Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Jason Redman: You Need to Get Off The X - 096

Episode Date: April 27, 2019

True American hero, Retired Navy Seal, Purple Heart Recipient and author of “The Trident”, Jason Redman was able to weather an Iraqi ambush, fought his way out, and became even stronger. Ambushes can happen both on the battlefield and in everyday life, in fact, any given person will have 4-5 life ambushes through their lives. Catastrophic events that will leave them with physical, emotional, or mental scars. What is important is how they react. Watch or listen now to discover what it means to get off the X of ambush, so when those events do happen in life or in business, you will be ready to fight and come out successful!   “I was sitting on the X of ambush as an entrepreneur” “It’s mission over the man” “I felt like I was dying, I felt like I was alone” - Bedros Keuilian   Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:52 - How Jason’s heroics unfolded overseas in Iraq 10:00 - Against all odds, Jason was able to recollect and listen to his training - which helped him survive 18:02 - Jason knew he was going through hypovolemic shock, this is what was going through his mind 25:02 - What the ambush taught Jason about life - and how it strengthened him 39:05 - The trials and tribulations Jason went through during his recovery - and how that can translate to your business     “We walked right into a very well executed Iraqi ambush” “The information is only as good as how quickly you can act on it” “My guys saw me get hit.. And they thought I was dead” “You have to take care of yourself” “Action is what makes all the difference”   -Jason Redman   Follow us on Instagram: @bedroskeuilian / @jasonredmanww Buy Man Up and get Bedros’s High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/   Make sure to review us on iTunes: http://bit.ly/theempireshow

We trained so well that we know what to do in just about every situation. And so I started going through my mind, my own checklist, okay, you know, guys are back there, hopefully. I'm pinned down here. What's next? And I knew that the guys had to win the firefight before they could get to me. If they tried to rush forward under that fire, they could be shot. And now we had bigger problems. Welcome to the Empire Show. My name is Bedros Kulian, and this is an inside look. And today we've got a very special guest someone who is an American hero a warrior someone who I look up to and I've learned from he's retired Navy SEAL Jason Redmond author of the

book the Trident and recipient of the Purple Heart mr. Redmond welcome to the show Pedro's thanks for having me yes sir yes sir so we've got a mutual friend Ray Care another seal yeah and I and I love the banter that I see between the two of you I see true brotherhood and Man, when I read your book, when I read your book, it spoke to me. And of course, when you and I met in Miami a few months ago, your talk from the stage directly spoke to me because in 2011, 12, and part of 2013, I was sitting on the X of Ambush as an entrepreneur. And while you were, as a seal, headed towards the X to do your job, you found yourself on the X.

and so if you don't mind jumping in and telling us, how does your story unfold? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look back on my life and you look back on a lot of different things about the SEAL teams, we spend our entire lives learning how to take the fight to the enemy. And we do that in a bunch of different ways. And one of those ways is setting up ambushes.

So how can we create an environment where we try and pin the enemy into an area and just direct absolutely overwhelming. firepower to crush their will and take them out. And in September of 2007, my team and I were executing a high-level mission going after the number one al-Qaeda leader in the Anbar province of Iraq. And the rolls got flipped. We found ourselves walking into a very well-executed al-Qaeda ambush, and I found myself and my team on the X.

Holy cow. So they knew you were coming? They did because we took down. an initial target so we took down an initial building it was late at night and we had flown in on our helicopters we made entry on that building and we had missed them and that you know this just how the world works I mean both in business and in life and in the military operations the information is only as good as how quickly you can react to it and oftentimes it'll quickly change that's

exactly what happened the intelligence we had said this guy was going to be at a specific time and location something we call a time-sensitive of Target. We made that entry and they weren't there. We could tell somebody had been there recently. So what we didn't know is before we arrived, he and his security detail had left and moved to another house about 150 yards away. And in preparation for anyone that was going to come there, they had set up a pre-stage ambush line in a densely vegetated area across the street. So we had taken down our initial house, unbeknownst to us, that he was in this other house about a 150 yards away. And basically we secured the initial target and we were standing down. We're

kind of wrapping up. We found some munitions, explosives, IED making equipment. We were going to blow that stuff up and we were going to call it a night. It was about 3 a.m. at this point. And you guys typically operate in the middle of the darkness in the middle of the night? Absolutely. We own the night. So, I mean, with the technology we have and the way we operate and train, it gives us a tremendous advantage. Sure. So I was standing there. I was standing in I ran it down. I led the assault on the initial target with my team and our boss, the ground force commander, came up to me and said, hey, you know, snipers are watching.

