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

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. 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 the reason I do that stand-up comedy is I strive to make not just my place better, but everybody around me's 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 guess, for somebody that came out of a career in the military and the kinds of things that you are trained to face, and I don't I don't know, actually, how much of that you were put in the middle of. I know we train 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. In reality, I cheated death quite a few times here and there. I was a paratrooper, an infantry paratrooper in the Army. I grew up as a sniper. We didn't start deploying, though, until I was— I was a platoon sergeant and immediately after I was a first sergeant. I wasn't a young guy when we started deploying. I'd already been in the Army for a good spell, but I ended up one trip to Iraq and 4 trips to Afghanistan, almost back to back. Basically, that's 5+ years I spent in combat.

Deployed for 5 years?

Right. Collectively, not all at one time, of course. But I'd be gone a year, come back a year, gone a year.

This is a question, boy, I didn't expect to ask you, but it's coming to me, so I'm gonna 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'd 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 2 things? Again, I— we're following— even before we hit the record, one of the things Tom and I said was we're gonna follow the breadcrumbs wherever they lead us. So—

There's not a lot of parallels, but I would say Outside of jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft in flight, which some people just died, is kind of idiocracy by itself. But in just my military career as a whole, though, that did feed into the comedy. And it goes— and kind of back to trying to turn— make lemonade out of lemons. But I will tell you, 32 years of being in the Army, I saw some funny stuff.

I imagine so. Yeah, I remember growing up Watching, and I think I'm maybe a, a minute or two older than you, but the show that I remember as a kid, I think it was on Tuesday nights, was M*A*S*H. You remember M*A*S*H, right?

Yeah.

And obviously that was a sitcom comedy show of sorts, situational comedy about life in the Army in Korea in the '50s. Right. 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, 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 midst of that absurdity, and even of that tragedy. You have a lot to draw on.

Right. It's kind of sometimes ironic. 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 Rogue by Hubert Piccard. I can't read it to you because I don't speak French. But Hubert Piccard is a phenomenal guy. Ever since he wrote that book, we've been friends. But he got embedded in my company in Iraq the day that a very traumatic event had happened to the company. But he wrote about that in particular. One thing that just really captivated him was And as stressful as the environment was, and especially at that time, we were averaging 5 to 7 firefights a day, 7 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, 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, when I was asking earlier just about what— if there's a parallel between the comedy, and I'll say, and the combat. Maybe we can keep it to 2 C-words, right?

Yeah, right.

Well, 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 got up in front of a large group of people. And of course, they didn't have guns and they weren't pointing at me, 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 and their arms are crossed and they're looking at you like, who in the world is this person? Right?

Right.

That's kind of a hostile audience right there. But is there something you can say about maybe the comparison of the mindset for combat and the mindset for being a stand-up comedian?

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 a level of a psyop that's 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 same goes with when you're in front of an audience, is you've got to read the audience. You got to try to plan your set out. You got to try to estimate what the audience is going to be. And 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. I come in with a game plan, but then in the middle of executing that plan, the audience has a vote in how that— how the outcome comes. And then you've got to try to adapt your speaking or comedy set what the audience actually gives you as you read them. I'd say that's probably the biggest parallel between the two is you can't just take for face value. 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 that I'm fortunate to have been a part of a couple of years ago, this book Pivot, and that's this concept, agility, adaptability, however you want to call it, this flexibility, On the one hand, and the capacity to read the situation, to read the room and what we're talking about, and then be able to adjust on the fly. And I would imagine it's the same out in the field when there's a plan of war, a plan strategy, and you've got to read what's happening that maybe changes that plan pretty dramatically, I would imagine.

Yeah, a great plan is only good till the moment of execution. 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 gonna ask, is that somebody's quote that you remember? Is that your quote?

I'd heard that somewhere years ago. And I cannot remember where I heard that. It was one of my leaders that said it. And I cannot remember who it was that said that. 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 courageous or something. Once they get hit in the nose, you know, their plan is completely out the window. Everybody's got a plan until they get punched or the bullets fly or what have you. But 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 fixed, if you will, the fluid mindset, the mindset that— Right. can pivot, I think is so vitally important in life. Now, I often talk to business audiences, so 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. 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 that 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 lose hope, where we feel as though there's not a lot we can do to change our situation? If you could share a little bit about your story and lead into the things you talk about today, the work that you're doing, that would be great, Tom. And thank you for your service. Yeah. Your extended service.

