Hope Is A Weapon: Building Resilience In The Face Of Crisis With Tom Campbell

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markell and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change.

Proof.

Hey, everybody, it's Adam Markell. And welcome back to another Change Proof podcast. I've got a. I've got a wonderful conversation ahead with a gentleman I'm going to introduce here in a second, but you're going to want to make a moment to sit, to listen to this and, you know, think about it hard, Think about it, think about it easy, think about it in a holistic way, and it may be an episode that you're going to want to share with some people that you know who may be dealing with some of the same stuff. So I've got a guest today. His name is Chris. Tom Campbell. Sergeant Major Tom Campbell. After suffering from survivor guilt, tbi, PTSD, and a plethora of other issues all at the same time, Tom went into a very dark place and attempted to take his life. A friend who would later become his wife intervened at the last minute and saved him from himself. Today, Tom speaks about these experiences publicly, has even started doing stand up comedy. It's a way to get the word out to help people through humor and through his story. It is a profound conversation ahead. So sit back and enjoy my discussion today with Tom Campbell. All right, Tom, so your introduction, your bio, you know, it's, it says some part, of course, of your history and your experience and, and that's what those things are for. That's when I hear my own bio read. It's sort of like, you know, encapsulating some chunk of my life. You know, it's kind of an interesting, funny thing. But my question to you at the outset of this conversation is what is one thing that is not part of your introduction? Your bio, so to speak, that you would love for people to know about you? One thing that's not in there, that's not written in and all that. What's one thing you'd love for people to know about you at the start of our conversation?

Yes, the bio focuses a lot on my military career. And now that I'm retired, I'm finding out there's more to life than army. But I think the one thing that's not really covered in there is that life is a great place. And it took me a while to find that out, unfortunately. And I do Stand up comedy. And that's. And the reason I do that stand up comedy is I strive to make not just my place better, but everybody around me place better. And that's where the comedy drove in, is if I can make you laugh for 10 seconds, you could have the crappiest day of your life. That's 10 seconds. I took you out of that crap and put you in somewhere good.

And stand up comedy is, I mean, I guess for somebody that came out of the career in the military and the kinds of things that you are trained to face and I don't know actually how much of that you were put in the middle of. I know we trained for the worst often and we don't always experience those things, but did you see combat? Were you in harm's way?

Yeah, quite a few times. And in reality, I cheated death quite a few times. Deer in there. So I was a paratrooper, an infantry paratrooper in the army, and I grew up as a sniper. And so we didn't start deploying, though, until I was. I was a platoon sergeant. And immediately after I was the first sergeant, so I wasn't a young guy. We started deploying. I'd already been in the army for a good spell, but I ended up one trip to Iraq and four trips to Afghanistan almost back to back. So basically that's five plus years I spent in combat.

Deployed for five. Five years, Right.

Collectively. Not all at one time, sure. But I'd be gone a year, come back a year, gone a year.

So this, this, this is a question. Boy, I didn't expect to ask it, but it's coming to me, so I'm going to fire away.

Yeah, nothing's off the table.

Exactly. Looking back now, what was scarier, the first time you jumped out of a plane or the first time you stood up in front of an audience to be a comic?

I would probably say first time I actually tried to do comedy because the airplane part, everything happened so fast, you don't have enough time to get scared. But trying to get up in front of a room full of strangers and then try to captivate their attention and then hold their attention, it was kind of intimidating when I first started this.

Are there parallels between those two things again? And we're following even before we hit the record, One of these Tom and I said was, we're going to follow the breadcrumbs wherever they lead us.

So there's not a lot of parallels, but I would say, I mean, outside of jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft in flight with some people just. That is kind of idiocracy by itself. But in just my military career as a. In hold of that did feed into the comedy and it go and kind of back to trying to turn. Make a lemon laid out of lemons is. But I will tell you, 32 years of being in the army, I saw some funny stuff, I imagine so.

I mean, I remember growing up watching, and I think I'm maybe a minute or two older than you, but the show that. That I remember as a kid, I think was on Tuesday nights was mash. You. You remember mash, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And obviously that. That. That was a sitcom. Commit comedy. Comedy show of sorts, situational comedy about life in the army in Korea in the 50s. And obviously in the middle of any war, pick a war, it doesn't matter what, or a conflict or whatever you want to call it, where people's lives are threatened, where people die, where people are being killed. You know, there's not a lot that you could say is funny. And yet that show ran for a really long time based on a book and all that. And there are funny things that occur even in the middle midst of that absurdity and even of that tragedy. Yeah. So you have a lot to draw on.