We've got another house about 150 yards away. We're watching a lot of activity. We watched five guys come out of it. There was a curfew in Iraq at that time. So typically at night when you saw people moving around, they were not good people. And we knew, well, you heard us come in on our helicopters, you heard us, you know, explosively breached doors. you know you know we're here. So if you're moving,

especially when you're just 150 yards away. Absolutely. So if you're moving, you are most definitely not a good person. So he said, hey, we saw these guys run across street, lay down in some vegetation across the street. He said, why don't you take your team and let's go investigate? Led my team around and we literally what we didn't know is those five were the last part of his security detail that we estimate about 14, 15 individuals. They had set up pre-stage fighting positions, two large machine guns, and then a bunch of AK-47 shooters. And as we maneuvered around on them, by happenstance, we walked right into their kill zone. How many of you?

How many seals were there? So there were nine, but we got separated. We got separated in the dense vegetation, and this is how we ended up walking into their kill zone. We pushed out to regroup. So our three guys on the left that got separated, we pushed them to the western side. Myself and my other six members pushed to the eastern side. Literally as we were coming out in the northeastern corner at the edge of this vegetation, one of my guys stepped on an enemy fighter.

Holy crap. Let me just ask you a question. This is a live human enemy and your guy steps on him. What is his reaction? Because I would poop myself. Well, his reaction, the, the, so you have to understand that when we make, when we design an ambush, this kill zone is one location. And we design it to have overlapping fields of fire, you know, we shoot. So you are facing a specific direction.

In this case, the enemy was facing north. That's where they thought we were going to come from a walk to. We came up from behind them. Gotcha. They were very disciplined, which this shows you how experience it were, how much time they were. how much time they had had. They were very disciplined fighters because if they had gotten scared and turned around and engaged us from behind, now we would have had them from behind because we were coming up behind them. So when my guy stepped on him, this enemy fighter literally was

laying facing the other way. So he tried to roll over and my guy immediately shot him. So it took him out. But at that point when they heard the gunfire, it initiated the ambush. And we had moved around, he was the last guy, my guy was the last guy that shot that fighter, and we had moved around and were in the first part of their kill zone. And that's when they opened up. So two PKM machine guns, which is a large belt-fed Russian-made weapon, opened up on us. My medic was initially hit, one of our other guys, and I was stitched across the body, across the body armor. I took two in the left elbow that I thought took my arm off. I was yelling at our guys because we were separated.

I was really worried about a crossfire that we were going to be shooting across with our three other guys that were on the western side at each other. Yep. Sure. So we call that a blue-on-blue. So I was yelling at our guys to make sure they knew what they were shooting at. When I did that, I think the enemy heard me yelling. And yeah, both machine guns got turned on me at that point. So I was taking really heavy fire.

I took rounds off my helmet. I had my left night vision tube shot off. I was taking rounds off my gun. Of course, I thought my arm had been shot off at this point. So I turned to look, you know, one of the things when you're being shot at, you need cover. Cover is anything that is hard or solid enough to stop bullets. And I turned around and looked, and all I saw was nothing but thousands of yards of empty out of rocky desert. So I'm like, shit, we are in a bad situation.

Shot again, and I looked off to my left, and there was a large track. tire that I saw our guys had fallen back to, like one of these great big John Deere tractor tires. Yeah. So they were shooting. One of our guys ran forward to grab our medic who literally had almost had his leg shot off, started drafting him back. He got stitched up the left side, a beast, a real big, strong guy, and still managed to drag

himself and our medic back behind the tire. I continued to shoot and then I turned to move back. And it was that point that I caught around in the face. It caught me right in front of the ear, traveled through my face, exited underneath my eye and the right side of my nose, taken off most of my nose. It blew out, vaporized my orbital floor, blew out most of my right cheekbone, kicked out what was left of my cheekbone to the right. My eye dropped down into this newfound hole in my face. It shattered all the bones above my eye, broke my jaw, and then it knocked me out. And so my guys saw me get hit, and they thought I was dead.

