Navy Seal REVEALS The Secret To Overcoming ADVERSITY IN LIFE! | Jason Redman & Lewis Howes

You can lead from any position, even a hospital bed. And all it is is choosing positivity in the face of negativity. The greatest gift you have as a human is choice. You have a choice. Nobody makes you a victim. You control whether you get up and drive forward or not.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

You have this incredible story where you got shot many times. and more and came out the other side with a positive attitude. Whereas a lot of people who go through minor setbacks have negative attitudes and stay in this victim mentality. Can you share what happened that really transformed your life with this injury and this accident that happened and how you decided to not be a victim?

After it happened? Well, I think, and I love that you talk about that, because I talk a lot about America is becoming a victim mindset nation. We are becoming a nation of individuals who are being convinced because of the color of your skin or your, you know, gender or your gender persuasion or where you came from or any of this, that you're a victim and that you cannot help yourself, that somebody else has to help you, which I unequivocally don't believe in. I believe in self leadership. And the problem is we have tens of millions of individuals who are successful, incredibly successful, that have broken those odds. So it's this lie and myth. And I talk often about the victim versus the victor mindset. So when you talk about that and being shot, I think we have to go further back because there was a period of time where I went through in my life where I had I was a victim. Really?

For how long?

It lasted about seven, six months.

Okay.

And it culminated with-- While you were a Navy SEAL? Yeah, absolutely. It culminated with a leadership failure. And we can get deeper into that, but all I will say is when I made that failure, instead of owning it in the moment, I saw myself as the victim. I saw myself as being thrown under the bus, and it was unfair. and like, I was great and, you know, how could they do this to me? And just, it was a victim mindset. So that positive attitude came later as I grew and really became, as I grew up, I should say, especially as a leader. And I think leaders, and it's one of the things that I talk about now, the power of positivity and leadership is such a powerful thing, and it's something that's that is needed. I mean, we're at a deficit for leadership in this country, and we are inundated with negativity. You were just fed nothing but negative energy from social media, from the media, I mean, people around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look at the world right now with COVID and civil unrest and all these things. I mean, people are just negative. So positivity as a leader is such a powerful thing, but I did not see that when I was younger. And this journey of coming out of that leadership failure and coming to learn slowly, step by step, what it is to be an effective leader. And one of those components was, I'm going to battle against this negativity, which the negativity was against me. The negativity was I had fellow SEALs who didn't want to work with me, who didn't trust me because of some of these leadership decisions that I had made in the past, the mistakes that I made, and said, we don't trust you. We don't want to work with you. but I had to continue to go through training and push against that and earn back that trust and build my credibility and build up my respect for these guys that I was supposed to be leading.

How do you build credibility if you've been made a mistake or out of integrity or, you know, hurt people or.

One day at a time.

Yeah.

By consistent, by leading yourself. So I teach three rules of leadership. Number one, 70% of leadership is how you lead yourself. And these were the rules that I kind of created for myself and what I wasn't doing in the past.

What were you doing before?

I was living the do as I say and not as I do.

Okay, this is what you're supposed to do, but I'm not doing this.

Exactly, and a lot of people, and this is a common problem everywhere with leadership, a lot of people confuse.

Their.

Ability to tell others what to do with leadership, and oftentimes that's not leadership, that's just management. oftentimes bad management.

Right, right.

You know, but 70% of leadership is how well you lead yourself, how well you build structure and discipline in your life, how you set goals within your own life and accomplish those goals, how you maintain positivity in the face of negativity in your own life. And the amazing thing about that, if you live your life that way in the immortal words of one of the best leaders I ever had the honor to work with, people will follow you if you give them a reason to. Right. That's 70% of self-leadership. So all of that coming full circle to your first question, it was a really long journey of several years of coming to understand that all these pieces came together to be effective leadership and to have that mindset of positivity. So when I got wounded, I was probably in the best position in my life to go through that because I had just finished this other super hard journey.

Of regaining, of leading yourself, of gaining trust with the people around you that you've lost trust with, of dealing with.

Some daily negativity, having to push back against that.

So how long were you working from the beginning of that to the injury? How long was that?

Two years.

Two years of trying to rebuild yourself internally and relationally with the people around you, right?

Absolutely. Well, I guess I should say 18 months, maybe 20 months.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

And then kind of got back on an even field and felt like I had come back in those last four months of heavy combat operations in Iraq when I got severely injured at the end of that deployment.

What's step number two? He said three things.

So number one is you have to lead yourself. And that's the foundational level of leadership. I tell people if anything is going wrong, frequently I'll go someplace and speak. Whether it's in, you know, the corporate sector or whether it's in law enforcement or fire or wherever it is and people will come up to me and they'll say, hey man, I'm having some problems with my team. Can you give me some advice? You know, and I always, I say, yeah, no problem, man. How well do you lead yourself?

Yeah.

And you know, there's an issue if they go, no, that's not what I'm talking about. Yeah, I'm talking about my team. I'm like, starts back to us. 70% of leadership, always go back to yourself first. How are you doing those things? Structure, discipline, goal setting, positivity. Number two is how do you lead others? And oftentimes people, oftentimes like we were talking about, a lot of people confuse our ability to tell people what to do as leadership. And that's not really leadership, that's just managing people. And if you're just telling them what to do and expecting them to jump, if you have the, you know, I say you jump and you say how high mindset, you're not a leader, you're a dictator. Good leadership of leading others is motivating and inspiring and providing the resources and the training and the guidance to be successful. And then also holding people accountable within your team if they're not, I mean, giving people right and left limits, but also trusting them, pushing the leadership down to them and letting them have those successes because they're part of your team. And all of us are working towards a common goal because at the end of the day, that's what leadership is. So that's number two. And number three is leading always. You cannot pick and choose. And this was the big mistake that I made as a young officer that almost ended my career is I was picking and choosing when I wanted to lead. And this can be both in a work slash recreational setting. That's how I was really damaging myself. But oftentimes I also see it in a work slash major adversity setting and that's where people start to break down.

What do you mean by major adversity?

There's a major crisis or chaos that has happened in your work environment. You know, if it's a sports analogy, your team is getting their ass kicked and everybody is starting to feel sorry for themselves and everybody's starting to turn inward. And even though they haven't physically quit, they are mentally quitting and they're just going through the motions. And that is the moment that a leader in those hardest moments in the storm, in the face of that has to step up and lead. that's where we lead always. And it is in those hard moments. It's when nothing is going right, everybody's miserable, that you have to step up and lead. And that's what's critical. And that's, you know, I talk about that, you know, in my case, I had that epiphany moment in that hospital bed.

And I realized, so you got injured. Tell us what happened, the story of you getting shot up. What happened?

So we were at the end of our deployment in Iraq in 2007. And.

And you've been a Navy SEAL for how long now?

I've been 15 years.

15 years.

15 years. But two years as an officer. So I had screwed up, came back, actually a little more than that, maybe three and a half years as an officer at that point, but had screwed up, came back, super successful, very combat heavy deployment in Iraq in the summer of 2007. And a lot of individuals who fought in Iraq know that 06-07, both in Baghdad and in the Anbar Province, Fallujah, Ramadi, some of our heaviest fighting was happening during that time. And we got there and almost every night we were going out conducting missions, multiple firefights. We lost several guys on that deployment. We lost quite a few guys got wounded. So a very intense deployment, we took a lot of enemy off the battlefield and we captured a lot of mid-level and high-level insurgent and Al-Qaeda leaders. So really, as a SEAL, and even to this day, my wife doesn't quite understand when I tell her that was the greatest deployment I was ever on. Even though I ended up getting severely injured and almost killed, it still was everything that I ever set out to do as a SEAL. And we were coming up on the end of the deployment. We were literally one week from going home I had redeemed myself. I was getting ready to step up in the next level of leadership. I was getting ready to screen for our next tier of SEAL team and gotten everything back on track. And we had been hunting the number one leader for Al Qaeda in the Ambarr Province, the entire deployment. A guy who had been responsible for the death of a fellow SEAL on the very first mission of our deployment.

Wow.