Yeah, right. It's. It's kind of sometimes ironic. And you'd asked earlier if I'd wrote a book, and I said I hadn't. So there was a book that was written about me. It's written in French, though. It's called OP3 Road by Hubert Picard. So I can't read it to you because I don't speak French. But Hewitt, Picard's phenomenal guy. We've been friends ever since he wrote. He wrote that book. We've been friends, but he got embedded to my. In Iraq the day that a very traumatic event had happened to the company. But he wrote about that in particular is one thing that captivated. That just really captivated him was as stressful as the environment was. And especially that at that time, we were averaging five to seven firefights a day, seven days a week in a little town called Karma up in the Fallujah province. And even in that, though, whenever the guys would get together, they would do the funniest stuff. One just to make laughter. And everybody says laughter is the best medicine. It is. Even after losing. I mean, of course, whenever we'd lose a soldier, I mean, we're a family, so it hurts the family. But then somebody would do something completely off the wall to break the mood, get our minds off of it and then we'd go back to work.

I'm curious if there's a mindset that, you know, when I was asking earlier, just about what if there's a parallel between the comedy and, and, and I'll say. And the combat, maybe we can keep it to two C words. Right?

Yeah, right.

Because I only imagine I'm a public speaker myself and I stand in front of audiences all the time and have for more than 12 years. And I remember the first time I, I got up in front of a large group of people and of course they didn't have, they didn't have guns and they weren't pointing at me, but they had their, but they had their eyes, which can feel like, you know, when somebody's looking at you, feel like they've got an assault weapon right there.

Right.

And their arms, you know, arms are crossed and they're looking at you like, who in the world is this person?

Right.

You know.

Right.

Kind of a hostile audience right there. But is there something you can say about maybe the, the, the comparison of the mindset for combat and the mindset for being a stand up comedian?

So, yeah, and this might sound a little bit strange, but part of when you're in war, especially when you're in direct contact with the enemy, there's, I mean, there's a level of psyops that is always going on. I mean, you've got to try to get in the enemy's head and try to get the enemy to do what you want the enemy to do. Of course that doesn't always happen, probably seldom happens. But the, the same goes with, when you're in front of an audience is you've got to read the audience, you've got to, and then you got to try to plan your set out. You got to try to estimate what the audience is going to be. And a Friday night crowd is going to be different from a Saturday night crowd. And the first show is going to be different from the late night show. And so you got to tailor your sets accordingly. And even public speaking, I mean, when I go out and tell my story, I gotta figure out, I mean, is it a group of veterans, is it an active duty unit that I'm talking to? Is it a school? Is it, I mean it's all different audiences. So I come in with a game plan, but then in the middle of executing that plan, the audience has a vote in how that the outcome comes. And then you've got to try to adapt your speaking or comedy set with what the audience actually gives you as you read them. So I'd say that's probably the biggest parallel between the two, is you can't just take for face value. You've got to. You got to come in with a plan, but then you've got to be able to tweak that plan in flight.

I'm holding up a book I'm fortunate to have been a part of a couple of years ago, this book, Pivot. And that's this concept, this agility, adaptability, however you want to call it, this flexibility on the one hand and, and the capacity to read the situation, to read the room in, In. In what we're talking about, and. And then be able to adjust on the fly. And I would imagine it's the same out in the field when, when there's a plan of war, plan, you know, strategy, and, and you've got to read what's happening. That. That maybe changes that plan pretty dramatically, I would imagine.

Yeah. And that's why, I mean, a great plan is only good till the moment of execution, and then it turns into a good plan.

I want you to repeat that, please.

I said a great plan is only good to the point of execution.

Now, Tom, I'm going to ask you, is that. Is that somebody's quote that you remember? Is that your quote?

No. So I'd heard that somewhere years ago, and I cannot remember where I heard that at. And it was one of my leaders that said it, and I cannot remember who it was that said that, but once you write it down. Yeah, go ahead. Once at the point of execution, though, everything's out the window.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard that Churchill said some things like that. I mean, we know Mike Tyson, in a very different context, said something similar to that.

Right.

Everybody's. Everybody's courageous or something until they get hit. Once they get hit in the nose, you know, their plan is completely out the window. Everybody's got a plan till they get punched or the bullets fly or what have you. But, you know, and we. We've all heard similar kind of things. I haven't heard it quite that way before. That's why I wrote that down. But that capacity, that mindset that is not so. So stuck so fixed, if you will, the fluid mindset, you know, the mindset that can. Can pivot. I think it's so vitally important in life now. I often talk to business audiences, so I'm. I'm putting things in a business context, but it doesn't matter what the context, whether it's that whether it's comedy, whether it's public speaking, whether it's military situations. So I, I think I want to get into your story and I want to keep in mind this, or at least put out there this thread, the mindset and whether we have a fixed mindset or an open mindset, where on earth does that fit in the place sometimes that we find ourselves where we are in pain, mentally where we are in feel as though we don't have options, where we don't where we lose hope, where we feel as though there's not a lot we can do to change our situation. So if you could share a little bit about your story and lead into a bit of the things you talk about today, the work that you're doing, that would be great, Tom and thank you and thank you for your service. Yeah, you're extended.

