How a Near-Death Accident Forced Navy SEAL Mark Divine to Rebuild His Life and Business

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.

Susan Sly 00:00
Hey there, your friend Susan here. And firstly, I'm sending you so much love. Thank you for being here. Today's episode is literally that—you get to sit as though you are in the most comfortable chair beside two people talking about near-death experiences, consciousness, what happens when we're out of alignment, and getting the smackdown—the spiritual smackdown that you're either prepared for or you're not.
And I can promise you that you are going to leave this episode—and I encourage you to listen all the way to the end. It's a bit longer than I normally go because the wisdom that comes from my longtime friend and three-time guest is profound.
And before we get into the show, one of the things that, for me, helps me stay in alignment is sleep. And when I'm not sleeping, I don't make the best decisions. You know, I don't get the workouts I want, I'm not the CEO I want to be, the mother I want to be, the human I want to be. I don't show up in the way that I need to—for all of you and for the world. So sleep is key, and I have tried many things to get better sleep.
And one thing that is working for me tremendously is a product called Harmonia from Isagenix. And if you go to susansly.com, Trusted Partners tab, scroll all the way down to the bottom and click that link—Harmonia is a natural sleep and menopause formula. Actually, it's for women 30+ who really struggle. And I'm having much deeper sleep, and it is transformative.
They also have a sleep spray that is for men and women, and it's all natural—just a couple sprays in the mouth about 30 minutes before bed, and it's incredible. And another formula they have is something called Ionix. And Ionix has adaptogens which help to really calm your body and calm your mind and prepare you for sleep.
So I love those three products. And again, they have transformed how I sleep and the quality of my sleep, and I encourage you to check them out.
If you are a woman who is navigating perimenopause or menopause and you are looking for support, you are looking to get questions answered—stop looking on TikTok and Instagram, because there are a lot of great resources, but there are a lot of resources that are not evidence-based.
And so, my new company—The Pause Technologies INC.—we have created a mobile app that has a 24/7 AI coach named Harmoni™ (she named herself), and it also has incredible meditations and fun challenges to help keep you centered and really improve your wellness. And one of the things women say is, “I just—whether it's two in the morning or it's two in the afternoon—I have the support I've been looking for.”
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Susan Sly 03:38
My guest today is a Navy SEAL, and he was a Navy SEAL team leader. He is a New York Times bestselling author. He is a CEO, and he is an incredible human being. He created SEALFit, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. He has been a transformational leader for people all over the world.
He and I were talking about that—you know, millions of people. And he is also someone who is so willing to be vulnerable and to take a look and say, "Hey, you know what? This is happening for me, not to me." And even though it's unbelievable, “I am going to grow and go higher from it.”
And so, my guest today is the one and only Mark Divine.

Voiceover 04:40
This is Raw and Real Entrepreneurship—the show that brings the no-nonsense truth of what is required to start, grow, and scale your business. I am your host, Susan Sly.

Susan Sly 04:54
Well, what is up, raw and real entrepreneurs? Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're having an amazing day.

Susan Sly 04:59
And the thing I have to say is—damn it—I didn’t hit record because I was catching up with an old friend, and we had so much to talk about. And then, about half an hour into our conversation, I'm like, "Oh, we better do a show."
And if you've been a longtime listener, you have heard Mark on the show before. But a lot has changed in Mark's life since last time he was here. And he's the only guest that I've had on three times. No one else has made that record.
And so, Mark, welcome back to the show, my friend.
Mark Divine 05:36
So great to see you again, Susan. And by the way, I have done that several times, where I've made it through an entire podcast and I'm like, "Oh crap, I forgot to record this."
It's one of the more embarrassing things—when you have to look at the guest and be like, "Well, thank you for your time. Great conversation... but we're gonna have to do it all over again."
Susan Sly 05:59
Yeah. And plus, because we know each other, we're having this great conversation. And it's like, okay, let's, let's share this with the world. Mark, you narrowly died two and a half months ago.
Mark Divine
Yes. That's the closest I've ever come.
Susan Sly 06:16
And considering Navy SEAL and everything else that you've done—deployments—let's jump in and talk about that, because that has been a catalyst for changing your whole business, your everything that's going on. So let's journey to my home country. I take no responsibility for this, but the way we know—it snows in Canada—but can you share with everyone what happened?
Mark Divine 06:53
Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, right. I made it through 20 years as a SEAL and didn't even break a bone. But it's not that I didn't stare death in the face several times. That parachute accident, mid-air collision—almost died in that—but I didn't get injured. I had—I almost got drowned, you know, locking out of a submarine, you know, where the escape hatch got stuck. But I didn't get injured. It was really interesting—just really close calls. I almost, you know, got shot several times where the bullet just kind of glanced by my ear or something like that.
Mark Divine 07:21
And all of those didn’t stop me in my tracks. I was just like, "Oh, that's part of the job. There’s danger." You know, I was fortunate to walk away.
But here I am, two and a half months ago, you know, not expecting really any danger. I had been invited to snowmobile, and I hadn’t—I didn’t really understand the nature of what’s happened to snowmobiling lately, right? I had this in my mind—you know, my dad's 1974 Ski-Doo, which went about 30 miles an hour and was always breaking down. And I also had in my mind this kind of nostalgic idea of like, you know, like hut skiing on snowmobiles, where you kind of like tour through the nature and go to a cool place and have a beer and a nice smile. That sounded fun.
So when this guy asked me for the fourth time—fourth year in a row—to come, and I had said, "No, no, no, no," but this time, I just kind of said yes. I scheduled a retreat up and had just finished my PhD. And so there I found myself up in Canada, and I’ll tell the short version of the story.
Mark Divine 08:24
I’m ripping along, you know, at 80—and then, you know, 80 miles an hour—like I'm barely hanging on. I'm thinking to myself, "Shit, I don't want to do this for four days." Like, I don't have a need for speed. I was a SEAL for 20 years. I've gotten all of that out of my system. So I was already kind of a little bit regretting being there.
And then we go into this wooded area, and we're like ripping around corners. Like, I can't keep up with this guy. And I'm getting a little nervous that I'm going to get lost. And so obviously, I was distracted. That's a big lesson right there. Like, if you're going to be doing something like that—this extreme danger—and in the SEALs, I learned that, like, don't—you’ve got to stay radically focused.
And I was getting distracted because I wasn't in control of my environment. Like, I hadn't trained for this. I didn't know this area. I hadn’t scouted it, right? I didn’t know this guy very well, you know? I didn’t know the routes.

