Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 7

Episode Date: July 24, 2017

The three most impactful changes/improvements to the SEAL Teams post September 11th, 2001. You might think I am talking about SEAL stuff, but remove the term SEAL, and think about the changes from the perspective of your own organization, regardless of what you do, and the sector. Effective leadership, and when to start thinking and acting like a leader.

What's going on, everybody? So last week, I said that I was going to be able to, in the very near future, sit down and be able to talk with some people. And I spent last week on the road, and I was hoping to get the chance, but that shit didn't happen. So life threw me some lemons. I'm going to try to make apple pie out of it. So for this week, it's going to be just me again. I'm going to keep it short and sweet. I'm going to answer one question from the internet and finish up talking about just my thoughts on leadership.

So here we go, right into it, episode seven. Okay, got the red smoke. Okay, copy. Where's the smoke? I'm looking at danger close now. Oh, one a minute. The one and only question from the internet today is going to be, what are the three biggest changes slash improvements that you saw in the SEAL teams post 9-11? So first, I can only answer for myself.

I speak for myself only. I'm not authorized to speak for the SEAL teams and everything that I'm about to say is purely 100% my opinion. So I had to think about this one and I wrote it out because there were substantial changes from pre-9-11 to post-9-11. And in order, here we go. So the number one change that I noticed was in communication. And by that I mean communication throughout the community. So pre-9-11, the only term that I think is accurate for the SEAL teams would be siloed. We were walled off, even though the distance between the seal teams on the West Coast,

if you suck at golf and had a pitching wedge, you could still hit Team 1 from Team 3 and Team 5 from Team 3. Super close together. In a couple instances, they're just separated by a fence. But that fence in that time period was more than a physical boundary. There were regional specific skills that were focused on. for each SEAL team. So I started my career at SEAL Team 5, and we focused on Asia, Southwest Asia. We were worried, not worried, we were focused on Korea specifically. So the first trips that I ever did in the SEAL teams were over to an exercise called Foul Eagle, which occurs every single

year in South Korea, working with the ROC SEALs or the South Korean SEAL unit. And I actually did that exercise multiple times throughout my career. But the point being is that I was only there with Seal Team 5 guys. So just down the street from Seal Team 5 in Coronado is Seal Team 3. And those guys were very focused on the desert. So they were driving around in these awesome dune buggies called DPVs or Desert Patrol vehicles. Think about mounting a 50 cow on top of a dune buggy. It's pretty awesome, I know. And these guys were getting after it in the desert. So they had different uniforms. We kind of had the same weapon systems, but they were focusing their training in different directions. While they were out in the desert, you know, my platoon is up in Kodiak, Alaska, going through

cold weather training, driving zodiacs out in the ocean, doing over the horizon, over the beach operations, swimming through the surf in dry suits, taking those off on the beach, sending lead climbers up a cliff, fixing ropes, bringing everybody up, throwing on a set of overwhites. And if you don't know what that is, it's, I guess it's exactly what it's, I guess it's exactly what It sounds like it's a pair of white clothing that you put top and bottom so you can blend into the snow, doing multiple mile foot patrols into the snow, you know, survival in those conditions, avalanche mitigation and rescue, setting up tents. I mean, it was some of the best and coolest training that I've ever done and, you know,

camping in the backcountry in Alaska. But only Team 5 was there. You know, Team 3 wasn't there. And then Team 1, I think, at the time, was focusing on Jungle operations. So long wind and explanation to the fact that we were very siloed. And there was not a lot of cross-pollination of information or tactics or gear in between those commands, even though, like I said, they were literally separated just by a fence. That fence was a impenetrable boundary for a variety of reasons. Probably the main one is that we were always internally competing because we didn't

have an enemy to fight, so we fought each other. And I mean that in a good-natured way, but there was an essence of competition. And at that time, pre-9-11, the team three guys were doing some shipboarding in the Middle East, and that was as close to combat as anybody had seen. And it was, yeah, I was jealous, for sure. There was an essence of jealousy, so I wasn't going to share with them a damn thing that we were up to. And most of those guys, not all of them, they weren't sharing a damn thing with what they were up to either. In the end, we all are still tasked with doing the same job, but we were using a, we were using a different language. Okay, so 9-11 hits, right? That's pre-9-11 into the way that SEAL teams were structured. I forgot to mention as well, there's also the East Coast.

