What people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself.

And through that- Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Louis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending Have some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special Masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

I achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I'd gone through ranger school. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records, everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. I still was like, Man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick, and I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick, and I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. But once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why was that?

In that moment, when my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training.Now.

You didn't have that.I didn't have anything.Now, you just had to sit alone.Alone.And not train.

And that's what changed It changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I had done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect. I was just going. I finished a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.

You're on to the next.

I get in the car and I go.

You wouldn't even take the medal? Dawn. Don't care about it. I'm not going to waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony.

Most people I'm sitting around, and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something.Validation.I haven't done anything. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.I'm.

Just getting started.

I'm just getting started. That's right. When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I call it my 40 % rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm a 180-pound person, lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, my God, you came from this and you're here. Those insecurities... And this is how I explain it the best way. Seal Training became pretty hard, and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL Prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp. That's right.

And it was two months. In my last two years, before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids to get ready for Buds.18.

19, 20-year-olds.Yeah.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL Training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming.I mean, they were hybrids.Wow. But they'd get to Buds, and the same amount of people would quit.

Why is that?

This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.It's.

Not aboutNot the mind.

It's right. We We weren't diving in to the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm going to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure, and they looked for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me. But you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to your insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were We look for our sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort.

It's in those moments, you must retrain your mind to think differently. And I wasn't training them to do that. Why weren't you training them? I wasn't training myself to do that because at that time, I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.Physical.

Standard.a.

Physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come.

Wow.

I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in the seven dollar a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, and I thought I was dying because that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived because I was for the first time in my life happy and at peace because I reflected back on where I started.

You said, Well, I have come a long way. That's right.

And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have. That's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else. You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callusing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved My mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father, but she hasn't done that one step. Really?

She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect that.

She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life.

And live in that space.

And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on, My God, this is what I've done with my life.

Have you talked to her about this?

We talk about it all the time. You have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there. Not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't give a, I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes in my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path that leads resistance, so we go a different route. When I'm afraid of something, it's telling me, you must do that.Do this thing. You must do that. You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left, and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it, I talk in life like...

A lot of us in life want to take the four-lane highway that has roadmaps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up, you're going to see a McDonald's or Crackle Barrel. It's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side.

That Crackle Barrel is that Midwest life. That's right.

That's right.

It's all about it, man. Indiana. Crackle Barrel everywhere.

Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful because I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things. It was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. So I need to do the things that scare me the most. That's right. I've talked about this a lot in the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I want to do this. I'm going to give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away. That's right. And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's how you live your life.

That's all it is, man.

And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear of saying, this doesn't have control over me anymore. That's right. It's like you can be at such more peace.

It's 100 %. In your life. For instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams, I could be a Navy SEAL. It's Until you opened your mind, open-mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. For instance, when I broke the pull-up record, everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was 4,020 pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh, my God.

4,024 hours?

Yeah, it's 4,020 pull-ups in 24 hours. The first thing I did, versus closing my mind, you're like, Oh, my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pin in.

How many is that? Every minute? Exactly. Every hour, every second.

Instead of taking life and making it not to be this grandiose thing. Start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box, and we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. What we do is we shackling our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we take away The possibility is you could be this, you could be that, you could be all these things. And I never thought at 300 pounds, I could be Navy Seam. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book. There'd be no book. There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. It will haunt me the most. People ask me, What haunt you the most? What haunt me the most is that if I were to die at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven, and God has a chart like that on everybody's life.

God knows all. Let's say that. I don't care what you believe in. It doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. But let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm 300 pounds. I sit I was a cockroach, terminated my whole life. And we're sitting down just like this, You're God, and I'm David. And he gives me that chart, and he says, Look at this. Now, look at this chart. And on the chart, it has all these different things But my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was going to change the world. I was going to set records. I was going to be a Navy SEAL. I was going to be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're going to get the VFW award. You're going to be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, this isn't me. It says, David Goggins, I was an eco lab guy. I sprayed for cockroaches, and I'm 300 pounds. Instead, here, I'm 185. It says, Here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says, All these things. And God goes, No, that's who you were supposed to be. My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world and there's a final judgment, and you talk to something much bigger than you.

I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, You're in heaven. This is what you should have been on Earth. Are you really in heaven now? Are you in heaven? Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. In my mind, I believe that, and God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now, as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, My God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.Wow..

Is there a cap on the human body?That's right.Is there one?

I don't believe so. Because one thing I found out was, I think for several years, I gave myself a way out.

When you were 300 pounds?

When I was 300 pounds, all the time until I have to tell is 24 years old, I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I'd start climbing, I'd fall back down for the first 24 years of my life. I went to my first Hell Week, my second Hell Week, and then my third Hell Week came in still training, and the CEO, Captain Bowen, looked at me. I'm on crutches. I'm all jacked up. He says, Hey, this is your last time you're going to go through buds. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up, and he gave me a few months to heal. He said, This is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through.