Yeah. and was unconscious for, they estimate about five minutes. Holy smokes. And then came to, realize. And all this time there's a firefight still happening while you're unconscious? Literally it was happening directly over me. I was laying on the ground, and when I came to, I woke up, I was laying flat on my back, and if anybody out there has ever been hit, really hard, concussion level hit, you know,

there's a fog as you're trying to unwrap what happens. in those first few minutes and that's kind of what was going on I woke up and I was like okay you know what happened I know I'm messed up I know I'm really messed up and but I couldn't quite put two and two together and then the world started to kind of come back I started hearing gunfire and I'm like all right that's right I'm an America I'm in a firefight are you feeling any pain I was not which is really interesting I felt a lot of pain when I thought my arm had been shot off but when I was hit in the face I don't know if my body was just over

overwhelmed and just kind of the adrenaline rush to keep me alive, whatever it was. I wasn't feeling pain at that point. It came back later when we started to move for extract when they first moved me. But I was as the world was coming back, I started to notice an important thing. There were red laser beams traveling about eight inches above me. And machine guns fire every fifth round. It has a trace Most machine guns don't actually use a sighting system. They just use the fifth round has phosphorus in it. So when it shoots, it glows as it goes through the air. And we use these tracers to sight in our machine guns

because we're just trying to lay down fire to suppress or kill. Sure. And so those laser beams I was seeing traveling eight inches above me was machine gun tracer fire. So your training tells you what in that moment? My training told me don't sit up. So important safety tip. tip. If you ever wake up and hear gunfire and laser beams traveling over you, don't sit up. I love that part of your talk in Miami when you said that I, and you brought so much humor in that

moment to an otherwise like, holy fuck moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was just, it was, it was a little surreal, but, you know, I had been, you know, at this point in my career, I'd been in for 15 years. Obviously, been around a lot of gunfire on the sending end and the receiving end at this point in combat. So I at least had enough wherewithal to know, okay, you know, this is what's going on, don't sit up, you're pinned down, you're fucked up, and how do we get out of this situation? And, you know, we do enough training that we train so well that we know what to do in just about every situation. And so I started going through my mind, my own checklist, okay, you know, guys are back there, hopefully, I'm pinned down here, what's next?

And I knew that the guys had to win the firefight before they could get to me. If they tried to rush forward under that fire, they could be shot. And now we had bigger problems. So it's mission over the man at this point? It is. And we've learned our lessons. Really, you know, don't sacrifice yourself because now you're going to make the situation worse. So we already had myself severely wounded, two other severely wounded,

and three healthy guys over there shooting. So if one of them tried to run forward and, now he's shot, well, now we have bigger problems. Sure. So in some situations, and life's a little bit like this, we have to be patient in the midst of chaos. You know, we have a phrase, you have to let the battlefield develop to really kind of see what's going on and be able to decide where to go. And for me, I knew I had to lay there and wait. Was there any kind of panic setting in because I've had catastrophic stuff happened to me in business, and I can't even relate it to battle, let alone being shot up in battle. But was there any

kind of panic setting in like panic has set in me before when I was a newer entrepreneur when something goes wrong unplanned and you start freaking out thinking of the worst-case scenario were you panicking at all no why some panicking I you know I'll be honest I don't know my thought process went like this one I thought about the mission and I thought about okay guys are back there they're shooting I have faith in them that we're gonna win this fight That was kind of my first thought. My second thought was I was kicking myself.

I was a leader and I had led us into this situation. I had allowed us to get into this ambush. And there were indicators. My spidey sense had been tingling before I went in there. And that is a key thing that we can talk about later when I talk about most ambushes, most, probably 80% of life ambushes. There are indicators that we see. and we either willfully choose to ignore them or we don't notice them well enough

until after the fact. So there were some indicators that I had seen and my spidey senses were tingling, but we continued to push through because we had done that before. So it's always good to not lull yourself into, is this always the best way, even though we've done it before?

And I did, even though it was according to our tactics. So that was kind of my second thought I was kicking myself that I allowed us to get into this situation. situation. And then, you know, I had time. This firefight, we estimate, lasted 35 to 40 minutes, and I was hit in the first. That's a long time. It was. It was a long time. What does a typical firefight last when you guys were doing a, I don't know if there is a typical mission, but? Most, one is, and this was an incredibly intense firefight. So you can have a

firefight that's really far away. I mean, there are, I know guys that have been involved in long range firefights in Afghanistan that last all day. But they are not massively amounts of fire that's directed on one position. And ambush usually is very short. Usually two to three minutes of just massive firepower because you only have so many bullets. And when you're putting out automatic fire, you're burning through magazines or belts. So this firefight lasted a long time. I mean, guys were having, they were going through magazines.

I remember at one point hearing the enemy reload. I mean, there's a very distinct sound when you open up a machine gun. and slap rounds into it, close it, and then jack that bolt. It's a very mechanical sound, clunk, as that bolt drives home. And I remember hearing that and thinking, you know, this sucks. Yeah, you know, I'm pinned down. Yeah, exactly. And it actually was in that second volley of fire.

