UFYB 130: The What If Parade

In The Way of the SEAL, retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine outlines strategies adapted from his military experience to help business leaders master the challenges of today’s rapidly evolving world of work. The explosion of technology has forever altered the corporate landscape. Leaders must have a balanced, flexible, forward-driving mindset to navigate the change.

Divine blends SEAL strategies, yoga, and martial arts to create mind-body training techniques to build powerful leaders. After publishing The Way of the SEAL in 2013, he authored Staring Down the Wolf and Unbeatable Mind. Divine founded six multimillion-dollar businesses, including SEALFIT and Unbeatable.

In this guide, we’ll discuss modern work world challenges that resemble a SEAL battlefield and examine Divine’s strategies to identify your values, focus on your goals, embrace uncertainty, and harness your mental strengths. We’ll look at actions leaders can take to lead and succeed in a complex business world. Finally, we’ll provide views from leadership, military, and mental health experts that support, counter, and contextualize Divine’s ideas.

In Soundtracks, best-selling author and speaker Jon Acuff offers a set of tools designed to help you stop overthinking and start chasing your goals. Acuff argues that the best way to overcome negative thoughts is to replace them with positive, motivating ones. With candor and humor, he provides a step-by-step procedure for interrupting negative thoughts, generating positive thoughts, and turning those positive thoughts into genuine beliefs.

In our guide, we’ll start by defining overthinking. We’ll examine how overthinking can negatively impact your productivity and consider the biological reasons we tend to focus on negative thoughts. Then, we’ll go through Acuff’s process for overcoming overthinking, providing examples that help illustrate how to apply each step in your own life. We’ll also include commentary that provides psychological context for Acuff’s ideas, as well as contrast those ideas against other notable approaches to self-improvement.

Former Vedic monk and award-winning content creator Jay Shetty claims that the route to happiness and fulfillment is to Think Like a Monk. According to him, monks are the calmest and happiest people in the world because they live with a sense of purpose that aligns with their true, inner selves.

Fortunately, you don’t need to cut yourself off from the modern world or shave your head to benefit from this mindset. Shetty draws from his experiences as a monk, ancient spiritual texts, and the latest psychological research to transform abstract concepts into actionable methods you can easily incorporate into your life.

In this guide, we’ve compared and contrasted Shetty’s key concepts with up-to-date psychological research and advice. In addition, we’ve expanded on his methods with actionable ideas from other self-improvement practitioners and psychologists.

In When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön provides guidance on how to find courage and compassion amid pain, loss, and uncertainty. She writes that pain and suffering are inevitable parts of life but that these experiences can also be opportunities for growth and transformation. Drawing on ancient Buddhist wisdom and practices, Chödrön shows us how to cultivate self-awareness and acceptance and face life's challenges with grace and resilience.

In this guide, we explore Chödrön’s views on why we suffer—what causes emotional pain and perpetuates it during challenging times—and outline what you can do to turn these experiences into opportunities for growth and healing. We also compare Chödrön’s teachings to insights from other Buddhist teachers and mental health experts and provide additional context about Buddhism so you can better understand and apply these concepts to real-world challenges.

Ever tried to think positively and still felt unhappy? You’re not alone—many people find it difficult to feel happy no matter how many positive thoughts they force themselves to think.

Journalist and best-selling author Oliver Burkeman sheds light on this conundrum, suggesting that relentlessly trying to be positive can, ironically, make you unhappy. In The Antidote, he draws on research, philosophical insights, and diverse interviews to argue that accepting and even embracing negative emotions, uncertainties, and failures may be the key to feeling happier.

In this guide, we’ll delve into Burkeman’s exploration of the potential downsides of positive thinking and present alternative approaches to well-being and contentment that extend beyond perpetual optimism. Additionally, we’ll supplement his ideas with psychological research and actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and practitioners. You’ll come away with diverse insights that may lead to a deeper, more nuanced understanding and experience of happiness.

Every one of us experiences hardship, often on a daily basis. But what if we didn’t have to suffer it? In The Stoic Challenge, William B. Irvine argues that minimizing suffering isn’t just possible—it’s something that people have been doing since the Stoics, a group of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers, pioneered a strategy to approach adversity as opportunity.

Our guide explains how you can do the same by following Irvine’s explanations of Stoicism’s central strategy—reframing—to live with more equanimity, effectiveness, and even delight. We’ll explain Irvine’s core assertion that we can change our lives by changing how we relate to adversity, and we’ll detail how you can implement this strategy through a variety of actionable training methods. In our commentary, we’ll compare Irvine’s perspective on Stoicism to other philosophies and approaches that address the same challenges.

Vulnerability is all too often engineered out of today’s work cultures, in a bid to make employees more efficient and less susceptible to emotions—but brave leaders who have the courage to allow vulnerability are essential to thriving work cultures. Dare to Lead breaks down the four courage-building skills that make up brave leadership, so that you can create an organization that takes risk, uncertainty, and failure in stride. You’ll learn how to lead your team in engaging with vulnerability, acting with integrity, having more productive and honest conversations, and moving on quickly from failure—skills that will allow your work culture to meet today’s ever-increasing innovative and creative demands.

In Becoming Bulletproof, former Secret Service agent Evy Poumpouras wants to help you become a stronger, more resilient person. Through her time in the US Secret Service, Poumpouras learned how to conquer her fears, how to overcome difficult physical and mental challenges, and how to understand and influence others.

In our guide, we’ll explain Poumpouras’s key ideas and strategies to help you become a more resilient, effective, and competent person. We’ll teach you how to deal with fear and danger, how to cope more gracefully with day-to-day adversity, how to tell when someone is lying, and how to influence the reactions and behaviors of others. We’ll also delve deeper into the psychology behind some of the book’s ideas, and compare its strategies to similar books on influencing others.

Dive into the fascinating connections between the brain, body, and personal well-being with Dr. Andrew Huberman in the latest episode of "Huberman Lab." As he enthralls a live Toronto audience with "The Brain Body Contract," Dr. Huberman traverses an array of essential topics—from the empowerment of mental health tools and the enigma of the subconscious mind to the brain mechanics of creativity.

Dr. Huberman's dynamic discourse ranges from practical advice for remote workers to intriguing developments in psychotherapy, such as the therapeutic prospects of psychedelics for PTSD. Alongside sharing his own 'space time bridging' morning routine to counteract life’s stresses, he also examines the scientific underpinnings of emotional resilience and the role community plays in fostering a rich environment for scientific knowledge. Whether unpacking the complexities of neuroplasticity or advising on physical health for life's unpredictable twists, Dr. Huberman offers invaluable insights for a science-empowered life.