Wow.

I started maybe still training with stress fractures. Stress fractures, not shin splits.

That's hard to finish.

Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training, the hardest training are The largest thing in the world was stress fractures. And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body if the mind is there. Every morning, I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me, I get duct tape, and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the mid of my calf, and I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot.Oh.

My gosh.And.

I ran my hip flexors. So for the first 45 minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs? Wow. All these guys around me are studs. They're They're stallions. They're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy. Most of them. They're not broken like this. They may have some... Everybody's sick going through that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world, broken, and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man, you are now the hardest man to ever live if you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game, and you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care. It got me through the hardest training starting out broken. Where most people quit, I had just started. And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, that's what made me powerful.

And my body followed. And three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.

Calcifying it, just like...

I never had them since.

43 years old. Wow.

I ran 7,000 miles in 2007. Haven't had a stress fracture since. And I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying that when the mind and the body connect, and you don't give yourself a way out. The only way out for me at that time was death.

Wow.

I'm going to be a Navy SEAL. Or I'm going to die. Or I'm going I'm going to die trying. Period. And my body said, Roger that. We're going to get you to do this.

So when the mind gives it no way out, your body says, Okay, I believe you now. I have to heal. I'm going to figure this out with you. We're going to do this. It's going to be the worst part of your life, but you're going to survive.

We're going to survive.

Wow. And as you hear in that 100-mile race I did, I started figuring out more and more and more and more about at the other end of suffering is a life that no one... And I'm not talking about go out there and kill yourself. Don't take these words and flip them and say, Oh, my God. No. It just be uncomfortable.

I call it suffering. Don't physically injure yourself. Yes. Not saying that. And then be out for six months. That's right.That's no good.That's.

No good. I'm not saying, I'm not saying, do what I did. I was in a spot that life forced me. I had a choice. I had a choice to be this guy or the guy that's in in front of you. I had choices. I chose this path.And.

You're still choosing it.I'm still choosing it. You can go back to that guy at any moment.

Because I found out. I found out something with those stress fractures. I found out something through facing all these things. I found out a whole 'nother' world, which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack. I found a whole 'nother way. A whole 'nother way of, no matter how far you get in life, you You have to be able to go back to scratch in your mind at a moment's notice. You can never get so far beyond scratch. What that means is when you accomplish something in life, if you want to go back to scratch and go back to that seven-dollar-a-month place where I once lived and visit that place for a long period of time. If you were here, when you went back to scratch, you would now be here. Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch, friction, obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game anymore. You think there is. When you achieve, yeah. That's right. When you achieve so much, the friction is minor. Because why? I'm sore. I'm going to get a massage today. I'm hungry. I'm going to eat today.

The refrigerator is always full. So your comforts are now... So your discomfort is now very minuscule to your discomfort back here in the seven-dollar-a-month place. So you have to go back to the $7-a-month place. So you have to go back to the $7 discomfort to then raise your level of where you're at now. I'm not saying stay there and stay there.Visit.Visit it.

And then you raise your level.

You can't be You can't be extreme in one direction or the other, right? You can't be... If you're in a leadership position, you can't talk all the time, right? Obviously, as a boss, you need to communicate. You need to talk to your people. But if you talk too much, guess what happens? People stop listening to you. You're putting out too much information. They don't know what's important and what's not. So that's bad. You can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough. And now no one knows what's going on. No one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced. And that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. But probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself, you know what? There's another side to this is I used to tell the young SEAL officers that you have to be aggressive. You got to be default aggressive. That's how you got to be. Because when something's going on, you got to be aggressive to get that problem solved. And if you're not being aggressive, then you're hesitating, well, then you can get killed.

Okay, so there you go. And that's what I used to tell guys.

That's an extreme.

Yes, that's the problem with it. And so the question is, can you be too aggressive? Yes. Absolutely. You can, Hey, there's a machine that nest over there. Let's attack it. So you charge up the hill and everyone dies. You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. And that's probably... So even as I had these mantras, like default aggressive. Can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. So you end up with this. What do you end up? Can you be too passive? Absolutely. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, now we're not making any progress. Now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay, so that's bad. So where do you want to be? You want to be balanced. Even the idea of extreme ownership. Can you take too much ownership? Yes. Yes, you can. Really?

Yes, you can. But I thought you said you need to take ownership of everything.

Two different things. Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the route I want you to use to get to the target. Here's the method I want you to use to secure the target. Here's the route I want you to do to get back. So that's the plan. Now, you take ownership and go execute. Now, can you really take ownership of that plan?

If someone else gave you the whole thing.

I gave you the whole thing. Is that your plan? No. No, it's your plan. It's my plan. So when you go in the field and now you come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan, what's your attitude?

Well, it's not my plan. It's his plan.