I took another round in my right side, all my right side. And this, you talk about a, you know, I don't know what people's faith, religion, whatever you want to believe. I typically did not wear my side. my side plates on missions. And the reason being is I wanted as much flexibility to be able to move and be as light as possible. We always wore our front plates and back plates. But we had the latitude, one of the great things about special operations, we had the latitude

to have a little bit of leeway on what we decide, how we want to be. So I would sacrifice a little bit of protection to be able to move faster, to be able to climb over walls, to be able to fight if I had to. And for whatever reason before this mission, when we were getting ready to go, there was a little voice that said, wear your side plates. And I wore them. And I took a round off my right side plate that probably would have killed me. It probably would have blown out my kidney or my back or whatever it is. So that second volley, I took that round and just still pinned down.

And really, I started dying. I mean, that's the reality of what happened. I was too weak to get my tourniquet on. I'd lost so much blood, I couldn't get my turnicet onto my arm. And we trained that way. We train, hey, self-aid. You have to take care of yourself first because if your buddies can't, you know, they've got to win the firefight, number one. You know?

And so you have to take care of yourself, and we train that way. So I was trying to get my tourniquet on my arm that I thought had been shot off, which literally it was actually pinned under my body. So when I reached over, I had no feeling, and that's why I couldn't feel. Sure. But to me, I'm thinking, geez, I'm losing so, and I was losing a lot of blood. So trying to get my turnicine on, couldn't get my turnicet on, continue to just bleed out. And there's a physiological process to dying, especially if you're losing blood. We call it hypovalemic shock.

Your body starts to get to the point that it can't maintain the pressures to operate normally. You know, so it starts shutting down. It starts going into emergency mode. So what it does is it constricts vessels to stop pushing blood to your extremities, and it tries to pull blood into your core, into your organs, your heart, and your brain. And this is why a lot of times you see people

that have been in severe accidents where they've lost a lot of blood, they get cold. Well, they get cold because they've lost the amount of blood that's flowing through their body. And I was starting to go through this. And having been through trauma medicine, and at one point in my life, I wanted to be a doctor,

at a very big appreciation for the human body and how it works. And I like new. Yeah, yeah, you're dying. So you know, like, holy cow, I'm dying right now. You've got a wife and kids at home. What's running through your mind? Because as entrepreneurs, I can tell you in 20, again, this is not even a direct comparison at all.

We're like universes away from what was happening to you versus to me and entrepreneurs who are struggling and suffering and silence. When I was going through 2011, 12, 13, 614, thousand dollars in debt knew I was an ineffective leader I had employees leaving and sabotaging my business I felt like I was dying and I felt like I was alone and I felt sad for my wife and kids yeah that I let them down what's running through your mind when you know physiologically I'm in this another

fucking country in their desert the enemy's trying to kill me and I am actually dying right now and you and so many entrepreneurs out there you know I was bleeding literally but you were bleeding money and you were bleeding the resources that you had. And in some ways, you put yourself in that situation. You and I have talked about this. I, in some ways, allowed us to get into that situation. So there was some guilt.

I was mad at myself. And then I really was mad at the fact that the enemy would have the satisfaction and knowing they killed me. That really pissed me off. So part of me was like, I am not going to die. I don't care what it takes. If I have to reach into my chest and squeeze my heart. And then as I lost more and more blood, I got weaker, it got harder to breathe, it got harder to think.

And then my thoughts drifted in my family. So my wife and my kids, my son was seven at that point, and my daughters were four and two. And, you know, they talk about your life flashes before your eyes, if you have the luxury in the time. And it did. My life, I started to look back on the things that I had done, the things, the dreams that I had had had that I did not accomplish. I thought about the stupid shit I had done, the mistakes that I had made, that I was just like, God, I wish I hadn't done that. And then I thought about the things that I wish I had done better at. I thought, man, I wish I had spent more time with my wife than kids.

I wish I had told my kids how much I love them more. I wish I could hold them one more time. And that was my thought. And I thought, you know, so it was September. And I was one week from going home. We were at the end of the deployment. So, you know, Halloween was a big thing for our family. We loved Halloween.

You know, we loved the holidays. And that's what's starting to run through my mind. You know, you won't be trigger-treating this year. And, you know, you won't have Christmas. And then it kind of flashed forward. You won't be there to raise your son to be this strong young man. And you won't walk your daughters down the aisle. So that was a really hard, melancholic moment to see.

the least. And, you know, for me, I just said, I have to go home. I have to go home. And this is where I think this idea of this relentless, overcome mindset, you know, whatever you want to believe. For me, I called out to the big man upstairs and I said, I have to have this strength. I need the strength to go home. And for me, it happened. It gave me some more strength. So I don't know what that timeline was, that sequence of events, of thoughts, and what happened. Whatever happened, sometime between the initial firefight to that point, we ended up calling an air support mission directly on our position. To this day, it was the closest fire mission ever executed in Iraq, so we literally called bombs directly on us.

