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EP173: Marty Strong - F*ck It! And Why It Matters
57 Plays13 days ago
“F*ck it. It’s kind of an internal cue for me to shut all those voices down, take a deep breath, and just start figuring out and planning and doing what I have to do to succeed.”
Let’s get real: most men today are operating at about 30% of their potential, and that’s being generous. Emotional sovereignty—the ability to own your inner chaos and come out on top—isn’t just a luxury; it’s survival in a world that rewards mediocrity. This episode is the antidote for men who are tired of feeling like they’re living life with the training wheels still on.
Our guest today, Marty Strong, doesn’t just talk the talk—he’s walked it, ran it, and probably swam it under enemy fire. With 20 years in the Navy SEALs, Marty’s resume includes leading 36 combat missions, going from enlisted SEAL to officer, and then flipping the script into finance, counterterrorism, and corporate leadership. Oh, and he also writes books. Because, of course, he does.
Marty peels back the layers of what it takes to go from “meh” to mentally unbreakable. Hint: it’s not about looking tough; it’s about training your brain to tell your inner quitter to shut up and sit down. From cold water hell weeks to crushing corporate chaos, Marty lays out how SEAL-level grit translates to everyday life.
Whether you’re out to crush it in business, relationships, or just trying to survive a leg day, this episode will make you laugh, think, and maybe even cancel your Netflix binge for a real workout. Spoiler: emotional sovereignty is the ultimate flex.
• “Be Nimble: How the Creative Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battlefield and in Business”
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Nimble-Creative-Battlefield-Business/dp/1789048400
• “Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization”
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B09DRR9F5L/about
• “Be Different: How Navy SEALs and Entrepreneurs Bend, Break, or Ignore the Rules to Get Results!”
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Different-Entrepreneurs-Ignore-Results/dp/1803411333
You’re invited to come to a Sovereign Circle meeting to experience it for yourself. To learn more, go to https://www.sovereignman.ca/. While you’re there, check out the Battle Ready program and check out the store for Sovereign Man t-shirts, hats, and books.
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Transcript
Mastering Your Mindset
00:00:00
Speaker
What made the difference was not between your legs. It was really about your mental state and your control of your mental state and how you created self-determinism by addressing what was happening in your head. I call it the voices in your head. You're not good enough for this. You're not big enough, fast enough. You're not tough enough. You should just quit right now and the pain stops and you can go do something else. You know, take that voice and basically crush that conversation and just tell it to shut the hell up.
00:00:25
Speaker
you don't have to motivate seals. They're sitting there like a bunch of Ferrari, just point what you want them to do and then they'll compete with each other and get there. You're a man living in the modern world in a time when men and manhood are not what they once were. You live life on your own terms. You're self-sufficient. You think for yourself and you march to the beat of your own drum. When life knocks you down, you get back up because in your gut, you know that's what men do. You're a badass and a warrior. And on the days when you forget, we are here to remind you who you really are.
Revisiting Masculinity: A Podcast with Nicky Baloo
00:01:05
Speaker
Welcome to Sovereign Man Podcast, where we aim to make men masculine again. I'm your man, Nicky Baloo, and we have a special guest here for you today, Marty Strong. Hey, Marty, how are you? I'm doing good, Nicky. How are you doing? I'm doing great, man. I'm doing great. So Marty, you you've got a...
00:01:25
Speaker
very interesting background, and I know it because I've interviewed you a couple of times on my business podcast, but folks listening to this show might not know it. Why don't you walk us through your background?
