Navy Seal's 3 Rules for Leadership, Overcoming Near Death Experiences & Breaking The Victim Mentality
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Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is retired U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Redman. He's a sought-after speaker, leadership coach, and the best-selling author of the books The Trident, The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader, and Overcome, Crush Adversity with the Leadership Techniques of America's Toughest Warriors. And he's a

And he's written a new book called The Point Man Planner, which allows you to set quarterly goals based off special operations principles. In this episode, we discuss Jason's heroic story of becoming severely wounded, shot in the face, and nearly killed in Iraq.

and how he mentally prepared to overcome the challenge of his life changing forever. How to not fall into a victim mentality when life gets really tough. The three rules of leadership everyone should be following right now. The biggest lessons he learned as a Navy SEAL and so much more. I was so inspired by this. I really hope you get a lot of value out of his story, his lessons, his principles. He's got so many great frameworks that he learned as a Navy SEAL that he has applied to life.

to marriage, to business, to career, to being a parent, all these different strategies. So if you're inspired by this, make sure to share this with someone that you think needs to hear it. Send it to someone that you think wants some more inspiration, some strategies, some skills, some tools to improve the quality of their life. And I love this fan of the week is from Mal.

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Welcome back everyone in the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest, Jason Redman is in the house. My man. Yeah, what's up? Good to see you. Yeah, great for having me. It's been fun chatting with you before we got started here. You have an incredible story of a lot of different things you've overcome. You've made a bunch of mistakes. You redeemed yourself from some of these mistakes. You went through a lot of personal injury and 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 life with this injury and this accident that happened and how you decided to not be a victim after it happened?

I think and I love that you talk about that because I talk a lot about America is becoming a victim mindset nation. We are becoming a nation of individuals who are being convinced that

because of the color of your skin or your gender or your gender persuasion or where you came from or any of this that you're a victim and that you cannot help yourself that somebody else has to help you which I unequivocally don't believe in. I believe in self-leadership and the problem is we have tens of millions of individuals who are successful

incredibly successful that have broken those odds. So it's this lie and myth. And I talk often about the victim versus the victor mindset. So when you talk about that and being shot, I think we have to go further back because there was a period of time where I went through in my life where I was a victim. Really? For how long?

It lasted about seven, six months. Okay. And it culminated with... While you were a Navy SEAL? Absolutely. It culminated with a leadership failure. And we can get deeper into that. But all I will say is when I made that failure, instead of owning it in the moment, I saw myself as the victim. I saw myself as being thrown under the bus.

And it was unfair. And like, I was great. And, you know, how could they do this to me? And just it was a victim mindset. So that positive attitude came later as I grew and really became as I grew up, I should say, especially as a leader.

And I think leaders, and it's one of the things that I talk about now, the power of positivity and leadership is such a powerful thing. And it's something that is needed. I mean, we're at a deficit for leadership in this country. And we are inundated with negativity. You were just fed nothing but negative energy from social media, from the media. I mean, people around you. Peers, yeah, yeah, family. 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 by consistent, by leading yourself. So I teach three rules of leadership. Number one, 70% of leadership is how you lead yourself. And these were the rules that I kind of created for myself and what I wasn't doing in the past. What were you doing before? I was living the do as I say and not as I do. Okay. This is what you're supposed to do, but I'm not doing this. Exactly. And a lot of people, and this is a common problem everywhere with leadership. A lot of people confuse leadership

their ability to tell others what to do with leadership. And oftentimes that's not leadership, that's just management. Oftentimes it's bad management.

But 70% of leadership is how well you lead yourself, how well you build structure and discipline in your life, how you set goals within your own life and accomplish those goals, how you maintain positivity in the face of negativity in your own life. And the amazing thing about that, if you live your life that way, in the immortal words of one of the best leaders I ever had the honor to work with, people will follow you if you give them a reason to. That's 70% of self-leadership.

All of that coming full circle to your first question, it was a really long journey of several years of coming to understand that all these pieces came together to be effective leadership and to have that mindset of positivity. So when I got wounded, I was probably in the best position in my life to go through that because I had just finished this other super hard journey. Of regaining confidence.

of leading yourself, of gaining trust with the 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 the beginning of that to the injury? How long was that? - Two years. - Two years of trying to rebuild yourself internally and relationally with the people around you, right? - Absolutely. Well, I guess I should say,

18 months, maybe 20 months. And then kind of got back on an even field and felt like I had come back in those last four months of heavy combat operations in Iraq when I got severely injured at the end of that deployment.

What's step number two? You 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 the corporate sector or whether it's in law enforcement or fire or wherever it is. And people will come up to me and they'll say, hey, man, I'm having some problems with my team.

Can you give me some advice? And I always, I say, yeah, no problem, man. How well do you lead yourself? And you know there's an issue if they go, no, that's not what I'm talking about. Yeah, I'm talking about my team. And I'm like, comes back to us. 70% of leadership, always go back to yourself first. How are you doing those things? Structure, discipline, goal setting, positivity. Number two is how do you lead others?

And oftentimes people, oftentimes, like we were talking about, a lot of people confuse our ability to tell people what to do as leadership. And that's not really leadership. That's just managing people. And if you're just telling them what to do and expecting them to jump, if you have the, you know, I say you jump and you say how high mindset, you're not a leader, you're a dictator.

Good leadership of leading others is motivating and inspiring and providing the resources and the training and the guidance to be successful. And then also holding people accountable within your team if they're not. I mean, giving people right and left limits, but also trusting them, pushing the leadership down to them and letting them have those successes because they're part of your team. And all of us are working towards a common goal because at the end of the day, that's what leadership is.