Mark Divine 09:13
I was in a foreign country, and all these things started to distract me. Like, "Oh shit." And sure enough, I rounded the corner and there’s another snowmobile coming at me—pretty much almost like 80% in my lane. He had taken the turn wide, and so we were looking at a head-on collision. And he wasn’t moving—like he was deer in the headlights—probably going like, "Oh shit."
So me, being the Navy SEAL, I had to act. So I veered to the right trying to pass him, but there wasn't enough room. My sled caught a ditch, and next thing you know, I’m flying through the air—40 miles an hour—
Mark Divine 09:46
And I hit a tree.
Mark Divine 09:48
Now, I told you earlier—I was heading toward that tree headfirst. And had I hit my head, I certainly wouldn't be here right now.
Mark Divine 09:55
You know, I’d probably either, at a minimum, be brain damaged—or most likely...

Mark Divine 10:00
Had been killed. But all the years of training—martial arts training, starting when I was 21—all the SEAL training, all the way up until that very day, led me to immediately, like instantaneously, reposition my body. It wasn't even conscious. It just happened, like I did an Aikido tuck and roll. And so I ended up hitting the tree with my upper back and shoulder.

Mark Divine 10:26
And there I am just laying in the snow, and I'm looking up and thinking, "Holy crap, that was crazy."
Mark Divine 10:33
And—but I'm alive. And I know I'm alive because I don't think heaven looks like Canada.
Mark Divine 10:39
I'm pretty sure...
Susan Sly 10:41
Some Canadians might argue.
Mark Divine 10:42
They might argue with that, but I don't think it looks exactly like Canada. Let's put it that way.

Mark Divine 10:50
And I knew I wasn't concussed, and I could move my hands and fingers, and I wasn’t paralyzed. And so I just—like a wave of gratitude.
So that would be my first two lessons. One is, when you're doing high-speed shit, you’ve got to pay really close attention. You can't get distracted, right? Puts you at extreme risk. And number two is—

Mark Divine 11:13
If something does happen—

Mark Divine 11:16
Immediately look forward and be grateful for the things you have, right? So I was grateful that I had my conscience, my life, that I wasn't brain damaged, and that I wasn't paralyzed. And I knew that everything else was just roses, you know? I mean, everything else—it was fine. I'd be fine. That's pretty cool...

Mark Divine 11:38
To have that awareness. And I tried to get up, and I couldn't even move right. And that's when I realized—wow, I really did injure myself.

Susan Sly 11:46
Who came back for you? Because that other guy was way ahead.

Mark Divine
Yeah, he came back, finally.

Susan Sly
How long did you lay there?

Mark Divine 11:57
About 10 minutes, yeah.

Mark Divine 11:59
And I knew he would come back. I knew he wouldn't go. Like, he would stop at the next intersection and wait, and then when I didn't show up, he was like, "Oh..."

Mark Divine 12:09
And so, sure enough, he helped me up. And like—I literally—this is Mark, Navy SEAL—I tried to get back on my snowmobile to drive it, and I couldn't lift my arm up. My right arm was completely useless. And that was when I knew.
You know, I was naively thinking, "Well, maybe I dislocated my shoulder." That would have been nice. No.
So I had to ride in the back of his snowmobile out for 45 minutes in this terrible pain.

Mark Divine 12:39
And then we finally found someone who could—you know, they all speak French up there, as you know. They pride themselves on not speaking English. I don't speak French, and neither did my friend. And so we—we're trying to get people to call 911, you know—get it.
We finally got someone to dial 911 and understand we were in trouble. Ambulance took us to the hospital.

Mark Divine 12:59
It took nine hours for me to get seen. And so I'm pacing back and forth, you know. And I—from the outside—I looked fine, right? You would never know that I just smacked into a tree at 40 miles an hour.
I'm box breathing. I'm deploying every single skill I teach Navy SEAL trainees, you know? I'm box breathing, saying my positive affirmations, right? I'm visualizing healing already, you know? And I'm doing the pain management—like, I'm bypassing the pain.
Like, Navy SEALs are taught not just to manage pain, but to ignore it until it's necessary to pay attention to it again.
But there were a few times where I asked, "Hey, you know, can I get some pain meds? You know, I think I really—I really hurt myself."
They're like, "No, we can't give you anything until a doctor sees you." And I'm like, "Okay."
They finally gave me two Tylenol.
Anyway, so I go and finally get the X-ray and MRI.
Mark Divine 13:52
And I'm thinking, "Okay, it's gonna be another nine hours." I'm like, settling in for a long night—a long, painful night—and 15 minutes later, the doctor comes running out like, "Mark! Yo—shit! Get in here!"
He goes, "I didn’t know you were this badly hurt and damaged. You broke your scapula—18 pieces. You got eight broken ribs. You got punctured lungs. We need to get you in a hospital bed."
And I smiled. I said, "How about I have some pain meds?"

Mark Divine 14:21
He looked at a nurse and said, "Get him some morphine." I'm like, "Thank you, baby Jesus."

Susan Sly 14:29
I love the Talladega Nights reference.
I—the first time I heard about box breathing was from you. And for everyone listening—it doesn’t have to be a high-speed snowmobile chase. You're building a business, and you have to focus. But you're—you’re—you’re—you’re trying to focus, you're distracted. And then something happens. You got a letter from someone's attorney, or an employee exposes IP, or just some crap happens. You...

Mark Divine 15:00
Right? You mentioned box breathing. You mentioned affirmations. Can you share with everyone—give a lesson on box breathing to start—and then I want to know what affirmations does Mark Divine say to himself in a situation like that?
Yeah. So, as part of these four skills that—if you practice, if you build them into a daily practice—they're transformative. They allow you to access flow on demand and remain really alert and calm.
And the first one is box breathing. And there are variations of box breathing. So it's not one strict practice. It really is kind of a—

Mark Divine 15:45
Maybe kind of a bag—a grab bag—of practices that you deploy as needed.
But the core practice is to—you know, it's all nostril, diaphragmatic breathing. And the first real focus is arousal control, like you just addressed. Like, if you've got something stressful that happens—a trigger—or you've got something stressful coming up, like a speech, or you need to calm yourself down, then you're really looking to control the arousal response, which means to activate your parasympathetic "rest and digest" nervous system.