Marty Strong's SEAL Journey
00:01:38
Speaker
So I i spent 20 years in the Navy SEALs, half as an enlisted SEAL and the other half as an officer, and then led 36 combat missions as an officer during that time frame. And then I I retired and went into managing money with the United Bank of Switzerland. and Then after 9-11, I went to work for various government organizations and agencies on counterterrorism. and Then I ended up in a corporate environment and eventually um
Transitioning to Civilian Leadership
00:02:11
Speaker
scored an equity position in a government contracting company. That was about six, seven years ago. since then i've
00:02:18
Speaker
helped acquire a healthcare care company, a second government contracting company. Now the two government contracting companies are gone. They were tactical training, anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism type training focused companies. And I just had the legacy care medical company left that I'm working on. Wow. That's a heck of a background that you just,
00:02:43
Speaker
delivered in a very powerful, succinct matter of fact way. So let's let's break it down a little bit. So it's unusual um for someone to start off in the military as an enlisted man and then to become an officer. Why don't you um tell us
SEAL Leadership Evolution
00:02:58
Speaker
that story? How did that end up happening? So and it kind of ebbs and flows. um There's a special rank in the military called warrant officer. And it's kind of this weird gray area between being a senior enlisted person like a command sergeant major or sergeant major or master chief in the Navy and an officer. And it ebbs and flows because usually during times of conflict, the United States gets caught with pants down because we're always we always you know not fighting the next war and I think we won the last war and that's it. So we shut down a lot of the recruiting. we we
00:03:37
Speaker
um trim back the forces. And then when something happens, like a Pearl Harbor or the Lusitania before, before World War I, or you you can go back and find there's always something that surprises us, you know, like the British invading, invading for the war of 1812. Hey, guess what? You know, the capital is on fire and we don't have an army. We don't have an avian. And that's just, I don't know why it's that way, but that's why the United States always starts out the wars. And when they do that,
00:04:04
Speaker
especially in modern times, they realize they don't have enough officers. They have to expand rapidly. And it's easy to find, you know, the foot soldiers and sailors because everybody patriotically runs in, signs up, goes to boot camp, and then, okay, what are you going to do with all Indians and no no leaders? So what they've done in the past in all the 20th century wars and and in this century,
00:04:29
Speaker
is they will go around and they will cherry pick and and advance senior enlisted people straight into becoming officers. They'll do battlefield promotions of enlisted people that show leadership in battle and promote a right into becoming officers. They will expand that that rank I told you about called warrant officer and convert a bunch of enlisted people into the warrant officer ranks, which then the warrant officer can take on a lot of the administrative and staff officer duties so that the shortage of officers isn't as bad.
00:05:03
Speaker
I'll give you an example. So SEALs in Vietnam, and they didn't have warrant officers and then towards the end of Vietnam, things were expanding and they didn't have enough officers, so they started allowing SEALs to be worn officers. And also that because they didn't have enough officers, they had special programs and SEALs went to college, paid for by the Navy for four years, called NSEP, and they came out and they became an officer, but they were still SEALs. So when i when I came in, it wasn't unusual, in ah and there's only two SEAL teams at the time, it wasn't unusual that about 25 to 30% of the officers in the team were all prior enlisted officers.
00:05:42
Speaker
well and And there was also warrant officers on top of that. Now, when the war starts to fade in your memory and the force structure start to get shrunk down by the by the powers that be, they start trimming back the number of warrant officers. They actually remove warrant officers completely for SEALs in the mid 80s. And then they brought them back again in the 90s because they didn't have enough officers again. so It's a long way to answer your question, but it's a, it's an observation that senior enlisted people have leadership capabilities and or management capabilities. And when you're short on officers, you got to whip them in there and have them fill the gap. So that's what I did. I i did half my two tour as a enlisted guy. I was, I was up for senior chief or E8 when I went to officer's candidate school, then finished out the last part of my 20 years as an officer.
00:06:38
Speaker
Wow. um How many men are in the SEALs right now? How big are the SEAL teams? Well, actual, what they would call an operator, somebody that would carry a gun in combat. The estimates are somewhere between 3,200 and 3,400. When I came in, there were only two SEAL teams and there were, I think, 120 per SEAL team. So it was 240 SEALs.
00:07:08
Speaker
But they also had three underwater demolition teams or frogman teams on each coast. so That's six teams. So all in, you're probably closer to 800. Then in 1983, Congress decided to shift all the seals along with the Air Force special ops into the new special operations command structure.
