The Navy SEAL’s Guide To Never Being Lazy Again [MASTERCLASS] EP 1440

My friend, I am such a big believer that your mindset is everything. It can really dictate if your life has meaning, has value, and you feel fulfilled, or if you feel exhausted, drained, and like you're never going to be enough. Your mindset is everything. And our brand new book, the Greatest Mindset, just hit the New York Times bestseller back to back weeks. And I'm so excited to hear from so many of you who've bought the book, who've read it, and have finished it already and are getting incredible results from the lessons in the book. If you haven't got a copy yet, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book I wish I had when I was 20, struggling, trying to figure out life 10 years ago at 30, trying to figure out transitions in my life and a book I'm glad I have today for myself. Make sure to get a copy@lewis howes.com/2023 to get your copy today. Again, lewishowes.com/2023 mindset to get a copy today. Also, the book is on audible now, so you can get it on audiobook as well over there also.

What gives you confidence not being afraid is overcoming the fear. I found out the whole key to life. You have to.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, So let's go ahead and dive in.

I used to take one day off a week. I used to take one day off a week.

For the body to recover, right? Makes sense.

But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours.

Wow.

But at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate, and I replace the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because The best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate, because therefore your blood's flowing through your body. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients, because then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body. All that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into As human beings, we believe, like so many people, before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Work out first. Before you talk to me about recovery.

How to recover, yeah.

Work out first. We are always looking for, like whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this portion was not built. This portion was not made by God. This person, sorry, this person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me. Because now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay. Because you are. But take that knowledge and put yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be 300 pounds. We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem.

The foundation, that's right.

You now know. I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something, it's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart. And people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to.

Yeah.

Yeah, I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh my God, you look happy. Because half of us aren't happy. We're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins, because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. Where people are going to be talking about working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability.

Yeah.

And you still want to be at the top of your class, I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does. You know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down, that guy that valedictorian's studying for an hour, and you know, I caught you. I caught you, and I am dumb. But I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Goggins got really invented. Yeah. Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty. And then three months later, they were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit. You go through these spiral notebooks of your life and you realize, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say, for me to learn this one math problem, it's gonna take me 10 hours.

Wow.

And that's where it, and you realize through hard work, you can do You can outwork anybody. No matter how badass they are. But that's the part people don't want to dive into.

Yeah. When someone's lacking confidence in themselves, what's the answer you would give them? If they're like, how do I gain more confidence?

It starts with yourself, man. You gotta start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It's gonna be a false reality. and the second life gives you that challenge, all you want to do is go back to what made you confidence or what gave you confidence. Is that happy spot?

No.

What gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own. Realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't. But I can learn. What gives you confidence, not being afraid, is overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people are gonna watch this. You know what gives me confidence? It's knowing I no longer care if I stutter or start stuttering to you. That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them, and facing them, and facing them, pretty soon you're gonna be like this. You know what, man, this is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer. There has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life.

You cheated.

I did.

I lied. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires. who called me on the phone and said, Man, I'm still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they had this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything in the world on the outside looking in, like, My God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with a backpack with all my stuff in it, no car. And I walk around happiest person in the world. have nothing, happy as hell. It's because I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that. You have to face yourself. So many people live to be 100 years old and they die miserable, having everything, because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this. Happiness, peace, Enlightenment, it's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this, people go, man, you know, I don't know. It's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You just gotta be willing to go and face it. That's the hard part.

What's your biggest insecurity today?

Not to be arrogant, I don't have one.

What was the last one you had, and when was that?

The last one I had was probably still me. Me, still living, because I always talk about I pay rent. So we used to live in a $7 a month place when I was growing up. Is this in Buffalo or is this in Indiana? This is in Indiana. So we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet.

Right.

And that $7 a month place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I had achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I'd gone through Ranger School. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records. Everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick, and I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick, and I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Why is that?

In that moment where my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training. Now you didn't have that.

I didn't have anything. Now you just had to sit alone.

Alone.

And not train. And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I had done in my life.

You hadn't reflected yet.

I hadn't reflected. I had done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect. Yeah. I was just going. I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.

You're like, on to the next.

I get in the car and I go.

You wouldn't even take the medal?

Gone.

Don't care about it. I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting.

Around for this ceremony. Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something. Validation.

I haven't done anything.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. What's right? When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I caught my 40% rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied And now I'm a 180 pound person who lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, My God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way, SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL PEP prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

That's right. Yeah. And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids.

Wow.

To get ready for boot camp.

18, 19, 20 year olds.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were hybrids. Wow. But they get the buds and the same amount of people would quit.

Why is that?

This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

It's not about... Not the mind.

That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Yeah. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I want to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure and they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me, but you go back to your insecurities and then when you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.

Why weren't you training them?

I wasn't training myself to that because at that time I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.

