EntreLeadership - #282: Leading With Military Precision with Mark Divine

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

It’s no secret that being a Navy SEAL requires acute mental toughness, emotional resilience, and an uncanny ability to perform under pressure. What you may not realize, however, says ex-Navy Commander and SEALFIT founder Mark Divine, is that those same qualities give you a sizeable advantage in the business world as well. Tune in as Mark shares insight on how to train your mind to successfully navigate an increasingly complex and volatile marketplace. Also joining us is Magnus Johnson, founder of Mission 22, to discuss the remarkable power of leading by example and the benefit of letting your team members fail. entreleadership.com/podcast Goal Tracker: Create Unstoppable Momentum from EntreLeadership 27 Email Templates from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If that could go wrong, it will. What we're going to do when it does go wrong? And by the way, we expect it, right? Because no plan survives contact with the enemy. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders.

Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Here's what's coming up. We've got two legit American heroes coming your way, Mark Devine, former Navy SEAL officer, and Magnus Johnson, former Green Beret. And we're going to throw in some great free resources, so let's get to it. All right, we're going to start it off with Mark Devine. He's got a book out entitled The Way of the Seal. And I'm just going to tell you, anytime you get a chance to talk to a Navy SEAL,

you might want to go ahead and take that, just because these are special, special individuals. individuals who not only sacrifice many times their lives, but they put themselves in a position where they might have to do that. And the training and the mental and physical toughness that these men display is absolutely unbelievable. So you're going to enjoy this. This is a serious man, and I think you're going to get some serious content that will help you. Here's my conversation with Mark and Mark. I'm going to jump right into how do Seals define the mission? What's the process by which you define a mission? Well, the context for mission, and this applies to business and life, you know, you have to be very clear about what we're talking about here. Like, I had a mission

when I wanted to become a seal, right? So becoming a seal was my mission. As part of that, I had a series of targets that I had to knock down in order to even qualify. Now, as we deploy and go to award, and now we're going to have our mission focus will shift. So if I'm in Iraq and my mission focus is to take down high value targets, then my mission focus narrow. So I'm very clear that during that period of my life for my team, that's our mission. Now within that mission, you know, we've got to define it pretty clearly. But then we even have to neck it down further because let's say our mission is to go out and get the bad guys while we're in Iraq for six months. You know, now, like tonight, we're going to go after a specific bad guy.

Right. And so now that becomes our mission focus. We literally will have a 24-hour mission focus. And then within there, the target set collapses even further. And we get very clear about what the targets are that we have to knock down on the way to accomplishing that mission. And then we plan accordingly. And the seals, you know, I talk about this in the book, the way of the seal, that we get very fast in this iterative planning process. so we don't take a lot of time seeking some sort of perfect plan.

We just get a good enough plan and we head out the door and we just fail our way forward to mission success. Yeah, I love that. We're going to talk about that too. But another part of this particular principle is simplify the battlefield. And I think you were beginning to touch on this. You're not trying to create the perfect plan. You're going to get said bad guy or bad guys

and they're in this area of Iraq and this part of this. town, how do you simplify the battlefield? Take us into that with an example, because I think we can begin to go, okay, I can begin to do this in my projects or in some big initiatives at our office. It really is one of the primary ways that seals are able to focus. Part of focusing is developing the powers of deep concentration. So you can see that Navy SEALs are able to concentrate with kind of like this radical focus on their mission, on their targets, on their training, and it's that unfettered concentration, which allows them to kind of master their game. And they also learned early on, there's an array of things that we need to concentrate on,

but we can't really go beyond that because we just don't have the time, and it would distract our attention. So we learned to control our attention on very narrow range of things that we concentrate on in order to make sure that we have the mastery and the team effectiveness to go accomplish our mission. And then, you know, when we look at our mission, we say, okay, what is our mission? How can we state this in the simplest term so we don't get this like overly complicated plan with all these moving parts that we have to think about? We're very clear.

Get to the target. Get the bad guy. Exploit the intelligence. Get home safely. One, two, three, four. There's four overarching objectives. So in order to learn that simplicity or to find that simplicity on the other side of complexity, you have to ask the right questions.

And I know that you're probably big on this, but, you know, asking the right. my questions leads to simplicity because a good percentage of the things that you think are important end up not being important. So we try to like declutter our minds and our planning from anything else except for the big things that could go wrong. We call those critical nodes. Those big things, we look at those and we say, okay, if that could go wrong, it will. What we're going to do when it does go wrong?

We'll have that contingency plan. We'll even mentalize or visualize the contingency plan. And by the way, we expect it, right? because no plan survives contact with the enemy. Yeah. You know, that's a very interesting point right there. Leaders, lock in on what Mark just said here. I want to stay here.