Hey, appreciate it. I get started in those 5 deployments that I talked about. 2 of them were very volatile deployments, or more so all of them were, but these 2, that was very significant. And one was while we were in Iraq, even though I was a first sergeant, normally 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 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 Brian Baum. Hands down the best spotter I'd ever had over the years. But we were always together, and they had brought in 3 Syrian snipers to kill me. 2 of them were just marksmen. They weren't really good snipers, and they met their fate fairly quick. One, though, Louie, was good, and I had hunted that guy down. He had shot a few of my guys, didn't kill them, but wounded them, and ended up Long story short, I was out on a hasty patrol. Lu Wei got the drop on us and killed Sergeant Vaughn. 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 Lu Wei got the best of me. I ended up going on a 10-day manhunt trying to find him. We ended up getting him, but the things that bothered me with Sergeant Vaughn's death, and 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 noncommissioned 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 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, harassing fire. And 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. We didn't know a lot about head injuries at the time. But while I was in Afghanistan, I got selected to be a Sergeant Major. When I redeployed, I had 2 weeks to get from Alaska to Fort Bliss, Texas. And when I redeployed, I found out that a 20-year marriage had went down the drain while I was gone. Wow. And I don't have enough time to process it because I only have 2 weeks to get from Anchorage, Alaska down to Fort Bliss, Texas. When I get down to Fort Bliss though, me and my little travel trailer that I towed down there, and I'm by myself. For 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 mind 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 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. Then I started self-medicating. I started drinking, and I'd feel a 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 of riding wheelies out of the trailer park in the middle of the night on my motorcycle and had no recollection even riding stupid So I started doing stupid stuff and not knowing about it. And what I tell people is I had 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. If you meet anybody that graduated from Class 61 at Sergeant 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 him. Unfortunately. And 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+ miles an hour in gridlock traffic on I-10 that turns into parking lot I-10 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 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 would 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 was suicidal before I knew I was 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 myself that she refused to be in the same room with me because she feared for her health. Then I went to see the commandant and I thought I was going to get kicked out of the Sergeant Major Academy. 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. He asked me a question. He said, out of all these deployments, how many NCOs or noncommissioned officers did you force to get help? That rung a bell because I'd always I preach to my leaders to lead by example. 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 that rung a bell because I had forced people to get help. And some of those are alive today because I forced them to get help. But somehow I was above getting help. I'm going to try to live my own preaching. So I'm going to 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 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— and then they sent me to another little old lady, bless her heart, Miss 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 don't have any holes in my head and I don't have lost any marbles. 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 motor skill tests, memory tests. And they say, look, your front left lobe of your brain is bruised, which explains a few months before I redeployed in Afghanistan, I fell off a cliff and a rock smashed me on the head. 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. What? On that same lobe, about the size of a 50-cent piece of dead tissue, 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 like Toby Keith sings, you won't be as good as you once was. But that's actually what broke the camel's back. Well, it's 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 I could not fathom how would they promote me to Sergeant Major? How would they keep me in the Army? I mean, I know nothing but the Army. I don't know what I'm going to do outside. But that's actually what broke the camel's back. There was one common denominator in 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. That's when I started making a plan to end everything. I don't want to hang myself or shoot myself, because for a couple of reasons. One, I didn't want to jeopardize my kids getting the benefits from survivor benefits and life insurance. And I didn't want to just be a statistic. 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 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. But I can't execute it because I got to get my affairs for my kids. While I'm getting my affairs in order, I rehearsed that plan. I can't tell you how many times I'd go to the top of the mountain, I'd race that motorcycle down, and I would slow down before I got to that curve. Now, once I got my affairs in order, then it became time for the plan of execution. And I went up the mountain, and then when I drove by that spot, I looked at that wall and I went up to the top, turned the motorcycle around, and I'm 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 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. I went back up and I pulled over on the side of the road and I waited for that car to leave. 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. I let it go to voicemail. It rings again. I let it go to voicemail. It rings again. This keeps going on. Finally, I answer the stupid phone to see who this persistent person is. That persistent person was a little girl that I'd met not too long before. 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 old girl, she's my wife now. And I asked her later, how long were you going to 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. Then I started doing and giving the mental health another effort. And they gave 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 they'd make me feel loopy and drool on myself. And so I never took it, which means it didn't do any good. Now I'm going to give this an honest effort. I go back to Ms. Pierce. She asked about how the medication's doing. 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 for me to even talk to you. In fact, you can just leave my office now. 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 it got my chemical balances in right. It made me quit bouncing around. 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 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 so for years though, I never talked about it, even after I was getting treatment because I was ashamed of it. And Theresa, my wife, she actually was the one who really got me to really start talking about it. And she kept saying, I mean, look, if you shared your story, how many people or lives can you touch? And at that time I was still a Sergeant Major, which I found out that there's a lot of myths over the years that we've gained on suicide. 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. 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 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. When I'm done, I am emotionally and mentally drained. 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 been my rock, and she stuck with me. Now, this year will be our 10th year of being married. That's the abbreviated version.