Physical standard.

A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. Wow. I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in a $7 a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, and I thought I was dying, 'cause that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived. Wow. 'Cause I was for the first time in my life happy. Wow. And at peace. 'Cause I reflected back on where I started.

He said, well, I have come a long way.

That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have, that's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else. Yeah. You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. you're always a victim, even if you have everything in life until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved in my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father. But she hasn't done that one step.

Really?

She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect on it.

She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life and live in that space. And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on My God, this is what I've done with my life.

So.

Have you talked to her about this?

We talk about it all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there. Not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't give a damn. I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose a path of least resistance, so we go a different route. I'm afraid of something is telling me you must do this thing. You must do that. You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I talk in life like a lot of us in life want to take the four-lane highway. that has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up, you're gonna see a McDonald's, a Cracker Barrel.

Yeah.

It's the easy route.

Very few of us wanna go to the right side.

That Cracker Barrel's at Midwest life. That's right, that's right. That's right.

That's right.

From Ohio, so... It's all about it, man. Indiana. Cracker Barrel everywhere. Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful, 'cause I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things. I was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. So I need to do the things that scare me the most.

That's right.

You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I want to do this. I'm gonna give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away. That's right. And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's what you, how you live your life. That's all it is, man. And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear of saying, this doesn't have control over me anymore.

It'S like you can be at such more peace. It's 100% in your life. Most of, like, for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy SEAL. It's until you opened your mind, open-mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like for instance, when I broke the pull-up record, everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was 4,020 pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.

4,024 hours or was this?

Yeah, it's 4,020 pull-ups in 24 hour period. The first thing I did versus closing my mind to like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pen and.

Say, how many is that every minute?

Exactly.

Every hour, every second.

Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box and we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. But we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we take away the possibilities of you could be this, you could be that, you could be all these things. And I never thought at 300 pounds I could be naked and still. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book. There'd be no book. There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. And what haunts me the most, you ask me what haunts you the most? What hampers me the most is that if I would have died at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all.

Let's say that.

I don't care what you believe in. Doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. Let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm 300 pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach terminator my whole life, and we're sitting down just like this, you,'re God and I'm David. and he gives me that chart and he says, look at this. Now, look at this chart. And on the chart, it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna. I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're gonna get the VFW award. You could be honored here, honored there. And I'm like, God, I was. This isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins, I was an Ecolab guy, I sprayed for cockroaches and I'm 300 pounds. It says here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

Wow.

My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world. and there's a final judgment, and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you,'re in heaven, this is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now, or are you in hell? Thinking about how much I left on a table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall, and over the next wall, and over the next wall. So in my mind, I believe that, and God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, My God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.

Wow.

Is there a cap on the human body?

That's right.

Is there one?

You're-- I-- I don't believe so. Because one thing I found out was, I didn't-- for several years I gave myself a way out.

When you were 300 pounds or when.

I was-- When I was 300 pounds, when I was-- all the way up till I was 24 years old, I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I start climbing, I fall back down. For the first 24 years of my life. I went to my first hell week, my second hell week, and then my third hell week came in SEAL training. And the CEO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, Hey, this is your last time you're going to go through BUD/S. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up, and he gave me a few months to heal. They said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through. Wow. I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures. Not shin splints.

That's hard to finish.

Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world, with stress fractures. And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body. If the mind is there, every morning I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me, I'd get duct tape, and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the mid of my calf, and I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot.

Oh my gosh.

And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first 45 minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me, Through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs?

Wow.

All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions. They're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy. Most of them, they're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going through that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world, broken and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now, from the weakest man, you are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game.

Why do you think so many people suffer in their stuckness of job, career, life, purpose, and how can they start taking full ownership as opposed to making excuses or blaming everything around them as opposed to being responsible for their life? How can someone learn this? When I hear this story of you, I'm just like, what's anyone's excuse on how to overcome adversity? Yeah.

I'll start off because you mentioned this perspective is a powerful tool. You mentioned comparison and whatnot. Powerful tool when it's wielded or when it's weaponized appropriately. And you know, I was in the hospital at Walter Reed for a year, lost my leg, could have easily felt really sorry for myself when I was alongside people that had, you know, they were missing all their limbs, or even worse, service members that had such severe traumatic brain injury that they did not recognize their wife and kids.

Oh, man.

