PDF Summary:Unbeatable Mind, by Mark Divine

Is your mind strong enough to weather all storms you face in life? Are you struggling to achieve what you want most? In Unbeatable Mind, Mark Divine offers a guide to training your mind to be stronger so that you have control over your whole self and can maximize your success. Divine is a retired Navy SEAL Commander and best-selling author who shares his whole-person training with the goal of creating millions of powerful leaders over the next two decades.

In our guide, we’ll explore Divine’s system, which features five levels of personal development along with tips for how to traverse these levels, plus important tools for training your mind and developing mental toughness through meditative techniques. We’ll also examine the science behind these ideas and techniques, as well as how other experts in the field recommend achieving the goals he sets out for the reader.

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(Shortform note: Putting your mind in control of the self means having agency over your own thoughts and actions. Because of the way the brain matures, this is difficult or impossible for children under a certain age, and like many of the traits Divine espouses, becomes easier when we enter adulthood.)

Integrating the first four plateaus can have some negative consequences when one of them begins to dominate. Focusing too much on self-growth can cause other things to fall by the wayside. For example, if you commit too intensely to the belief that everyone is equal, it can lead you to view everyone as “perfect,” and you risk being taken advantage of by others. Also, if you focus too much on spiritual attainment, you may begin to feel detached from reality.

(Shortform note: It’s important to maintain balance in your integration of the four levels. You should try to avoid becoming overly fixated on personal development to the point that it interferes with other aspects of your life—otherwise it can lead to obsession, self-doubt, and conflict in your relationships.)

While the goal is for you to operate mainly from the fifth level, Divine explains that you won’t eliminate the other four, but instead will become aware of how to integrate them into your life or behavior as needed. Sometimes you’ll be operating at different levels in different areas of your life, like if you feel you’re achieving what you want in your marriage but feel like you’re in survival mode at work.

What You Need to Grow

Divine’s five levels align in some ways with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy is a psychological model depicting the five different types of needs humans have, listed in the order in which they need to be met.

Maslow’s first level of needs is physiological, or survival needs, which aligns with Divine’s suggestion that you must meet your body’s basic needs to pursue personal growth.

Maslow’s second level is the need for safety, which comes from society and the people around you, and his third level is the need to be loved and to belong. These two together correspond to Divine’s second level, which is about forming close bonds with others and working to keep them safe.

Maslow’s fourth level, the need for self-esteem and the respect of others, corresponds to Divine’s third level, as both are related to working toward achievement in your life.

Maslow’s fifth level, the need for self-actualization, could apply to Divine’s fourth and fifth levels together, as all three are about striving to be the best person possible in every facet of your life.

Unlike Divine’s levels, Maslow’s levels are mostly eliminated as you move up the hierarchy. Once a deficient need is met, it goes away and you can focus fully on your next need.

Awareness

You may feel ready to dive right into working your way through the five levels, but more than likely you’ll need help figuring out where to start. To enact meaningful change within yourself and be able to navigate the five levels of development, Divine says you must learn to be constantly aware of what’s going on inside you and around you. This involves understanding how your brain functions and how best to control it.

(Shortform note: You can also use knowledge about how the brain functions to enhance your learning, as research shows that understanding how the brain learns and adopting a growth mindset improves learning outcomes in children.)

Animal Brains

Awareness starts by understanding your mind, and that includes your physical brain and its different functions. Divine explains that the human brain evolved over millennia, building up from lower levels of functioning and ability to more complex functioning. As it progressed through these stages of evolution, it built upon itself, and many of the neurological traits that formed in our brain’s earliest stages of development have stayed with us rather than being bred out of us.

The three stages of our brain’s evolution are:

1) Reptile: The first of our three “brains” to develop was the reptile brain. It consists of the cerebellum and the brain stem and is responsible for maintaining our basic bodily functions such as heartbeat and motor control.

2) Mammalian: The second brain to develop was the mammalian brain, which is responsible for higher functions like emotions, as well as our reactions to stressors.