And let me just explain that to our viewers and listeners. When you guys were calling an air support mission, this means, hey, we're overwhelmed, the bad guys need to be killed, but you guys were in such close proximity to the bad guys that the cats in the planes who were about to drop the bombs were like, hey, you are extremely close to the bad guys. Right. And you said drop away anyways? We did, but there was a little bit of time for that

because my team leader who I owe my life too, I mean, he saved us. I mean, my team, amazing, you know, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them. So he was talking to the gunship up above and saying, hey, I need a phone. fire mission. You know, we're running out of rounds. I got two guys, you know, critically wounded. And at that point, they thought I was dead. I thought I was KIA. And, you know, then I came two and he realized,

oh my God, I got, you know, three critically injured. So he called, gunship said, no way, you guys are too close. We will kill you. If we drop these rounds, you have to figure out a way to move back. He said, there's no way. There's no place to go. Called a second time, they said, no, we'll kill you. Third time, he said, look, you don't bring this in. Nobody's going to be You know, these guys are going to bleed out and die. He said, we're running out of ammunition. So you're bringing this fire mission in. I'm going to tell you how to do it.

And they did. And it was, when I was an enlisted guy, I was a communicator. So I used to do close air support. I used to call it in. So he called out to me and said, hey, incoming. And I remember literally hearing the gunship fire. And then literally the rounds exploded in front of me. and dirt and debris went up over us and it took out the machine gunner.

That machine gunner was firing before that happened and he instantly stopped. How far would you say that machine gunner was from your position? 45 feet. Holy shit, Jay? He was in the vegetation so I could only see his muzzle flash, but he was close. And when that initial volley of fire came in, it injured him. I could hear him crying out in the darkness. and we brought in a second fire mission right after that, which took out the enemy.

My team leader came up and got me at that point, and he got me back to the tire, and he got a tourniquet on my arm, saving my life, stopping the bleeding. So finally we secure this. They ended up calling in several more fire missions. Just kind of vaporized that area, and we brought in the Medevac helicopter. They loaded us on, flew the rotors off of it to get us back. and, you know, mad, mad shout out to our military medical professionals who saved my life. I mean, we learn our most valuable lessons in medicine on the battlefield, and there was a statistic,

something that I had hung on to a thought, an additional thought that popped into my head. I knew that our medical professionals were so good that if you showed up in the combat sport hospital with a pulse, you had a 90% chance to make it at home alive. And that was kind of my focus. And thank God, I showed up with a pulse and they saved me. But that started a whole new journey. And it was something that over time I've come to realize, and life is a lot like this.

Ambush is usually common in not real world enemy ambushes, but the formulation of a life ambush and the impact on us comes in two stages. So there's usually the initial ambush point. So for you, it was this point of anxiety. you had in your career. The secondary ambush is this how we deal with it as a person, as we look at where we're at and the overwhelming nature. And this becomes the life ambush, and this is where we can anchor ourselves.

And in my case, it was inaction. Let's just call it what it was. Which is what? I had the anxiety attack, and instead of doing something about it, I sat on the X of ambush. Which is what so many people do. And that is really what an ambush is designed to do. designed to be overwhelming and to pin you down in that location and we we want to do

that we want to try and lay down as much fire and make it as overwhelming as possible so that it's very difficult to build this you know overwhelm this overcome and positive mindset to say oh my god I got to fight my way out of this I mean what you want to do is just hunker down and be like please let this go away and I started to see the parallels as the years have gone by between this enemy ambush and being on the receiving end of enemy fire and what people do in life and life ambushes because they get overwhelmed with all the bad things that are going on you know whether it's divorce whether it's catastrophic business failure whether it's life-threatened injury illness to them

or someone they love whether it's sexual trauma whatever it is they they get stuck by this negativity and they get stuck on the X and we are trained and what saved us at night is action is one will make all the difference. And the quicker you react and the quicker you can either attack or move out of it is what will save your life. We have a saying, get off the X. You have to get off the X as quickly as possible. Whether you attack into it, whether you move back off it or we talk about blowing through, getting getting through and out of it. And I began to realize that life ambushes are no different. For whatever reason as human beings we have a natural tendency to experience this overwhelming catastrophic thing, the life

ambush and sit there. Why do you think that is? I know obviously you guys were able to survive what happened to you because of probably an overabundance of training. How does the average person, whether entrepreneur or just in life, train to get off the X when we find ourselves on the X? Some of its preparation. And you cannot necessarily predict an ambush out there, but they're out there. I don't care who you are. In life, human beings tend to go through about four or five life ambushes. You're going to have a catastrophic event that's going to occur in your life that will leave physical, mental, or emotional scars on you. You'll never fully recover from it. You will either get better or unfortunately some people that destroys them. The difference is the individuals who, whether they get totally pinned down and stuck on it for years and then finally slowly work their way off, some people never get off the X, they're stuck on it. Some people have you mentally, physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually, prepare yourself for it, knowing that someday some unexpected event is going to come along, that at least puts you in a position to know, man, I just had this major life ambush happen.