And you're at an obstacle now and you're like, Hey, Jocko didn't think of this. So his plan is horrible. So now you just back away and you come back and you say, Hey, we failed the mission because you didn't think of this.

You didn't think of this option. Yeah.

Right. So that's me taking too much ownership. So what I need to do is I say, Hey, here's the plan or here's the mission. How do you want to do it? And now, if you're You're a good leader, you'll go get with your people and you'll say, Oh, hey, guys, here's the plan, or, Here's the mission that we have to accomplish. How do you guys want to do it? Now, you all come up with a good plan, and you come back to me and you say, Here's the plan, and I say, That looks pretty good. Go execute. And now, when you hit an obstacle in the field, what's your attitude?

I need to adapt and adjust. What's your plan? You'll make it win. We came up with this. Yes.

So can you take too much ownership? The answer is yes, you can. So with just about every... You can name a trait, right? You can name a trait from a leadership perspective that you think is a positive trait. And you'll immediately see that if you go too far with it, it'll become bad. It'll become bad. So you have to be balanced. So even as I came up with the dichotomy of leadership, I had to be humble enough to say to myself, You know what? Being aggressive is really good most of the time. But if you're too aggressive, that's not good. So like you said earlier, you're constantly questioning everything. And to me, what that is, that's humility. That's you being humble enough to say, You know what? I really I don't understand this that well. And there's some things in my life that I don't get. Whereas as opposed to you walking around saying, I already got this figured out. I already know what I'm doing. I already know where I'm going. I already know what God is, specifically. I already know what's going to happen to me when I die. All those things. But instead, you're questioning everything, which in my mind is a positive thing.

Yeah, that's good to know. Is there anything that is missing in your life? You feel like something's missing?

I know. I feel like I'm living a pretty good life right now. I'm totally blessed. I got a great family. I got great kids. I got a great company. I got working with great people.

No, you're healthy.

It gets a workout, train.I'm feeling good.Living the dream, man. Yeah, living the dream.

You never feel like there's something missing for you right now. If there is, you're working towards it. You're working on the next book. You're building the business.

Yeah, well, there's a difference between something missing and am I satisfied? Because I'm not satisfied. I always want to go. I never get done with the end of the day and go, Cool, mission accomplished. It's like you got to be close. Yeah.

So you're not satisfied, but you feel like nothing's missing.

Yeah. I'd say that's a fair statement.

What brings you the most joy in your life and makes you smile the most?

Oh, I mean, my kids. My kids are cool. They're funny. My wife and kids. My wife and kids are cool and funny, and we have a good time. And lots of inside jokes and all that. And I train jiu-jitsu, and that's very fun. And surf, that's fun. Yeah.bring a guitar, that's fun.

How old are your kids again?

Age 20, 18, 16, and 10.

And what's the biggest lesson you learned about yourself being a father to them?

Your kids are not going to be who you want them to be. You can't train them to be. They're going to be who they are. And you can give I'll give them some course corrections a little bit, but they're going to be who they are. And the more you try and force them into what you want them to be, the harder they're going to push back and rebel.Wow.Yup..

Did you learn that the hard way, or did you get... So you tried to train them in a certain way?

Yeah, somewhat. And it's pretty obvious. From my perspective, I was having a similar conversation with a bunch of executives, and we went down the road because we're having dinner now, so we're done talking about work. But now everyone wants to ask me about parenting and everything else. I said at the table, I'm like, Hey, who here ended up doing exactly what their parents wanted them to do? And there's one guy out of 10, right? Because most people, your parents are wanting you to do this thing, then you do something else. I mean, I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old. That probably wasn't even on the checklist of top 20 things that my parents wanted me to do. Not even That's what they say in ballpark, right?

They didn't want you to go to war.

Yeah, they didn't want that. So here you go. Yeah, see you. So the more you try and pigeonhole your kids into being something that you want them to be, the worse off it's going to be. It's the same thing with leadership. It's the same thing with leadership. If I'm trying to force my plan down my team's throat, the more resistance I'm going to get from it. Whereas if I plant the seed and I allow that plan to grow with them, the better it's going to be received. When people ask me, how do you get people to buy in? Well, you allow them to come up with a plan yourself.

What if in your mind, you're like, you really know that plan is not that good?

It depends on how bad it is. How bad is it? Or what's at stake? If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them, and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with, and the contract doesn't really matter, I'd be like, Hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple. I might give you a couple of adjustments and give you some coaching on it. And then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, Oh, no, we didn't land it. And I say, Well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it. I said, You said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, Hey, here's some other things that might have worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was going to have value to our company, I'm going to either-Step in.

Yeah, I'm going to step in and be like, Okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction going to be? And by the way, that's what I'm not going to say, No, don't do it that way. I'm going to say, Tell me that again, and let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though all of a sudden, they're going, Yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with a solution. So then you're going in there like, You got this dialed. And then you're going to feel like you won, which you did.That's great.Which.