I'm not saying all leaders do this, but I think there are many times we as business leaders don't expect to fail, right? Because we don't have to confront what you have to confront. When you and your team are out there in battle, if you fail and you haven't planned for it, people die. Like, there is no comeback from death. Whereas in business, we kind of, you know, hey, if I fail, you know, what's the worst can happen?

It's intense conversation. I got to fire somebody. You know, maybe we have to, you know, like, it's not life and death. It can suck, but it's not life and death. You guys have to say, we expect big things to go wrong. So what are we going to do? Do you think that's true or am I barking up the wrong tree that we, in business, we don't expect to fail like we should expect to fail. Right. The risk is entirely different. And so the return on investment in the, the reward structures are all based upon, you know, living after the mission is accomplished, which is very different. So you tend to focus on different things, different outcomes. Seals, you know, there is no such thing as an acceptable loss for Seals.

We do not go into any mission expecting one of our teammates not to come home. We know it's possible, but we go in expecting that everyone is going to come home. We take care of our teammates. We train. And what it does is it forces all the individuals on the team to be relentless with their own mastery, to be relentless. with the mission focused and to be relentless on taking care of their teammates because they know that it's only by doing this mission together, do we have any hope of accomplishing it? And the only way that's going to work is if I have my teammates back, I've got to be watching my teammates.

If their gear is wrong, I'm wrong. If their training is off, I'm wrong. And so you end up with this amazing multiplier effect because on a 14-man seal platoon, I've got 13 guys who are all elite operators watching my back. and they're not doing it selfishly, but there's a little that there because they want to succeed. They want the mission to succeed. They don't want to die.

And in order for them to live, everyone's got to be at 100% of their game all the time. So when you get out there, that kind of failure is not an option. Mentality becomes we expect to fail, so therefore we can't fail because every failure is another way that we can learn how not to do something

or learn a new workaround. and we expect it, right? So we embrace it and we learn from it. It's a very powerful thing to adopt that attitude. You know, if you go out thinking every day, you're going to fail and fall on your face, and you actually look forward to it because you're going to learn something

and you're going to grow from it, man, then the decisions you make become a little bit different. You actually tend to make fewer decisions, and the decisions become more focused and precise. You know, you learn to say no to the wrong things so you can say yes to the right things, and you put more energy into the execution because, you know, it's as if your life depended on it, even though in the business world, it doesn't necessarily.

Yeah, that leads us. I want to jump ahead because you just touched on it. Principle 6 is break things. And one of the things that you write about in the book is fail forward fast. And you did touch on that earlier. And you just, you kind of let us there. So I want to jump to that because the idea of failing forward fast is what you just talked about, which is we know we're going to fail. We're kind of anticipating failure. What do we do? And so you just, you run through it instead of letting it just shut your life down or something. shut your business down for the day. That's invigorating, isn't it? Because now you treat failure not as this stop sign, but just, okay, we're going to go through it regardless. So we're not going to let it stop us. So game on. Let's go. Right. In fact, we have a whole different relationship with that word. And I think, you know, that word is just a bad word. It knows it's got a lot of bad connotations or

negativity associated with it. And so we don't even think about failure. We just think about how things could happen, and we have a range of scenarios. Some look better than others, but ultimately at the end of those scenarios is a vision for victory. And we know that that vision is going to be a little, it's not going to turn out exactly like we can envision it now, because we can't see into the future with precision. But what we know, we can see all the things that could go right and all the things that could go wrong, and we plan for both. And so we just don't think about failure. It's not the same as like, oh, you know, if we fail at this, you know, that's got a huge kind of weight to it. Like, we're bad.

We screwed up. You know, the institution has come down and hammer us. Now, the institution of the SEALs gives us that top cover. And they say, go out and risk because without risk, there's no reward. We're not going to accomplish the mission at the level that we want. So go out and fail. Push yourself. Don't do stupid things, right?

You still have to mitigate the risk. But, you know, if you're not failing, then you're not trying hard enough in the SEAL teams. What happens, Mark, and I know you've got an answer for this, so this is not a gotcha question, but, you know, what happens when you do plan for all the scenarios, what could go wrong and what could go right? And you said it a moment ago. You can't obviously predict everything. But what happens when you're out there and the scenario that maybe nobody thought of happens because it's completely out of left field? I mean, is that possible that that does happen? And then how do you react to that? Of course it happens, especially in warfare. Combat is highly unpredictable. We have this acronym. The whole first chapter in the book is called Leading and Accelerated Times. And I talk about the acronym VUCA, VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And warfare is a Vuka environment. But guess what? The business world is starting to look like that, too, isn't it? Nowadays, things are complex, and complex is different than complicated than that it's not linear. It's acting in a holistic fashion. You don't know when that volatility is going to happen. You don't know when the black swan event's going to happen.