What do I have to do? I got to get off the X as quickly as possible. Most people have a natural tendency to look back on the past, and they're like, well, I want that back. I want this joyful period of my life. I want my success. I want my money. I want my marriage. I want my health.

Whatever it is. But the reality is we can never change the past. It's gone. And I don't know why we spend so much time longing for it and wasting a lot of time wishing we could have back what's lost because it's gone, man. You will never get it back. All you can do is shape the future.

You can create something new, but you can't recreate what's gone, you know, what's gone in the past. And that is this whole idea of how, you have to get off the X as quickly as possible. In life... That is the overcome mindset, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

It is this idea that I don't care what hits me, I will drive forward. In your book here, Trident, The Forging and Reforging of a Navy Seal leader, you're very open, honest, and transparent about your mess-ups. Yeah. Your mess-ups that potentially cost you your career, your Trident. And as you said, rather than long... longing for what you had. And there's so many great lessons in this book.

And if you're watching this or listening to this, you've got to invest in the Trident and buy two copies and give one to a friend, family member, coworker that you care about. As you get out of this traumatic situation that happened to you in 2007 September, you find yourself probably longing for, well, the old life, the old Jason, the old face, the old missions,

but you find yourself in a hospital with 30-some-odd surgeries ahead of you. And there was a conversation that took place in the hospital room that caused you to put a sign on the door. Why don't you share that part of the overcome journey? Because you didn't feel sorry for yourself one bit. I did in the first few days. Did you? And this is where I'll talk about, so I had this initial enemy ambush,

and then I stepped out of that ambush right onto this life ambush, because suddenly I was faced with, you know, you're severely injured, half your face is blown off, your nose is gone, your eyesight's damaged, your arm, they were originally talking about amputating it, and I had gone through this amazing journey of failure as a young leader and did the unthinkable, came back within our community and redeemed myself, you know, respected as a leader once again, and was on the, you know, now on the track to the next levels of leadership within the seal

teams and suddenly here I find myself laying in a hospital bed with the prospect of cutting my arm off, you know, this mangled monster face and my career being over. So yeah, I will admit for the first couple of days I felt sorry for myself. What did you do to get yourself out of it or what situation helped you get out of it? So I was kicking myself like so many of us do. You know, we focus on the negative, we focus on our mistakes and I was in that spiral. of reliving the firefight. Man, what if I had gone left? What if I had gone right?

What if we had done this? What if I had listened to my spidey sense and we had done something different? And it was at one point, you know, this little voice popped into my head and said, stop it. What's done is done. You can never go back and change what happened. The situation you're in is what you're in, you know?

So you're not gonna undo it. There's no amount of beating yourself up. The only thing you can do is look to the future. And you need to drive forward and shape your future. And that became my focus. I said, you know what? I've got to be positive. I've got to build this.

I've got to drive forward. So that became a little more clear a few days later when somebody came into the room, a couple family members. And basically, my wife had left for the first time. She had not left my side at all. She went to go get a cup of coffee. and they were there, and I started drifting off. But I was in that subconscious state

where you haven't really drifted into deep sleep, you can still hear people talking or the TV in the background. And they started having a conversation about, and don't get me wrong, Walter Reed or Bethesda at that time is an overwhelming place to go. You see young men and women at their worst, blown to pieces, traumatic brain injuries, burns.

It is a very hard place to be emotionally. And I'm sure to see me laying in that bed as mangled as I was was probably hard. But they started talking about what a pity, how sad it is that we send these young men and women off to war, and they come home and this is what we have, this mangled mess. You know, they'll probably never be the same. They'll probably never be successful again. You know, they're just going to take this destroyed life and, you know, never fully recover. And when they left, man, that was kind of churning in my head.

more I thought about it, the angrier I got. And when my wife finally came back, I looked at her and I wrote because I couldn't talk. I was tricked. I was wired shut. And I said, never again. Never again is somebody going to come in my room and feel sorry for me when I am just relentlessly driving forward and refused to feel sorry for myself? And I asked her to give me a piece of paper that I wrote out this mantra, if you will. I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it. it was literally was kind of a stream of consciousness in that moment, and it's at attention to all who enter here.

