The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rule of 3, How Elite Leaders Win by Atlas Aultman

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

Rule of 3, How Elite Leaders Win by Atlas Aultman Leaders-kit.com To be released in June 2023, this is the pre-purchase of the Rule of 3 book that changes how leaders look at leadership. Atlas Aultman has decades of experience successfully leading selectively manned military and innovation teams in combat, White House, and Special Operations mission sets. This book can be consumed in as little as 10 minutes and be ready to apply, or you can enjoy the stories that help paint the picture. Atlas hasn't written a leadership book that hasn't become a bestseller, this one will be no exception. Get your copy first, pre-order today.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big circus tent of podcasting in the sky. I don't know what that means because we don't have elephants, lions, and tigers or bears. Welcome to the big show,

my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, we have an amazing author and brilliant mind on this show, so we'll be getting to him in a second and some of the things he's working on in leadership, et cetera, et cetera, some of the children's books he's written as well. In the meantime, as always, the Chris Voss Show isn't quite an MLM, but we do require you to have five people in your downline. No, I'm just kidding. We don't do that. But please reach out to your family and friends and mail them a postcard that says,

hey, have you subscribed yet to the Chris Voss Show? Tell them to go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Foss. Go to our big LinkedIn group. LinkedIn newsletter over there is killing it. The big LinkedIn stuff we're doing. We just booked the second billionaire we've ever had on the show today. So watch for that.

They'll be, I think, here next week. We're talking to billionaires. And I think we just might make the show all just billionaires from here on out. So this guest might be the last normal guest on the show. No, that's not going to happen. We're not going to be that way. Anyway, guys, one tip of the news that I thought was kind of interesting. Meta, if you're familiar with Meta, which is otherwise known as Facebook,

one of their vice presidents told staff to make the Metaverse so obviously successful that his dad stops calling him every week to ask about it wow that's some pressure right there basically he's just telling his uh his staff uh please make the better verse stop sucking so there's that anyway our newest author and uh welcome to the show uh is going to be Atlas Altman. He is here to promote his newest book that will be coming out in June. It's Rule of Three, How Elite Leaders Win. And this is one of several books that he has. We'll be talking to him about his amazing book, his life, what sort of things he did in the White House, et cetera, et cetera.

Atlas Altman has successfully led military and technology teams in the White House special operations and combat zones since joining the Air Force in 1995. He and his 16-year-old son recently teamed up and published a book series that garnered number one best-selling rank on Amazon for over two weeks in preparation to self-publish his leadership lessons book, which we just aforementioned, and it's available to the public coming June 2023. He is now helping people write, speak, and win using his processes and experiences from the shadowy sidelines of history. I should put that in the moving voice.

Welcome to the show, Atlas. How are you? Thanks, Chris. I am excellent now. Thanks for that awesome introduction. I love the word shadowy. You said it so perfectly. Yeah, it was like the whole in a world gone mad.

Atlas Holtman brings you the process and experiences from the shadowy sidelines of history. I don't do that well at all. I feel like a billionaire, though, so let's go with that. We try to make every guest feel like a billionaire. So welcome to the show, Atlas. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you on those interwebs in the sky. Perfect.

Yeah, I'm on leaders-kit.com, so that's leadersi-t.com let's talk about a little bit of your history let's sell you a little bit to the audience and talk about what sort of upbringing background what got you in the military etc and focus on leadership yeah i love myself so let's talk about me this is fantastic i thought i was the only narcissist in the room. Yeah, no. Early childhood, my dad left us. I ended up hanging out with my grandpa, who was a special operator. He taught me how to march, and my first words were, up two, three, four. I looked at him, and I said, man, I want to be that guy. Everyone comes up to him for answers. Then my mom went and married another guy in the army. He was fantastic at leading too. And I was like, I got to do this leadership thing. And apparently the military is

a place to do it. So the recruiter came over and I said, I want to learn how to do leader things. And he sold me a bill of goods. They always do. And I became an admin troop. And I sat next to commanders. And apparently I did that really well. That was before email was a thing. I used to print out a lot of emails. One of them said, hey, general officer who I was working for, you can give a scholarship to anyone.