Mark Divine 16:16
So that's like an acute use. You use this in an acute situation—great—but you've got to practice it. And the benefit of practicing it every day is:
A) You’ve got the skill when you need it, but
B) It rewires your nervous system to bleed off all that extra stress that you pick up.
And a lot of us are stuck in a state of hyperarousal, which means you’ve literally atrophied your parasympathetic pathway.
And so, daily practice of box breathing—I recommend, you know, twice a day, 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening—has a profound impact on your nervous system, and a lot of other things too.
But that’s the start—you’ve got to get the nervous system back into balance.

Mark Divine 16:30
So you inhale deeply through your nostrils to a count of five. And when you do that, your belly relaxes. A lot of people have the opposite, where during the inhale, they tuck their belly in. It's the exact opposite.
You relax your belly and you allow the fullness of the breath to be experienced—drawing a lot more air in because you're breathing through your nose instead of through your mouth.
The average person breathes a lot through their mouth—about 17 times a minute. With box breathing, we’re breathing three times a minute.
Right? Five-second inhale, and you hold your breath for five seconds. Then five-second exhale—again through the nose—and hold your breath for five seconds.
Some people struggle with the exhale hold, and so you can truncate it. Like, it doesn't have to be five on the exhale.

Mark Divine 17:44
So what this does is—it massages your vagus nerve. It gets you a lot of oxygen. It retrains your muscles to draw in a lot of oxygen—a lot of chi, life force.
It actually stimulates your brain, right? Because you're breathing through the nostrils instead of your mouth. And it really calms yourself down.
It calms your body down. If your body’s calming, your brain is calming down. And that’s experienced subjectively as clarity—and a little bit of, you know, less of that monkey mind.
Mark Divine 18:13
So it's profound. We teach this to SEALs, and that is the practice. But then when they go into combat, right? We say, "Okay, just—you’re going to do something we call tactical breathing," where you just don't hold for five seconds. You just inhale and then slowly exhale—just a slight pause at the inhale and the exhale.
And that’s a five count in and then a five count out, roughly—which is six breaths per minute. Research has kind of confirmed that as the ideal breathing pattern—six breaths per minute, through your nose, deep diaphragmatic breathing. It's the ideal pattern for optimal health and longevity.
And you can actually—you can heal your body. You can actually get into your optimal weight. It's magic. It happens when you begin to do this, and it becomes your normal breathing pattern—

Mark Divine 19:02
Over time. That won't be something you have to think about. You literally train yourself so that during the day—every day—you're breathing naturally through your nose, deep, diaphragmatically. Five count in, five count out. And it literally changes your life.
That's that first skill.
And then, you know, the other skills really kind of tie together. The second one is—what you referred to—is like, how do you talk to yourself?

Mark Divine 19:27
Right? It's that, you know, automatic negative thoughts most people have. Negative conditioning. Negative programming. Our culture—media, TV, news cycle—it’s all negative.
And so that just gets kind of greased into you. And especially if you grow up with trauma or in negative families or—

Mark Divine 19:46
You know, it can be debilitating because it's largely hidden from view, right? I call that your "background of obviousness." It's not obvious to you, but it can be to everyone else around you, right? Because that's how—

Mark Divine 20:00
Your operating system works. So you've got to override that, right? Because whatever you give energy to will grow, as you know.
So by entertaining negative thinking—like, "Oh shit..." Well, there I am, laying on the floor of that forest, looking up through the trees—had I been beating myself up—

Mark Divine 20:20
And playing the victim and being pissed off in the snow—you know, at the guy who drove me off the trail—and wanting to chase him down and discover who he was, and, you know, I could have gone down an entire rabbit hole trying to figure out how to sue this guy. And it's all negative—

Mark Divine 20:35
And it would have been depleting my body of energy.
So you've got to do the exact opposite, right? You've got to intercept those negative thoughts, and you've got to replace them with positive affirmations. And you've got to stake your claim there until you make it—until you start to feel positive.
You know, the shortcut is through radical acceptance and forgiveness. But most people need to cultivate a positive mindset before they can even get there.
It’s kind of like Dr. Hawkins said: "You’ve got to go through courage to get to acceptance, and through acceptance to get to forgiveness."
So for me, you know, I've got some go-tos. One of my favorites was coined by Emile Coué, the French guy:
"Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better."
And I say, "Better and stronger."

Mark Divine 21:23
Yeah. Hey. So I like them to rhyme:
"Day by day, I’m getting better and stronger. Hoo-yah, hey. Hoo-yah, hey."
Hoo-yah is a Navy SEAL mantra for "We got this. Easy day."

Mark Divine 21:36
And then I always fall back on my Navy SEAL BUD/S mantra, which is:
"I'm feeling good. I'm looking good. Ought to be in Hollywood."
I don't actually want to be in Hollywood—and I know that—but it's got a nice ring to it. You know what I mean?
Mark Divine 21:52
And—

Mark Divine 21:54
I've got another one, which is just—and then this one, I said over and over and over again, you know, throughout this accident, every day:
"You’ve got this, Mark. Easy day. Piece of cake. Hoo-yah."
Right? So simple. So simple.
So whenever I'm in a hard workout, or I'm experiencing pain in my shoulder—because I've got this erector set in there trying to hold all these bones together—I talk to myself from the second-person perspective. This is powerful. There’s research around this too, right?
So, you know, I'm acting like my higher self talking to my ego. It's my ego that is experiencing the resistance, the pain, the not wanting to do it and wanting to quit, right? The traumas—that’s all ego conditioning.
And so I see myself in the witness. And I talk to myself:
"You got this, Mark."
Almost like a little brother, you know?
"You got this. Come on. Easy day."

Mark Divine 22:48
And sometimes I even go like, "We’ve got this," and then I start to feel like I’ve got a split personality—"but we’ve got this."

Mark Divine 22:55
How many are you?

Susan Sly 22:58
It's all—well, if you include your, you know, the parts of you that sometimes do rebel, right? You can—yeah—the shadow parts. Yeah, they’re all legitimate parts of the ego personality, for sure. Exactly.
And I love that you shared that because I was thinking as you were talking about the talking, you know, to yourself—the Claude Bristol, The Magic of Believing, that book from the ’30s—and he talks about that and the mirror activity.
And I started doing it, and it was amazing, because everything that I would say in the mirror every morning, eventually those things started happening.
And it almost—Mark—it almost freaks me out, to be very candid. Because, you know, sometimes we make things really hard. And as Joe Dispenza says:
"Everything you're experiencing right now is a manifestation of the thoughts that you have on repeat."
Right? And thinking about reflective world, right? Yeah, you receive back what you put out.

Susan Sly 24:02
So why did the accident—review, right?

Susan Sly 24:06
So why did the accident happen to you, then? Being the high-conscious person you are, why do you think it happened?

