The Way of the SEAL

How can you think and act with the clarity, courage, and purpose of an elite warrior in today’s chaotic world? That question lies at the heart of The Way of the SEAL by retired Navy Commander Mark Divine, whose two decades in special operations taught him that leadership is not a set of tactics—it’s a way of being. Divine argues that success in business, relationships, and life demands a warrior’s discipline: mastering your mind, directing your emotions, and committing to a higher purpose.

At its core, the book contends that anyone—not just soldiers—can train to “think like a SEAL” by cultivating what Divine calls kokoro, the unity of heart and mind in action. True leadership arises not from status or systems, but from self-mastery. When you learn to control your thoughts and fears, you inspire trust and can lead others ethically through uncertainty. The SEAL mindset isn’t about aggression or domination—it’s about presence, purpose, and resilience.

The Warrior Path for Modern Life

Divine presents his eight principles of leadership and performance as a modern warrior’s manual for navigating life’s battles. These include: establishing your set point (your moral and mental compass), developing front-sight focus (clear goal-centered vision), bulletproofing your mission, doing today what others won’t, forging mental toughness, breaking things to innovate, building intuition, and thinking offense all the time. Each principle reflects lessons hard-won through SEAL training—where Divine was the “Honor Man” of his class—and later refined through his SEALFIT Academy for civilians and professionals alike.

Through vivid stories—nearly drowning in a parachute incident, leading exhausted trainees through Hell Week, and failing forward through a disastrous brewpub venture—Divine shows that elite performance starts with internal control. You learn to simplify your battlefield, maintain composure under pressure, and define your mission in value-centered terms. By transferring military clarity to the civilian realm, Divine gives readers an accessible code of action: courage, authenticity, and service beyond self.

Why This Matters Now

Modern society, Divine notes, suffers from scattered attention and moral confusion. We seek quick hacks for success instead of cultivating strength of character. His approach rejects that shallow path. Like Sun Tzu’s or Musashi’s teachings, Divine’s system asks you to slow down, breathe deeply, and train every dimension of self—physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual—which he calls the “Five Mountains.” Strength in one area without the others creates imbalance; the warrior-sage must develop all simultaneously.

This book also bridges East and West: drawing from Zen meditation, Seido Karate, yoga, CrossFit, and SEAL drills. Divine blends rational goal-setting with intuitive awareness, proposing an “integral development model” influenced by philosopher Ken Wilber. It’s not merely about leadership in business; it’s about leading the self toward wholeness. In practice, this means crafting morning rituals, visualization routines, deep breathing (like box breathing), and reflective reviews that build lasting habits of excellence.

The Promise of the SEAL Mindset

The result of these trainings, Divine assures us, is transformation—not in status, but in presence. You will develop calm amid storms, clarity in uncertainty, and courage in risk. You will learn to “embrace the suck” of adversity, knowing pain refines growth. You will replace reactive fear with proactive purpose. As you master your inner battlefield, you become what Divine calls a “warrior leader”—someone who leads with heart and inspires trust through integrity rather than authority.

Ultimately, The Way of the SEAL is a handbook for personal evolution disguised as a leadership guide. Divine’s invitation is simple yet demanding: live each day as if earning your Trident—the SEAL insignia—anew. For those ready to step into authentic leadership and navigate life’s chaos with unwavering calm, this book provides both philosophy and practice for mastering the warrior within.

Mark Divine opens his training with a crucial command: before you lead others, you must know what you stand for. Your “set point” is your inner compass—a combination of values, beliefs, and purpose that steers your actions no matter how fierce the storm. Without it, life tosses you between pleasure and pain, success and failure, leaving you directionless. Establishing your set point means defining your stand, your purpose, and your relationship with risk and failure.

Make a Stand

Divine’s story begins with his SEAL officer interview, where a commander stared silently for ten minutes before asking, “What do you stand for?” Divine realized that vague words like “integrity” weren’t enough. He crafted his own ethos: to prepare mind, body, and spirit, to earn leadership through action, and to seek truth and love over fame or wealth. This became his anchor as he faced hard choices—such as leaving active duty to save his marriage. Like the SEAL Ethos itself (“I humbly serve… I will not fail”), your stand becomes unconditional guidance in ethical dilemmas.