So that's number two. And number three is leading always. You cannot pick and choose. And this was the big mistake that I made as a young officer that almost ended my career, is I was picking and choosing when I wanted to lead. And this can be both in a work-slash-recreational setting. That's how I was really damaging myself. But oftentimes I also see it in a work-slash-major adversity setting. And that's where people start to break down

What do you mean by major adversity? There's a major crisis or chaos that has happened in your work environment. You know, if it's a sports analogy, your team is getting their ass kicked. 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, in the face of that, has to step up and lead. That's where we lead always.

And it is in those hard moments. It's when nothing is going right, everybody's miserable, that you have to step up and lead. And that's what's critical. And that's, you know, I talk about that, you know, in my case, I had that epiphany moment in that hospital bed. And I realized... So you got injured. Tell us what happened, the story of your, you getting shot up. Yeah, so... What happened and... So we were at the end of our deployment in Iraq in 2007. And...

You've been a Navy SEAL for how long now? I've been 15 years. 15 years. 15 years, but two years as an officer. So I had screwed up, came back, actually a little more than that, maybe three and a half years as an officer at that point. But I had screwed up, came back.

Super successful, very combat heavy deployment in Iraq in the summer of 2007. And a lot of individuals who fought in Iraq know that '06-'07, both in Baghdad and in the Anbar Province, Fallujah, Ramadi, some of our heaviest fighting was happening during that time. We got there and it was almost every night we were going out conducting missions.

multiple firefights. We lost several guys on that deployment. Quite a few guys got wounded. So a very intense deployment. We took a lot of enemy off the battlefield and we captured a lot of mid-level and high-level insurgent and al-Qaeda leaders. So really, as a SEAL, and even to this day, my wife doesn't quite understand when I tell her that was the greatest deployment I was ever on. Even though I ended up getting severely injured and almost killed, it still was everything that I ever

- Wow. - Set out to do as a SEAL. And we were coming up on the end of the deployment. We were literally one week from going home. I had redeemed myself. I was getting ready to step up in the next level of leadership. I was getting ready to screen for our next tier of SEAL team and gotten everything back on track. And we had been hunting the number one leader for Al-Qaeda in the 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 IED cells, ran sniper cells. Just a really violent guy. And we'd been hunting him to no avail and got word on September 12th that he was going to be in a specific time and location and a place.

coincidentally called karma iraq so a place that we had been into many times and a very uh enemy-centric location very al-qaeda heavy every time we went in there we got into a gunfight so

We knew that the stakes were high. We also had been told that this Al-Qaeda leader had a very, rolled with a very heavy, well-trained security detail, that every one of his guys wore suicide vests and they had to train if we got too close to him, that as part of their defense, they would clack themselves off to prevent us from getting to him. That's crazy. Yes. And, you know, high level of stress when you're going in on a mission. Oh my gosh. And, you know, where part of your training or part of your, you know, training.

contingencies or talking through actions on target or don't allow yourself to get closer than 15 yards to the enemy if they're closing on you headshots. So needless to say, pretty high stress at night as we launched on this mission. And there's, you know, interesting details as part of it. I remember getting ready for that mission and it happened pretty quickly. I'll admit that it actually had happened so fast I didn't think it was going to happen.

I just, you know, we've done a lot. We had done a lot of missions at this point and I just needed some, there were some things related to 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. You 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're preparing for everything? We were, we were preparing, but I went to the gym. Like, you know, the mission wasn't any different than a lot of the other missions we had done. But I didn't think it was going to happen. So guys were planning, but we weren't in full planning prep mode.

It was just kind of like, this could happen tonight. Is our gear ready? Is it all set up? Yeah. So I went to the gym. I was working out. And yeah, one of our guys came in and said, hey man, this mission is a go. We're launching at like 1 a.m. I was like, okay, roger that. So I went and I was gearing up to get ready. You know, we did our planning. And then the last thing you do is get your own personal gear. And one of the things I never wore...

when we did ground or more fast-based operations. If we were mobility and vehicles, I would wear my side plates for extra protection. But when I was on the ground, I wanted to be lighter and be able to move faster. So, you know, it's one of the things with special operations, you have a little bit of leeway in what gear you wear and, you know, personal preference. And when you're walking long distances or climbing over walls, or there's a good possibility you may be fighting or wrestling with somebody, I wanted to be lighter.

So that night getting ready for that mission, I remember jocking up and getting my gear on and like this little voice was like, "Wear your side plates." And I'm like, "No, yeah, I mean, no, I don't do that. Like, I want to be light." And it was like, "Wear your side plates." And we weren't going to be walking long distance on this night because the timing and the speed, we were landing what's called landing right on the X. We were landing right on the target.

So I was like, okay, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to 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,

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 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 we thought that 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 that that was going to be it. And move on.

So about that time my boss came up to me and said, "Hey man, we got a whole bunch of activity on another house about 150 yards away. We just watched five individuals flee out of there and run across the street into a field and they're hiding in the vegetation." And we had seen that before. You know, if we had watched stuff like that, the snipers watched them do that. The snipers were up on the rooftops kind of watching everything around the target.

So my boss said, "Hey, why don't you take your team? Let's walk these guys down. Let's find out who they are and what they know." I said, "Okay, roger that." So we came up from the south to the north in this field. And at this point, we had a aircraft up overhead that was giving us some surveillance, watching what was happening. And I remember asking them repeatedly, "Hey, do you see any weapons? What are these guys doing?" And, "No, we're not seeing anything."

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 stopped and then I chalked it up to fear.

And I just said, you know what, man, this is a high stress mission. You know, you know, the level of the enemy, you know, that's just fear. Just swallow it. Keep going. Let's keep going. According to we were doing everything according to our SOPs or standard operating. 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, we

They told us, the air asset up above said, "Hey, you're going to miss these guys the way you're walking. So you need to make a turn and kind of turn to about 45 degrees to the northeast to walk up on them." When we did that, I had two new guys and one of our explosive ordnance guys on that left flank, and somehow they did not hear that call.