Is great. It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, confidence, belief. How important What is feedback for leaders? Getting feedback from peers, coaches, or employees, team members.

Feedback is how you get better. No feedback, no improvement. And if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback, and you're not listening to it. So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're not asking for it. And even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble.

What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you thinkyou need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have?

The weird thing about me is, even though you might think, look at me and think, oh, who's going to tell this guy anything? The reality is, if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, Hey, I don't know if that's a good plan. So even when I was a task unit commander, so I'm in charge, and I'm the head seal for this 40 Seals. I'm the main guy. Anyone in that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, Hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it? My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that. So my friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long.

They're not intimidated or scared of you?

No.that's good.No..

So how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team, in order to welcome the feedback of the information.

Yeah. What you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like just the other day, we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year. But the thing that I was telling this group of people was, as a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. So every time you come to me and you say, Hey, Jocco, I don't like this plan. I don't say, Shut up and do it my way. I say, How would you want to do it? Tell me what you don't like about it, and then tell me how you want to do it. So therefore, the next time you have an objection, you're like, the door's open. You know that I'm going to be open minded and listen to you, and that's how you build it. Every time you shut someone down from speaking their mind, you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback. And if there's no feedback, as we just said, you're not going to improve.

What are two What are the two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills? Right off the bat? Two things you can think of. And what are two things that want to be leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders? So what are the two So there's a lot of things they could add to our skillsets. Yeah.

Two things that you have, number one is listen, which we just talked about. So that's fresh on my mind. And you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time. Wrong answer. I'll sit through a meeting with a client or with one of my companies, and I'll listen for 38 minutes. And at the end of those 38 minutes, I'll have already thought through every discussion that's been had. You want to argue with him, and he's arguing with her. And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. Meanwhile, you're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's given up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments. And I do that for 38 minutes. And in the 39th minute, I say, Hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually going to be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter It wasn't because I had better tactical understanding.

It's because I actually shut my mouth, listened to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew, and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was.

So listen.

And the other one is the word that I just use, which is detached, which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're going to see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking I'm sitting on the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high port, take a step back, and actually look around, I can see infinitely more. So apply that to a meet. It's It's a meeting that we just talked about, a 38-minute meeting. All this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm a boss. I could jump in there and start arguing and give them my opinion. But what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is I'm in the weeds, and I'm not able to assess what is That's what's actually happening. So there you apply it there to your personal life.

If you and I are arguing, you're my friend, and you did something, and now we're starting to escalate an argument, and I'm starting to get emotional, am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on? If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad, and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction? No. No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying, and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without saying, You need to calm down, or, You're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no, Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me, whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say, the dang, the supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed. If I say, Hey, calm down, right? If that's my reaction, then you realize that I'm against you, right? I don't get it. And so now it's me and the supply department against you.No.

One understands me.No.

One understands. So I do a little technique. What is that? I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm going to reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm going to diminish them a little bit so that we're not escalating the situation.

How would you do this with your wife?

Well, if you come to me and you go, The supply department's been late. They're two weeks late on this stuff. I don't say, Calm down. I say, Oh, you got to be kidding me. Two weeks? And you go, Yeah, can you believe it?

That's horrible.

We got to put a solution. We got to get that figured out. In the At the same time, what do we need to do right now to get the problem solved? Now we're on the same team so we can work together to find a solution.

We bonded on the pain.

Yes.

You felt the pain.

Yes. We're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's going to make my wife mad? The ice machine is not working. The ice machine is not working. It's your fault. Whether it's my fault, we don't know. The ice machine is not working. By the way, this is a real story. This is happening today. The ice machine is not working. She didn't get mad about it, but the ice machine is not working. If I go, Hey, you have a refrigerator and a house, and you have a place, you can just calm down. How's that going to go? It's not going to go good. Now she's going to get mad. Now it's me against her. Instead, the ice machine's not working. Man, And that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden we're on the same team, and she's like, Well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. As opposed to, The ice machine is not working. Well, okay, do you want me to have ice shipped in from Alaska there, Princess? That's not going to go over well.

For those who are looking to accomplish their goals, but they feel stuck in life, what would you say What were the strategies of the Seals in accomplishing your goals at the highest level? What are some of the things that you guys did strategy-wise to make that happen?

Structure and discipline. Muscle memory would be the biggest one, which is now many of the things that I teach in both Overcome and in my Point Man for Life program. It was something that I was missing. I felt like I was missing when I left the military. I think a lot of military members feel the same way. The SEAL teams are incredibly effective at what we do for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is selection. That selection is there's a lot of things you have to do to qualify just to get the SEAL training. A lot of people don't realize how smart seals have to be. There's a level of intelligence, there's a level of physical ability, there's a level of, obviously, resiliency that has to come into this. Then we put everybody through this meat grinder called seal training that eliminates anybody that doesn't have that ability Then once you get to the seal team, it's how we train and build teams. It's forged through tremendous adversity because our training, even once you get to a team, is designed to be very hard. Some people would say almost sadistic in the way we would train.

