Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 13 - Failure

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

It happens to us all, and it happened to me last week. I have found that failures appear to come in many shapes and sizes, but they are nearly always the result of the same thing, focusing on what you cannot control instead of the one thing you can, yourself. It is a simple concept, but it is certainly not easy. Hopefully someone can learn from my recent mistakes, and not repeat them elsewhere.

All right, here we go. Episode number 13. And an unlucky number for some people. Did you guys know that most hotels don't have a 13th floor? It doesn't make any sense to me. Don't be scared of numbers. Be scared of clowns walking around in the night. Which is currently what's giving my children nightmares and they want to come sleep in the bed with us.

It's pretty awesome. So I'm going to open with some housekeeping here. T-shirts. All the T-shirts that have been ordered are on the way. If you live in the U.S., they should be there within Z. 72 hours. Overseas, it takes a little bit longer. And on that overseas international side of the house, they're on the way. There was a delay. It took me a little bit to figure out the right mechanism to get with all the custom forms and all that stuff. And when I first put up

shirts for sale, the clearedhotpodcast.com site is actually hosted on WordPress, which apparently about 70% of the internet is hosted on WordPress. And then I had to switch it over to shop because it was manually inputting all the shipping data and that's that's just not going to work. So I went with a little bit of an easier one button solution. And in doing so, it erased some of the orders, but I went back through all of the emails and I double checked and triple check. So everybody should have a shirt on the way who has ordered a shirt. If you don't get your shirt, screen grab me the order confirmation and just hit me up through the contact on clearedhodpodcast.com and I'll get it to you. don't worry about it. It might take a little bit.

But I'm just trying to figure this stuff out. So selling T-shirts, not exactly my strong point. But they're on the way. Thank you for everybody who purchased them. Both of the designs. I have a little bit left of both of them. So get them if you want to get them and get them soon. Okay, on to the episode.

I had an interesting 48 hours last week. Or actually, I guess this week, because I'm recording the Sunday night. And I want to tell you guys about those 48 hours, because it rocked me. It rocked my confidence specifically in something that I'm new to, but I think it's safe to say that I'm passionate about. So I want to talk about what happened and what my plan is going forward and what it is I'm trying to learn from it.

And then hopefully tie it into something that everybody can learn something from because I think if you switch a few words out, the lessons across the board are exactly the same. So here we go. Clear it Hut. Unlucky episode number 13. Let's talk about failure. I got the red smoke.

Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I'm all winter, baby. Give it to me. I need it. You're clear it hot. Copy, cleared hot.

Where do I begin? I don't even know if I want to talk about this two-day stretch of time, but I feel like I have to as part of, like, a self-help program of me being able to move past it. So here we go. Have you ever, you know, watch? a NFL football game and seeing how high the punter's foot actually goes up in the air when they just drill a kick downfield. So what I feel like is instead of that punter hitting a football, I was just standing in front of that punter with my legs apart enough for his foot to go directly into my nuts. That's how the last 48 hours of last week treated me. It put me on my ass. And I tell

people all the time that you need to experience failure and you need to seek it and as a matter of fact I think I actually cover that on episode 12 so that just happened to me I just experienced I wasn't seeking it but I certainly experienced failure and it sucks it sucks it sucks just as much as anybody else and I struggle with it in the moment and I can find myself struggling with it in the time shortly thereafter. I'm trying to get myself out of that loop and do something positive with it. So I got to tell you a little bit of a story about what happened, surprisingly enough. It's going to be about hunting, although the lessons learned from this have nothing to do with hunting. So if you're not a hunter, just bear with me. So before I begin, I need a little bit of

clarification. 48-hour hunt. I was up in Park City, Utah. I was hunting for elk. and by every metric that I use to judge a hunt as being successful, it was. I have never, up until last week, had a close encounter of any kind with an elk. I mean, I've seen them on TV and I've seen them at a distance, but I had a couple encounters that were, I would say, sub 20 yards and a couple of them that were sub 10 yards.

So I got to observe a lot of animals and learn about their behavior. I got to interact with them. I got to be intimately more familiar with the gear that I'm using. I'm very new to bow hunting and very new to the gear and kind of the setup that I want to use going forward. So I got to dial that in even more. And in my mind, you know, a worst case scenario for going out in hunting is that you don't come back with any meat to put into the freezer, which is the reason why I'm hunting is I really enjoy the experience of taking it from in the wild to on the text. and everything in between.

