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've got to have a dream the school of greatness please welcome you have this incredible story where you got shot many times in war 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 your life with this this uh 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's becoming a victim mindset nation we are becoming a nation of individuals who are being convinced um 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 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 right it's this lie and myth and i talk often about the vic 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 uh it lasted about uh seven six months okay and it culminated with uh while you were navy seal yeah absolutely and culminate 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 um you were just fed nothing but negative energy from social media from the media i mean people around peers yeah everybody i mean 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 seventy percent 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 um 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 um their ability to tell others what to do with leadership and and oftentimes that's not leadership that's just management oftentimes it's 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 how you set goals within your loan 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 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 percent 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 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 uh of leading yourself gaining trust with the people people around you that you lost trust with of dealing with some daily negativity right having to push back against that so how long were you working from you know 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 i guess i should say 18 months maybe 20 yeah and then kind of got back on an even field and felt that guy had come back in those last four months of heavy combat operations and wow 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 uh 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 uh no that's not what i'm talking about yeah i'm talking about my team and i'm like start coming back to us 70 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 um and 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 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 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 um as a young officer that almost ended my career as i was picking and choosing what 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 um 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 if it's a sports analogy your team is getting their ass kicked right 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 and the face of that has to step up and leave that's where we lead always yeah and and um it is in those hard moments it's when nothing is going right everybody's miserable that you have to step up and lead um and 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 your you're getting shot up yeah so what happened and so we were at the end of our deployment in iraq in 2007 and and uh you've been a navy seal for how long now i've been 15 years 15 years 15 years about two years as an officer so i had to go up came back uh actually a little more than that maybe three and a half years as an officer at that point but uh it screwed up came back super successful very uh combat heavy deployment in iraq in the summer of 2007 and a lot of individuals who um fought in iraq know that 0607 both in baghdad and in the anbar province fallujah ramadi um some of our heaviest fighting was happening during that time and we got there and it was almost every night we were going out conducting missions uh multiple firefights uh we lost uh several guys on that deployment we lost uh quite a few guys got wounded so a very intense deployment we um we took a lot of enemy off the battlefield and we captured a lot of mid-level and high level insurgent al-qaeda leaders so it really as a seal and even to this day my wife doesn't quite understand when i tell her that's 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 wow set out to do as a as a seal and we were coming up on the end of the deployment we were literally one week from going home i'd redeem 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 and the anbar 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 schwedler responsible for the deaths of marines and other coalition forces ran id cells ran sniper cells just a really violent guy and we'd been hunting him to know to no avail and got word on september 12th that he was going to be in a specific time and location um in a place uh coincidentally called karma iraq so a place that we had been into many times and a very uh uh enemy-centric location very al-qaeda heavy every time we went in there we got into a gunfight so we we knew that the stakes were high we also had been told that this al qaeda leader had a very ruled with a very heavy well-trained security detail that every one of his guys wore suicide vests and they had not trained if we got too close to him they 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 gosh and and you know where part of your training is or part of your you know uh 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 head shots so needless to say pretty high stress at night as we launched on this mission and there's uh 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 gonna happen um 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 this mission that i 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 going to happen i didn't think the mission was going to happen i didn't think the mission was going to happen so you guys weren't really prepared you were just kind of like you pray 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 um but i didn't think it was gonna happen so guys were planning but we weren't in full planning prep mode yeah it was just kind of like this could happen tonight 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 we're launching at like 1am i was like okay roger that so when 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 um when we did ground or 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 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 want 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 oh and i'm like no yeah i mean no i don't do that like i want to be light and uh and it was like where are your side plates and we weren't gonna be walking long distance on this night because the uh 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 going to be shot up it's going to be tonight really which i guess i was right wow it just didn't happen initially wow so uh 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 and uh excuse me and we thought that um we were just going to blow that stuff up and we thought that was going to 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 they would move on yeah so uh 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 the if we had watched stuff like that the snipers watched 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 uh let's walk these guys