00:07:31
Speaker
and they renamed all the underwater demolition teams, SEAL teams. And that's where all the extra numbers came out all of a sudden. So up until 1983, there was only SEAL team one, SEAL team two, um and the other teams were underwater demolition teams. And all those underwater demolition team guys, they all went through the same screening process. They went through the same buds program and everything. And you know since 1983, there's been only been SEAL teams. Wow. When did you join the teams?
Marty Strong's Post-Military Career
00:08:00
Speaker
Um, I joined the Navy in 1975 and I went through buds at the end of 76 into, uh, the first or second month of 77. So it was, I went to jump army, jump school at Fort Benning and reported sometime in the spring to, uh, seal team two on the East coast. So you retired just a few years before 9 11. Correct. I retired in 1995.
00:08:29
Speaker
Wow.
00:08:32
Speaker
So when 9-11 happened,
00:08:37
Speaker
um I'm imagining that they reached out to folks like yourself to try and tap into your knowledge base. um Tell us a bit about that. They did. But not just not just the uniform services, all the intelligence agencies reached out to everybody. So I had 80% disability. so Nobody was going to grab me, have me come back, grab a gun and slide down a rope or, or do anything like that. So sure the, um, there were a lot of people that were in reserves that were pulled back in rapidly to, um, backfill all the staff positions and everything to free up the active duty officers so they could deploy overseas. And and that was done. They, um,
00:09:24
Speaker
They changed the way senior leaders were responsible for troops. So it used to be that when you were a senior lieutenant, 03, that was the last time you actually led SEALs in combat. When you moved up to the next rank, you were basically a staff guy. The Navy didn't have, the SEALs weren't big enough. The Navy didn't have any other jobs for SEAL officers. So they would just get out for the most part, or they would go into intelligence. Some guys became fighter pilots, come some guys became doctors, whatever, but for the most part, they got out.
00:09:54
Speaker
But when 9-11 happened, they, um, they decided to bundle all these different groups together into ah squadrons. And that justified having Lieutenant commanders and even commanders and even Navy captains, um, deploy overseas in charge of large scale operations. So that that didn't happen until I guess around 2000, probably 2002, 2003. So before 2003.
00:10:22
Speaker
Once you hit senior lieutenant, you're behind a desk. So um another reason why I ended up retiring when I did, I mean, all the fun was over. um So, yeah, so then 9-11 happened and the the various groups that were asking for people with my experience and other types of experience reached out and we a lot of people ended up working with the US government one way or the other.
00:10:50
Speaker
for the next couple of years, including me. I mean, I was in Baghdad for eight months. I was in Afghanistan for a short period of time, not in uniform. And I was also doing other things under contract to, I was the threat profile guy for the Athens Olympics, a 2004 counter-terrorism guy. So I profile what the bad guys would look like, how they were planning. um Although the emphasis at the time was talking about the the event itself, when I got there, I said, no, that's not that's not how bad guys plan. That's not how a good good bad buye bad guys plan. They back plan from the event. So you've got things happening right now, 15, 16 months before the Olympics start. And that can open the rise a little bit.
00:11:38
Speaker
And so I started laying out some scenarios and some storyboarding. I said, this is the back plan from here. And this is what I think they would be doing right now. They would be in fundraising, preliminary resource and team selection. Then they're going to have a training phase. And they're going to have to take these guys and put them someplace where they can train with weapons or demolitions without being too obvious. Then they're going to have to have transportation. It's not going to be clear if they're not going to jump on an airplane. So here are all the different ways they can get across the Eastern Mediterranean, blah, blah, blah. And then when they get here,
00:12:08
Speaker
um They're gonna need intelligence. So start looking at all the local goofball groups and activist groups and communist groups, which were there were a lot in Greece, and watch their bank accounts. Because if somebody wants the local guys, which are the best eyes on scene, to run around and start collecting data, taking pictures of venues, you know as things are being constructed, et cetera, um it's gonna be the local guys.