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We stopped to link back up with them, but at this point they had moved further up and they were actually closer to the outer edge of the field. Guy on my right flank, he was closer to the outer edge of the field, so we said, "Okay, this is super dangerous. We have two separate forces. This gets... It's a really bad situation because if the enemy starts shooting, you now have two forces shooting at potentially what we call blue on blue. Two friendly forces shooting at each other with an unknown enemy in the middle.

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

Enemy fighter? Enemy fighter. What's that? And an enemy, you know, part of the security detail. Fighter, F-I-G-H-T-E-O. He stepped on a person. On a person. He stepped on one of them. Correct. So what we didn't know was that our leader was in that house and that those five individuals that came out were actually the last part of his security detail.

that we estimate to be about 12 to 15 individuals. The one you were trying to get was in that house. Correct. 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 immediately shot him.

At this point, and he was the last guy on the line. So at this point, I'm now out front with my medic. I'm sorry, with our interpreter and our other guys behind, and our medic was the last guy. But all of a sudden, the world erupted because when our medic shot that guy, it tripped the ambush, and the ambush went live. So our medic was initially shot. He was hit.

below the knee that severed both bones, dropped him and anchored him on that corner. One of our other guys ran forward to grab him and was stitched up the body, two rounds in the leg and one in the arm, but a big beast of a guy, a guy about your size, who grabbed our medic and started dragging him back

- And 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 John Deere tractor tire about 15 yards back from the field with nothing else behind it, like literally thousands of yards of empty desert. I was out front and started shooting and yelling

Because I also was thinking about our guys on the other side. Are we shooting at them? So I was really worried about a blue on blue. Thankfully, our senior guy in that group was smart and got those guys sucked down and was like, do not shoot.

So it became us and this, at that time, unknown enemy force. But they had two PKM machine guns, which is a large belt-fed machine gun that shoots big bullets. In the vegetation. Just like unloading. Yeah, because you couldn't see them. They were probably five yards back. All you could see was the muzzle flash. That's crazy. Yeah. How far away from you was it?

I mean, it's, I was bullets. I could literally, I've been shot at before, but never like that. I mean, literally I had bullets. I could feel the pressure of bullets going by me. You can, you can, a big bullet like that. It's actually, you know, that's what, when a, when a bullet cracks, it's actually a sonic crack. It's the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier.

but it's pushing this air out of the way and you could feel it when it goes by you. It's like an angry bee, I guess, flying or something like that is how I've described it. Wow. So how far away from the gun were you? 45 feet. 45 feet, wow. And immediately I was stitched across the body armor and I took two rounds in the left elbow, but I only thought it was one. I didn't know it was two until later, but I thought my arm had been shot off. You thought it was gone.

Just because of the pain or you just felt you couldn't feel it or I couldn't feel it It was so my instant - 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 and

It was like an 800-pound gorilla hit me in the elbow with a bat, and then I was struck by a lightning bolt that traveled up my arm and slammed me in the back of the head, and then I couldn't feel my arm. Oh, my gosh. So I remember reaching over, and I guess it caught on my gear, but when I reached over, I couldn't feel it. I felt nothing, so I thought my arm had been shot. Oh, my gosh. But I'm taking all this gunfire, so I kept shooting and yelling at our guys, and at this point then...

Both guns turned on me and I took rounds off my helmet. I took rounds off my gun. I took my left night vision tube was shot off.

And I turned to move back to where the guys were towards that tractor tire. And that's when I caught a round from behind that hit me right in front of the ear. It traveled through my face, exited the right side of my nose, took off most of my nose. It blew out my right cheekbone. My cheekbone kicked it out to the right. Vaporized the orbital floor, broke all the bones above the eye, broke the head of my jaw and shattered my jaw to my chin.

It's like a moment. And it knocked me out. One bullet did that? One bullet. Holy cow. And the guy saw me go down and thought I was dead. Thought I'd been hit in the head. I mean, technically I had, but thankfully not in the brain. Yeah. But I was unconscious. We don't know how long, five to ten minutes. And so at this point, this gunfight is happening directly over me.

The guys are shooting, the enemy'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 definitely out of it.

I know you've had your bell rung really good. - Yeah. - And it takes-- - I didn't get shot in the head, but yeah, I mean, I've been feeling-- - But yeah, I mean, you know, the impact, yeah. - Yeah, and 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 like, okay, what's going on, okay. And the biggest thing,

Was like I'm really messed up like that's new your arm. I thought my arms gone. I think my head is blown up Yeah, yeah, so I would you can probably feel like the pace up there And then I actually remember reaching up to my and feeling the whole oh, yeah, and and and was like you felt the whole you're like Oh, man, I've been shot in the face. You're like I can feel the bone in there and the teeth sticking out and oh so

So, and then I was literally watching the tracer go over me. 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 laser 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 you know if you ever wake up and you hear gun firing see laser beams don't sit up i did yeah you're welcome

But, and then my second thought was, man, I am like really messed up. Like I don't have a lot of time. I was trying to get my, I was still thinking that my arm had been shot off. So I was like, I got to get a tourniquet on my arm because we train that way. Like you have to save yourself first. Yes. Kind of like self-leadership. Absolutely. You know, but I couldn't, I couldn't get my tourniquet.