We would look for what is the absolute worst case scenario we can think of, and then how do we amplify that just a little more. To make it even worse. Then train from that. Then train from that. It was grueling and painful. Sometimes we got guys killed in training. I mean, you try to reduce the level of risk, but we also recognize that in order to be ready for combat, we have to train at the highest level. In order To do that, it was a lot of repetition. Crawl, walk, run was the mentality. It was not these big goals of, Hey, I'm going to take down this entire town right off bat, because that's really complicated. That starts to get into all kinds of very complicated things. It was, How do I take down a single room? We walk as we flow through it. Then it became, Well, how do I take two rooms? How do I take three rooms? How do I take a house? How do I take a compound of three houses? How do I take a village? It was a crawl, walk, run mentality all the time. Then structure and discipline in the way we trained.

Everything was built up that way from shooting. Oftentimes, I was a marksmanship instructor, and I've trained some other people to shoot. They're always a little funny because the very first thing you do when I train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the three-yard line. A little black dot, and we're shooting at the three-yard line, and they're like, Hey, man, this is stupid. I'm like, No, you're not. You're learning the repetition that you need to effectively pull your weapon out and get a positive sight picture, trigger, squeeze, release that round, second sight picture, and follow through so that we can do that over and over and over again until at whatever point you're shooting from 50, 100 yards or more. All of that comes together to create small victories and repetition, structure, and discipline that all come together to be successful.

How does someone create that for themselves when they're not in the military? Or not on the sports team.

When I left, what I began to realize. So Overcome, when I wrote The Trident, which was my first book, it was just the story. It's my story of a young punk kid who did well enough to become an officer or a leader, and then totally failed because of ego and arrogance, got a second chance, and then redeemed himself, and then got wounded, and realized there was another level of leadership. When people would read that, people would say, How did you do that? I couldn't I can't definitively answer that question. Overcome came out in, I think, five years after I wrote The Tradeit because it took that long to think about what enabled that. A lot of that had to do with when I got out of the military, I missed that structure and discipline. A lot of people don't understand that the military is sometimes a really simple existence, especially deployed. When you're in the combat zone, it's a very simple existence. You eat, you sleep, you work out, and then you train and conduct missions, and you worry about the guys around you. The real world is really complicated. There's all these distractions. There's no one that gives you the guidance.

No one hands you a mission and says, Hey, man, this is what you're doing today.

You got to figure out your own mission.

Exactly. As I got out, I realized that I had to figure out my own mission, and all these things were not there. I started with, Okay, so how was I successful coming out of these injuries? Because that's what everybody wanted to see. How were you so positive? How did you write that sign on the door? How did you lessen a year and a half after your injuries, launch a nonprofit? How did you later create your own speaking company and all these things? I realized that I was super balanced as a leader when I was wounded. When you were wounded? When I was wounded. I wasn't prior to being wounded. Really? Not when I had the leadership failure. At other points in crisis in my life, I realized I wasn't as balanced.

I think I saw one of your videos recently talking about the key to successful leadership is balance. It is.

I believe it. But balance is a misnomer, too, because it's not like, Well, I put 20% in this bucket, in this bucket, in this bucket. I teach something called the Pentagon and peak performance. So five key areas that a should be balanced in. The foundational level is physical leadership. It's something that I've come to find that all of us, as we get older, have a tendency to let slide. We do the opposite of probably what we should be doing.

It's going to be going harder.

Yeah, because as we get older, we're breaking down. We need to take care of ourselves better than we do when we're younger, where your body is so much more resilient. That's why I tell people, as a leader, you need a lot of energy. You need to be able to think clearly. You need sound mind in everything that you're doing. So that foundational level of physical leadership is critical to what you're doing. And that consists of sleep, nutrition, and fitness. Those three components. My physical leadership saved my life when I was wounded. Now, for most people, hopefully, you're never at that level. But in some ways, right now, you look at today, COVID is a strange thing. But for the most part, it is individuals who are not healthy that are having the greatest problems. And those with a stronger immune system seem to be doing better. It's like that with other diseases. Once again, physical leadership to have the energy and the ability. We manage stress better. That's the foundational level. Number two was mental leadership. When I became a junior officer and I was super arrogant, I really thought I knew everything. I didn't challenge my beliefs.

I didn't question my own capabilities. Do as I say, not as I do. I didn't do things to get out of my comfort zone. Those are the things that make up mental leadership. Constantly educating ourselves, constantly challenging our beliefs. We're in a day and age where it's dangerous in my opinion, because social media feeds you the information that you like to see. And so many people don't go seek out. They don't challenge that belief system of what they're being fed. So it only furthers their belief in things that may or may not be true, but because you keep clicking on that line of thought, you're being fed all that information. The news is no different. The media people watch what they like to see, and it's very biased in this day and age. So mental leadership is It's not necessarily challenging your beliefs. It's doing your due diligence to find out what's really true and how does it play into who I am and what I'm trying to do. It's getting outside of your comfort zone. It's finding the individuals who are where you want to be and identifying them as mentors so you can be better so that you're not surrounding yourself with individuals who are pulling you away from where you want to go.