00:12:33
Speaker
And a lot of that stuff came, came true we were way, way in advance when they thought they'd have to focus on it. And they actually were able to, they were able to put surveillance teams on the surveillance guys because they knew the money came in and they said, okay, we're going to watch these, these 25 guys we've got, you know, in our, in our police wow list of suspects and see what they're paying attention to. So that's, you know, that's a ah different angle to, um, it's intelligence more than special operations. But when you put the two together,
00:13:04
Speaker
you know guys guys that did what I did can figure out what what bad guys are going to do and write up pretty much to the time of the event and then also how they're going to react to different stimuli.
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
Mental Resilience from SEAL Training
00:13:21
Speaker
you know It strikes me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, that when a man goes through something as challenging as SEAL selection training and makes it through that ah and then becomes a member of the SEAL teams and lead SEAL teams in the combat. There is something about that whole process that brings out the very best in you and the best of who you are. You get to perform
00:13:55
Speaker
at the highest level that you can actually perform. What it teaches you more than anything else is how to get all the potential in you and fully realize it. Because let's face it, most people, myself included,
00:14:11
Speaker
never get to operate at their very best. In fact, our society right now is raising most most men in particular to be pussies, you know, to not push themselves to be the the best that they can be. ah And I think that's part of what's wrong with our culture and our society right now. I'm just wondering your thoughts on that. You know, there's ah it's a really interesting subject that comes up all the time. It's kind of like one of those um in the in the military anyway, you know, is is leadership nature or nurture? Is the 45, as one 45 caliber round as good as two well-placed nine millimeter rounds? There's these like philosophical debates that you think Aristotle was in the room because people will come up with all these different reasons for it. And one of the ones is, are the guys coming into the military, you know, worse than the the ones that are that came in when I came in?
00:15:09
Speaker
And this has been going on, as much as i can I can determine, this has been going on since the beginning of time. Because the people that are evaluating them are already qualified, trained, and seasoned, and they and they they obviously have a perspective, right? But they forgot the perspective of when they walked in the door. yeah And I spent eight years as a, let excuse me, eight years after I went through SEAL training, I went back to be the lead enlisted guy in charge of the first phase of training, where Hell Week and all the basic selection happens.
00:15:37
Speaker
And I was stunned at what I was observing because I have almost no memory of it, what they were going through. And then just the duration of the pain and the agony. And you wake up every morning, it's going to be the same 10 hours of nonstop exercise. And then you wake up the next morning, it's going to be the same 10 hours of nonstop exercise. And watching people break down psychologically and see their eyes dull. And then the waves start coming out of people that quit.
00:16:05
Speaker
and And there's very few superheroes that you have people that have a spark in their eye or a little twinkle in their eye. And it's not the biggest guys, not the fastest guys. I mean, I was only 125 pounds and 17, 17 and eight months old or something like that. And I was intimidated. Everybody that looked like middle linebackers were all going to just kick ass, right? And that's not the way it turned out because what made the difference was between your ears, not between your legs.
00:16:36
Speaker
It was really about your mental state and your control of your mental state and how you created self-determinism by addressing what was happening in your head. I call it the voices in your head. They were telling you, you know, you're not good enough for this. You're not big enough, fast enough. You're not tough enough. You should just quit right now. And the pain stops and you can go do something else. And the group that a very small group that are able to have that, you know, take that voice and basically crush that conversation and just tell it to shut the hell up.
00:17:07
Speaker
Those are the guys that you want to be around. Those are the guys that you can take a look in their eyes at any stage in SEAL training and you go, they're not going to quit. They're not going anywhere. But the vast majority, because the attrition is 75%, all the way back to 1962 when they started the current course, the vast majority had that look in their eyes within the first 10 days. And the instructors, we we got so we could read their body language. We could see the look in their eyes. Victor Frankl talks about this in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, about the way human beings react to the stress of, you know, a German Nazi camp. And I mean, it's exactly, almost exactly the same kind of understanding that you come to as a business director. Excuse me. So I guess what I'm saying is you come in as a kid, you're not so macho John Wayne guy.