Petty Officer Clark Swedler, responsible for the deaths of Marines and other coalition forces, ran IED cells, ran sniper cells. Just a really violent guy. And we'd been hunting him to no avail and got word on September 12th that he was going to be in a specific time and location in a place coincidentally called Karma, Iraq. So a place that we had been into many times and a very enemy-centric location, very al-Qaeda heavy, every time we went in there, we got into a gunfight. So we knew that the stakes were high. We also had been told that this Al-Qaeda leader had a very rolled with a very heavy, well-trained security detail that every one of his guys wore suicide vests and they had trained if we got too close to him, that as part of their defense, they would clack themselves off to prevent us from getting to him.

That's crazy.

Yes. And, you know, high level of stress when you're going in on a mission. Oh, gosh. And, you know, where part of your training is or part of your you know, contingencies or talking through actions on target are don't allow yourself to get closer than 15 yards to the enemy if they're closing on you headshots. So needless to say, pretty high stress that night as we launched on this mission. And there's, you know, interesting details as part of it. I remember getting ready for that mission and it happened pretty quickly. I'll admit that it actually had happened so fast, I didn't think it was going to happen. I just, you know, we've done a lot, we had done a lot of missions at this point and I just, it needed, there were some things related to this mission that I can't talk about, but I'll just say that it had to go up the chain of command for some approval, so I just didn't think it was gonna happen. You didn't think the mission was gonna happen. I didn't think the mission was gonna happen.

So you guys weren't really prepared.

You were just kind of like, you're praying for it, but you're like, We were, we were preparing, but I went to the gym. Like, you know, the mission wasn't any different than a lot of the other missions we had done. But I didn't think it was gonna happen. So guys were planning, but we weren't in full planning prep mode. It was just kind of like, this could happen tonight. Alright, is our gear ready? Is it all set? Yeah, so I went to the gym, I was working out, and yeah, one of our guys came in and said, Hey man, this mission is a go. We're launching at like 1:00 a.m. I was like, okay, Roger that. So I went, and I was gearing up to get ready. You know, we did our planning, and then the last thing you do is get your own personal gear. and one of the things I never.

Wore.

When we did ground or more fast-based operations, if we were mobility in vehicles, I would wear my side plates for extra protection. But when I was on the ground, I wanted to be lighter and be able to move faster. So, you know, it's one of the things with special operations. You have a little bit of leeway in what gear you wear and, you know, personal preference. And when you're walking long distances or climbing over walls or there's a good possibility you may be fighting or wrestling with somebody. I wanted to be lighter. So that night, getting ready for that mission, I remember jocking up and getting my gear on and like this little voice was like, where are your side plates? And I'm like, no. Yeah, I mean, no, I don't do that. Like, I want to be light. And it was like, where are your side plates? And we weren't going to be walking long distance on this night because the timing and the speed. We were landing what's called landing right on the X. We were landing right on the target. So I was like, okay, I don't know what that is, but I'm gonna wear them and I put them in. And that's an important point I'll hit in a few minutes. So we launched on that mission. We took down the target and nothing happened. I mean, massive amounts of, like, anxiety, like, hey, if I, you know, I definitely got the feeling, like, if I'm gonna be shot up, it's gonna be tonight.

Really?

Which I guess I was right. It just didn't happen initially. So we took down the initial target building and nobody was there. We could tell that there had been activity there. We could tell that somebody had been there recently. We found a lot of anti-American anti-coalition propaganda. And then as we started digging deeper, we started to find weapons, we started to find bomb making materials and things like that. Excuse me. And we thought that we were just gonna blow that stuff up and we thought that was gonna be it. So I was actually sitting on the porch with my guys just kind of waiting for our explosive ordnance guys to blow that stuff and we thought that.

Was gonna be it. And move on.

Yeah.

So about that time, my boss came up to me and said, hey man, we got a whole bunch of activity on another house about 150 yards away. We just watched five individuals flee out of there and run across the street into a field and they're hiding in the vegetation. And we had seen that before, you know, if we had watched stuff like that, the snipers watch them do that, snipers were up on the rooftops kind of watching everything around the target. So my boss said, hey, why don't you take your team, let's walk these guys down, let's find out who they are and what they know. I said, okay, Roger that. So we came up from the south to the north in this field. And at this point, we had a aircraft up overhead that was giving us some surveillance, watching what was happening. And I remember asking them repeatedly, hey, do you see any weapons? You know, what are these guys doing? And no, we're not seeing anything.

So.

But as I started to push into that vegetation and super thick, you know, and they were probably 50 yards in front of us at this point, or maybe even 100 yards in front of us. This densely vegetated field was probably 100 yards thick. And I remember, like, my Spidey sense was going crazy. And I, and I stopped, and then I chalked it up to fear.

Right.

And I just said, you know what, man? This is a high stress Mission, you know? You know, the level of the enemy, you know, that's just fear. Just swallow it.

Keep going.

Let's keep going according to, we were doing everything according to our SOPs or training.

So how many people are with you?

So there were nine of us. This is kind of an important part of the story. So there were nine of us, but as we started pushing through the vegetation, they told us the air asset up above said, hey, you're gonna miss these. these guys the way you're walking. So you need to make a turn and, and, you know, kind of turn to a, you know, about 45 degrees to the Northeast to walk up on them. When we did that, I had a two new guys and one of our explosive ordnance guys on that left flank, and somehow they did not hear that call. So we made this turn, and they kept going straight and quickly realized it. We stopped to link back up with them, but at this point they had moved further up and they were actually closer to the outer edge of the field. Guy on my right flank, he was closer to the outer edge of the field. So we said, okay, this is super dangerous. We have two separate forces. This gets, it's a really bad situation because if the enemy starts shooting, you now have two forces shooting at potentially what we call blue on blue.

Yes.

Two friendly forces shooting at each other with an unknown enemy in the middle. So I said, okay, push out. I said, both you guys on the left, push out to the left. On the right, we're going to push out to the right. We're going to move up to the north, and then we'll link back up and we'll push back in from the north to grab these guys. So as we were moving out, I had now moved up closer to the front with my interpreter. And so now there were six of us. Those three were, you know, probably 150 yards away from us on the other side. And our medic literally stepped on an enemy fighter.

Enemy fighter?

Enemy fighter.

What's that?

And an enemy, you know, part of the security detail. Fighter, F-I-G-H-T.

He stepped on a person.

On a person.

He stepped on.

Correct.

One of them.

So what we didn't know was that our leader was in that house and that those five individuals that came out were actually the last part of his security detail. that we estimate to be about 12 to 15 individuals.

The one you were trying to capture. He was in that house.

Correct.

So this was his protection.

Correct. And they had set up an ambush line in that field and we had walked up behind it. Oh my gosh.

He stepped on one of them.

He stepped on one of them and the guy rolled over and our medic initially immediately shot him at this point and he was the last guy in the line. So at this point, I'm now out front with my Medic, I'm sorry, with our interpreter and our other guys behind and our medic was the last guy. But all of a sudden the world erupted because when our medic shot that guy it tripped the ambush and the ambush went live. So our medic was initially shot below the knee that severed both bones, dropped him and anchored him on that corner. One of our other guys ran forward to grab him and stitched up the body two rounds in the leg and one in the arm but a big beast of a guy a guy about your size who grabbed our medic and started dragging him back.

He got shot a bunch too.

Yeah.

And grabbed him after being shot.

And still managed to drag himself and our medic back to the only point of COVID Cover being something that'll stop bullets, which was kind of like a big like John Deere tractor tire about 15 yards, you know, back from the field with nothing else behind it. literally thousands of yards of empty desert. I was out front and started shooting and yelling because I also was thinking about our guys on the other side. Are we shooting at them? So I was really worried about a blue on blue. Thankfully, our senior guy in that group was smart and got those guys to suck down and was like, do not shoot. So it became us and this at that time, unknown enemy force. But they had two PKM machine guns, which is a large belt-fed machine gun that shoots big bullets.

In the vegetation. Just like, just like unloading.

Yeah, because you couldn't see them. They were probably five yards back. All you could see was the muzzle flash.

That's crazy.

Yeah. So, and how far away from you was it? Oh, I mean, it's, I was bullets. I could literally, I've been shot at before, but never like that. I mean, literally, I had bullets, I could feel the pressure of bullets going by me. You can, you can, a big bullet like that, it's actually, you know, that's what, when a bullet cracks, it's actually a sonic crack. It's the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier. But it's pushing this air out of the way and you can feel it when it goes by you. It's like an angry bee, I guess.

Flying or something like that is how I've described it.

Wow.