down let's find out who they are and what they know i said okay roger that so we we came up from the south to the north in this field and uh 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 uh hey do you do you see any uh weapons you know what are these guys doing and no we're not seeing anything so um 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 um 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 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 stranded operations yeah according to our 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 the air asset up above said hey you're gonna miss these guys um 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 to walk up on them when we did that i had a uh two new guys and uh one of our explosive ordnance guys on that left flank and and somehow they did not hear that call so we made this turn and they kept going straight and uh quickly realized it um 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 oh man force is 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 um 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 uh enemy fighter enemy fighter without one and an enemy you know uh part of the security detail fighter fight 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 um that we estimate to be about 12 to 15 individuals so when you're trying to get 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 uh all of a sudden the world erupted because when our medic shot that guy it tripped the ambush and the ambush went live um so uh our medic was initially shot he was hit below the knee that severed both phones dropped him and anchored him on that that corner one of our other guys ran forward to grab him and was stitched up the body two rounds in the leg and one in the arm but a big beast of a guy guy about your size who um grabbed our medic and started dragging him back um 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 cover cover being something that'll stop bullets which was kind of like a big um like john deere tractor tire about 15 yards you know back from the field with nothing else behind it like literally thousands of yards of empty you know desert um 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'm really worried about a blue on blue um thankfully our senior guy in that group was smart and got those guys shot down and was like do not shoot so it became us and uh this uh 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 in the in the vegetation just like were just like unloading yeah because you you couldn't see them they were probably five yards back all you could see is the muzzle flash that's crazy yeah so and and 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 when a bullet cracks it's actually a sonic crack it's the sound of the bullet breaking the 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 it's how i've described wow how far away you from the gun where you 45 feet 45 feet wow yeah so and immediately i was stitched uh across the body armor um and i took two rounds in the left elbow but i i only thought it wasn't 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 you couldn't feel it or i couldn't feel it um it was so 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 um 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 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 uh both guns turned on me and uh and i took rounds off my helmet i was taking i took rounds off my gun i took my left night vision tube was shot off um and i turned to move back to where the guys were towards that uh tractor tire and that's when i caught around from behind that right in front of the ear it traveled through my face uh exited the right side of my nose took off most of my nose it blew out my right cheekbone my cheekbone kicked it out to the right vaporized the orbital floor broke all the bones above the eye uh 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 uh go down and thought i was dead thought i'd been right in the head yeah i mean technically i had but you know thankfully not in the uh not in the brain yeah um but i was unconscious i don't know we don't know how long five to ten minutes and so at this point this gun fight is happening directly over me the guys are shooting the enemy's 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 um and definitely out of it um i know you've had your bell rung really good yeah there's it takes i think it's shot in the head but yeah i mean yeah i mean you know the impact yeah i mean where it takes a couple of minutes to like get clarity back to the world and like 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 know 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 stopped me oh and then i actually remember reaching up to my face and feeling the whole life oh yeah and uh and and was like you felt the whole you're like oh man i've been shot in the face like i can feel the bone in there and the teeth sticking out and oh my god so um so and then i was literally watching the um the tracer go over me so um the bolts or the so machine guns every fifth round has phosphorus mixed in with the gunpowder so if you watch a 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 and you know i just aim my face 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 don't sit up don't move yeah you're dead yeah important safety tip wow if you ever wake up and you hear gun firing you see laser beams don't say i can't yeah yeah you're welcome but um 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 um 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 um kind of like self leadership absolutely you know um but i couldn't i couldn't get my tourniquet um 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 medevac and he was like red i think at that point they realized i was still alive um so and he yelled out five minutes wow um which was a lie so you're like i could die in five minutes yeah yeah but i i and and i was and um because i was losing a lot of blood and i was just focusing on um [Music] 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 what 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 uh and he did an amazing job he 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 got to save my life well i i actually thought that i was i realized that i was probably not going to make it was my i came to and it made me and i'll be honest at first it made me angry it made me angry that i was in charge and i'd let us into this situation so that made me angry it made me angry that the enemy would get the satisfaction and knowing that they had killed a seal that made me angry wow and then my thoughts drifted to my family um and i and you know so it's september 13th at this point and we were real big into halloween my wife 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 me 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 yeah 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 oh 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 um and at that point i uh i i called out to god and i said i need help like i need strength to come home and like that so like miracle moment but i suddenly had strength and uh and i don't know how long from that moment