Lessons from the Special Forces and Mossad’s Top Psychologist | Elite Performance Podcast #1

Today we're gonna talk about emotional fortitude. Basically how to build the emotional and mental fortitude that's necessary to constantly tackle any goal and really win big in life and in business. So for anyone who doesn't know me, my name is Itamar Marani. When I was 18, I was drafted into the most elite unit in the Israeli Special Forces. So out of the whole country, 18 year olds, there were 12 of us. I then went into the Israeli security agency, I did some undercover work abroad, and various countries, I was also the youngest Air Marshal in the country's history at the time, I'm a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, I was ranked top 10 in the world amateur level. And I also did some counter terrorism projects in the private sector and managed multiple teams, multinational seals, and that was a pretty interesting time in my life. And nowadays, what I do is I talk to entrepreneurs, and I coach entrepreneurs, about emotional fortitude, and having an effective mindset that they can really win in their business, and really excel what they thought they ever could. So I want to take you guys back to my time, there's really special forces. Now between months four to six is what's called advanced unit bootcamp. It's literally the toughest time the training, it's two months, which basically consists in Hell Week. So my story was that on one wintry day, when it was cold, and it was raining, and we brought in the last week, after seven weeks of not sleeping, of not eating, not knowing what's going to happen next, and being in this entire fog, and this haze, it really, really started to come down in the rain. And as soon as that happened, the officer came to our tent were clean air weapons and said, guys, it's raining. Time to get your gear on. And we knew what that meant. That meant we were gonna go for a run. Now these runs, they were also a fog. You never knew how far you would go. And you never know how long they would take you to start running. And you would just keep going until the officer said, Stop. Now this run when particularly long, and we also had to go through some pretty deep puddles, we were literally waist deep, wet, our boots were just soggy and squishing everywhere. And all the skin that was already shaved off was bruising even more. Now personally, I always struggled with the long runs. There were some things that I was really good at with the leadership tactics, some of the drills, but the long runs were over, I was struggled. And I started falling behind. When I fell behind. The officer came to me and said, Itamar, are you okay, I was okay, I'm fine. He said, Itamar, are you sure it's okay, I'm good. And he said really good. You're gonna take a break for a sec, just the trucks right here. Once you take a breath, relax for a second. So now I'm going to share my trucks right there. And in a tired haze, I just thought that would be a good idea. So I said, Cool. I'll take a look. Take a breath for a second. When you catch my breath. He said right trucks right there. And the moment I sat on the truck, was the moment I got kicked out of the unit. There was no ceremonial Bell, nothing big. He basically told me afterwards, when we got to the bases, like listen, that shouldn't have happened. And we're kicking you out of the unit for self secession that uses CT to weakness in your mind. And basically, this is not the place for you. And they dropped me off at a gas station afterwards, I was close to my house, and they were like, we'll get in touch with you. And we'll explain to you how you get to wherever you're gonna get to next in the military. Thank you very much. And it was one of those moments I'll never forget. Because I remember sitting there in the dark in the gas station kind of by myself, and a lot of pain, and a lot of embarrassment. And I remember in that moment, a couple beliefs seared into my head. And we all have these moments in life where we get down, and they leave a very strong imprint on us. And for me, the worldviews I adopted back then when this happen are as follows One em soft, because if I quit like that I must be soft. To Itamar as a failure. It was a very embarrassing thing for me to feel like I had to go back and tell people that I failed in this unit. And also that if Itamar sees initial success, then he gets complacent and fails because it did see initial success. There's put in leadership positions and drills. But honestly, they go to my head a little bit, and I thought I could coast. And finally, if things get hard, video Mark gives up and fails. As an 18 year old, those were the worldviews I started carrying with me. And they created this giant sense of fear, a fear of failure, and of worthiness, that I'm not good enough because I failed, and I'm embarrassed. So what that did, honestly, it created a giant chip on my shoulder.