So things are much more in a flowing state than fixed. Complicated is fixed. Complex is flowing. These two, volatility and complexity, lead to an internal state of uncertainty and ambiguity. So that's where this VUCA came from. Volatility complexity means that I'm uncertain as to which direction to go, left, right, forward, backwards. And it's ambiguous as to even which one of those is right or wrong. They all might be the right thing to do.

So for the seals, it all comes down to mindset. You know, mindset trumps the plan all the time. And that kind of addresses what you were talking about earlier, Ken. It's like you get in the field, you might have like everything gamed out, you visualize success, you practice all the principles, and it still goes wrong. And at this point, it's all mindset. And the mindset there is, you know, hey, we got to solve this problem regardless. It's going to be uncomfortable. But we know in the seals that doubt is eliminated through action.

And so what we do is we try to figure out the smallest action that we can. take that will lead us toward some solution and then we pause and we take, we get feedback immediately. We activate what we call the OODA loop. We observe what happened from that action. We reorient ourselves to the new reality. We take another action or make another choice or decision for another small action and then we take that action and then we pause and we learn to do this very quickly. We say that those who have a very fast ODA loop are the ones who win in a VUCA environment.

Oh, it's so true. This is a very powerful concept for business leaders to kind of lock onto and to train their minds. It requires awareness, right? If you just keep doing, doing, doing, you're going to miss the observing and the reorientation part, which is really non-doing. That's the part where you breathe. That's why mindfulness meditation is taking hold in the business world, because meditation and breathwork and visualization is how we kind of reorient as the world of complexity and volatility hits us smack in the face. I'm taking notes here, folks. It's the seals win when there's communication after observation, right? It's like, or it's a cyclical thing. I'm just learning from you. You know what I mean? It's like you guys are looping. Yeah. Observation, communication is really where you win your battles. All right. So I'm going to go back into principle five, which is forge mental toughness. We've been all around this mark and I love this. But I want to go back to a couple times you have painted a picture for us of a 14-man unit. Okay. And while they all have their own units, unique role in the mission. You also mentioned that they're all looking out for each other too, and you just took us to that front site focus. Here's one of the things you write on in the book. Control your attention. Boy, that's big for the leader, isn't it? And for the individual team,

control your attention, because if you get focused on something, you're not supposed to, people die in your world. Correct. And that's a skill. So one of the things I wanted to bring out in the book was that these internal skills can be trained. They need to be trained. They become literally a daily practice for us. The art of attention control is essentially learning how to direct your mind at the right target slash thought at the right time for the right reason. So in that regard, you need to step away from your obsessive, compulsive thinking or your loops.

A lot of those loops are what I call fear loops. And you need to be able to step away from that and connect to like a deeper, high, perspective within your own mind where you're watching your own thoughts constantly and you're watching the thoughts that are coming in from your teammates or from the environment and that includes your emotional states because emotions are just you know an energetic thought pattern and so we learn to control our attention and to redirect it from things that are distracting us or thoughts that might be negative you know so roadside bomb goes off you know it's going to cause a an immediate fight or flight response the seal will look at that and see it arises

in his body mind system and say, okay, got that. It's common. I can interdict this through deep breathing. So control my breath. Calm down now. Okay, I'm calming down now. What's the one thing I need to do right now? And all of a sudden, that drowns out all the clutter and my attention control, I control my attention to shift on the one thing I need to do right now. It might be taking care of a teammate who got hit. It might be getting off the road. It might be taking cover. What's that one thing? Okay, done. Let's do that. And then. And I maintain my mental state through that breath control and by always asking myself, what's the one thing I need to do right now to get my team back on track and move toward victory?

That's attention control. And it's something that can be trained through a daily practice. I talk about that in that chapter on forging mental toughness, what I call the big four skills are money for leaders. Yeah, if I was going to rip out a section of the book and just say, if you can only read this, that forge mental toughness, I think, is the game. game changer, honestly, in every area of our lives. If we're trying to get a breakthrough and sustain excellence, it's all about mental toughness, period. End of story. But people have a

limited concept of what mental toughness is. I think it's just doing barbell curls with your brain, you know, or it's all about just resiliency. But no, it's actually about learning how to curate the quality, quantity, and direction of your thoughts and then to transmute negative emotions into powerful, positive emotions that's going to fire you up and keep you motivated over the long haul. So all of that is within our purview to train. It's just the skills are rare to find. And it's one of my missions is to teach people how to do the working in part, you know, as a leader, as opposed to just, you know, tactics and strategies and, you know, everything being externally focused because the wisdom is inside. You know, I was talking to a bunch of Harvard neuroscientists early last

year. And, you know, these guys are, wow, talk about brilliant, talk about peak of their game. These are the, you know, 99% effectiveness. There's nothing left for them to give. And that was kind of the point is like, we are doing all we can, but we still feel like we got more, and also we still feel a little incomplete. What we have to do is learn how to take the 1% that's left and crack that open to another 99% of potential. And the only way you're going to do that is take time, to work on the inner domain. You know, if you're working 140 hours a week and surgery and all your other stuff,

you don't have to spend 140 hours on top of that working on the inner domain. It might be just 10 minutes or 20 minutes a day. You know, time is really relative when you go into that inner space. And the work you do there has a magnifying effect on the quality of decisions you make.