until the end of the gun fight but over that period of time guys continue to fight my team leader got a tourniquet on me um and we ended up calling in um uh what we call fire missions rounds from an aircraft munitions basically to give you some yeah to take the enemy out which that though 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 gay man there ain't going to 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 or yeah he just uh he he did certain things and very smart on him how he basically called those rounds in but uh i remember literally watching those rounds impact in front of us and uh as it took the enemy out that's crazy and then uh and then all i focused on was stay away stay alive yeah you fall asleep and that's what i and i wanted to i've never felt 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 um but yeah that uh when they loaded us uh 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 like seriously hurts oh my gosh just dragging you from like your neck collar or something and like oh my oh your face here's the other thing i wanted to say so i took a round when i two things happened when i was laying on the ground before we called in those rounds before my team leader came and got me um for whatever reason i took my helmet off oh i don't know why i mean like i mean you know 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 um so my helmet um 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 uh 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 oh damn it starts up here goes down here and there's just this giant hole you know the bone is kicked out of here so um he drew this but he drew the hole in my helmet and the skull which gives it this cool look but the other thing but thank you how about thankfully i took it off for whatever reason i don't know why so the helmet got shot you said i did while i was laying on the ground when you took it off i also took around in the right side when you were laying down yes on the right side plate so go so it hit it would still be painful oh i knew it i knew i had been like like when i got the uh my body armor back i was like uh almost like i immediately pulled it out and sure enough you can see where the round uh impacted the plate and ricocheted off but that would have probably killed you because it would have gone through and taken out my kidney probably would have blown through my spine um so i you know i don't know what plates well so how many did actually how many rounds hit you in the body like so three in the body eight in the body armor that were awesome body armor is a lifesaver yeah absolutely and uh and when they loaded us on the helicopter um several years later i got to meet the crew that medevac oh my gosh and they thought we didn't make it like when they dropped us off they these guys are dead yep and uh and they told me um they they told me the story of that night and it was amazing they said that uh one that helicopter was only configured to carry two wounded guys uh and it was uh tf 160th our or 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 furiously to save all of us while they were flying the rotors off to get us to baghdad but um 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 um it was creating um this mist of blood oh my gosh so when they landed and and got us out like they realized they were all coated they were just soaked in blood because it had like literally sprayed everywhere everywhere and they said it took months to get all the blood out from every diet 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 friend of mine that was part of the 160th managed to dial back find out who's in charge during that time and who would have flown that mission and uh 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 uh from the moment you were shot so but what's interesting like your brain doesn't realize that you've passed out you know you just come too and they're absolutely and there are some things to this day i i won't i don't remember there was a point in the gun fight that they had pulled me back to the um 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 uh there's a uh and you never throw grenades into vegetation because there's a high chance they will hit a branch and bounce back at you so uh super dangerous don't do it and uh i guess whatever reason those lessons were in my brain because 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 until years after the gunfight we happened to be sitting around one night drinking and catching up and he was like do you remember this wow no man no memory at all so in and out of consciousness um and 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 uh 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 i'm happy to be alive i'm here i'm alive yes i'm gonna see my family exactly and i was just so thankful um to be alive um i remember like when i first came to my commanding officer was there and the master chief was there and uh and i 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 uh lieutenant you've been shot in the face you are trached uh you're wired shot you're not gonna 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 uh i said has my wife been notified and uh and do i still look pretty and uh and uh 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 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 maryland so that was 96 hours i was back back in the u.s yep wow so did they do did they stitch you up in the first day or they just kind of like putting gauze over it how are they no no they stitched me i mean yeah they had to stop you know all the bleeding and stabilizing and then they do reconstructive surgery later like okay yeah so they've gotta repair the damage and stabilize you and then all the reconstruction happens later and that's where the elations start to war off and several things happen one i remember laying in bed in bethesda um and the first thing like many of us when something bad happens replaying it in your mind and like i've done something different if i've done that if i'd moved left if i'd moved right and i was really kind of kicking myself and then finally i was just like dude stop like one nothing you do about it nothing you can do about it like and and two you did things according to how we've trained like so put that out of your mind and and you need to move forward but i remember the 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 uh 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 and uh yeah and she was like she was just incredulous like looking at me like lieutenant 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 going to be permanently disfigured and i'm going to be forever disabled wow because they were also talking to me about amputating my arm amputating it uh because i had no use of yeah at this point they knew i had taken two rounds and it effectively destroyed my elbow um 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 in the ultimate race 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 um orthopedics at bethesda at that time was a former seal and he said to me i'm going to do everything i can to shave wow yeah i think if anybody else they would have they would have taken