Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 18 - Stress, Stress Inoculation, and Leadership Failures

Episode Date: October 19, 2017

This episode focuses on two questions received from listeners. The first is on the value of stress testing and "inoculation," why it is used in every aspect of SEAL training, and how everyone, regardless of occupation can benefit. The second question is about dealing with leadership failures, the lessons to be learned, and moving forward.

Episode 18. Here we go. I'm a couple days behind schedule, been on the road for a bit, trying to play a little bit of catch-up. So we're going to get right into it today. And today I'm going to focus on two questions. Both of them I received through email. The first one is about stress. And specifically it was about stress inoculation in regards to interaction with other people a confrontational environment, but I'm going to add onto that and talk a little bit about stress testing and the importance of, you know, using stress to challenge your fundamentals. So that's one question. And the second question is about, I would almost call it being betrayed, but I think what

it really is is just a failure in leadership. So those are the two questions for today. Like I said, I'm a little bit behind schedule. I wanted to get this out earlier in the week, but it is what it is. I'm up in Vancouver doing some stuff. And with that, if you've made an order of a shirt or a hat, or not a hat, a shirt, a coffee mug. The hats are on the way, by the way. Spoiler alert.

I'm going to have all those things out by Saturday when I get home. So anything you've ordered will come out on Saturday. I reloaded the Be the Example T-shirt. So that is back in stock. Grab one if you want it. and if Game of Thrones ever got anything right, winter is in fact coming and it's cold where I live in Montana. So hoodies are on the way too, a nice thick hoodie that'll keep you warm if you live somewhere that actually gets cold. Full disclosure made a very small order of the sweatshirts.

Like I've said before, I'm not really interested in adventures and retail sales. So when they come up, they should be up in about two weeks. So obviously I'll let everybody know that they're for sale. Grab them when they're up and then when they're gone, that's going to be it. So with that said, let's get into this thing. Episode 18 coming at you. Before I get into talking about stress testing and the process that we used for my old career to, I'm not going to say inoculate yourself against stress, but to refine your skills to appoint

that you perform very well under stress or indirese. I need to make a little bit of an analogy about stress testing and stress training in and of themselves. In my opinion, it's a lot like sharpening a knife. So you have a knife and you have a sharpening stone. And with the correct angle and the correct application of that stone, you can take something that perhaps started off, very dull and sharpen it to a razor sharp edge. Now applied improperly with that same knife and that same stone, if you take the wrong angle and the wrong application, you're going to make something that should be razor sharp incredibly dull and essentially useless. So it has to be structured and it has to be

controlled. The reason we did so much stress testing and stress training inside of the seal teams is that the work environment is obviously very hostile. And what we're trying to do is replicate and simulate the demands of what they're going to experience in a non-training environment. Or if you want to put it in the air quotes, what they're going to experience in the wild. The goal of stress testing is to improve performance. or again, like I said, if you want to put it in air quotes, inoculate against stressful environments. But it has to be gradual and it has to be controlled.

It's not the point to try to overwhelm your people. It's actually very simple to overwhelm people, especially if they have little to know experience. And I talked about this previously in a podcast. One of the easiest things to do is overwhelm junior officers with too much information because they haven't learned how to prioritize and disseminate the proper information that they need to so they become overwhelmed. And if you just do that over and over and over again without showing them the proper steps

and the proper mechanics to perform, they're not going to get any better. So it's not the goal to overwhelm your people. We do it to test mechanics that are developed in non or low stress environments. And how often do we do it? I had to think back on this because I didn't realize how prevalent it was in our training. We did it all the time through every phase of training. And we started right away. And I mean right away.

So I was a second phase instructor at Buds, which is the wide open end of the funnel in your journey to becoming a seal. And I taught in second phase, which was the second phase of three. And I really can't remember for the life of me if it was the fourth or fifth week of second phase that we administered a test called, as the instructors, we administered a test called pool comp, which was short for pool competency. And if there's ever been a diving test that has absolutely nothing to do with diving proficiency, it is that test. And we actually told the students precisely that, you know, if you graduate or successfully complete this test, please by no means, beg of you not to think of yourself as an incredibly competent diver. Because the test in the pool, underwater, was not about their proficiency at manipulating their equipment.

