Mitchell Hall, Trident Focus Consulting

Mitchell Hall was born and raised outside Chicago, and joined the Navy in 1990. At eighteen years old he succeeded in training to become an elite US Navy SEAL. Over the span of twenty-one years, his career included nine deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and other locations. He is the veteran of four national campaigns, was a Navy Special Warfare SEAL instructor, a Platoon Chief and was the research and development/acquisitions department head for the west coast SEAL teams. Hall is a highly decorated SEAL and Silver Star recipient. Through-out his time serving in the Navy Hall pursued his passion for triathlon and competitive cycling. After twenty-one years of service and retired from the Navy he quickly transferred his enjoyment of competing in endurance sports into the longstanding, yet fledgling Superfrog Triathlon. He has competed several times in the Hawaii Ironman World Championships and is a nationally ranked triathlete and top masters cyclist. Currently Hall resides in San Diego and concentrates on consulting in the entertainment industry. He has worked on three major films. A personal story was used in the 2012 film, Act of Valor. He was the technical advisor for the film, Zero Dark Thirty and worked with the director to help with set design and story/script concept. Hall was a technical and stunt advisor on the set of Lone Survivor where he collaborated with the director to authenticate everything from using the correct gear to using the correct military language. Hall is a member of SAG and the recipient of the Best Stunt Ensemble SAG Award in 2012.

Hall served for 21 years as a Navy Seal, and is a nationally ranked triathlete and top master's cyclist

SZ: How old were you when you realized your destiny was to become a Navy SEAL? What events inspired you to take your life in this direction?

Mitchell Hall: I was sixteen and wanted to be a fighter pilot. But due to some family circumstances and my grades weren’t great, college was not on my radar screen. My cousin mentioned the Navy SEAL’s to me. If you could rewind the tape, now everyone knows about the SEAL’s but at the time it was in it’s infancy and not well known. More well known were the Green Berets and Delta Force. The Navy SEAL’s were more of a mystery because the internet wasn’t around to look up what they did. It tested my imagination. They were supposed to be the best and at sixteen I decided that’s what I wanted to be. My entire goal in joining the Navy was to become a SEAL.Today it’s quite different in that there is more of a pipeline for guys that want to become SEAL’s. When I joined the Navy I had to raise my hand and try out for it. I had to go through a physical fitness test to get entered into that pipeline. If at any point I were to fail or be spun out of it I would still have had a four year contract in the Navy and would have become a sailor. Quite honestly that was a horrible thought for me. Not to take anything away from sailors but it wasn’t my goal. I only wanted to be a SEAL.

SZ: How many guys went through the training with you?

MH: We started out with just over one hundred guys and finished with thirty something. Historically there’s a seventy-five percent attrition rate. I was a fairly conservative kid from the midwest and from day one was a deer in the headlights. I knew I would have to swim because the Navy SEAL’s operate in the maritime environment. But no-one ever told me I would need to swim with fins. The first morning I was trying to impress all the instructors and my potential classmates and after an hour of swimming hard with fins on every tendon in my foot was sore and achey. That afternoon we did a run that was in soft sand. I was a pretty good runner but no-one told me that we would be running in soft sand. At the end of my first day I remember thinking “What have I got myself into?” But like a lot of teenagers I was resilient. I adopted quickly and was not sore after a couple of days.

SZ: I assume other guys were in the same situation as you. Did the guys talk amongst themselves about their experience?

MH: Yeah, there is a constant stream of dialogue between classmates but at the same time you’re trying not to show a kind of weakness. That mentality is forwarded into the actual SEAL teams where occasionally you confide in people but you never want to show too much weakness because it reveals a crack.

SZ: If someone shows weakness it makes an impression on the rest of the group like there is a weak link on our team?

MH: You hear all this talk about the brotherhood and willingness to fight next to each other and all that is true. But at the same time we are very hard on each other. It is part of the culture and that’s part of what makes us good. If you feel a bit of weakness guys are going to prod and get in there and see if they can bother you just because it’s the nature of who we are. It’s a bunch of alpha males.

SZ: You were a Navy SEAL for twenty-one years. What are some of the biggest shifts in training that you experienced during those years?

MH: The training cycle is endless. It’s built into the calendar year. Training rotates around deployments and then you return from the mission and rest. Then you gear up for the next one which involves a lot of training and pushing the envelope, trying new things, new tactics that you learned from the battle field during the previous experience.

SZ: So regardless of whether you have an opportunity to put your training into action there’s still another training cycle.