So I can only speak to what I saw happening on the West Coast SEAL teams. I have a very limited knowledge of what was going on on the East Coast, other than that regional specificity still was occurring. Team 4 was doing like jungle anti-drug interdiction. I remember Team 2 was like the premier cold weather team, Nordic skiing, working with people from Europe. A lot of stuff going on. None of those things made it their way back to Team 5 other than in just talking about it in conversation. Okay. Fast forward to 9-11 and we have all of these commands or multiple commands that had been focusing on specific mission sets and specific. areas of the world now coming together in an area of the world that I would say probably none of the

commands had focused on to any degree. And we were expected to work together seamlessly as a team. And I'm not going to say it was catastrophic, but I'll say there were hiccups. It's like somebody learning how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. The gear shifter going in between the gears wasn't always smooth and there was a little bit of grinding along the way. Don't get me wrong, we did our job when we were able to accomplish our job. But it was an odd experience to come together. You know, when people think of seals, they just think of one large organization. Another person or people that I found often thought like that at that time were the battle space owners that we worked for. They weren't interested in an explanation of, oh, well, we're an East Coast SEAL team and they're a

West Coast SEAL team and yes we can do the job but here's the differences and this is why we talk about ourselves one way and they talk about themselves and another yeah they're not interested in that the person that you work for is interested in symmetry not gears grinding so we had to figure our stuff we had to figure our own stuff out and we did that from a doctrinal level from the way that we communicate internally from the way that we describe our rank structure and organization so when we're speaking externally, it made sense to other people. By that, I mean, pre-9-11, the seal teams were very blue, meaning we were very Navy-centric. We kind of, I think, in my opinion, operated like we were a little bit of a fishbowl. And then there was the Marine Corps,

right? They were very red. Then there was the Army. They were very green. And all of those elements spoke that language. So Marine Corps spoke red, Army spoke green. We spoke blue. And you can just imagine coming into a room and people focusing on trying to achieve the end state that you want, but using slightly different language and how much miscommunication could occur because of that and unintentionally. Now, if you fast forward to 2017, I would describe the world as gray. All of those colors have combined, and it's a much more seamless and efficient and effective. I can look at somebody's uniform and tell what their rank is and where they fall into their own rank and file organization, just like anybody else who's familiar with the military rank system, can look

inward into the SEAL teams, and we're all on the same page. It made it much better just by kind of cleaning up our language and embracing the fact that we don't operate in a fishbowl, we need to operate in that greater environment. We did not have that mindset pre-9-11. And we go all the way to, you know, as far as communication goes and making sure that tactics are spread throughout the community is a biannual meeting where both the east and west coast come together. at a location, generally in the middle of the country, and they sit down and they talk about, you know, everything new that's up and coming, everything's current, trends that they're seeing, all with the goal of making one cohesive fighting unit. So when a boss or a battle space owner

gets a seal element or a unit overseas, if they come from the East Coast or the West Coast, it's one organism and they know the end state that you're able to achieve. So number two, the second biggest change that I saw in the SEAL teams post 9-11 was in the space of training and equipment. So pre-9-11, you know, after Vietnam, before 9-11, there were, you know, there were a couple things that occurred and there was a little bit of combat. I have to use that in air quotes because some communities saw much more than the SEAL teams did.

The SEAL teams didn't see much combat. A couple people saw combat in a few environments. but largely there was 30 years of peace. When I got under the SEAL teams, incredibly highly motivated individuals who were dedicated to training, who were dedicated to mastering their craft, for lack of a better term,

but they were totally untested. So everything was hypothetical. There was one or two people still active in the SEAL teams from Vietnam. They were the only ones who could speak from any level of authority about actually experiencing combat. For the rest of us, to include the senior guys that were in my first platoon, they understood the concepts, but they had never practically executed them. And we spent a lot of time focusing on our legacy missions.