And I knew I was losing a lot of blood. So I remember there was kind of a lull in fire and I yelled out to my team leader, how long to the metabolic? And he was like, red? And I think at that point they realized I was still alive. So, and he yelled out five minutes. Wow. Which was a lie. So you're like, I could die in five minutes, yeah. Yeah, but I, and I was. And because I was losing a lot of blood and I was just-

focusing on on I so interestingly enough in the beginning I was kind of thinking about like the gunfight and like what we were doing and where assets were and like I was still in I don't know work mode if you will like okay how are we addressing the gunfight where's the medevac you know we need to call in a fire mission all this but I was out of the fight I mean my team leader took over I owe my life to him and and

He did an amazing job. He came forward and grabbed me at some point and dragged me back. But at some point, my thoughts shifted to I'm dying. I'm going to save my life. Well, I actually thought that I was I realized that I was probably not going to make it was my I came to that decision 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 had led us into this situation.

So that made me angry. It made me angry that the enemy would get the satisfaction in knowing that they had killed a SEAL. That made me angry. And then my thoughts drifted to my family. So it's September 13th at this point, and we were real big into Halloween, my wife and the kids. And at that point, my son was eight, my older daughter was five, and the youngest was two.

And we had already talked, man, I was supposed to be home, you know, in a week, two weeks. Well, our first wave of guys were going home in a week. I was in the second wave. So two weeks I should have been home. And we were talking about Halloween and everything. I remember thinking like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be there for Halloween this year. And I'm not going to be there for Christmas. I'm not going to raise my son. And then I thought about, I'm not going to walk my daughters down the aisle. And that's like hard. And at that point I,

I called out to God and I said, I need help. Like I need strength to come home like that. So like miracle moment, but I suddenly had strength and, and I don't know how long from that moment until the end of the gunfight. But over that period of time, guys continue to fight. My team leader got a tourniquet on me and we ended up calling in a

what we call fire missions, rounds from an aircraft, munitions basically. - To give you some time. - Yeah, to take the enemy out, which that fire mission was the closest fire mission ever brought in the Iraq war. We literally called rounds directly on our position, which the aircraft didn't want to do. They were like, "We will kill you guys."

and my team leader was like hey man there ain't gonna be anybody left so you know bring it wow so would he just try to not do it 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 oh my gosh uh as it took the enemy out that's crazy

And then all I focused on was stay awake and stay alive. Stay awake and stay alive. Stay awake to sleep. And that's what I, and I wanted to. I've never felt a fatigue like that. So tired, right?

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, yeah, that when they loaded us, so the three of us got loaded onto the helicopter. And I guess I should back up. So when the helicopter came in, it landed about 75 yards away. And my team leader tried to drag me.

And I was like, stop that like seriously hurts. - Oh my gosh, it's dragging you from like your neck collar or something. And like, oh my, your face hanging off. - Oh, and 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 and before my team leader came and got me. For whatever reason, I took my helmet off. I don't know why.

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. So my helmet, we have a drawing, this No Bad Days skull drawing that we use that people love that it shows all the damage of. A friend of mine that's an artist drew it after the –

Right after I was brought to the hospital they did a cat scan and created a 3d model of my skull to figure out how to put me back together and it literally looks like somebody took an axe and hit me in the face the damage starts up here goes down here and there's just this giant hole, you know, the bone is kicked out of it so 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 thankfully you took your helmet off thankfully i took it off for whatever reason i don't know why so the helmet got shot you said it did while i was laying on the ground when you took it off i also took a round in the right side when you were laying down yes on the right side plate so i'd go through the plate or no so it hit it was still painful oh i knew it i knew i had to hit like when i got the uh my body armor back i was like um i was like i immediately pulled it out and sure enough you can see where the round

impacted the plate and ricocheted off. But that would have probably killed me. - Ended you, yeah. - Because it would have gone through and taken out my kidney, probably would have blown through my spine. So I don't know what-- - The plates, wow. So how many did it actually, how many rounds hit you in the body? - So three in the body, eight in the body armor that we're wearing. - Wow, so body armor is a lifesaver. - Yeah, absolutely.

And when they loaded us on the helicopter, several years later, I got to meet the crew that medevaced us. Oh, my gosh. And they thought we didn't make it. Like, when they dropped us off, they... These guys are dead. Yep. And they told me...

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

Because there were three of us instead of two and we were all bleeding so bad. They said that it was creating

This mist of blood. Oh, my gosh. So when they landed and got us out, 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 dial. 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 was in charge during that time and who would have flown that mission. And pretty cool, I got to meet them and thank them. - That's amazing, man. - Yeah. - Wow. So were you unconscious during this time? Did you wake up? Were you in and out? - So I was adamant at the hospital that I never lost consciousness. They were like, the doctors were like, "You're kidding me." And I was like, "Nope, never lost consciousness." And then my guys got home and like, "Dude, you were in and out of consciousness."

from the moment you were shot. So, but what's interesting, like your brain doesn't realize that you've passed out. You know, you just come to and there are gaps. And there's some things to this day I don't remember. There was a point in the gunfight that they had pulled me back to the tire. And at one point they're shooting and they're dealing with the enemy. And one of our guys, our medic was like, I'm going to throw a grenade.

And I guess I sat up and I had worked in a jungle warfare team when I was younger. Yes. There's a and you never throw grenades into vegetation because there's a high chance they will hit a branch and bounce back at you. So super dangerous. Don't do it. And I guess whatever reason, those lessons were in my brain because I immediately sat up and was like, don't you throw that grenade. You're going to 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. 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?

I mean, physical devastation, emotional trauma, loss, you know, you're unable to be fit for service now. How did you, when you kind of come through in the hospital, I guess, what happens next? So in the beginning, so in the very beginning, I'll tell you, it was elation. Like I was so happy to be alive. I'm here, I'm alive. Yes. I'm going to see my family. Exactly. And I was just so thankful to be alive.

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

I said, has my wife been notified? And do I still look pretty? 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 just trying to be funny.

And so that was kind of the first thought. And then it was just elation. And I was on super heavy drugs, which I've never done drugs. Sure. So but as that timeline progressed, by the time 96 hours later, from the time I was wounded, I was in Bethesda, which is a testament to our medevac system. Like in four days, I went from.