Number three, and this is the biggest one of my weakest point, and that's something I found about the Pentagon. Most people have one area that they're super strong, naturally, and then they have an area where they're super weak. My weakest area was emotional leadership. Emotional leadership is our ability to maintain... As a leader, it's critical to be even keeled. We're not too hot, we're not too cold, we're not too excited, we're not too angry, because people can count on you with that consistency. They know as a leader, I can come to you and tell you bad news, and you're going to take it well, and I can come in and tell you amazing news, and you're not going to burn it down drinking and be an idiot. You got to ride that balance. I really struggle with that because I was an emotional roller coaster when I was younger, and I came to realize that that really damaged my credibility as a leader. It's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity. Nobody wants that leading leader that is just an emotional train wreck or a negative Nelly. They want that leader who they can count on, that's positive, that's going to push you forward.

They also don't want that leader that's something I call a leadership wrecking ball. A leader who they're all about the result, but they leave a path of destruction behind them. They'll crush you in their path to get things done. That, in my opinion, is weak emotional leadership also. I mean, as a leader, we got to think about the others.

The health of others, yes.

Or a four. And then, the last point. Well, the last part of emotional leadership is managing our mouths because- Our mouth? Our mouth. Yes. Yeah, because so many people-So true. So many people... And I was guilty of this. And I'm not impervious to this. Like I said, this is my weakest area, but I'm really aware of myself now because when we let Let that zinger fly. 90% of the time, it doesn't do anything to further what we're trying to accomplish as a leader. All it does is massage our ego. Well, I was angry in the moment, so I wanted to say this. I see this in relationships all the time. Husband and wife that let these zingers fly. It does nothing to further that situation in a positive way. No. That's part of being a leader also. Right. That people are going to disagree with you. So what? If you have conviction in who you are, it's just going to happen in this world.

Yeah. Another Navy seal that I had on Chad Wright said, Your tongue is like a rudder in a boat. It's like, whatever you speak, it's going to start guiding you in that direction or influencing you in certain directions in your life. So make sure you really use your words correctly based on where you want to go. Back to the no negativity. If you're negative, it's going to affect you and take you down a negative path in your life. Feeling that way, emotionally, you're going to attract negative people. So you made that decision in that moment to speak differently, use words differently, which I think was powerful. Yeah. Okay, so that was three. Number four?

Social leadership. Social leadership. How do we build the rings of influence around us. When I break that down into four rings of influence, the outermost ring is our work relationships. The innermost ring is a lot of times our work acquaintances/friends. The third ring is close friends, and then that bullseye is our immediate family. In Western culture, there's a tendency to put a whole lot of time and effort into the two outermost rings, our work relationships and our work friends and acquaintances. We have a tendency to take for our planet, our close friends and our family. We think they'll always be there for us. But when a major crisis comes, when you're on the X, that may or may not be true because that's when everything is being pressure-tested. If you haven't the time and effort into your immediate family, then oftentimes it will break. Jimmy Hatch, a friend of mine, described it like this, We all ride on trains in this life. I rode on the SEAL train You rode on football train. We never know. All of us hope that someday we'll get to wherever we want to get off. For some of us, it's the end of the tracks.

For others, it's a specific stop they want to get off on. But sometimes there's a catastrophic event that occurs in our life and we get thrown off the train. Those outermost rings don't get off with you because they're still on the train. It's not that they don't like you or anything like that. They're just still riding the football train or the SEAL train, and you're no longer on it. But who gets off with you is your close friends and family. So often I have watched individuals that get into a major crisis. You also know so many successful people that have been super successful but got to the end of their career or even the end of their lives and said, Why didn't I put more time into my family? That's true. Social leadership is making sure that we are investing in those relationships to be ready. The key question I ask everybody is, Will you be ready?

For what?

It doesn't matter. Will you be ready for that moment when it comes? Because we don't know what that moment is. That balance enables us to be ready for almost anything. Having a mindset of the next ambush is out on the horizon. If I maintain balance, if I have a leadership mindset of being ready for it, I'll be ready for no matter what it is. No matter what it is. It doesn't mean it's going to hurt less, but at least I'll be ready for it to drive forward. But it takes those things. That's why I was so successful when I got wounded. I was balanced in those areas. The last one is spiritual leadership. For me, faith played a part in that. But for others, I tell them it's our ability to get outside of ourselves and have perspective in this life that what you're going through... We all live in our own personal hell when we're in a crisis, but spiritual leadership enables us to recognize that there are a whole lot of other people out there that are going through much worse than you are. If you can do things to get outside of yourself and recognize, there's a great big world out there, that what you're going through is temporary.