Now, a legacy mission, the description I'm going to give it, is a role in responsibility that was critical in the formation of an element. So for the SEAL teams, we draw our origins from the UDT teams or underwater demolition teams. And one of their first missions was to survey beach landings, literally cover themselves in axle grease and throw on a Jacques Cousteau mask, swim around in the ocean in places where there were going to be amphibious landings. And they had a string with a piece of lead attached to it and a slate that they could ride on. and they would as an element take a sounding on the depth of the water. So you're looking for coral reefs or things that might impede landing craft. You're looking for mines.

You're looking for obstacles. And then you can go back in and destroy those things. But first, before you could destroy them, obviously you have to find them. So that was a legacy mission of the UDT, critical in their formation. And that was a legacy mission inside of the SEAL teams as well. Right before 9-11, in both of the platoons that I did pre-9-11, we were doing beach surveys. We would go out as an element with lead lines,

that string and the lead attached to it and a piece of plexiglass on your wrist and a grease pencil, and we would take soundings. And we wouldn't spend too much time on it, but we were still doing those things in the days and weeks and months leading up until 9-11.

So we focused a lot of our stuff on legacy missions. And a lot of the training that we did because the last sustained combat the community saw was in view. Vietnam, many of our tactics were focused on the Vietnam environment, jungle environment, much less in urban terrain, especially the urban terrain that we were going to rapidly encounter post-9-11, much less training in vehicles, less training out of helicopters. So we were training in the rear view mirror, which the training was great, and we were

definitely a capable element. but the individuals, the tactics, and the equipment, pre-9-11, they were untested. 30 years of being untested. So if you fast forward now, post-9-11, the change that I saw is a willingness in the community to take an objective look at the training that we did. And to look at the legacy missions, the legacy equipment, which was driven off the missions that we thought we were going to be tasked with, right? you equip yourself based on what you think you're going to be asked to do.

It was a willingness to to objectively look at how we were training, objectively look at our gear and then to change things to make sure that they meet the modern day battlefield. We train smarter. So, and I've talked about this a little bit in a previous podcast, when I came into the SEAL teams, I went through BUDs, which is the filter into the SEAL teams, stands for basic underwater demolition seal. You're not a seal when you get out of buds.

you have years of training and practice before you become very proficient. But at a minimum, you have 12 to 18 months of individual training that you're going to do at your SEAL team and then you test to get your trident, which is the pin they put on your chest that signifies that you're actually a SEAL. When I got in, each individual SEAL team conducted that training. So the SEAL Team three guys who were focused more on the desert environment, when they were getting their trident and getting tested on their knowledge, it was in that environment. The SEAL Team 1 guys, if they were focusing on jungle stuff, their test would have more jungle-specific job, mission set specific stuff than mine did.

And that changed after 9-11 because the siloing of information and the siloing of tactics and everybody focusing on one precise thing or one precise area instead of focusing on their general ability, I would say it was slightly detrimental. So they changed it. Now when you graduate buds, whether you're going to go to an East Coast SEAL team or a West Coast SEAL team, your training continues as a unit. And everybody, I don't know the exact structure of it, but I know that everybody goes up to Kodiak, Alaska, and everybody gets baseline cold weather training. And that training up there is amazing. Then you come back to San Diego and you all learn how to static line jump. Then everybody learns how to free fall jump. And then the training

continues on for months, and at the end of that training, every individual that's coming out of there has a baseline set of skills, a baseline set of knowledge, and they get their trident at the end of that training block. So when you show up at your SEAL team, you are already a SEAL, which is a completely different paradigm than when I came in. I've heard arguments from guys saying that they like it or they don't like it. I'm sure there's pros and cons to it. But I would say the biggest pro is that you know what you're getting when it comes to the SEAL team. You're not getting somebody who knows a lot about the desert and not much about a high elevation,

high angle terrain and cold weather. Everybody should be able to do the same stuff. And given the world that we're in where you don't know where you're going to get deployed or where you're going to get tasked to go or who you're going to get tasked to go with, I think it serves the teams much better that if you had an East Coast team and a West Coast team link up somewhere unknown, you're all operating off the same playbook. Another great shift that came with the training and equipment side of the house was guys were now deploying to combat environments, and they were coming back and they were populating the training cells that were training the rest of the SEAL teams. So instead of having a hypothesis about a tactic, we began to be trained by our own people. who had proven whether or not the tactic worked in real life, and that became the litmus test.