MH: Yes, but we were fortunate over the last fifteen years to actually put our training into action. The ten years prior to that there wasn’t much going on. While we had all these ideas, concepts and tactics, not all of them were proven. Some of them we learned early on weren’t working and we needed to adapt and evolve them. Some of them were already written in blood and they are the fundamentals of what we base our tactics and existence on. There is a funny cartoon floating around that is a comparison of a SEAL from Vietnam and a SEAL of the mid 90’s. The Vietnam SEAL had the bare minimum, a gun, some ammunition, a canteen, a camouflage uniform and that was about it. Next to him was the SEAL of the mid 90’s. He had the gigantic backpack on, radios everywhere, guns, sunglasses, all sorts of stuff. It was pretty funny and true. The technology in the mid to late 90’s was good but it hadn’t evolved. An i-phone does as much or more than any radio we had before then. It’s a tenth of the size of the radio’s of the 90’s. The GPS’s equipment was gigantic but we had to carry it all because it became somewhat mission critical. In 2001 we carried ten or eleven magazines of ammunition. But what we realized when we were in Afghanistan especially in the mountainous terrain, with all that weight we weren’t able to be very catlike. You can barely get out of your own way carrying all that equipment. So we had to really take a hard look at what we were carrying. We paired that 100 lbs. of equipment down to forty or sixty depending on the mission. Some of our equipment evolved because the companies or manufacturers made it smaller and lighter but other times we just decided we didn’t need certain things any more.

SZ: The standards of excellence, preparation and efficiency are high for Navy SEAL’s. What was it like to retire? Was it a difficult adjustment after that many years of service to leave?

MH: When I retired I was very fortunate. I have some very interesting projects that I am involved with and because of that I think I turned the page rather gracefully. I made a decision at the twenty-one year mark when I acknowledged the fact that I’ll never be satisfied. I’ll always want to do another mission. That realization helped me say, “You know what it’s time.” Because if I’m waiting for that one mission that’s going to seem like, “This is it that was awesome.” It’s just never going to happen, because I’ll always want more.

SZ: Is it the adrenaline rush of preparation then the actual….

MH: It’s everything. It’s the process, it’s hanging out with the guys, it’s doing the actual mission. I was smart enough to realize that there wasn’t going to be that one mission to satiate me. I said, “This is it. I am alive.” I’d just received a very prestigious award and it just seemed like the right time to leave. I also had other ambitions. I was never truly, totally, completely defined by being a Navy SEAL. Although most people around me view me as that. My self perspective is not that. So at thirty-eight years old I said it’s better to start this new chapter in my life in my late thirty’s as opposed to just continuing on, chasing something that will never be caught.

SZ: Did you have opportunities prior to leaving the Navy or did you just know there were opportunities that would be available to you after leaving?

MH: Because I am an endurance athlete my goal at the time was to go into event production which I did. My new motto is that I will always have a conversation even if I don’t initially see where it goes unless it’s obvious that’s it’s not something that aligns with my code. But I’ll usually have a conversation with just about anyone and that was the case of the first movie I did. My initial thoughts were I had absolutely zero interest in working in entertainment. Now it’s kind of funny because they are my friends. Working on the first film was an incredible experience. The people were amazing and they are the best in that business. I can appreciate the best in any line of work. It takes that extra dedication, extra motivation, extra passion to be the best at what you do regardless of the field you are in.

SZ: You are a nationally ranked triathlete and top masters cyclist. Fear of failure is not uncommon in sports, what mental skills do you use if any from your Navy SEAL’s days to help you focus on what you want to accomplish in training and races?

MH: I think it’s a question of nature vs. nurture. I think that some people just have something naturally. It can be rather undefined at the beginning but I think I just had this drive. Trust me no-one from my high school class would have thought that I had this inner drive but it was down there deep. I think my friends were rather shocked when they found out what I ended up doing.

SZ: Did joining the SEAL’s give you the discipline to discover that inner drive in a way the structure of school couldn’t do?

MH: The opportunity to take a swing at becoming a SEAL made me flip a switch. I wasn’t super disciplined but I was a hard worker. I’ve had four jobs in my life and early on one of them was moving furniture. Even though I was smaller than some of the guys on the job I worked circles around them. The triathlon or endurance side of me feeds off of the SEAL side of me and the two activities help each other. When I am running a marathon and at mile sixteen everything is falling apart I can stay in there because of my SEAL training. There is a quote, something to the effect that, “Not failing out weighs the joy of winning.” That totally resonates with me. When I did well at a triathlon or on a SEAL mission I wouldn’t take a lot of satisfaction from the success. It’s more like that was cool, but I don’t revel in the satisfaction that all the work came together. It’s more like I wonder if I could have gone even faster if I had just done this, this or this a bit differently. If I fail at something I can still remember all those failure points.

SZ: When you win a race your preparation and process during the race met the needs of that situation. You were able to accomplish what you needed better than everyone else you were competing against that day. If you finish a race third and still accomplished your pre-race goals does coming in third still feel like failing?

MH: As I’ve matured I’ve been able to be more comfortable with this. But before if I’d come in fourth or fifth, I would beat myself up a bit. I’d say to myself, “Dude if you’d just done this or this differently during the event it could have put you up a couple of places.” As I look back on this now with more clarity it seems like fear of failure is a bit of fuel for victory.

SZ: I read a segment of “8 Secrets to Grit and Resilience, Courtesy of the Navy SEAL’s” by Eric Barker.

Time management is a balancing act.