3) Monkey: The final brain to develop was the monkey brain, or neocortex. This is responsible for higher-level thinking and learning like analysis, creativity, planning, and decision-making. This brain is ripe with the potential to create and innovate, but it's also pleasure-seeking and unwilling to tolerate pain. Since pleasure is not always productive and pain is necessary for growth, you must work hard to train this brain.

(Shortform note: The concept of the three animal brains evolving and maintaining their original structure and functions in discrete parts has been widely accepted for decades, but recent research has debunked this idea. It indicates that the human brain did not evolve directly from the reptile brain and that it cannot be separated into distinct regions that function independently of each other. Instead, the brain functions as a highly interconnected web of neural networks that touch on and incorporate all parts of the brain for many different functions.)

According to Divine, these different brains need to be under the control of the mind. He emphasizes that the mind is separate from the brain’s neurological functions. He calls the mind the “witness,” meaning the conscious and purposeful awareness of your brain’s functions.

To achieve higher levels of consciousness, you must train your mind to have control over your neocortex. This training can be done through a number of eastern practices like yoga and meditation, and Divine has based his own system on these practices.

(Shortform note: Divine’s view of consciousness as separate from the functioning of the brain is generally not accepted by science. While it may seem like the mind is something greater than the sum of its physical parts, research shows that the processes of the mind and the memories and knowledge that inform those processes are stored physically in the brain, suggesting that the idea of a higher consciousness is an illusion.)

Divine says that in order for the mind to become the master of the neocortex, we have to embrace a state of silence in the mind. To do this, he advises that you push out all distractions, and he recommends various meditation techniques (which we review at the end of the guide).

When you embrace a state of silence, you can better connect with your higher self and the universe. This takes practice and feels unnatural at first, since western culture teaches us to constantly analyze everything. However, tapping into this silence and using it to identify negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts is the impetus for personal change.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama recommends a method for stilling the mind that involves taking on a neutral state of mind and pushing out distractions, like Divine’s method. He also emphasizes that you’re not just tuning out, but that you should stay alert and connect with your mind in a pure state.)

How to Use Your Awareness to Fulfill Your Purpose

Divine says that achieving awareness and putting your mind in charge of your neocortex allows you to identify and follow your purpose. To identify your purpose, ask yourself how you can pursue your passions, how you can embody the traits you feel are important to your character, and what you exist to do. Once you’ve answered these questions, you can focus on the steps you need to take to fulfill your purpose: building emotional strength, building mental strength, and establishing and following through on goals.

The Purpose of Your Purpose

Many authors have written about the importance of finding your purpose in life and using it to guide your actions and thoughts.

For example, in The Success Principles, Jack Canfield echoes Divine’s sentiment that your purpose is essential to your success and happiness. To find your purpose, he recommends reflecting on what makes you happy, noticing your interests and skills, and envisioning what you want the world to be like. He also recommends meditation and a few questionnaires to help you pinpoint your goals.

Likewise, in Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi agrees that your purpose is vital in achieving happiness, and he suggests that finding your purpose requires you to alternate your focus between yourself and your community. He also distinguishes between different kinds of purposes, including purposes that you take on willingly and feel internally motivated to pursue versus purposes that you follow because others expect you to do so.

Similarly, in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Robin Sharma adds to the idea that your purpose will guide you through life and says that your purpose should involve helping others in some way.

If you struggle with Divine’s guidelines on how to find your purpose, the methods recommended by these and other authors may help you narrow it down.

Emotional Strength

To train your mind, you must forge emotional strength. If you build emotional strength, you can weather the emotional storms that come with every challenge you face, keeping strong in the face of adversity and using challenges to help you grow and fulfill your purpose. Use your purpose to guide your actions and motivate you during difficult times.

(Shortform note: Our natural tendencies regarding challenges are to either avoid the challenge entirely or overly fixate on it, depending on our personalities and the way we were raised. The key to emotional strength is finding the middle ground between these two tendencies and facing challenges without letting them overwhelm us.)