So we objectively looked at our training and started checking things off. Does this work or doesn't? Should we change this or should we leave it be? Could it be refined or could it be improved? And without that combat experience, it was all hypothesis. You know, 30 years of basing most of your training off of maritime and jungle environment isn't the best way. to train for an urban environment in downtown Baghdad or an incredibly high altitude environment up in the Hindukush mountain ranges of northeastern Afghanistan. So we needed those people to come back

and we needed that information to come back into the SEAL teams and filter all the way down to the lowest level, which it did. And again, another thing that really helped with that was the combining of all that training post-buds. So people were getting the real spit from downrange as soon as they got out of buds. And when they got to the team, in my opinion,

they were a more capable combat fighting force because of it. At the end of the day, the community showed a willingness to change and objectively look at how we did business. We played the hand that we were dealt instead of trying to force the world into what we had been practicing and training for for the previous three decades.

And because of that, we were extremely effective at what we were trying to do. So I can kind of tie points one and two together. So our communication changed and the way that we trained change and the litmus test that we use change. And what was the end result of that? And so previously, right, we were siloed and we trained specifically for what we thought we were going to do. Fast forward, we were more open and trained for a broad set of skills that the world was challenging us with. What was the difference between the two?

Well, the modern day seal teams, in my opinion, are substantially more effective. and substantially more lethal as a fighting force because of that. We broke down the internal boundaries and barriers inside of our own organization, and because of it, we're substantially better than we were in the pre-9-11 era, in my opinion. So number three, and I struggle with this one a little bit. I don't know if I'm going to do it justice on exactly how I feel, but the third change of many changes that I've noticed in the SEAL teams is an increase in the number of people who are seeking recognition or fame or money or fill in the

blank that you feel would be the most appropriate for their time as a seal or for their actions when they were a part of the seal team and I don't know what caused it and I know internally inside of the seal teams it is not well received and now being on the outside for just over four years now, it's very interesting to watch. The velocity with which the number of individuals going down this route seems to be exponentially increasing, even though the response to it inside of the SEAL teams and from the SEAL community seems to be extremely negative. And I don't know what caused it. I don't know if it's because after 30 years of peace, guys have more to talk about because now that they have been tested and they've gone overseas and they

is it an insatiable desire to talk about what you've done? I don't know. That could be a part of it. Is it an easier time because of outlets like social media? You know, you can just take a picture of yourself. And this I see all the time from people still in the military, taking pictures of themselves from overseas and posting it on social media. And to depart for a second where I was going to go with this,

if you're that person doing that or you're thinking about doing it, don't. There's no positive upside to that. There's only negative consequences. So do yourself a favor and leave the selfie stick at home when you go overseas. The posting pictures that you took from overseas while your home is another issue in and of itself. But please, for the love of God, do your job when you're overseas and stay off of Facebook. Sorry. So back to what I was talking about.

So easier outlets or is it a cultural shift? Is that just the way things are now? Or is there an increased appetite from the American populace that wants to hear about the things that were happening overseas? I don't know at the end of the day. But I think it's, I think it can be problematic for a couple reasons. The biggest one is if you're not from the community and you didn't live that life for a good period of time, and you just pick up a book, any given book that has a trident on it, you are completely susceptible to being snowballed.

You have no idea as to whether or not what's written in that book is accurate or true or the individual who wrote it has any level of moral integrity whatsoever. Because right now, again, my opinion, I see more books being written on combat than actual combat ever experienced. Just because it has a trident on the book cover doesn't mean that what's going to follow in the pages of that book is true at all. Just like, just because somebody is wearing a trident on their uniform, doesn't mean that they are a good person.