my life oh really and he was like i'm going to do whatever it takes and he did and uh 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 a leader finally not finally but kind of came to a intersection and and there were several things that happened the one last thing that kind of made me come to this this pinnacle or this this intersection was about all that time i had somebody else had come into the room and and they were um they were having a conversation with me and then i started to drift off um but i was hearing 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 um how overwhelming the hospital was and how terrible it was for all these wounded warriors and how you know 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 um 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 buds you've been to 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 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 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 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 and 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 in a job that i loved 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 most physically i have the ability to recover and then i'm going to 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 wow and we we signed it the the management and that's cool and it took on a life of 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 um 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 talk to a lot of people about is having a mission statement that guides you in the dark 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 had this hole in my face i felt like a skeleton oh man that's hard um 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 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 yourself 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 um i mean earned me an invitation the white house to meet president bush it has been written about in other books secretary robert gates wrote about in his book first lady michelle obama wrote about it not once but twice in her book really moved her so much wow wounded warriors to this day write me it i didn't keep it i it uh 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's 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 you you in this life you can lay on the axe 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 it'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 uh excuse me go ahead take a time yeah i think part of the current victim mindset we have in the nation is we are not um i mean if you go back to the beginning of america and probably life 200 years ago life was hard yeah like you know um 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 harder 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 um coming out of world war ii forward to really um 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 to some third world and seen poverty at the highest level it doesn't compare to here right 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 where 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 real 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 track so you're the wrong gender race creed color religion whatever it is and people buy it and they say oh man you're right because i'm this color because on this race or creed or religion or whatever you know sexual orientation but it's just not true um 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 who are black and white and and and female and and muslim 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 going to 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 gun that 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 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 um 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 reign as much fire 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 quickly as possible because the longer you sit on it the harder it is to get out of and ambush so 2007 my gun fight uh 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 i'm it's no longer the bombs and bullets of battle it's the bombs and bullets of life wow 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 and like 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 have 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 going to play in the nfl this was my launch point and then 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 that is the victim mindset that pins us to the ex 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 that 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 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 uh 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 um [Music] 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 and 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 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 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 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 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 uh 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 um structure and discipline so muscle memory would be the biggest one which is now many of the things that i teach in 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 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 um 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 to make it even worse and and then train from that and then train from that and it was grueling and painful and and 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 and 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 things it was how do i take down a single roux 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 qual rock crawl walk run mentality all the time and and then structure and discipline and 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 to do when i train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the uh 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 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 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 left uh 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 uh 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 did you do that and i couldn't definitively answer that question so overcome became i mean it took overcome came out in um 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 um you know a lot of people don't understand that that the military is a 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 you eat sleep you work out and then you train and conduct missions and you're worried 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 uh as i got out i realized that 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'd 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 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 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 five 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 um and it's something that i've come to find that all of us as we get older have a tendency to let slide uh we we do the opposite of probably what we should be doing it's been going harder and yeah yeah because as we get older we're breaking down need 