So the worst case scenario for me, in my mind, is you just don't have any meat, even though I guess that's probably not the worst case scenario. You could probably get shot by somebody or a bear could eat your face, but absent those two things, it's really not like there's any consequence other than you're going and buying meat if you choose to eat meat, as opposed to just going to your freezer and remembering every time that you do go to your freezer,

the experience you had harvesting that animal. And to me, hunting is, it's a lot more than, just killing. I don't know, I don't know any other way to describe it other than to say. I have been killing things since my 20s and it's not, it doesn't turn the lights on and off for me. I mean, it just is what it is. I would rather go out into the field and share a really difficult and arduous experience that's sprinkled in with humor because I think camaraderie is nothing more than a combination of shared suffering and comedy. I would rather have that experience and not see an animal and become, you know,

better friends with the people you choose to surround yourself with, then go out there alone and be successful with an animal. I truly would rather just be out there with people that I enjoy being with and enjoying the experience. The animal is, as far as I'm concerned, it's just the icing on the cake. So a condensed version of my Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday of this last week. And before I start, I know that people go years without seeing an elk, and I know that the amount of interactions that I've had to some people is going to seem

seem like I'm complaining about what they would normally consider to be successful. And I understand those things. I'm not complaining about any of that stuff. I'm actually not trying to complain at all. So I know people have gone years without seeing an animal in the wild. And on Thursday, I went 0 for 5 with shots, archery shots on animals in the wild on essentially my second Elkhunt. So the first shot, it was really early in the morning, and I'm going to call that guy the head scratcher because he was raking his antlers in a bunch of trees. Second shot, I'm going to call this guy the ninja feet because I was able to watch him come in from a distance and maneuver through some brush and move his head around in a way that I did.

didn't think that an animal of that size could do. Didn't make a single noise. And if you guys have never seen an elk in person, I mean, I guess they're about the size of the horse with a tree on their head. And their ability to move through the woods making less noise than I do, it's pretty humbling. Third and fourth shots, or the third shot was on Sleeping Beauty. The fourth shot was on Standing Beauty. And then the fifth shot was on Big Daddy. All of those shots did not end in the way that I surely was hoping that they would because if I go out to the freezer in my garage right now and I open the lid, yeah, it's empty. The issue with these shots or the first shot, it was truly an issue of there probably wasn't enough light. The second one in

arrow nicked off of the tree. The third and fourth shots are the ones that really put the nail mentally in my coffin. The first two opened the door for a little bit of uncertainty in my skill level. even though I knew there was some mitigating circumstances, at the end of the day, I was really starting to question my comfort level and ability to take a well-aimed archery shot in a moment that mattered. The third shot I had in the moment leading up to it, I thought I had as much time as I needed, and I thought I was mentally prepared and composed. And in hindsight, I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. In hindsight, it's kind of where everything derailed for me. The fourth shot was very similar to the third in what happened. And by the time the fifth shot even occurred, I was at a point where I did not even want to be hunting anymore,

not because I didn't enjoy the experience and not because I didn't want to bring back meat for my family, but because I was at an absolute basement level when it came to my confidence. And of course, we encountered another animal. and by the time I drew back on that last animal, my headspace could not have been more incorrect. And the outcome was reflective of that. At the end of that day, Thursday, that night, I basically spent the entire night sitting in bed,

looking at the ceiling, re-evaluating and questioning everything that I had done that led up to it. And people probably right now are asking, well, where's the failure in this? You're describing that much interaction with animals, you have the ability to take shots on animals. I didn't hit or wound any.

So there really was no consequence. So what are you talking about? You got super lucky. It's your second elk hunt. You were around animals the whole time. So where's the failure? The only thing that I've thought about for the last 72 hours since then was what I consider to be that failure.

And the failure has nothing to do with the outcome. It has nothing to do with whether or not it hit an animal. The failure was 100% in my execution. and more importantly, it was in how I allowed individual actions to cascade and increase their gravity and that gravity's impact on what it did between my ears. So when it comes to archery, I'm going to give myself a C. I'm going to say I'm an average archery shot. I do think that I'm relatively consistent.