When I'm next to that individual, this is a paper cut to me. So like that power of perspective, because I was able to weaponize the gratitude in that scenario. that's the key. Cause a lot of times I think when it comes to comparison or perspective, it can drive people even deeper into a hole because they're saying, hey man, like this person did this thing under these extreme circumstances and I'm having difficulty getting up in the morning. Like what's wrong with me? And it ends up being a driving factor that makes it worse. Where, no, no, stop for a second. Be grateful for what you have, see it that way. open up your heart and your soul a little bit, say, wow, I'm really fortunate. I got a lot of great things going right now and use that as a tool. Those that are stuck, you know, if there is not a mission that's been identified, in my opinion, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to get past the adversity, but even and oftentimes just to get moving. Like, what is it that you want to do? It sounds like a very simple question, but there's layers of difficulty built within this. Like, have you begun an internal dialogue with yourself yet at all? Have you looked in the mirror at any point in your life and said, what do you want to do? Who do you want to become? And I think oftentimes, and that's how it started for me, just very simple. and letting the universe or God or your soul or call it whatever you want communicate back to you on what do you want to do? Who do you want to become? In order to make that exercise of any kind of value, one is expectation, knowing that it's likely not gonna, the answer's not gonna come blasting through the glass and punch you in the face more often than not. It takes repetition. You have to actually work at it. Two is if there's not a degree of self honesty, then it's really not gonna matter. And in today's world, you can make the argument that that has never been more difficult ever in the world of immediate satisfaction and social media and where people are projecting an image because that's become the norm. It's easy for us to begin to believe our own and our own facade. And so that internal dialogue, that level of self-awareness is important. But if you're lying to yourself, then it's not gonna matter. So there's a lot there to begin playing around with. But I do think that once that mission has been identified, and oftentimes I'm asked, well, I'm having that conversation, I really am, I'm journaling, I'm being honest, I'm doing all these things, but I still don't know what my purpose is. I'm still, my soul is not being lit towards something, a technique that is often used is to hone in on your talents and kind of leverage the likelihood of success. Because if you hone in on our talents, which are the things we do best with the least amount of effort, and then you lay a skill on top of that, Odds are you're gonna be in a really great place to do some really great things. I just prefer to use the course of action prior to that as COO 01 because it doesn't place any limitations on ourselves.

I think it's beautiful. This is everything that I've been preaching but communicating to my audience about from my lessons in sports. If I didn't have a goal, I wasn't willing to I would quit football if I didn't have some type of mission or goal that I was excited about. It was meaningful to me, that had a reason why I wanted to do it. Because three days were so painful and it was hot and I could go chase girls instead or do something easier. So I needed something bigger than myself, a mission bigger than me that I was excited about, to go through all the pain of all the different sports injuries and just sacrificing whatever, early mornings, all these different things, cutting out bad food, whatever it was, that was the easy way out. And same thing when I transitioned to business and just life and relationships, it was like I would suffer and struggle more when I didn't have a meaningful mission. You can take on different things in life, but if it doesn't bring some type of fulfillment or meaning, it's gonna feel harder and you're gonna suffer more. It's going to be hard no matter what.

Sure.

Right?

There's going to, you have to do things every single day to be successful. You have to show up, you have to experience some type of pain and overcome it in order to build your emotional, mental or physical strength, right? Absolutely. Consistently.

Yeah.

So you might as well enjoy it or find fun in that process with a meaningful mission that you're tied to or seeing in the distance and trying to draw in closer. So I love that you talk about mission because I think a lot of people don't have that. and I love that you talk about talent and skills. One of the things I did when I got out of sports and was trying to figure out who I was and my identity in life now that sports was over, was I started to address a lot of my insecurities and fears. And I said, how can I maximize my talents, but also my fears and insecurities make me feel really, I lack confidence, because I know these are in the background. It was hard for me to do public speaking. I knew this was just a challenge for me. So I went all in on public speaking every single week for a year. I knew I had this desire to learn salsa dancing, but I was terrified to get on the dance floor because I didn't want to be made fun of. So I went all in and practiced every week for a couple of years as well. I just said, what are the things that I can build as talents and skills that I'm not good at as well that will make me more bulletproof emotionally and mentally?

Yes.

You know, like I can, whip out these tools at any moment and feel more confident and see where it leads me towards my mission. So, these are some of the things that I'm so glad you're talking about this because I've been preaching this stuff. And, what would you say are the main talents or skills then that you've developed since that time, since losing your leg? And, you speak another language too or did you have to learn another language?

Yeah, I speak a few. A few languages now.

Yeah. Pretty fluent or less.

No, we'll say we have a working knowledge.

Right, right, right, right.

Yeah.

If I know I'm going someplace where I may have to use that, I got to pull out the materials and dust off the cobwebs. It's an awesome question, you know, kind of looking at the positive sides of any scenario because they're there. I don't care how horrible it was. I believe that it's only a matter of time and with enough reflection, that there's positivity to extract from that. This being, you know, one of those, certainly not towards the top, but one of them, one I would say is my my level and commitment to efficiency. And the example I'll use or really the way in which this has been reinforced is, you know, when you have an amputee or when you use a prosthetic with a traditional socket system. So imagine this is my actual leg, my leg fits inside this bucket. and that's how it stays attached to my body. That's how most of those of us that have prosthetics, that's how it stays attached to us. Sweat becomes the ultimate enemy because it gets slippery, it slips around, it's not working, it starts to chafe, the leg isn't functioning normal. So I eventually began to visualize the second I put my prosthetic on my body, a clock began to tick. and it was only a matter of time before I had to take it off, wipe it down, depending on what I was doing, maybe let it breathe for 10 minutes or 20 or an hour.