How to Build Emotional Strength

To build emotional strength, Divine writes that you must:

Cultivate high self-esteem so you feel respected by others. (Shortform note: Divine doesn’t elaborate on why self-esteem is important for emotional strength, but we can infer that high self-esteem will help you bounce back from negative experiences and avoid internalizing them.)

Build up your self-control so you don’t react emotionally in the moment and inadvertently make the situation worse. (Shortform note: To build self-control in conversations, it may help to imagine yourself pressing a button to pause your mind and take several seconds to fully process what was said before giving your response.)

Take on a positive mindset so you can view setbacks as opportunities. (Shortform note: A positive mindset serves you best when it’s based in reality and takes into account your skills and resources so you feel equipped to handle the setbacks you’ll face.)

Orient yourself toward helping others. Tending to others will help you find meaning in your struggles. (Shortform note: Experts agree that helping other people helps you make sense of your own life’s challenges, and they add that it can help you find your purpose as well.)

Divine also writes that the biggest roadblock to achieving emotional strength is the negative emotions that result from hardships you face. However, when you encounter one of these negative emotions, you can build emotional strength by processing it effectively.

When a negative emotion strikes, acknowledge the emotion without letting it convince you that there’s something wrong with you. Then dig deeper: Find what is underlying that emotion, and then change that emotion into its corresponding positive emotion (such as turning envy into compassion, or turning anxiety into self-assuredness). Take that positive emotion and internalize it, letting it drown out the negative one, and finally, use this new mindset to enact positive change in yourself or to help others.

(Shortform note: Turning a negative emotion into a positive one can help you minimize negative feelings in your life, but you may also be able to use the negative emotions themselves to motivate you to make change. If you’re struggling to turn anger into forgiveness, for example, you could try using that anger to spur a major life change. If a negative emotion leads to positive change, like if anxiety motivates you to begin therapy, it can be reclassified as a positive emotion.)

Mental Strength

Divine also writes that fulfilling your purpose requires mental strength. Mental strength gives you the ability to power through obstacles that stand in the way of reaching your goal. Divine’s advice on building mental strength focuses on managing stress. Mental strength can help you process stress in a productive way to keep you moving on your path to your purpose.

(Shortform note: Other writers agree that stress is one of the biggest obstacles in our lives and add that people often resist stress management because some of our stress responses were survival mechanisms in childhood, and it can be difficult to let those go.)

Stress

We tend to view stress as the source of our internal problems, but Divine says that very belief is actually the source of these problems. He emphasizes that stress is neutral, and that whether our stress is negative or positive is a matter of how we frame it.

If we view stress negatively, we might develop a victim mentality, feeling like we’re at the mercy of the stressors in our lives. But, if we view stress in a positive light, we can use it to facilitate our growth, strengthen our minds, and work toward our purpose.

(Shortform note: Research supports the idea that our perception of stress affects its impact on our health and that viewing stress as a major negative influence in our lives even corresponds to a shortened lifespan.)

Divine offers a method for managing stress productively, similar to the process for managing negative emotions. First, acknowledge the stressor and the effect it's having on you, and remember that experiencing this stress doesn’t make you a worse person. Then, intercept the effects of the stressor, reframing it to have a positive impact on your mind and body.

Through this process, you're training your mind to overcome the brain’s stress response and act in the moment to work through your crisis calmly.

(Shortform note: Managing stress productively may even prevent certain types of brain damage, as research shows that chronic stress can change the structure of the brain, including causing it to shrink.)

Goal-Setting

Proper goal-setting is another important step in finding and fulfilling your purpose.

(Shortform note: Some experts recommend using techniques like a journal specifically for manifesting what you want in life to help you set and achieve your goals.)

Divine recommends the following techniques to guide you in setting proper goals:

KISS

The first tip he gives is the acronym KISS, which you may recognize as “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Set a goal that’s small, or that can be broken down into smaller steps to increase your chances of success.