Baghdad to Balad where they treat head injuries and they stabilized 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 US? 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? No, no, they stitched me. I mean, yeah, they had to stop, you know,

all the bleeding and stabilize. - And then they do reconstructive surgery later, like, okay. - Yeah, so they've got to repair the damage and stabilize you and then all the reconstruction happens later. And that's where the elation start to wore off. - This is painful. - And several things happen. One, I remember laying in bed in Bethesda and the first thing,

like many of us, when something bad happens, replaying it in your mind. And like, if I had done this, if I had done that, if I had moved left, if I had moved right. And I was really kind of kicking myself. And then finally, I was just like, dude, stop. Like one, nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do about it. Like, and two, you did things according to how we've trained. Like, so put that out of your mind and you need to move forward. Uh,

But I remember the second point of really reality setting in was my sister was getting married and we were supposed to go to the Virgin Islands for the wedding in October. And I remember the nurse coming in and I said, hey, how long is it going to take to put me back together? Because one, I need to get back to my guys. Two, I got to go to my sister's wedding. And yeah, and she was like, she was just incredulous, like looking at me like,

like it's gonna take years to put you back together. - You're done. - And that was like such a shock to me and depressing. And I remember thinking to myself like, so my special operations career is over. I'm gonna be permanently disfigured and I'm gonna be forever disabled.

Because they were also talking to me about amputating my arm. Amputating it. Because I had no use of... Yeah, at this point, they knew I had taken two rounds and it effectively destroyed my elbow. The first round hit me in the base of the humerus and just shattered my humerus. And the second round hit me on the inside of the elbow, which shattered both heads of the ulnar radius. Oh, man. So, and I had no use of my left hand.

They were, you know, pretty extensive nerve damage. So the doctors were talking about amputating. And the only reason I still have an arm is the head of orthopedics at Bethesda at that time was a former SEAL.

And he said to me, I'm going to do everything I can to save you. Wow, man. I think if anybody else, they would have taken my life. Really? And it was like, I'm going to do whatever it takes. And he did. And that, I mean, amazing. And that journey was incredible. But I remember feeling depressed. Like, where do I go from here? But this is where this journey started.

of failure, redemption, really coming to understand what it is a leader finally, not finally, but kind of came to a intersection. And there were several things that happened. The one last thing that kind of made me come to this pinnacle or this intersection was about all that time I had somebody else come into the room and they were having a conversation with me and then I started to drift off. 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 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 in that hospital were wounded other wounded guys guys that have been shot up guys missing limbs you know individuals burn 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 I thought to myself, dude, like,

This sucks, but you've been through worse. You've been through buds. You've been through ranger school. You've been through the hardest journey you've ever been through, this leadership failure and fought back. And now you need to live everything that you've talked about. These guys look up to us, and I already knew it. I had guys that wanted to come into the room and meet me. And this was, I recognized, this is what leading all. You can lead from any position, even a hospital.

And all it is, is choosing positivity in the face of negativity. And it was in that moment. And that's what I tell everybody in this life. The greatest gift you have as a human is choice. You have a choice.

Nobody makes you a victim. Nobody holds a gun to your head and tells you, well, it's not fair and I can't do it because of X, Y, or Z. That's BS. There may be more adversity or obstacles in your path, but you control whether you get up and drive forward or not. And that is the power of choice. That is the power of positivity to drive forward despite whatever adversity stands in your path. And that was kind of the epiphany moment. And when my wife walked back in, I was like,

Never again. Nobody's allowed to come in my room with that mindset. And I refuse to have it. And I wrote out that sign and it said, attention to all who enter here. If you're coming in this room with sadness or sorrow, don't bother.

the wounds that i received i got in a job that i love doing it for people that i love defending the freedom of the country that i deeply love i will make a full recovery what is full that is the absolute utmost physically i have the ability to recover and then i'm 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 and we we signed it the the management that's cool 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...

never having any idea of the impact that it would have on others. 'Cause 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 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 gonna be back put back together at one point The nose I had 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, that's hard

But that sign kept me on track. This is who I am. This is what I stand for. You're the overcome guy. Like, let's go set that example. Lead always it, you know, this is how you, this is who, how you, this is how we do it. 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. Cause that sign has now gone on to motivate you.

Millions. Millions of people. I mean, it earned me an invitation to the White House to meet President Bush. It has been written about in other books. Secretary Robert Gates wrote about it in his book. First Lady Michelle Obama wrote about it not once, but twice in her book. Really? It moved her so much.

- Wow. - Wounded warriors to this day write me. I didn't keep it. President Bush signed it and we had it framed and it hangs in the wounded ward at Walter Reed to this day. - Really? - Yep. - That's cool. - So that's the power of choice. So anybody who'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. In this life, you can lay on the X 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 learn this earlier on and stay in that positive mindset?

I think part of the current victim mindset we have in a nation is we are not... I mean, if you go back to the beginning of America and probably life 200 years ago, life was hard. Yeah. Like, you know...

If you wanted to eat, if you wanted sustenance, you pretty much had to go out and either have a farm or you worked some hard physical labor to get these things done. And that made people a lot heartier and more resilient. And now in this day and age, we don't have that anymore. We're so blessed, especially here in America, in this country, to coming out of World War II forward to really...

And don't get me wrong, there are some poor areas of 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 its highest level, it doesn't compare to here. And I think, unfortunately, part of that byproduct is we have individuals that are not as resilient.