Because you sweat a lot. Because I sweat a lot. Me too. I'm a big guy.

You're sweating all the time. Walk out in the snow and you sweat probably, right? All the time. Me too, yeah. Right. Especially fun fact, when you lose this many sweat pores, your other ones work in overdrive. Oh my gosh. To cool you off, yeah. Learned that in the hospital. I was going through like multiple t-shirts a day. So, you know, I am more capable when I'm on two feet. Certainly I can be mobile, I can be in a wheelchair, I can be on crutches, but I'm not as capable as I am when I'm on two legs.

You're more efficient when you're on two legs.

Absolutely. I'm more productive when I'm on two legs. So that clock begins to tick. So I knew I needed to maximize every single moment that I was on two legs. and it got a little OCD, which my wife eventually kind of got cool with because it got to the point where if I, for example, were leaving my house for the day and I grabbed my stuff and I took, you know, eight steps and I realized I had forgotten something. Well, that's 16 steps that I'm not getting back. Eight to go back to my thing, eight to get back to where I was. And it started to drive me more and more crazy.

So I began, every step needs to matter.

Every step, every minute, every second needs to matter. And this is, I get, I understand this is the extreme, and some of your viewers may be like, this is insanity, but, you know, again, I had set my sights on something so ambitious that I needed to maximize every single moment, and therefore I began just modifying, creating or modifying these different systems to minimize the likelihood of me missing those 16 steps again. So it's like, okay, I forgot my, you know, wallet. So now it's wallet, phone, like at the end of every day, like this is where everything goes.

So that everything you need to leave the next day is in one place.

Everything is streamlined. Yes. So just day to day, I began just kind of instinctually creating these different systems throughout my day to maximize my level of efficiency just so I could do more things better. better on two feet and for longer. So that's just kind of a process in which I likely would not have learned if I had not gone through this. And it's one that I've maintained really to this day.

For the last nine years now, right here, however long it's been.

Right, so it's almost instinctual where I'm constantly looking at ways to improve, to make up a second or two or not.

But with the stream, circumstances, you need to take extreme changes to maximize your life or to master your life. Otherwise, you could fall two hours behind every day because, oh, I forgot this and not upgrading your systems with a level and the degree of your new reality. You need to upgrade your level of thinking, your skill sets, the systems inside of you, your processes, to be even more efficient than before, even with the changing of the prosthetic or whatever you might have to do, right?

And this is more tactical on the ground stuff, physically moving things around through my day. This is tactical, tangible tools. I'll use a second point. It's more conceptual, but I really want to emphasize this when you talk about what were the upsides? What were the positive aspects that you've learned or been able to leverage from, from losing your leg? And it's knowing, realizing and knowing that although I was a hard worker and I was productive on two legs and I've got plenty of, you know, accomplishments and stuff that I'm certainly proud of, that took a lot of really hard work. There was an entire another level of work ethic. and productivity that was sitting inside me the entire time that I did not know existed until this happened. And I set my sights on something extraordinarily unlikely, but I committed myself to because I knew I needed to be able to work at an extraordinarily higher level, like the highest possible level. And it's not as if when I was in the hospital, you know, some scientist walked into my room and rammed a metal spike in the back of my head and uploaded work ethic, like Neo in the Matrix. Like it was literally there the whole time. I think that oftentimes it takes a traumatic event or hitting rock bottom for people to realize that there's so much more inside them that is literally sitting there waiting to be leveraged. And that becomes the kind of the catalyst for them to start to see that. And then it becomes contagious. It's like, oh my gosh, look what I just did. What else can I do? What else can I do? And that snowball effect happens. But having retrospectively kind of analyzed that, yeah, sure, this was the catalyst and I've seen what I was able to do. How did I really do that? And it was through the modification primarily anyway of two relationships, my relationship with fear and my relationship with pain. And those are relationships like any other relationships we have, right? It's a two-way street. You talk to that entity and it talks back. You can only influence so much, but by modifying my relationship with those two things really is what facilitated my ability to do more, push harder, create more and accomplish more.

How do you modify your relationship with fear and pain?

