Jocko Underground: Being Reactive is Jamming You Up.

This is the Jocko underground. Podcast. Number 114 is sitting here with Echo Charles. Reactive versus proactive. So you've heard these terms before?

Yes, sir.

And everyone says you don't want to be reactive, you want to be proactive. Meaning we don't want to be on defense. We want to be on offense, generally speaking. Good rule. I like it. It's better to be proactive than it is to be reactive. It's better to be on offense than it is to be on defense.

A good example of this. During my first deployment to Iraq, we were doing direct action missions where we would.

Load up our vehicles, leave our base, we would drive between.

15 minutes and five hours.

Get to a enemy location, assault that building or position, grab whatever bad guy we're looking for, do an extensive search of the area looking for intelligence, load back up into the vehicles, drive between 15 minutes and five hours to get back home.

When you think about that.

Initially it sounds like you're on offense, right. Going out and you're attacking.

The reality of it. And it kind of felt like that for a little while. But then the more I thought about it.

That whole time, when you're driving in a vehicle down a road.

That you're not on offense, you're on defense, and you're. You're waiting for the enemy who has the opportunity to be on offense to attack at the time of their choosing.

So you're on offense. Yeah. When you hit the target, you're on offense to the people that are in that target building because they didn't hear you coming up. I mean, now if they hear you, obviously you're almost immediately on defense anyways. But if they don't hear you, which they shouldn't, and you get a good jump on them and you keep the element of surprise, which is a critical part of any sponsored special operation. If you do that, you're gonna be on offense for those four minutes that you're clearing a building. But by the way, everyone that's now outside of that building, everyone that's in that neighborhood, in that city, in that vicinity, that's an enemy now, they can come attack you, and you're gonna be on defense and they're gonna be on offense, and then you gotta drive home now, you're. When you're driving home, you're on defense, you're waiting to suck start in a freaking ied.

So even though it felt, and it sounds. I shouldn't say it feels, it sounds like offense, a lot of it's defensive. And I definitely felt that More and more, the longer that deployment went on. And this was in 2003, 2004, and now the enemy's getting more organized. They're starting to be better with their setting up ambushes. They're being better with their IEDs, their roadside bombs. So as they're getting better, we're now really feeling more defensive.

Now fast forward a few years to 2006. I'm over in Ramadi, and now we're doing what we did. We look, we still did direct action missions. They still felt about the same. In fact, they felt a little bit worse because now in 2006, the enemy was really good with roadside bombs. They were really good with conducting ambushes. They were really good with combined arms. So they'd hit you with an ied, and then that would stop you, and then they'd come with RPGs and then machine guns. And so it was like they were good.

So now going down the road to go do a direct action felt very defensive. And we started doing on that deployment, a lot of overwatches, sniper overwatches, where now we're sneaking and they don't see us, we're quiet. They don't know where they're. We're seeing the enemy maneuver and they don't know where they're. And we're able to kill them without them even knowing what happened.

That's real offensive operations. Like, it felt a lot better. We were fighting the enemy on our terms, not on their terms.

So there's just a bit of a reframing of your mind.

That goes, that takes place. And I, when I came home, like, I was explaining this to other SEALs when I got home, even senior SEALs, you know, senior leadership in the SEAL teams, when they would be asking about these operations, be like we were on offense. And they will direct actions on offense. No, actually, think about that. Sure. It's on, off. It is an offensive operation for 40, 48 seconds, and we are going and attacking the enemy. But most of the time, you're on defense, and it doesn't feel that good.

So it's a reframing of the mind that you have to do. And this is, this is also in tune with Peter Attia when he talks about medicine 3.0. Right. We're not just trying to.

Attack the disease once it hits us. We're not going on offense once we're sick. No, we're doing preventive things to attack the illness before it even gets to us, before it even takes hold of our body. We're not just countering what the disease is doing. We're actually going on offense. So the disease can't even get a foothold.

It's an important thing to think about because, again, you can have the same mindset of, well, you know, if I get sick, I'm going to do this, I'm going to fight. It's like, whoa, what can you do prior to the fight?

So I think that we can have a tendency to make this mistake in other parts of our business, in our life. What we make the mistake of what being proactive really means.

And I think what it. What we need to pay attention to is what's going on.

Assessing the future, assessing possible outcomes, assessing possible contingencies that can take place. And what's better than contingencies? A contingency is a reaction. Like when you do a contingency plan, it's a reaction. It's better to do a full preventative plan of what could go wrong. It's the same thing with self defense. Right. What's the best form of self defense?

Not being there.

Not being there. It's the best form of self defense. What are you going to do if you get tacked at night going down a lonely, dark street? I got an answer for that. Why am I going down a lonely, dark street at night? Why am I doing that? Why am I there? Why didn't I organize things so that I wouldn't be exposed like that? And people make that mistake. Do we need to train with firearms? So if we do get forced into that situation? Sure. Do we need to train martial arts so we can handle ourselves? Sure.

However, what's optimal? We're not even there. And it's not like it's that hard in many cases to avoid those kind of things.

The other one is, and it ties into that is situational awareness. We use the term situational awareness a lot, but we talk about looking at the situation we're in.