It was about fear. It was about panic. It was about stress and controlling and managing all of those things. Like I said in the beginning, it's incredibly easy to overwhelm your people. And Pool Comp, the actual practical test at the very end, is actually the culmination of a week of curriculum. And we start with the entire class in a classroom sitting at desks and chairs with PowerPoint presentation. and it starts off very slow and very gradual with fundamentals. And you're going to hear me coming back to this time and time again

when I'm talking about stress and stress testing. It has to be built on the fundamentals. So for this week, we literally had a PowerPoint slide and on the slide showed them how to, in the proper procedure, the procedure we expected from them, how to put on their equipment and take it off. Then we would do a practical exercise out of the water with the balsa wood scuba tanks and then actually the real tanks as well but on land where you can

breathe as much as you want to and there's no stress whatsoever and then we would go to the pool and conduct that exercise there'd be a little bit of a time limit involved with that but it was a one to one student to instructor ratio the instructor does nothing more than observe the student in that environment and all we ask them to do is take their scuba gear off while underwater and put it back on Now, after that, once they have those fundamentals, we'd pair them up and we'd give them a set of scuba equipment. And when I'm saying scuba, we taught two different types of diving in second phase. We taught closed circuit diving, which means no bubbles escape and open circuit diving, which means the bubbles came to the surface. And this stuff, the gear that we taught on, Jacques Cousteau probably would have thought it was antiquated, but it worked good for our purposes.

So there was nothing high speed about this gear in the pool. So the second test, I'm sorry, the first test was you do everything with the ability to see. You take your gear off with a mask that you can see through and you put it back on. If you pass that test, we put tape on the inside of your mask and we turn it into a nighttime environment. And you do exactly the same skill, but this time you can't see. So it goes off of touch and touch alone. And actually most people improve when you take their vision away, especially in that test. They're much more smooth.

And again, as an instructor, I would stand on the ledge of the pool with my face in the water with a snorkel and I'd just watch the student perform. And any stress in that environment was completely self-induced. You pass those two tests, we pair you up with a swim buddy. Give you one piece of scuba gear to go between the two of you. You enter the water. You take the gear off of one student and you put it on to the other student. Buddy breathing, managing your breath holds, managing your time, managing your procedures and managing. managing your equipment. If you pass that, we repeat that test again with the dive mask blacked out

and continue on slowly building on individual fundamentals, then the team fundamentals between the two, and then we start introducing malfunctions into the equipment. And we can give them a little bit of a taste of what the practical exercise, the pool competency test, is going to be like. and then Thursday and Friday are completely dedicated to that pool competency test. Now, full disclosure, that test is pretty rough. And the vast majority of people, they do not pass their first attempt. As an instructor, I was very bounded in what I could do, the knots that I could tie. we would interrupt the breathing cycle, we would interrupt the exhalation cycle, we would

introduce malfunctions into the equipment that we expected the students to find via very procedural protocol and flow through the equipment, checking their gear. And the entire time, the goal of the instructor is to induce as much stress as possible with the goal of getting the student, to deviate from their mechanics. I can't make the student quit, but I can create an environment where fear or panic or that stress takes control

instead of the individual taking control of those things. And what ends up happening is they either bolt from the bottom of the pool and they try to rocket to the surface or they'll make a procedural error because they deviate from the mechanics because of how they feel, because of how the environment is making them feel. In both case, it terminates in a failure. And some students, I would say most students, their first attempt at the test, and to include myself, I didn't pass this test until my third