I think, at least for me, man, it began with a recognition of what they're there to do. And the human brain does a lot of amazing things for us, but its primary responsibility is our survival. It's to keep us alive. And the brain has a security system within it, and within that are two different alerts, one of which we know is fear, one we know is pain. Fear is the alert of, pending danger or a potential threat. Like something bad could happen. You're now scared. I need you to be scared of that to stay away from it. Pain being the alert of damage or impairment, right? Because the brain wants us to survive. Knowing that our brain is there because it wants the comfort zone. Like homeostasis, like the medical term. It wants things nice and predictable and sustainable and forecastable. and let's just keep things all nice and calm here when it comes to even our heartbeat, our red blood cell count, like it doesn't want change. Recognizing that and then knowing that if we set our sights on something righteous, something of ambition, something that is unlikely, unprecedented, there are gonna be times when we have to ignore our brain and listen to our heart. and our soul. And one of the greater challenges of life really is knowing when to take that risk and asking yourself in that moment, in real time, like right now, are you willing to take the risk of doing this particular thing? Knowing the potential hazards, but then also knowing the potential effects. Like, are you willing to do it?

I'm curious about in your mind, I don't want to assume anything, but has anything become harder since you've lost your leg? And has anything become easier or better since then as well? I don't want to make assumptions either way that things have gotten harder or easier and better, but if there is, is there something on both sides that's been harder and easier and better?

Yeah, certainly. I mean, there were countless specific tasks were really hard to relearn and are still harder today, even after having learned them and doing them now for almost a decade. I mean, walking is harder now than it was prior. I think, generally speaking, the hard comes from a willingness to accept that you don't know how to do something right now, and that's okay. And not letting my pride and ego get in the way of that. Slicing off a massive serving of humility, be willing to take that risk of embarrassment. And when it comes to fear, sure, we're fear of physical damage, but I would argue fear mostly comes through the lens of emotional damage. fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, self-judged by other people. Judgment, I think most of that. So again, a modification of that relationship. Am I willing to do this? But most, I think it's probably accurate to say, most tasks, certainly anything that involves me being on two legs, are more difficult today than before.

What's easier or better?

If that's, man, I'll start off in the clouds, man, because if I could go back in time, right? Like, Doc Brown shows up in the DeLorean and he's like, let's go back and we'll save your leg. You know, the butterfly effect is, you know, a concept.

You weren't there and you were in another room or something during that time.

Sure.

Yeah.

But I look at the life I have now, man, and, you know, particularly my family and my boys and my wife and And it's just amazing. I would not undo a single thing. Really? Because there's just a chance that I don't end up where I am here right now, like talking to you with my family at home. I live such a fulfilling and loved life that I wouldn't change a thing about this. That's like up in the clouds. But it's important, you know, note, I think I'll go into the tactical realm. So I'm big into jiu-jitsu and I started as a two-legged guy and competed. And jiu-jitsu was a huge part of my recovery, which began in a hospital, certainly physically, range of motion, flexibility, humility.

Also your spirit too, just not having to be in a hospital. Absolutely.

Comradery, competition, all that stuff. Yeah, huge aspect of my recovery and just really overall life. But, you know, jiu-jitsu is a weight class. Sport. And although, you know, I walk around now today at around 220 pounds, big strong guy, man, I'm missing about 45 pounds of leg.

Right, right. So you would be a 265 weight class, but you're right against guys, you know, my size.

Absolutely.

And you're freaking just bear hugging them.

Yeah.

So, you know, I learned that there's, like, a huge advantage in that realm, which is, you know, I wouldn't say it's silly because you can conceptualize that to say, like, no, there's, there's always upsides to it. Sure. I was able to leverage, you know, my upper body strength and whatnot when I would compete as an amputee. And if you looked at me versus some of my competitors from the waist up, you'd be like, there's no way.

These guys are in the same weight class.

Right.

It's impossible. Well, you look like a beast next to them. Yeah, right. So certainly, this is an example, man, of things that I would say are are easier, but certainly things that I can leverage to my advantage.

Yeah, yeah. That's cool, man. Anything else that's easier or better now with this, is do you have a different, you know, mental capacity, emotional capacity? Do you appreciate things more?

Yeah.

Oh, gosh.

Is your heart open now because you have different type of humility? I mean, I'm just, I have no idea, but I'm throwing it out there.

Yeah.

My degree of confidence is actually probably higher now than it was as a two-legged guy.

Wow.

Wow.

Why? How?

Yeah, great question. You know, I think you could summarize confidence into two words, like training and preparedness. And when you put in the reps and you've got the resources in place to deal with the what ifs, I think drastically increased the level of confidence. And my training was, you know, I attacked that on a whole another scale. And as I was working my way back to the team and then continuing to deploy into combat and doing all these different things, my level of training was quite, was quite insane at times. And I needed to physical training or.

Like, oh, yeah, workout training to get back.

Yeah.

I mean, it was It was belligerent, you know, my lifestyle and structure was nuts. And then my level of preparedness also had to increase as well. I would break these things. I would need tools. I would need stuff to have available. I learned all these through really difficult lessons. So training and readiness or training and preparedness were essential for me to do what I needed to do. But most significantly is as I began to fail repeatedly in front of those in which I wanted to impress, like my teammates and my commanders, I eventually got to a place where I was okay with failing in front of people. Like when I first got back to my unit, I was only in the hospital for a year. I got back to my unit. I was still really raw. I would not be seen without my prosthetic on my body. No one would see me without a leg.