I appreciate it. So I guess I get started. We had in those five deployments that I talked about two of them were very volatile deployments or more so all of them were but these two was very significant and one was while we were in Iraq. Even though I was a first sergeant only first sergeant wouldn't be the company sniper. But it was a really unique situation. I was the senior sniper in the brigade and I was ended up I was the company sniper. Every time the guys were out I was in a hide site and then my spotter was also the company medic Sergeant Brown Bomb and hands down the best spotter I'd ever had over the years and but we were always together and they had brought in three Syrian snipers to kill me and one of two of them were just marksmans. They weren't really good snipers and they met their fate fairly quick. One though Luay was good and I had hunted that guy down. He had shot a few of my guys, didn't kill him but wounded him and ended up long story short, Luay got to I was out on a hasty patrol. Luay got the drop on us and killed Sergeant Bomb and that really irritated me a lot. One not only just because that he was the closest soldier to me, not that he was any more or less important than any of the other ones but the other part was that Louis it got the best of me and so I ended up went on a 10 day manhunt trying to find him and ended up we ended up getting him but the things that bothered me was Sergeant Bond's death and this is, this is what I would find out later. Survivor guilt, one of many survivor guilt issues that I was dealing with. But he was going to leave that night because they were waiting for him to get back to Alaska to induce labor to his wife for their first child. My children were old enough to have lifelong memories of their dad where Leah, his daughter, would never know her dad. And I was at a point in my career I had met all the goals I wanted to in my career. And where Sergeant Baum had a lot of goals he hadn't met yet. Definitely was a future sergeant major, hands down, one of the most professional non commissioned officers I'd ever worked with in the army. And I was at a point in my life I could have died happy. And he still had a lot of life left in him. And that patrol, he wasn't supposed to be out there, he let, he talked me into letting him go at the last minute. It was a hasty patrol that I had spun up as a reaction to enemy fire or harassing fire. And so I lived with that for many years. And then you fast forward a little bit a few deployments later and I had some head injuries that never got looked at. And we didn't know a lot about head injuries at the time. Time. And but I ended up got selected to be, well, I was in Afghanistan, got selected to be a sergeant major. And I, when I redeployed, I had two weeks to get from Alaska to Fort Bliss, Texas. And when I redeployed, I found out that a 20 year marriage had went down to drink while I was gone. And I don't have enough time to process it because I only have two weeks to get from Anchorage, Alaska down to Fort Bliss, Texas. And so when I get down to Fort Bliss though, I'm in my little travel trailer that I towed down there and I'm by myself. And it's the first time ever, I've been a very long time I've been by myself. I wasn't in charge of nobody. Nobody's in charge of me. It was just me and my little trailer and my motorcycle and my truck. That was it. To the Tom Campbell clan and the old saying that an idle mine is the devil's playground. Oh by God it is. And I have nothing to do but think about all the survivor guilt that I had about decisions that I made that cost people's lives. I thought about the family that I didn't have, that I used to have, that I don't have anymore. And at the time I had a strange relationship with my kids, great relationship with them now, but at the time I had a strange relationship. And then on Top of that I was having these migraine headaches. I didn't know what was causing them, but my head would hurt so bad I couldn't move. And then I started self medicating. I started drinking my and I'd give feel the headache come on. Me and Jim Beam would start having a doctor session which I would find out Jim Beam is not a good doctor contrary to popular belief. But I would drink myself to sleep every night. And then I would hear stories from other students that was staying in the campground where of riding wheelies out of the trailer park in the middle of the night on my motorcycle and had no recollection even riding stupid motorcycle. So I started doing stupid stuff and not knowing about it. And what I tell people is I've gotten to the point that I didn't care. I didn't care if I lived or died. I was very angry. I hated myself, I hated God, I hated everybody around me. And if you meet anybody graduated from Class 61 and saw major academy and ask them if they know Tom Campbell, they'll say oh yeah, I know that idiot. And they won't have nothing good to say about me, unfortunately. And so I was suicidal before I knew I was suicidal. And what I mean by that was because I didn't care if I lived or died. I did stupid stuff like ride my motorcycle at 100 plus miles an hour and gridlock traffic and it turns into parking lot i10 in the afternoons because I didn't care for my health and I didn't care for your health or anybody else's health around me. And I like, I still like rock climbing but I would go out to Waco Tanks and I would climb just to get away from the world. And I'll climb a couple hundred feet up in the air with no anchors and no ropes because I didn't care if I fell or not. I didn't care if I lived or died. So I suicidal before I knew I suicidal. But what broke the camel's back was I had an episode in class and then I was forced to go to mental health. And when I went to mental health I had a chip on my shoulder because now I got to prove I don't have ptsd. And the poor little old lady that I saw in there, I made such a spectacle out of my that she refused to be in the same room with me because she feared for her health. And so then I went to see the commandant and I thought I was going to get kicked out of the sergeant major academy. And instead though he had my enlisted records brief, which shows everything, all your awards and deployments and assignments and everything you've done in your career. And he. He asked me a question. He said, out of all these deployments, how many NCOs or non commissioned officers did you force to get help? And that rung a bell because I'd always preached to my leaders to lead by example. If you can't. If you can't live by your own preaching, I don't want you on the team. In fact, if you got to tell me how good a leader you are, I don't want you on the team. If your actions show me how good a leader you are, I do want you on the team. And so that rung a bell because I had forced people to get help. And some of those are alive today because I forced him to get help. But somehow I was above getting help. So I'm gonna try to live my own preaching. So I'm gonna give this mental health an honest effort. And I go back to mental health and my next psychologist, of course. He's a big guy. He's about that much taller than me, about that wide, had hands big enough, looked like he had bananas for fingers. And I had a few sessions with him. He was leaving, they gave me to it. And then they sent me to another little old lady, BLESS her heart, Ms. Pierce. And she picked up on this