Even though it's painful, super painful, you will get to the other side and be able to get beyond it. What I talk about is that if you're alive, man, it's a gift.

Yes.

It's a gift. It may be hard, it may be tough, but it's still a good day, and it's up to you to drive forward to get off that act. I have a motto, No bad days. Yeah. Because I'm still here.

That's right, man. No bad days. What do you think is the skills that we should learn to master more to help us reach at the top of our field, our industry, or to set us up to be prepared when that ambush comes? So we stay ready. We don't have to get ready.

In my opinion, it comes back to four key things, which I call the point man principles. Point man principles. Last year, I wrote a planner called the Point Man Planner. It came about because I got really sick. While I was really sick, they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I had a parasite and a blood disorder that attacked my central nervous system, and I was super messed up. I thought I was dying, to be honest. At one point, I was like, Man, I wish I had a point, man, like when I was in the SEAL teams, to lead me out of some of these bad situations. It made me think, Well, why? What made them so effective. When we were talking about what makes the SEALs effective, it became really clear to me that a really good point, man, a lot of Seals live their life in this way. There's four principles, and I think this is how anybody out there can be effective and bring their game to the highest level. Number one, relentless belief in your mission. There's a lot of people who don't know what their mission is.

They've never written it down, they've never defined it. If you write down your mission, it's got to be built on the foundation of your values. There's a lot of people that don't know what their values are. They'll tell you cliché things. They'll say faith, family, finance, fitness. But when you hear those things, you're like, Dude, you haven't been in church in two years. You haven't been in a gym. I haven't seen you in a gym this year. We just throw these things out there and understanding… Because whether you know what your values are not, know what your values are or not, they are driving you and they're driving your decision making. Right. If one of your values maybe as fame or recognition, that's okay. You should be aware of it. It doesn't mean it's a negative thing unless you're stabbing somebody else in the back to get it. But knowing that is important because now you can build your mission in this life upon it. Because my mission now, now that I'm out of the SEAL teams, it's about setting that example as a leader. I want people to regard me as a point man for my own life, someone that they want to learn from, someone that is a leader, that sets the example, that communicates well.

That has become my new mission. Number two is a clearly defined destination and a set course. In the military, we We always knew exactly where we were going. In life, people often don't. In life, people say, Well, I want to be rich, or I want to be in better shape. Well, those are not clearly defined things. It's like saying, I want to go west if I needed to go someplace. So a clearly defined destination. In the military, we use something called the Universal Transverse Mercator System. It's a grid system that covers the entire Earth, and it breaks it down into a-It's the exact point. Exactly. A one meter square, almost the size of this table. Really? Yeah.

That's crazy.

And the whole world. Well, all the way, the North and South Pole has become an issue. Yeah, sure. But yeah, all the way, almost to the North and South Pole.

Where most of the people live. Yes.

Exactly. When we identify a target, it's broken down, usually all the way to that 10-digit grid, meaning a one by one meter square. That's crazy. A very clearly defined destination. That enables It allows us to not have any deviation. We're not going west. We know exactly where we're going. Then the second part of it is a clearly defined course. That course is a bearing on how we get there or how we follow our compass to get there. Most people may have one, but they don't have the other. You can't get to where you're going without having both.

They may have the destination but not know the how to get there.

That's right. Because the course becomes the how to. It becomes our waypoints. I give the example of when I wanted to be a SEAL as a kid, I knew that was my destination. That was a very clearly defined destination. The course was all the things that I had to do. I had to enlist in the Navy. I had to get accepted. I had to get a SEAL contract. I had to physically pass the seal screening test. I had to academically pass the ASFAB score with a high enough score to get picked up for seals. I had to get a seal rating. I had to graduate from my A school. I had to get the seal training. I had to make it through seal training. I had to make it through Hell Week. All these things were waypoints on the course. If people can break I break goals down in this manner, and I break them down in the point man planner quarterly, and then every day we make sure I do something called the rule of three P's, one physical, one personal, one professional. Every day we're moving the needle just a little bit towards those goals.

That's how we stay on course. Right. I'm sorry. Number three of the point man principles is risk assessment and situational awareness. So many people walk through life totally blind. When we talk about, Will you be ready? They're not ready for the ambushes that are coming, and oftentimes, they never see them coming, even though the signs were there. So one, are We're regularly doing risk assessments of where we are in our life. Are we still balanced? Are we still taking care of ourselves, both in the Pentagon peak performance? Are we making sure that our destination is front-site focus, that we're on course, that we're hitting the waypoints we should? We're consistently doing a risk assessment. We're also looking for the indicators that an ambush is on the horizon. Yes. So many people don't. Then they walk into these ambush and they're like, Oh, my God, I never saw that That's what I'm talking about.