I don't try to do anything crazy, but I think I can consistently execute at an average level. I always try to do exactly the same thing, and that rolls over from my previous career. I'm very systematically based or process-based, even when it comes to, I think one of the reasons that I was able to pick up flying on the trajectory that I did is because it was checklist-based. It was very easy. There was not a lot of, you know, I feel great today, so I'm going to do it this way, and I feel like crap the next day, and I'm going to do it that way. It's very systematic.

It's very checklist-based. and in those environments I do really well. So I try to set up a lot of the things that I do physically in exactly that same way. What started rattling me was that I felt like I was doing those same things, but the outcomes and the results were different. And almost immediately I let that starting get into my head. So after 72 hours of thinking about not much more than a 12-hour time period, Here's the conclusion that I've come to and this is what I'm going to need to do.

So I haven't touched my bow since I flew back. My bow is in timeout right now and I'm in time out right now. We're not allowed to speak to each other or interact until tomorrow morning. But the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I'm going to test all of my gear. And the reason I'm testing my gear is not to look for deficiencies in gear and deficiencies in my bow or the arrows or any of that stuff because I already know what I'm going to find. what I'm doing is confirming to myself that the errors that occurred that terminated in the failure of the hunt, if you want to consider a hunt to be harvesting an animal, they were internal. I say it all the time.

Work on controlling the things that you can, and don't waste any of your time and effort on things that you can't control. And the failure in what happened to me this last week was completely self-induced. And I allowed a situation or what I perceived a situation to be to take control of my actions. And more importantly, I let it take control. I didn't let it take control of my actions. I let it work its way into my thought process, which then drove me to act in a manner that terminated in not being able to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. So I'm a very inexperienced animal hunter. There's some, you know, there's contributing factors here that kind of helped me.

And I'm just giving you guys this more for some context, a better idea of the situation that I was in and the environment that I was in and the experience level that I have with it. Because again, you could switch out hunting with filling the blank, whatever it is that you do. When you first start off at whatever your occupation is, you're not going to have a lot of experience. You might find yourself in a situation where you don't necessarily know what to do, kind of like I did in the last. last 48 hours and it's a dangerous place to be. So I'm a very inexperienced animal hunter, even more so with elk. Like I said, I have never really had a close encounter with an animal like that. So I didn't know what to expect. And by that, I mean, I didn't know, and I still to a large degree because I have very limited experience. I still don't know exactly what I can get away with.

I don't know how much time I have. I don't know what they can see. I don't know what the behavior is to expect as you get closer on their first initial alert. If they do see something, what to expect, there's a lot of things that happen really, really fast. I mean, I would describe bow hunting as sometimes it being quite slow and then you're dumping the car into fifth gear almost instant and you got to do a lot of things right. The situation that I was in, I didn't have a lot of those answers. I would actually say, honestly, I didn't have any of those answers. And it was unsettling because I found myself in two of those five shots,

thinking in my head, as I was at full draw with an arrow knocked, getting ready to shoot it in an animal, I didn't know exactly what I should do. I didn't know if I should let down. I didn't know if I should shoot. and I also didn't know if I moved a little bit to improve my shooting position if the animal would have bolted. So in hindsight, that whole context and explanation is I surrendered the timing of my shot sequence, which directly impacted the outcome to something other than myself. I rushed myself and artificially applied pressure,

and the resulting outcome eroded my confidence like a bowling ball rolling. downhill. I distinctly remember, and now especially looking back over the last few days, the feeling in my head is that I needed to go now. It wasn't perfect, but I needed to go now. I needed to rush it. And I was allowing that emotion, and it could be, maybe it was excitement, maybe it was anticipation, you can fill in the blank. But in that moment of allowing an external feeling or an emotion to drive how fast I needed to act, just the way that I was thinking about it drove the physical action to an outcome that I obviously didn't want it to be. And every time that outcome was something other than what I was looking for, the confidence in my ability to do it

properly took a huge percentage hit negatively, especially as the day went on. So by the time I took my fifth shot of the day, I drew my bow back. and what do you think I was thinking about in my mind? Because I can tell you right now what I wasn't thinking about. I wasn't thinking about the mechanics that I do when I'm standing in the backyard of my house, thinking about my stance, an anchoring position, a slow drop of my head down into the people,

looking through the sights and focusing on that shot timing completely under my control. All of those things are under my control. And in that moment of my last shot, by the time I got to that point in the day, I was not thinking about a single one of those things. What I was thinking about was every other shot I had taken in the day and the outcome that had come from that.