And that's how you crack open that new 99% performance factor. Wow. Okay, folks, if you ever needed a reason to go read a book, Mark just laid it out right there. If you care at all about being the best you can be, you've got to dive into this. Okay, we're going to jump forward. Again, there's eight principals, folks. So I've just kind of picked a few here, as you know I like to do.

Principal eight, think offense all the time. Now, I'm a weekend warrior. I'm coaching my kids, but I was an athlete one time, a long time ago, Mark. And I love that thought. Think offense all the time. I love that, love that, love that. I'm going to pull out one of the teachings in the book. And I'm genuinely curious what you're going to tell us on how we take what you do as a seal

and how we apply that in the business world. And here's the thought. Execute with velocity and agility. Because when you think velocity, right, you think, okay, I get that. I see that. That's the running back who's at the goal line. and he's just running people over. He's trying to get as much blunt force as possible.

But when I think velocity and agility, I think Usain Bolt, right? Here's the guy who super fast, but it looks fluid, like his feet aren't touching the track. Talk to me. How does seals operate with velocity and agility, then how do we do that?

Yeah, so the think offense all the time, you know, that idea came to me early in my seal training from my martial arts teacher. We did three days on the beach just kicking the shit out of each other. And I had a black belt before I went into seal training, and I tell that story in the book. I had a black belt.

But in karate, you know, we blocked. It's usually like block, block, punch, block, kick. You know what I mean? Yeah. And you're kind of like dancing around, trying not to get hit. In combat, or if anyone who is listening has ever been in a street fight, guess what?

That does not work. That does not work. You have to have an all-of-all-a-all-all- offense all the time, hair on fire, you go straight into the target and you find one target after another to deliver a blow to until, you know, you come out victorious. And so when you train yourself to defend and you train yourself to block, there's language associated with that, and language has imagery and emotional energy associated with that. So my instructor, Jerry Peterson, who had this unbelievable system that he created called Special Combat Aggressive Reactionary System. It's awesome. Scars

Oh, that's good. I like that. And we all wanted to deliver the scars to the other guys and not get them ourselves. And I did the 30-day training, 300 hours of non-stop fighting. It was unbelievable. But he came up to me like on the second day. He goes, Mark, you've got to unlearn that karate stuff because it's slowing you down. It's going to get you killed. And he was referring to defensive thinking defensive language. So the way offense works is you don't think block, you think attack. Right? You don't think retreat.

You think attack, you know, forward. And then the seals, as they learn this, then they learn to not only, it's not only the attack, but it's the attack with speed and surprise and agility, right? And I just use velocity and agility in this chapter, but it's also surprise. Surprise comes naturally when you move faster than your competition. But you have to also, if you're moving fast, a lot of times you develop this momentum, you can't change course. That's not good either.

So you have to have the momentum or the velocity, but you also have to be able to change course really quickly. And again, that comes back to the mindset as well as the decisions being made, having the autonomy to make the decisions on course corrections closest to the activity, closest to the firefight, so to speak. And we call that fast twitch iteration. So you're in the field, you're gaining velocity, you're knocking down your targets, and all of a sudden, you know, something happens. You know, our version of Black Swan event might be an IED goes off and something goes horribly wrong. Well, we have to fast-twitch iterate to get through that and get to mission success without having this capture our mind and lead to a defeat. Wow.

Unbelievable stuff. And I want to mention towards the end of the book, you really close with the secrets of elite teams. We don't have time to cover that in its totality. But when I looked at that, I'm thinking, well, here's what you lay out in that chapter, build a team spirit, nurture a culture of excellence, reinforce structural integrity. I want you to challenge our leaders on how seals nurture a culture of excellence. Because I think we all go, we want an elite team. We really do.

We'd love our team to operate like seals. We really would. So I'm thinking to myself, how do you nurture a culture of excellence among a seal team? Well, one of the key things for us is how we tracked the right people onto the team. Of course, not everyone has a luxury of a two-year arduous selection process like we have in the Seals, but ultimately, you know, if you don't belong in the team, we ferret you out early on. And that's a really important lesson for everyone, you know, because if you choose someone for your team who doesn't share your vision, who isn't willing to share your values, and it doesn't have to have all the same values.