So why?

Because in my mind, that would be seen as a, I would as weakness. I would be seen as a liability. I would be seen as, man, there's no way this guy can stay in this community. So I struggled with that for a while. And there was a time eventually when my teammates came over and I was hobbling around, I clearly needed to take my leg off and like let it chill for a minute. And he came over and he's like, dude, why don't you just take your leg off and like, like, sit down for a second? And he knew why without me having to say it. He's like, listen, dude, everyone here knows you only have one leg. Like, if you take your prosthetic off, it's not gonna change anything. I'm like, okay. And that was like step one. And I just did that and I looked around and-- no one cared. No one cared.

Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Absolutely.

The fear of embarrassment or the worry, what are people gonna think? No one cared.

No one kid.

They just want you healthy, happy, they want you to feel ready to go.

That's it. And then from there, it just kind of began to snowball where I would, you know, I'd push myself harder and I would trip and fall or my leg would come detached or I would fail on this deadlift or I'd be out trying to learn how to run and I'd fall down and I began to just care less about the opinions of others.

Yeah, if you fell down, it didn't matter anymore.

Didn't matter. Like my teammates, my family, my loved ones, they love me regardless.

Yeah.

So I just began to build up a greater sense of confidence because I was callousing my mind to a degree where, no, I can do this. I can be vulnerable. I can mess things up. And not only is it okay, but it actually inspires people around me and makes them want to dig a little bit deeper.

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 the X is any point of attack, any point of crisis, and now that's one of the big things I talk about to 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.

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 on 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 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 together, I felt like, man, it's no longer the bombs and bullets of battle, it's the bombs and bullets 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 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 is the victim mindset. That pins us to the X, 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 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 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 were hard. I mean, it was not, you know, it's 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 that's, and it is a virus. It is a cancer when it occurs because usually when a team is at a point in time where 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 gonna be that guy. I was gonna 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 I teach in both Overcome and in my Point Man for Life program. And it was something that I was missing, and 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.

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 that 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 gonna 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 things. It was, how do I take down a single room? And we walk as we flow through it. And then it 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 then structure and discipline in the way we trained. Everything was built up that way from shooting. 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 to do when I train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the three-yard line. A 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 so that we can do that over and over and over again until, you know, at 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?

Or not on a sports team when they 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, 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. There's 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, lessen 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 bound 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, in this bucket, in this bucket. I teach something called the Pentagon of Peak Performance. So five key areas that a leader should be balanced in. The foundational level is physical leadership. 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, 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 that's, 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 is 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.

Right.

Number three, and this is the biggest one of my weakest point, and that's something I found about the Pentagon. Most people have one area that they're super strong, naturally, and then they have an area where they're super weak. And 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 tell you amazing news and you're not gonna burn it down drinking and be an idiot. You gotta ride that balance. And I really struggle with that because 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 it's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity. Nobody wants that leader that is.

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 and their path to get things done. And that, in my opinion, is weak emotional leadership also. I mean, as a leader, we gotta think about the others.

The health of others, yes.

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

Other than maybe making you feel good to attack people who disagreed with. And that's part of being a leader also.

Right.

That people are gonna disagree with you. So what?

You can't be extreme in one direction or the other, right? You can't be, if you're in a leadership position, you can't talk all the time, right? Obviously as a boss you need to communicate, you need to talk to your people. But if you talk too much, guess what happens? People stop listening to you, you're putting out too much information, they don't know what's important and what's not. So that's bad, you can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough. And now no one knows what's going on. No one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced. And that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. But probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself, you know what? I, there's another side to this, is I used to tell the young SEAL officers that you have to be aggressive. You got to be default aggressive. That's how you got to be, because when something's going on, you got to be aggressive to make that, get that problem solved. And if you're, not being aggressive, then you're hesitating, well then you can get killed. Okay, so there you go.

And that's what I used to tell guys.

And as a- But that's extreme. That's an extreme.

Yes.

That's the problem with it. And so the question is, can you be too aggressive? Yes, absolutely. You can, hey, there's a machine gun nest over there, let's attack it. So you charge up the hill and everyone dies. You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. And that's probably, so even as I had these kind of mantras like default aggressive, can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. So you end up with this, what do you end up with? Can you be too passive?

Absolutely.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Well now we're not making any progress, now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay, so that's bad.

So where do you want to be?

You want to be balanced. Even the idea of extreme ownership.

Can you take too much ownership? Yes. Yes, you can.