attempt when I was going through training. The first one was a train wreck. I might have lasted, I don't know, three minutes because I was nervous. I was scared. I had heard horror stories about the Now, all three of those things, we try to induce that into the students before they get there to that phase because that plays into our hand of can this person focus and operate in a stressful environment? First test is really difficult. I would say half of the class doesn't get the opportunity, or I'm sorry, it's not that they don't get the opportunity. They're not successful in completing the first two attempts at pool comp. After two attempts, you're done for the day. you go back, we review all of the standards, we review all of the procedures, all of the techniques,

and then we test again on Friday. Most of them pass on their third attempt. Very few I have found to actually be successful on their fourth because they're just amped out of their mind. And they're going into the pool with a pretty high resting heart rate, very nervous. They just can't hold their breath. and the world kind of comes collapsing in on them. And what's unfortunate is that if you can't successfully complete the test, there's a good chance you might actually get kicked out of training,

which sucks. I mean, that ends the dream of quite a few young men who have wanted nothing more to be a seal. And like I said, it sucks, but we're not looking for good people. We're looking for people who can perform. And at the end of that test, you have an individual who knows very little

about diving, absolutely nothing about modern diving gear, but can follow procedure, can follow protocol in an environment that they have no control over when they get to breathe. They're stuck and the only thing that they can do is maintain control of their self, their emotions, and their own headspace. It's a violent test. It's really hard to pass, but it is completely based on the fundamentals that we teach leading up to that final practical exercise. And that's the whole point of the story. We could easily take them after giving them a PowerPoint slide, throw them into the pool, and absolutely nobody would pass.

But that's not the point of the introduction and inoculation to the stress. Slow, strategic, incremental introduction to that stress that ramps up over time, building the individual's capacity. That's the point of stress tests. like I said earlier, I was a little bit surprised. And I guess I don't know why I should have been, but I just didn't spend much time thinking about it before, I guess. You know, that second phase pool comp test,

that's not the end of stress training in a seal career. That's the beginning. Like that's your initial steps along the way. And thinking back, we implemented tests of that nature in every block of training that I was ever involved in. And most of the time it showed itself in a combination of doing a physical requirement or a demand plus a skill. So we would have to do a shooting test with, you know, you're looking for accuracy and precision.

But we would do stuff to raise your maximum heart rate, whether that be dragging a tire or carrying a dummy or doing sprints or calisthenics or whatever it may be, something that raises you beyond your normal baseline of just standing there and shoot. We did it on medical drills. We would have, you would be doing, you know, clearance drills inside of an urban environment. You'd be inside of a building focusing on your tactics, your technique, and procedure to clear buildings. And you'd come into a room and there was a live tissue medical training scenario that occurred. And you had to switch your mentality from looking down the sites of your rifle to assessing a medical

problem and treating it on the spot. We did stress tests. when it came to memory drills. When I was going through sniper school, they call it a Kim's game where they'll lay out a, on a table, 10 items. And they'll give you, and they'll have a poncho liner over the top of it

or something like a blanket. They'll pull it back and you'll have 60 seconds to look at the items. And then they cover it back up and you need to remember all of those things. We did it in an academic perspective. One of the best examples I can think of is static line or any of the free fall jump mount

courses where it starts off again with a basic knowledge and understanding of what it is you're expected to do. And from the Jumpmaster perspective, you're required to ensure that people put their equipment on properly and then make sure that before they leave an aircraft in flight, you are actually over where you need to be, which you would think would be a hard mistake to make. You would be surprised. But in that academic perspective, you have to learn about all the malfunctions that can occur. And you practice time and time and time again looking at and looking through people who have equipment on looking for errors. And then at the end of it, you have to take a test. And it's been over a decade since I've taken this test. And so I might be getting

the details slightly wrong. But I remember being three jumpers in a different configuration with a very restricted timeline. And you could fail one of two ways. You could either miss, we call them gigs or deficiencies, or you could go over on the time, or you could actually do both. But just that compression of time in that academic environment creates all of this self-induced stressed. And what it almost cheats and makes your mind and your body want to do is deviate from that mechanic that you have learned. And as soon as you go down that road, you're in trouble, because the mechanics and the fundamentals are exactly that. They're the mechanics and the fundamentals. And especially if you're doing a jump master inspection, if you deviate from the way that