You know, we have all sorts of cultural nuances and, you know, every single race and every type of person in the Seals. but at the core, we settle on some values that we all agree on. And for the SEALs, that's like disciplined, right? Drive and determination for mission success. Courage instead of fear. The ability to take care of our body, mind, so that we can take care of our teammates, the ability to take our eyes off ourselves in the most intense moments in the crisis situation and to put them on our teammates to help them get through the crisis.

Mission focus, right? So you need to select people who coalesce. around the values of the organization and share the vision. And then that naturally creates this culture where everyone is trying really hard through their daily actions to fulfill that vision, to make the mission line up to that vision for the organization and for what you want to do in the world. For the SEALs is to serve and protect as the most elite maritime special operations force. So we don't allow mediocrity.

And if we see mediocrity, we deal with it right away. Like we don't wait for it to go up the chain of command or for someone to be administrative. They separated five years later because they are missing the fitness standards. We deal with it right away because it's going to affect us, our ability to get mission accomplishment done, and it's going to affect our quality of life, and we're not going to have a culture of excellence. So anytime someone slips from our standards, we deal with it right away. And we know that because every single important thing we do, we debrief. After we get it done, like any training mission, even our hard workouts, we would sit there and debrief, you know,

if it was a complicated one that required equipment. and logistics like a long ocean swim. And what do we do well? What do we do wrong? If we saw someone who did something stupid that put the team at risk, we deal with it. And it's not personal. And we expect behavioral modification from that.

It's really liberating, you know, once you get an organization that is holding everybody accountable to an extremely high set of standards. You know, Ray Dalio talks about that. I was super stoked to read his book. And, you know, and I'll give him props for that because I didn't know if that could be done

outside the SEAL teams. And I'm like, yeah, he's talking about that in his book principles. Everybody is, this is our vision. These are our values. We're going to eat, breathe, sleep, and live these values. And if you don't, there's going to be a challenging conversation and it will be uncomfortable. But over time, you learn to really appreciate, you get comfortable with that discomfort, you embrace the suck, and everybody starts operating at a really elite level. He is Mark Devine. The book is The Way of the Seal. Think Like an Elite Warrior to lead, succeed. Really good stuff, Mark. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I think this is a must buy for people to get. I want, before I let you go, tell folks where they can connect with you, how, and why they would connect

with you, because I know you're up to a lot of good stuff. And then after you tell them all that leadership stuff, you and I were talking before we started on the broadcast today about this burpee challenge. And I know we've got some physical fitness nuts out there that would love to know about this because I think it's a great cause. Well, let's start there. Thanks for asking me that. So as a vet, you know, I'm very concerned that we have 22 veterans a day committing suicide. And of course, suicide has been in the news lately and it's a national epidemic. You know, I heard a grandmaster once say that the disease of the industrial age was cancer, but the disease in the information age is insanity. And we're starting to see that. People are losing their grip on reality because things are moving so fast. They can't find their center. They can't. can't find any purpose anymore. There's a solution to all that. But the vets, though, they've taken on so much stress, and then they come out of the field, so to speak, and they've lost their mission, and so now they don't have a mission. And now their team isn't around, so they don't have

their team. And then they go to the VA, and the VA, you know, put some drugs in them, and then that locks them in this kind of like almost emotionally comatose state. And guess what? There's a downward spiral. So I started the foundation a couple years ago called Courage Foundation. And our mission is to help vets who are suffering from post-traumatic stress, and particularly we want to help those who are suicidal. So this year, as a way to raise money and awareness, we decided to suffer for them. And so I've committed a team to do 22 million burpees. That's a B-Hag. Yes, it is.

And so 22 million burpees. I'm going to do 100,000 minimum, and I break that up at 300 a day. It's my morning ritual. 300 burpees a day. It crank them out in about 35 minutes. While I do that, I'm thinking about the vets, thinking about how they were suffering and sending them, you know, some healing energy. Burpees for Vets.com is the website for that. And that's like really a passion project of mine because those guys need help.

Yes, indeed. If anyone is into challenging themselves, then we have the ultimate challenge at SealFit called Kokoro Camp. It's 50 hours of nonstop physical mental team training. That's all at sealfit.com. And then my executive, I call it vertical development, my leadership development program where I teach these skills in coaching and in three-day academies, that's called Unbeatable Mind. And I have a book by that title also called Unbeatable Mind.com is that website. Well, Mark, I got to tell you, beyond you spending time with us today for which we are very grateful, I know I speak on behalf of our audience, when I say thank you for your service to our country, for putting your life, on the line. We just can't say thank you enough. And so we need to take every opportunity to thank

our vets. Love what you're doing with the book and everything. We're better for our time with you today. So thank you, sir. Ken, it's been a real honor and I super appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed our conversation with Mark. Really, really enjoyed the book, The Way of the Seal. And again, if you feel led to get involved in what he's doing, we really want to promote him and his program. All right, time for some free stuff. Who doesn't love free stuff? Today, we're giving you the goal tracker. This is the create unstoppable momentum resource.