00:18:03
Speaker
You're not taught to be macho or John Wayne. You go through this crucible of external factors and and environmental input on your on your your body. Your body breaks down. Your mind wants to follow your body and say, okay, if my if I'm this tired and I'm just, I'm done. But you decide I'm not done. And that person that gets through the first, you know, eight, nine weeks of the of the course, that's the raw material that you turn into a Navy SEAL.
00:18:33
Speaker
It's a little bit different than people would think. The tough guys don't come in the door and make it all the way through to graduation as the same tough guys. The tough guys, here's another kind of side theory that was proven out. Some of the earliest people to quit were the guys who were the best athletes. Now, the the focus in everybody's mind, whether you're going to go through the special forces, you know, Greenberry Q course, you're going to go through moot brain boot camp, you're going to go to SEAL training, you got to practice pushups, you got to practice sit ups, you got to do all this.
00:19:02
Speaker
stuff to be physically fit. We get guys in there, both in my class and when I was an instructor watching it, there were absolute, incredibly gifted athletes, collegiate athletes. I mean, we had a guy was who was number three in the, in the Hawaiian, um, iron, um, Ironman, um, competition. Yes. The reason these guys were quitting eventually we figured out was because they'd never had any mental adversity.
00:19:33
Speaker
They were winning so much as they were growing up That they had never faced failure Yes, and in this case the failure was to get one foot to move in front of the other Because hey you want to do you can do the hundred push-ups and I can do 50 I'm gonna have you do thousand push-ups and I'm gonna get you the same mental state as the guy that crapped out at 300 Same thing with winter versus cold winter cold water versus summer warm water to get to the edge of hypothermia in the winter takes a shorter period of time. We do we do the same thing in the summer. We just take a little bit longer time to get to the edge of hypothermia. It's still the edge of hypothermia. It's it's part of the the quality of the course in that that's one of those points where somebody thinks they're losing control of their body and they decide they want to get they want to get out of it. They want to quit. So all these are mental things I'm talking to you about. It's a mindset, it's a mindset but it wasn't a mindset coming in the door. It's a mindset that you you forged under fire, so to speak.
00:20:32
Speaker
And then when you get a group of people that have that have come to that realization on their own, they're self-motivated. It's all self-initiated. You don't have to do any motive. You don't have to motivate sales. You know you don't have to ever give a round of speech ever for any reason. they're They're sitting there like a bunch of Ferraris just kind of waiting waiting for, just point what you want them to do and then they'll compete with each other and get there.
00:21:01
Speaker
These are these are like the best of the best Because like you say they're self-motivated and they they theyre they're there because they want to be there You don't need to like convince them to be there. They're there because they want to be there and they want to perform at their best But it also strikes me that that mental toughness Allows them to actually go to the very edge of their capabilities because most people quit way before they get to the very edge of their capabilities Right, you know um
00:21:32
Speaker
I'm working out ah with my son. My son is a is a fitness trainer at a gym. And um this gym is owned by the man who I hired a year and a half ago to help me drop 60 pounds. And now at 57, I've decided I'm gonna go do my IFPB pro card. At the age of 60, you're allowed to go for a pro card. so I'm gonna go for a pro card at 60. I mean, people younger than that can too. But I mean, for people my age range, I gotta hit certain metrics. He's training me. And you know, today we were doing chest and there was a ah few exercises we did where I felt completely done. Like my pecs were on fire. I was ready to drop. And he told me five more.
00:22:27
Speaker
I didn't think I could move it an inch, not one inch. You're my main. I'm like, youre you're fucking crazy, kid. This isn't gonna happen, right? But he looks at me and all seriousness is like, come on, old man.