And, you know, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out how the fifth shot went. And then how the fifth shot impacts how I feel now. So I was thinking about previous shots and outcome, the things that I can't control. And what I should have been thinking about is execution. The only thing that I can control. if there was ever an example of the power of the mind and specifically how devastating emotional attachment can be it was in those five shots and the cascading effect that it had when one went bad and I allowed that to

impact the decisions I made on the second one and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the scope of where I started the day and quite frankly and honestly where I still am right now. The difference in those two positions in my own thoughts about my own competence and capabilities, there's the Grand Canyon of difference. And it's that emotional attachment that I surrendered, right, or that external force that I surrendered to control to, it's devastating. And again, the reason I'm dedicating this podcast to talking about it is that it absolutely occurs in every other environment other than hunting. So replace the word bow. And and just use boardroom.

Or think about arguing with your spouse. You know, my wife and I have had some doozies, and I can think of more examples than I wish I could, of me reacting to something that she said, and it doesn't even really matter what it is that she said. It was the emotional reaction and the anger that I derive from it and what it caused me to say. Or, you know, a business decision that I've seen people make

when they're excited, or when they feel like the world is crashing down, on top of them. Both of them are incredibly dangerous because that emotional attachment drives action and it might make sense or it might feel like the right thing to do but you're compromised. Another good example of where I see it, I've seen in myself again more times than I'm proud to say that I have. It's with my kids. You know when I'm emotionally attached to something else and you know one of my three kids either need something from me or want something from me

and I'm just, I'm not able to be the parent that I want to be because I'm so goddamn focused on something else that is so trivial and almost every single time emotionally based, and I've regretted it every single time. It's all versions of the same thing. It's all versions of giving control to something external. You need to be able to react to external events, but there's a difference between reacting to external events and being controlled by them. They're not the same thing, and you have to recognize that. I personally feel that the most dangerous position you can find yourself in

is that position where you're being controlled by external forces, whatever they may be. So how do you get out of it, right? I realized that that's the position that I was in, and it's probably still the position that I'm in a little bit. Like I said, my bow's in timeout and I'm in timeout. So if you realize you're in that position, what the hell do you do next?

Well, the first part is, I think we just covered it. You recognize that you're actually in that state. And then right after you recognize you're in that state, you got to remove yourself. And for me, the perfect removal of myself from that environment was the fact that the trip ended. I've actually thought a little bit about, I don't know, I don't know what would have happened if there was a 72-hour hunt instead of a 48-hour hunt. I don't think I would have gone into the field for the third day. but if I had and things had gone the same as they had the day before, which I have to assume that they would have because I hadn't changed anything.

And most importantly, I hadn't changed my mental headspace about how I was thinking about what had happened. I may never have picked up a bow again because I think it would have continued to go downhill and it would have put me into a place where it might have ruined something for me or at least would have taken me a very long time to build myself back. So you have to remove yourself, and by that I mean you need to provide yourself some space. Now, people are going to say that, you know, well, sometimes I don't have time to.

Okay, that's a lovely excuse. And you can use that excuse if you want to, but that's exactly what it is. You always have time to make a good decision. You always do. Even in combat, I have had personal situations where an event got to a level where I needed to take a knee. I recognized that I was getting emotionally attached to what was going on. Maybe that even emotion was just fear.

Take a knee and take a breath and make a good decision. Take the time to make a good decision so you don't spend the rest of your life regretting a bad one. So after you find some space, I don't know if this is necessarily a hard and fast rule, but what I personally recommend is communicate. Probably not a best time to communicate about what happened if you're in a combat environment, right? If you're a firefighter or a first responder or somebody who's in the EMS world that needs to get their job done, focus on recognizing and providing the space and then, you know, getting back into the fight. If you're an environment where you can really take the time to assess what happened,