So how far away from the gun were you?

45 feet.

45 feet, wow.

Yeah.

So, and immediately I was stitched across the body armor and I took two rounds in the left elbow, but I only thought it was one. I didn't know it was two until later, but I thought my arm had been shot off.

You thought it was gone just because of the pain or you just felt, you couldn't feel it or?

I couldn't feel it.

It was just instant too, it's just.

Like, so, you know, when you hit your funny bone, Yes. It felt like that amplified by like a thousand. Yeah. It felt like I had been struck by a lightning bolt. It was like, it was like an 800 pound gorilla hit me in the elbow with a bat and then I was struck by a lightning bolt that traveled up my arm and slammed me in the back of the head and then I couldn't feel my arm.

Oh my gosh.

So I remember reaching over and I guess it caught on my gear but when I reached over, I couldn't feel it. I felt nothing so I thought my arm had been shot.

Oh my gosh.

But I'm taking all this gunfire, so I kept shooting and yelling at our guys. And at this point then, both guns turned on me. And I took rounds off my helmet, I took rounds off my gun, I took my left night vision tube was shot off, and I turned to move back to where the guys were towards that tractor tire. And that's when I caught a round from behind that hit right in front of the ear. It traveled through my face, exited the right side of my nose, took off most of my nose. It blew out my right cheekbone, broke my cheekbone, kicked it out to the right, vaporized the orbital floor, broke all the bones above the eye, broke the head of my jaw and shattered my jaw to my chin.

It's like a moment. And it knocked me out.

One bullet did that. one bullet.

Holy cow.

And the guy saw me go down and thought I was dead. Thought I'd been right in the head, which, I mean, technically I had, but, you know, thankfully not in the. Not in the brain. Yeah. But I was unconscious. I don't know. We don't know how long. Five to ten minutes. And so at this point, this gunfight is happening directly over me. The guys are shooting the enemy shooting back, and I'm. unconscious on the ground as bullets are flying directly over me. So when I came to, I was laying flat on my back and definitely out of it. I know you've had your bell rung really good. It takes...

I didn't get shot in the head, but yeah, I mean, the impact, yeah.

Where it takes a couple of minutes to get clarity back to the world and where am I, what happened? and that's kind of where I was at. And I could still hear shooting and, wow, okay, what's going on? Okay. And the biggest thing, I was like, I'm really messed up.

Like, that's you. Knew your arm. I thought my arm's gone. I think my head is blown up.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I was. You could probably feel like the pain. And then I actually remember reaching up to my face and feeling the hole in my face. Oh, no. Yeah.

And.

And. And was like, you felt the whole. You're like, oh, man, I've been trying. You like I can feel the bone in there and the teeth sticking out and oh my gosh.

So.

And then I was literally watching the tracer go over me.

So, the bullets or the...

So machine guns every fifth round has phosphorus mixed in with the gunpowder. So if you watch the movie where you see it looks like laser beams coming out of the gun, that's tracer fire. Machine guns use that every fifth round. It's like a sighting thing, you know, I just aim my... You see like.

Going right over you.

Yeah, literally like eight inches over me. So that was kind of my first cognizant thought. Don't move.

Don't move.

Don't move.

Yeah.

Important safety tip. Wow. You know, if you ever wake up and you hear gun firing, see laser beams, don't sit up. I did.

Yeah.

You're welcome. But, and then my second thought was, man, I am like really messed up. Like I don't have a lot of time. I was trying to get my, I was still thinking that my arm had been shot off. So I was like, I got to get a tourniquet on my arm because we train that way. Like, you have to save yourself first. Yes. Kind of like self-leadership absolutely, you know? But I couldn't. I couldn't get my tourniquet, and I knew I was losing a lot of blood. So I remember there was kind of a lull in fire, and I yelled out to my team leader, how long to the the back. And he was like, red. I think at that point they realized I was still alive. So, and he yelled out five minutes.

Wow.

Which was a lie.

So you're like, I could die in five minutes.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I, and, and I was. And because I was losing a lot of blood and I was just focusing.

On.

On, I, I. so, interestingly enough, in the beginning, I was kind of thinking about, like, the gunfight and, like, what we were doing and where our assets were. And, like, I was still in, I don't know, work mode, if you will. Like, okay, how are we addressing the gunfight? Where's the medevac? You know, we need to call in a fire mission, all this. But I was out of the fight. I mean, my team leader took over. I owe my life to him and, and. he did an amazing job. He came forward and grabbed me at some point and dragged me back. But at some point, my thoughts shifted to, I'm dying.

I gotta save my life.

Well, I actually thought that I was, I realized that I was probably not gonna make it. I came to grips with that decision. And it made me, and I'll be honest, at first it made me It made me angry that I was in charge and I'd led us into this situation. So that made me angry. It made me angry that the enemy would get the satisfaction in knowing that they had killed a SEAL. That made me angry. And then my thoughts drifted to my family. So it's September 13th at this point, and we were real big into Halloween, my wife and I. and the kids. And at that point, my son was eight, my older daughter was five, and the youngest was two. And we had already taught him. I was supposed to be home, you know, in a week. Two weeks. Well, our first wave of guys were going home in a week. I was in the second wave. So two weeks, I should have been home. And we were talking about Halloween and everything. I remember thinking, like, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna be there for Halloween this year, and I'm not gonna be there for Christmas. I'm not gonna raise my son. and then I thought about, I'm not going to walk my daughters down the aisle. And that's like hard. And at that point, I called out to God and I said, I need help. I need strength to come home. And like that. So, miracle moment, but I suddenly had strength. And I don't know how long from that moment until the end of the gunfight, but over that period of time, Guys continued to fight. My team leader got a tourniquet on me, and we ended up calling in what we call fire missions, rounds from an aircraft, munitions basically.

To give you some time.

Yeah, to take the enemy out, which that fire mission was the closest fire mission ever brought in the Iraq War. We literally called rounds directly on our position, which the aircraft didn't want to do. They were like, We will kill you guys. And my team leader was like, Hey, man, there ain't gonna be anybody left, so, you know, bring it. Wow.

So what do you just try to not do within 100 yards where you're at?

Yeah, he just, he did certain things and very smart on him how he basically called those rounds in. But, I remember literally watching those rounds impact in front of us and blow my gosh. as it took the enemy out.

That's crazy.

And then, and then all I focused on was stay awake.

Stay alive.

Yeah.

So we fall asleep.

And that's what I, and I wanted to, I've never felt a so tired like that. Yeah. And I lost, the doctors asked me, I lost 40% of my blood volume. And they said, it's a miracle you survived. They said, your fitness was, you know, they said, your fitness was the only thing that kept you alive. I think the big man helped. Wow. But, but yeah, that, when they loaded us, so the three of us got loaded onto the helicopter, and I guess I should back up. So when the helicopter came in, it landed about 75 yards away. And my team leader tried to drag me and I was like, stop, that seriously hurts.

Oh my gosh, dragging you from your neck collar or something. Oh my, oh your face.

Here's the other thing I wanted to say. So I took a round, two things happened when I was laying on the ground before we called in those rounds, before my team leader came and got me. For whatever reason, I took my helmet off. I don't know why. I mean, here, let me take this life-saving piece of equipment off and set it next to me. but I did, and it took a round through it. So my helmet, we have a drawing, this no Bad Days skull drawing that we use that people love that it shows all the damage of a friend of mine that's an artist drew it after the right after I was brought to the hospital, they did a CAT scan and created a 3D model of my skull to figure out how to put me back together. And it literally looks like somebody took an axe and hit me in the face. The amount of damage starts up here, goes down here, and there's just this giant hole, you know, the bone is kicked out over here. So, he drew this, but he drew the hole in my helmet in the skull, which gives it this cool look. But the other thing, but that way-- you- took your helmet off. Thankfully, I took it off. For whatever reason, I don't know why.

So the helmet got shot, you said?

It did, while I was laying on the ground. When you took it off.

I also took a round in the right side plate.

When you were laying down?

Yes. On the right side plate. So, did I move?

Go through the plate or no?

So it hit it, which still painful.

Oh, I knew it. I knew I had been hit. Like, when I got the. My body armor back, I was like. I was like, I immediately pulled it out, and sure enough, you can see where the round impacted the plate and ricocheted off. But that would have probably killed you because it would have gone through and. And take it out my kidney, probably would have blown through my spine, so I, you know.