Find Your Purpose

If your stand answers “What would I do?”, your purpose answers “Why am I here?” Divine contrasts two trainees: his buddy Bush, who quit BUD/S during Hell Week because he wanted to impress his father, and Lieutenant Michael Murphy, who gave his life calling in support during a firefight. Murphy embodied clarity of purpose: to lead and protect. When purpose comes from within—not from others—it fuels resilience. Divine helps readers articulate this intrinsic “why” through journaling and meditation exercises. What would you do if every choice were your last? That level of clarity creates unstoppable resolve.

Embrace Risk, Loss, and Failure

Committing to your purpose means accepting risk. Divine himself left a lucrative corporate job and family expectations behind to chase his calling as a SEAL—risking everything for meaning. “Destiny favors the prepared in mind, body, and spirit,” he writes. Failure is not the enemy but the necessary teacher. By walking through open doors even when pain or uncertainty lurks, you evolve into a person who does not fear change but thrives within it.

Key Reflection

As Divine puts it, “Stand your ground in virtue before you stand your ground in combat.” The warrior’s moral center is forged not by ideology but by sustained introspection and action. This clarity of stand and purpose allows you to lead from authenticity—even when life’s storms rage uncontrollably.

The takeaway: leadership begins with self-definition. When you know your internal coordinates, you no longer stumble through life’s chaos reacting to circumstances; you navigate by truth. The set point transforms decision-making from survival mode to deliberate mastery, ensuring every move aligns with who you are and why you exist.

The second principle of Divine’s system teaches you how to direct your mind like a sniper’s sight—laser-focused on the target while keeping situational awareness. “Front-sight focus,” he writes, comes from SEAL marksmanship: when aiming down a weapon barrel, your eyes zero in on the front sight, not the target itself. This calm, disciplined attention separates elite performance from frantic multitasking.

Prepare Your Mind

Divine shows that mental preparation precedes all victory. In karate sparring, when fatigue pushed him to the brink, slowing his breathing and quieting his thoughts allowed time itself to stretch. He discovered that disciplined breath—what he later taught as box breathing—is the gateway to awareness. Deep breathing stabilizes the nervous system, collapses fear, and centers the mind. Combined with sacred silence (similar to meditation), it transforms chaos into clarity. Without training your breath and attention, front-sight focus is impossible.

Envision Your Goal

Visualization translates focus into results. Divine recounts helping a student, Jim, visualize a SEALFIT gym he would someday own. Jim pictured every detail daily—equipment, partners, clients, even family involvement. Within two years, CrossFit Honor was real. Divine cites Napoleon Hill’s maxim (“What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”) as proof that focused mental imagery anticipates success. By seeing outcomes before acting, you “win in your mind before going to war.”

Define the Mission and Simplify

SEALs bulletproof their missions by clarifying goals and reducing complexity—what Divine calls “simplifying the battlefield.” Leaders fall when distracted by noise or overcomplication. Like Steve Jobs’ insistence on eliminating extraneous buttons from Apple’s designs, clarity yields efficiency. Divine urges readers to identify their *unique offer*, declutter physical and mental space, and focus on high-value targets. Simplicity isn’t minimalism—it’s the stripping away of anything that does not serve the mission.

Front-sight focus thus combines three disciplines—breath control, visualization, and simplicity—to deliver fast, decisive momentum. Where most scatter energy in every direction, the WOS leader channels all energy toward one aim. Divine’s mantra captures it succinctly: “Keep your eyes trained on the front sight and your front sight trained on the target.”

Mental toughness—the fifth principle—is the defining trait of the SEAL mind. Divine notes that SEAL trainees aren’t the strongest or fastest; they’re simply those who never quit. “Grit,” he writes, is formed by mastering five skills: controlling your response, controlling your attention, developing emotional resilience, setting effective goals, and visualizing powerfully. Together they build an unbreakable spirit.

Control Your Response

Stress ignites chaos. Divine teaches “box breathing” as a reset button for the body’s fight-or-flight reaction. By inhaling and exhaling in equal measured counts, you calm the sympathetic nervous system and restore awareness. This steady breathing—used by SEALs under fire—helps you reclaim rational thought when adrenaline surges. Instead of reacting to fear, you respond with composure.

