without modern day technology and how those moments showed him how impactful the moments of deep thinking with no distractions are for him. 

“I think it’s really important for all of us to understand the power of introspection and to let ourselves be in our own heads because inundated with so many ways we can escape that it’s almost habitual that we don’t think and get into our heads” 

Rich says that he will consciously take time to think about topics that he is interested in from podcasts or other forms of entertainment. 

Running is another way that Rich takes time for himself to get in his head, saying that he has begun to bring a recording device with him because he comes up with so many ideas during these times. 

50:28 Questions that Clear Rich’s Mind 

In the book, Rich talks about how neurologically our brain is designed to answer questions and it is constantly asking questions about our environment to understand the environment. 

“If we consciously take charge of that and ask ourselves any question our forebrain is going to immediately come up with answers. The problem is most of us do this without thinking and we do it the wrong way” 

If we ask ourselves “Why am I so bad at this” our brain is going to come up with answers and so we have to reframe the question to be a valuable answer we can apply and work with. 

“The question I ask myself when I don’t know what to ask myself is, what’s the better question right now and I just let my brain answer that”

When the environment is stressful and challenging, Rich always asks himself the question, ‘what can I control right now’. 

“That’s how you step through challenge, uncertainty, and stress. You begin to ask yourself, what can I control, you move to that and then you ask it again and then you move to that and you ask it again” 

Rich explains how peak performance is unrealistic for the everyday person that isn’t preparing to ‘peak’ at a certain moment or event. 

“Real life is optimal performance. Optimal performance is how can I do the best I can in the moment with what I got, whatever that looks like” 

55:25 Don’t Beat Yourself Up 

Rich describes the intense Seal training saying that he was doing the best he could which was to not quit. 

“The key to not beating ourselves up is accepting that we’re human” 

Whatever feels best for you in whatever situation, whether it is progressing or resting, do what feels right for you and don’t beat yourself up. 

58:02 Recent Reads 

Rich says he tries to read books that are outside what he might be thinking about. 

Rich recently re-read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari which he says is a great reminder to continuously remember our unique engines as humans. 

“How can we continuously seek our edges and explore our potential to the next edge and do it again and again. That’s how we evolve. That’s how we’ve gone from cave dwellers to space explorers” 

1:01:18 Staying Uncomfortable 

Rich intentionally puts himself in chaotic situations now that he is out of the Navy Seals. He describes writing a book, giving speeches, and taking classes as some of the situations he has been put out of his comfort zone. 

“I’m constantly looking for those edges and I’m gauging it on where I am in life. I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon but what those edges are and how I can look at edges I can go and conquer that are proactive and empowering to my life right now, my family, and where I want to go in the future” 

1:05:31 The Attributes

Rich’s website for his book, The Attributes, has an assessment tool that you can use to learn which attributes are your strengths and weaknesses. 

1:07:03 Rich’s Interview Choice 

Carl Sagan