I don't know what plays well. So how many did it actually, how many rounds hit you in the body?

Like, so three in the body, eight in the body armor that we're on.

Some body armor is a lifesaver.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and when they loaded us on the helicopter, several years later, I got to meet the crew that medevaced us.

Oh my gosh. That must have been.

And they thought we didn't make it. Like, when they dropped us off, they.

These guys are dead.

Yep. and they told me the story of that night. And it was amazing. They said that one, that helicopter was only configured to carry two wounded guys. And it was TF-160, basically the Navy SEALs of helicopter pilots. So they were our medevac crew that night. And those guys are awesome. I owe my life to them. They had a flight medic on board who worked feverishly to save all of us while they were flying the rotors off to get us to Baghdad. but they couldn't close the door because there were three of us instead of two. And we were all bleeding so bad they said that it was creating this mist of blood.

Oh my gosh.

So when they landed and got us out, they realized they were all coated, they were just soaked in blood because it had literally sprayed everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. And they said it took months to get all the blood out from every dialysis. Oh my gosh. So they were like, thought about us all the time and they never knew if we survived. And it was only years later that I tried to track them down. A friend of mine that was part of the 160th managed to dial back, find out who was in charge during that time and who would have flown that mission. And pretty cool. I got to meet them and thank them.

That's amazing, man.

Yeah.

Wow.

So Were you unconscious during this time? Did you wake up? Were you in and out?

So I was adamant at the hospital that I never lost consciousness. They were like, the doctors were like, you,'re kidding me. And I was like, Nope, never lost consciousness. And then my guys got home and like, dude, you were in and out of consciousness from the moment you were shot. But what's interesting, your brain doesn't realize that you've passed out. You just come to, and there's gaps. and there are some things to this day, I don't remember. There was a point in the gunfight that they had pulled me back to the tire. And at one point, they're shooting and they're dealing with the enemy, and one of our guys, our medic, was like, I'm gonna throw a grenade. And I guess I sat up, and I had worked in a jungle warfare team when I was younger. Yes. There's a, And you never throw grenades into vegetation because there's a high chance they will hit a branch and bounce back at you. So super dangerous, don't do it. And I guess whatever reason those lessons were in my brain, 'cause I immediately sat up and was like, Don't you throw that grenade, you're gonna kill all of us, put that away. And then I laid back down. And to this day, and I actually wasn't told that story till years after the gunfight, we happened to be sitting around one night drinking and catching up and he was like, do you remember this?

And I was like, wow, no, man.

No memory at all. So in and out of consciousness and later the gaps got filled in, the gaps from the helicopters, the gaps from my team.

So how did you, I mean, how do you overcome this devastation? I mean, physical devastation, emotional trauma, loss, you know, you're unable to be fit for service now. How did you, when you kind of come through in the hospital, I guess, what happens next?

So in the beginning, so in the very beginning, I'll tell you, it was elation. Like I was so happy to be alive. Just so happy to be alive.

I'm here, I'm alive.

Yes.

I'm gonna see my family.

I was, exactly. And I was just so thankful to be alive. I remember, like when I first came to, my commanding officer was there and the Master Chief was there. And so the first thing I really remember is one, I tried to talk and I couldn't. I was just pushing air, which was really weird. And I remember the nurse said, Lieutenant, you've been shot in the face. You are trached. You're wired shut. You're not going to be able to talk. I was like, okay. So I motioned and they brought me a piece of pen and paper and I asked my first questions were, Are the guys okay? I said, Has my wife been notified?

And.

And do I still look pretty?

And.

And that's. I don't know, man. It's that positive. I think it was all those lessons had come back together. Like, I did not care what happened in that moment. I wanted to know that they were okay. The guys were okay. Like, nobody had died and that my wife was aware, and then I was just trying to be funny. And so that was kind of the first thought. And then it was just elation, and I was on. super heavy drugs, which I've never done drugs.

Sure.

So. But as that timeline progressed by the time 96 hours later from the time I was wounded, I was in Bethesda, which is a testament to our medevac system. Like in four days, I went from Baghdad to Balad, where they treat head injuries and they stabilize me. And then they moved me to Germany, where they had more stabilization surgeries, and then they flew me to Bethesda. in Maryland. So that was 96 hours I was back.

Back in the US?

Yep. Wow.

So did they do, did they stitch you up in the first day or did they just kind of like putting gauze over it?

No, no, they stitched me. I mean, yeah, they had to stop.

You know, all the bleeding and stabilize.

And then they do reconstructive surgery later, like, okay. Yeah, so they've got to repair the damage and stabilize you and then all the reconstruction happens later. And that's where the elations start to war off. we're like, man, this is painful. Several things happened. One, I remember laying in bed in Bethesda, and the first thing, like many of us, when something bad happens, replaying it in your mind and, like, if I've done something different, if I had done that, if I had moved left, if I had moved right, and I was really kind of kicking myself. And then finally I was just like, dude, stop.

Like, one, nothing you can do about it.

Nothing you can do about it. Like, and, and two, you did things according to how we've So put that out of your mind and you need to move forward. But I remember the second point of really reality setting in was my sister was getting married and we were supposed to go to the Virgin Islands for the wedding in October. And I remember the nurse coming in and I said, Hey, how long is it going to take to put me back together? Because one, I need to get back to my guys. two, I gotta go to my sister's wedding. Of course. And yeah, she was like, she was just incredible. It's like looking at me like, it's gonna take years to put you back together.

You're done.

Yeah. And that was like such a shock to me. I know. And depressing. And I remember thinking to myself like, so my special operations career is over. I'm gonna be permanently disfigured and I'm gonna be forever disabled. Wow. Because they were also talking to me about amputating my arm.

Amputating it.

Because she had no use of. Yeah, they. At this point, they knew I had taken two rounds that had effectively destroyed my elbow. The first round hit me in the base of the humerus and just shattered my humerus. And the second round hit me on the inside of the elbow, which shattered both heads of the ulna. Oh, man.

So.

And I had no use of my left hand. There were, you know, pretty extensive nerve damage. So, the doctors were talking about amputating. And the only reason I still have an arm is the head of orthopedics at Bethesda at that time was a former SEAL. And he said to me, I'm gonna do everything I can to save your arm.

Wow, man.

I think if anybody else, they would have taken my arm.

Really?

And he was like, I'm gonna do whatever it takes.

And he did. And that, I mean, amazing. And that journey was incredible. But I remember feeling depressed, like, where do I go from here? But this is where this journey of failure, redemption, really coming to understand what it is to lead finally, not finally, but kind of came to a intersection. And there were several things that happened. The one last thing that kind of made me come to this pinnacle or this intersection was about all that time. I had somebody else that had come into the room and they were having a conversation with me and then I started to drift off.

But.

I was hearing what they were saying and they started having a conversation thinking I was asleep.

Like you had already passed out or yeah.

About how overwhelming the hospital was and how terrible it was for all these wounded warriors and how they were never going to be the same. They were going to be broken. It was a victim mindset. And I was hearing it and they left. They were kind of walking out as they were having this conversation. When my wife came back in, like the more I thought about the angrier I got, like I woke up and was just angry. When she came back in, I wrote to her and I said, never again. I said, that is not going to happen again. Nobody's going to come in this room and feel sorry for me. And this was where, like, this moment occurred where I was like, this is bigger than you. Like, this is, you've been, you've been for two years, you've been walking this path of lead yourself, lead others, lead always. And around me, in that hospital were wounded, other wounded guys, guys that have been shot up, guys missing limbs, you know, individuals burned. In the room next to me, there was a young army kid who had a penetrating brain trauma, so he had a severe traumatic brain injury. And his wife, I remember watching his wife, and they had a brand new baby, and she was dealing with this husband who no longer could cognitively function. And. And I thought to myself, dude, like, this sucks, but like you've been through worse. You've been through a bunch, you've been through Ranger School, you've been through the hardest journey you've ever been through, this leadership failure and fought back. And now you need to live everything that you've thought about. Wow. Like you have to, these guys look up to us and I already knew it. I had guys that wanted to come into the room and meet me. And this was, I recognized this is what leading all, you can lead from any position, even a hospital bed. and all it is is choosing positivity in the face of negativity. And it was in that moment, and that's what I tell everybody in this life, the greatest gift you have as a human is choice. You have a choice. Nobody makes you a victim. Nobody holds a gun to your head and tells you, well, it's not fair and I can't do it because of X, Y, or Z. That's BS. There may be more adversity or obstacles in your path, but you control whether you get up and drive forward or not. and that is the power of choice. That is the power of positivity to drive forward despite whatever adversity stands in your path. And that was kind of the epiphany moment. And when my wife walked back in, I was like, never again. Nobody's allowed to come in my room with that mindset. And I refused to have it. And I wrote out that sign and it said, attention to all who enter here. If you're coming in this room with sadness or sorrow, don't bother. The wounds that I received, I got job that I love, doing it for people that I love, defending the freedom of a country that I deeply love. I will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically. I have the ability to recover and then I'm gonna push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you're about to enter is room of fun, optimism and intense rapid regrowth. If you're not prepared for that, go elsewhere. And we signed it, the management. That's cool. And it took on a life of its its own. I put it on the door, or I had my wife put it on the door, and I said, Nobody's allowed in the room until they read this.