I decided I'm going to become Ultra disciplined. I am going to not just go harder, I am going to be harder. And that's just that. And basically I want it to be like the Terminator. I thought if I could be like a terminator could be this machine that would make me happy because all these fears all these feelings of insecurity or inadequacy won't be there anymore. And it kind of worked. So when I joined the Israeli security agency and did the whole Air Marshal thing as well. It served me well there. The course is very intense to get into this. It's only x Special Forces, and it's 10 weeks of nonstop Krav Maga up running in physical exercise, shooting drills like tactical shooting, how can you hit a target? How well can you hit a target, and finally clearing death houses, planes, and all that jazz. And it was a very difficult course for me because I had also gotten to a car accident the first week. And I had all the reasons in the world to give myself an excuse, but I didn't. And because I didn't, I was able to see a lot of success there. And I was able to graduate there and this person ever, and I really felt like me just going harder and being harder. It served me really well there. And it also served me really well. When I started going into jujitsu and competing. I was winning a lot of local competitions, I was super disciplined with all my training, literally, I didn't drink any alcohol for I think five years, I was just ultra ultra discipline. And I saw a really good level of success with it. Until I got to the world championship level, every time at the world championship level, at the quarterfinals, I will choke the matches leading up to that usually with five matches leading up to the quarterfinals, I will destroy people will be shut out, it'd be really big margin of victory, I would be the kind of job that I was capable of being. But as soon as the quarterfinals were around, I would choke, I would have this immense sense of pressure that wow, this could finally validate me, this could tell me that I am not soft. And I'm not a failure, if I'm the first is really ever met all the worlds. And obviously, that created so much tension and so much unnecessary and unrealistic pressure that I wasn't able to perform. And no matter how my coaches how much they would try to coach me about this and tell me what I'm doing and explain to me what's going on. I just couldn't listen to it. I just had this block. And literally, I would lose it the world's at 4pm. And I would find someplace in LA to train at 8pm. And I just thought I need to do more of the same thing that obviously isn't working. That's explained the next part, I really take you back to when I worked in the Israeli security agency. So I was stationed in Mumbai, India in 2010. And when you're undercover abroad, there are certain boundaries that you can play within and certain things you can absolutely not do. Now, I hadn't met a person at the local Gold's Gym, and we would meet up to spar, we would just hit the pads a little bit and spar, but I never let him know obviously, where I live, what my real name was, and so on and so on. I always kept a safe distance. Now during the quarter, the half final the semi finals of the World Cup in 2010. He called me off Sunday at halftime and he said, Itamar our TV isn't working, is there any chance we can come see the game at your place? And I said, No, just go ahead. There's a little bar in the neighborhood area that the gym is in? Why don't you go see it over there? And he said, Are you sure we really want to see the I'm gonna go I'm just gonna say that the game at the sports bar, you'll be fine. And he calls me about two minutes later. He says either they're not showing the game, we're really desperate to see it. Is there any chance for coming to your place? And this was of course was an absolutely not. There's no way I would ever First off, let anybody know where I live, be invite somebody else into my own house when I'm doing that kind of work? And I said, No. I'm sure you can find somewhere else to watch it. He's like, Oh, man, come on, please. We're just downstairs from your place anyway. And as soon as he said that, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I remember this. And there was a pause. And I asked him, How do you know where I live? And the phone went silent. And after about two seconds, where my flatmate who was also working undercover gave me a look like what's going on. I spoken to the phone and said, Okay, now I know who you are. And you obviously know who I am.

Luckily, that was enough to deter them. And I was out of the country within a couple of days. But it scarred me. And I didn't realize that at the time, I didn't realize that that left me with a lot of PTSD about meeting new people. And I had a lot of social anxieties. And for about eight years, I wasn't able to make any social connections in life, I was very, very shelled off. And I was very shut down emotionally a lot of ways. Now, I was fortunate enough to have a friend point this out to me and explain something's going on here. And that it's okay for me to go see some help about this. And I was very, very fortunate that because of my background, and through my backchannels I was able to get in touch with the head of psychology of the Mossad and he worked with me one on one. Now, granted that when we started to work on this, I had zero awareness of all that stuff in the military, all those fears of inadequacies, all that stuff that held me back in jujitsu. I had zero awareness that I had any of these insecurities. I already told him I had this issue with that kinda, it's stopping me from being social, I want to work on it. And what I learned from him really, is that a lot of times in life when we think we want something we say that we feel like that we really dream about this thing that we want all the time. We say we really want this thing but the reality is we're more connected to something else. We think we want this but subconsciously where really matters, we're much more connected to something else. And more times than not, that thing is actually a fear. And it's not a fear of spiders or heights, it's a fear of having a certain