Celebrating Mental Fitness, with John Macaskill and Sean Fargo

Speaker 1 · 0:03Hi, everybody. My name is Sean Fargo. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. Today we're joined by John McCaskill. John is a retired Navy SEAL commander, turn leadership and mindfulness coach. During his 24-year Navy career, he served in multiple highly dynamic leadership positions from the battlefield to the operations center and the boardroom. He now runs a podcast called Men Talking Mindfulness. He does speaking engagements on developing leadership, grit, and resilience. And he owns his own mindfulness consulting company called Frogman Mindfulness. In all three roles, his desire is to improve cultures and individuals through mindfulness and meditation, vulnerability and compassion. John, it's a pleasure to reconnect with you, to catch up with you, and to learn a little bit more about how you're bringing mindfulness to the world these days. So welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 · 1:14Well, thanks for having me, Sean. It's uh it's good to reconnect. It is good to have mindfulness in my own life, and it is an honor to be sharing it with others so that they can have it in their lives, so that they can live that happier, healthier, more fulfilled lives personally and professionally. Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 1:32What brought you to mindfulness personally?

Speaker 2 · 1:36Well, sure. It started ironically in the Navy SEALs. I had a particular operation that I was involved in that uh went sideways very quickly. And we lost a a lot of my brothers on the battlefield. And that caused me a lot of anxiety and stress and survivor's guilt, imposter syndrome, depression, you name it. I was I was struggling with it. And I addressed that through alcohol initially, and then prescription drugs. And then I got to a very dark spot and I went to go see a counselor, and this counselor recommended mindfulness and meditation to me. And at first I laughed in his face because I was very naive about the power of these practices and what they were. And there's a stigma, even more so amongst men, around doing what could be perceived as kind of soft practices and what they are and what they aren't, and what they do and what they don't do. So I laughed in this counselor's face and I told him I actually had some real deep problems, real deep issues that I was struggling with. And I didn't believe that mindfulness and meditation could help. And then he actually kind of flipped the script on me and knew that I was in a field where high performance is rewarded and celebrated. And uh he appealed to that side of me and he said, Well, what if I could give you something that would change the way that you perform personally and professionally, mentally and emotionally? And I said, Well, yeah, doc, absolutely. I would I would take that pill if I could. And what is it? And he's like, Well, it's not a pill, it's it's mindfulness and meditation. So I want you to try it out and see whether it changes your performance. So I went home and I downloaded a meditation app. I mean, there's tons of them out there, and I downloaded one of them and sat down the next morning for an hour-long meditation, my first meditation, an hour-long meditation, and didn't go very well, as you may expect. Yeah, I'm a type A personality, and if I if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna go all out. So I went back to that same counselor the next week and I was like, hey, doc, that that meditation stuff, it's exactly what I thought it was. There's no way I can meditate. I'm too busy a person. My mind is too full of stuff. There's no way that I can sit down and meditate. And he asked me what I did, and I told him what I just told you. And he said that's like lining up with the starting line of a marathon without ever having run a step before, or like going into the weight room and getting under 350 pounds on the bench press without ever having stepped foot in the weight room before. So now he's speaking my language. And I'm like, Well, Doc, how do you recommend I start? And here's the irony: he introduced me to a practice that I had done before in the SEAL teams. He re-introduced me to box breathing. And we do box breathing in the SEAL teams to control our heart rate and control our anxiety, control our breath, our respiratory rate when we are training so that we can shoot better, so that we can be more aware of the present moment. And so I was like, Oh, Doc, I've done that before. He's like, well, do it outside of the shooting range. You can do it, you know, in your car when you're driving to work and you get cut off by somebody, or you can do it when you're sitting behind your desk and you get a new email that causes some anxiety, or you can do it when you're starting to feel sad about past events. And so I started to do that more regularly. And the effects, they're immediate, but they're not long lasting. Well, I continued to do it, and then I started to get into more in-depth meditations and I started to see that the effects were longer lasting, and eventually there was some overlap between these effects. And after about two or three months, I started to notice performance changes, yes, but the quote unquote side effects of these practices were that I was more at peace. The anxieties, the stresses, and the depressions, they still came, but I was better able to handle them, process them in a more healthy way. And it got to the point where this became a regular part of my routine daily, multiple times a day. And I had somebody come up to me at work and they pulled me aside and they said, John, what are you on? Like, what are you taking? Because they had seen the difference in me. So it wasn't just me thinking that I had changed. They could see the difference. And I saw at that point that it was almost a duty and an obligation to pay it forward and share what I consider to be life-changing and quite literally even life-saving practices with anyone who will listen, which is when I jumped online and thought, okay, I want to, I want to be a mindfulness teacher, I want to be certified in this so that I can help others. And I jumped online and I looked and found you and found your program. And we went through that together. And since then, I've been working to change and save lives.