And.

Never having any idea of the impact that it would have on others, because I'll be honest, in the moment, I really kind of wrote it for myself. Like, Hey man, here's my new mission statement that I'm going to live by. And it became that. And that's something I talked to a lot of people about, is having a mission statement. that guides you in the dark times, having that light in the darkness. Because there were some hard moments over the next four years, and especially in the first couple of years where like crying my eyes out, like this sucks, I'm in pain, like I'm never going to be back put back together. At one point, the nose I have now is the third nose they built, the first two failed. At one point they had to cut all the tissue out and I just I just had this hole in my face. I felt like a skeleton.

Oh, man, it's hard.

But that sign kept me on track. This is who I am. This is what I stand for. You're the Overcome Guy. Like, let's go set that example. Lead always. It, you know, this is how you. This is who. How you. This is how we do it, right? So that's what I tell people. That is the power of choice. That is choosing positivity in the face of negativity. And the thing is, when you do it for you never know the ripple effects it's going to have on the others around you. Because that sign has now gone on to motivate millions, millions of people. I mean it earned me an invitation to the White House to meet President Bush. It has been written about in other books. Secretary Robert Gates wrote about it in his book. First Lady Michelle Obama wrote about it not once but twice in her book. Really? Moved her so much.

Wow.

Military warriors to this day write me I didn't keep it. President Bush signed it and we had it framed and it hangs in the wounded ward at Walter Reed to this day. Really?

Yep.

That's cool.

So that's the power of choice. So anybody who is like, I don't know if I can do this or if I, you know, well, you're a Navy SEAL or this or that, that's BS. In this life, you can lay on the ax and be a victim or you can just get up and be a victor. And it doesn't guarantee success. It doesn't guarantee that there's not going to be pain. It doesn't guarantee that's not going to be hard, it's going to be.

But.

You will be better for it and that's how you lead and that's how you drive forward and that's how you make a difference. Right.

I mean, why do you think people get into a victim mentality in the first place? Why don't you think that they learned this earlier on and stay in that positive mindset?

So I think part of it is, Excuse me.

Go ahead, take your.

Time. Yeah.

I think part of the current victim mindset we have in a nation is we are not, I mean, if you go back to the beginning of America and probably life 200 years ago, life was hard. Yeah. Like, you know, if you wanted to eat, if you wanted substance, you pretty much had to go out and you know, either have a farm or you worked some hard physical labor to get these things done. And that made people a lot heartier and more resilient. And now in this day and age, we don't have that anymore. We're so blessed, especially here in America, in this country, to coming out of World War II forward to really, and don't get me wrong, there are some poor areas in the country, there's no doubt. But I mean, if you've been around the world and you've been third world and seeing poverty at its highest level, it doesn't compare to here. And I think unfortunately part of that byproduct is we have individuals that are not as resilient. Sports is a good place sometimes to build resiliency when we don't have the physical labor aspect of what we had in the past. The military does it. There are some other places, but really at the end of the day it has to be pushed by the individual or maybe the family or the upbringing. and if that doesn't happen, I think it leads it to a not being as resilient, which leads it to another problem where you have political leaders and people of influence that'll say, well, the reason you can't make it is because, you know, you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, or you're the wrong gender, race, creed, color, religion, whatever it is. And people buy it. Oh, man, you're right. Because I'm this color, because I'm this. or creed or religion or whatever, you know, sexual orientation. But it's just not true. There's a level of resiliency that comes with choosing to drive forward. And if it was true, then nobody would be able to get ahead that comes from that persuasion. And that's not true. There are tens of millions of incredibly successful, amazing people who are black and white and female and Muslim and and whatever it is, whatever demographic that we want to try and paint on somebody and say you can't get ahead. So I think that's part of the problem. So we need to build a more resilient people and help them to get this idea that sometimes nobody's gonna come save you but you, but it starts with you. And you have to be the one that gets up and starts to drive forward.

What would you say would be the biggest lessons you learned from being a SEAL then, that just about life in general? from your entire time there.

So I summarize that in one phrase, get off the X.

Get off the X. Yeah.

So, and, and the X is any point of attack, any point of crisis, any, and that, now that's one of the big things I talk about, the companies and individuals, it is the sticking point in SEAL training and special operations lingo. The X was the point of the attack. It was the ambush point. So, for one side of my career, I had trained to try and put the enemy on the X. And that X is a specific point that usually we pick ahead of time that will channelize them into an area that it makes it very difficult for them to get out of and then we rain as much firepower and explosives to try and A, destroy their will to fight and B, destroy them or equipment or whatever else. And what I had learned also was if if you're ever on the X, you have to get off the X as quickly as possible because the longer you sit on it, the harder it is to get out of an ambush. So 2007, my gunfight, we survived because my teammates fought back and we were able to get off that X. I mean, it took a little while. We had to use the air assets, my teammates fought back, but that's what enabled me to be successful. Out of that gunfight, when we got to the hospital, or when I got to the hospital, I kind of realized that I had stepped out of one ambush into another ambush.

An emotional psychological ambush.

Absolutely, and this journey that I was facing, and I remember when the doctors were telling me, you know, we're thinking about amputating your arm and it's going to take years to put you together, I felt like, man, it's no longer the bombs and bullets of battle, it's the bombs and bullets of of life. And everybody gets hit by those bombs and bullets. So it took a couple of years for that all to come into clarity, but it made me realize everybody gets ambushed in life. Everyone. And everybody gets stuck on that X. And that X is insidious. It's like quicksand. And the more you want to feel sorry for yourself, and that's what happens when people get on the X, three things happen. Number one, we will look back at what we've lost. And we waste a lot of time at, well, you know, I mean, a little bit like I did. Well, what if I had moved this way? Or what if I had moved that way? Or I want back my life before I got wounded because it was so much better. And we waste a lot of time doing that. We also look forward, well, I was supposed to be this, or I was supposed to be that, or this was supposed to be my most successful year, or, you know, I was gonna play in the NFL. This was my launch point. And then we get bitter about that. And then the last one is we look for someone or something to blame. You know, it was their fault. They did this or they didn't do this. And that, that is the victim mindset that pins us to the X. And, and what happens is, I mean, in a gunfight, you literally can physically die, but in life, I watch people who mentally and emotionally die. Yes. And they, and they, and, and I write this in the book overcome that there are people who, that life Ambush that hits them becomes the excuse for everything in their life for decades. And they become lesser individuals than they ever were before, like alcohol, drugs, whatever it is. Every bad behavior is Justified because of what happened to them, and they just lay on the X and they're just a dead person walking.

So when you made that conscious decision to make that sign and kind of create a mission state for your statement for yourself to recover in a more positive state, what shifted for you and what shifted for the people around you that you weren't claiming to be a victim?