(Shortform note: When the phrase “Keep It Simple, Stupid” was first coined, it didn’t refer to breaking down goals into small steps but to a design principle that any product you make should be simple.) enough that someone with only a basic understanding of how it works should be able to use or repair it.)

Set Appropriate Goals

Divine recommends that you choose goals that are appropriate for you (and your team if applicable). Set goals for yourself that are in line with your purpose, highly motivating, and within your means to complete. If you don’t have all the skills or resources needed to achieve your goal, figure out what you would need to gain to achieve it.

Also, set goals that are appropriate in terms of time. If your overall purpose is to start a new career in six months, it wouldn’t make sense for your smaller goal to be getting a medical degree, as that takes much longer than six months. If your goals are not feasible in the timeframe you’ve set for your goal, then you should let that one go and select a different goal.

(Shortform note: Large-scale goals may be appropriate for visions involving big groups, such as an entire company. In Traction, Gino Wickman describes how to use both incremental and long-term goals to enact your company’s vision, including setting a 10-year goal, a three-year goal, and a one-year goal.)

Visualize

Once you’ve established your goal and stated it clearly, visualize yourself achieving the goal in order to see it become a reality. This can involve either imagining a future where your goal has been achieved or mentally walking through the process of achieving your goal. Divine says that research shows visualizing throwing a basketball through a hoop improves performance better than just practicing in real life.

(Shortform note: Some research actually suggests that visualizing yourself achieving your goal can have a detrimental effect on your progress because the subconscious mind can’t differentiate between the hypothetical vision and the reality of actually accomplishing it, and this can reduce your motivation for pursuing that goal.)

How to Train Your Mind

To navigate the five levels of development, cultivate awareness, and apply that awareness to your own growth, you must train both your mind and body. Divine shares a number of meditation and concentration techniques that he has learned or developed through studying such systems as Ashtanga yoga, Seido karate, and other eastern practices.

Practice these skills while keeping your mind focused on your purpose. This will give you the ability to turn your concentration on and off on command. These techniques include developing a mantra and practicing breathwork, meditation, and journaling.

(Shortform note: In addition to helping with concentration and awareness, meditation can also help with mental health issues such as anxiety and panic attacks, as it helps shift your focus from sadness about the past or fear of the future to calmness in the present moment.)

Mantra

First, come up with a mantra for yourself. A mantra is a short phrase that provides a positive or motivational boost to your mind. According to Divine, choosing an effective, positive, and catchy mantra will allow you to redirect your negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts that align with your needs and goals. You'll use this mantra regularly in your practices, and eventually it’ll blend into your mental backdrop so you no longer have to consciously employ it.

(Shortform note: A mantra is a type of positive affirmation. In addition to conveying a positive idea as Divine says, your mantra will work better if it uses positive words as well, such as saying “I am strong” rather than “I am not weak” so that your focus is on the word strong and the word “weak” doesn’t slip into your subconscious.)

A mantra is essential for personal development but can also be very useful in motivating teams. As a leader, if you see your team struggling with motivation or feeling defeated, introduce a mantra that will reinvigorate them and refocus their attention on the task at hand.

(Shortform note: Research shows that repeating a statement or idea again and again makes us more likely to believe it’s true, even with simple ideas that we should know are false. Repeating a positive mantra can be particularly effective in teams involving children, as you’re teaching them positive ideas about themselves that they’ll internalize as truths.)

Breathwork

Divine says that, while we’re all born knowing how to breathe correctly, that skill fades as we age, and by adulthood most people are only using one-third of their total lung capacity and taking three times as many breaths as they should. Breathwork is the most important tool in strengthening your mind.

(Shortform note: In addition to age differences, there are also gender disparities in lung function and capacity due to differences in rib structure and the muscles that allow for lung expansion. These differences may result from anatomical differences related to men’s and women’s reproductive organs and capabilities.)

Re-learning to breathe correctly strengthens your body’s physical breathing structures and immune system, and also improves your control over the flow of energy through your body. According to Divine, using focused breathwork to improve health is an integral part of many schools of yoga. It can help you manage stress and lengthen your life, and its spiritual benefits make it a great tool for navigating the five levels of personal development.

