If you are like most people, you sell yourself short. It’s safer that way, but according to former Navy SEAL and sought-after public speaker David Goggins, you are tapping into less than half your potential. Goggins is ready to make you a warrior capable of pushing through self-limiting beliefs. He argues that as long as you hide inside your resignation, you will never find out what you are made of. More than a motivational kick in the pants, Goggins seeks to provide tools for reframing limiting beliefs so readers can take complete ownership of their lives.

As far as the neighbors were concerned, the Goggins were a model family. Despite being black, they lived in a beautiful house in an all-white Buffalo, New York, suburb. Luxury vehicles filled the driveway, and as far as the neighbors were concerned, the Gogginses were upstanding citizens and poster children for the American Dream. But behind the plastered smiles lay some hellish family secrets.

Most kids come home after school, do their homework, have dinner, and go to bed, but life was different for the Goggins boys. They drove with their parents to the skating rink their father owned. Above the rink was the hottest club in town, patronized by Buffalo Bills players, well known musicians, and other famous (and infamous) personalities. OJ Simpson stopped by from time to time. The club was also a Goggins family business,  which meant the boys worked all night—renting out skates, working the concession booth, and ringing up customers. If they failed to pull their weight, there was hell to pay later. The father surveyed his domain from the DJ booth with hawkish vigilance.

Goggins’ mom was young and naïve when she married his father, a man far more preoccupied with money and power than family. His children did not make a dime for all their work. Neither did mom—she didn’t even have a bank account or credit cards. The mom and the brothers knew that any misstep meant a beating, and dad knew how to inflict not just physical pain but psychological terror, too. As is often the case with kids surviving domestic abuse, Goggins intuited something was wrong, but was afraid of what would happen to him if he told a teacher or neighbor that his bruises came from a rage-drunk father and not from playing.

The boys would return home at 6 in the morning after a fitful sleep on the couch directly below the club. They would toss and turn as the ceiling above them rattled and pulsed to the music. It wasn’t just Goggins and his brother who got beaten. Their mom was often brutalized before their eyes. Unfortunately, the police were no help—this was the 1980s, well before #metoo movements or pleas to “believe all women” had hit the mainstream.

Mother and sons eventually escaped with a concerned neighbor’s guidance, but between an early childhood dodging the devil and a trying adolescence, Goggins had a mountain or two to climb before he could consider himself capable of accomplishing anything significant.

What kind of hand did life deal you when you were young? What were the heartaches, the deprivations, the limitations? Were you abused or bullied? Abandoned or lonely? Write your story down. Don’t flinch and pass over the hard parts. You will be able to see the contours of your pain better. Only by confronting it will you flip it into something new that will work for you rather than against you. If growth still sounds fun and exciting to you, you haven’t really started digging into the pain and flipping it yet. This exercise takes work and it will be painful, but you will also never regret it.

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Goggins had a moment of epiphany late in high school. He had been cut from the basketball team, even though basketball was one of the few skills he had a shred of confidence in. He was reading on a fourth grade level and failing most of his classes. He had cheated his way through grade school, and it was beginning to dawn on him that the joke was on him. As he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he began telling himself the ugly, unvarnished truth about himself: that he was a joke, an aimless, wanna-be-thug with no goals and no future. He had been through a lot, sure, but he wasn’t entitled to anything and no one was going to save him. It was up to him.

From this face-to-face self-confrontation emerged a practice he would continue for years: the Accountability Mirror. He would give himself a blunt, no-nonsense pep talk as he shaved, and then write down his goals on Post-It notes. Goggins began with simple tasks like making his bed, cutting the grass, washing all the dishes, and pulling up his pants, but he had to start somewhere.

Are you honest with yourself? Really, truly honest? Most people are not. Plenty of fat people look in the mirror and desperately try to convince themselves they’re actually not fat. If you’re fat, look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself the truth.

Own your weaknesses instead of caressing them or convincing yourself they’re not that bad. The ego tries to be your savior, but the ego is your killer. It keeps you from being yourself or being better. The main goal of the Accountability Mirror is to level with yourself and own your issues and insecurities. No sugarcoating. This is a constructive way to thicken up your skin. Life won’t change unless you have skin thick enough to hear hard things. Your negativity is your own yearning to change. It’s honest. Listen to it.

Reinventing yourself is possible whether you’re a high school punk or verging on retirement. Whether it’s an athletic goal, a lifestyle change, or a new career you’re after, honesty about where you are changes everything. It helps you locate yourself. If you’re lost on the road, you can’t reroute until your GPS knows where you are. Be forthcoming even if your internal GPS locates you in a place you are not proud of. From there, write out on Post-It notes the steps needed to accomplish your goal. If you are trying to take your weight down from 250 to 150, start with a goal of 248. Write it down. Once you’ve reached 248, remove that Post-It and create a new Post-It with a new goal post: 245. Don’t remove that note until you’ve dropped those next three pounds. No one said this was easy, but it does work.

Instead of ignoring the person in the mirror you don’t like, stare that person down and accept the truth. Only then can you leverage that truth for change.

Younger Goggins folded in the face of obstacles. Sometimes he was even relieved when they popped up because it meant he had an excuse to soothe a bruised ego. He let go of one of his precious few dreams—becoming an Air Force Pararescueman— because the training seemed too difficult. When the Air Force doctor ran blood tests and discovered Goggins had the Sickle Cell Anemia trait (not the condition, mind you), Goggins had the option of leaving. He took it. He hid behind an ambiguous medical pronouncement when people asked him what happened, but he knew the truth: that he had been a quitter.