feeling that we do not want to have. And you might be shocked to hear someone like me saying that. But that's what it is. Like, that's the reality. As human beings, we all have three core fears. And what's really important to understand is that they're not rational fears. They're not something that makes sense in today's world. There's something that stayed with us from 100,000 years ago, when we evolved, and they were extremely, extremely helpful in helping us survive back then. But these days, when we're not trying to survive and not get eaten by a lion. The reality is, they really stop us from going heavy really stop us from thriving. Now I'm going to talk about the three core fears, one of them might stand out more to you than the others. But I guarantee you, all three of them affect you in some way or another. So the first core fear is a fear of uncertainty. This is I'm terrified to feel out of control, or I don't have the power to control things. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to control your life and ownership of your success. But whenever in an attempt to override your emotional fear of losing control, we try to make everything perfect. That's when we run into big problems. Because that's not something that's realistic, we can't control everything in our lives, right? That leads to a lot of anxiety leads to an analysis, paralysis, and overthinking, and Autumn micromanaging and being the bottleneck in your business and a life sometimes. And if you've ever been called the control freak, this is probably where it comes from. Now, the second core fear is a fear of worthlessness, and this is what I had, this is I'm not good enough to, or I need to have x y Zed before I or it's a fear of failure, or who am I to, which causes a lot of perfectionism and a lot of imposter syndrome. Now, I felt like I needed to have a certain accolade, before I was good enough in my own space, I needed to have that metal the World Championship, in order for me to be good enough to be respectable to be worthy of respect. And because of that, it created so much pressure that I always always underperformed when I got to that stage. And it was always at stage three times three quarterfinals it's want to choke. Now, with entrepreneurship, there already is a built in lack of stability. So it's very understandable why we have that fear of failure and perfectionism. And again, usually comes to some kind of irrational fear of not being loved or seeing some kind of failure, usually in your early adult life or in your childhood. But this can't stop us. And it's something really important to be aware that this is probably playing in the back of your head. That's third core fear is a fear of abandonment. Now this is the one where I talk that everybody tries to pretend they don't have but they do. Now this is what happens if she he or they leave me. Or I could never do X because of what they might say or think about me. Well, what will people think if I fail?

Now, the funny thing with this fear of abandonment is that most of the times we don't even know who this they are, or this he or this she are. It's this ominous fear of being outcasted by the tribe. But we let that stop us. And the real problem with this fear of abandonment is out of a fear of not wanting to be abandoned by all these random people that we don't even know. We ended up abandoning ourselves in a way. So we abandon our dreams, we abandon new business ideas or product ideas or projects. Because again, we're afraid of being judged somehow and being left. Or we abandon ourselves by being stuck in relationships that don't serve us. Or we resort to vices, drugs, drinking, sex, shopping, procrastinating. We try to find all these ways to numb ourselves. Because every time we fall into any of these fears, we know we're not acting in alignment to what we truly want to the kind of people we want to be. And so we try to run away from it. For some people, it's drugs. For some people, it's drinking. For some people, it's sex, or porn, or shopping or buying things to make you feel good. Or the really low level things like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or even doing small things in your business that you know won't make a difference, but at least make you feel productive. Now I'm sure if you think about this stuff, you can pinpoint times where this has happened to you. Whether it's you haven't taken action, and because of a fear of uncertainty, because of a fear of worthlessness or the you've abandoned what you wanted because of a fear of abandonment. So take a time for a second right now and ask yourself which one resonated with you the most was the fear of uncertainty, the fear of worthlessness or the fear of abandonment. Now, to go on a different note. In order to see success you have to take action That's a given. And I think a big part of why so many people don't take the actions that will serve them and actually help them get what they want in life comes down to a simple equation, I want to introduce to you a call to action equation. So the action equation basically dictates that your desire, or your level of motivation minus the resistance you're facing, will determine whether you take action or not. Now, the motivation fallacy, which is so common out there is that people keep trying to focus on that first part of the equation, and just leveling up their level of motivation or their level of desire. Now, the reason people fall into this, I think, is very understandable. So when we start out in entrepreneurship, and we have to make money, we have to get that product launch, we have to make a couple sales, we'll do whatever it takes, because we have to survive, we have to make it happen. It's very similar to when you hear those stories about a mom who picks a car off her kid, because she has to her kid has to survive. And we kind of do the same in our businesses. But then at a certain point, we've succeeded, and things are good enough, we don't have to do more, we don't have to grow, we don't have to push our boundaries. And that survival motivation naturally dies down to a normal level. And then we're stuck. We're stuck at this place of inaction, where