you've been taught and you skip from one area to the next without looking for what you need to look, I mean, it's amazing. They would always hide the gigs in exactly that spot and people would fail, not because they didn't know what to do, but because that artificial stress that was all imposed from a stopwatch forced them or didn't force them. They deviated from what they knew they should have done, because of that self-induced stress. And in the end, it terminated it in a failure. Another example of self-induced stress that I saw time and time again, and this device has unraveled me on more than one occasion,

is the shot timer. And we use this on shooting drills. And all a shot timer is, it does two things. One of them is it beeps. And the second thing it does is it records time, how much time from the first beep to your first shot and all the subsequent shots until your last one. So you can get a variety of times from it. You know, if you were doing a pistol drill, you can hit the button, it beeps, how much time to get to your holster and get your first round fired,

and then how much time from that first round until your last one. And I've never seen a device that has more impact on mechanics. and in an attempt to increase speed, people start making stuff up on the fly. And like I said, I've been completely guilty of this many times in my career. You're standing there. You know what to do. You're getting ready to go. Nothing has changed from the practice that you've done,

except for the fact that somebody is standing next to you with a box that's probably six inches long and four inches thick. It's right next to your ear and your heart rate is already higher because you know, now it's a test. Now it actually matters. I have to go as fast as I can. Plus, your peers are probably watching you. They hit that button, beep, it goes off. And you just start seeing these wild departures and deviations from the mechanics that usually terminates in a slower time or failure. And at that point, that's where your true baseline is determined. It doesn't matter how good you can do something in a non-stressed environment

because at least in my own experience I've never gone out the door of my house without having some level of stress interjected into my life usually from other people maybe it's in traffic maybe it's at the airport and there's a line of people behind me

and I'm trying to get my stuff out of my backpack have you ever seen any I see it all the time when I travel people freaking out at the conveyor belt trying to get their backpack in their toothpaste in their Ziploc bag out of their back

backpack or their suitcase and get it on the conveyor belt. They're sweating. They're shaking. They're not used to dealing with stress because they've probably avoided it their entire life instead of going at it and teaching yourself how to develop and function in those environments. Because in stress, that's where you find your true baseline. And that's the value of those stress tests. So when you have that shot timer to go back to the range, you're doing great on the range when there is no time constriction and then your mechanics start falling apart a little bit as that time constriction comes back. So you need to back off that stress, focus on your mechanics more, and keep pushing your tolerance forward and forward and forward incrementally at a structured

approach. So the next time that beep goes off, you perform better. And then once you can get yourself to that place where you're performing really well with that shot timer going, then you start pushing the speed. You don't create any new technique or mechanic. you just start trying to go through those proper mechanics faster, but you have to take a systematic approach to it. So everything I just talked about was very specific to my old career. And those stress tests make sense for what I used to do, because like I mentioned, it's a hostile working environment.

And I'm sure people right now are thinking, okay, that's cool, that's great, that's what you guys did, but I work in a suit and tie, and what in the hell does that have to do with me? I work in the business world. Well, I got some examples that may work for you as well. And hopefully by now you realize the importance of actually challenging not only yourself, but the people that you work for in an environment to find that true baseline. So if you're in a mill fire, LEO first responder environment, you're probably already doing stress tests of some kind.

I would be shocked in this day and age if it's not part of your selection process or your, or your training protocol, whether that be on a weekly or a semi-annual or a quarterly, whatever it may be. I would be surprised if you're not doing it already. If you're not, though, I would absolutely recommend that you start. And I would say, for one, don't get out of control with it. Start with just, you know, taking some tasks that you have at your job and doing them at a heart rate that is near maximal, if not maximal. And however you want to get there in those environments, fire mill, LEO, the best way to do it is just some type of physical task, right?