Yeah, I mean, it was just nothing but positivity that. And don't get me wrong, I had hard times. I mean, there were definitely days that it was not blue skies and rainbows every day, but it is a choice. It doesn't mean that it's a choice to keep driving forward. And my wife, who I call the long-haired admiral, is amazing. But I, yeah, she's trying to raise three young kids, and really, I felt like this fourth kid because you know who was cleaning my wounds, you know who was grinding up my medicine who was feeding me through, you know, grinding up food so that I could eat through a stomach tube. It was my wife. I was in a wheelchair when they brought me home. I had all this metal and hardware, you know, helping me clean this trach that I wore for seven months and two days. So the last thing I was going to do was add additional stress to her by complaining or by, you know, and not only that, I want to set the example to my kids like, hey, bad things happen. to good people, but by complaining and being negative, you are not helping the situation in any way whatsoever. And this is something I talk to people about in this idea of leading always. When it sucks the worst, nobody needs to hear about it because all you're doing is pulling others down. And it is a virus. It is a cancer when it occurs because usually when a team is at a point in time where people are starting to turn inward and feel sorry and eat themselves, you're at a tipping point. And this is when a great leader can step up and step out of his own misery to try and lead others forward to push you in the right direction or you will fall in the other direction. And that's, I wanted to show my kids and others that I wasn't going to be that guy. I was going to continue to drive forward no matter what.

That's powerful. lead yourself, lead others, lead always. For those who are looking to accomplish their goals, but they feel stuck in.

Life.

What would you say were the strategies of the seals in accomplishing your goals at the highest level? What are some of the things that you guys did strategy wise?

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

To make it even more worse.

To make it even worse. And then train from that. And then train from that. And it was grueling and painful, and sometimes we got guys killed in training. I mean, you try to reduce the level of risk, but we also recognize in order to be ready for combat, we have to train at the highest level. So, and in order to do that, it was a lot of repetition. And crawl, walk, run was the mentality. And it was not these big goals of, Hey, I'm going to take down this entire town, like, you know, right off the bat, because that's really complicated. That starts to get into all kinds of very complicated complicated things. It was, how do I take down a single room? And we walk as we flow through it. And then that became, well, how do I take two rooms? How do I take three rooms? How do I take a house? How do I take a compound of three houses? How do I take a village? So it was a crawl, walk, run mentality all the time. And, and then structure and discipline in the way we trained. Everything was built up that way from, from shooting. you know, oftentimes I was a marksmanship instructor and I've trained some other people to shoot and they're always, they're a little funny because the very first thing do when I train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the, you know, at the three yard line. I little black dot and we're shooting at the three yard line and they're like, hey man, this is stupid. I'm like, no, you're not. You're learning and the repetition that you need to effectively pull your weapon out and get a positive sight picture, trigger squeeze, release that round, second sight picture and follow through. through so that we can do that over and over and over again until, you know, at that whatever point, you know, you're shooting from 50, 100 yards or more.

Yeah.

So all of that comes together to create small victories and repetition, structure and discipline that all come together to be successful.

How does someone create that for themselves when they're not in the military?

So that's.

Or not in the sports team when you left.

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

You gotta figure out your own mission.

Exactly. And as I got out, I realized that I had to figure out my own mission. And all these things were not there. So I started with, okay, so how was I successful coming out of these injuries? Because that's what everybody wanted to see. How were you so positive? How did you write that sign on the door? How did you, you know, less than a year and a half after your injuries, launch a non-profit? How did you, you know, later create your own speaking company and all these things? And I realized that I was super balanced as a leader when I was wounded.

When you were wounded.

When I was wounded. I wasn't prior to being wounded.

Really?

And not when I had the leadership failure. And at other points in crisis in my life, I realized I wasn't.

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

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

It's being harder.

Yeah, because as we get older, we're breaking down. We need to take care of ourselves better than we do when we're younger, where your body's so much more resilient. And that's why I tell people, as a leader, you need a lot of energy. You need to be able to think clearly. you need, you know, sound mind and everything that you're doing. So that foundational level of physical leadership is critical to what you're doing and that consists of sleep, nutrition and fitness. So those three components and my physical leadership saved my life when I was wounded. Now for most people, hopefully you're never at that level, but in some ways right now you look at today today, you know, COVID is kind of a strange thing, but for the most part, you know, it is individuals who are not healthy that are having the greatest problems. And those with a stronger immune system seem to be doing better. And it's like that with other diseases. So once again, physical leadership to have the energy and the ability, we manage stress better. So that's the foundational level. Number two, was mental leadership. And when I became a junior officer and I was super arrogant, I really thought I knew everything. And I didn't challenge my beliefs. I didn't question my own capabilities. You know, do as I say, not as I do. I didn't do things to get out of my comfort zone. And Those are the things that make up mental leadership. Constantly educating ourselves, constantly challenging our beliefs. We're in a day and age where it's dangerous, in my opinion, because social media feeds you the information that you like to see. And so many people don't go seek out, they don't challenge that belief system of what they're being fed. So it only furthers their belief and things that may or may not be true. But because you keep clicking on that line of thought, you're being fed all that information. The news is no different. The media, people watch what they like to see and it's very biased in this day and age. So mental leadership is constantly challenging your beliefs. It's doing your due diligence to find out what's really true and how does it play into who I am and what I'm trying to do. It's getting outside of your comfort zone. It's finding the individuals who are where you want to be and identifying them as mentors so you can be better so that you're not surrounding yourself with individuals who are pulling you away from where you want to go. Number three, and this is the biggest one of my weakest point, and that's something I've found about the Pentagon. Most people have one area, they're super strong naturally, and then they have an area where they're super weak. My weakest area was emotional leadership. and emotional leadership is our ability to maintain as a leader it's critical to be even keeled. We're not too hot, we're not too cold, we're not too excited, we're not too angry because people can count on you with that consistency. They know as a leader I can come to you and tell you bad news and you're gonna take it well and I can come to you and tell you amazing news and you know you're not gonna burn it down drinking be an idiot. You know, I mean, you gotta ride that balance. And, and I really struggle with that because I, I was an emotional roller coaster when I was younger, and I came to realize that that really damaged my credibility as a leader. Yes. Yes. And, and it's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity. Nobody wants that leader that is a, um, just an emotional train wreck, you know, or a negative Nelly. They want that leader who they can count on, that's positive, that's going to push you.

Forward.

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

Yeah, the health of others, yes.

And then for the last point, well, the last part of emotional leadership is.

Is.

Managing our mouths because our mouth, our mouth. Yes. Yeah. Because so many people so true. So many people. And I was guilty of this. And, and, and I'm not, I'm not impervious to this. Like I said, this is my weakest area, but I'm really aware of myself now, because when we let that zinger fly, 90% of the time, it doesn't do anything to further what we're trying to accomplish as a leader. All it does is massages our ego, you know? Well, I was angry in the moment, so I wanted to say this. I see this in relationships all the time. Husband and wife that let these zingers fly does nothing to further that situation in a positive way. No. President Trump was a example of someone who I mean, he would tweet these things out that I was just like, what does that really accomplish for you? Other than maybe making you feel good to attack people who disagreed with. And that's part of being a leader also. That people are gonna disagree with you. So what? If you have conviction in who you are, it's just going to happen in this world. Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Okay, so that's three.

Number four? Social leadership.

Social leadership.

How do we build the rings of influence around us? So, and I break that down into four rings of influence. The outermost ring is our work relationships. The innermost ring is a lot of times our work acquaintances slash friends. The third ring is our close friends. And then that bullseye is our immediate family. And in Western culture, there's a tendency to put a whole lot of time and effort into the two outermost rings, our work relationships and our work friends and acquaintances. And we have a tendency to take for granted our close friends and our family.

Yes.

And we think they'll always be there for us. But when a major crisis comes, when you're on the X, that may or may not be true because that's when everything is being pressure tested. And if you haven't put the time and effort into your immediate family, then oftentimes it will break. And Jimmy Hatch, a friend of mine, described it like this. We all ride on trains in this life. I rode on the Seal Train, you rode on the Football Train. And we never know, all of us hope that someday we'll get to wherever we want to get off. For some of us, it's the end of the tracks. For others, there's specific stops. they want to get off on. But sometimes there's a catastrophic event that occurs in our life and we get thrown off the train. And those outermost rings don't get off with you because they're still on the train. And it's not that they don't like you or anything like that. They're just still riding the football train or the seal training. You're no longer on it. But who gets off with you is your close friends and family. And so often I have watched individuals that get into a major crisis and you also know so many successes. successful people that have been super successful but got to the end of their career, even the end of their lives and said, why didn't I put more time into my family?

That's true.

So, social leadership is making sure that we are investing in those relationships. To be ready, the key question I ask everybody is, will you be ready? For what? It doesn't matter. Will you be ready for that moment when it comes? Because we don't know what that moment is. So, that balance enables us be ready for almost anything. Having a mindset of the next ambush is out on the horizon. If I maintain balance, if I have a leadership mindset of being ready for it, I'll be ready for it no matter what it is.