the level of motivation we have is the same as the level of internal resistance we have. And it sometimes changes here or there. But mostly, we're kind of plateaued, we're stuck. We don't understand why we can't push and do the big things like we used to when we got started. The motivation fallacy basically tells people you know what, let's go back to the good old days, when we were super motivated when we had level 10 motivation, and we could overcome any kind of resistance that we ever faced. And it's very tempting to do that. So people do it. There's two main ways I've seen it. One is let's call it the softer approach to realign with your purpose and find your why and get really, really inspired. The second approach is the harder approach this is to find an external source of motivation to toughen up to push harder to wake up at 4am, watch YouTube videos, and all that jazz. Now, the reality with both of these is that they're extremely difficult to do and maintain focus on their motivational bandaids. Now, the good news is, if you're trying to do any of these, if you've done this before, it means that you're aware that something here is not around your skill set, you're not trying to learn more things, but you're trying to enhance your ability to execute, and really take action. So it means your problem where which is great. The bad news is that these kinds of methods do not create sustainable, elite performance, what they do is they absolutely will give you a boost of motivation, they get you back to let's say, a level eight level of motivation. And that will override your level five internal resistance. But after a while, it could be a day, it could be a week, it could be a month,

it will subside. And you'll be back to that level where you're stuck with your level five motivation and your level of five internal resistance. Now, beyond causing frustration, this causes a lot of confusion. People think why can't these people I see do it? Why can I do it. And what I want to propose is doing something entirely different. Don't get more motivated, because it's not sustainable. Instead, let's hack at the other part of this action equation. Let's focus on just getting people's internal resistance down to almost zero. So that way, even when they have a level five motivation, if they just have level one internal resistance, they take action, and every regular day, they just take action. And what's really amazing that even on days when they aren't motivated when things aren't going their way. If they have level two motivation only, but their internal resistance is just at a level one, they will still take action. And if you're asking yourself, well, why focus on this part of the equation because it sounds a lot less sexy? Well, I'll ask you this, what's the more intelligent thing to do? If you're trying to go further and faster, one, press harder on the gas pedal. Or to put the handbrake down, you want to put the handbrake down. But most people these days only teach how to press harder on the gas pedal. And it looks great to all this confusion, and most frustration, people not seeing the results. And on top of that, why should focus on this part of the equation is because it's sustainable. Now, we all know that success compounds, and we need sustainability in order for that to happen. Correct. And that's why this is so important. You don't want ups and downs of motivation. We take action in action action in action. You want this consistent action. That's why we really create elite outcomes, this sustainability that compounds. And honestly beyond that you have a better life outside of your business. If every time you have to motivate yourself and pump yourself up to take action because you have to override all this resistance that you're facing. You're going to get burnt out. You're not going to have the energy to also enjoy other things in life. And more importantly than just the success you'll see from doing this as far as money and success in your business. See, you'll be able to actually live a lot more life, like, this stuff doesn't only affect your business, and you have to realize that we don't magically leave our insecurities and personal issues in the office. It affects how we are with others, how we are with ourselves. And simply put the level of connection, love and fun, we actually get to have in life beyond external success. And the thing that's most effective for where you are right now. And that's really important to understand. Now, I don't want you or anyone else to waste their time, if there's something else that give them better results. So next week, we're going to cover how to understand that we'll cover how to assess if the next constraint you really need to tackle in order to see success is actually an effective mindset, or emotional fortitude, or something else entirely. Okay, we'll be talking about the hierarchy of elite performance and give you clarity about what goes into being able to perform at an elite level, and achieve massive external and internal results. Now, we might lose a few listeners, but that's perfectly fine. Because if after that, you're saying, This is me, we'll get you the best stuff possible. Now, this season is going to be a mix of case studies, interviews, and live coaching calls. So I had a coaching call the other day with a former client, we're gonna do just a one off and I was like, Man, I wish people could see this could listen to because there's so much value to be learned just from seeing how this happens in real time. And now he was just being so cognizant of his mental bicycle. This is what's going on this, what's going on this what's going on. And I think there could be tremendous value in sharing with you guys who's giving you a front row seat to see exactly how this works, so you can apply it for yourself. So also, if you're interested in that, go to the link below Itamar marani.com/podcast guests, and we'll take it from there. And that's it. So I will see you in the next episode. We will break down the hierarchy of elite performance and you can understand if effective mindset and emotional fortitude is what's going to take you to that next mountaintop. See you there.