Speaker 1 · 7:08Beautiful. Thanks for sharing all that. Wasn't aware of all of that background. Yeah, and some of these practices like box breathing, mindfulness of breath, can help us to bring awareness to these more coarse, say obvious levels of experience and help settle the mind. And then once it starts to settle, we can start to notice other energies, emotions, what lies beneath. And things like body scan, mindful walking, some of these visceral somatic practices can help us to realize oh, we might be bottling something, or oh, there's these energies I wasn't really noticing before because I was so distracted, and I was coping in these different ways, and I wasn't really acknowledging what's already here. You talked about side effects a couple times, and how some of these side effects can be actually positive side effects, which is not normally what we associate with the term side effects. And you mentioned how other people noticed how you change. And you said that they said, What are you taking? Like, what's what's different about you? What are you doing? Can you speak to what kinds of side effects you think other people may have noticed in you at that time? Did they say what they noticed in you that might have been different? And what they thought of that.

Speaker 2 · 8:53Yeah, I mean, the community that I was in in the military was a hyper masculine community, the the Navy SEALs, you know, one, all the SEALs at the time were all men, and and currently they are still all men. They have opened up the training to women, but they have yet to have a woman successfully make it through the training. Because of that, the training that it takes to get there, and then the fact that we're all men, the environment that we operate in, that we train in, that we kind of live in is hyper-masculine. And we kind of wear this false bravado, false armor of bravado at times, and we don't want to share that we're hurting, that we're scared, that we're sad because of how that may be perceived. And we also don't want to come across as poor performers mentally or physically. And there were times when I was so anxious about my performance, both mentally and physically, that that showed through. So I was ironically, I so badly wanted to perform well that I actually ended up hurting my performance. And people could see that. Prior to finding mindfulness and meditation, I was very anxious from almost the moment that I woke up until the moment that I went to sleep. And I was concerned about the things in my life that didn't really matter. And I think people could see that I was not apathetic. I still cared about my performance, but I wasn't to the point where my anxiety caused my performance to degrade. And they saw that. And then, yeah, they did see the softer side of me as well. And you know, I started talking openly about my feelings. At one point, I had a big calendar that sat behind me at work. And whenever I had a mental health appointment, I would write it on that calendar and highlight it in yellow where everyone that walked past my desk could see it. And I would have people come up to me and say, Hey, hey, sir, are you okay? And I was like, Yeah, I'm perfectly fine. What's up? They're like, I see you have a mental health appointment on your calendar. It's like, well, that's me attaining and maintaining some level of mental fitness. And we need to change the narrative around mental health and make it where it's mental fitness. Because that's what physical fitness is, right? We applaud somebody if they go to the gym or they start running or they start eating well, taking care of their physical fitness. And if they're doing that, we don't tell them that they're physically ill. We don't treat them as though they're physically ill. But if we have someone trying to attain and maintain some level of mental fitness, then we think that they're mentally ill and they need help. Now, there may definitely be times when you need help. And I'm I've been there and I continue to go there. I am not immune to feeling down, but I know how to get the support that I need. And mindfulness allows me to be open and honest with others, but more importantly, be open and honest with myself about how I'm feeling, about how I'm thinking, those types of things.

Speaker 1 · 12:41So you talked about how you know a lot of your peers, like in the Navy SEALs, obviously had this value of performance, fitness, health, and that's largely measured and evaluated on a physical level. What you can do physically, you know, there's this mental component of being able to perform, but mental health is not always seen as something that we need to prioritize proactively in order to attain this mental fitness that people talk about more and more these days. But mental health is oftentimes seen as a response to when we're mentally traumatized or quote unquote damaged, or when we're going through a really rough patch that's often shrouded in shame. And yet when we talk about mental fitness, it's interesting how you know some of the ways that you experienced an increasing amount of mental health and fitness was when people said that you seem more relaxed, more present. And oftentimes that sense of relaxation can feel like a sense of confidence, strength to be able to be with whatever's here in a relaxed way, where you're not being distracted, or that you're not allowing the external stimuli to dictate where your mind goes, that you're not being blown by any given wind direction in any given way. But when we talk about mental fitness, it can be easy to think that it's all about doing, doing, doing, attaining, that it has to be hard, that you have to exert, you know, blood, sweat, and tears in order to be mentally fit. You know, there is a side of learning how to concentrate, meeting mental challenges for what they are, working with energies in the body that may not be pleasant. So there is this sort of active element to mental fitness, but yet there's also this side of learning how to relax, how to breathe, how to notice these miracles in front of us, you know, how to sleep in a way where we're feeling a sense of ease and calm, and dare I say, care. So it's interesting how when we talk about mental fitness, there's this say active element that is true some of the time, and yet there's also this side of ease and relaxation that can oftentimes be harder than the active stuff. Can you talk about what it means to be mentally fit and what sorts of practices are you finding that people resonate with in the beginning? And which ones are harder for say men or people who are highly uh interested in the performance uh part of their lives?