00:22:40
Speaker
Push. So I pushed, I got the first one out, I go, how the hell did that happen? Okay, second one out, I got it. And the third one, I got it halfway up, and then he started to help me, and we got all the way to five more. I don't know how it happened, but when I think about it afterwards, what strikes me is that, you know, I think I'm mentally strong, but I'm really not that mentally strong. I wanna quit. when when When I get to the point of pain, I wanna quit.
00:23:09
Speaker
And it it it took my boy telling me, you can do five more to get me to do it.
Breaking Mental Barriers in Fitness
00:23:16
Speaker
Then when I'm on my own and I'm doing exercises, I noticed I'm going way past the point where I would normally wanna quit. I'm going five, six, seven, eight, 10, sometimes 12 reps past the point where I'd normally in my mind said I wanna quit. And it's interesting to me because I just think to myself,
00:23:36
Speaker
how much more could I do in other areas of my life that I'm just mentally checking out on? And it strikes me, Marty, that the greatest gift the SEAL programs gave you and your fellow SEALs is it made you men go to the very edge of your capabilities. And that's gotta have had spillover into every other area of your life. You as a businessman, you as a CEO, you as ah as a husband, et cetera, et cetera. And and that that's really the point I wanted to make. Yeah. And I wouldn't be too tough on yourself with the no reaching for the edge all the time physically because
00:24:17
Speaker
We're intelligent beings and we, there's a natural tendency to economize when you get towards the edge of the, get close to the edge. And it's like a little buffer zone. It's like you want to leave a little bit in the tank. It's exact opposite of leaving nothing in the tank. Your brain's telling you the smart thing to do here from a survival standpoint is to back it off a few notches and save a little bit, right? And you need sometimes an ah an external catalyst to push you that hard beyond that. um Well, the hard part about what you just said about transferring it to a lot of other things. And you do. and And I've written about this. I've spoken about this actually recently. That it was six years later when I was actually colder than I'd ever been in Hell Week. I was 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, top of the world in Norway on this mountainside. And I'd passed out from dehydration. The guys are putting IV in me. And IV is in me trying to get me rehydrated. And there were two other guys end having the same thing.
00:25:15
Speaker
because we were supposed to be up there for two days and a whiteout came, which basically the snow coming down and the wind kicks up the snow that's on the ground. So everything's just one big you know snowball that you're trying to go through. And we're cross catcher skiing with all this weight on us and everything. And two days became five days because nobody could get to us. And I know, I remember having this you know kind of come to Jesus thought process that was 10 times worse than i anything I went through in a week. It was six years later.
00:25:45
Speaker
But then I saw bigger waves, darker waves, trying to load land rubber boats in Greece in about four years after I was in, that were 10 times worse than California waves. So what I learned from that was it doesn't really teach you what the edge is. It teaches you that the edge is never where you think it is. You have to be prepared for the unknown. And when the moment comes again, which it always will, you're going to have to step up and do the same thing you did all the other times.
00:26:14
Speaker
and it may be a much bigger sacrifice or task or level of effort, but you're not inoculated to tough. You have to be tough when it's time to be tough. And sometimes it's ah it's a double capital letter is tough. You know, um you know it's it's like the fight rule. You know, you don't have to be the greatest fighter in the world, but there's always somebody in a bar that can probably kick your ass. And so if you walk around and you're not humble, you're you're just waiting for that moment. And then then it humbles you.
00:26:43
Speaker
I've seen Vietnam vets with you know two silver stars get the help beat out of them by a 19-year-old Marine because the Marine just got the jump on them. It's like, wow, you know those are superhero SEAL combat guys with Valor medals. Wrong venue. Wrong wrong competitive space. yeah They weren't thinking that way. right They were resting on their laurels and figuring nobody's going to want to kick my ass because i'm well they weren't in uniform. Nobody knew who they were. They didn't care. The world, the universe doesn't care. so Sometimes you can plan.