thing called TBI, traumatic brain injury, and asked if I'd ever been screened. Well, no, why would I? I mean, I don't have any holes in my head and I don't have lost any marbles. I don't. So I go off to. She sends me over to the TBI clinic on Fort Bliss, and they do the MRIs and CAT scans and muscle memory test, muscle motor skill tests and memory tests. And. And so they say, look your front left low where your brain is bruised. Which explains. A few months before I redeployed in Afghanistan, I fell off a cliff in a rock, smashed me on the head. And luckily I had my helmet on, but it knocked me unconscious. And so that was explained. And the doc said that the bruise will heal itself over time. He said, but you got something else going on in there on your same low, about the size of 50 cent pieces, dead tissue, where you hadn't. You evidently had an aneurysm during one of your brain injuries and that will never heal. So we'll get you better than you are now, But Toby Keith sings, you won't be you. You won't be as good as you Once was. And. But that's actually what broke the camel's back was now on top of the failed marriage, the relationship, the survivor guilt, questioning my decisions and everything else is now my brain's not right. And so in my mind, I didn't. I could not fathom how would they promote me to sergeant major? How would they. And keep me in the army. And I have. I mean, I know nothing but the Army. I don't know what I'm gonna do outside. But that's actually what broke the camel's back was there was one common denominator, all my problems. And it was me. And in my mind, if I removed that common denominator, everybody around me's world would be better. So that's when I started making a plan to end everything. And I. But I can't. I don't want to hang myself or shoot myself or. Because. For a couple of reasons. One, I didn't want to jeopardize my kids getting the benefits from survival benefit or survivor benefits and life insurance. And I didn't want to just be a statistic. I wanted to. I wanted to stage an accident. And I found the perfect place to stage an accident on Trans Mountain Road there in El Paso, which goes up in the mountains. And it's. And I had the perfect place. A little sharp left curve coming down the hill. There's a rock wall right there in that curve. And it looks like I can make it look like I just missed it with my motorcycle and hit that rock wall, and that'd be the end of it. And. But I can't execute it because I got to get my affairs in order for my kids. And so while I'm getting my affairs in order, I rehearsed that plan. I can't tell you how many times I go to the top of the mountain. I'd race that motorcycle down, and I would slow down before I got to that curve. And once I got my fares in order, then it became time for the plan of execution. And so I went up the mountain, and then when I drove by that spot, I looked at that wall and. And I went up to the top, turned the motorcycle around, and I. Screaming down. Well, the time it took me to go to the top, back down. Somebody parked a car between that wall and that curve. And somehow I got that motorcycle. I mean, I was well over 100 miles an hour. I got the motorcycle under control, went around the curve sideways, tires smoking. I don't know how I did not wreck. And I went back up and I pulled over on the side of the road, and I waited for that car to leave. And while I'm waiting for that car to leave, my phone rings in my pocket, which I don't answer because I'm on a mission here. And I let it go to voicemail, and it rings again. I let it go to voicemail, it rings again, and this keeps going on. Finally, I answer the stupid phone to see who this persistent person is. And that persistent person was a little girl that I'd met not too long before. And we were friends somehow. I mean, as ornery as I was, she couldn't believe I was really as bitter as I put on to be that there was a good person in there. She kept talking to me, even though I was a bitter butthole. And she had this weird feeling that she just needed to call and check on me. Well, that little girl, she's my wife now. And I asked her later, I said, how many times, how long would you call me? And her answer was, when you answered the phone. I was getting in my car, and I was going to keep calling until either I found you or you answered the phone. She had no idea she was about to intervene in a suicide attempt, but she literally talked me off the mountain that day. So then I start doing. Giving the mental health another effort, and they give me the TBI clinic. They gave me a bunch of medicine which I wasn't taking because I didn't want to get hooked on medicines, and I don't. And they make me feel loopy and drool on myself, and. And so I never took it, which means it didn't do any good. And so now I'm gonna give this an honest effort. I go back to Ms. Pierce. She asked about how the medication do, and I told her I ain't taking it. And so she refused to talk to me. She said, look, if you're not going to get your chemical balances right, it's pointless in me even talk to. In fact, you just leave my office now. I thought, well, I kind of need this lady. I mean, just try to sort through this stuff. So I start taking my stupid medicine. I still take it today, but then I. But it got my chemical balances in, right? It made me quit bouncing around. Like, if I hadn't. If I didn't take it this morning, I'd be bouncing around like an idiot right now. Another medicine to help my anxiety and to help control my emotions and help me get to sleep. And so I have a pile of pills I take every night, unfortunately. But once I got My chemical balances right now. We can start trying to sort through and try to build coping, making mechanisms and what have you to try to deal with the stresses. And not that the stresses went away, but I had somebody to help me try to cope and build my mechanisms and what have you. And. And so for years, though, I never talked about it, even after I was getting treatment, because I was ashamed of it. And so Teresa, my wife, she actually was the one who really got me to really start talking about it, because she kept saying, I mean, look, if you shared your story, how many people or lives can you touch? And in that time, I was still a sergeant major, which I found out that there's a lot of mess over the years that we've gained on suicide. And. But they promoted me to sergeant major. I got to keep my security clearance. I mean, all the stuff that everybody says will happen didn't happen if you go get mental help. So I started sharing my story to be able to maybe talk somebody else off the ledge. And I will tell you, that's therapy all in itself. Yes. I mean, every time I share my story, it's like another brick is taken out of the pile on my back. And, I mean, it gets. It's emotional, especially when I do my presentation. I mean, anywhere from an hour and a half or more, depending on how engaged the audience is. But when I'm done, I am emotionally and mentally drained because I take myself back down memory lane, what have you. But I would tell you that life is a good place, and I'm in a good place now. I mean, I'm not out of the weeds. I still have my moments. I still have my days. Bless Teresa's heart. She's. She's been my rock, and she stuck with me now, where. This year will be our 10th year of being married. But that's kind of. That's the abbreviated version.