Go and do some exercise with some dumbbells. Throw your gas mask on and start sprinting. Whatever it is, it's not that hard to get your heart rate near maximal, then go into an environment where you have a completely different stimulus and challenge. So pair that physical challenge with a skill. So what about everybody else, right? That's the easy section because those jobs will be. considered physical in nature. How do you do stress testing? How do you inoculate your people from stress in the business world? Well, first, you're a little bit more limited with your options.

I would not recommend going and getting diving equipment and taking a group of people that work in an office space to a pool and tying knots in their breathing lines. If you are going to do that, please get a hold of me. I would love to come watch and perhaps document. but I'm still going to recommend against it. In business, I think the most effective and important tool that you have, again, in a controlled environment that is structured, the most effective tool that you're going to have in that environment is time. You need to find a way to first determine what are the fundamentals of your career path.

And then second, create a testing environment where you can modulate the time available to utilize those fundamentals and challenge your people. Nearly every corporation, if not every corporation that I've ever worked with, has some type of onboarding program or yearly training. Like I said, whether it's quarterly, biannual, whatever it may be. That's your opportunity to teach the fundamentals and your opportunity to reinforce them if it's a retraining type cycle. An example that I've seen work,

extremely well and highlight deficiencies in individuals that before this exercise were thought to be the rock stars. And after the exercise, the leadership was scratching their head a little bit is a presentation, creation, and delivery on limited time. And again, this should be on the core competes or competencies or fundamentals that these individuals have been trained on and are expected to be able to utilize in their day-to-day career field. Think of a topic that you could challenge your people with and task them with creating and then delivering a presentation, but find a timeline to allot them for that

that would be extremely difficult for them to complete it in. And I would also say there's an argument to be made for giving them a time window that it is impossible for them to actually finish the presentation 100%. And the reason I'll say that is with an impossible timeline, you're going to see how well your people can adapt,

how much they can prioritize information, and how much they can innovate and think on the fly. Some people have an innate ability to do this, and a lot of it comes from experience and the ability to just trim away the BS they don't need to focus on. Some people do not. And what you'll find with those people

is that they will crumble, and then they're going to freeze. Now again, the goal isn't necessarily to make them fail, even though I do think it is important to take people to failure every so often just to show them the consequences of becoming, as an example, overwhelmed or a lack of ability to prioritize or a lack of ability to process the correct information. if your goal is to take them there once to show them the dangers of returning there, I think an argument can be made.

And that's what's going to happen if you don't give them enough time to successfully complete it. You're going to have a great ability to talk about all of those things and the impact that they have. Combined with the restricted timeline and the impossible timeline, again, as just one example, what you're going to get is a window into the real world of readiness of your people. And performance under pressure, which is, I mean, let's be honest, that's what matters. People who can perform with no pressure, that's great in a controlled and contrived environment. I don't know anywhere on earth that has one of those things, specifically and especially

the business world where, you know, there's other corporations, countries, and entities that are damn near doing battle with you. They're not going to give you that controlled and contrived environment. You need people that can perform in that world. not the world of no stress, no consequence. It just doesn't exist. Bottom line, find a way to test skill and knowledge in a controlled training environment. Now, I think I just spent about 20 minutes talking about the stress tests we did in the military and some stuff you can do in the business world. And I haven't even answered the essence of the question that got asked to me. So to

paraphrase, this individual said they get overly anxious or stressed when dealing or when being in a confrontational situation with another person. So I have to make a couple assumptions here. The first assumption I'll make is that I'm assuming this person means a physical confrontation. Because I look at this, there's two aspects. There's a verbal interaction in confrontation, and then there's a physical interaction in confrontation. I think they're very different. On the verbal side, I would say you're talking about a disagreement, perhaps, an argument,

or maybe it's just you have an idea that is different from the norm and you're in an environment or with an individual that you feel would be challenged by that idea. My advice in those situations, for one, don't avoid them. Address it head on. If you are uncomfortable talking to someone and I can definitely speak from my own experience when it comes to this. If I'm concerned about a conversation or I like, just the feeling in my stomach like,

oh man, I hope I don't run into fill in the blank. It's probably for a reason. There's probably something unsaid that needs to be said. And there might be some gravity or importance to that interaction that I've been avoiding. Don't get me wrong. I've avoided confrontation and interaction plenty of times in my life.