You know, So I say, echo, make sure you have good situational awareness. Now you're walking down the street alone at night and you're looking around. Great. I'm glad. You're situationally aware, but you're situationally aware of the present. This is not optimal. What's optimal is to be situationally aware of the future of where you're going to be. Wayne Gretzky. Don't skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck is going to be. That's. That's what we need to do. And how do we. Okay, so now how do we do that? Well, you've got to take time, you've got to take time. You've got to, you got to detach. And we know in the military we end up with a person when a unit gets big enough, you end up with a person that does quote future operations. Because the operations guy that's in charge of everything, he's worried about what's going on today, maybe tomorrow. He's like, yeah, we got this going on. We got this operation. You need someone that's thinking a month from now, two months from now, when we don't always have that luxury in our lives. You know, I can't hire someone to be Jocko's future operation life guy, right? To look at, hey, man, look at your health right now. It looks like, you know, in another six months you're gonna be in a, you know, have gone down in your number of pull ups. You need to pay attention to that, right? I don't have somebody doing that.

No.

I don't have somebody tracking that. I don't have someone saying, hey, you know, hey, Jonco. Just like I'm looking at how much time you've been spending with your wife. You haven't taken your wife on a date in, you haven't taken her out for dinner in, you know, four months. That might not be good. I don't have anyone doing that. So we have to kind of do it ourselves, right? We gotta pay attention. How do you do that? You know, writing things down is such an incredible method of detachment. So when you start writing down, hey, earnest questions about where you're at right now.

Looking at possible outcomes, looking at likely outcomes, looking at unlikely outcomes, writing those things down so that you can then assess them. That is a positive way to gain the perspective of the future so that you don't find yourself in a scenario that you shouldn't have been in in the first place. This will make you proactive instead of reactive. This will allow you to be on offense instead of defense.

This will make you better. That's what I got.

That was one of the better little statements I've heard in a while.

Which one was that?

Don't put yourself in a place that you shouldn't have been in in the first place.

Yeah.

Or you'd want to do stuff to find yourself in a place that you shouldn't have been in the first place. Dang that, that. What was it, the gas station, the whatever analogy? When you're like, yeah, I got here, but I'm situationally aware. So I'm kind of saying there's a bigger picture going on kind of a thing.

Where.

Certain places, you know how they call them transitional spaces. Right. Where. Where you, you know, you got to be situational even though it's. You got to be situationally aware everywhere. But these are times where, like, it's kind of heightened. Where the, you know, increased threat or whatever. Where you could keep yourself out of increased threat situations just by keeping this state of mind, essentially. Yeah. That big, bigger picture. We might miss a lot of the time.

Yeah.

That future operations.

You could have filled up. You use gas station. I just said dark street. Right. But gas station is a good one. Right. You're planning out a trip. Well, I'm gonna be out of gas in this neighborhood. You know, it's a bad neighborhood. Fill up before that area. Why are you there? Sure, you can get out of the car and be all situational or press check your weapon before you get out and do all those things. But wouldn't it be better if you weren't there?

Yeah.

Yes, it would be.

Yeah. That's funny. Cuz, like Brady, I. You put these into terms, this. This idea. Because every once in a while I'll feel. I'll feel that and I'll make it happen. Sure. They're mundane things for the most part. So I was coming home from wherever I was coming home from the other day. You know, I was done with whatever I was done. And I was driving home. I look, my gas is at quarter tank. A little bit less than quarter tank, actually. And you know, that's irresponsible. So I've heard.

So I'm like, Pat Mack came in and said, echo.

Yes, sir.

Basic dude stuff. Get that tank topped off.

Exactly right. So I think, you know, like, freaking. I'd really like to get home right now. The gas station is literally like one more minute. It's one minute out of the way at this time. And I'm thinking, wait, tomorrow I have a few things to do. I'm not in any kind of rush, but I have a few things to do the next day. I have a few things to do or whatever. It's like right now is literally the time I should go.

So.

But I'm thinking days in. In advance, you see, I'm saying because I could easily go tomorrow, like, literally. Because it's literally only one minute away. But still, I'd. I'd rather do. I'd rather spend that one to two minutes now when I can kind of spare it.

In a way, it's better to pay now than pay later.

Yeah. And because later is like, it's like a dice roll, you know, like, who. What if I forget? What do we get in the car? I gotta go. I'm freaking right on time. Oh, wait, my gas is too low. Whatever, you know, but it's that, that vision, I know I'm making it sound like a bigger deal than it is, but because this applies to bigger things is what I'm saying.

Echo Charles, strategic thinker, topping off that gas tank.

I'm saying if you keep this idea in mind, brah, it'll get you just like how you said, which is, again, a very good way to put it. It'll keep you out of situations that you shouldn't have been in in the first place.

We did this op either 2003 or 2004 in Iraq, and it's the wintertime, so it's dark for a long time, right? You know, it's dark for a long time. And we had an op that was like a five or six hour drive in our Humvees. And we go, we drive four, five, six hours, get up to this area, link up with the conventional forces. That is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jockounderground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms so we are not subject to their control. And we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko podcast, which will remain as is free for all as long as we can keep it that way. But we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's Jocko underground.com it costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email assistancecaunderground.com and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized Underground.