Navy SEALs: Master self-talk and mental toughness | David Goggins & more | Big Think

In Hell Week and in SEAL training, they wanna make you panicked. They wanna put you in a situation of stress. They wanna question, "Why are you here?" They wanna put you in a dark spot that makes you question your own sanity. And they do that very well. And if you don't have the proper tools, you're gonna quit. You have to learn you have control over your own thoughts. If you can't control your own thoughts and you have negative thoughts in there, you have to make a negative a positive to get through everything in life.

One of the things that happens in our lives is that everybody, all the time, has a conversation that's happening in their head with themselves. And this is self-talk. We're always kind of talking to ourselves as we go through our lives. This self-talk is gonna happen in your life. You can't turn it off, but what you can do is you can turn it in your favor. What they taught us, my great master chief Navy SEAL, Will Gayle, taught me, and what Olympic athletes learn, what great elite performers learn, is that really good self-talk is often very short and very practical. So people say to themselves little things. They say, "Stay tough, good job, do it again, focus." And what you can do is, through a practice of actually honing your self-talk, you can actually build self-talk that helps you in those moments of great hardship and difficulty.

Hell Week is 130 hours of continuous training. In my first Hell Week, early on, I got injured. I got rolled back to day one, week one. And this time they said to me, "You're only gonna get one more chance to go through. No matter if you get injured, no matter what happens, only one more chance." In this period of time, I was developing this thing called my own personal cookie jar. Things that went through in my life that I overcame—positive things, negative things, whatever it was, I was still here. I was overcoming them. So when things got hard for me, I was able to go in my mental cookie jar and remember, "Hey, I survived what my dad did to me." "Hey, I survived what the kids at school did to me." My dialogue was proper. Even the hardest people in the world forget who they are when times get bad. That mental cookie jar is where you can go through and remind yourself, versus panicking and quitting. And usually, whatever's in front of you isn't as big as you make it out to be. We start to make these very small things enormous because we allow our minds to take control and go away from us. We have to regain control of our mind. And that's what the cookie jar is; it's gaining control of a situation that isn't that big. Most situations in life aren't that big. And if they are that big, usually we can find the strength to handle them just through having the right mental process.

And now, here's what's also important to keep in mind: self-talk only works if it's tied to real practice in the world. If you go to the big game and you just start talking yourself up, you're not gonna believe your own talk because you know that you haven't actually practiced and prepared. Self-talk without disciplined practice is just self-delusion. But if you're willing to practice hard and you're willing to push yourself, and at the same time, you're willing to build a mental toughness technique of having the right self-talk, it helps you in those moments of hardship to find a way through.

I can give you a class all day long about self-talk, visualization, eating one bite at a time, arousal control. But if you never put yourself in a situation to actually practice these things, you're never gonna grow. How you gain mental toughness, how you become the person you wanna be is by constantly facing the things that you don't wanna face.

I don't think you can get better unless you're willing to get uncomfortable. Having lived with someone that was a Navy SEAL, his name is David Goggins. The mindset was just fascinating. By the time that I invited David to come live with us, I just wasn't getting better. I was doing the same thing every day. Like so many of us, wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner...