Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: Your Emotions Are Holding You Back. Emotional Strategy. Freezing Up Under Pressure.

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

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This is the Jocko Underground podcast number 42 sitting here with Echo Charles and DC, D.C. D.R. Cooper, guest appearance. I was thinking about some of the principles of combat leadership that I talk about all the time. One of them is prioritize and execute. And the reason I was thinking about this is because obviously I talk about it a lot from a business perspective. I talk about it a lot from a combat leadership perspective. And sometimes I talk about it from a life perspective. And I think it is, it's, well, not I think, I know it's applicable in all those categories is absolutely applicable in all those categories. But there's something else that we're in talking with people and communicating with people, I talk to a lot of people and communicate

with a lot of people in a lot of different situations and scenarios. And one of those is I talk to people that are dealing with like a bunch of different issues. Sometimes. emotional type issues, sometimes traumatic type issues. And because of, this is interesting, you know, I always say in combat, because of Murphy's law, all your problems are going to hit you at the same time. In business, because of Murphy's law, all your problems are going to hit you at the same time. So you're going to get the client that's mad, the factory that's on fire, the supply chain that's

broken. It's all going to happen at the same time. In combat, you're going to get somebody wounded. You're going to have a bad head count. You're going to have civilians. You're going to have all these things happening at the same time. And in life, same thing. You're going to have your water heater break.

You're going to have your kid sick. You're going to have, look, all this stuff, Murphy's Law. But this also happens on an emotional level, too. So I talk to people and sometimes I see that they are under an emotional attack. And because of Murphy's Law, it's an emotional attack from multiple different directions and what I wanted to talk about is the fact that even in those situations prioritize and execute still comes into play so when you have multiple emotional traumatic scenarios happening at the same time this your reaction can be the same as

someone messing up on the battlefield that is they freeze that they freeze they don't do anything or they try and solve all the things at the same time same thing can happen to business I don't know what to do what should I focus on and they don't do anything or they try and solve all their problems at the same time, life the same thing can happen. So when we as humans get hit with multiple emotional attacks or like psychological attacks, you know, it's like you lost your job, you lost your girlfriend, you found out that you've got some sickness that's going on and all those three things happen at the same time.

Look, if one of them happens, you lose your job, you got your girl, you've got your girl. You're okay. You lose your girl, you still go to work. You got your job. You're okay. But when you lose both those things, that's a huge hit to your emotional stability. And then on top of that, you find out that you're sick. And then on top of that, you know, the mortgages do.

And now you're a couple days late. So these are like problems, but they're not just normal problems. They're not just normal problems. They're emotional problems and they hit you at an emotional level. So in those situations, Prioritize and execute still applies. And I've talked some people through this recently who have had some significant emotional challenges going on. And it's the same principle.

Okay, what is the major cause of your problem? Okay, you've got a bunch of problems going on. You've got this one major significant problem. Let's talk through that problem first. let's focus on coming to grips with that initial problem. Because you combine six problems, this is how people get overwhelmed. This is how people end up hurting themselves, killing themselves. Because there's six problems, they're just overwhelmed, and they say, I'm never going to get out of this.

Same thing on the battlefield. You've got all these problems going on. Leader doesn't know what to do. They freeze. They don't do anything. They think, oh, I'm overwhelmed. So when you have five, six, seven emotional things that are dragging you down, prioritize and execute, okay, what's the biggest issue that I have right now? How can I start to address that?

What can I do to get to a better place with that particular issue? Now, there is, whenever I talk about prioritized next year, I talk about handling the biggest problem first. that is one technique for prioritized and execute. There's another technique that is also effective, depending on the scenario. Sometimes you got 10 problems, and you got one, you know, the biggest problem is this,

the next biggest problem is that. But you got a couple little straggler problems that aren't that big. You can actually go, you know what, I'm going to get rid of this problem right now. I'm going to focus on this for the next two hours, get it done, get it taken care of, boom, then I can go to the problem that's going to take three hours,

get that one off my plate. So you actually can then focus on these big problems that might take you a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month to get solved. But you've gotten rid of some of those smaller problems. So you could do that technique as well. The principle is the same as prioritize and execute. But the technique is maybe you go after the small problems first or ones that are going to

be easier for you to handle. You know, you got a sick cat. And it's draining you emotionally because your cat's going to die and it's a problem and you're crying every night. You know what the solution is. Just kill the cat. I mean, quite honestly, yes. You've got a cat that needs to be put down.

And it's dragging you down. You might need to say, okay, you know what? I need to do the right thing here. My cat is suffering. My cat has no, there's no medical, viable option. I need to do the right thing and get my cat put down. Boom. So you get that off your plate.

That could also be the biggest problem. I mean, in some cases. But the point is it doesn't really, matter if you use the first technique or the second technique. You could even just look at, hey, this is the one that I, here's another way to do it. This is the biggest problem that I'm most scared of facing. So I am either going to tackle that one. I'm going to tackle that problem.

You know, I'm having an existential crisis and I'm afraid to die. Okay, maybe you say, all right, you know what? I'm going to sit down. I'm going to talk to my, I'm going to read, I'm going to talk to my friend, you know, echo who seems to have a good handle on this. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jocco underground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this. We're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms.

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