Really? Yes, you can. But I thought you said you need to take ownership of everything. Two different things. Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the route I want you to use to get to the target. Here's the method I want you to use to secure the target. Here's the route I want you to do to get back. So, that's the plan. Now, you take ownership and go execute. Now, can you really take ownership of that plan?

If someone else gave you the whole thing?

I mean, I gave you the whole thing, right?

Is that your plan?

No, no, it's your plan. It's my plan. So, when you go in the field and now you come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan, what's your attitude?

Well, it's not my plan.

It's-- yeah. And you're at an obstacle now and you're like, Hey, Jaco didn't think of this. Right, right. So his plan was-- so now you.

Just back away and you come back.

And you say, Hey, we failed the mission because you didn't think of this.

I can think of this option.

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

So that's me taking too much ownership. So what I need to do is I say, hey, here's the plan or here's the mission. How do you want to do it? And now if you're a good leader, you'll go get with your people and you'll say, oh, hey guys, here's the plan or here's the mission that we have to accomplish. How do you guys want to do it? Now you all come up with a good plan. You come back to me and you say, here's the plan. And I say, that looks pretty good. Go execute.

And now when you hit an obstacle.

The field, what's your attitude?

I need to adapt and adjust. What's your plan? You'll make it come up with this.

Yes. So can you take too much ownership? The answer is yes you can. So with just about every, you can name a trait, right? You can name a trait from a leadership perspective that you think is a positive trait and you'll immediately see that if you go too far with it, it'll become bad. It'll become bad. So you have to be balanced. So even as I came up with the dichotomy of leadership, I had to be humble enough to say to myself, you know what? Being aggressive is really, really good most of the time, but if you're too aggressive, that's not good.

Yeah.

So like you said earlier, you're constantly questioning everything. And to me, what that is, that's humility. That's you being humble enough to say, you know what? I really don't understand this that well. And there's some things in my life that I don't get. Where as opposed to as opposed as opposed to you walking around saying, I already got this figured out. I already know what I'm doing. I already know where I'm going. I already know what God is specifically. I already know what's gonna happen to me when I die.

All those things.

But instead you're questioning everything, which in my mind is a positive thing.

Yeah, that's good to know. Is there anything that is missing in your life? You feel like something's missing?

I know. I feel like I'm living a pretty good life right now. totally blessed. I mean, I got a great family.

I got great kids.

I got a great company. I got working with great people. -Yeah. -No. -Healthy. -Healthy. You know, I get to work out, train. I'm feeling good. -Living the dream, man. -Yeah.

Living the dream. -So, you never feel like there's something missing for you right now. If there is, you're working towards it.

You're working on the next book. You're building the business. -Yeah. Well, there's a difference between something missing and an satisfied.

Yeah. Right?

Because I'm not satisfied. I mean, I always want to go like I never get done with the end of the day and go cool, mission accomplished. It's like you got to be close.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you're not satisfied but you feel like nothing's missing.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'd say that's a fair statement.

What brings you the most joy in your life and makes you smile the most?

Oh, I mean my kids. My kids are cool. They're funny. You know, my wife and kids.

Yeah.

My wife and kids are cool and funny and we have a good time and lots of inside jokes and all that.

Yeah.

You know, and I trained jiu-jitsu and that's very fun. And surf, that's fun.

Yeah.

Play guitar, that's fun.

How old are your kids again?

20, 18, 16 and 10.

And what's the biggest lesson you learned about being about yourself being a father to them.

Your kids are not going to be who you want them to be.

You can't train them to be.

They're going to be who they are. And you can give them some course corrections a little bit, but they're going to be who they are. And the more you try and force them into what you want them to be, the harder they're going to push back and rebel.

Wow.

Yep.

Did you learn that the hard way.

Or did you get Yep.

So you tried to train them in.

A certain way or... Yeah, somewhat. And it's pretty obvious, like, from my perspective, I was having a similar conversation with a bunch of executives and we went down the road because we're having dinner now, so we're done talking about work, but now everyone wants to ask me about, you know, parenting and everything else. And I said at the table, I'm like, hey, who here ended up doing exactly what their parents wanted them to do? And there's like one guy out of ten.

Right?

Because most people, you know, your parents are wanting you to do this thing and you do something else. I mean, I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old. Like, that's... That probably wasn't even on the checklist of top 20 things that my parents wanted me to do. -Right.

-Not even in the same ballpark, right?

-Yeah. -They didn't want you to go to war.

-Yeah.

-They didn't want that. So, here you go. Yeah, see ya. That's... So, the more you try and kind of pigeonhole your kids into being something that you want want them to be, the worse off it's going to be. It's the same thing with leadership. It's the same thing with leadership. If I'm trying to force my plan down my team's throat, the more resistance I'm going to get from it. Whereas if I plant the seed and I allow that plan to grow with them, the better it's going to be received. Like when people ask me, how do you get people to buy in? Well, you allow them to come up with a plan yourself.