No matter what it is.

It doesn't mean it's going to hurt less, but at least I'll be ready for it to drive forward. But it takes those things. That's why I was so successful when I got wounded. I was balanced in those areas. The last one is spiritual leadership. and for me, faith played a part of that. But for others, I tell them it's our ability to get outside of ourselves and have perspective in this life. That what you're going through, we all live in our own personal hell when we're in a crisis, but spiritual leadership enables us to recognize that there are a whole lot of other people out there going through much worse than you are. And if you can do things to get outside of yourself and recognize there's a great big world out there that what you're going through is temporary, even though it's painful, super painful, you will get to the other side and be able to get beyond it. And what I talk about is that if you're alive, man, it's a gift. Yes, it's a gift. And it may be hard, it may be tough, but it's still a good day and it's up to you to drive forward and get off that act. So I have a motto, no bad days. Yeah. You know, because I'm still here.

That's right, man.

No bad days.

What do you think is the skills that we should learn to master more to help us reach at the top of our field or our industry or to set us up to be prepared when that Ambush comes so we. We stay ready. We don't have to get ready.

So.

In my opinion, it comes back to four key things, which I call the Point Man Principles.

Point Man Principles.

Last year I wrote a planner called the Point Man Planner. And it came about because I got really sick. And while I was really sick, they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me, out of parasite and a blood disorder that attacked my central nervous system. and I was super messed up. I thought I was dying, to be honest. And at one point, I was like, man, I wish I had a point man, like when I was in the SEAL teams to lead me out of some of these bad situations. And it made me think, well, why? What made them so effective? And when we were talking about what makes the SEALs effective, like, it became really clear to me that a really good point man, a lot of SEALs live their life in this way. And there's four principles, and I think this is how anybody out there there can be effective and bring their game to the highest level. Number one, relentless belief in your mission. And there's a lot of people who don't know what their mission is. They've never written it down, they've never defined it. And if you write down your mission, it's got to be built on the foundation of your values. And there's a lot of people that don't know what their values are. They'll tell you cliche things. They'll say, you know, faith, family, finance, fitness, but when you hear those things, you're like, Dude, you haven't been in church in two years. Yeah, I'm in a gym. I haven't seen you in a gym this year. You know, we just throw these things out there and understanding, 'cause whether you know what your values are or not, know what your values are or not, they are driving you and they're driving your decision making.

Right.

So if one of your values maybe is fame or recognition, that's okay. You should be aware of it. It doesn't mean it's a negative thing unless you're stabbing somebody else in the back to get it. But knowing that is important because now you can build your mission in this life upon it. And because my mission now, now that I'm out of the SEAL teams, it's about setting that example as a leader. I want people to regard me as a point man for my own life, someone that they want to learn from, someone that is a leader, that sets the example, that communicates well. So that has become my new mission. Number two is a clearly defined destination and a set course. So in the military, we always knew exactly where we were going. And in life, people often don't. In life, people say, well, I want to be rich or I want to be in better shape. Well, those are not clearly defined things. It's kind of like saying, I want to go west. if I needed to go someplace, you know, so a clearly defined destination in the military, we use something called the universal transverse mercator system. It's a grid system that covers the entire Earth and it breaks it down into exact point. Exactly. A one meter square, almost a size of this table. Yep.

It's crazy.

And the whole world. Well, all the way, the, the North and South Poles become an issue.

Yeah, sure.

But, yeah, all the almost to the North and South Poles.

Yes. Where most of the people live.

Yes.

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

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

That's right. Because the course becomes the how to. It becomes our waypoints. Like I give the example of when I wanted to be a SEAL as a kid, I knew that was my destination. That was a very clearly defined destination. And the course was all the things that I had to do. So I had to enlist in the Navy. I had to get accepted. I had to get a SEAL contract. I had to physically pass the SEAL screening test. I had to academically pass the ASVAB score with a high enough score to get picked up for SEALs. I had to get a SEAL rating. I had to graduate from my A-school. I had to get the SEAL training. I had to make it through SEAL training. I had to make it through Hell Week. All these things were way points on the course. So if people can break their goals down in this manner and I break them down in the Point Man Planner quarterly and then every day we make sure I do something called the Rule of Three P's. One physical, one personal, one professional, every day we're moving the needle just a little bit towards those goals. That's how we stay on course.

Right.

Number four, or I'm sorry, number three of the Point Man Principles is risk assessment and situational awareness. So many people walk through life totally blind. When we talk about will you be ready, they're not ready for the ambushes that are coming and oftentimes they never see them coming, even though the signs were there. So one, are we regularly doing risk assessments of where we are in our life? Are we still balanced? Are we still taking care of ourselves, you know, both in the Pentagon and peak performance? Are we making sure that our destination is front sight focus, that we're on course, that we're hitting the waypoints we should? So we're consistently doing a risk assessment we're also looking for the indicators that an ambush is on the horizon.

Yes.

And so many people don't, so then they walk into these ambushes and they're like, oh my God, I never saw that coming.

Okay, and number four, so it's risk assessment and situational awareness, right?

Yep.

And the fourth one is an overcome mindset to get off the X as quickly as possible.

Overcome mindset.

Yeah, so you can't prevent every ambush. Most, I estimate that most people in this life will go through five at a minimum five major life ambushes. And I define a major life ambush as anything that will forever leave physical, mental, emotional, or deep financial scars. And you'll never fully recover from it. Or let me rephrase that. You will always carry the pain of that ambush. You will always look back and you will think, God, that was painful. It hurts when we think about it. And I tell people that on the lower end of the scale, it can be the ending of a relationship. It can be the ending of a marriage.

Job.

Job, personal failure, professional failure, lawsuit, bankruptcy, the failure of a business. It can be life-threatening illness or injury, life-threatening illness or injury to someone you love, it can be sexual trauma to you or someone you love, and then at the higher ends it starts to get into the loss of a loved one or one of the highest I've seen is the loss of a child.

Oh man, yeah that's tough.

So having a mindset of readiness and knowing that unfortunately those things could happen and I teach something called the REACT methodology so it's a system to use when these ambushes.

What'S that system?

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

Or it's hard to recognize.

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

Like I have to, at some point get up, yeah.

Exactly. So number one, recognizing you're in a crisis. or recognizing the reality is what I say. Number two is evaluate your assets. So when we are hit by a life ambush, by any kind of crisis or catastrophic event, it's natural to feel totally overwhelmed in the moment because your world has just come to a grinding halt for whatever it is. It's like you suddenly stepped into a raging storm. You're in the darkness. You're trying to figure out what's happening in this chaos with the wind howling and lightning and thunder and people beating on you, and it's overwhelming. And we tend to think, you know, there's no hope, there's nothing I can do, it's all outside of my control. But we have to, in that moment, figure out how we control what we can. And one of the first things we can do is evaluate what assets do I have to bring to bear to this problem. I was talking about it's like tools in our toolbox. you know, so what can I either buy, borrow, use it, I already have? If it's a, you know, business crisis, it may be an accountant or an attorney, or it may be advisors or a board that, you know, or maybe whoever that's helping you to get out of this crisis, it may be, you know, outsourcing someone that has specialties that help you deal with whatever problem you're in. If it's a personal crisis, maybe it's a relationship crisis, so it could be a marriage counselor, a priest, or whatever it is. Having those things though makes you suddenly say, okay, this is crisis, but I can deal with it. Number three is assess possible options and outcomes. And what usually tends to happen when we go, the slowest part is A, recognizing B, starting to gather, hey, I have tools, or what's in my inventory to deal with this. And then there tends to be this, this tendency, if you will, to suddenly rush like, oh my God, this sucks. I want to get off the X and I have these tools. So let me use these to get out of here as quickly as possible.

Right.

Okay.

And I tell people, you got to slow down. You got to take a tactical pause. In the military we called it, Let the Battlefield Develop.

And look at all the outcomes.

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

Behind the scenes.

Yeah.

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

Okay.

And the C, choose and communicate. So you choose the direction you're going to go and you communicate it to the people around you. you're never on the X by yourself. The X has its own gravitational pull, any kind of life ambush. So if you are in a, if it's a personal ambush, your family, your kids, your friends get pulled on the X with you. It's a business ambush. Your team, your team, believe it or not, even your clients can get pulled.

