Do New, Hard, and Dangerous Things
For leaders, athletes, students, and others who want to stop existing and start living • Not motivation • Transformation.
About LiveCANA
Constant And Never-ending Adventure
Life Begins Beyond Comfort
Most people never notice the moment their life quietly ended — not the body, the nerve. The part that used to want things. Somewhere between the first mortgage payment and "I guess this is good enough," they swapped the unknown for the predictable and called it maturity.
LIVE CANA is the way back.
You can decorate a cage all you want; it's still a cage. CANA is the decision to walk out of it — to trade comfort for challenge, certainty for adventure, and a small, safe life for the one you were actually built for.
On a stage, in a workshop, or one-on-one, Mike Hawkins doesn't hand out motivation that costs you nothing. He hands you a method, forged in the places that test a person: deeper purpose, real resilience under pressure, and the courage to move forward — not someday, today.
Three words drive everything:
Come Alive. Be the Best. Make a Difference.
Nine Dimensions of The CANA Framework™
Meet Mike Hawkins
Adventure Athlete · Author · Speaker · Leadership Mentor
Mike Hawkins lives where most people hesitate — between danger and beauty, fear and freedom, the shark-dark ocean and the fire of volcanic earth.
He walked away from the polished corporate version of himself — a Berkeley engineering degree, a fast-track IT career, the condo, the car, the suits — and clocked out, hard, into a life lived at the ragged edges of the map: Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asia, the Indo-Pacific, Hawaii, and beyond. Along the way he's been an international adventure athlete, rescue diver, enterprise risk advisor, and author. He holds multiple state powerlifting records, has navigated open oceans and volcanic systems, and is a two-time cancer fighter who lost vision in one eye and kept waking up with more wonder than the morning before.
He's also the founder of Ocean Risk Intelligence (ORI), an advisory firm working at the intersection of enterprise risk and ocean systems — the same hard-won understanding of pressure, danger, and resilience that drives CANA, applied in the boardroom for federal agencies, banks, and energy companies.
Out of all of it came one belief and one philosophy: comfort is the quiet killer of greatness — and CANA, Constant And Never-ending Adventure, is the way back to life.
Today he trains those who refuse mediocrity — athletes, leaders, students, and men — to become dangerous in the best way, through keynotes, workshops, coaching, and the CANA movement.
The CANA Depth Protocol™
This is not a talk. It's a descent.
The CANA Depth Protocol is a real, guided ocean experience — a modern misogi, the ancient rite of facing something so demanding it changes who you are. It combines breath control, freediving, and a shark dive with real physical encounters, taking you past the surface and into the place where excuses don't survive: depth, darkness, and ultimate fear with real danger.
What happens down there isn't mystical. It's physiological, psychological, and spiritual all at once:
- Breath control triggers the body's dive reflex — slowing the heart, calming the nervous system, and teaching you to find stillness exactly when panic wants to take over.
- Depth and the ocean strip away noise and force absolute presence. There's no multitasking at sixty feet.
- Facing real danger — sharks, pressure, the dark — reveals who you actually are under load, and forges an identity that holds when conditions get uncomfortable.
- Coming back up delivers what most people chase their whole lives and never find: clarity, reverence, and the unmistakable feeling of being fully alive.
It's the difference between hearing about courage and earning it. Done with discipline, restraint, and the right preparation — not recklessness — it's the deepest expression of everything CANA stands for.
Because transformation doesn't happen on the surface. It happens in the depths.
Led personally by Mike Hawkins — rescue diver and adventure athlete with 40+ years in the water — every descent is built on preparation, safety, and self-control. You're never thrown in. You're guided down.
Who it's for Leaders, athletes, and anyone standing at a threshold — ready to stop reading about transformation and go experience it. No elite athleticism required; the willingness to be uncomfortable is the only prerequisite that matters.
What to expect
- Prepare — breathwork and mindset training on land before you ever go deep.
- Descend — freediving on a single breath, learning to stay calm as the pressure builds.
- Face it — a guided shark dive where fear becomes information, not panic.
- Surface — integration: turning what you discovered in the water into how you live on land.