Jocko Underground: It's Not Working Because You're Over-correcting. Don't Let "The Path" Ruin Your Relationships. Dealing w/ Overbearing Co-workers.
7 Dec 2025 · 10 min
Podcast episode (Jocko Underground) featuring Jocko Willink and Echo Charles discussing leadership, the danger of overcorrection, and the value of balance and humility in interpersonal and professional situations. The hosts give examples (team training, personal anecdotes) showing how extreme reactions and over-helping create stress and conflict, and they close with a promotion for jockounderground.com.
Chapters
This is the Jocko Underground podcast. I'm sitting here with Echo. Charles once again seem to be sitting with you on a fairly regular basis, which can be a little bit annoying, but it's all good challenging.
Yeah, sure, I understand.
So I was, I was. Look, every day for me, I'm thinking through things and one thing I was thinking about the other day, I got. Got into some situations, started handling some things and I realized how much I relied on and how much I see good leaders rely on being balanced, on not getting themselves into extreme situations or into attitudes where they're handling things in an extreme manner. Now, this is obviously nothing new. In fact, it's so nothing new that when I was on Tim Ferriss podcast the first time, which I had never been interviewed before, and he asked me what makes a good leader? And I said number one, humility. I said number two, someone that is balanced.
So again, the past like week I've been in some scenarios either with clients and seen how they're handling things or myself and having to get through some situations.
And.
And it's. I realize that I'm not getting tripped up like a good thing. I'm being complimentary to myself. Same thing I'm being complimenting some other leaders that I work with. They don't get tripped up. They don't get sucked into problems. And that is because they are balanced. So it's fresh in my mind because I.
Would say it's not something that I'm haven't been reminding people about enough. That's what I'm feeling. I haven't been reminding people enough about. Listen, being balanced is.
Usually the best way to handle things, right? It's usually the best way to handle things. For some reason, human beings have a tendency to not do that. For some reason, human beings have a tendency to pick a direction and go 1000% in that direction. In fact, I had a name for this when I was in the SEAL teams and I was putting guys through some training and I would give them an adjustment, I'd be like, hey, you need to do a little bit more of this. Guess what they would do 9 million percent in that direction. And I would call it. Or I'd say, hey, you need to be a little less aggressive or a little more aggressive. And then they would do another iteration and they would go so hard the opposite way. And I'd say, hey, you guys just did. This is the term. I would say classic team guy over correction. Meaning you say, hey, be. You know, you got to be a little more aggressive. They Go out there and just get nuts. Or you say, hey, you need to check yourself, then they don't move. You would see this all the time. So why am I talking about this? When you get confronted.
And that's a strong word, but when you get confronted with a new idea or an opposing idea, we as human beings have a tendency to have an extreme reaction to this new idea, an extreme reaction to this opposing idea, and it's not good. It's not good. It's not good to get emotional. It's not good to take the extreme opposite stance. We're doing this all the time, by the way, in America right now. You know, you have an opinion, I have opinion. I maybe don't agree with all of your opinions. So I take the hardest possible stance against your opinion. And I fully dig in on my opinion. It causes problems. Problems. So when somebody does present you with a new idea or an opposing idea, instead of taking check yourself. And a good way to check yourself is be humble. Another way is like, okay, what is it that I like about Echo Charles's idea? He's presenting an idea. I've not really heard it before.
Or.
It's different. It's very different from what I want to do. Instead of thinking, how can I immediately smash his idea over the head with a baseball bat? I think, what part of. What part of Echo's ideas are good? What part of his. You know, it's kind of different than mine. Okay, what part of it can I agree with? Where can I accept some of his ideas when I go on the attack to you, if I say, well, actually, your idea is not going to work because of this. You are going to. My attack is going to cause your defenses to go up. It's going to cause you to get more aggressive and hostile with your idea, and it's going to separate us from. From being able to come to some kind of a conclusion.
To be. Come to some kind of a resolution. I shouldn't say conclusion for you. And I be able to agree on something, and it stems from the fact that I am not thinking in a balanced way. So what are the good attributes for a leader or human being to have? Be humble. Yes, absolutely. And being humble will allow you hopefully to find some balance in your interactions with other people and find balance inside your own brain. Housing group.