If you're coming into 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 a country I deeply love. I will make full recovery. What is full, that is the absolute utmost physically I have the ability to recover.

Then I will push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you're about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you're not prepared for that, go elsewhere. And we signed it, the management. Why the management? I don't know.

It was funny. You know, it was like, you know, what else do we put on here? You know, so, and I told my wife, I said, put this on the door. I said, no one's allowed into my room until they read this. Do you realize that mantra is going to long live for decades and decades after you and I are gone, like after we have left this plant? Like what you wrote there was something profound. And it is.

And I never, I didn't put, it's amazing to me the impact and what it is done and who it is motivated. I've had hundreds of thousands of people that have contacted me and say, I can't tell you what your sign did for me. And it really became a, just this motivational symbol for wounded warriors everywhere. It got posted online and it went viral. It went all over the place. and it is just amazing the impact it's had. I've had individuals with cancer that have written me and said, I put your sign on my door,

thank you so much for giving me the motivation, people who have been in severe accidents. So my advice to anyone is that you never know the impact that you're going to have, and this is why it's so critical. Your attitude will determine the outcome. That really what leadership is. Leadership is how we project ourselves,

despite how we feel. I wanted to lay in that bed and have a pity party at everything that I had lost, but that was the X. And I knew the only way I was going to drive forward and find success was to get off the X, for myself, for my family, for everybody around me. And in doing so, you know, it launched me forward into a whole other successful place that never could have happened if these incidents didn't. And it led to that sign on the door and the impact that it continues to have. Michelle Obama's book just came out. She writes about my sign on the door. and the profound impact that had on her when she went to the hospital, because that's where it is.

I got home, and my wife was like, what do you want to do with this? And I looked at it and I said, it's not mine. I said, I harnessed this relentless overcome mindset that is not just mine. It belongs to these other wounded warriors that are going to be going through the same thing I've been through. So I got invited to the White House to meet President Bush,

because he had heard about the sign. And he signed it, and we had it framed, and I wrote a motivational message to the wounded warriors on the bottom, and we put all four service emblems for, you know, Air Force, Marine Corps, Army, and Navy. And then at the top, I put the Afghanistan campaign medal, the Iraq campaign medal, on a purple heart. And we framed it, and it hangs in the wounded ward

at Walter Reed Medical Center. And what's neat is the wood on the bottom has been worn clean, because warriors who have been wounded warriors who are in the hospital, when they're going to surgery, they go by it and they rub it. So you never know the impact you're going to have. Dude, that's crazy, man. That part I didn't know and the impact that you have. But the impact that you have, Jason, continues because August of 2007,

and if I came to you as you were planning whatever your next mission was and said, look, man, a decade from now, you're going to be a public speaker, a motivational speaker speaking to Forbes 500 businesses. Would you have believed me? No. I mean, where you wrote on that sign that I will not only make a full recovery, but I will go 20% above and beyond that, you have done that. What in your Navy SEAL training allows you to be this prolific speaker, this voice of a message that we need so much?

Like what, how were you able to make that shift? People go, well, I'm just a warrior. I'm not a businessman. I'm just a warrior. I'm not a public speaker. Or I'm just a mom with an idea. I'm not an entrepreneur. That's a big shift from warrior to public speaker.

How did this happen? So really a lot of the story which is captured, in the majority of the story of the Trident, the firefighting that ambush is definitely a big part of the story in the recovery process. But really the true story, my story, what makes it so unique is the failures I had as a young leader that almost cost me my career. The reason the book is called the Trident, that is the Seal emblem. But the forging and reforging of a Navy Seal leader, the forging was my failure. And I liken the book, the book's actually broken into five parts that represent the making of a sword. I am a student of history.

I love edged weapons. You know, I saw your battle axe in your office. Yeah. It's immediately drawn to it. You know, but some of the best weapons in the world, the Japanese made some of the greatest swords that were out there just for their flexibility, their ability. And I liken my story a little bit of the forging of a sword. And my sword was made. I went through training, but I was a knucklehead.