Well, it's. You know, it's a. I want to pick up on something you said there at the end about. About the myths in. And I would imagine whether it's military or it's. Otherwise, the feelings are the same. I mean, I. I had something not remotely. Well, I won't say that I'm conflicting myself. You know, pain is pain. Doesn't matter what the cause of the pain is. It could be that we. We all have different thresholds for pain. We get that. Right?

So.

So. But the feeling of pain, what pain feels like, I think is the same and mental. The strain of it, the. The feeling of just being out of. Out of Solutions, out of options, out of, you know, out of a plan that. That is not a good place to be. And when there's a solution or, or at least the, the. The promise of a solution, that, that, that feels at odds with our ego, it's a challenge. Right? Because I think a great part of what, what we're able to do as human beings has a great deal to do with how we've. How we see ourselves in the world with, with our identity. And, and your identity. Well, I won't speak for your identity. My identity at various points in my life has been as a bit of a warrior, as a. As somebody who could do difficult things, maybe be tenacious, be the last person standing, be vigilant beyond, be very good at being on guard for my, for my clients, my family, you know, whatever it might be. And, and when you're, you're in that. When that's the identity, you know, to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be in need of help, to be out of, you know, unable to help yourself, that is a. There's a real conflict there between that re. That reality and, and your identity in that moment.

No, it is. And that's one of the reasons that I didn't get help was exactly that I had a Persona, that I was invincible. And a lot of people looked up to me. I mean, and whenever we get in stressful situations, they always first are Campbell or Sergeant Major Campbell in later deployments was the guy that was never. That never got deterred. He was the level head and the most stressful. And so all that kind of those reasons was somehow I thought help wasn't me. I don't know if it was because I was ashamed that I wasn't as invincible as everybody thought I was or what, but you spark something just a while ago is, you know, the last thing that a person loses before they lose everything is hope. And Napoleon III made two comments. He said, one, if I, If I had enough cloth, I could conquer the world. And he also said leaders are dealers in hope. And what he means by those two statements is he, his leaders have got to be able to maintain and instill hope in their soldiers to be able to conquer the world. And part of that hope was the cloth is given just something as minuscule as a piece of cloth for doing something good. Which is where the military got the idea of medals and ribbons for their uniforms is you give them a little piece of cloth, which it's not the cloth, it's the recognition of doing good. Now you're boasting that hope that you as the leader instill and put it in outside of a military's term is. I mean leaders aren't just in a military or a skill or the boss at the organization. I mean there's natural born leaders out there in the world. But one thing that I think us as humans is we've got to reinstile hope. And those that lose hope if we want to save them.