1. Make it a game. It’s the best way to stay in a competitive mindset without stressing yourself out.
2. Be confident – but realistic. See the challenges honestly but believe in your own ability to take them on.
3. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Grit comes a lot easier when you’ve done the work to make sure you are ready.
4. Focus on improvement. Every SEAL mission ends with a debrief focusing on what went wrong so they can improve.
5. Give help and get help. Support from others helps keep you going, and giving others support does the same.
6. Celebrate the small wins. You can’t wait to catch the big fish. Take joy where you can find it when good times are scarce.
7. Find a way to laugh. Rangers, SEAL’s and scientists agree: a chuckle a day can help you cope with stress and keep you going.
8. Purpose and meaning. It’s easier to be persistent when what you’ve doing is tied to something personally meaningful.

This is a useful formula for any sports training. Is this an actual rating scale used in the military?

MH: No, there is no system in place in our process, but I’ve heard of these things. There is something I will say going back a bit. It took me fifteen years, three-fourths of the way through my military career to actually realize why I wanted to become a SEAL. Most of the guys will answer by saying, “I love my country.” Or, “I needed a challenge.” You will hear all the answers you would expect but the truth of it for me was that joining was all about me. This was a lot more of a selfish move than most people realize. I needed this to satisfy myself and prove to myself and the people who doubted me that I could do this. I love my country and I doesn’t mean I wouldn’t die for this country. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t die for a team-mate but it just means that this decision was more mainly about me.

SZ: Mental/physical recovery from trainings and competitive events is a very important topic to avoid burn-out. What have you learned and find useful for mental/physical recovery? Does the military actively teach recovery skills?

MH: In my experience the person in the breach or the eye of the storm is the last to know that they are burnt out. Everyone around them, their spouse, teammates, people that work with them probably start to see it first. People that are good at what they do and take pride in what they do just don’t want to believe that they are slipping a little bit and they need a little rest. That rest can be a week, a month or a year. What we call, “Op temp” or operational temp is something that needs to be closely managed. In fifteen years of war there were times that guys were just maxed out and fatigued. In the SEAL’s line of work that is very risky. In football there is an off season. But in war it’s not a sixteen game season. There is no off season it just keeps going. There’s no trophy at stake, there are lives at stake, so in that sense it needs to be managed even more closely. Everyone needs a break, an off season, even if they are forced to take it. Even if they are told, “Hey dude I am benching you for a bit I’m putting you in the training department. I’m going to put you in as a SEAL instructor and off of the battle field, because whether you believe it or not it’s the best thing for you.” That’s what a good leader will do even if the soldier or athlete is kicking and screaming all the way.

SZ: There are many mental training devices, biofeedback/neurofeedback on the market to add athletes in relaxation, focusing, stress reduction what’s your thought on these? When a person has been identified as not quite ready to be put back into action because of mental or physical fatigue is there a specific protocol for recovery? Or is it just take time out, change the environment and do things that are less stressful?

MH: I think everyone is trying to figure that out. As far as the wearables the reality is that they are in their infancy. I simply don’t think that we have all the answers right now and we are a ways away from it. I mean of course we need to rest, we know that six hours of sleep is better than four, and eight is better than six. But in the SEAL teams we don’t have this formula that measures whether a guy is ready or not. I have a feeling if there was a magical device there would be push back on it. Like I can imagine a solider thinking, “I don’t want to wear that device because what if it tells me I need to take a break?”

SZ: Professional sports teams are beginning to experiment with useful ways to monitor a player’s work/training load and mental/physical recovery by the use of biomarkers. They can monitor an athletes level of hydration, stress levels, how much sleep the athlete is getting etc.

MH: I think they are trying to do it but again you’re only going to get as much feedback as the user will allow. You need buy in from the athletes and soldiers themselves first. Some athletes are fascinated by that stuff and some athletes don’t want to track that information. When I am coaching some people want to know specially why they are doing something and can talk for thirty minutes about it and some people just want to be told the workout. Some people want to know why this device or methodology is going to work and others will just say they don’t care and they perform just as well.

SZ: What are your biggest challenges as an endurance athlete?

MH: Balance. In the endurance world time management is very time consuming. With a compulsive personality it’s very easy to want to do more and more and more. You think you’re just going to get better and better and better. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes you dive into this thing head first and other things in your life start to fall by the wayside whether it’s your family or whether it’s your profession. Balance is the key. That’s why a coach provides objective feedback, because the athlete themselves are the last to know and don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on.

SZ: What are you doing professionally these days?

MH: I’m doing a lot of consulting. I was a technical advisor for some movies, Zero Dark Thirty was one of them. I am a product consultant for Under Armour, and most recently I’ve been doing technical consulting for the Call of Duty video game franchise which is surprisingly fascinating. My athletic goals have been side-lined temporarily while I work but I need to get back at it pretty soon. I have goals to participate in the Superfrog Triathlon again and I’d like to get back to the Hawaiian Ironman World Championship. But I am taking a more balanced approach to my athletic and professional endeavors these days.

SZ: Mitchell thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule for this interview.

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