00:27:13
Speaker
The adversity, like it sounds like what you're doing, you're planning some adversity. I did the ah did the full MRF thing with a 20-pound vest for my 66th birthday this summer. I was trying to go for the 45-minute advanced athlete level on on CrossFit and I got to 48 minutes after training for eight eight weeks. And the training was 10 times worse than the actual event. Training for eight weeks because I wasn't doing weighted vest pull-ups at all when I decided to do this.
00:27:43
Speaker
And my wife was like, why are you doing this? Why did you decide this is nuts? And I thought, well, I just want to do something that was nuts. Because I work out every day, too. And I would just go in there and do the same old, same old, same old. And I wasn't sure if I was even going to be able to complete it the first time. I did a practice one, and I completed it. And I said, OK, now I got to see if I can get to that time. So now it doesn't seem like a big challenge. Now I'm thinking January 1st for New Year's, I'm going to see if I can get to the 45 minute or past that.
00:28:14
Speaker
because it's it's not a mystery. It's not a boogeyman anymore. But I'll tell you what, if if you don't if you don't take risks, if you don't risk your ego, if if you don't kind of stick it out there a little bit, you are what you are and you're not going to be much more. And it doesn't mean you're going to go out there and you're going to conquer everything that you're you're you're risking, but you're going to learn from it. You're going to get stronger from it every single time. Sometimes you can pick those those those moments and those objectives.
00:28:43
Speaker
Other times it just happens to you. and But you always have to have the mindset that you're ready. you're never you're never You're never there, you never have completely arrived. So you always have to be preparing and and be prepared for the moment. Yeah, i I appreciate what you're saying. it's It's true. And, you know, I don't want to be easy on myself.
00:29:12
Speaker
I've been too easy on myself all my life. If anything, I want to be way tougher on myself. It doesn't mean that I think you know there's something wrong with me or I'm bad or I'm wrong or oh my God, you're such a loser. I don't think like that. I think like ah i think I'm a winner, but I think I need to be hard on myself. I think being hard on myself is the surest path to being the best me and being easy on myself is the surest path to decay and decline.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I used to be a top fitness trainer. And when I got out of that field, I stopped paying as much attention to nutrition. I just stopped. I ate what I wanted when I wanted. Did I always eat bad food? No. But I ate a lot more of it. And over a 12-year period, I gained almost 60 pounds. And that's what happens when I start to go easy on myself, when I start to just relax, do whatever you want. But when I am focused and I have an outcome in mind,
00:30:11
Speaker
I accomplish things that make me feel good about myself. And I think that's important. That's one of the things that men are lacking in 2024 is we're way too easy on ourselves. you know it's It's crazy enough that society as a whole has said, oh, well, you know you know women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, which I think is a load of crap you know and things like that. And masculinity is toxic, which is another load of crap.
00:30:38
Speaker
I mean, all that's bad enough, but the worst of it all is when men don't push to be the best version of themselves. And for me, one of the reasons I've been excited to have this conversation with you, because our other conversations have been business conversations, they've been great.
00:30:53
Speaker
i wanted to to get a look inside the mind of ah of a man who's been a lazy seal. I wanna understand how you think and how you thought when you were going through the process of being a seal and how you you thought when you were helping other men become seals. And I gotta tell you, it's um it's very different than what I thought it would be. What you have to say to me was very different than what's popularly out there about what people think a seal is like. That's true.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, cartoons are are you know, one-dimensional Certain characters and that's it's an easy thing to create. It's much much more difficult I was talking to somebody one time about the movies about seals or any special ops guys and I said, well nobody would sit there and watch a movie that lasted You know three or four days Because you'd have to sit there and watch a movie that's three or four days long of people going through that misery without sleep You know, following other guys, picking them up, being miserable, sandy, cold, before you really got it. Before the before a little light bulb switched on and said, holy crap, yeah this is really bad. this It's showing some guy with a log going like this for three three and a half seconds in a clip. And saying these guys are tough. That's the one dimensional kind of look at it. But you know, all these things I was saying before about preparing yourself and being prepared and
00:32:21
Speaker
and and never resting on your laurels, never never deciding that you've arrived. That works for everything. It works for every walk of life. It's been a great way of looking at the world in business for me. I've had ups and downs. I've had lefts and rights. I've had, in some companies where they give me a challenge, that's it's already a failure. you know and It's like trying to bring this patient back to life. We've already declared it you know dead.