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 um to what you're doing and that consists of sleep nutrition and 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 kovit's 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 right uh and and those with a stronger immune system seem to be doing better and it's like that with other diseases right right 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 um when i became a junior officer um and 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 um you know do as i say not as i do i didn't do things to get out of my comfort zone um and 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 right 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 it's doing your due diligence to find out what is what's really true and how does it play into who i am and what i'm trying to do it's it's getting outside of your comfort zone it's it's finding the individuals who are where you want to be and 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 they're 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 um 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 uh and and you're going to take it well and i can come to tell you amazing news and you know you're not going to burn it down drink it and be an idiot right you know i mean you got to ride that balance and uh 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 and and it's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity nobody wants that leader that is a 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 um they're all about the result but they leave a path of destruction behind them they'll they'll crush you and their path to get things done and that in my opinion is weak emotional leadership also yeah as a leader we've got to think about the others the health of others yes and then uh well the last part of emotional leadership is uh 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 ninety percent 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 right other than maybe making you feel good to attack people who disagreed with and that's that's part of being a leader also right that people are going to disagree with you so what you know if you have conviction and who you are it's just going to happen i mean in this world yeah another navy seal that i had on uh chad wright said your tongue is like a rudder in a boat means like whatever you speak like it's going to start guiding you in that direction or you know influencing you in certain directions in your life so make sure you really use your words correctly and 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 know you're gonna attract negative people so you know 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 uh the outermost ring is our work relationships the innermost ring is a lot of times our work acquaintances friends uh the 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 um oftentimes it will break and and and jimmy hatch a friend of mine described it like this we all ride on trains in this life i wrote on the seal train um you rode on football 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 a specific stop 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 successful people that have been super successful but got to the end of their career or even the end of their lives and said why didn't i put more time into my family that's true so uh social leadership is making sure that we are we are investing in those relationships to be ready that 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 right so that balance enables us to 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 doesn't mean it's gonna 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 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 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 um you will get to the other side and and and 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 uh 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 uh 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 mash more to help us reach at the top of our field 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 i it comes in my opinion it comes back to four key things which i call the point man principles point man principles last year i wrote uh uh a third a planner called the point man planner and um and it came about because i got really sick and while i was really sick trying to they were trying to figure out what was wrong without a 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 shields live their life in this way and there's four principles and i think this is how anybody out there can be effective and bring their game to the highest level number one uh 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 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 a gym this year you know we just throw these things out there and and understanding because whether you know what your values are not know what your values are or not they are driving you and they're driving your decision making right um so if one of your values maybe is uh fame or or recognition that's okay you should be aware of it doesn't mean it's a negative thing unless you know you're stabbing somebody else in the back to get it but yes knowing that is important because now you can build your mission in this life upon it um 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 you know 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 uh-huh you know so a clearly to find destination in the military we use something called the universal transfer transverse mercator system it's a grid system that covers the entire earth and it breaks it down into the exact point exactly a one meter square almost like really table yep that's crazy in the whole world well all the way the the north and south poles become an issue yeah sure but yeah all the way uh almost to the north and south poles yes where most of people live yes exactly exactly so uh so when we identify a target it's broken down usually all the way to that 10 digit grid meaning a 1 by 1 meter square 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 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 want to be a seal as a kid i knew that was my destination that was a very clearly defined destination and the 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 sealed 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 sales 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 right all these things were waypoints on the course so if people can break their goals down in this manner and i break them down in the pointman planner quarterly and then every day we make sure i 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 uh 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 of 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 ambush and they're like oh my god i never saw that 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 acts as quickly as possible overcome mindset yeah so you can't you can't prevent every ambush most uh we i estimate that most people in this life will go through a 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 you know or let me rephrase that you will always carry the pain of that ambush you