Mark Divine 24:13
Well—

Mark Divine 24:15
This is such an interesting thing, and I love to, you know, have a conversation about this—not just tell my part—because I don't really...

Mark Divine 24:23
I could easily veer into telling you more than I know and pretending that I know it. I don't.

Mark Divine 24:29
Yeah, being human is extraordinarily complex, right? You have your consciousness that you bring into this world. And I think our overarching purpose is to remove karmic—negative karmic—tendencies, to allow that to elevate, to ascend to higher levels.

Mark Divine 24:51
And at the same time, you know, we get born into these families that I believe are also chosen. We spiritually choose it.

Susan Sly
Mm-hmm.

Mark Divine 25:00
And so when I look at my life—so I’ve got karmic tendencies. You’ve got the general consciousness level, which, you know, you could probably map if you’re trained with muscle testing.
Say, "Okay, Mark came in as blank and a blank." And maybe he's, you know, either evolved or descended, depending upon his choices. Probably a toss-up for me.

Mark Divine 25:22
And then you have the conditioning, right? But it’s easy to gloss over the conditioning—

Mark Divine 25:32
The impact it has on your life is incredible. It’s persistent. It never goes away—

Mark Divine 25:42
And it can take lifetimes to unwind—you know, a particularly traumatic childhood.

Mark Divine 25:51
And at the same time—

Mark Divine 25:53
I believe the more challenging the childhood, then the higher, more spiritually evolved you are. Because that’s—you know, you're choosing deliberately to experience the hardship so that you can face those challenges in this life, right?
So anybody who is listening and thinking, "Well, you know, I don't know—why the hell—I must be a low-consciousness human to have chosen to be sexually assaulted or be abused..."
I say actually, it's probably the opposite, right? Because those are the most challenging human conditions—and the ripest opportunity for accelerating your development.
So I got born into a really challenging family situation. God bless them—they're great people, you know. And I adapted—like, I was magnificently adaptive—to the point where I thought I had the perfect family. But they were extremely abusive. A lot of—you know—a lot of...

Mark Divine 26:48
Boundary issues—

Mark Divine 26:50
Sexual boundary issues breached. And...

Mark Divine 26:54
You know what I mean? A lot of rage. And I think I was really angry, but since my dad was a rager, I had to suppress that. It wasn’t safe to be angry.
Mark Divine 27:04
And I ended up being really co-dependent, which is a natural—

Mark Divine 27:09
Dropping—or, you know, kind of outcome—of growing up in a shame-based, you know, environment.

Mark Divine 27:17
And so part of that co-dependence was hanging on to things—like I have claw marks hanging on to my business, the old form of my business, as you and I talked about—not wanting to let it go, not wanting to let people go.

Mark Divine 27:31
The other outcome of growing up in those environments is, you know, you really—you lack so much confidence or trust in yourself that you look to others to solve your problem. And so you become a magnet for narcissists.
And so I was a magnet for narcissists who would come in and tell me they’re going to solve all my problems with my business—and then steal the entire thing.

Mark Divine 27:52
So I ended up—

Mark Divine 27:56
Hanging on for so long to this business that I started back in 2006—actually started in 2001—

Mark Divine 28:03
But it’s been transformed several times. And yet, I knew it wasn’t serving me—especially since COVID and some other things that happened, and some of the narcissists who really destroyed it. And our revenue was down like 70%. And I’m like, just pouring money into it, paying everybody else and not myself.
Which is, you know, the entrepreneur’s dilemma—like, that’s why they say: Pay yourself first.

Mark Divine 28:27
And—

Mark Divine 28:29
Anyways—and just hanging on and not being willing to let it go.

Mark Divine 28:34
And then there were other things that I was hanging on to, right? Not just the business—but in relationships. I was making decisions that were not really nurturing for my family—my wife and family.
I basically had all these latent tendencies come up—and we talked about this—and I truly believe this: the more evolved you get—because I've done some intense spiritual evolutionary work in my life, and in many ways, I’ve evolved significantly.

Mark Divine 29:05
But um—you know, like Ken Wilber says:
Wake up. Grow up. Show up.
And then he's like, “Oops, I missed one—you’ve got to clean up too.”
You've got to clean up the past—the shadow—or else it'll keep on showing up. It'll show up in bigger and bigger and nastier ways. You know what I mean?
And even all the saints and sages—and even Jesus—talked about this, right? The farther along you get, the bigger the—

Mark Divine 29:34
Karmic and other tendencies—the more they're going to really kind of attack you. Those seven deadly sins, right? They show up in a big way to try to take you off track. It’s a final test, maybe.
So that was all happening, right? And I was ignoring it. And then I was like, wanting to run away.

Mark Divine 29:53
You know, a big part of me—the ego—was like, “Man, maybe I’ve done enough,” right? Susan, I've—

Mark Divine 30:00
I had this mission to help 100 million people find a path to integration and wholeness—to bring more love and light and compassion into the world. World-centric leaders.
And I've had people tell me, “You know, Mark, you have no idea the impact you've made through your books and your teachings and whatnot. You’ve probably hit 100 million.”
And I think my ego grabbed onto that and was like, “Well, shit, maybe I’m done.”
Mark Divine 30:22
I'm ready. And the reality was—underneath that—was: I don't know if I'm—

Mark Divine 30:29
Worthy. I don't—

Mark Divine 30:32
Know if I'm worthy. And I don't know if I can. I don't know how to do the next level of work to feel worthy—to step into that full fullness of who I need to be—

Mark Divine 30:43
To fulfill that earthly mission.

Mark Divine 30:46
I couldn't see it clearly. The—

Mark Divine 30:48
Vision was getting murky because I was getting stuck in the mud of business challenges and money and all that—you know, all that stuff.

Mark Divine 30:58
And so I was in a rut, so to speak.

Mark Divine 31:03
And as I was in this rut—and this rut has been going on for several years now—I find myself zooming along this trail—

Mark Divine 31:11
And guess what? I hit a rut.

Mark Divine 31:15
And the—

Mark Divine 31:18
Other thing that was kind of interesting is—I told Sandy, before—my wife—before I left, I said, "I really think I need a break. Like, I need to go on sabbatical. I need to slow down, clear the air, like, get some distance. Like, my life has gotten so—"

Mark Divine 31:37
The opposite of what I teach about: simplicity and decluttering. And, you know, it’s a "no" unless it’s a "hell yes." You know, all these things—I feel like I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off.
You talked about your schedule causing anxiety. And I'm doing podcasts every week. And I’m—you know, I put out a book, I just finished my PhD. I'm trying to run three businesses. And—and I'm trying to do it all in four hours a day because that’s all I allow myself because I prioritize my health so much, you know?
Yeah, so a lot of things were falling through the cracks. Or I was like—I don’t...
Anyways, that was part of it too. And I was like, "I think I need a break, Sandy."