You got to get momentum. And the way you get it is by tracking your goals, seeing what's working, what's not. And this is big, not just for you, but for your team. Now, remember, goals need to be specific, have a time limit, and be in writing. And in this tool, you're going to be able to put goals into different. categories, including career, family, financial, social, physical, intellectual, spiritual, and on. Once you've got your goals categorized, you can create an action plan and a target date. So to get this great resource, text episode 282.

That's episode 282. Text that to 33444. Up next is Magnus Johnson. What a wonderful, wonderful man, Magnus is. He has been a part of the Entree Leadership Trials. for a while. It's how we got to know about Magnus, a green beret of eight years and a business owner and just an all-around great guy.

And we're really excited to introduce you to Magnus and Mission 22. Here's my conversation with Magnus Johnson. Magnus, I want to ask you from your experience, what have you seen work when it comes to establishing trust and continuing to build the trust within the team? You know, I spend time with people on my team. I care about their lives. I care about what their interests are. I care about their kids.

You know, I care about who they are. Yeah, we do outings and we do stuff together. And that's great. You know, we eat together and we do things together. But what I believe is the most important for a leader to do is to know their people, you know, because people know when you know them. They know it. They can feel it.

And so I take that time because I do care who's on my team because whoever's on my team is an extension of me and it's an extension of this vision. So I take lots of time with my people and I establish a relationship. I establish trust. They know what teams are on. They know where they are. So when things get rough, big change starts happening. They know like, hey, Magnus cares about me.

Magnus cares about this vision. Because see, I'm always saying the same thing. I'm always doing the same thing. If you wonder what Magnus is doing today, he's working on mission 22. He's working on finding the vision for mission 22, how to make it better, how to make it stronger. He's working with other veterans.

He's on the phone. Everybody on my team knows what I'm doing. The biggest thing about, there's two different types of leaders. There's leaders that point and tell you what to do, and then there's a leaders with a sticker on their back that says, follow me, do what I do. That's the kind of leader that I want to be.

I want to be the kind of leader that says, follow me, do what I do. And people are willing to do what I do because they see me out there every single day doing it. And they want to be a part of that. They want to be associated with that. You know, they love me. I love them. They trust me. I trust them.

And that's the world they want to live in too. You mentioned that you believe leadership is not simply pointing people in a direction, but getting people to follow you. What works and doesn't work when it comes to getting a team to follow the leader? Well, you know, you got to, it depends on what kind of team you want, right? like I want a team of leaders. So once I have my team and I establish trust, then I start giving them responsibility.

I start giving them lanes. I give them rope. I let them fail. You know, and that hardens them, that conditions them. And that lets them know that they can fail and I'm still there. Because when I have a team of leaders,

they're out there crushing it. They're out there making big attempts for big things. And sometimes they fail. Sometimes something big happens. And all of a sudden, what they thought was going to be doesn't work out the way they thought. you know what they're not ashamed to tell me they tell me immediately and maybe i'll get upset but i'm not upset at them i'm upset of i didn't do a good enough job being a leader myself

and so we all work on it together and we take the feedback we look at our failures we ask ourselves why did we fail in the military we called an after actions review what went wrong what can we do to make it better and they know that i'm going to arm them equip them and have trust in them to be the leaders right I don't want to micromanage my leaders I want to lead my leaders you got to divide multiply you know you don't get great smart ambitious strong-willed people and then breathe down their neck every two seconds you got to give them room to grow you got to give them room to fail you got to have enough confidence in your leadership in your business and your vision that people are going to fail let's see if you focus on that failure then they focus on that failure and then they

stop seeing an opportunity. They stop trusting you, right? You got the right person in the seat on the bus. They're going to fail, but then they're going to get up the next day, dust off, and then they're going to go crush it. And you want to focus on those wins more than you do on those losses. Hey, if it's the wrong person, you've got to let them go, but they're going to know it. If you build a culture that's self-cleansing, they're probably going to quit themselves before you even have to tell them. I want to be a leader of leaders. Leaders need room to be leaders. Good leaders learn how to follow, once they've learned how to follow, you've got to let them go out and leave. When I think about leaders in the military and the preparation that goes into some of these high-stakes

missions that we've been talking about, I just can't process how much preparation is actually involved. But what I want to ask is, is you can prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare, but then, certainly in battle, but also in the business space. Unexpected things happen. It's going to happen. You can just expect the unexpected. How do you, military leaders like you, how do you handle the unexpected?