So my wife used to, like, help her. Her friends, family, you know, how, like, okay, you know, some people, they. They're so into helping other people or taking care of things for other people. Like, oh, if. If you're Going to. I don't know, you're going to go on a trip or something. She'll jump in with all the hotel recommendations. She'll even be like, hey, I'll call. Yeah, yeah, this is how she used to be. Right. And she'll be like, I'll even call the hotel. I know a guy there or something. And then she'll, like, go out of her way to do a bunch of stuff. So what would. What would start happening is.
It became she basically takes all on her own, takes on a task for someone else, a bunch of tasks, and then those tasks slowly, slowly become stressful. And then she's like, in this stressful mode, starts getting mad, and then on top of it later on, the person, like, not only did they not ask for the help, it's like they come off as less appreciative than by her standard, you know?
Yeah.
She runs that risk.
And she's got a grudge, I'm guessing. I don't mean to throw anything on. Yeah. On Sarah Charles. But, like, I'm thinking that maybe with that whole scenario that you just talked about, like, when you do something to help something, somebody, and it turns out to be a much bigger task, if I'm like, hey, Echo, can you come? And I remember we, we, we.
We used to train with this guy at black belt. Greg. No, Craig. Craig. Freaking old school black belt from Fabio Santos. And he was an arborist. Do you know what that is?
Something having to do with trees.
Yeah, he used to do tree stuff. And one day he. I go, hey, bro, like, I got this tree in my yard. Can you come help me get it out? And he's like, he's like, how big is it? You know? And I, like, held up my hands. I don't know, like, maybe like three inches around or whatever. Maybe, maybe four or five inches around, right? And he goes, yeah, yeah, cool. You know, let me know when to come by. So I sent him a text or whatever we did back then, called him.
Sure.
He comes by and, like, the tree was way bigger and way more and whatever kind of, like, root system it had. As soon as he saw it, I saw a look in his face, and he was, you know, he was gonna do a bro deal, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And he did a bro deal for me, but I could see that it hurt, you know? And both of us were out there with pickaxes at the end, you know, freaking digging the root system out. It was a serious day's labor. He thought he was going to come over with a chainsaw you know, cut it down, whatever, pop, you know, rip some roots out. Be gone in 20 minutes. He's there for four hours. I like, he was Sarah Charles at that point, and he. I mean, he's a freaking awesome guy. So there was no factor. But that can build. So how does this tie into balance?
Okay, so talk about the overcorrection, essentially. So what you do is. Or what. So what would happen with her? Is it that it wasn't an incident, it was how she was, that's how she is. And there's. I know a lot of people like that where they, like, sometimes they insert themselves too much into your thing, you know, and they mean well, but it's just. It's part of their personality. But there's so many side effects.
That expression is stings, doesn't it?
A little bit.
Means, well, oh, that one stings.
But you. But doing that to that degree anyway will, like, there is some drawbacks for the other person and yourself, for everybody. So you shouldn't do that to, like, that much of a degree. Right. Nonetheless, she would do that from time to time, like, pretty often too. So it got to the point where, like, I see it happening the whole time. I'm like, there's. It's a lose situation where you're gonna help. You're gonna be stressful for doing it, for taking on the responsibility, and then they're not gonna be appreciative in your mind because not only do they not know they didn't ask for it, and then you're gonna be mad at them, though, something you did, you know? So every once in a while I gotta kind of break it to her a little bit, you know. But every time I would, she'd be like, fine, I just won't help anybody.
Yeah, that's.
That's your classic team guy over correction. Yeah.
Although that's like a conscious sort of emotional reaction.
Emotional.
Yeah, the classic team guy over correction is. Might be a little bit of that, but it's also, oh, I'm too far right, Go hard left or too far left, go hard right. That's. That's. That's what we need to watch out for. And, you know, this is one of those things where, you know, you were talking to me about.
You're like, you get to see me in a lot of different situations where I'm interacting with people, and you get to see me sometimes where people are kind of bringing it in or coming at me or whatever. And, you know, just through echelon front, you see me doing Interviews. You see me get interviews. You, you, you, you.
You go through tons and tons of video of me doing whatever, and. And, you know, you were talking to me like, it's seeing me get flustered or seeing me get trapped or seeing me get.
You know, got. See me get got. Yeah. And you were saying, like, hey, you know, I don't really see a lot of you getting emotional. I don't see a lot of you getting got. I don't see a lot of you getting caught and flustered when something's happening. And part of that reason.
Is because of this idea that we're talking about, of being balanced. So when someone says something.
So 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. 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. 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 dot com. It cost $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us, we can still support you. Just email assistanceacoonderground.com and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized Underground.
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