I said, hey, boss, can I do this? He said, yeah, go talk to the speechwriter. Christmas, he visits me, pays for my education. I become a commission officer. And now 27 years later, I've worked at the White House, elite military organizations that people will never hear of because they're in the shadowy sidelines of history. I've commanded some really fantastic teams across battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've opened the door to technology and innovative cells. But really, innovation was where leadership is.

In fact, if you look at all the leaders that everyone looks at now, people look at innovation first. And they say, how do I be like that? So I went into that. Now my official title in the air force is where warfare communications operations and i have a 17 which is an operator uh air force specialty code which i'm about to retire here pretty soon and then help people with all the things that i learned and all of these special teams that i got to be a part of and uh yeah in afghan, I punched the ticket. I was the director of special operations and President Trump at the time said, hey, we're leaving. And I said, guys, I think we're serious.

And the Air Force made an offer. They said, how about you stay in? We'll send you to Phoenix. I said, man, you know me too well. It's been too long. And I'm serving out that a couple of years that they're letting me do before i uh before i go help so there you go and you served in the obama administration i did uh two years there at the end first term where i was advancing him which means i was going before him and making the white house appear before him and his staff and secret service and all those people. Nice. And then I, you know, I lived at the white house for, for two years, um, as a, as his personal communicator, uh, which means whenever somebody had a bad day, they would call me and say, Hey, this is a bad day. And I would vet all of his calls for him if I, if needed to be for a military emergencies. Oh emergencies oh wow it's a good gig

i suppose that's pretty necessary for you know what goes on in the world and all the confrontations military you know the chances for something to escalate and turn into world war three so you got to have some definitely a handle on that yeah it was phenomenal to be there the team was amazing too i mean i can't say enough good things but uh yeah he's always the president whether he's sleeping or whether he's in the oval so yeah somebody's always got to be there it's a hell of a job you look at how much toll it takes uh i think he vomited some jokes about how how old he looked uh i think it was the national press thing you know about the difference in age and stuff. And yeah, I mean, the stuff you have to worry about and the weight of the world.

I mean, you know, I run small businesses and, you know, I had 100 plus employees. That weighs on you. I'm like, well, what is it like when you're the leader of the whole world? So let's get into, you know, how you've transposed a lot of that. I was going to tell the joke, too. You went from Afghanistan to Phoenix, so you just went from one hell desert to another. No shame. No, it's gorgeous here.

You should come visit. It's a beautiful place, but it's hotter than hell. And I say that because I live in Vegas. Right. I feel your pain, except about 10 degrees less. So let's see. Let's talk a little. Let's touch on the first book that you put out,

I believe, with your son, the Fox book. Let's give that a plug. Okay. Yeah. So my son looks at me. He's 15 at the time. And he goes, Dad, I'm going to be driving soon. How do I make money?

And I was like, write a book, dude. And he's like, let's do that. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, we should write a book. I'm like, ah, write a book, dude. And he's like, let's do that. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, we should write a book. I'm like, I don't speak French. What is this we word you're using? So I was like, you write a book. I'll write a book.

We'll see who's better. And we go after it. And he brings me the book, and he goes, dad, you know, seriously, how do I make money? And I said, you know, you need to get one of those clown suits and some good makeup and figure out how to do the balloon animal thing. That was just during the circus.

He's like, your book is good. Let's go with that. We got an illustrator, and we published the book. I went through the process because I'm getting ready to do that anyways. I pulled my book back from a couple of very well-known places because Dave Goggins was like, don't let anybody publish your book. And he's right. They own a lot of your information when somebody else publishes your book. So I wanted to give it a plug, did it with the kid's book. Next day, we're on the bestselling list on Amazon. And my son at 15 is the editor of

a bestselling book. I was like, dude, your resume is golden. You could pick your job. Let's go. And he's like, I don't feel any different. And I still don't have any money. I'm like, fair enough. I really wish I would have started writing books earlier in my life and career. I actually tried to write one earlier, about 10 years earlier than I did. Um, and, uh, it got rejected, of course,

by the, by all the book, uh, sellers. And back then, there really wasn't the whole Amazon thing, but, uh,

you know, I wish I'd done it sooner. Uh, I, I, I, I, I,

I could have wrote you so many books during my business career. Uh, I, there's at least four books in me of just employee stories alone of like all the crazy you know i come home every day and tell my girlfriends you know you won't believe what this employee did today um it was a never-ending adventure of stories like and and so i wish i'd written more in fact when i wrote my book a lot of my memory had faded and it took a while for stuff to come back and fortunately a lot of stuff came back. But, you know, it's one of those things.