Yes, I agree with that. I, and that word shame, I, I can identify with that as well because when I was in a position where I felt like I didn't, I didn't know how could be as that my identity and my reality were, were different. In that moment of realization then I felt, I felt shame, I felt self loathing, I felt, yeah, just this, used the word hate earlier. And, and so that is, that is a, I think that's a fairly low watermark for any of us that, and I would say for all of us because I believe that most people have felt this at some point and maybe it was fleeting, maybe it was passing and now it's a distant memory and they don't want to, they don't want to go back there. They don't want to think about that again. Right. And maybe, maybe some people had it over, over a period of time, a prolonged period of time and maybe some people are dealing with it right now and none of us know what the future will hold and, and there's a chance that, that we might, any of us or all of us feel that way again. But I think what, what is really important is the awareness and that you've brought through your story for people that, that may be thinking, you know, somehow again that, that, that this is, this is a, you know, that there is, that there's some shame and in acknowledging the need for that kind of help. And I really felt great to hear you say that the military did not penalize you or punish you for being, taking steps to get yourself better and to put yourself in a more in a state of equilibrium. I mean chemical, chemical things going on in the body, you know, are well known that bodies are almost like a little bit of a science experiment in some levels. So you know, your food, what you drink, the things that, that, that we take for supplementation purposes or even the medicines, things that we've got that help us to get to that equilibrium, you know, what somebody might call balance. But that, that, that state of that homeostasis that's, that's required, that's what we have to have. We all have to Sleep. We have to have clear head. We can't be walking around and feeling in pain. Because in those states, we cannot make right. We cannot think rightly, and we cannot make right decisions. And certainly anybody that somehow either themselves is questioning whether they should get help or there are people in their lives, whether they're members of their team, that they can see the signs of burnout, that they are not actively checking in on, checking on. Or family members or friends they know are struggling, that they're not. That they're not checking, you know, checking in on. I think. I think this conversation is super helpful in that regard. That we have to. Just like Teresa, you know, she must have had some instinct, was led somehow to you to check in on you. And it just turned out, I would say, you know, with divine intervention.

Exactly.

That she got you.

Yeah, right. And that's why I share with my story and is a couple of things happened at the point of execution. One, actually, this goes back to a good plan. What we talked about with plans earlier.

I was thinking the same exact thing. Same thing.

So I think the. I mean, why did those people park that car in that place at that time? Who knows? I mean, it could have been just divine intervention or whatever, but that was the disruption to the plan. The intervention happened with Teresa acting on her intuition. And had she not acted on that intuition was persistent on acting with it, I wouldn't be here. And even today, if somebody starts weighing on my mind, I'm gonna pick up the phone and I'm gonna call, because you don't know what's on the other end of that phone, phone. And sometimes a simple hello goes a very long way. But, you know, I want to talk real quick. You sparked on something. I had to write me a note down so I don't forget because I definitely want to bring this to light when we talk about getting mental health and health society as a whole right now, we. We look at mental health as a reaction to a crisis. And so nobody goes to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist unless there's a crisis that's happened that force them to go get help. Very few go on their own cognitive. But why is that? Because like in the military, every year it's required we have a physical. Our physical health examination. We also, every year we get our ears checked or our eyes checked, and we get our teeth checked every year. Why are we not checking on our cognitive wellness? And the analogy that I use, so I drag race too. That's how I get my drilling fix and drag racing. I've blown up more motors than I can count, unfortunately. And whenever I make a pass and the motor goes out, when I get back to the shop, I pull that motor out of the car, I take it apart, I find out what went wrong and how can I prevent that from going wrong again. And then I'll rebuild the motor and put it back in the car and then off to the next weekend race and. But if I don't maintain that motor, I'm not going to get very many races out of it. And I'm going to be right back pulling it back out, tearing it apart and figuring out what went wrong. And I use that analogy for our mental health. I mean, when we use it as a reaction to crisis, that's what they're doing. They're pulling out our motor. Not really physically, but they're going to help figure out what went wrong and then put everything back together. But if we don't maintain that, we're going to be going right back down there to get rebuilt again and the army right now in particular. So now I couldn't. I couldn't just retire. And so I went back to work for the army, and I worked for the Army's holistic health and fitness director. And there's five domains to the army, and I wish they had this when I was young. I wouldn't hurt so bad now. But there's five domains. Our physical domain, of course, our physical fitness, our nutritional domain, which of course we got to eat right to maintain our fitness. A sleep domain, which is a tremendous amount of sleep science out there that we didn't know about early on about how. I mean, when the Army I grew up in, if you sleep was a crutch and if you fell asleep, you was weak and we were so stupid. But there's two domains that's really hard to get across. One is our spiritual domain. It's not religion, but there's something that drives us to do what we do and how do we optimize that? The other one is our mental wellness domain, and that's where we're trying to drive now is quite. Quit looking at this as a reaction to a crisis. Let's look at how can we maintain our mental wellness and optimize and not just maintain it, but how can we optimize it for our whole. Because our holistic health and people that say, I mean, yeah, I sacrifice my health for my family or my soldiers or whatever, and every time I hear that, I cringe, because if you're not right, you can't take care of your loved ones. Ones you've got to be right to be able to. So your mental wellness is just as important as your loved ones, probably more so because you need to be mentally fit to be able to assist others with it. But when you part that, that come up, I just, I just, I had to share it.