What if in your mind you're like, you really know that plan is not that good.

It depends on how bad it is. How bad is it? Or what's at stake? If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with and the contract doesn't really matter, I'd be like, Hey, hey. Give it a shot, here's a couple, I might give you a couple adjustments and give you some coaching on it. And then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, oh no, we didn't land it. And I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it and say, you know, you said this and you said that, here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, hey, here's some other things that might have worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was going to have value to our company, I'm gonna, I'm gonna either step in. Yeah, I'm gonna step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction gonna be? And by the way, that's what I'm not gonna say, no, don't do it that way. I'm gonna say, give me that, tell me that again. And let me hear, let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with the solution.

So then you're kind of going in there like you got this dialed. And then you're gonna feel like you won, which you did.

That's great, which is great.

It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, competence, belief. How important is feedback for leaders? Getting feedback from peers, coaches, or employees, team members. Feedback is how you get better.

No feedback, no improvement. And if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it. So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're definitely not asking for it, and even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble.

What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you think you need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have?

I mean, the weird thing about me is even though you might think, look at me and think, oh, who's gonna tell this guy anything, right? The reality is, if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, Hey, I don't know if that's a good plan. So even when I was a task unit commander, so I'm in charge and I'm the head seal for this 40 seals, I'm the main guy. Anyone in that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, Hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it. My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that.

So.

My friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long.

-They'Re not intimidated or scared of you?

-No.

That's good.

No.

So, how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team in order to welcome the feedback of the information?

-Yeah.

What you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like, you know, just the other day we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year, but the thing that I was telling this group of people was, as a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. So, every time you come to me and you say, Hey, Jocko, I don't like this plan. I don't say shut up and do it my way. No, I say, How would you want to do it? Tell me what you don't like about it and then tell me how you want to do it. So therefore, the next time you have an objection, you're like, you know the door is open, you know that I'm going to be open-minded and listen to you and that's how you build it. Every time you shut someone down from speaking their mind, you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback and if there's no feedback, as we just said, you're not going to improve.

What are two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills right off the bat, two things you can think of. And what are two things that wannabe leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders? So what are the two things they could add?

Yeah, two things that you said. Number one is listen, which we just talked about. So that's fresh on my mind. And you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time. Wrong. wrong answer. Wrong answer. I'll sit through a meeting with a client or with one of my companies and I'll listen for 38 minutes. And at the end of those 38 minutes, I'll have already thought through every discussion that's been had. You know, you want to argue with him and he's arguing with her. And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. Meanwhile, you're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's given up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments. And I do that for 38 minutes. And in the 39th minute, I say, Hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually gonna be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter. It wasn't because I had better tactical understanding. It's because I actually shut my mouth, listened to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew, and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was. So listen, and the other one is the word that I just used, which is detach, which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're going to you see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon, shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high port, take a step back and actually look around, I can see infinitely more. So apply that to a meet. This is the meeting that we just talked about, a 38 minute meeting. All this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm the boss. I could jump in there and start arguing and giving my opinion. But what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is in the weeds and I'm not able to assess what is actually happening. So that. So there you apply it there to your personal life. If you and I are arguing, you're my friend and you did something. and now we're starting to escalate an argument and I'm starting to get emotional. Am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on? If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction? No. No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying, and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without saying you need to calm down or you're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no. Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say the dang supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed. If I say, hey, calm down, Right? If that's my reaction, then you realize that I'm against you.

Right?

I don't get it. And so now it's me and the supply department against you.

No one understands that.

No one understands. So I do a little technique.

What is that?

Yeah.

I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit. so that we're not escalating the situation. How would you do this with your wife? So if you, well if you come to me and you go, the supply department's been late for, they're two weeks late on this stuff. I don't say, calm down, I say, oh, you gotta be kidding me.

Two weeks?

And you go, yeah, can you believe it? Ah, that's horrible. We gotta put a solution, we gotta get that figured out. In the meantime, what do we need.

To do right now to get the problem solved?

Right?

So we already, now we're on the.

Same team so we can work together to find a solution. We bonded on the pain. Yes.

You felt the pain.

Yes. We're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's gonna make my wife mad?

The ice machine's not working.

Right, the ice machine's not working. It's your fault. Whether it's my fault, but we don't know. The ice machine's not working. By the way, this is a real story. This is happening today. The ice machine's not working. She didn't get mad about it, but the ice machine's not working. If I go, Hey, chill out. You have a refrigerator. and the house and we just calm down, right? How's that gonna go? It's not gonna go good. Now she's gonna get mad, now it's me against her. So instead, the ice machine's not working. Ah man, that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden we're on the same team and she's like, well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. As opposed to the ice machine's not working. Well, okay, do you want me to have ice shipped in from a Alaska there, princess.

Right?

That's not gonna go over well.

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