Control Attention

Attention management means feeding the Courage Dog, not the Fear Dog—a metaphor adapted from Native American legend. Whatever you focus on grows. Positive self-talk (“I’m getting stronger every minute”) overrides destructive inner chatter. Divine encourages mantras and mental sentinels to watch thoughts and redirect them instantly. This creates laser concentration amid uncertainty, echoing sports psychologist Jim Loehr’s “mind as musician” model for performance.

Develop Emotional Resilience

Divine’s own training with Jerry Peterson’s SCARS system taught him that uncontrolled emotion destroys effectiveness. Detect, interdict, and redirect anger, fear, or doubt into determination and curiosity. Transforming emotion—as yoga masters or Stoic philosophers also advise—turns adversity into power. Emotional resilience fuels optimism and humility, preventing ego from hijacking progress.

Set Goals and Visualize

Divine’s SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely—anchor toughness in practicality. Break goals into micro-milestones and visualize success repeatedly. The brain can’t distinguish imagination from reality, so each visualization rewires confidence. In SEALFIT, trainees mentally rehearse holding a push-up position far beyond perceived limits—the mind quits first, never the body. When the mind believes, the body obeys.

Core Insight

Mental toughness is not numbness—it’s mastery. By blending breath, focus, emotional awareness, goal design, and visualization, you build the calm intensity that lets you “hang on after others have let go.” The toughest warrior is not he who feels nothing, but he who harnesses everything.

Forging mental toughness finally dissolves the option to quit. Through persistent practice, you move from reactive survival to proactive flow—a state where grit becomes grace and endurance becomes effortless power.

To evolve, Divine insists you must break old patterns—comfort, business models, habits—and rebuild them better. The sixth principle, “Break Things,” is not about destruction for its own sake but about creative transformation. When his web company NavySEALs.com collapsed, Divine didn’t cling to the wreckage; he pivoted to build SEALFIT, the enterprise that defined his later career. Chaos, he argues, is nature’s forge for growth.

Apply Total Commitment

Warriors burn their boats. Divine recalls Commander W’s SEAL Team in Iraq, tasked with protecting elected leaders in live combat. They committed fully despite no blueprint, inventing tactics never tried before. Total commitment generates certainty—“Yes, I’ve got this!”—and eliminates fallback options that dilute effort. Commitment aligns energy toward decisive victory.

Fail Forward Fast

Learning depends on rapid iteration. Divine’s mantra—try, fail, analyze, adjust, repeat—mirrors Silicon Valley’s startup ethos. His friend Alden Mills, after his first product flopped, used the lessons to invent the Perfect Pushup and made millions. Failure, embraced early and often, accelerates mastery. “What doesn’t work is the data for what will,” Divine writes.

Navigate Gaps for Opportunity

In chaos lie hidden openings. Instead of fearing uncertainty, identify “gaps”—areas competitors overlook due to rigid models or mental blind spots. Divine’s dolphin-training anecdote (where SEALs used sonar to bypass detection) illustrates how seeing beyond routine yields advantage. The leader’s task is to operate in the present, neither stuck in nostalgia (past focus) nor paralyzed by future anxiety—but alert to what is possible now.

Innovate and Adapt Quickly

“Semper Gumby,” the SEAL’s tongue-in-cheek motto, means “Always Flexible.” Divine shows that innovation requires decisive action, not endless planning. When opening SEALFIT, he tested formats live, learning while moving. In crisis, routine is the enemy—break habits deliberately to spark creativity. This principle connects to thinkers like Nassim Taleb (author of Antifragile): growth comes from volatility, not stability.

By breaking things with commitment, failing forward, spotting gaps, and adapting fast, you become antifragile—a leader strengthened by disruption. Divine’s message: “Destiny favors the prepared, but also the flexible.”

After mastering focus and toughness, Divine turns inward. The seventh principle—building intuition—teaches that true genius arises when intellect partners with subconscious awareness. “We honor the rational mind and forget the gift,” he writes, quoting Einstein. Intuition transforms leadership from reactive thinking into expansive knowing.