You know, the way to prepare for the unexpected is to internally grow, right? Build faith. Be physically strong. Work out. Meditate. Calm your mind. You know, establish your values and your principles. Establish what it is your living for. And then having an expectation is a front-loaded resentment. Life is in a constant state of change. The world is in a constant state of change. It's going to change. It's going to change. Right when you thought you're about to reach success, there's going to be a change. Expect it to happen. Embrace it. Because if you're firing on all cylinders, you're living a life of humility, you're accepting reality, you've got a purpose, you've asked God to be in your life, you're committed. When that change comes, you can start to

see the opportunity. You can start to see where what you thought was what you wanted actually isn't. And because you're remaining open, willing, humble, and honest, then you can see that, no, this diversion is actually an opportunity because I'm aligned, because I'm strong, because I have vision. Resistance, failure, change, transition, all these things, they just signify that you're breaking through ceilings. That's just letting you know that you're on your way to success. I want to go back to something you said just a moment ago. You mentioned the word willing in the context of adapting to change. Why is that word willing important when we're talking about adapting to change? To stay in a state of, if I can be willing, I can reach out to mentors and advisors.

I can talk to my family. I can talk to people in my church. And I can ask them to help me. You know, pride gets in the way of a lot of people achieving success because they don't want to ask for help because they think they should know all the answers. We don't know all the answers. There's no way to know all the answers. The only way to even have a chance of being able to even see any of the answers is to remain willing.

And you stay willing by knowing your values, by knowing what you believe in, by believing in your team, and believing in yourself. You know, you stay willing by staying out of resentment. You got to stay out of negativity. You got to stay out of the rear view mirror. And you got to keep looking through the windshield. Because once you let in self-pity, resentment, fear, anger, doubt, you know, that shuts off willingness. And when you shut off willingness, you shut off openness. You know, when you shut off openness, you're probably not going to make it.

One of the biggest things I do is I try so hard to stay in the state of openness and willingness through prayer and meditation, through constant commitment to what our vision is. Because that's the only place that I can really make big impact and a big effect on people. Because other people can feel it. Other people in business can feel it. If you're working from a state of openness, willingness, hope, encouragement, and strength, people want to be around that. People want to work with people like that.

You know, everyone fails. Everyone hits roadblocks. Everyone hits ceilings. It's the ones that remain willing are the ones that break through. I admire the routines of military leaders and great business leaders. And I think that people of purpose have a routine, whether it's super intentional or it's just become a habitual routine over time. I want to talk about getting into a routine, establishing one and making it a routine that you can count on when it matters.

Talk about the discipline and mindset to start and sustain a routine. You know, you've got to create the world you want to live in. You know, when I first got to the military, you know, I had undiagnosed PTSD. I had some traumatic brain injury. I suffered from headaches, insomnia. I was gaining weight because of high levels of cortisol. I had no vision, no plan for the future. You know, one day I just realized that, like, I've got to change the world I live in.

What I started to do was I started to break down all the components of my life, you know, the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, the mental. And I started looking at all these components and I started looking at them as a scale. And I started looking at the scales. One side's positive and one side's negative. But I'm in charge of the decisions. I'm in charge of where those pebbles go. And so I took this big mountain of a world, you know, transitioning out of three combat tours coming back as a civilian and I took this Herculent challenge and I broke it, I made it in the small, manageable,

attainable pieces. All right, today I'm going to work out. Today I'm going to meditate for five minutes. Today I'm going to say something positive to somebody, even though I feel angry. You know, I made decisions to do these little things to change my trajectory, to change my own internal compass, you know. The only way to change something really big is to look inside and look at what's going on in the small thing. and start changing your, changing what it is you do day to day.

If you change your habits, you change your life. Instead of watching TV, you read a book. Instead of getting up at 10 o'clock, you get up at 9 o'clock. Then next week you get up at 8 o'clock, you know, and you start shifting how you operate, what your habits are. You start shifting them slowly to what it is you want to be. Because so many people, they want this big change, and they're like, I'm going to change everything right now.

Now, very few people can really do that. The people that I know that can do that have been changing little things in their lives a long time. You know, you've got to build the muscle of willpower. You've got to build a habit of having good habits. I break it down into the small things that I can manage. I can manage when I wake up. I can manage when I go to bed. I can manage what I eat.

But I got to start somewhere. Magis, I want to ask you about your transition from the military into the business. this world, we read a lot of articles, hear a lot of stories, see stories about the difficulty of our military heroes transitioning from the military into the private sector. I'd love to ask you what your transition has been like. You know, I had a lot of expectations. I thought coming home was going to be, I thought I was going to go home and everything was going to be like it was supposed to be. You know, I have all these memories, ideas of what I thought life was going to be like, you know, and I held these memories for eight years in the military. Well, when I got home,

that wasn't reality. I had changed and home had changed. And a good friend of mine hung himself, and that's when I found out about the statistic of 22 veteran suicides a day back in 2012. You know, and I had to, I was full of resentment, fear, and anger. You know, life wasn't happening the way I thought I was going to happen. So what I had to do is I had to take a long, hard look at myself and I said, you know, I had to think, well, what am I going to do about it? Am I just going to roll over and just not do anything or am I going to dig deep and am I going to find something in me? Am I going to find a purpose greater than myself that I want to serve? Right. I had to, I had to look for that. I had to create that. And when I found out about the suicide rate,