Mark Divine 32:17
And so—I got a break.

Mark Divine 32:20
I got, like, 25 of them.

Mark Divine 32:24
That's not the way I wanted to have the break, but...
So that's a long-winded answer to your very simple question.
I think this happened because, actually, it was probably a very graceful way for the universe, higher power, guides, and guardians—whoever—

Mark Divine 32:43
To smack me down and wake me up and slow me down and get me to step up. Stop screwing around, right? In shame, and, you know, worry, and not trusting myself.

Mark Divine 32:59
Otherwise, I would have died, you know, and gone on to a different mission. But the fact that I didn’t—and I’m like, literally—I walk down the street, nobody would know—

Mark Divine 33:11
The internal damage. Nobody would know. And I will have a full recovery. It just takes about—it'll take about nine months total.

Mark Divine 33:19
So I feel like I got off easy.

Mark Divine 33:22
Right? It was like a slap in the face—but it was a body slap.

Mark Divine 33:28
And one of the biggest things that kept coming to me afterward—in the week afterward—was: "Pay attention, Mark."
And I didn’t mean, like, pay attention while on a snowmobile. I mean—pay attention to this. Don’t waste this opportunity. Anytime we have a smackdown—like, especially the big ones—it is rich, rich opportunity—

Mark Divine 33:50
Right? For evolution, for insight, for clarity—and to move on.
Like we said—it’s like the, you know, the transformation. You know, the chicken coming out of the egg—it’s painful. It’s hard. It’s confusing.
You know, one minute they’re in this dark little egg, totally comfortable. Next minute, they’re being compelled to, like, peck at it—this home that they've had—to break out into what? They have no idea what’s on the other side.

Mark Divine 34:19
So that’s what it’s like. It’s painful. But on the other side—you know, right?—suddenly a whole new vista opens up.

Susan Sly 34:27
And you—the thing is with you—and we were talking about this before the show—and myself included, we cannot do—once the consciousness is expanded, it cannot go back to its previous form, right?
And for people who—just to share that—Dr. David Hawkins, who Mark mentioned, he was the... he wrote the book Power vs. Force, and he was the sort of the—
Susan Sly 35:00
The forefather of muscle testing. And I was—in my work I used to do in speaking and so forth—I was trained by Dr. Hawkins himself in muscle testing.
And David, when he was in his wheelchair, talked about how his body—like, his consciousness—outgrew his body.
And then with Wayne Dyer—I was in Maui, and I told you this story, Mark—but Ram Dass was there, and the same thing happened to him. And I looked in Ram Dass's eyes, because I wanted to see what love looked like.
And I’ve never, Mark, experienced anything so profound. I just stared. And Star—Wayne—was like, “Do you want to meet Ram Dass?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I just want to stare in his eyes, and I want to experience love.”
Never experienced anything like that. But he couldn’t speak, and his body had given out.
And when we’re on this mission, and we’re focused on a mission that’s so much bigger than us, that we also—you mentioned about affirmations and how we speak to ourselves—you said to Sandy, “I need a break.”
And my youngest, Avery—when she was five—she said, “Mommy, sometimes God doesn’t tap you on the shoulder. He hits you over the head with a frying pan.”
Because then it becomes so literal, and we have to be cautious about our words, right?
And so you and I were talking, and I was saying, like, I’m looking at my schedule now—it’s giving me anxiety. Well, that’s wonderful. That’s a tap on the shoulder.

Susan Sly 36:39
Smacking into a tree is a frying pan moment. And I know if I don’t deal with the tap on the shoulder, I will have my frying pan moment too. And that’s what happens.
And so you—you came back from this and said, “I’m going to deconstruct.” Like, this—breaking my bones—is a metaphor for what I’m going to do with my companies.
And you’ve done a lot in the last two and a half months. I mean, it’s crazy, right?

Mark Divine 37:00
I had to basically break the bones of my business and completely reorganize them, and bring my own little erector set in and do some reconstructive surgery.
And that’s hard to do—especially for organizations that have been around for a while. You know, SEALFit—I started in 2005—

Mark Divine 37:25
So that’s been around, you know, quite a bit—

Mark Divine 37:29
20 years, almost.

Mark Divine 37:30
And you create a lot of baggage—systems, processes, people—and it wasn’t working anymore. So I basically upended that organization. I had to let people go, ending all of our public events—which have been really popular—but, you know, they don’t make any money.
Because, you know, event businesses are—yeah, it’s a loss leader.
But we have these very popular things called The Crucible or Kokoro. So we’re running our last Kokoro this July. That’s a Navy SEAL simulation for Hell Week—but it’s a transformation process, you know?

Mark Divine 38:07
And I’m bringing in partners to run aspects of that business. And I’m removing myself—at least my physical self—from any operational role there, taking my team off the task too, right?
Stuff like that.
Then I’ve relaunched and rebranded as Mark Divine Leadership, so that I can step into the fullness—you’ll appreciate this—I really wanted to call it Divine Leadership—

Mark Divine 38:35
But, um, you—

Mark Divine 38:36
You know, the practical side of me kept hearing the advice that, “You know what? People will think it’s like a Christian organization.”
And it’s not. It’s—right—it’s my name. But it’s certainly going to be teaching spiritual principles. So maybe someday I’ll drop the ‘Mark’ off and—

Mark Divine 38:52
Leadership. Got to establish the brand first.

Mark Divine 38:56
So anyways, the bigger principle you’re getting at is—you know—yeah, we have to do this with our personality, right?
You have to deconstruct stories. And then, you know, determine what’s the bigger story—what’s the, you know, what’s your true potential and what does it look like?
How are you going to define that? What value systems? You know, what passions? What’s your purpose?
And then you create a new story around that.
But then you have to train that new story. And you train it with your dialogue, you train it with your thoughts, you train it with your imagery.
You practice that imagery until you create a memory of that future self—

Mark Divine 39:32
Right? Because our ego minds—the linear mind—is all based on memory.

Mark Divine 39:38
Right? So you have all this memory cascading into the present, which is essentially deciding your future. And that’s why most people’s future looks exactly like their past.
If you want to change, you have to create a memory of a future that is radically different—

Mark Divine 39:54
So that you’re pulling from that, instead of the other stuff—the negative stuff, or the stuff that’s limiting you.