Expand Awareness

Awareness means perceiving both details and the whole simultaneously. Divine trains SEALs to switch between “focused awareness” (laser vision) and “relaxed awareness” (wide-angle peripheral vision). Like an Apache scout sensing danger by softening focus, leaders maintain broad situational insight while homing in on critical targets. Alternating these modes channels intuition; it’s how you detect subtle patterns others miss.

Strengthen Sensory Perception

Divine’s sensory drills—listening in darkness or “cupping your ears”—heighten mindfulness. By reducing external noise, the inner voice grows louder. In business meetings, this translates to reading nonverbal cues, energy shifts, and emotional tone. He learned this from meditation under Grandmaster Nakamura, where silence revealed meaning beyond words. Intuition begins when observation replaces assumption.

Confront Your Background of Obviousness

Every leader wrestles with hidden programs—beliefs formed early that unconsciously drive reactions. Divine calls this the “Background of Obviousness” (BOO). Through visualization, he revisited teenage memories where fear and anger had shaped his adult defensiveness. By healing these memories in his “mind gym,” he dissolved barriers between conscious mind and gut instinct. Clearing the BOO frees intuition to act without distortion.

Open Up to Inner Wisdom

The culmination is dialogue with the subconscious—sometimes literally. In visualization exercises, Divine invites a “counselor” into his mind gym (often an imagined Apache elder) to ask guidance questions. Answers surface as images, sensations, or dreams. Whether mystical or psychological, the technique aligns with methods from José Silva and Carl Jung’s “active imagination.” When decisions stall, intuition offers clarity faster than analysis ever could.

Key Reflection

Divine’s holistic warrior sees intuition as the next level of intelligence. It’s not magic; it’s mastery—the art of listening to subtle signals from body, mind, and spirit. When reasoning fails, awareness guides. This union of logic and intuition forms the ultimate leadership radar.

By cultivating expanded awareness, sensing deeply, clearing subconscious blocks, and trusting inner wisdom, you reclaim the ancient gift of instinct. Intuition becomes your silent ally—your sixth sense for ethical decisions, creative breakthroughs, and knowing when to act.

Divine’s final principle commands: think offense, always. This mindset doesn’t mean aggression—it means readiness, confidence, and momentum. Defensive leaders wait; offensive leaders act. Whether in combat or corporate chaos, survival favors the proactive. To think offense, you develop unwavering confidence, activate radar-like awareness, do the unexpected, and execute with velocity and agility.

Develop Unwavering Confidence

Confidence arises from language and action. Divine’s SCARS training taught him to swap defensive words like “block” or “retreat” for offensive ones like “strike” and “advance.” Words shape physiology: saying “I will” instead of “I’ll try” changes posture and energy. This parallels Tony Robbins’ insight that motion creates emotion—standing tall activates courage. The warrior controls inner dialogue as strictly as outer tactics.

Activate Your Radar

In war and life, awareness is armor. Divine recounts being choked unconscious in a bar fight before SEAL training—a wake-up call that taught vigilance. Using the Cooper Color System (white: unaware; yellow: alert; orange: ready; red: act), he trains readers to operate in “yellow”—constant relaxed readiness. This awareness spotlights threats and opportunities alike. In everyday life, yellow means noticing market changes, emotional cues, and emerging patterns before others do.

Do the Unexpected

Innovation thrives in rule-bending. SEALs exploit surprise—whether smuggling Humvees via creative logistics or entering bases disguised as firefighters. Divine urges ethical rule-breaking to outmaneuver stale systems. Habits of unconventional thought—such as rejecting multitasking or prioritizing simplicity—keep you agile. (Comparable to Adam Grant’s Originals, which celebrates creative contrarians.)

Execute with Velocity and Agility

Speed and adaptability define elite success. SEALs dominate by planning fast using the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). Likewise, in business, shorten decision cycles while maintaining clarity. Divine stresses trust in those “in the field”—empower decentralized leadership rather than micromanagement. Standard Operating Procedures handle routine tasks; trust and adaptability handle chaos. Speed with precision wins the day.

To think offense means to live in action—preparing, scanning, and advancing while others retreat. Divine’s philosophy closes on moral courage: lead from the heart, risk failure, and take a stand even when odds overwhelm. By combining confidence, awareness, creativity, and speed, you embody the timeless warrior creed: calm in motion, decisive in chaos, compassionate in victory.