Tom. I'm so happy. I'm so glad you did. And it's, it, it's wonderful to know that we're, we're all sort of zoning in or, or where you know, when you're trying to get your sights to hit something, you've got to adjust your sights so that you can recalibrate if you will. I think we're all recalibrating and in a very similar ways. I've had the really great fortune and I know we're going to wrap up here in a second, but I'll, I'll quickly share this. I, the, the Navy and the Marines have had me come in and for Pendleton, Camp Pendleton, which is very near where I live half the year and, and, and speak with both, both enlisted men and, and, and officers about what you're talking about. That holistic resilience we use the term resiliency is a kind of a catch all for that mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual well being. And it's, it's a really big deal to see it as, as not one single thing like you know how physically capable you are because it's such a small piece by itself. I mean it's an important piece of the puzzle in its entirety, but by itself it doesn't, it doesn't, it won't, it won't win the day.

No.

And as you said, it's, there's a lot there that we just don't yet understand about the mind, body, connection for one thing. And, and certainly what drives us and the best word to describe what, what it is we can't understand about what drives us from the inside out is that that word spirit or spiritual. So.

Right.

Could just couldn't agree more. And I, I guess what my final question to you is, is really just about, you know, you said life, life is a great place. It's first thing you said. And I did a TED talk some years ago where my through line was, was about I love my life that when I went through my period where I was the darkest and the darkest for me was having trouble getting to sleep at night or trouble getting back to sleep if I woke up in the middle of the night, trouble waking up in the morning feeling good at the start of the day and I started to do this, this very simple and maybe, maybe even robotic thing at the start, start of my days after that period where I would put my feet on the floor and take a breath and feel some. Something in the moment I feel grateful for and then say out loud, I love my life.

Right?

No matter what, I love my life. And I thought when you said, and you said it again just a little bit ago, life is a great place, I thought maybe again, you and I have, we have something in common. So is that a mantra? Is that something you say, you remind yourself and remind other people about it?

Is I say it a lot. And I've got a really good friend, David Bartley. A lot of people know him by Woody, and he does a lot of speaking engagements as well. And me and him have similar stories other than he didn't serve in the army, his older brother did, General Bartley. And so he grew up in his brother shadow. But David, though, me and him, I love that guy like a play cousin. I mean, I love that guy to death. But he said something that. Or the first time I met him, we did a joint presentation of Washington D.C. and he said something I'd never heard before. And he said, hope is a weapon. And in the context that he said that was. And suicide's not the target. And when he said that, I said, holy crap, I've never heard that before, but I'm still in it. But. Right. I do. I mean, part of my defense, though, I don't go back into that deep, dark place that I went to that I don't ever want to go again. And I don't want anybody else to go to is I remind myself, and I use hope as a weapon. And I do. I tell myself all the time if one hunt the good stuff. And I tell myself, you know, life is good today. And every time that something good happens, I remind myself that my life just got better. I mean, just. I mean, just an example. I mean, me and my wife, now that I'm retired out of the army and now I'm back to work in the. The same organization I retired out of as a sergeant major. And so now we're going to stay in Virginia. And so we're trying to find a place to buy and it just can. And I'll tell you, that's the most monotonous process. I mean, a picture's worth a thousand lives when it comes to real estate. But we finally found a house. I mean, and we find a place we liked and we put a bid in where they just accepted a bid before ours got through or we get out bidding. And so it just. It started getting frustrating. Frustrating. I had to keep reminding myself, just keep going, keep going. And so we found a house. When we went out and looked at it, my wife, when we pulled in the driveway, she said, I love this house. This is where I want. So I said, we do everything. So I got on the phone immediately, started setting everything up. So, anyhow, we won the bid on the house. House. We close on the 13th. We're happy. But that's an example. I told myself, you know, life's good. I mean, we're finally going to have a house to call our own instead of paying somebody else's mortgage. We're finally going to get to settle down instead of moving every other year. Life is really good.