I was smart and good enough to excel the majority of the time, 95% of the time, but I would have these 5% moments where I would just decide not to be a leader. I would just do dumb things. I wouldn't think through what I was doing, whether it was I wanted to go out and party and just do what I want to do and I don't, you know, damn the consequences, or whether it was in a leadership position where I would make an impulsive decision that I didn't take the time

to truly think through. And unfortunately, in combat, you cannot make decisions like that. People's lives are on the line. So I had these series of mistakes that I made, you know, coupled with drinking too much. And it led to this, it led to this perfect storm where all of this came together and on a mission in Afghanistan, I made a bad call. And thankfully nobody was lost, but what was lost was my professional credibility. Sure.

said he's dangerous he makes bad calls he's a drunk we don't want to work with him as a matter of fact you should take his trident and kick him out so here I was to a seal the trident is everything it's everything I mean it's so hard to earn this emblem and to be a part of this community to be faced with your brothers to say you don't measure up was the the toughest blow I've ever encountered I literally thought about killing myself. I sat in my room after all that happened and, you know, we have weapons all the time and we're overseas in the combat zone. And I held, I pulled my pistol out and I thought about shooting myself. And the only thing that stopped me was as I put the gun in my mouth,

I looked and on the desk was a picture of my kids. And I thought, you know, what kind of example are you and what kind of coward are you that you're in this moment and yes, you're in this moment and yes, everything is in tatters, but what example do you leave for them? So I put it away and still was really struggling. At least I decided that wasn't the way to go. But it led me on this whole new journey. And thankfully I had leadership that said, you know what, 95% of the time you're good, you have these 5% moments, we think we can help fix you.

And so they basically put these things in place, and one of those things was you're going to go to U.S. Army Ranger school. And a lot of people are like, oh my God, you're a seal. Why are they going to send you to Ranger School? Ranger School is an amazing. It is a leadership school. It is a combat leadership school. That is what Ranger School is.

It teaches you how to lead in the most chaotic, ambiguous situations with heavy amounts of stress added onto the situation. And they do that through lack of sleep. They do that through stress through the instructors. They do that through constantly moving you around in different leadership positions to challenge your thinking. They do it through lack of food. You know, great thing about Ranger School.

It's an amazing diet program. Most guys lose about 50 pounds. But Ranger School was the first time that I had to step back and really come to grips with who was Jason Redmond, this self-assessment. And I really began to realize you're not as great as you think you are. And you really did make a lot of mistakes. You know, you want to be a leader.

But you wanted to be a leader in name only. You weren't truly leading by example, which is the essence of everything. I came up with this idea, three rules of leadership while I was there, and I realized that the foundation of leadership is how we lead ourselves. You write a lot about this in your book, and I loved your book. It resonated so much with me because it came down to discipline. It came down to these critical things were the foundation of leadership. By doing so, it gives us the ability to lead others,

and then the final component you have to lead always. You can't pick and choose when you're going to lead. You can't go out to the bar and be like, oh, well, I'm going to take off my leadership hat, and I'm going to be, you know, Bedro shit show, you know, because people look to you as the leader. So your three rules are lead yourself, lead others, and lead always.

And lead always. Yep. I love that. I love that. How does someone learn more about you or connect with you? Then go to Jason Redmond.com. Jason Redmond.com and my website, you can book me for speaking. Here shortly, we're going to be launching some new programs on coaching.

You know, helping others out there get off the X. And then you can find me on Facebook under Jason Redmond, Instagram, and Twitter at Jason Redmond, www. And if there was a question that I missed or that I should have asked, is there one that I should have asked that I might have missed? No, I would just tell everyone out there that's listening to this, you know, life ambitions are going to happen, and I guarantee that there's a bunch of your listeners right now that are in one. And sometimes we don't realize it. We're going through this pain. We're going through this suffering.

But oftentimes, we bring it on ourselves. We stay there. And some people get comfortable in that pain. So my advice to you that's listening is if you are in a life ambush, the number one thing you need to do is get off that X. It will enable you to drive forward. Stop looking at the past, start shaping your future, and you are going to find happiness and positivity again. You'll never fully heal from a life ambush. It's just a scar you'll carry, just like I wear these scars on my body now. But they make me who I am, and they make me stronger. And if you can focus on that, get off the X, drive forward, success is waiting.

Well said. Well, Jason, thank you so much for your service. Thank you for writing this book. And above all, thank you for joining us on the Empire Show, man. We appreciate it. Honor. Yes, sir. Yeah, absolutely. Guys and gals, thank you so much for watching and listening to this show. If you got any value from this episode, please invest in the Trident. And of course, take a screenshot of the iTunes or the YouTube that you're watching here and share it on social media. Tag Jason, tag myself. We want to get the word out, help people get off the X and reach their fullest potential. Have a great one. Hey, thanks so much for being here for today's Empire Podcast show. We would love for you to do a quick little favor for us. Just go to iTunes and give it. us a five-star rating, leave a comment, share it with your friends, and if you're interested in growing your business faster, go to bedroskulean.com forward slash empire, fill out the application to see if you're a good fit for our Empire Mastermind Group.