John R. Miles

Hopefully there's some connection there between the two.

I know Jim Murphy, who wrote Inter Excellence, was taking my book to some of the teams that he works with.

And also golf coach Sean Foley uses it with golfers he coaches.

So maybe the ideas are expanding.

Dan, I want to take this whole concept that we've been having and now take it to one of the groups that you've worked with closely, which is Navy Special Warfare, or SEAL teams as many people know them.

I myself didn't go to BUDS.

I had hoped I could have gone to BUDS, but I got injured my senior year at the Naval Academy playing rugby.

My father is actually UDT class of 16, so he preceded me, which made me want to do it.

But I ended up serving the National Security Agency, and I got really lucky because at the academy, we have sponsor families, and my sponsor dad ended up getting promoted at NSA.

In fact, he was the top civilian leader at the National Security Agency.

He asked me to take this concept of inserting integrated teams into the SEALs,

So I went from the unit that I was stationed at and got reassigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10.

What I observed when I did that switch is that in the SEAL teams, there's this concept of the brotherhood that you hear them often talk about.

And I found that in their groups, it wasn't that they just perform well, but they felt unusually alive, which is something that you really capture in Flourish.

And this is fundamentally different from high performance.

And I was hoping you might be able to explain it.

Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment.

Conversations like this often surface a quiet realization.

Flourishing depends on whether people experience their presence as meaningful.

Inside the Ignited Life, each episode in the You Matter series is paired with guided reflection prompts designed to help you examine where your environments support presence and where they quietly drain it.