On the X with you.

That's true. So it's important that we choose and then communicate because frequently as a leader, especially when we're in a crisis, sometimes we want to internalize and we don't want to, even though everybody around us can see you're in a storm, man, you're on the edge. But it's important to communicate for three different reasons. Number one, when we communicate, we verbalize what we're going to do. And there's a level, and there's that lead yourself level of internal accountability when we say we're going to do something now it's like, yes, this is what I'm doing. Number two, it tells others and they're like, oh my God, yes, we have a plan. This sucks, let's go. And that third component of that is hope. It gives people hope. It's like a positive direction. Yes, we have a plan. This is where we're going. And then the last one is take action. Execute on that plan. There are so many people who will go through this process and then they're waiting for the perfect moment. And the perfect moment is never going to come. The time to act is now, imperfect action is better than waiting for this perfect plan.

Exactly.

And it creates momentum. It gets you off that X and you may go from one X to the next and that happens sometimes, but use that momentum to keep going instead of just sitting there.

But what about our world that has no structure in general? A lot of people have no structure and no discipline. What are ways we can develop it when we don't have a team, we don't have, maybe the family didn't give us the structure we wanted, maybe we're not in the military. How do we learn to develop discipline and structure ourselves?

Start very small. So this becomes the rule of three Ps that I teach. So daily goals. So for me, it goes big and it comes back small, but you can actually start small and build big. You can go either way.

Yes.

As humans, I don't care who you are, I don't care how lazy you are, we want to be productive. People feel good when they're productive.

Yes.

I mean, even if it's completing a video game level, believe it or not, there's a level of productivity to that. You went through something and completed it and you feel good about it.

Exactly.

But in order to do that, there has to be two things, structure and progress. Then those two things come together. So we were talking about Bill McRaven before we started in his book, Make youe Bed. Well, what is making your bed? Structure and progress. You know, every day the structure is I'm going to make my bed. The progress is you have completed this task and that comes together for success. Something as little as that, you come home at the end of the day, your bed's made, you feel good about yourself, you completed something. That's why I teach the rule of three P's. This creates balance also do one thing physical. Not everybody has to be a CrossFit athlete or the COVID of Muscle and Fitness. Everybody thinks that this is what I have to look like. No, you don't. Just be healthy, man. Like it's good for you. It'll help you. Even if that's going outside and walking for like 20 minutes. So one thing physical, one thing personal because as especially in Western culture, we typically define our jobs with who we are. So that becomes our primary focus. And usually the personal side of our lives gets put to the way point and we deal with it on a weekend or we just don't deal with it. So do one thing personal. You know, have dinner with your family. You know, take your wife out or spouse out or do your budget or clean out that closet. Just take five minutes a day to clean out, you know, just move one thing out of that closet that's threatening to throw throw up all over your house that you're afraid to open the.

Door every time you walk by.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

And then one thing professional, and this isn't within the normal realm of day-to-day activities, it's what is something that's going to help you or your business in the long run that maybe you don't have the time to do every day. Maybe it's an online course to get another qualification. Maybe it's I want to expand my product line into this new thing, but I don't have time to do it. Well, you know what? If I take 10 minutes to just work on what this is going to look at like every day. That's structure and progress. I know you're familiar with this term. The Japanese call it the Kaizen principle. So small gains lead to success.

Yes, yes.

So that's how people do it. I mean, we just start small. Everybody wants.

We are a instant gratification now results.

Yeah.

And everybody stops when they can't, you know, look like, when they can't be a millionaire, look like the COVID model of muscle and fitness.

Yes.

And be, you know, Bill Gates all in all in all day. Yeah.

I love this, man. I love the practicality of it. I love the frameworks. I love the inspiring stories that you've had to learn the hard way many different times to implement these strategies in your life. You can, yeah, go ahead.

I was just, and it was, so, and that's really an important thing, 'cause I think people want to say, oh, well, you're a Navy SEAL. Of course you can do these things. Dude, I'm a nobody. I'm five foot nothing. I weigh a hundred and nothing. My family was poor. We came from nothing. Like, all these things have worked for me, and they'll work for anyone.

Right.

But you know the deal. You just gotta put a little bit of the work in.

You gotta show consistently, man. Yeah. Consider, that's what we have when we always ask me like, Louis, how did you grow your show? How did you do these things? I go, I've been showing up for eight and a half years. Every week, I haven't missed a week. Keep showing up. I keep trying to get a little bit better. It's like there's no real crazy hack. It's like you got to keep showing up for yourself and other people will show up for you the more consistent you are. Opportunities will come to you. You'll start to feel better about yourself because you're showing up consistently for your bed. for your health, for your professional, you know, your family, all these things, you'll start to feel better.

Yeah.

But you got to be consistent. So true. You got an amazing book, man. It's called Overcome: Crush Adversity with the Leadership Techniques of America's Toughest Warriors. Make sure you guys check out the book. You got my guy, Ed Mylett, who's been on the show, John Paul DeJoria, who's been on the show, Steve Weatherford, who's my guy as well. So you've had a lot of my friends on here endorsed it. and very powerful message, book and strategies in here. Make sure you guys get the book, get it to some friends. You also got the Point Man Planner which I think is powerful, which gives people a daily framework on how to do this, right?

That's right.

You can get the Point Man Planner, get this book Overcome over at JasonRedman.com, it's also on Amazon and bookstores like that. You're on social media, what are you using more, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram?

Probably Instagram and Facebook, but I try to put out something positive every day. My big thing, every Monday I put out Monday Muster. And I put that on all the socials and it's usually about a 10 to 12 minute just positive message of starting your day and especially your week off, right?

Absolutely, yeah.

And that's on my YouTube channel.

On YouTube as well, awesome. So Jason Redman, Is it WW? Is that right? Or Jason Redman, WW on social media and jasonredman.com for your website. We can get all the information about this stuff. This is a question I ask everyone towards the end called the Three Truths.

Okay.

So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on earth, many years away from now. And you get to accomplish all your dreams and goals and live the life you want to live. for the rest of your life. For whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work, your books, your messages, all the content you've put out in the world has to go with you or go somewhere else. But it's not here in the world. And no one has access to your information anymore. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world. I call it three truths. What would you say would be those three truths for you to leave behind?

I would say, I would say recognize in this life you have a choice. You know, adversity is coming to all of us. So choose positivity over negativity. Or basically choose to be a victor, not a victim. I would say get off the X. You know, we're all going to hit these moments where we're stuck of negativity. And then focus on leading yourself. That's, I think, the most critical thing. Everything else will fall into play. If you can do that effectively, I mean, yeah, I mean, when I screwed up, that leader told me and helped me get back on track. One of my great leaders, hey Jay, people will follow you if you give them a reason to.

Ooh, yeah, you gotta lead yourself. those are powerful, man. I want to acknowledge you, Jason, for how you continue to show up for yourself throughout your entire life, from setbacks to injuries to probably years of frustration after a lot of these things. I know it's not easy from just minor injuries myself, trying to come with setback from those setbacks and to continue to show up and serve other wounded Warriors, to serve people that are going through adversities to keep showing up for your brothers and seals to continue to write and just put this message out there is really inspiring. So I acknowledge you for showing us that you don't have to be the biggest, fastest, strongest to make it to an elite level. And you don't have to be the greatest to make a big impact on a lot of people. So I acknowledge you for how you show up, man. It's really inspiring.

Thank you.

My final question for you is, what's your definition of greatness?

I think it's the legacy you leave behind. On who is the most important to you is greatness. And it doesn't have anything to do with money, in my opinion. I think it is the positive impact of the people around you. So, the final thing I talk about in the Point Man Planner that I wrote about is something that I call your life's mission objective. Also, your legacy. And mine is that I hope that everybody I come in contact with will walk away and say, that guy made me better. In some way, some small way, maybe and that's my goal. I mean, I'm living a second chance at life.

Yeah.

So many of my friends didn't get that chance. I mean, I'm definitely not perfect. I mean, I screw up at times, but that's my goal to get back on track and hopefully that.

That.

That would be my greatness. That would be my definition of greatness.

Oh, man, Jason. Thanks, man.

Appreciate you.

Yeah.

Thank you, man. Absolutely. I appreciate it. Where most people quit, I I started. And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, that's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.