will always look back and and you will think uh that was painful like that 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 end 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 and i teach something called the react methodology so it's a it's a system to use when these ambushes come what's that system so react is an acronym for when an ambush comes uh 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 and i want to make sure that people understand [Music] if you lose a child timeline is relative i don't expect you to you know yes it's going to take time to get off the action losing a job 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 um 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 [Music] um i also talk about it's like tools in our toolbox you know so what can i either buy borrow use that i already have um if it's a you know business crisis it may be an accountant or an attorney or it maybe advisors or a board that you know or maybe whoever that's helping you to get out of this crisis maybe you know outsourcing someone that has specialties that helps 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 or a priest or uh you know whatever it is um having those things though makes you suddenly say okay this is crisis but i can deal with it sure um number number three is assess possible options and outcomes and what usually tends to happen when we go the 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 um this tendency if you will to uh to suddenly rush like oh my god this sucks i want to get off the x and i have these tools so let me let me use these to get out of here as quickly as possible right okay and uh 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 or 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 uh 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 yeah it's a business ambush you're a team your team believe it or not even your clients can get pulled off with you so it's 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 there but it's important to communicate for 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 is 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's never going to come right the time to act is now you know 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 uh instead of just sitting there but what about our world that it 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 yeah so this becomes the rule of three ps that i teach yes 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 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 uh we were talking about bill mcraven before we started in his book make your 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 you have you know 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 ps this creates balance also do one thing physical you don't not everybody has to be a crossfit athlete or the cover 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 to help you even if that's going outside and walking for like 20 minutes yep so one thing physical one thing personal because as 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 waypoint and we deal with it on a weekend or we just don't deal with it so do one thing personal do you know have have dinner with your family you know take your wife out or 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 up all over your house that you're afraid to open the door every time you walk by yes yes yeah and then and then one thing professional 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 right 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 um 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 cover model of muscle and fitness yes and be you know bill gates all in uh all in a day yes i love this man i love the uh 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 to implement these strategies in your life um yeah go ahead i was just and louis so and that's really important thing because 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 got to put a little bit of the work you got to show consistently man yeah consider everyone 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 there's no real like 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 uh you got an amazing book man it's called overcome crush adversity with the leadership techniques of america's toughest warriors uh make sure you guys check out the book you got my guy ed milette who's been on the show john paul de jourio 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 this and very powerful very powerful message book and strategies in here so make sure you guys get the book get it to some friends you also got the pointman planner which i think is powerful which kind of gives people a daily framework on how to do this right that's right so you can get the point man planner get this book overcome over at jasonredman.com it's also on amazon and bookstores like that uh you're on social media what are you using more twitter facebook or instagram probably uh 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 your and especially your week off right absolutely yeah so that's on my youtube channels on youtube as well awesome so jason redman um is it ww is that right or jason redmond ww on social media and jasonredman.com for your website we can get all the information about this stuff uh 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 of your work your books your messages like 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 called three truths okay 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 and true 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 uh and then lead you 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 our my great leaders hey jay uh people will follow if you give them a reason to oh yeah you got to 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 uh from just minor injuries myself trying to come a sub back 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 for 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 um 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 uh is greatness um and it doesn't have anything to do with money in my opinion um i think it is the positive impact of the people around you um and and so the the final thing i talk about in in the appointment planner that i wrote about is something that i call your your life's mission objective yeah uh also your legacy yeah and and mine is um that i hope that everybody i come in contact with uh will walk away and say that guy made me better in some way in some small way you know maybe and that's my goal i mean i'm living a second chance at life yeah um so many of my friends didn't get that chance and 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 uh 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 when most people quit i just started wow and when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around that's what made me powerful in my body followed and three months later my stress fractures were healed by running

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 170,692

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: Wyz6fPPEUq8

Length: 94min 28sec (5668 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021