Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Scott DeLuzio on How to Drive on and Reclaim Your Strength EP 213

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Today I talk to Scott DeLuzio (@scottdeluzio) about the need to drive on and reclaim your strength after experiencing hardship. Scott DeLuzio is an Army veteran who served in the CT Army National Guard as an infantryman between 2005-2011 and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. Scott is the author of surviving son and the host of the Drive On podcast. Purchase Scott's book Surviving Son: https://amzn.to/3NUqQqI   (Amazon Link) Brought to you by Shopify. Discover the number one eCommerce platform for all Businesses. Start, run + grow your business with Shopify®. Sign up for a FREE trial at SHOPIFY DOT COM SLASH “passionstruck”, What We Discuss with Scott Deluzio Scott tells a compelling true story about the life of a U.S. Army combat infantryman fighting in Afghanistan at the same time as his younger brother, Steven, who was killed in action just miles away. We discuss how people from all walks of life who have faced incredible hardship can choose to survive, learn from the experience, and make themselves and those around them stronger.  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/scott-deluzio-drive-on-reclaim-your-strength/ --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/-OJj6BQDAes  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. When you're at that point where you're not at that 100%, you're not 100% there as a leader for your soldiers. You're not 100% there as a husband or a wife or as a father or a mother or whatever it is that you are. You're not operating at 100%. You just can't. It's impossible. Welcome to Passion Struck.

Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators,

scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 213 of PassionStruck, which was recently ranked as one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you to each of you who come back weekly. But listen, and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.

If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would just like to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode sturder packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics. Go and find them either on Spotify or on passionstruck.com slash starder packs.

In case she missed my interview from earlier in the week, it featured Jeff Struker, who is a pastor, author, Army veteran, speaker, and was selected in 2017 to the US Army Ranger Hall of Fame. My solo episode from last week was on the 9 ways that you can protect your success. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued ratings and reviews. Your support goes such a long way in helping us to grow the passion struck community, increase our popularity, and overall reach. I also know that our guests love to read reviews from our listeners.

This week, I am featuring veterans in honor of the upcoming Veterans Day. I hope you will take time today to remember those who risked it all and served so that we can be part of a free country. Today's guest is Scott Delusio, who is an Army veteran who served in the Connecticut Army National Guard as an infantryman from 2005 to 2011 and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. Jeff is the author of Surviving Sun and the host of the Drive-On podcast. In our interview, we discuss how the early elements of his life ended up shaping who he is today. Why? He decided to join the Army National Guard. His mental health suggestions on why it is so important to act and not keep the pain inside.

The impact of losing his brother while they were both deployed in Afghanistan. We talk about his leadership advice on a variety of topics, as well as his advice for aspiring podcasters. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. So excited to welcome Scott Delusio to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome Scott. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity to be on your show. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate this opportunity to be on your show. Well, I always like to start out the episodes by giving an opportunity for the audience to get to know the guest on the show.

And I normally like to start out by asking, we all have moments that define us. How did your early experiences in your life shape, who you are? Yeah, so there are several experiences early on in my life that really did shape who I am today. First off, I grew up in a very patriotic family. We grew up respecting the military and first responders and looking basically at anyone who puts a uniform on day in and day out to protect other people

as kind of like the real-life super heroes. And so that was something that was ingrained in me very early on at a young age. And fast forward a few years to when I was in college, 9-11 took place. And you saw all of those people on the news, the video footage of them literally running into the towers, running towards the wreckage, not running away, but they're running towards it. And those were the people who were doing that selfless act of going and helping out other people. And that just reinforced that respect that I had for both types of people. 9-11 also had a huge impact on me because it was a spark that caused me to join the military in the first place.

After 9-11, like I said, I was in college, I decided to finish out college. I only had a couple of years left, and I figured if I quit college and joined the military right away, I would probably not go back and finish my degree. So I wanted to finish that off. And when I got out of college, my younger brother actually joined the military first. He was in

college at the time. He met a guy who was in the National Guard, got to learn a little bit about what the National Guard was all about. And he decided he liked it and he joined the National Guard. he liked it and he joined the National Guard. And overnight, he went from being my little brother to being this guy that I was looking up to and respecting. Not that I didn't respect him before, but in a whole different light, just really looked at him in a different way. I was super proud of him and totally respected his decision.

And later on that year, I heard a report in the news that the military was struggling to meet their recruiting numbers. And that started to really get under my skin. What happened to all these people after 9-11 who were ready to go and move mountains to go get payback for what took place and everything? It was only a few years later. Where were all these people? And then I realized that I was one of those people and I still hadn't done anything myself.

And I revisited that thought and said, I'm young enough, I'm capable enough. There's no reason why I couldn't join the military myself. And so I decided to also enlist in the military. That's where my start in, a lot of what I do now, got started. I didn't really advocate Army National Guard for about six years, deployed to Afghanistan in 2010. And my younger brother, Steven, he and I,

both were deployed to Afghanistan at the same time where he was tragically killed in action. And that clearly had a profound impact on my life, my family's lives and everything. And it really set me in bad direction. I was not coping with the grief of losing him and the PTSD that I had experienced and all this other stuff that I was doing with.

I wasn't doing it in a very healthy way and eventually I realized that I need to do something different to get the help that I needed. And once and I started doing that, I realized just how many other people are out there in the military and the veteran communities who are struggling the way I struggled. And I realize that you don't have to go down this route and struggle by yourself. There are resources available. You can get the help that you need. You just have to know where to look and know what to do. And so that's the background of why I started doing some of the stuff that I'm doing now, my podcast, the drive on podcast focuses on these issues to raise awareness for some of the resources that are available for military veterans. We talk to people who have struggled with homelessness or addiction or PTSD or any number of other issues that plague the veteran community. And we talked about what they did to come through

on the other side in a better place. And all with the hopes of providing hope to the listeners who might just be sitting there thinking that all hope is lost for them and that they don't really have any good options ahead of them. And when you start hearing about other people who are in very similar situations

and they have message of positivity, a message of hope, then it gives that listener a little bit of hope as well, it says, okay, maybe I haven't tried everything, maybe there's something else that I need to try. Well, I'm very sorry about Steven's loss, and I can't even imagine what it was like going through that and especially learning about it while you yourself are on the battlefield. In your books, surviving son, why did you think it was important

to write about grief, death, and mental health? Yeah, because all of those things, grief, death, the loss of my brother, mental health, to me, they all are intertwined. The grief and the loss of my brother really affected my mental state in ways that I never really imagined it would because my brother was only 25 when he was killed and I never thought that I would have to deal with this type of a loss at that age. I just assumed, like most people do, we're going to live long healthy lives and we're gonna grow old and we'll deal with that when the time comes. But in a blink of an eye, everything changed.

And it really affected me. And my mental state was just so fragile at that point, especially coming out of combat, but then also adding on the grief of losing my brother, did all of that just compounded and just made such a bad situation for me. And the reason why I wanted to write about it was so that first off for the civilians, the people who never served in the military, so that they could understand some of the sacrifices that are made by military families and the

impact that has on their immediate family, on the communities that they live in, and all that kind of stuff. Because when you hear about someone in the military who has killed an action, you might hear the 30-second clip on the news, you might get a quick flash, a couple pictures of them, and maybe a couple sound bites of who that person was and what they meant to their families and things like that. But outside of that, you don't really get too much. And my book is as much my story as it is my brother's story. He's no longer here. He doesn't have a voice to tell his story. So I

wanted to be able to put his story into words and a format that will obviously outlive him, but also outlive me and give people a little insight into what goes on over there. But I also wanted to write the book for the veterans who have maybe not necessarily lost a direct relative. There are other people in a similar situation to me where they've lost relatives as well, but there's loss in the military. You lose friends, you lose battle buddies who win your you're in combat and there's grief that's associated with that and how do you deal with that? And I made plenty of mistakes and I don't want other people to make those same mistakes. So I write about all of those

and pretty candid detail about all the things that I did wrong, how I did them, and what I did to change the outcome. So I didn't continue going down that path. And really that's why I wanted to write this book. So that other people didn't have to suffer in the same way that I did. Yeah, it was interesting to me that you started out the book by discussing your deployment and you come back and you're meeting with a bunch of mental health providers

and you're basically giving them canned answers that, you know, they're going to want. And I remember I did 10 or 12 deployments while I was in. And because of the fact that I worked for the national security agency, we were told very clearly that you cannot have a mental health diagnosis at all, or you're gonna lose your clearance levels, et cetera. And it was very frowned upon both in our community and I spent some time with a couple of still teams,

that community as well, that you talk about any of this. But back when I served, which was about a decade before you served, there really wasn't the mental health focus that there is now and so it was very rare when we came off a deployment that anyone talked to us about post-traumatic stress disorder or Any of our emotions. In fact, I just learned how to hold them in because the last thing you wanted to show was to reveal them because In many of those situations it made you look weak or that's what kind of the feeling was at that time.

But I thought it was important that you laid out that looking back you felt it was a mistake that you ended up taking that approach. And for veteran who's listening or perhaps someone who's on active duty, what would your advice be to them about this? Yeah, and this I think goes beyond veterans or active duty, military or anything like that. If this goes for just about anybody, if you are experiencing something that

causes you to look at yourself and be like, this is not me. This is not the same me from a year ago, two years ago, whatever the time period is. I'm behaving differently. I'm getting angry and lashing out. I'm drinking more. I'm sleeping less. I'm doing all of these things that are just, they're not you. They're not your personality. You notice that there's something different about you and there's something wrong about you. Go get help. Go talk to somebody about whatever it is that you're dealing with because there are trained professionals who can help you with whatever it is that you're going through. And that's their job. That's why they do what they do is to help people like you. And if your mindset is, oh, that's weak, or I'm going to be looked at as less of a man or less of a

soldier or less of a whatever, like that to me just doesn't make sense because you get up in the morning and you go and you do PT and you exercise your body. You work on your physical health all the time. You go to the gym, you lift weights, you run, you eat, right? You do all the things that you're supposed to do for your body, but you do that because you're not invincible. You need to do this, you're human. Just like everybody else, you need to do these things in order to be strong.

And when you start getting weak, you realize, okay, I need to pick up my exercise routine. I need to focus on certain areas of my body. When your mind starts having some of those issues that we're talking about, you need to go and do something about that. It's not going to just magically go away. If you're driving in your car and it starts making funky noise, it starts clunking around as you're driving and a in your car and it starts making funky noise, it starts clunking around as you're driving and you decide to just ignore it, it's not going to make itself just magically get

better. Unless you take it to a mechanic who fixes it and diagnoses a problem, fixes the problem, and then you'll be on your way, you're going to end up with a car that you can't drive and it's very similar to how your mind works. If you are just ignoring the problem, you're going to end up with a mind that goes down a path that's going to be much harder to recover from. And so if you want to be the best soldier that you can be, your marine or airman sailor, whatever you are, the best just all around person. Never mind, forget the military for a minute, just see best all around person that you could be. Go and get the help that you need. Get your mind fixed to the extent that you can through mental health professionals. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the same idea as going to a mechanic or hiring a plumber to fix

plumbing in your house. If you're not knowledgeable in how to do that yourself, you're not going to make the problem any better by just working on it yourself and trying to figure it out. Go to talk to someone who knows what they're doing and can lead you in that right direction. I think that's the biggest message. It's not weak to go and talk to somebody. Nobody's going to look at you differently in a negative way, I should say, if you do. And if they do look at you that way, then especially from a leadership perspective, they're probably not the best leader to begin with, or they would be encouraging you to improve yourself, to get yourself better, so that you can be the best feeling of the blank, whatever it is that you are, soldier, marine person, that you could possibly be.

Yes, and there are a number of different motalities that people can use. I think some of the most common ones that I went through were cognitive processing therapy, which kind of falls under the CBT umbrella and EMDR treatments. But it's interesting. I've had some guests on this podcast talking about validies of using psychological drugs now to help treat this as well. And what I found very interesting is the efficacy of proctorapy is about 30%, but they're finding that the efficacy of MDMA and silocybin in, I think, one isn't phase three, one is in Phase 2 trials, has been almost 70%, which is pretty remarkable, that I think each of them use them in a two or three time setting

and they have such a profound impact. So I'm actually partnered with Vets, which is one nonprofit, Pro-A-Carts Project, which is led by a former Army Ranger, Jesse Gould, and where Angels Foundation, which is treating for both TBI and PTSD, and is very much also on the cutting edge of these treatments. So I would agree with you. I spent way too long letting this fester inside,

and after a while, you're just compounding grief on top of grief and to the point that you feel numb. And when you reach that point, I wouldn't wish that condition on anyone. And I don't think it only comes from trauma. I think it can also come from burnout, which so many people are feeling today. It can come from grief. It can come from many different ways. But if you don't release it, that's when you really start putting yourself into not only physical and mental health issue, but also emotional and spiritual health issues.

And the one thing I found is if I wasn't anywhere in your 100%, how could I be 100% for those I loved? Exactly. When you're at that point where you're not at that 100%, you're not 100% there%, you're not a 100% there as a leader for your soldiers. You're not 100% there as a husband or a wife or as a father or a mother or a whatever it is that you are. You're not operating at 100%. You just can't. It's impossible. It's go back to that car analogy. That car, if you have a NASCAR racer,

they're on the track and their car is making this crazy noise and it's go back to that car analogy. That car, if you had a NASCAR racer, they're on the track and their car is making this crazy noise and it's not supposed to be making that noise and they're like, well, I'm just going to keep driving. They're not going to be operating at peak performance. They can't possibly expect to win that race if their car has a problem. So they're not 100% there. They might as well just back out of the race, figure out what's wrong with the car and come back for the next race. Like they're just not going to be operating at 100%. Yeah, I completely agree with you. One of the topics I wanted to jump into is I had a Naval

Academy classmate of mine, Chuck Smith, on the podcast, maybe a year ago, and Chuck served in the Marines and lost his exo from when he was in service to suicide. And Chuck's TED Talk has been viewed, I think 2.6 million times now, but what was startling is we hear about the 22 a day, but his research, which was independently verified by TED, which if you're gonna put out statistics on their site, they have to do some type of independent verification,

showed that the actual number, and this was a year ago, so I don't know what it is now, but for the period of 2001, until that point, which was the 20 year period, there were over 145,000 veterans who had committed suicide, which when I heard that number, it was much more than I anticipated it to be. I look at my own class at the Naval Academy,

and we're now approaching having more of our classmates die from suicide than we do from being killed in action or in the military. And so I wanted to unpack this a little bit with you as we're trying to help veterans is you've been having different people on your podcast talk about this. What are some of the most prevalent reasons that you think this is happening as frequently as it is? And what do you think are some of the things that we need to do as a community?

Because it's not only veterans. And if you look at suicides in the United States, they're on the rise too. I think it was 89,000. The last study I looked at in worldwide over 936,000. So it's something that is chronic across the entire world. And I think as people are facing disengagement loneliness helplessness, et cetera, it's only getting worse. Yeah, it is definitely is getting worse and things like the lockdowns during the COVID situation, all of that probably made things worse as far as people's mental health, where they were usually maybe going in to work at an office

or some physical location where there were other people going into work and they were around those people. They could talk to them. The water crew would talk that you might have had. But then when you switch to working from home, you may live by yourself. You may not have anybody around that you can talk to other than through quick zoom meetings, but you don't have that physical interaction with anybody. You don't ever get to see the people that matter to you in your life. And that is not an ideal way to conduct your life either

because yeah, we all wanted to stay healthy and stay away from the virus that was out there that could have gotten us sick. Other things were happening to us and we were getting sick in a different way. Our mental health was deteriorating and while there's no test necessarily like a COVID test to tell, are you positive for this or whatever. But I think it's clear just looking in these numbers in some of the statistics that you mentioned that it clearly did have some sort of impact on society worldwide. And when you talk about that kind of isolation

where people are removed from a work environment or some other environment where they normally are socializing or around other people, you talk about the veterans who are struggling with their own mental health and a lot of times the solution that they come up with just on their own a lot of times is to just remove themselves from the situations that cause them that sort of negative emotions or negative feelings that they might have. And they tend to just isolate themselves. They don't want to associate with people who don't relate with them. And they don't want to get out of the house and go do things. They want to just kind of stuff themselves away and not deal with those types of things.

And that's the same type of isolation that we're just talking about with some of the lockdowns and things like that. And it doesn't help when you isolate yourself, you remove any sense of purpose or passion that you might have for things outside of yourself. When you get out and you're serving something or someone such as when you're in the military. You have a purpose that's bigger than yourself. You're serving your country. That's a pretty big purpose. And you have that which can guide you as far as I don't want to let my country down. And so I'm going to push forward. I'm going to do what I need to do in order to be able to continue serving my country. But when you remove all of that external influence

and you're sitting at home and you're having those, woe is me kind of moments and feeling sorry for yourself and whatever else that you're feeling, you stop thinking about what impact you can have on the world at large and you start just focusing on the problems that are happening to you day after day. And you don't think about, okay, what can I do to influence other people around me and

have a positive impact on this world and do some of that potential that you might otherwise have had. And yeah, it's definitely a problem. I'm sure I don't have all the answers to it, but I feel like one of the big things is just getting out there and interacting with people, socializing with people. And it may be hard to do at first, but try it.

What do you have to lose, really? Yeah, I just did my latest solo episode this past week on the chronic loneliness epidemic, because it kept coming up from guests, primarily civilian world guests who were talking about it. And the research is pretty staggering. Some of the studies that have been done over the past 20 years just show it's prevalent in 113 countries and territories.

In addition to that, it impacts 33% of the population. But R.P. said said in the United States, it's 45% of adults experienced it at some point. And surprising to me, the number one country who is impacted by it is Brazil, where 50% of the population is impacted by it. So this is not a trivial thing at all. And it seems to be getting worse as people are feeling all this social discourse that we're having across the world. I think social media has made it worse to your point

in many ways because we're interacting more and more on our devices when what we truly need is the feeling of giving love and being loved. And you don't get that without having in-person human connection. I think starting out seeking help can have help someone who's feeling this way, but they also need to be interacting

with people in their lives, whether that's a neighbor going to a American Legion, VFW, if you're a vet or finding some other way to get it because to your point, if you're just contained in your house, what is interesting is this loneliness is as dangerous to you as smoking 15 cigarettes today, it's as lethal as alcoholism and causes everything from more strokes to a higher percentage

of cardiac issues as well. So it really is something that if a listener is feeling this way, they need to do something and I provided some advice on that. I just wanted to add in real quick as you mentioned the VFW, the American Legion, which are great options for people who are in that military veteran communities, but that may not be appropriate or even possible for people who are outside of those communities, but there are so many different things out there, different interest groups and hobbies and things like that.

You can get involved with whether it's getting out into nature hiking and running clubs and stuff like that. It's just a matter of finding those people who share similar interests. I went for a run yesterday in my neighborhood and there's a few fields that I ran by and one of them had a group of people who were doing like a ultimate frisbee kind of thing.

And I've seen them there several times on Sunday mornings. They always meet there. Another field had people setting up soccer nets and everything in there playing soccer. Again, I see them pretty much every Sunday morning, baseball, same thing, like every Sunday morning. I'm seeing these people getting out there and there's groups.

There are people out there who actually go out and do things and you can find those people and do those things with them. So if any of those things are stuff that you're interested in, but if it's not bad, it could be taking a cooking class or a painting class or something that you're interested in and just getting involved with other people. And that is just another way of getting out of your isolation and finding your community.

Yeah, I think those are some great suggestions. And there's so much to be said with just getting out in nature and interacting with the world around us even if that is by yourself, it definitely is one of the things I highlighted in the episode as well. As I was reading your book, a couple things jumped out to me. One was you were talking about you have to check your backswing and you talk about how you accidentally hit your brother and the head with baseball bat. And unfortunately, I hit both my siblings. So my younger sister, I hit her with a croquet mallet and then my brother, I guess I didn't learn, are a younger brother.

I ended up hitting him somehow with a tennis racket. So I was the cause of stitches for both of them. But what were some of your favorite memories growing up with your brother that really stick out for you? That is certainly one that memory that you talked about. That's certainly one. It's definitely not a favorite because it was a terrible situation. But it's one that I was at such a young age and I

still remember it pretty vividly playing in the backyard with my dad. He was pitching a ball to me and I was swinging the bat and my younger brother, he came running behind me as I was swinging and I cracked him right in the forehead and he had the scar from that. He was probably only, I forget now, he was maybe two years old at the time. He had that scar on his forehead till the day he died. It became a part of him. That's just, you look at his face and you see that and that was just there and it always was there. And I always felt bad about it because I was like, oh my gosh, I should have been more careful

because I literally scarred him for life. But just growing up, we, like any set of brothers do, we found things to do without playing and stuff. And we'd golf, my dad would, he took the lawnmower and, you know, how the lawnmower has different height settings. And he made basically a golf course in our backyard by cutting like the green real low and the fairway a little bit higher. He made all that kind of stuff.

And my brother and I would go out in our backyard. We'd play golf for hours and hours as kids. Before we were old enough to go out on a golf course and like that was fun. But then as we got older we ended up moving out of my parents house into a condo together and just hanging out together and enjoying each other's company. We'd go up to Boston. We lived in Connecticut at the time. We'd go up to Boston to watch the brewing and hockey games and stuff and that was always fun. We always always have a story after leaving one of those games. Just stuff that happened and stuff like that. I fun. We always always have a story after leaving one of those games.

Just stuff that happened and stuff like that. I write about some of those stories in the book as well. One time when my brother, we were at a Bruins versus the Montreal Canadiens and my brother got the entire stadium chanting USA as we were walking out of the stadium and so that's just the kind of person he was. Yeah, this personality that literally infected the entire stadium by chanting USA after the Bruins beat the Montreal Canadian. It's just stuff like that that really sticks with me and the funny things that he would do if you were telling a story that was boring and didn't interest him at all. You just pretend to fall asleep.

It didn't matter if you're standing up, sitting down, whatever you just collapse down in fall asleep. And like little things like that just stick with you and their funny reminders of the type of person that he was. This is the Passion Start Podcast with our guest Scott Delusio. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. Here that little chit-chin, that's the satisfying sound of another sale on Shopify. It's all They all in one commerce platform trusted by millions of entrepreneurs to create their online store.

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to our sponsors because they're the ones that keep the show going as well. You can check out all the sponsors at passionstruck.com, slash deals. You'll find all the codes and URLs, all those things are there. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now, back to my conversation with Scott Delusio. I'm going to take us to just some general advice that you can give the listeners. I love the Stoics, so I'm going to use some of their quotes to get a response from you.

Epithetists said we must go through harbinger training, which is exposing yourself and getting uncomfortable on purpose. How do you get comfortable with being uncomfortable? It is literally the word that you used in that is exposure. You have to have exposure to it when a child is born, that they come out of the nice warm wound and they come out into this cold hospital room and they're crying. But everyone else standing in that room isn't crying. We've been exposed to that kind of temperature over years and years and we're okay.

We're comfortable with it. It's not probably the most comfortable thing as a nice cozy warm wound might be, but it becomes comfortable. And I think with anything, and this even goes to some of the therapies that you were talking about, there's prolonged exposure therapy, where you revisit unpleasant memories or experiences over and over again, and it might sound like torture, but you do

it over and over again, until it doesn't have as big of an impact on you as it may have had before. Really, it's the exposure to whatever that unpleasant experiences or that uncomfortable situation. So if for you, it's uncomfortable to be in large crowds. Maybe you don't start by going to a concert with 50,000 other people, but maybe you start by going to the mall and just walk around the mall when it's maybe not so busy. Not during the peak Christmas shopping season or something like that, but just go walk around there and there's going to be other people. And maybe it's a little uncomfortable, but good. It'll be uncomfortable until it's not. You keep doing that time after time and then you move on to something bigger until eventually you're comfortable with the things that you just weren't comfortable with doing.

Yeah, I was reading your blog andwium brand a while ago and he said this phrase to me as he was going through Buds training. He said it's better to suck at the front than to suck at the rear and it can aid me think the same thing as the Buffalo because in that analogy you're the weakest link and how have you found

that play out both in your military career and now in your civilian career? You don't want to be the weakest link ever. You always want to be improving yourself and getting better at whatever it is that you're working on. The analogy where you're only as fast as the slowest member of the group, you don't want to be

that slowest member. If you start off as at the slowest and then you work to get yourself somewhere in the middle and then you work to get yourself somewhere towards the front of the pack that pushes a person who's or the animal in this case who might now be the one who's at the back of the pack to push themselves to get better and push themselves to continuously get better. And so as we continue to push ourselves, we're in a way pulling the rest of the group with us to get better too. And when you look at groups of people like veterans, for example,

just because we've been talking about them, but if you're pushing yourself to get better, you don't want to end up being the worst in a particular situation. You want to strive to get better. And we all want better for the veterans. And so we'll help pull those veterans up once when we get a little bit ahead of the pack. We're going to want to pull them up too and help them out and the veteran community especially is super great at stuff like that where we look out after each other and we try to help out any way that we can. Yeah, on this whole topic of suffering and it's sucking. I know another common thing that we talk about in the military is embrace the suck. So how have you found yourself using that phrase and applying it in real life? Yeah, embrace the suck is basically going back to that getting uncomfortable with being uncomfortable, almost enjoying the journey.

And being able to get to whatever your destination is, say it's a long ruck march in the military when you gotta go 20 miles or whatever it is with the pack on your back and your feet are getting blisters and your hot and you're tired and you're uncomfortable. But when you get to the end of that journey, whatever the journey is doesn't have to be military-related. Whatever it is, when you accomplish your goal and you look back and you're like, holy crap, I did something pretty amazing here. I accomplished this. Didn't think I might have been able to accomplish this, but I started it and I didn't quit. And I think that's an important aspect of all of this is not quitting,

because when you quit on yourself, it becomes easier to quit on yourself time after time because you don't flex that resilient muscle if you will by pushing through the things that are uncomfortable. You don't learn how to do that. And so the more you quit on yourself, the less resilient you become. And the fewer difficult things you'll be able to accomplish. Yeah, it reminds me of that quote where you're going to be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the things that you did do. So throughout the battle lines, etc. That kind of reminds me of that as well as.

But it's interesting. I call on a Brady who's an adventure athlete on the podcast and he's got a new book out right now called the 12 hour walk and I remember doing those forced marches when I was in the service as well and it's a similar concept because I don't know about you, but I did mine mostly with the Marine Corps and you're not talking to anyone when you're six, seven miles in and each step starts becoming harder and harder as your legs are starting to cramp up and everything else. But the last thing I ever wanted to do was fall out. So it really required me to be not only present in that moment, but it allowed for a lot of time to do self-reflection. And I don't think we give ourselves that time very often. So it was interesting to me that you brought that up. But that brings up a good question.

What is the difference do you think between selfishness and self-interest? Selfishness is something that, in my opinion, anyways, is something that you do that only benefits you and in some cases actually takes away from somebody else. So at their detriment to your benefit, selflessness where you have somebody else's interest in mind, it may appear as if you're being selfish in the moment, but without being selfish right then and there in that moment, you can't offer any sort of benefit or improvement to that other person or to that other situation that might be going on.

A classic example is when you're on an airplane and they tell you before the flight takes off it, if the air pressure changes and the oxygen mass drops from the ceiling to put your mask on first before help other people like a child or something like that. And you may look at that, that's pretty selfish that you're taking care of yourself before your child who's sitting there struggling with this mask. But if the child's struggling with this because it's a chaotic situation, they're scared and they're panicking. They don't know what to do. And you're trying to struggle to get that mask on them. Because you don't want to be quote unquote selfish. If they're fighting you and you're not able to get that mask on them, they're going to pass out. You're

going to pass out and you're going to be completely useless to that child. And so you have to take care of yourself first in that situation. You have to put your mask on before you can put the other person's mask on and help them with that. The same thing like in the military, when you're in combat, if a soldier or a marine or whoever gets injured in combat, you can't just go run out and help that person as much as you might want to. You can't just go drop everything and just go run and grab them and like the heroics and the Hollywood movies and stuff

and just grab them and bring them back undercover and start treating their wound and stuff because whoever's out there who shot that person is going to shoot you too. Like their aim is clearly good enough that they're able to shoot somebody. They're going to get you too. So you have to take care of the immediate threat first. As much as it might pain you to see your friend suffering and knowing that you can't do

anything about it, you have to take care of that immediate threat. And yeah, that from the outside looking in might be looking like, oh, I'm just taking care of myself. That's selfish, but it's not. It's like, I can't possibly help that person without taking care of this threat first. So I'm doing what I need to do,

not just for me, but for that person. And so that's how I look at the difference between those two, is that when you're doing something purely for your own benefit and possibly even at the detriment of somebody else, then that's definitely selfish. But when you are acting with other people's best interests in mind while the action itself may benefit you, very well-made benefit you, I don't see that as there being anything wrong with that, so long as the goal also is to help that other person. Yeah, I agree with you. To me, there's taking care of yourself and then their selfishness

and there are two completely different things because if you just look at it like kindness, it's very difficult to be kind to others if you're not kind to yourself to begin with. kindness, it's very difficult to be kind to others if you're not kind to yourself to begin with. Sure. And so I find we tell ourselves what events in our life mean and I'm asking this through some of your personal experiences. Why do we fall victim to whatever we allow our internal voice to say? Man, our internal voice can really be a pain in the butt sometimes.

It can be our own worst enemy, I think, in all seriousness. I think that internal voice is just so powerful. It's that voice that's always with you. And it's always telling you things. It's telling you that you're a good person, you're a bad person. It's telling you if you're doing stuff right, doing stuff wrong, it's telling you if you're being doing stuff right, doing stuff wrong, it's beating you up over every little thing because it knows everything that has happened to you in your life and everything that you've screwed up and you've done wrong, we've

all made mistakes, we've all screwed things up, but it knows about every single one of those things and it's going to be quick to remind you about all of those things. Now why it does that? I have no idea. I don't know why and I wish I did so that we can maybe turn that off or hit the mute button for a little bit. But it does it. And so I think the key to all of this is figuring out a way to change the internal narrative and change how you think about some of these things that maybe you beat yourself up over. An example, and I talk about this in my book, there's a situation in Afghanistan where it was faced with a decision of whether or not to shoot a child. And that decision has plagued me for years because prior to that moment, I thought of myself as a type of person who would do just about anything to protect a child. And then here I was staring down the barrel of a rifle, deciding whether or not to pull the trigger with this child. And it completely changed how I thought about myself and in the years afterwards I was telling myself how bad of a person I was for even considering shooting a child and given the circumstances, I was

justified in what had taken place, but it just still just changed that internal narrative and it really rattled me and shook me and it made me really start to talk negatively about myself. Like how could I be a good father if this is how I'm going to treat a child? How could I be a good person, a good, whatever? How could I even consider a moment like this? And really, it took a long time for me, but what I had to do is just really start to think to myself, like, what are the facts of the situation? Not the emotions, because the emotions will get you. But what are the facts of the situation? Not the emotions, because the emotions will get you.

But what are the facts? And in this case, the facts were, I literally thought this child was going to kill some of our soldiers. He had what appeared to be a rifle, and he was pointing it at them. He was at a distance, and they couldn't see him from where they were. And I was the only one really in a position to do anything. So I raised my rifle ready to shoot. It wasn't until I noticed that he was just carrying a piece

of wood that was cut out and carved into the shape of a rifle that I decided not to shoot. But I was at the point where I was the safety was off and I was ready to shoot. And so the facts were, I was trying to protect my soldiers. And that's an admirable thing. That's something that is, it's a good thing. If I didn't do that, then I might be looked at as a piece

of crap for not caring about my soldiers. I have to look at the facts of the situation and really tell yourself, like, look at it as if you're talking to somebody else, not to yourself because we really criticize ourselves. But if you're talking to your best friend who went through a similar situation to you, what would you tell them? And chances are you wouldn't be quite as harsh. Yeah, and maybe for the listener who doesn't understand, because I read about that experience

in one with an older man that you mentioned in the book, what are the four S's that kind of govern our actions when we're in combat? Yeah, the four S's are the shout show shove and shoot. So at first you're supposed to shout to the person to basically give a command to stop what you're doing or put the weapon down or something like that. In this case with the child, he was too far away from you to shout show is raise your rifle and show that you mean you're going to use your rifle. Again, in this situation, the child wasn't even looking at me. So me showing my rifle didn't really matter. Shove is self-explanatory. If they're close enough, you shove them.

Again, in this case, the child was well, I forget exactly what it was, 50, 75 yards, somewhere like that, away from me. So I wasn't able to shove. And the next step in the escalation is to shoot. And so they put that escalation in place so that you really stop and think about what it is that you're is to shoot. And so they put that escalation in place so that you really stop and think about what it is that you're about to do. Because once you pull that trigger

in the bullet, it leaves the gun. There's no getting it back. And you don't want to create an international incident when you go and you kill someone who could have been saved that killing could have been prevented by going through some of these steps. Now, obviously, if the person's shooting, forget about all those steps and you just go straight to shooting back. You don't have to go through every single one of those steps, but yeah, that's really what the process was. And there's another case that I talked about and you brought up with the old man, in terms of he was walking into a restricted area. We had closed off this area and he walked into it

So I shouted at him. I raised my rifle. I showed it. I got to the point where I started like pushing into him and I realized there's something just wrong with this guy. It like something wasn't right and I would have been justified at that point to shoot him, but I was like something just doesn't feel right here. And it turns out the guy was just deaf. He didn't have a clue what we were saying. And he didn't know that we wanted him to stop. He didn't know why he even had a gun pointed in his face. He just kept going. And so it turns out like he just didn't know. And had I shot, yeah, I would have been justified. I probably quite frankly never would have found out that he

had any sort of disabilities. I probably would have just thought I was doing the right thing. But all these years later, I look back on that and start to question myself like, why didn't I see this sooner? Why? And that goes back to that internal monologue that goes on and at least do start to question yourself. But if you start looking at the facts and start looking more objectively at the situation, you start to realize that you're not that bad of a person. There's reasons for the things that you did. And yeah, every now and again, people screw up, people make mistakes.