Speaker 2 · 16:55Yeah, great way of phrasing that, Sean. And and I love listening to you because you just have such a calming way about you. So thank you for helping me to be at ease in this conversation. You mentioned that the term mental fitness has this connotation of doing, doing, doing, so that you achieve some goal. And I'm sure you've heard the saying that we've turned into human doings and not human beings. I think that is one of the tougher things to do, is to just be. So many of us wake up with a cell phone. This is what we use as our alarm clock. And after we turn that alarm clock off, we instantly jump into social media or our email or our bank accounts or our text messages, and we start the day off in a reactive stance. Maybe not even a stance, we may still be laying in our beds, right? We're reactive before we even get out of our beds because we're doing and we don't allow ourselves to just be. That's why I so much appreciated that pause that you took at the beginning of this. It's something that even as a mindfulness teacher, I sometimes neglect to do. And our podcast, Men Talking Mindfulness, we start off the show with a meditation and we end the show with some type of grounding practice, just as much for ourselves as it is for our audience. Because we can get wrapped up in the doing and we can even get wrapped up in the performance enhancing sides of these practices. I feel that if you start these practices for the performance enhancing, that's great. I think a lot of people will start these practices for performance enhancement that otherwise would never have started. But once you get into these practices, you start to see the other profound effects that they have on your mind, on your body, on your heart. And then the outward effects that they have on your relationships with your friends, your family, your colleagues, and your inward side that it's the relationship with yourself. When you start to see that, then you start practicing for another reason altogether, or multiple other reasons altogether. And now the main reason that you started practicing and the quote unquote side effects are flipped. Now the side effects are the performance. That's a side effect. But the main reason you're practicing is because of all the other things that it does for you. And I think that's where people become lifetime practitioners, is when they start to see how it affects their heart and mind, their spirit, their soul on a different level. And you walk through life in a different way. You see things quite literally with your eyes in a different way than you had before. I was speaking last week out in uh Portland, Oregon. And I took a pause in between sessions and I went and did a walk. And somebody came up to me in between. They're like, So, what were you doing? I was like, Well, there's this beautiful bumblebee flying around the flowers, and I wanted to capture that. And they're like, Well, you didn't you didn't take out your phone. I was like, No, I didn't, I didn't want to capture it with my phone, I wanted to capture it with my mind's eye. And I think that's just how we walk through life is you see and feel things in a completely different way when you start to uh live mindfully.

Speaker 1 · 20:46Yeah, well said, yeah, you're reminding me of my very first meditation practice was like an hour, and I treated it as say a competition or a game, like how long can I concentrate? How long can I stay with this? It was very humbling because I hadn't trained my mind at that point, but I thought, you know, I want to get into meditation because it is so challenging. I want to be able to do it kind of as a performance metric. Like, can I do this? And then over time, similar to your story, the more I practiced, the more people noticed a change in me, and they were reflecting back what was happening internally, that I was in fact changing in very different ways than I had ever anticipated. And so, in a way, you know, what brings us to mindfulness almost doesn't matter. I mean, it matters, but if we're sincere with the practice, or if we're really doing the practices, they will change us, whether we know it or not, whether we know what those changes are or not, they will bear fruit for everything, ranging from performance and confidence to happiness and care and ease. And we'll have that choice of how we respond to our life. It's not like we're being controlled by this practice, but rather it gives us more choice on how we want to be and how we show up in the world. John, how can people find out more about your work and how can they get in touch with you?

Speaker 2 · 22:46The easiest way is to go to johnmacaskill.com forward slash links, and that's J-O-N, M-A-C-A-S-K-I-L-L dot com forward slash links. That will take you to all my different social media, my email, and all the various business ventures and mindfulness ventures that I'm on.

Speaker 1 · 23:12John, I've been staying in touch with you over the years, and I've always appreciated your sincerity to the practice, your ability to share mindfulness and share mindfulness practices in a clear, relevant way. I think that a lot of people can really resonate with your way of being as well as your story. You know, not only men, but anyone can certainly learn a lot from you. I highly recommend John's podcast for those of you listening. If you need a keynote speaker, please reach out to him. But John, thank you so much for the work that you're doing in the world. It's so nice to reconnect with you. Let us know how we can best support you. But I really appreciate how you're helping a lot of people through these difficult times with a sense of courage that you embody. And so we need more of you in the world, John, and just want to celebrate you. And thank you so much for sharing part of your journey with us.

Speaker 2 · 24:22Oh, thank you for allowing me to do so, and thank you for allowing me to get to this point with what you've taught me and everything else. And then thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. I really appreciate your bringing me on, and I appreciate the conversation. It was a very rich conversation, and I enjoyed it very much.

Speaker 1 · 24:41Wonderful. Thank you, John.