I can't think of how that really worked out well for me. So I would advise that you not do that. So what am I really saying? Yeah, you need to do the hard thing. You need to package and present your point, your idea, your thought to the individual or the group. You need to step up and you need to say what needs to be said. What if the person you're talking to doesn't like it? Well, what if they escalate it? Well, you can't do anything about that. You can control one half of that equation and that half is yourself. So, Be the bigger person and de-escalate it. It doesn't really matter if you're right. And actually doesn't really matter at all if you're right. If you can't get your point across and deliver it to somebody and hopefully get information through their ears into their mind and get them thinking in the manner that you're thinking. When I say de-escalate from my own experience, I don't know how many times I've done this and I probably owe my wife quite a few apologies.

but when people are upset, don't tell them to calm down. That is the number one way to escalate somebody who has already pissed off. Well, my wife tells me, hey, just calm down. What's my response? I am calm, God damn it. Except I'm not calm. So don't go that route. Be the bigger person.

If somebody is losing their emotional cool, what I would recommend is they escalate, you de-escalate. Maybe you need to step away and come back again. Maybe you need to step away and give them some time to think about what it is that you're saying, getting into a shouting match, it's not going to work. So just don't do it. Be the bigger person. Maybe you need to walk away. Okay. So now on to what I think the question was actually about physical confrontation with another human being. All I can really say is that if you are concerned with or you're anxious about physical confrontation with another person,

and maybe it's because you feel like you don't know how to handle yourself, or you've never been in a situation like that, and you don't know how you're going to react. Or maybe you're just really adverse to physical confrontation and violence. Whatever it may be, if there's anxiety or stress that's involved with that, the only way that you will ever get, I don't want to say used to, but the only way that you will ever become even remotely comfortable with those situations is to experience them. Now, I am not saying go out and get into fights. That's actually the

last thing that I'm saying. Because what I think you'll find is the more comfortable you become with physical interaction, the less likely you will actually be to fight. The people that I know who can fight the best are the least likely to actually engage into a fight. So if you want to experience this and test yourself, what you need to do is you have to go find other. witting participants. And there are plenty of avenues to do that. Go find a controlled environment. You can go to a Brazilian jiu jitzy class. You could go to a boxing class. I mean, if you've never been hit in the face really hard, I'm going to tell you right now from personal experience, when it happens for the first time, it's a little startling. And the person that you

think that you might be when that happens may not end up being the person that you are. It's better to find that out before it happens in the street, and I hope that it never happens to anybody in the street. But it does happen. Be prepared. You need to go seek out anything that can help expose you to pain, discomfort, and struggle with another human being. Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking right now. Marriage. But that's not what I'm talking about.

Marriage is more mental than physical. And the solution to that is at your corner liquor store. All right? It's a joke. So please don't take that too seriously. And if I go missing, please suspect my wife of murder. If you go down that route, and like I said, I already recommend that you do, please don't confuse bar fights with BJJ classes.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that just because you go to a boxing class or whatever, whatever it is you decide to do. Just please make sure you always understand there's a difference between those environments and to an environment, like I said, in a bar that can get completely out of control. And especially with the introduction of alcohol is not boundary by any logical laws or reason. When it comes to physical altercations, I'm going to give the same advice that I give for the verbal altercation. You know, it takes two to get into a fight. and just be the bigger person. And I'm dead serious when I say that the more you expose yourself to those types of

visceral physical experiences, the more comfortable you become in your own ability, the less likely that you're going to want to actually engage with anybody in those types of environments. So just de-escalate it. I would rather walk away from a fight than engage in one. You got to be the bigger person and just de-escalate it. I mean, I don't know how many times I have bought somebody a beer at a bar who is getting mad.