Unfortunately, for most people, you guys have no baseline, and it's impossible for you to tell who's, who's, in air quotes, legitimate and who is not, because it's slightly subjective, right? The SEAL community internally has their own dialogue about the people who go from internal to that community and the quiet professional, defining the quiet professional to the external of the community and being, I don't want to say a loud mouthpiece, but they're vocal about the things that most are not used to hearing. So I fall into that category as well too. I believe in standing in judgment of my own community and I try to be very

careful about the things that I say. I try to be very careful to always say that I'm speaking from my opinion and I don't speak for the SEAL teams, but there may be people who have a problem with what I do as well. I mean, I've never written a book, but I have a blog. I have this podcast. Yeah, and it might not be well received. And if it isn't, I'm open to hearing those things because I'd rather portray the SEAL teams in a positive light with accuracy and integrity than make shit up to try to get people to pay attention. So when it comes to that, right? What's the value of war stories?

My answer to that is very simple. There is none. War stories are good for entertainment. And if you want to be entertained, go to a war movie, go pick up the vast majority of the books, and look at it purely as that as entertainment, not as a chronological history or an accurate reflection of what the SEAL teams are. There's another side of the war stories, and that's the experience and the lessons learned from them. Those have impact. They have impact on leaders. They have impact on organizations. They have impact on personal lives. but you can impart those lessons and those experiences largely without just, you know, starting off with a classic seal beginning to any story.

And it goes like this. So no shit. There we were. I swear to God, a lot of people, to include myself that started off stories like that. And everything that follows after that is a story. So take it as a story.

You don't need those things to impart lessons learned on people. You need to provide some context, but it shouldn't be about the story. It should be about the lesson. Again, in my opinion. So there has been a huge shift. And like I said, I don't know what caused it. But if you're listening to this, just be cautious with how much weight you put into what other people say or what they write.

Take everything with a grain of salt. The seal teams, they're not about books. The seal teams, at the end of the day, their essence is about teams flourishing in high risk, high consequences. time critical environments. And those lessons, I think it's critical that they get imparted because they apply directly to business and personal life, just like all three points, right, that I've covered on the changes that I saw post 9-11. Communication throughout your community.

Think about that from a perspective of being in business, breaking down the silos and having communication between elements that you may not think would have a direct impact on each other. You might be surprised, you know? training and equipment, take an objective look at how you do things and why you do them. If the answer is we do them this way because that's how we've always done it, you know, consider taking a more real-world approach to it and have the litmus test be whether or not it meets the criteria of the real-life challenges.

And then number three, you know, keep an eye on your people and make sure that you as a leader are facilitating environment that is based off of the team as opposed to the me. So all three of those changes point me directly to where I want to finish today, and that's just talking for a little bit about leadership. This is the topic that I am most commonly asked about, and I'm most commonly asked to speak about when it comes to getting in front of organizations and teams. And again, just like I think the lessons in the changes of the modern-day seal team are applicable to almost every aspect of life outside of the military, I think that leadership is exactly the same way. So at the end of the day, there are only two types of leadership. I know there's a variety of different jobs. I know there's a variety of different sectors, but there are two types of leadership.

There is good leadership, which is effective, and there's bad leadership, which is ineffective. And that's it. I don't care what your job is. I don't care what your role is. Anything outside of those two is an excuse. Now, I understand that there are different ways to lead, but you're living. leadership should be judged against those two criteria, good and effective or bad and ineffective. So leadership, it's about empowering people that work for you. It is not about telling people what to do.

And I'm going to repeat that because I see this time and time again. Leadership is about empowering people that work for you. It is not about telling people what you want them to do. And as far as style, of leadership or types of leadership or ways to lead people, I would say that there are two ways. The first way is you can push your people. And by push people, I mean externally imposed discipline upon them. Or another word for that would be micromanagement. And a great stereotype for this would be what most people think of military boot camp. Probably specifically the full metal jacket scene were the Marine Corps.

Gunnery Sargent, sorry if I messed up the rank, but I think he's a gunny, is walking down the rows of the new recruits, and he's just in their face and everything that they're doing, they're being told to do with somebody over their shoulder, given a timeline, how to do it, do this, do it like that, right? The classic micromanager. And the problem with micromanaging is it only works in the short term. And I've had plenty of bosses who are micromanagers. and all I want to do when I have a boss who is a micromanager,

who is sitting over my shoulder, my entire goal in life when they're doing that to me is to do the minimum amount of work possible to get them away from me. All I want them to do is go away and do something else, and when they do that, it's very likely that I'm not going to continue to do the job that they've asked me to do because I can't stand their leadership style,