Susan Sly 40:00
Yeah. And what do you say to someone who says, “I—I’m going through so much trauma. I’ve had so much trauma, I have a hard time imagining a future.”
Like, I can think of some—some people right now that would say, “I can’t imagine a future that’s different than the one I’m anticipating. That’s so painful.”

Mark Divine 40:26
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s—that’s fairly common. So first off—

Mark Divine 40:26
Join the club, right?
There’s not a single human being that isn’t traumatized at some level—family, culture, right? Friends, peers, abusers.

Mark Divine 40:38
And so in order to construct—

Mark Divine 40:43
Be able to construct a positive view of the future, you gotta—you gotta address the traumas.
You don’t have to address them all, you know, to heal from all—

Mark Divine 40:51
But you have to take a look at them and recognize that they’re there.
So that’s kind of the first step in self-awareness—is to recognize that these things are things that happened to you, but they’re not who you are.
That you have agency—

Mark Divine 41:08
Right?
So, they say with trauma work that just bringing it into awareness is nine-tenths of the work—because then you stop identifying with it.
“Oh, look at that—there’s a trauma pattern. That’s not Mark.”
Right? That’s just a broken-up piece of my personality that was, you know, a survival mechanism that made a lot of sense at the time—you know, when you were three years old.
But, you know, it’s not serving me so well at 55 or 60 now. So we’re going to take a look at that and whatnot.
Mark Divine 41:40
And so I think, like for me, this all started—the self-awareness work—I told this story, I think probably on our first podcast, when I started studying Zen and Mr. Nakamura in New York City.

Mark Divine 41:52
And the process—you know, we talked about box breathing earlier—so he didn’t teach box breathing. But I naturally was led into that practice—something that I think the body intuitively knows, right?
You have this wisdom inside of you. And so I started box breathing, and then I started—you know—as that entryway to my meditative practice.
And then his practice of Zen was like concentration boot camp, right? It was attention control and concentration. Hold your attention on: inhale, exhale, and count one. Inhale, exhale, count two.
But the trick was—the gamification was—when, not if, but when your mind wanders and you notice it, you’ve got to go back to zero, right? You don’t get to just keep on going. So you go back to zero.
And obviously, in the beginning of that practice, you’re not very honest with yourself. Because you get up—like 6, 7, 8—you’re like, "I'm doing great," but the whole time you’re thinking about other stuff. But you’re just not even aware of it, because it’s the default mode network—it’s there.
So the longer you sit, the more you notice that your attention is actually split.

Mark Divine 42:59
I am sitting here, inhaling, exhaling, counting to 10—but my mind is also working on all these other loops and patterns, and it’s all just happening automatically.
And so—I actually never got beyond one. And that right there is a huge, like, aha moment. Like, “Oh, holy shit, okay. Let’s take this seriously.”
Like, when he says, "no other thought," he means no other thought. Just that. And that’s the beginning of concentration training.

Mark Divine 43:27
And so I stayed with that for months and months and months until I could get to, like, six.

Mark Divine 43:34
And he even said—I was thinking, like, I was a perfectionist—like probably you and a lot of other people, right? Because that’s a response from my childhood.
And if I didn’t get to 10, I was a loser—like I was a failure. And I asked him one day at our little Dharma talks, which happened—he said, “No, no. If you can hold your attention for about 50% of the time, you’re doing pretty good. That’s like expert level.”

Mark Divine 43:58
So what’s cool, Susan, is that—

Mark Divine 44:03
The physical body was already strong.

Mark Divine 44:07
Now I’m like refining my mind—narrowing my attention, holding my attention on just a simple breathing pattern. And I’ve got the arousal control from this breathing pattern, which was box breathing. Because I would inhale, hold, and then exhale, hold—count one.
So arousal control—I was getting really calm. In the midst of New York City, I started to feel really calm, right?
And then I’m able to hold my concentration for a long period of time.
Now this next part is magic, right? This is where everyone needs to hear—

Mark Divine 44:42
And I’ll tie it back into deconstructing, right?
Because up until that time, I was completely merged with my thoughts. I was completely merged with the story that I—and I was getting my MBA at Stern University, Stern School of Business. I was becoming a Certified Public Accountant, working for Coopers and Lybrand, and I was going to go make a ton of money.

Mark Divine 45:00
And then maybe go back to the family business and transform that and make a ton of money. That was the story.

Mark Divine 45:07
Well, my learning how to meditate—and just trust in this process, and going through this process—which was a continuum: arousal control, attention control, concentration—suddenly I would open up. Something happened. I—
Mark Divine 45:21
I don’t remember—it wasn’t like an exact moment—but it happened over a period of a few weeks, where suddenly I completely—

Mark Divine 45:31
I don’t want to sound—this word is not the right word—but I disassociated from my thoughts. It wasn’t like a dissociative break or a psychotic break. It was where I literally popped into witnessing awareness.
And it wasn’t permanent. I had to do it in meditation at first, where all of a sudden I’m like, “Holy shit—I am not my thoughts. I see them now.”

Mark Divine 45:54
And so then I could ask questions about them.

Mark Divine 45:57
That’s when I started journaling, because I’m like, “Are those thoughts really serving me?”
You know, and the story that I was telling myself—I saw it wasn’t serving me. It wasn’t my story. I wasn’t interested in what I was doing, really. I wasn’t passionate about it. I didn’t care about the money. I didn’t like the work even.

Mark Divine 46:17
I mean, there was so much about it that was just wrong.
But it took me to, like, pop out of that story to be able to observe it from afar—

Mark Divine 46:26
To recognize that I was living that life—that false ego life that was conditioned by my family and by my, you know, upbringing, and society, and whatnot.

Mark Divine 46:37
So that gave me the opportunity then to begin to deconstruct that story, and then to ask—while I’m deconstructing the story—to ask the dangerous question: Who am I really? Why am I on this planet? What am I going to do about it?