And you could tell that, you know, who knows what everybody else is experiencing their life? You have no idea what's happening inside of somebody else's skin and inside of somebody else's head. They could be coming off the worst day of their life. They could be picking for a fight. Somebody wants to get rude with you. You know what in your bar, buy them a beer and walk away. Somebody wants to say something insulting to you, who cares? It's just words.

Walk away. If it doesn't meet your threshold, and by a threshold, I mean the line in the sand that you have where you're going to take action. And I hope that that threshold isn't an insult or somebody being rude or somebody being offensive to you. Largely what I'm talking about is, you know, people with drunk behavior, weigh the cost of getting involved in those situations. If it doesn't meet your threshold, just be the bigger person and walk away. Do the hard thing. Take the insult. Live to fight another day.

But hopefully you don't have to. And so that's it on stress testing and inoculation, right? If you want to call it inoculation, it has to be that structured approach. And I think there's something there for everybody. It doesn't matter what you do. There's value to seeking out that stress, to seeking out that adaptation. that comes from operating in that environment. But before you do that, focus on the fundamentals, build,

and then over time, you'll be amazed at how far long you can get in your process. Okay, the second question I got, and again, I'm going to paraphrase here a little bit, but this was from a guy named Marco. He asked if I could talk a little bit about leaving an organization that you believed in, that you were all in at and that you know now is all talk. The email was a little bit longer and it described a situation where a group of employees sounds like they feel betrayed by somebody who was their friend but also their boss and had worked together for a long period of time.

If I had to boil that down to one thing, what I would say, is to me that sounds like a failure in leadership. And on that note, what I'll say is that the best leadership lessons I have ever learned are from watching other people do it wrong. And I know that that does not make this an easier pill to swallow for the guy that sent out this email, but those lessons and those examples of people doing things that are wrong and incorrect, especially in leadership, are so blatantly obvious. And every time they happen, it's an example and a reinforcement of how you can never go down that path. And I have notebooks from when my time in the military that I wrote things down, examples of great things that I saw and examples of mistakes that I saw made or mistakes that I made that I didn't want to repeat.

And it was far easier for me to write down examples of things, especially in leadership that I saw that were wrong. It's actually really hard for me to pinpoint great leadership because those people just, seem to flow and function. They just seem to do. So it sounds like the situation that occurred, and I actually have no details on what the situation is, but it sounds like it sucks. But it made me think. And I think every organization has two faces. One face is how they, one of you, viewed by the public, right? Their external face. And then the internal, the reality of what it's actually like. And I would suspect, maybe not always, but probably nearly always, the external picture is prettier than the internal. I'm going to use the SEAL teams as an example.

There have been a ton of books and movies and TV shows about the SEAL teams. The vast majority of the time, it's about brotherhood and sacrifice and honor and service. And that's the the external message that the SEAL teams want portrayed. And then there's the internal, where it is the most vicious, eat your own, sometimes narcissistic, power hungry, hypocritical organization of individuals and the infighting is unbelievable. Now, not always and not everybody, but both of those things exist. And I'd like to think we live up to the external portrait much more often than the internal, but they both exist. The best leaders that I ever worked for were in the SEAL teams.

The worst leaders and some of the worst people that I've ever been around were in the SEAL teams. So here is the myth that is oftentimes sold. It'll be pitched to you as an individual that you're irreplaceable. that the team is going to suffer without you. The team needs you. And then there's the reality. What the team actually needs is a warm body with a pulse. And if it's not yours, they're going to find another one.