And that's just the human nature, but it doesn't mean that we're bad people because of it. Okay, and I'm gonna totally switch topics on you. Maybe some listeners out there have their own podcast or they're an aspiring podcaster. I think you've been doing your show now for about three years. I have it. You started out doing one show a week and it appears you're up to two now. What is your biggest

piece of advice that you would give someone who's considering doing this or maybe who has a show? I think the biggest thing is consistency. Get a schedule and stick with it. If you decide to change it somewhere down the line, maybe you were too ambitious in the beginning and you thought I'll do a daily podcast, right? I put out a new episode every single day and then you realize a month or two into it,

like, I don't know if I can sustain this. It's just too much work. But it is a change to make sure something that you can be consistent with. For the first couple of years of my podcast, I was doing one episode a week and that was definitely sustainable for me. I was able to record the episodes,

find the guests, edit the episodes and put them out consistently on a regular schedule and I had no problem with that whatsoever. And it got to the point where I had so many guests coming to me that I was scheduling myself out with new guests about six months out. This was late last year. So at the end of 2021, maybe November timeframe, I think I had a guest scheduled out into late

April or early May at that point. And I was like, wow, this is great, a great problem to have that I have so many episodes recorded there all in the queue. But that's a lot of episodes to be sitting on and in a long time to make a guest wait for the episode that is going to be coming out. They're trying to promote a service or an event that's taking place. It's not really realistic to schedule that much in advance. So I decided to, at the beginning of the year, to switch to two episodes a week, and I've been able to consistently keep up with that cadence as well. And so I think the reason why consistency is good is because the listeners are going to come to expect every Monday morning that your episode is going to come out or whatever

day it is that they are going to be able to start their weekly commute to work and be able to listen to your podcast. And if for some reason you miss a few weeks and you don't put out an episode at all, they're going to start to forget about your podcast and they're not going to keep checking to see if there's new episodes, because maybe this guy just decided a quit and he's not doing podcasts anymore. So click that on unsubscribe button. Now they're gone and now you're not getting listeners. So if you're consistent with it, they'll start to find your pattern and come to expect it really. Okay, thank you for that. My last question is a fun one. We had a spaceship that was supposed to go up today to the moon that unfortunately wasn't able to take off, but my question is this, if you were selected to be in the first group of astronauts that went to Mars and you were given the ability to set one law, premise, regulation, whatever it may be for this new planet. What would it be in why?

Oh wow, that's a good one. I think I'd have to do something that benefited the group of people who were there in a way that maybe the individual contributors might not see it and by that I think I when you're on Mars a pretty Baron planet. There's no resources around that at that point when they first get there there's really nothing there and here on earth we have abundant resources all over the place and And here on Earth, we have abundant resources all over the place. And we can be a little selfish with some of these resources, whether we are leaving the water running too long in our sink, or if we are using too much fuel, and I don't want to say too much fuel,

but using more fuel than we need to go back and forth to the store, whatever. I would think that we would have to, in a situation where resources are limited, we'd have to really focus on what do we really need to do and just do those things and not be wasteful with the resources that we have available to us, because otherwise we're just not gonna survive. And so I think it would have to be something

along those lines. Well, I'll tell you one of the things that would scare me being on that mission is, I think about how many road trips I've been on or international trips and I always forget something. Yeah, they're not going to have that luxury. No, they're not going to be able to run into the drugstore to grab a toothbrush or something like that. That stuff just doesn't exist out there. So yeah, you the packer, you're not going to have it. Well, Scott, for the listener, if they want to find out more about you, hit up your show,

I'll put the book in the show notes along with that, but in case they're listening, what will give them some ways, please? Yeah, sure. So the podcast you can find at driveonpodcast.com, and from there, you have all the social media links and the links to subscribe to it on wherever you listen to podcasts or you can just search in your favorite podcast app, driveon podcast and the book, like you said, is it's available on Amazon, but it's available in all the formats you could possibly consume it in. So there's a ebook, there's the paperback heart cover and recently released as an audio book as well. So if you are interested in the book, go check it out on Amazon. And yeah, that's where to go. Okay, thank you so much for coming on the show. Greatly appreciated you being here and

best of luck with your own show. Thank you so much for the opportunity to come on. I really do appreciate all of these opportunities. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Scott Delusio and wanted to say thanks to Scott and Admiral Tim Galadette for the honor of interviewing him. Links to all thanks Scott will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. It helps support the show and make it free for our listeners. Videos are at YouTube at John Armiles where we now have over 400 of them for you to check out along with exclusive content. Advertiser deals and discount codes

are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm at JohnRMiles both on Twitter and Instagram and you can also find me on LinkedIn. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with Max Bezerman, who is the Jesse Isador Strauss, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Max is the author or co-author of 13 books,

including his new book, which releases next week, Complicit. I think we would all be well-served to think about which of those groups do we want to be in. So if we end up in a situation where our firm is acting in inappropriate ways, we're assigned to a consulting project where our client is acting in the various ways, how do we want to behave? And I think that a lot of us would have greater clarity about who we want to be and we don't stop to reflect on that enough. The fee for this show is that you share it with others. When you find something useful or interesting, if you know someone who's dealing with mental health issues,

definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give this show is to share it with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live Life Ashenshtrap.