(Shortform note: Long Covid can drastically reduce lung capacity and function, as it’s a disease that attacks the organs—including the lungs. Deep breathing exercises can help strengthen the diaphragm and improve outcomes for people suffering from lung damage, though they should be avoided if they cause dizziness, chest pain, or other troubling effects.)

Divine offers a technique to retrain your body to breathe the right way:

1. Breathing only through your nose, inhale deeply, pulling the air all the way down into your belly like you’re inflating it. Exhale completely, using your diaphragm to completely empty your lungs of air. Do this several times.
2. On the following inhale, don’t stop when your belly is full, but use your diaphragm to widen your ribs and take in even more air. Then exhale completely, letting the ribcage relax and push out the air from the top down. Repeat several times.
3. Finally, inhale as deeply as you possibly can, filling up the belly, the ribcage and the upper chest. Exhale completely from the top down again.

(Shortform note: Divine does not specify exactly how this process retrains your body to breathe, but we can infer that it strengthens the diaphragm and other muscles needed for respiration so that your breath will be stronger even when you’re not doing this exercise.)

Divine also describes a technique he refers to as box breathing. This involves four stages of breathing performed for five seconds each. Before you begin, empty the air from your lungs. Inhale for five seconds, hold it for five while keeping your body relaxed and avoiding clenching your muscles, exhale for five seconds, and then hold another five seconds before inhaling again. Add a five-second mantra that you repeat with each step to improve your results. Divine recommends using this technique for at least five minutes daily.

(Shortform note: Divine’s technique is a variation on yoga breathing, or pranayama. Pranayama encompasses a wide range of styles involving cycles of inhaling, holding the breath, and then exhaling in timed intervals, as well as more specific techniques like alternate nostril breathing.)

Meditation and Journaling

Finally, Divine offers two meditative practices to enhance your training. Do these regularly to improve your concentration and overall health.

The methods he describes are insight meditation and contemplative meditation. These are techniques for analyzing what you believe to ensure that it’s correct and in line with your purpose. To practice these, you need to get rid of the assumption that you must be right and anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. Reflect on how other people view this belief in differing ways, deeply exploring each idea. You might begin to feel less attached to your belief and may want to change your views.

The difference between insight meditation and contemplative meditation is that the former involves focusing specifically on a belief you currently hold, while the latter involves focusing on a work of some kind that you would like to consider deeply, such as a book or a movie.

Divine says to follow both of these practices with a few minutes of journaling, writing down what your beliefs were beforehand and then noting how they have changed during the meditation.

Meditation for Other Purposes

Both of Divine’s meditation techniques are designed for concentrating on and analyzing what you believe, but there are many meditation practices available that focus on different results and activities.

Mantra meditation is the practice of focusing on and repeating a mantra. This style helps you push out distractions, and the chanting of the mantra lets your breathing slip into a relaxing rhythm. Mantra meditation helps with focus, memory, energy, and mood.

Spiritual meditation involves using self-reflection to connect with something higher or greater than the self. This can be a religious entity, but the practice isn’t specific to religion. It requires you to let go of negative feelings toward others and focus on helping them from a place of authenticity. Spiritual meditation can help with enriching your inner life, strengthening your faith, and seeking to help others.

Present-moment meditation is a practice designed to center your awareness on the present, pushing out thoughts about the future or the past and tuning in to your senses—what you see, hear, and feel—in the moment. It can help with stress management and heart health, and it can also help you manage certain conditions like learning or mood disorders.

Candle-gazing meditation involves focusing your eyes on an object—like the flame of a candle—in order to focus your mind on your own awareness. If you struggle to clear your mind in regular meditation, the visual stimulus of the candle can make it easier to clear out distracting thoughts. Candle-gazing meditation can help with sleep issues, concentration, and executive function, and may even improve eyesight.

All of these practices can help you foster the type of awareness Divine describes—in addition to their other benefits—and aid you in your personal development and the building of your unbeatable mind.