Indeed. Tom, I have so enjoyed the time we had together today and loved our conversation. I will echo the crowd of people who've said it to you before.

4.

I think there's a really good book. Not just a book. You know what, when you say, you know, people say, hey, write a book. You know, I think there's a good book there, Tom. A really good book. I think there's a great TED Talk there as well, if you ever want to work your way onto that crazy, crazy stage or whatever. I know that that was harrowing experience for me. I think the TED experience will maybe rival the first time you stood up and did comedy. Maybe you jumped out of a plane or something. But I would love to stay in contact and.

Yeah, for sure.

I just so appreciate you, sir. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Appreciate you as well. Thank you.

Tom Campbell is. Is a remarkable man. He's done some things that. That many of us will never do, things that we will never experience, things that we will never dream of experiencing or want to experience either. And. And he is on the other side of many of those experiences now and working not only on making his life as great as it can be like we all are, but he's actively helping others to deal with their own challenges in the arena of mental health. His story is remarkable. I don't. I don't know that I've. I've sat recently and listened on a podcast to someone tell their story and felt as though I. I just couldn't interrupt, even. Even just to say yes, because it was a sort of sacred space as. As I was listening to him. But that's how I felt today as Tom was talking about survivor guilt and the work, his work in the military and his role as a leader and his view of leadership and speaking in particular about his own mental health and vulnerably sharing what he was going through at a period of time, about 10 years ago in his life when he was thinking very seriously and planning, planning very seriously to take his life, and was in the process of doing so when fate or good fortune or divine intervention or whatever you want to call it, disrupted that plan. And it's, it's. It's a remarkable story. It's, it's just as Tom said, a great plan is only as. Is only good to the point of its execution. A great plan is only good until the point of execution. And at the point of execution of his plan to take his life, it was disrupted, fortunately. And so, yeah, we talked about hope. We talked about hope as a weapon. We talked about leaders as dealers in hope and how it is that is so important that we help people to feel that there is hope, that we acknowledge them, that we see them, that we help them to understand that their cognitive health, their brain health, their mental health is not something that we need to feel odd about or ashamed of, but rather instead that we seek before there's a crisis. Too often we look at mental health as a reaction to a crisis, and by that point in time, it's harder than it needs to be. I know when I speak in this area of mental health in a resiliency context, often the lesson I share is that it's far easier to prevent our fatigue in the first place than to recover from it afterward. And in this same vein, it is easier to prevent our mental dis. Ease if we are preventing it beforehand. It's easier to prevent ourselves from. From getting to that place where we're burned out, even if we are. If we are developing, working on proactively creating our resilience before. And that's in a context of work, that's in the context of leading and leading others in a work scenario, in a work environment. And it's equally as important, as you heard Tom say in the military, in our family lives, in our personal lives. It was wonderful to hear him talk about how important it is that we take care of our mental health so that we have the capacity to also look out for others. How. How can we have other people's backs? How can we be of service to others if we are putting ourselves and our health and well being mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually in the back behind taking care of other people? It's, it's A riddle. It and the answer, as Tom shared with us, is to not do that is to put ourselves first and not see it as being selfish. It's quite the opposite. It's probably the most selfless thing that we can do is to be our best so that we can be there for other people again. I, I just thoroughly enjoyed Tom's presence, his contributions today and I absolutely hope that you will share this episode with other people that you may see as as in need of it, or people that you see either at work or at home who are, who are struggling in some way. We would love for you to of course rate this episode too is if you feel like this was a valuable conversation and you could leave a five star review on whatever the platform that you consume this podcast from. That would be helpful because it helps the algorithm to let more people know about it, more people will hear it, be given access to it. So that's helpful to us, of course, but it's also and hopefully has a greater ripple effect in helping others. So thank you for doing that. You can also go to AdamMarkel.com podcast AdamMarkel.com podcast to leave a comment for Tom or myself and we'll be the ones to answer that. If you want to check in with your own mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual resiliency, it's as simple as going to rankmyresilience.com and just in three minutes time answering 16 very, very quick simple questions, you're going to get an immediate baseline score. Rankmyresilience.com it's free. It's our, our contribution and hopefully you will take advantage of it. Get a snapshot in time of how resilient you are as well as what you can do to raise those numbers. Raise your score by taking better care of yourself and the ways that the sort of granular details of what that can look like. So again, as always, thank you so much for your participation, for your being involved in the way that you are and for all that you do to support this conversation and this community. Thank you so much and I hope you're having a blessed and a beautiful day wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Ciao.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com to get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.