And there's a lesson to be learned in that. As much as it sucks, there's a lesson to be learned in that. And hopefully you only have to learn it once. And it's this. If you ever get to a point where you actually believe that myth, where you think that you're irreplaceable, it's very likely that you're irrelevant. Be very cautious.

at arriving at that place. So to dig into the question a little bit here, and this is farther down where he was talking about, he felt betrayed by somebody who he thought was his friend, but also his boss. And that sentence in and of itself is very, it's telling. And it's difficult to be a friend and a boss. And there's no better example than the military. You know, your boss, by definition or by title, they serve an organization. Friends, I mean, to me, friends transcend the work environment.

And there could be potential family ties and connections. You know, one is your 9 to 5 in air quotes and one of them is the rest of your life. And in the military, you know, in some positions, you could be tasked with maneuvering or asking the people that you are very close with into positions that are inherently dangerous. You have to maintain your objectivity and make the correct, unbiased decision. And unfortunately, that does not sound like what happened in this situation. Based on the limited description you gave me in the email, my initial thought, to be totally honest,

is perhaps you guys weren't as close to friends as initially thought. Or the person that you're talking about, he or she, they didn't do the hard thing. They did the easy thing. And as much as it sucks to say, it is the truth. There's some horrible people in the world. And power, money, fame,

even though I have absolutely no experience with any of those things, I've seen the impact that it's had on some people. And when it comes to power, you can easily equate that to a leadership position or being a boss. And what I've found that all of those things to be are amplifiers. Let's use money as an example.

If you are somebody who is a good person with morals and values and honor and integrity, and you come into an insane amount of money, and I've seen this happen to a few people, it is an amplifier for those things. And it gives you an enhanced breadth and debt. depth of being able to impact others with those values and virtues. And on the other side of that coin is the individual who might portray themselves to everyone is being full of values and virtues. But inside, they're the exact opposite of that. Well, the money also amplifies that internal drive of who you are.

And instead of enhancing the lives of those around you, what it does is it exposes under a spotlight who you actually and really are. I've worked for an individual who was like that, who was at the apex of an organization that claimed to be one thing, but internally stood for something else, especially at the very top. And it was frustrating. And I was angry when I left. And probably the most overwhelming sense that I felt was that I wanted to get revenge. And if you're feeling like this right now, my advice to you for what it's worth, don't do it. I know with a place that you're at right now and that your coworkers are in and it sucks, that it can totally drain all your motivation for just about everything else that you want to do in life because I've experienced it myself. It can ruin your

perspective on mankind and it can give you some trust issues. You got to fight all of those things. what you need to do and the only thing that you really can do is close the door on what happened in the past, pick yourself up and move on. Every second you spend thinking about what happened or being upset about what happened or being frustrated about what happened is a second waste that you could be using to move forward. And as much as it sucks, I think everybody needs to get kicked right in the teeth at least once. because you learn and you learn how to pick yourself up. You learn how to pick, you know, deal with adversity. You learn how to maneuver and get back on the course that you want to be on. And more importantly, it gives you that sick to your stomach feeling that you can remember.

And if you're ever in a position where you're in charge or you're the leader, or you have a chance to make the decision that somebody made that had a drastic and negative impact on your life, you can remember that. And you can protect the people that work for you and do the job of the leader, which is, you know, taking care of the people that work for them. Remember the mistakes that were made. And just try not to repeat them. It's a very simple concept, but it's not easy.

But it's the only thing you can do. And that's episode 18. Thank you again. supporting their reviews are awesome thank you for taking the time and go in and writing those if you haven't written a review or if you have any feedback please reach out to me if you got negative feedback put it up on the review platforms just like the positive i want to hear good bad ugly and indifferent please my goal is to make this as good as possible i find this process to be wildly rewarding because it challenges me to really drill in and think about my beliefs and

hopefully narrow them down into an articulation that makes sense in at least a somewhat concise manner. I really enjoy the process. I think next week he doesn't know this yet, but I'm going hunting with Dudley. We're going to do a little bit of podcasting. So Dudley, you're on notice. I'm bringing the stuff. But until then, I will see you all later.

See you.