Sports is a good place sometimes to build resiliency when we don't have the physical labor aspect of what we had in the past. The military does it. There are some other places. But really, at the end of the day, it has to be pushed by the individual or maybe the family or the upbringing. And if that doesn't happen, I think it leads it to, A,

Not being as resilient, which leads it to another problem where you have political leaders and people of influence that'll say, well, the reason you can't make it is because you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. 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 I'm this race or creed or religion or whatever, sexual orientation. But it's just not true.

There's a level of resiliency that comes with choosing to drive forward. And if it was true,

then nobody would be able to get ahead that comes from that persuasion. And that's not true. There are tens of millions of incredibly successful, amazing people who are black and white and female and Muslim and 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 then? 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, any and that 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 that X is a specific point that usually we pick ahead of time that will channelize them into an area that it makes it very difficult for them to get out of. And then we rain as much firepower and explosives to try and A, destroy their will to fight and B, destroy them or equipment or whatever else.

And what I had learned also was if 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. 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. And this was supposed to be my most successful year. You know, I was going to play in the NFL. This was my launch point. And then we get bitter about that.

And then the last one is we look for someone or something to blame. You know, it was their fault. They did this or they didn't do this. And that...

that is the victim mindset that pins us to the X. And 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 it is a virus, it is a cancer when it occurs because usually when a team is at a point in time where people are starting to turn inward and feel sorry and eat themselves, you're at a tipping point. And this is when a great leader can step up and step out of his own misery to try and lead others forward to push you in the right direction or you will fall in the other direction.

And that's, I wanted to show my kids and others that I wasn't 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 to make that happen? 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. 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

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 practice.

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 worse. To make it even worse.

And then train from that. And then train from that. And it was grueling and painful. And sometimes we got guys killed in training. 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. 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 you 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 how

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 that whatever point, you know, you're shooting from 50, 100 yards or more. Yeah. So all of that comes together to create small shots.

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 on the sports team when I 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

who did well enough to become an officer or a leader and then totally failed because of ego and arrogance got a second chance and then redeemed himself and then got wounded and kind of realized there was another level of leadership and when people would read that people would say how'd you do that and i couldn't definitively answer that question so overcome became i mean it took overcome came out in

I think five years after I wrote the Trident because it took that long to kind of think about what enabled that. And a lot of that had to do with when I got out of the military, I missed that structure and discipline. I missed, you know, a lot of people don't understand that the military is sometimes a really simple existence, especially when you're deployed. Like when you're in the combat zone, it's a very simple existence. You...

You eat, you 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 got to 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 nonprofit? 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 a Wooten. Really? 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 five, I teach something called the Pentagon and peak performance. So five key areas that a leader should be balanced in.

The foundational level is physical leadership. And 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 going 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 is 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 experience.

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 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 information.

they don't challenge that belief system of what they're being fed. So it only furthers their belief in 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, what's really true and how does it play into who I am and what I'm trying to do. It's getting outside of your comfort zone. It's finding the individuals who

are where you want to be and identifying them as mentors so you can be better so that you're not surrounding yourself with individuals who are pulling you away from where you want to go. 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 going to take it well. And I can come in and tell you amazing news and you're not going to burn it down drinking and be an idiot. You got to 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 in their path to get things done. And that, in my opinion, is weak emotional leadership also. As a leader, we've got to think about the others. The health of others, yes. And then 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 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 things fly it does nothing to further that situation in a positive way no yeah 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 in 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 it's 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 going to 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 was three. Number four? Social leadership. Social leadership. How do we build the rings of influence around us? So, and I break that down into four rings of influence. The outermost ring is our work relationships. The innermost ring is a lot of times our work acquaintances slash friends. The third ring is our close friends. And then that bullseye is our immediate family.

And in Western culture, there's a tendency to put a whole lot of time and effort into the two outermost rings, our work relationships and our work friends and acquaintances. And we have a tendency to take for granted our close friends and our family. Yes. And we think they'll always be there for us.

But when a major crisis comes, when you're on the X, that may or may not be true because that's when everything is being pressure tested. And if you haven't put the time and effort into your immediate family, then oftentimes it will break. And Jimmy Hatch, a friend of mine, described it like this. We all ride on trains in this life. I rode on the SEAL train. You rode on the football train. Yeah.

And we never know. All of us hope that someday we'll get to wherever we want to get off. For some of us, it's the end of the tracks. For others, there's 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 train and 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 social leadership is making sure that we are investing in those relationships to be ready. The key question I ask everybody is, will you be ready? For what?

It doesn't matter. Will you be ready for that moment when it comes? Because we don't know what that moment is. So that balance enables us 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. It doesn't mean it's going to hurt less, but at least I'll be ready for it to drive forward. But it takes those things. That's why I was so successful in

when I got wounded. I was balanced in those areas. The last one is spiritual leadership. And for me, faith played a part in 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 to get off that X. So I have a motto, no bad days. - Yeah. - You know, 'cause I'm still here. - That's right, man, no bad days. What do you think is the skills that we should learn to master more to help us reach at the top of our field, our industry, or to set us up to be prepared when that ambush comes? So we stay ready, we don't have to get ready.

So, in my opinion, it comes back to four key things, which I call the point man principles. Point man principles. Last year, I wrote a planner called the point man planner. And it came about because I got really sick.

While I was really sick trying to fit they were trying to figure out what was wrong with Matt 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 is

like it became really clear to me that a really good point, man, a lot of SEALs live their life in this way. And there's four principles. And I think this is how anybody out there can be effective and bring their game to the highest level. Number one, relentless belief in your mission. And there's a lot of people who don't know what their mission is. They've never written it down. They've never defined it. And if you write down your mission, it's got to be built on the foundation of your values. And there's a lot of people that don't

know what their values are. They'll tell you cliche things. They'll say, you know, faith, family, finance, fitness. But when you hear those things, you're like, dude, you haven't been in church in two years. You haven't been in a gym. I haven't seen you in a gym this year. You know, we just throw these things out there 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. So if one of your values maybe is

fame or recognition, that's okay. You should be aware of it. It doesn't mean it's a negative thing unless you're stabbing somebody else in the back to get it. But knowing that is important because now you can build your mission in this life upon it. Because my mission now is

Now that I'm out of the SEAL teams, it's about setting that example as a leader. I want people to regard me as a point man for my own life, someone that they want to learn from, someone that is a leader, that sets the example, that communicates well. So that has become my new mission. Number two is a clearly defined destination and a set course. So in the military, we always knew exactly where we were going.

