What does your boardroom meeting have in common with a platoon of Navy SEALs dropping into a war zone?
Apparently, more than you’d think. Both involve the fear of the unknown, and both require a mastery of that uncertainty to succeed.
We sat down with Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander turned entrepreneur and thought leader, to learn how to walk confidently into the unknown, whether it’s a major life decision or the next stage of your career.
From combat to corporate
Diviney completed 13 overseas deployments—11 in Iraq and Afghanistan—and served as the officer in charge of selection. In 2017, he set aside his combat boots, and in 2020, he stepped into different shoes as founder of The Attributes, where he teaches leadership workshops and delivers keynote speeches.
Working with the likes of Google, American Airlines, the San Francisco 49ers, Zoom and the Bank of America, he transforms organizations using the same lessons he picked up during his time in the SEALs. Turns out there’s not a whole lot that’s different when it comes to leadership, whether it’s in a war zone or an office—at least, from a neuroscience perspective.
“Leadership is fairly ubiquitous in the way it’s done,” Diviney explains. “High-performing teams exist everywhere…. They’re certainly on the battlefield, they’re in sports arenas and they’re in the business world.”
Excelling when things are going well isn’t the measure of a high-performing team. The key is to look at how a team handles pressure in the worst circumstances. This close examination drew Diviney into his current role when transitioning from his Navy career.
“As a Navy SEAL, there were certain distinctions… that allowed us to do what we did: our ability to drop into chaos and perform, our ability to do what most people think are fairly amazing things,” he explains. “It became very interesting to me to try to dissect what those elements about us are—and were—and then see if I could translate that into regular, everyday life.”
How to master uncertainty
What sets those who make the cut as Navy SEALs apart, other than the 70–85% attrition rate?
Physical prowess is certainly part of the picture, but Diviney explains that Navy SEALs’ minds function differently. It’s about how they handle fear, a topic he delves further into in his latest book, Masters of Uncertainty.
Fear isn’t inherently bad, despite how we tend to perceive it. Diviney describes fear as a “human risk assessment tool,” referring to research conducted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.
“Fear is simply a combination of two things… anxiety plus uncertainty,” he explains. “What’s happening in that environment is that your frontal lobe—your conscious, decision-making brain—is starting to take a back seat to your limbic brain, your emotional aspect at the extremes. This is called autonomic overload, or amygdala hijack.”
And that’s where we stay, unless we try to master it. “Uncertainty exists in our brains when three aspects of our environment are not present… duration, pathway and outcome (DPO),” he adds.
But there’s a way to get back in the driver’s seat. “One of the tools that we as Navy SEALs, or any top performers, use to step through those environments is… creating our own DPOs,” he says. “This is done through a process that I call ‘moving horizons.’ In other words, we pick something to focus on.”
Diviney explains this using the analogy of running for hours while carrying heavy boats in the middle of the night. Instead of focusing on getting through the entire night, Diviney moved the horizon. “I remember thinking to myself… ‘I’m just going to focus on the end of this sand berm…’ As soon as I… created that DPO and picked that horizon, I created a goal in my head,” he says. “And so, when I got to that end of that sand berm, [my brain gave me] a dopamine reward… [allowing] me to come back and do it again and say, ‘OK, what’s my new horizon?’”
If you’ve ever done something similar, you’re actualizing your neurology, according to Diviney. “We’re bringing our frontal lobe online, and we’re beginning to chunk our environment in a way that creates these DPOs and allows us to step through these environments,” he adds.
Attributes matter more than skills
This approach is transferable to just about every challenge, including major decisions like succession planning—though it goes even further than that. To choose the right leader, you need to look past skills and zero in on attributes, the character traits that come out in high-stress situations.
“[Our] attributes show up the most visibly and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty,” Diviney explains. “It’s because in those environments, [our] attributes tell us who we are at our most raw.”
“Skills tell us what is. Attributes tell us what could be. Skills show the ‘now,’ and attributes show potential,” he adds. “We angle toward skills because they’re easy to see, easy to measure… so we often overindex on what skills are required. That’s when most people get in trouble with the hiring or succession process: They hire the best, most skilled person, and that person turns out not to have… the qualities that are required for actually doing the job.”
Diviney and his team have come up with 41 attributes that are innate to all people, though our levels of each attribute differ. “We have an assessment tool that stacks your attributes from your top one all the way down to your bottom one,” he says. “[But] your top five attributes [and] your bottom five attributes [are] not strengths and weaknesses. Your success as a human is as much because of your top five as your bottom five.”
Evolving leadership
Diviney explains that it’s crucial for leaders to consider what a company needs to get to the next level, rather than what’s worked thus far. Appointing someone just like you, for example, might be the wrong choice for reaching this goal.
“We all know that in the startup entrepreneurial phase, what got a company through the first five years is not necessarily what’s going to get that company from year five to year 15,” he says. “Oftentimes, the leadership has to change because it takes a different leader to play the long game.
“Now, you might need someone who’s a little bit more patient,” he adds, “someone who might be more discerning, someone who might be more deliberate… someone who’s perhaps more persistent.”
Regardless of who they select, the best thing leaders can do during a time of succession is to keep their team in the loop as much as possible. “I think transparency and communication [are] the key to helping people through uncertainty, challenge and stress,” Diviney continues. “[In] SEAL teams, everything… was about communication. We communicated seamlessly.”
Selecting the right attributes for leadership is daunting, especially since attributes are, by their nature, dynamic and can be altered—though not without considerable effort. Diviney explains that adjusting the levels of any attribute requires the knowledge that it’s lacking, the desire or motivation to develop it (because it’s not always necessary) and finally, the effort to seek out environments that test the lacking attribute, like driving in traffic or choosing the longest lines in the grocery store on purpose to test their patience.
“Human beings in any environment are constantly dialing up or dialing down our attributes,” he says. “The key is it takes conscious thought for us to do that.”
Constructing an attribute dream team
Good leadership should understand that altering an attribute isn’t always feasible. If this is too difficult, Diviney suggests a much easier alternative: Rely on teammates with attributes that are opposite to yours. By constructing a leadership team with varied attributes, you can cover all your bases, no matter what is thrown at you.
“We are faced with uncertainty, [the] challenge of stress, every single day, and it’s really about generating that habit of introspection with ourselves and our teammates and helping them understand and figure that out for themselves,” Diviney explains.
“If we do that together as a team, one of the superpowers of the SEAL teams—or any high-performing team—is, ‘I don’t only know my attributes, I know the attributes of my teammates as well,’” he adds. “And now you’re clicking, because now you know exactly how [and] when you’re going to lean on people, when they’re gonna lean on you, and you’re fully transparent and fully vulnerable about… strengths and weaknesses, and the team begins to run at super, super high levels.”
As we continue to endure uncertain, high-pressure situations, the ability to navigate them with confidence is a necessity. Surviving chaos is one thing—but thriving in it? That’s where the magic happens.
If you’re ready to fine-tune your leadership skills, register for the SUCCESS® Leadership Lab, where Diviney presents “Define Your Leadership Identity,” which will help you clarify your leadership vision, style and strengths. Diviney is one of 10 experts in this 18-day virtual course for rising leaders who want to lead with clarity, influence and confidence. The hybrid experience combines expert-led lessons with live coaching to provide you with practical tools to build trust with your team, navigate chaos and crises, shape a healthy, driven work culture, and more.
This article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of SUCCESS+ digital magazine.
Photo courtesy of Rich Diviney