Okay. Number four, so it's risk assessment and situational awareness, right? Yeah. And the fourth one?

Is an overcome mindset to get off the X as quickly as possible.

Overcome mindset.

Yeah. So you can't prevent every ambush. I estimate that most people in this life will go through five, at a minimum, five major life embushes. And I define a major life ambush as anything that will forever leave Physical, mental, emotional, or deep financial scars. You'll never fully recover from it. Or let me rephrase that. You will always carry the pain of that ambush. You will always look back and you will think, God, that was painful. It hurts when we think about it. I tell people that on the lower end of the scale, it can be the ending of a relationship. It can be the ending of a marriage.Job.Job, personal failure, professional failure, lawsuit, bankruptcy, neuropsy, the failure of a business. It can be life-threatening illness or injury, life-threatening illness or injury to someone you love. It can be sexual trauma to you or someone you love. Then at the higher ends, it starts to get into the loss of a loved one, or one of the highest I've seen is the loss of a child.

Oh, man. Yeah, that's tough.

Having a mindset of readiness and knowing that, unfortunately, those things could happen, and I teach something called the REACT methodology. It's It's a system to use when these ambushes come.

What's that system?

React is an acronym for when an ambush comes, the very first thing we have to do is recognize that we are in a crisis. It goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning. When you're on the X, there's a natural tendency to procrastinate and deny and look at the past or the future or blame.

It's hard to recognize.

It's usually the hardest, and depending on the level of ambush. I want to make sure that people understand if you lose a child, timeline is relative. I don't expect you to… It's going to take time to get off the X from losing a child. But also recognizing that you're already thinking I can't lay here forever. I have to…

At some point get up.

Exactly. Number one, recognizing you're in a crisis or recognizing the reality is what I say. Number two is evaluate your assets. When we are hit by a life ambush, by any crisis or catastrophic event, it's natural to feel totally overwhelmed in the moment because your world has just come to a grinding halt for whatever it is. It's like you suddenly stepped into a raging storm. You're in the darkness. You're trying to figure out what's happening in this chaos with the wind howling and lightning and thunder and people beating on you. It's overwhelming. We tend to think, There's no hope. There's nothing I can do. It's all outside of my control. But we have to, in that moment, figure out how we control what we can. One of the first things we can do is evaluate what assets do I have to bring to bear to this project. I also talk about it's like tools in our toolbox. What can I either buy, borrow, use that I already have? If it's a business crisis, it may be an accountant or an attorney, or it may be advisors or a board, or maybe whoever that's helping you to get out of this crisis.

Maybe outsourcing someone that has specialties that help you deal with whatever problem you're in. If it's a personal crisis, maybe it's a relationship crisis, so it could be a marriage counselor, a priest, or whatever it is. Having those things, though, makes you suddenly say, Okay, this is crisis, but I can deal with it. Sure. Number three is assess possible options and outcomes. And what usually tends to happen when we go... The slowest part is, A, recognizing, B, starting to gather, Hey, I have tools, or, What's in my inventory to deal with this? And then there tends to be this tendency, if you will, to suddenly rush. Like, Oh, my God, this sucks. I want to get off the X, and I have these tools, so let me use these to get out of here as quickly as possible.

Right. Okay.

I tell people, You got to slow down. You got to take a tactical pause. In the military, we call it, let the battlefield develop.

Look at all the outcomes.

Yeah, all the outcomes. Also, maybe there are things that are happening that you haven't seen yet.

You're behind the scenes, yeah.

Getting your team together, whoever is helping you, whoever is part of this inventory, this is where we now assess both the short term and the long term impact of the decisions that we're going to make. Okay.

The C?

Choose and communicate. You choose the you're going to go and you communicate it to the people around you. You're never on the X by yourself. The X has its own gravitational pull, any life ambush. If you are If it's a personal ambush, your family, your kids, your friends get pulled on the X with you. It's a business ambush, your team. Believe it or not, even your clients can get pulled on the X with you. It's important that we choose and then communicate because frequently as a leader, especially when we're in a crisis, sometimes we want to internalize and we don't want to... Even though everybody around us can see, You're in a storm, man. You're on the X. But it's important to communicate for three different reasons. Number one, when we communicate, we verbalize what we're going to do. There's a level in that lead yourself level of internal accountability. When we say we're going to do something, now it's like, yes, this is what I'm doing. Number two, it tells others and they're like, Oh, my God. Yes, we have a plan. This sucks. Let's go. And that third component of that is hope.

It gives people hope. It's like a positive direction. Yes, we have a plan. This is where we're going. And then the last one is take action. Execute on that plan. There are so many people who will go through this process, and then they're waiting for the perfect moment. And the perfect moment is never going to come. The time to act is now.Imperfect action is better than waiting for this perfect plan.Exactly. And it creates momentum. It gets you off that X. And you may go from one X to the next, and that happens sometimes. But use that momentum to keep going.

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