Well, I want to pick up on something you said there at the end about the myths. And I would imagine whether it's military or it's otherwise, the feelings are the same. I mean, I had something not remotely— pain is pain. It doesn't matter what the cause of the pain is. We all have different thresholds for pain. We get that, right? But the feeling of pain, what pain feels like, I think, is the same. And mental, the strain of it, the feeling of just being out of solutions, out of options, out of a plan. Right. That is not a good place to be. And when there's a solution, or at least the promise of a solution that feels at odds with our ego, it's a challenge, right? Because I think a great part of what we're able to do as human beings has great deal to do with how we see ourselves in the world, with our identity. And your identity— well, I won't speak for your identity. My identity at various points in my life is a bit of a warrior, as somebody who could do difficult things, maybe be tenacious, be the last person standing, be vigilant, be on— be very good at being on guard for my clients, my family, whatever it might be.

Right.

And when you're in that, when that's the identity, to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be in need of help, to be out of— unable to help yourself, there's a real conflict there, that reality 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 whenever We'd get in stressful situations. First Sergeant Major Campbell, on later deployments, was the guy that never got deterred. He was the level head in the most stressful. 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. But you sparked something just a while ago. The last thing that a person loses before they lose everything is hope. Napoleon III made 2 comments. He said, one, if I had enough cloth, I could conquer the world. He also said, leaders are dealers in hope. What he means by those 2 statements is his leaders have got to be able to maintain and instill hope in their soldiers to be able to conquer the world. 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 uniform. You give them a little piece of cloth, it's not the cloth, it's the recognition of doing good. Now you're bolstering that hope that you as the leader instilled. Put it outside of a military Leaders aren't just 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 reinstill hope in those that lose hope if we want to save them.

Yes, I agree with that. And that word shame, 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 I could be as— that my identity and my reality were different in that moment of realization, then I felt shame. I felt self-loathing. I felt— used the word hate earlier. And I think that's a fairly low watermark for any of us. Right. 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 go back there. They don't want to think about that ever again. And maybe some people had it 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 there's a chance that we might, any of us or all of us, feel that way again. I think what is really important is the awareness and that you've brought through your story for people that, that may be thinking. Somehow again that there's some shame in acknowledging the need for that kind of help, and really felt great to hear you say that the military did not penalize you or punish you for being for taking steps to get yourself better and to put yourself in a more in a state of equilibrium. I mean, chemical things going on in the body are it's well known that our bodies are almost like a little bit of a. Science experiment in some levels. Your food, what you drink, the things that we take for supplementation purposes, or even the medicines, things that we've got that help us to get to that equilibrium somebody might call balance, that homeostasis that's required. That's what we have to have. We all have to sleep. We have to have a clear head. We can't be walking around and feeling in pain because In those states, we cannot think rightly and we cannot make right decisions. And certainly anybody that somehow either themselves is, 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, that they are not actively checking on, or family members or friends they know are struggling that then they're not checking in on. I think, I think this conversation is super helpful. In that regard, we have to just like Teresa. She must have had some instinct, was led somehow to check in on you, and it just turned out, I would say, with divine intervention.

Exactly.

That she got you. Yeah.

And that's why I share with my story, and is a couple of things happen 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.