I cannot recommend enough communicating with somebody that you have enough respect for that you can. can be honest. So for me, I needed to get my head pulled out of my ass and the two Js help me out. John and Joe took the time to call me up and talk to me and ask me about what had happened and give me a much more objective viewpoint and a different, you know, a detached viewpoint, which is always going to be more objective and help me view the situation. from an angle that I wasn't viewing it from because it was literally an inch in front of my face and it was covering 180 degrees of what I could see. So again, surround yourself with good people. Surround yourself with people that are better than you who can see you in a moment where you're

struggling and can help pull you along. So I owe the two jays quite a bit. If you're not going to communicate, you know, there's still a couple other steps that I would recommend. I'm not necessarily sure what these two, what order these two should go in. So I'll just put, you know, find some objectivity. For me, the assist in that came from the other people. But finding the objectivity, and it's amazing how objectively you can view something when you remove that emotional attachment, right? So recognize it, remove yourself, look at it objectively, and then go back to your fundamentals. Reestablish a baseline, and in doing so, you're going to reestablish your confidence. Now, those principles, I don't care if you're hunting.

I don't care if you're in combat. You know, bow to the boardroom and everything in between. If you find yourself in a position where you're shook and you're rattled, work yourself through that. And then the last step is need to get your ass back in the fight. So what am I going to do next? Or actually, what did I do after talking? to the two jays. My first step was to get shit-faced,

but that was not necessarily by design. I'm just, I'm trying to be honest. I came home from the trip. My wife was at the neighbor's house. They were drinking wine. So I drank some wine. I started feeling better about what had happened the more wine that I had drank.

So I drank enough to kill a small donkey. And yeah, woke up in the morning with a headache and still felt bad about what happened. So don't necessarily take that path. I'm just telling you what I did. So what else do I need to do? I need to learn from what happened. I need to take the frustration that I still feel right now, and I'm not frustrated with anything

other than myself. I spent a really long period of time in my life learning to control myself and just about any environment that I could be put into, and when I look back and realize that it was that control that I sacrificed and allowed an animal, I allowed an animal to rush me and put myself into a position where I was making errors. It's very frustrating. So I'm going to mold that into motivation. How do you do that? Or how am I going to do that? The first thing is you got to get out of your own way. And if you have somebody you can communicate with, that's one of the steps right there. You know, it's okay to be human and humans aren't perfect. And you got to put your ego down. And I'm doing all three of those things. I actually made a post on Instagram about how, as I was

traveling back, how humbling the experience was. It was a success by all, nearly every metric, but I felt like it was an absolute failure. And I still feel like the way that I performed is an absolute failure, but I'm going to learn from that failure and I'm going to come back from that stronger. So what am I going to do tomorrow morning? I'm going to pick up my bow. I'm going to go out to 20 yards. And we're going to start over again. And we're going to work our way. through the mechanics to re-assert to myself that I have those things and then I'm going to seer the lessons that I learned into my mind to make me a better hunter out of this situation. And the only reason, again, I brought this topic up is that you can replace the situation

that I am in with a parenting situation or a relationship situation or a business situation. The principles are exactly the same. And this one, I mean, it stinks. It sucks. It hurts. It keeps me up at night. That might not make a lot of sense to a lot of people. And that's fine because I don't want it to happen to you.

So hopefully you can take some of the lessons that I have learned retroactively looking back and apply them. And maybe recognize you're getting into this situation before you go far enough or as far down the rabbit hole as I did. That's the whole reason that I'm even bringing this thing up. So at the end of the day, what I'm really trying to say is control yourself. That's all you have. Focus on you and the things that you can control. Focus on your execution, not the outcome and let everything else fall away. That's all you have control over at the end of the day. And that's all I got. I need to go out. Actually, I need to go to bed and I need to wake up early, make a cup of coffee, go out and shoot my bow and start putting one foot in front of the other. So that's all we got for today.

Later. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in again. Thank you to everybody who's writing reviews. Thank you to everybody who's helping spread the word. Thank you to everybody who's buying the shirts. The feedback has been amazing. I love hearing from people. You know, good, bad or ugly. Hit me up through any of the contacts stuff on any of the websites that I have and let me know what you think. Give me your feedback. I love hearing stories of how it's impacting people's lives. It makes me want to keep doing it. It makes me want to dive deeper into these topics and it gives me a better understanding of who I am and helps me make sense of some of the experiences I have from my previous career. So thank you to everybody who's listening and we'll

see you next week.