00:32:49
Speaker
and And my biggest fear was failure. Okay. They think I can fix this thing. What if I can't fix this thing? What if it's too hard to fix this thing? What if it's, you know, and then I go through the same kind of psychological challenge that everybody would go through. And then the little voices start kicking up in my head about saying, well, the reasons why I shouldn't be doing
Embracing the 'Fuck It' Mindset
00:33:08
Speaker
it right. You know, and then a little exit clauses and the disclaimers. Then I go, wait, usually what I say is fuck it. If any of that's true, then it doesn't matter, right?
00:33:19
Speaker
But if I just pretend it's not true and I just try to fix it, whatever happens happens. And that is the same kind of mindset I have every time I get faced with some kind of a challenge in life that has nothing to do with combat or military ah context. I'll just say, fuck it. And it's kind of an internal cue for me to shuttle shuttle those voices down, take a deep breath and just start figuring out and planning and doing what I have to do to succeed.
00:33:49
Speaker
it works for me That's that's a really great thing for us to land the plane on this conversation because Inside sovereign man the men's organization that are run We say fuck it when we want to take something on to and when when a man is about to join our community and he's wondering whether he should or or he shouldn't and We tell them to fuck it. Are you ready to fuck it? Because to us, that means are you ready to say yes, to throw your hat over the wall and figure out a way to make it work to be the best version of you. So I really like that. I think I'm going to call this episode Fuck It. It's a good name for the episode.
00:34:34
Speaker
ah Marty, you're a good man. i I enjoy our conversations. By the way, I got your books um and I'll be reading them soon. I'm excited to read them.
00:34:44
Speaker
and um I read your book pretty fast, man. I started reading and I didn't put it down, so I'm taking notes. Good. good that's excellent That's excellent. I'm glad.
00:34:59
Speaker
um i think
00:35:04
Speaker
I think it's important that people get to listen to conversations like this because it's the best way to learn. to hear things that you on your own would never get to figure out, never get to hear. I'm never gonna have an opportunity to try out to be a Navy SEAL. First of all, I'm a Canadian, I'm 57 years old, I'm way too old to try out for something like that. But I've always been fascinated by what it takes for a man to be able to challenge himself at that level. And what kind of man is able to challenge himself at that level
00:35:42
Speaker
and meet that challenge to become a seal because as you say, over 80% of the people who try out for the seals don't make it and the men that make it really have a certain quality to them that other men can learn from. Learning how to be mentally tough, how to go past
00:36:13
Speaker
your brain's negative chatter that wants to stop you from being the best you that you can be. In my opinion, that's an incredibly valuable skill. And maybe the men that make it through SEAL training always had that skill. But I say the SEAL teams hone that skill for you and brought it out of you in a wonderful and beautiful way. And I think that's fantastic.
00:36:38
Speaker
And I thank you for sharing that with me because that insight to me is probably the most exciting thing I've learned today. And I've learned a lot today. I've been on five podcasts today, so.
00:36:49
Speaker
That's good. And I was still your negative chatter line. I like that. I always use the voices in your head, but the negative chatter sounds pretty good, too. Good stuff. Blondie, thank you so much. And i'm I'm looking forward to having you back on once I read both your novels and finish your book.
00:37:06
Speaker
All right, man. Yeah, it's always been always been good to talk to you. Yeah, absolutely, brother. God bless you. Take good care. All right, you too. Bye-bye.
Join the Empowerment Movement
00:37:15
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Sovereign Man podcast. If you're ready to take charge of your life and become the man you've always wanted to be, we invite you to join the movement at sovereignman.ca.