and I don't actually want to work for the person. So micromanagement is a sense, style of leadership for sure, and it might work, but it's a short-term solution, and it only works when that individual is physically present. If you're not there or you have to go on a trip, pretty good chance that your team isn't going to be living up to the standard that you want them to, and it also inhibits future leaders, and I'll cover that in a minute. The other way to lead is to pull your people, and by that, I mean, inspire them. And I have many good examples from the SEAL team, of leaders that I looked up to in the way that they conducted themselves,

in the way that they spoke, in the way that they led their people. It was amazing. It was probably one of the greatest things of serving as a seal was the privilege of being able to serve with those leaders and watch how they did their job. It was inspirational. And what did it make me as a human being want to do? It made me want to work as hard as humanly possible

to live up to the image and environment that that leader had created. And they didn't need to be there to do that. If they were gone for a month, I still had a vector to follow in the direction that I wanted to, because I understood their guidance, and I didn't want to let that person down. Their physical proximity to me had nothing to do with how I felt about them because they inspired me. They created inside of me and helped foster and facilitate more internal discipline. as opposed to standing over the top of me and putting their boot on top of my head and constantly

putting my head under water. That's how you want to lead your people. And you do that, ladies and gents, not by what comes out of your mouth, even though that's a part of it. You do it with your actions. Okay. Inspiring people creates future leaders. And if you don't know what kind of a leader you are, I'm going to give you a real world litmus test for that. And I'm using the word litmus a lot today. I don't know why I'm not going to use it again. Here is a test for you as a leader if you're unsure what category you fall into. Listen to your people. If your people come to you and they say constantly, what do you want me to do?

Well, guess what? You're a micromanager. Because your people don't feel empowered to make decisions on their own. They're looking to you to tell them everything that you want to have done. And they're probably going to ask you how you want them to do it as well. this is not the environment that you want to live in. Okay. What you want and what we were looking for in the SEAL teams

is the empowered forward-thinking individual. What I want to hear from somebody is this is what I'm going to do. Right. They see a problem constantly looking for what it is that needs to be done. They think of a solution on their own and then they come to me and they say, hey, this is what I see going on. This is what I'm going to do about it. what are your thoughts?

And at that point as a leader, right, instead of having to figure out what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, you can sit back and listen to what they say and judge it against the bigger picture, which is your job as the leaders to look at the bigger picture to keep your head and chin up and out, not down and in at your people's job, and you can bounce it against the overarching structure of where it is you're trying to take your organization. And you can say, hey, that's awesome. You know, maybe make this little change and then go, execute, and come back to me when you're done with that, right? And you empower your people and you send them off. The difference

between the individual who is constantly looking to be told what to do and then the individual who is constantly looking for what to do and then solving it on their own can be the difference between life and death and your organization, especially in the SEAL teams and micromanagement and that individual constantly looking to be told what to do doesn't work in the SEAL teams because the environment is very complex, we're often disaggregate, multiple elements, and in combat,

the person who is in a leadership position because of the caller device that's on their uniform, they may not have the most up-the-date or accurate information. They may be in charge of an element that they're only talking to on a radio, and how is that person going to have any idea

as to the guidance that should be given at that point for the individuals? There's no way that they're not. that they can. And if your people are paralyzed and they're unable to make those decisions without you, your organization is going to suffer. And so will the individual. You have to empower your people. Empower your people early so they start thinking about being a leader. So what's going to happen if you're not there as a leader? We test this often in the SEAL teams to reinforce that mindset that you need to constantly be looking to solutions or looking for solutions.

before being told to do so. And we do it at the most critical moments in training. Okay, I'm going to recommend that everybody does something like this, whether I don't care if it's a business or a sport or a military unit. You need to experience failure in a training environment, and you need to experience the loss of leadership in a training environment just to see what your people do. So here's how we set this up.

We do a lot of what are called iads or immediate action drills. that would be in this example you would have a seal platoon or a seal squad so eight or 16 people walking through the desert and you're contacted by gunfire maybe it's from the front maybe it's from the left whatever direction it may be what is your immediate action to that now in the seal teams it's shoot back as hard as possible overwhelming fire superiority to make the individuals that shot at you think that they made a bad decision and then second to that is you're going to have to maneuver Now, not everybody can yell out commands when you're shooting because nobody would know what to do. So we have a rank structure in the military and you've worked with the guys for long enough that you know who should be making the call.