And in life, people often don't. In life, people say, well, I want to be rich or I want to be in better shape. Well, those are not clearly defined things. It's kind of like saying I want to go west if I needed to go someplace, you know?

So a clearly defined destination. In the military, we use something called the Universal Transverse Mercator System. It's a grid system that covers the entire Earth and it breaks it down into a-- - Wow, it's the exact point. - Exactly, a one meter square, almost the size of this table. - Wow, really? - Yep. - That's crazy, and the whole world. - Well, all the way, the North and South Poles become an issue. - Yeah, sure. - But yeah, all the way, almost to the North and South Poles. - Yes, where most of the people live, yes. - Exactly, exactly.

So when we identify a target, it's broken down usually all the way to that 10-digit grid, meaning a one-by-one-meter square. Wow, that's crazy. So a very clearly defined destination, and that enables us to not have any deviation, you know, and we're not going west. We know exactly where we're going. And then the second part of it is a clearly defined course, and that course is a bearing on how we get there or how we follow our compass to get there. Most people...

may have one but they don't have the other and you can't get to where you're going without having both they may have the destination but not know the how to get there that's right because the course becomes the how-to it becomes our waypoints like I give the example of when I wanted to be a SEAL as a kid I knew that was my destination that was a very clearly defined destination

And the course was all the things that I had to do. So I had to enlist in the Navy. I had to get accepted. I had to get a SEAL contract. I had to physically pass the SEAL screening test. I had to academically pass the ASVAB score with a high enough score to get picked up for SEALs. I had to get a SEAL rating. I had to...

graduate from my A school. I had to get the SEAL training. I had to make it through SEAL training. I had to make it through Hell Week. All these things were waypoints on the course. So if people can break their goals down in this manner, and I break them down in the Point Man Planner quarterly, and then every day we make sure I do something called the rule of three Ps, one physical, one personal, one professional. Every day we're moving the needle just a little bit

towards those goals, that's how we stay on course. Number four, or I'm sorry, number three of the point man principles is risk assessment and situational awareness. So many people walk through life totally blind. When we talk about, will you be ready? They're not ready for the ambushes that are coming. And oftentimes they never see them coming, even though the signs were there.

So one, are we regularly doing risk assessments of where we are in our life? Are we still balanced? Are we still...

taking care of ourselves, you know, both in the Pentagon and peak performance. Are we making sure that our destination is front site focus, that we're on course, that we're hitting the waypoints we should? So we're consistently doing a risk assessment. We're also looking for the indicators that an ambush is on the horizon. Yes. And so many people don't. So then they walk into these ambushes and they're like, oh my God, I never saw that coming.

Okay, and number four, so it's risk assessment and situational awareness, right? Yep. And the fourth one? Is an overcome mindset to get off the X as quickly as possible. Overcome mindset. Yeah. So you can't prevent every ambush. Most...

I estimate that most people in this life will go through five, at a minimum, five major life ambushes. And I define a major life ambush as anything that will forever leave physical, mental, emotional, or deep financial scars.

And you'll never fully recover from it. Or let me rephrase that. You will always carry the pain of that ambush. You will always look back and you will think, God, that was painful. It hurts when we think about it. And I tell people that on the lower end of the scale, it can be the ending of a relationship. It can be the ending of a marriage.

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

readiness and knowing that unfortunately those things could happen. And I teach something called the REACT methodology. So it's a system to use when these ambushes come. What's that system? So REACT is an acronym for when an ambush comes, the very first thing we have to do is recognize that we are in a crisis.

And it goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning. When you're on the X, there's a natural tendency to procrastinate and deny and look at the past or the future or blame. It's hard to recognize, yeah. It's usually the hardest, and depending on the level of ambush. And I want to make sure that people understand that.

If you lose a child, timeline is relative. I don't expect you to, you know, it's going to take time to get off the X from losing a child. But also recognizing that you're already thinking, I can't lay here forever. Like I have to. At some point get up, yeah. Exactly. So number one, recognizing you're in a crisis or recognizing the reality is what I say. Number two is evaluate your assets.

So when we are hit by a life ambush, by any kind of crisis or catastrophic event, it's natural to feel totally overwhelmed in the moment because your world has just come to a grinding halt for whatever it is. It's like you suddenly stepped into a raging storm. You're in the darkness. You're trying to figure out what's happening in this chaos with the wind howling and lightning and thunder and people beating on you. And it's overwhelming.

And we tend to think, you know, there's no hope. There's nothing I can do. It's all outside of my control. But we have to, in that moment, figure out how we control what we can. And one of the first things we can do is evaluate what assets do I have to bring to bear to this project? I was talking about it's like tools in our toolbox. You know, so what can I either buy, borrow, use that I already have? If it's a...

you know, business crisis, it may be an accountant or an attorney or 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 you deal with whatever problem you're in. If it's a personal crisis, maybe it's a relationship crisis. So it can be a marriage counselor, a priest or whatever it is. Having those things though, makes you suddenly say, okay, this is crisis, but I can deal with it. Number three is assess possible options and outcomes.

And what usually tends to happen when we go, the slowest part is A, recognizing, B, starting to gather, hey, I have tools or what's in my inventory to deal with this. And then there tends to be this tendency, if you will, to suddenly rush. Like, oh my God, this sucks. I want to get off the X and I have these tools, so let me...