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 going to pick up the phone and I'm going to call because you don't know what's on the other end of that phone. And sometimes a simple hello goes a very long way. I want to talk to you 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 our mental health and health, society as a whole right now, we look at mental health as a reaction to a crisis. And nobody goes to see a psychologist or 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 our physical health examination. We also, every year, we get our ears checked, 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, and 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. But if I don't maintain that motor, I'm not gonna get very many races out of it, and I'm gonna 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 just retire, and so I went back to work for the Army. And I work for the Army's Holistic Health and Fitness Director. And there's 5 domains to the Army's— and I wish they had this when I was young, I wouldn't hurt so bad now. But there's 5 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 there's a tremendous amount of sleep science out there that we didn't know about early on about how— I mean, the Army I grew up in, sleep was a crutch. And if you fell asleep, you was weak. We were so stupid. But there's 2 domains that's really hard to get across. One is our spiritual domain, 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 quit looking at this as a reaction to a crisis. Let's look at how can we maintain our mental wellness and optimize it and not just maintain it, but how can we optimize it? Or holistic health. And people that say, I mean, yeah, I sacrifice my health for my family or my soldiers or whatever. Every time I hear that, I cringe because if you're not right, you can't take care of your loved one. You've got to be right to be able to. 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. But when you sparked that, that come up, I had to share it.

Tom, I'm so glad you did. It's wonderful to know that we're zoning in, or 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 in 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 quickly share this. The Navy and Marines have had me come in and Camp Pendleton, which is—

Yeah. Yeah.

Very near where I live half the year and speak with both enlisted men and officers about what you're talking about, about holistic resilience. We use the term resiliency as a kind of a catchall for that mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual wellbeing. It's a really big deal to see it as not one single thing, like How physically capable you are. It's such a small piece by itself. It's an important piece of the puzzle.

Right.

In its entirety, but by itself, it won't win the day. And as you said, there's a lot there that we just don't yet understand about the mind-body connection, for one thing. And certainly what drives us, and the best word to describe what it is we can't understand about what drives us from the inside out. That word spirit or spiritual. Could just, couldn't agree more. Well, my final question to you is really just about, you said life is a great place. That first thing you said, and I did a TED Talk some years ago where my through line was about, I love my life. 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 and feeling good at the start of the day. And I started to do this very simple, maybe even robotic thing at the start of my days after that period where I would put my feet on the floor and take a breath and feel 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, Again, just a little bit ago, life is a great place. I thought maybe again, you and I have something in common. Is that a mantra? Is that something you say you remind yourself and remind other people about?

It is. I say it a lot. I've got a really good friend, David Bartley. A lot of people know him by Woody. 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. He grew up in his brother's 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 the first time I met him, we did a joint presentation up in Washington, DC. 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. When he said that, I said, holy crap, man, I've never heard that before, but I'm stealing it. But right. I do. I mean, part of my defense so 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, 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. 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, the same organization I retired out of as a sergeant major, now we're going to stay in Virginia. And so we're trying to find a place to buy. And it just can't— and then I'll tell you, the most monotonous process. I mean, a picture's worth a thousand lies when it comes to real estate. 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'd get outbid and it started getting frustrating and frustrating. I had to keep reminding myself to 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 to be. I said, all right, let me do everything. So I got on the phone immediately, started setting everything up. So anyhow, we won the bid on the house. We closed on the 13th. We're happy. But that's an example. I told myself, life's good. 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. I have just so enjoyed the time we had together today. Loved our conversation. I will echo the crowd of people who've said it to you before. I think there's a really good book, not just a book. You know what people say? Hey, you should write a book. 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 stage or whatever. I know that that was a harrowing experience for me. I think the TED experience will maybe rival the first time you stood up and did comedy.

All right.

First time maybe you jumped out of a plane or something. But I would love to stay in contact. I just so appreciate you, sir. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

I appreciate you as well. Thank you.

Well, Tom Campbell is the remarkable man. He's done some things 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 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 know that I've sat recently and listened on a podcast to someone tell their story and felt as though I just couldn't interrupt even just to say yes, because It was a sort of sacred space as I was listening to him. But that's how I felt today as Tom was talking about survivor guilt and 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 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 a remarkable story. It's, as Tom said, a great plan 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, 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 need to 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 this same vein, it, it is easier to prevent our mental, our mental dis-ease if we are preventing it beforehand. It's easier to prevent ourselves from getting to that place where we are burned out, even 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 others in, 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 can we have other people's backs? How can we be of service to others? If we are putting ourselves and our, our health and wellbeing mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually in the back behind taking care of other people. It's a riddle. 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 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 in need of it, or people that you see either at work or at home who are struggling in some way. We would love for you to, of course, rate this episode too, as if you feel like this was a valuable conversation, then you could leave a 5-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 /podcast, adamarkel.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 3 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 contribution. Hopefully you will take advantage of it. 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, the sort of granular details of what that can look like. 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. Thank you. 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.