You inherently kind of know when the call is going to come and instinctively you probably know what the call is going to be. So while you're shooting in the back of your mind, you're waiting for the preparatory call and then the action call that's going to follow from that. So what we'll do is, let's say there's one person in charge of each element of eight. We'll wait until right before that call needs to be made and walk up to that person who's going to be making the call and you pull them out of training. And you say, hey, shut your mouth, you're dead. And then we sit back and we watch. And what do you think happens? Well, early on, when people need more reinforcement to proactively think instead of reactively think, it gets pretty ugly in that moment.

because they're so conditioned and so used to having one individual make the call that when that individual doesn't speak up and the call doesn't get made, things kind of start falling apart, right? The spokes kind of start coming off the wheel and it gets very chunky. So oftentimes we'll stop the training and say, hey, you know, you can't be paralyzed by a lack of leadership. And if that person who you're used to having have the call made, you know, maybe they got killed. Maybe they're task saturated.

Maybe they're working on something else. somebody still needs to step up and make that call. So we'll put it into the training environment again, and we'll conduct exactly the same drill, not like right after each other, but you give it a little bit of time so they can kind of go back to their own habits, and you get right to that critical decision-making point again,

and we pull the leader. Now, just because you do it one time doesn't mean that it's going to be seamless the next time, and it takes a little bit of time for this lesson to reinforce itself, but the second time, it's a little bit quicker and it's less chunky. the third time is even better. And, you know, a week into it, you can stop doing that drill.

Because it really doesn't matter if you pull the leader or when you pull the leader. People, every person that they're in charge of, each one of those eight individuals is not only doing their primary job, their role in responsibility, they're thinking two or three steps ahead. So when that leader does get pulled, they take a moment to realize that that person's gone. They step up and they make the right call. And it almost doesn't matter anymore. the pieces are moving seamlessly.

But that is a skill that has to be practiced and it also has to be reinforced. And we'll do that all throughout training. It's really reinforced in those immediate action drills, but you can do the same thing in vehicles. You can do the same thing in medical scenarios. You can fill in the blank. You can set it up however you want to,

but it reinforces and drives home that point that don't sit there and wait for somebody to tell you what to do. Think proactively. Think two or three steps ahead. Which guess what? that's how leaders should be thinking. So even in that simple drill, you're developing the thought process for future leaders. And I'll close with leadership on this. Just set up a scenario for you guys and gals. And let me know whether or not you think this is a good approach to getting your driver's

license in the United States of America. So everybody knows, right, you're 15 years old. You can get your learners permit. 16 years old, you can go and you can test for your driver's license. So let's imagine for a second an individual who on their 16th birthday wakes up and has spent exactly zero minutes ever practicing driving the car they never took the time to develop any of the skill or experience necessary but since they're 16 years old and it is their right as they may think it is to go get their driver's license they decide that that's what they're going to go do so they look over to their neighbor's house their neighbors got this awesome old f-150 that's a manual transmission. And for whatever reason, this person goes over there and they convince the neighbor to take

them down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, they stand in line, they fill out their paperwork, and they're going to attempt a driving test in that manual transmission vehicle. What do you think the odds would be of that individual actually passing? I would say 0%. And if I were to ask the question why, I would think that the answer is pretty self-explanatory, because they have no goddamn idea how to drive a vehicle. If I were to give you that scenario or explain that to you and say, hey, are you surprised by the outcome? I've never had somebody say, oh, yeah, you know, that's surprising. I would have thought that they could pass a test.