Mark Divine 46:52
And I would ask those questions before I would meditate. And then I would go in—and my practice had now deepened to the place where I would even fall off into—

Mark Divine 47:01
The nonlinear, timeless reality. And, you know, you bring gifts back when that happens. And every time they would come back, I would have a deeper understanding of who I really was.
And I kept feeling and sensing that I was meant to be a warrior. And I was a warrior. And I had been a warrior in past lifetimes.
And here I was, you know, training to be a CPA. And I’m thinking, “I don’t think that’s how I’m supposed to be a warrior,” right?
And so I was able to begin to ask better questions—to begin to envision a different future.
But I had to first see that the story I was living was false. And—and I hadn’t even at this point gotten into the trauma—

Mark Divine 47:40
Right? This was really just the story that led me there, which was an outcome of the trauma: trying to be the perfect, beautiful son, right?
Put points on the board. Be the perfect athlete. Be the—you know, be the star pupil. Be the this—the son who goes out and makes millions of dollars and makes Mommy proud.
You know, I didn’t even get into the underlying traumas. That didn’t happen until I married my therapist wife. And I’m still working on that today.

Mark Divine 48:11
It’s a lifetime.

Mark Divine 48:15
So you can—

Mark Divine 48:18
You know, if you’re—if you’re—if you have, like, serious trauma, and you’re thinking, “Oh, I don’t—I can’t envision a positive future.”
That’s okay.
First, know that you’re not your—you are not your trauma. That’s just something that happened. And that inside that is an opportunity.
So it’s an opportunity—you can either stay, play the victim, and suffer for the rest of your life, or you can see that as a—

Mark Divine 48:44
As a seed for radical growth and transformation.

Mark Divine 48:48
And, you know, trying to understand—or, you know, it’s better to just go straight to forgiveness.
Yeah—have the courage to go straight to forgiveness. That’s the fast track through that.

Mark Divine 49:01
Every trauma—straight to forgiveness. Let it go. Release that energy.
That’s the opportunity.
And as you release the energy, the story you were telling about yourself—“Not worthy,” right?

Mark Divine 49:13
“Can’t do this. Can’t do that. Not beautiful.”

Mark Divine 49:17
You stop believing it.

Mark Divine 49:20
It loses its convincingness, right? Loses grip over you because you’re like, “Oh, that’s a bullshit story.”
Because you are not your thoughts.
Mark Divine 49:31
If you’re not your thoughts, then you can’t possibly be what they say you are.

Mark Divine 49:36
That’s life.

Mark Divine 49:39
So you begin to—

Mark Divine 49:41
Really kind of seat your awareness more in your spiritual center, until eventually, it's permanent.

Mark Divine 49:48
Sitting in silence really helps. I don't—you know—I want to call it meditation. You know, I love Punjaji’s quote: “Sitting in silence is the most important thing for you to do. Don’t waste time not doing it.” Yes, and—

Susan Sly 50:00
To that point, I always think, what was my perfect day?
Or, if I’m being interviewed: what is my perfect day?
My perfect day is literally sitting in silence and meditating for the whole day.
And I love what you said about asking the questions, because so many people will go into what they think is a meditation—and meditation is very open to interpretation—but they’re going in, and there’s a lot of talking and so forth happening where it’s so forced.
Like, “I’ve got to think about this and that.” And you and I are both trained in neuro-linguistic programming as well, and really, that comes down to pattern interrupts and asking the question.
So I’ll give an example. Going into a meditation—and let’s say your focus is generating wealth—and you say, “I am wealth.”
Then the next question before you go into the meditation is: “Why is it I am wealth?”
And then, as you said, coming back with the gifts—and your mind is going to go—going to go, “Huh?”
Because most people say, “I’m not wealth. I can’t make money.”
So your mind goes searching and seeking for evidence to support what is real—versus saying, “Oh, why is it I am wealth?”
“Oh, I had a lemonade stand when I was six and I made $30.”
“Oh, okay, you know, I just got a raise.”
“Okay.”
Your mind is like a puppy—it’s going to go retrieve whatever it is you send it out to retrieve.
So my question is—as we’re coming to a close here—are you asking different questions now before you go into your meditation?

Mark Divine 51:40
When I go into my meditations now—

Mark Divine 51:46
I’m entering it from—

Mark Divine 51:49
Not Mark.

Mark Divine 51:54
So—

Mark Divine 51:57
It’s really become much more of a—I’m—

Mark Divine 52:03
Resting in the wholeness.

Mark Divine 52:07
And anything that is puzzling—you know, the Mark character, right?—I’ll just ask for clarity and guidance.

Mark Divine 52:18
Again, so it’s part of the surrender practice. Like, I’m surrendering any ego attachment to my business. I’m surrendering the resistance that I had prior to the accident, and saying, “Show me.”
Like—I don’t want to presuppose I know how I’m supposed to fulfill my mission.
Like—even Navy SEALs—we pretend to know how, but there’s no mission that ever goes exactly like we planned.
And so we’re very adaptable—very open to, like, things changing on the fly—which is one of the unique hallmarks of what we do, because we’re so adaptable.

Mark Divine 52:55
So I’m practicing that.

Mark Divine 53:00
Questions...

Mark Divine 53:03
Um...
Mark Divine 53:08
I would say again, no—

Mark Divine 53:13
Not—not in my meditations, right? Not in my meditations.

Mark Divine 53:18
My meditation has gotten to a place where I very quickly just drop in and experience the stillness. I would say where my big shift for me is—

Mark Divine 53:29
Because I was so closed off as a youth, right? And even well into my adult life—walled off—because it wasn’t safe to feel and it wasn’t safe to express emotions.

Mark Divine 53:41
So for me—you know, remember the term Kokoro? I think I mentioned to you once before—it means to merge your heart and your mind, and then bring them forth into your actions.

Mark Divine 53:52
And so for me, I’m really trying—like, I’ve had this incredible experience, like Jnana Yoga, right? The path of wisdom, where—when I meditate—I am the expanse, right? I am the totality.

Mark Divine 54:06
But I’ve been experiencing it from here up.

Mark Divine 54:11
And so I’m like now dropping that, right? And like, experiencing that from the heart out—merging heart and mind as one.

Mark Divine 54:23
You know, in the Eastern traditions, those—the three primary paths, you know, up the mountain of enlightenment—are:
Jnana Yoga—that was like Ramana Maharshi. “Who am I?” path. Asking that—that’s the dangerous question—

Mark Divine 54:36
And recognizing that you are actually the totality. You are source.
And the other one was Bhakti Yoga—path of devotion, the path of heart.

Mark Divine 54:46
Big Mother Teresa—no, actually, she’s probably more Karma Yoga. She kind of blends the two.
And the third one was Karma Yoga—service. That was the whole story of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita—like, he couldn’t avoid his karma. He had—

Mark Divine 55:00
To be in service as a warrior, even though he subscribed to Ahimsa, non-violence. But his karma was to be a warrior. So he was struggling.