my friend hanging himself, I said to myself that I'm going to not let this happen quietly. I'm going to be a voice out there that's talking about this issue. This is going to be my purpose. This is what I'm going to do every day. I'm not going to let men and women that serve our country take their own lives. I'm going to save as many as I can. I'm going to help others help us to save as many as they can because we're going to make a difference, whether that's one or thousands. This is going to be our purpose. This is what we're going to do every day. And I'm going to commit to this for better or for worse. Small stuff or big stuff, I'm in. I'm committed. Well, I love your story, Magnus, that you took a passion and you turned it into your purpose.

And it is work that matters, something that we love and believe in here at Entree leadership. I would love for you to take a moment and just challenge our audience about stepping into the fear of the unknown and doing work that matters deeply to them. Well, when I became willing to do inside work, when I became willing to grow, you know, when I, you can't fill your cup with very much. if you got a small cup, right? So I began expanding my context, expanding my ability to grow. I started to grow. When that happened, I started having more to offer other people. I started looking in front of me and what was something.

I stopped paying attention to negative things and I started paying attention to positive things. I imagined my life was a scale and I imagined that my choices were pebbles. And I put as many pebbles as I could on the scale on the end of the positivity. And I just committed to keep doing this because one of these days, that scale is going to tip. One of these days, you're going to live the life you want to live if you just commit to choosing the positive decisions. Stay open, stay willing, ask God to be involved, and it's your job to make the decision. It's your job to put the pebble on the positive side,

not on the negative side. Mission 22's growth for a long time had to do with my own internal growth. You know, now it's bigger, now we've got a team, now we got all these different things. But in the very beginning, the more I grew, the more Mission 22 grew. And it finally grew to a point where I could get a team and I could let them loose on the mission. And, you know, we've grown into, we have 3,000 ambassadors that are out there on the streets. They're talking to people. They're getting veterans into treatment. They're raising money.

They're spreading awareness. They're connecting with their community. We got 3,000 of them. You know, I wrote a book about it. I told my story. I told about Mission 22, everything we went through. What I went through is at Green Beret, three combat tours, IEDs, TBIs, TBI, and TBI, PTSD, addiction.

Everything that I had to face, I faced it head on. And from there grew, the strength grew, where the people that were on the team of Mission 22, you know, they started to grow. And they started to want to be a part of that culture. And now that culture is a self-cleansing, growth-oriented, service-oriented charity that brings on people that want to be a part of something meaningful

and empowers them and gives them the tools and the ability to get out there, And that all happened because we stayed on the road to success to making a difference, to making change happen. Every day we do that. So if I stay willing, I stay humble, I stay in line with God's will. You know, the company, the charity, the team, they do the same thing. And then that just perpetuates itself. And now, you know, we just keep moving forward and we get more people coming with us every single day to carry out this vision.

Well, Magnus, we really appreciate the service that you have given to our country for your example as a leader and really an entree leader as well. And we're really grateful for your time. Thank you for being with us. There you go, folks. Two American heroes in one program. I don't know where you're getting that anymore else. I'm just going to throw that out there. But two great men, what a privilege it was to talk with both.

I'm going to tell you right now, I hate email. I despise it. Everybody that knows me knows I despise it, but I love templates because then I can doctor the templates or use them exactly the way they are and I have to think about it. I put them in drafts, move them over there.

Do you like that sound effect? Will the producers looking at me? His eyes are crossing behind the glass. Templates are great. That's the point. Templates are great. And we've got 27 templates coming to you from Infusionsoft.

This is for Common Email Blasts. Sales. Thank you email. re-engagement campaigns. There's so much goodness in here. Honestly, it's like Christmas morning for somebody who's sending emails all the time. So here's how you get it.

Go to infusionsoft.com slash 27. That's the number, 27 email templates. Infusionsoft.com slash 27 email templates. Or you can get the link in this episode. Show notes. It's episode 282. Well, that's going to do it for this program. Thrilled to have you with us.

On behalf of Will the producer, Tim the engineer and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, folks, I want to make sure that you're aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of the Chris Hogan Show. I am so excited to be able to talk to you all week in and week out. We're going to talk about your money, your life, your dreams, and your goals. You know why?

Because I'm your coach. Whether we're talking about building wealth, paying off your home early, investing, paying for college, and guess what? How to become an everyday millionaire. We're going to focus on taking your calls because you matter to me. Together, we can do this. This is The Chris Hogan Show. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search the Chris Hogan Show in Apple Podcasts

or go to chrishogan 360.com.