Everybody says, no, of course not. They don't know how to drive. So it makes sense for a driver's license, right? I would love for somebody to articulate for me how that doesn't make sense for leadership as well. If you attempt leadership with no experience and no mistakes on your, your belt and no training, why do you think that you're going to be more successful than the person who tries to drive a car or take the driving test without ever having driven a car? You know, let's look at how we learn how to drive, okay? You find a vehicle and you sit side

by side with somebody and you get mentored. They teach you about the vehicle itself. They teach you what the knobs and the dials do, and this is how you turn the lights on and this is how you get the wiper blades. And let's talk about the transmission and it's in a controlled environment, usually in a parking lot. And you practice in a parking lot under the mentorship of somebody sitting right next to you, who is handing to you experience because you have none. You have basically luck, and you're slowly developing your experience. And then you take that, and when you're ready in the parking lot, you go to some side roads,

and then the side roads lead to city streets. The city streets lead to freeways. And all along that journey, if you brush up against the boundaries of your experience, You have somebody there to mentor you. It's the crawl, walk, run with a lot of practice built into that. And it makes perfect sense when it comes to learning how to drive a car. But why don't we treat leadership the same way? I see this over and over and over again.

People who equate leadership with what it says on their business card, what it says on the wall of their office, what it says on a plaque, what it says on a uniform. and they don't want to put any time and effort into thinking about leadership until they achieve that position. Like, okay, I'm going to be a leader when I get that job. Well, guess what? If you think like that, you're the exact same person going to the DMV who's never driven a car.

And I'm not saying that you're not going to be successful. What I'm saying is you're setting yourself up for failure. And if you do fail, don't be surprised. And if you want to find the person responsible for that failure, it's very easy. Go into any bathroom and turn on the light and look in the mirror. They're staring right back at you. So it begs a question, when do you start practicing? And my answer to that is right now.

If you currently do not think of yourself as a leader, or you do not think of your actions or the things that come out of your mouth through the lens of behaving like the leader that you want to be when you get into a leadership position, then you need to stop that shit right now. Literally, as you're hearing me say this, you need to recalibrate the way you think about yourself. and you need to start training and practicing and developing experience so that when you get to your

leadership position, you're prepared because there's two types of leadership. One of them does in fact have to do with business card and what's on the wall, right? That's leadership by position. And that's great, except for the fact that some leaders in positions of leadership suck and some of them are really good. So you need to prepare yourself so you're on the good side of the house. And in addition to that, there's not enough leadership positions by title for everybody to fill. I'm sorry, there's not enough CEO positions for everybody to have one.

And people will think and often say, well, I'm not in a leadership position. So what impact can I have? Well, here's the impact you can have. Other than leading by position, you can lead by example, which is the most important type of leadership, especially when it comes to team sports family of any kind. and I would even say even those positional leaderships as well because like I said it's not about what you say it's about what you do and how you conduct yourself and the example you set it's going to have far much more impact and pull than anything that comes out of your mouth

so you've got to start thinking like a leader right now this very instant and you need to practice and you need to think about the leader that you want to be and if you're not sure look around for examples there's going to be plenty of them both good and bad. Write down to the things that you see that you don't like coming from other people and write down the things that embody leadership and the example that you want to have going forward and live your life like that. Leadership is exhausting because you're constantly being watched. If you're in a leadership position, every single thing that you do is observed. Everything that you say is observed and then they're bounced off of each other. Did what this person say is a commensurate

with their actions. And if it's not, guess what? Your integrity is done. You can have to practice to get like that. Lead by example. If you're not in the position that you want to be to lead by title, if you start that now, you're going to be infinitely more prepared when you get that job title that you actually want. I think I made it through it. Okay. I'm tired of hearing myself talk. That's all I got today, guys, for episode seven. See you next week. Later. Episode seven, guys, in the the books. I apologize. I told you guys I was going to do an interview, or I should say a conversation. I don't ever want to do interviews. I like sitting down and talking with people. It didn't work itself out, but I wanted to stay on the rotation of practicing for myself, right? Just getting the

experience of doing these every single week. I've been flooded with questions that I find to be very interesting and it causes me to think about what I believe and draw from my experience of my previous life and hopefully do something positive with them. And hopefully it has some type of impact on you or maybe you're completely bored out of your mind by hearing me talk and you turn it off five minutes into it either way something there for everybody so if you like it again the only thing i can ask is that you help me spread the word uh and if you haven't written a review write a review and if you don't like it go write a bad review i don't care slam me online go for it so reach out if you have questions write a review if you got the time and then tell somebody about it if you can and that's all

i got i will see you guys next week later