Mark Divine 55:12
And so, because he was a karma warrior, he had to go fulfill his karmic duty. So those three—and Kokoro means to bring them all together into one.

Mark Divine 55:22
And that’s what I’m working on right—

Mark Divine 55:28
Now. Throw in a dose of forgiveness as well.

Susan Sly 55:32
It’s interesting you mentioned the Gita. A friend is going through some interesting things with his company, and I messaged him—

Susan Sly 55:43
A passage from the Gita, and he messaged me one back. And it was very much about this conversation—this dialogue—about being a warrior, but a warrior in service.
And when you decide that that is your path, there is no other path. Because when you stray from the path, then things happen to put you back on the path.
And Mark, I—I—I am so excited for you as your friend to go through this evolution of your businesses, and for you to be here. I’m grateful you’re here, because I know there’s a bigger path and purpose for you. And that it took a snowmobile accident to go, “Okay, I’ve got to—I’ve got to take these issues on.”

Susan Sly 56:37
Over the better story, right? You know—

Susan Sly 56:40
Yeah, it could have been like, “I was sitting at the beach and looking at the ocean, and whales were...” You know, it looks like a scar on my back—everyone says it looks like a shark attack. I should maybe use that.
“Yeah, I was attacked by a shark. Almost killed.”
Yeah, a karmic shark—I don’t know. By a tree in Quebec...
I think that when I step back, as your friend, and say—

Susan Sly 57:05
You know, as much as that really, really sucks—the fact that you came out with a scar—but it took that to really get you to the place to see the beauty of what you had, and to—

Susan Sly 57:21
Realign it into something that is much more you, right?
And that’s the thing. I think everyone who’s listening—sometimes when—

Susan Sly 57:31
Not sometimes—when things feel hard, when they feel overwhelming, when they feel out of alignment—and you know, as a spiritual being, that you’re out of alignment—

Susan Sly 57:40
That frying pan moment will come if you don’t address the tap on your shoulder.
And mine was—

Susan Sly 57:47
Homelessness in 2016.

Susan Sly 57:49
It was getting the amoeba and almost dying.
And I know when I’m so trying to force things, Mark—and it’s like push, push, push—something always happens.

Mark Divine 58:17
Right? Yeah. And I think you’re absolutely right. And you want to pay attention and develop your intuition and trust it.
And at the same time, if you’re due for a smackdown—you can’t avoid it. You can only prepare for it.

Mark Divine 58:36
I kid you not—the doctor who did the surgery on me—this sounds so cliché—he’s like, “Mark, this would have killed a lesser man.”
We used to say stuff like that in the SEAL teams, you know what I mean? We had to be harder to kill. We trained to be hard to kill.
So my lifetime of training also prepared me for that.

Susan Sly 58:38
Yeah.

Susan Sly 58:38
And I love that you said that because when I got the amoeba, Mark, they said, “You would have died if it wasn’t for your nutrition,” right?
Because this kills people. It didn’t kill you.
I felt like I was dying. I was misdiagnosed. But it was because of my nutrition that I lived.

Mark Divine
That’s amazing.

Susan Sly 59:05
Yeah. So you were prepared for that.

Susan Sly 59:08
And that helped you get through and transform. That was you getting out of that eggshell.
Unfortunately, then we build another eggshell around us, right? So we have to break through that.
Oh, yay yay—that’s what I have to say.
Well, Mark, I mean—thanks for coming back. I’m—I’m so genuinely happy for you.
And for everyone listening—drop your comments. I read them all. And Mark’s adventures are unfolding, so make sure that you do follow him.
Go to his website—we’ll put everything in the show notes. But Mark, any final words?
To go back to that—I’m going to ask you to give advice to the Mark you were—

Susan Sly 59:52
Let’s say five years ago.

Mark Divine 59:58
Tell Sandy—if I could do—I...

Mark Divine 1:00:00
I know it’s not possible, but if I could, like, take a way-back machine five years—holy shit—I’d make a lot of different decisions.

Mark Divine 1:00:09
So I think that’s one of the—

Mark Divine 1:00:12
New practices. You know—actually, I want to go back and say—I do have a question I ask. And I ask my future self—

Mark Divine 1:00:20
Like, “Guide me.”

Mark Divine 1:00:23
Because if I had asked my future self five years ago what to do in certain situations, I would have gotten really different answers than what I did.

Mark Divine 1:00:36
So I think that’s a good—a good lesson. Like, take a look every five years—look back and say, “What would I have done differently?” And you can see, like, a whole shit-ton of things you could have done differently.

Mark Divine 1:00:49
So if you’re ever sitting with something and you’re confused, or you’re like—or you’re feeling that compulsion to act—that’s like, for me, it was that co-dependence: I gotta act.
Like, when I bought the company—brute force—like, I can see now that that kind of energy, that co-dependent energy: this will solve my problems...
Just pause—

Mark Divine 1:01:08
Breathe into it—

Mark Divine 1:01:10
And go forward five years and say, “How’s this going to play out? What if it doesn’t work out? What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
Well, for me, it was a $5 million mistake.

Mark Divine 1:01:24
You know that saying—I didn’t coin this—but: If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.

Mark Divine 1:01:31
So define what your “hell yeses” are—

Mark Divine 1:01:36
And then stick to them. And life can get a lot simpler.
So that’s what I’m also working on. That—like, what are my hell yeses?
And, you know, I’m really clear what kind of people I want in my life. I’m not going to settle for anything less—

Mark Divine 1:01:51
Right? Because it’s just slowing you down.

Susan Sly 1:01:57
Amen to that, brother.

Mark Divine 1:02:00
Hoo-yah—as we would say in the teams.

Susan Sly 1:02:04
Well, Mark, thanks again for being here. And for everyone listening—love you all to pieces. And again, give us your comments—we would love to have them.
And with that, God bless, and I will see you all in the next episode.

Voiceover 1:02:24
Hey, this is Susan, and thanks so much for listening to this episode on Raw and Real Entrepreneurship. If this episode—or any episode—has been helpful to you, you’ve gotten at least one solid tip from myself or my guests, I would love it if you would leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts.
After you leave your review, go ahead and email reviews@susansly.com—let us know where you left the review. And if I read your review on the air, you could get a $50 Amazon gift card.
And we would so appreciate it, because reviews do help boost the show and get this message all over the world.
If you’re interested in any of the resources we discussed on the show, go to susansly.com—that’s where all the show notes live.
And with that—go out there, rock your day, God bless, and I will see you in the next episode.

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.