Let me use these to get out of here as quickly as possible. - Right, okay. - And I tell people, you gotta slow down. You gotta take a tactical pause. In the military we called it, let the battlefield develop. - And look at all the outcomes. - Yeah, all the outcomes and also maybe there are things that are happening that you haven't seen yet. - Behind the scenes, yeah. - So getting your team together, whoever is helping you, whoever's part of this inventory, this is where we now assess

both the short-term and the long-term impact of the decisions that we're going to make. Okay. And the C? Choose and communicate. So you choose the direction you're going to go and you communicate it to the people around you. You're never on the X by yourself.

The ex 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 ex with you. It's a business ambush, your team, believe it or not, even your clients can get pulled on the ex with you. So it's important that we choose and then communicate because

Frequently as a leader, especially when we're in a crisis, sometimes we want to internalize and we don't want to, even though everybody around us can see you're in a storm, man, you're on the edge. But it's important to communicate for three different reasons. Number one, when we communicate, we verbalize what we're going to do. And there's a level and there's that lead yourself level of internal accountability. When we say we're going to do something now, it's like, yes, this is what I'm doing.

Number two, it tells others and they're like, oh my God, yes, we have a plan. This sucks, let's go. And that third component of that is hope. It gives people hope. It's like a positive direction. Yes, we have a plan. This is where we're going. And then the last one is take action. Execute on that plan. There are so many people who will go through this process and then they're waiting for the perfect moment. And the perfect moment's never going to come.

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 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 we were talking about Bill McRaven before we started, and 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 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,

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. It'll help you. Even if that's going outside and walking for like 20 minutes. So one thing physical, one thing personal because as...

Especially in Western culture, we typically define our jobs with who we are. So that becomes our primary focus. And usually the personal side of our lives gets put to the waypoint and we deal with it on a weekend or we just don't deal with it. So do one thing personal. Have dinner with your family. Take your wife out or spouse out or family.

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, yes. Yeah. And then one thing professional, and this isn't within the normal realm of day-to-day activities. It's what is something that's going to help you or your business in the long run that maybe you don't have the time to do every day. Maybe it's an online course to get another qualification. Maybe it's

i want to expand my product line into this new thing but i don't have time to do it well you know what if i take 10 minutes to just work on what this is going to look at like every day that's structure and progress right it's the i know you're familiar with this term the japanese call it the kaizen principle so small gains lead to yes yes yes so that's how people do it i mean we just start small everybody wants

We are a... Instant gratification, now results. Yeah. And everybody stops when they can't, you know, look like, when they can't be a millionaire, look like the cover model of muscle and fitness. Yes. And be, you know, Bill Gates all in, all in, you know. In a day. Yeah. Exactly.

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 uh learned the hard way many different times to to implement these strategies in your life um you got yeah go ahead i was just and 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. But you know the deal, you just gotta put a little bit of the work in. - You gotta show consistently, man. I feel like everyone always asks me like, "Lewis, how did you grow your show? "How did you do these things?" I go, "I've been showing up for eight and a half years "every week, I haven't missed a week. "Keep showing up, I keep trying to get a little bit better."

It's like there's no real 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. It's so true. You got an amazing book, man. It's called Overcome Crush Adversity with the Leadership Techniques of America's Toughest Warriors. Make sure you guys check out the book. You got my guy, Ed Milet, who's been on the show. John Paul DeGioia, who's been on the show. Steve Weatherford, who's my guy as well. So you've had a lot of my friends in here endorse this.

and 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 Point Man 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, you can get this book over at jasonredman.com. It's also on Amazon and bookstores like that. You're on social media. What are you using more, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram?

Probably Instagram and Facebook, but I try to put out something positive every day. My big thing, every Monday I put out Monday Muster. And I put that on all the socials and it's usually about a 10 to 12 minute, just positive message of starting your day and especially your week off, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So that's on my YouTube channels. On YouTube as well. Awesome. So Jason Redman, awesome.

is it www is that right or jason redmond www on social media and jasonredmond.com for your website we can get all 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

But for whatever reason, you've got to take all 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. No one has access to your information anymore. But you get to leave behind three lessons that you would share with the world. I call it three truths. 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. Or basically choose to be a victor not a victim. I would say get off the X. You know we're all going to hit these moments where we're stuck of negativity and then focus on leading yourself. That's I think the most critical thing. Everything else will fall into play. If you can do that effectively

I mean, yeah, I mean, when I screwed up, that leader told me and helped me get back on track. One of my great leaders, hey, Jay, people will follow you if you give them a reason to. Ooh, yeah, you 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 from just minor injuries myself trying to come a setback from those setbacks and to continue to show up and serve other wounded warriors, to serve people that are going through adversities, to keep showing up for your brothers and seals, to continue to write and just put this message out there is really inspiring. So I acknowledge you for

for showing us that you don't have to be the biggest, fastest, strongest to make it to an elite level. And you don't have to be the greatest to make a big impact on a lot of people. So I acknowledge you for how you show up, man. It's really inspiring. Thank you. My final question for you is what's your definition of greatness? I think it's the legacy you leave behind on who is the most important to you is greatness.

And it doesn't have anything to do with money, in my opinion. I think it is the positive impact of the people around you. And so the final thing I talk about in the appointment planner that I wrote about is something that I call your life's mission objective. Also, your legacy. And mine is that I hope that everybody I come in contact with

will walk away and say that guy made me better in some way, some small way, you know, maybe. And that's my goal. I mean, I'm living a second chance at life. Yeah. So many of my friends didn't get that chance. 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 that that would be my greatness. That would be my definition of greatness.

My man, Jason. Thanks, man. Appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you, man. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.