He refused to make the same mistake again years later when the stakes were much higher: His marriage was on the verge of collapse, he was working a dead-end job fumigating restaurants by night, and he was overeating and powerlifting by day. He was now almost 300 pounds, a hefty blend of muscle and flab. Goggins was in there somewhere, hiding, but he knew he couldn’t keep living like this. A Navy SEAL documenting the most grueling physical training in the world inspired him to try enlisting, but it was a long shot. He would have to drop 100 pounds in 3 months and pass the military equivalent of the SAT, a test he was not prepared for at all. He would have to alter radically his diet, exercise, study, and do little else. Still, he sensed that the solution to his anguish and disintegrating existence lay in the kind of suffering he saw in the Navy SEAL documentary.

During his first run, his lungs were on fire after a quarter of a mile. By the end of those three months of swimming, biking, and lifting most of everyday, he was swimming 50 meters and then walking across the pool with a brick in each hand—all on a single breath. Then he’d run for miles in the ice and snow. His comfort with discomfort was growing.

Grab your journal and jot down all the things you hate to do or that stress you out, focusing specifically on those things that would actually benefit you. Find one item on that list, and do it. Repeatedly. Live there in that zone of discomfort. Your life will not change instantly, but you will become the kind of person who keeps a level head even in the face of discomfort.

It doesn’t have to be earth shattering; it just has to make you uncomfortable. The task could be making your bed every morning, getting up early, or running a mile every day. These are the foundations of your strength training. These wins are the ones you build on. They will seem small someday even if they don’t seem small right now. Most motivational claptrap tells people to find their strengths, but here it is best to find a few weaknesses to be turned into strengths. These reversals instill forward momentum and initiate a flow of constructive internal dialogue that affirms—rather than subverts—your capability in uncomfortable settings.

No one becomes a Navy SEAL without enduring one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing tryouts on the planet. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S) lasts six months, and the most gritty, toilsome part of it all is the aptly labeled Hell Week: a nonstop 130-hour test of physical endurance and mental fortitude. Most never make it through, and the officers running the aspiring SEALs through their paces are eager to break them down and weed them out.

One of the officers looking for weaklings seemed to take a vicious joy in breaking the new recruits. He reminded Goggins of the many bullies he’d known growing up, and Goggins refused to grant him any mental real estate. There was one decisive moment at the end of Hell Week when Goggins and his boat crew were physically beleaguered and the steady barrage of snide remarks was starting to get the better of them. Goggins rallied the troops, breathed fresh life into them, and leveraged the frustration so that they could hoist their boat overhead and run the distance. They even started a taunting chant in unison as they plowed forward. The pain and frustration was utterly transformed, and the boat was not as heavy as the men remembered.

The instructor’s expression changed from sadistic glee to shock and a smile that faintly glimmered with newfound respect for Boat Crew Two. Goggins had taken his superior’s soul. He’d chosen to pursue excellence where it was least expected.

Taking someone’s soul is a mind game you play with yourself. It’s an act of defiance that leverages energy from enemies and competitors to gain a tactical edge, but it’s for you. Emotionally and mentally crushing another person can’t be your goal.

With bullies, the best way to beat them can be to help them. They only oppress people because they are deeply insecure themselves, which means they have emotional problem areas that are in your power to irritate or to assuage. If you do your homework and find those places, you can take their soul without them even knowing you’ve totally taken control of the situation. You will rob them of any further sick gratification at your expense and could even turn an enemy into an ally.

No matter how bad things got for Goggins and his mother growing up, the cookie jar above the fridge remained well stocked with one kind of confectionary delight or another. Goggins still remembers the excited anticipation of reaching into the jar and wondering what he would pull out, and the bliss of munching on a sweet treat or two. It was a moment for gratitude and a modicum of joy amidst the steady stream of pain and uncertainty that characterized his childhood.

Each of us has a proverbial Cookie Jar, filled with our achievements, skills crafted, and challenges overcome. These are your treasures. Stick your fist in and grab an accomplishment or two and let the gratitude wash over you. Take hold of whatever you go back to to remind yourself of who you are and that you have what it takes.

To clarify, this is not a waltz through your personal hall of fame for its own sake. No one likes the guy who keeps telling the same tired tales about how fit, strong, and talented he was when he was younger. You are not a one-hit wonder. In the moments when you doubt yourself, use the victories, big or small, to propel you into new ventures. You could even collect them in a literal jar.

For Goggins, those cookies were passing the exam needed for entrance into the military reserves, getting his reading level up from 4th grade to 12th grade when he was in high school, getting through Hell Week and Navy SEAL training with distinction, and running 101 miles nonstop without any training for long distance running. Even the resultant kidney failure and a trip to the ER  was a feather in his cap. These are the moments in his Cookie Jar.

Self-doubt, pain, and boredom are part of the game of growth. It’s normal for those thoughts to flood your mind, and you need to be equipped to deal with them. Having a Cookie Jar helps you regain control of your train of thought before doubts derail it. If you don’t have any major boasts in your Cookie Jar to fuel future success, start with little wins. They will build you up for the bigger wins to come.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Can't Hurt Me here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.

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