And so I think someday he's going to thank you for getting him started early. And what's the title of the book? Let's give that a plug out so people can look it up on Amazon. That first book is called The Fox in a Box. I got a little Sheba that looks like a fox. And she stopped and looked at an Amazon box. That's where the title came from. There you go. And then I was like, what am I going to write about? I took parts of my book and I whittled it down to where kids could talk to their parents and their parents could bring home stories like

you just talked about and talk to them at a kid's level. I have questions at the end of the book that everyone raves about. Those questions, of course, have different answers based on the ages. So the book is it's been getting great reviews. But I never wanted to be known as a kid author. But whittling down the messages helped me on stages. We did Grant Cardone did a little competition. He called the Great American Speak Off and they did a TV show on that. And I auditioned and I was one of the top 150 people in the nation on that,

telling a quick story about, believe it or not, my time at the White House. What we talked about earlier, where the president has a whole lot of weight on his shoulder, I kind of tell the opposite side that no one sees. That goes like this. While I was in an event site, I looked at the calendar and I saw a little thing called a meet and greet. I love those things. So I looked around and all I saw was this guy in a wheelchair and he was just kind of slumped over. And when the president came in with his booming voice, he's like, hello, young man. And immediately this guy's shoulders rocked back and

his chest popped out and his face that was filled with wrinkles. It just burst in the smile that made him just look young. And what's amazing about that is you don't have to be the president of the United States to speak that into someone's life, to give somebody that feeling where a recognized leader, because somebody's looking at you as a leader, recognizes you in a moment. And that got me to the national stage, and then I messed with it and screwed it all up after that. Well, you know, it is interesting what you mentioned,

that leaders, you know, leaders need to be conscious about the fact that they have. You know, that was the thing I talked about in my book, you know, the, the importance of realizing that people are looking at you. You know, I, I, there's a lot of companies I see where a CEO put out, you know, some PR thing and know about the company and their, and their, you know, mission statement or what their moral sort of thing is. And, and you'll look at the leader and he's doing the complete opposite of what he is espousing or the company is espousing in their company's values. And people see that.

It's almost like they don't realize that people are like, you're full of shit. We see right through you and we see that you don't walk your talk and stuff like that the military is so good at generating leaders and leadership we've had a few people that have done i believe we have one of the west point um guys who who does uh leadership and stuff and i think for one of the top colleges and and the military is so good at that and developing leaders and you know teaching people leaders at every level. It's really important.

So your book, Rule of Three, How Elite Leaders Win, is coming out in June 2023. You can pre-purchase it on the site if you go to your site there. Give us the dot com for that again so people can go there and pre-order. Leaders-kit.com is where you can pre-order that. And why don't you title the book Rule of Three? What's the impact of that? Yeah, so psychology, right? And you know all about this.

Psychology tells us why people don't do things. And what I've noticed is whenever you give more than three things to people, they dump it all usually and they can't handle it. So the three things for leaders, as I started to go through my I'm a student of awesomeness and now I like to be a professor of awesome awesomeness. What I do anytime I see something that's awesome is I write it down like you can't grab traction without friction. I'm like, write that down. That's a fantastic. I love it when somebody says stuff like that. I took this giant stack of notebooks when I was going to retire and I had no family in Afghanistan, so I started looking at all these things and highlighting what it was. I found three things that elite leaders do.

And when I'm talking to elite leaders, my career looks like multiple four stars, multiple three stars, people who are commanding in combat, the president of the United States, special operators at every elite team that you can probably think of that have invited me out to be a part of their team to make it better. And so I got to see a lot of angles of leadership and these three things stuck out to me. The first one is people. People are the priority. And so the people aspect gets overlooked all the time. The second thing is time and how you manage it. And the third thing is money. But this is how we do it. This is wrong, but this is how we do it. So whenever you're given a leadership task or a problem, you ask, how much is it going to cost? How much time is that going to take? And then you look at who's going to do it.

When you flip the script, you get how elite leaders win every time. Who's going to do it? And then they tell you how much time and money it's going to take. And that is, that's the winning formula. It even formed, it's a, it's a W look at that. Throwing a W up on the screen because it's a, it's a win every time. And it's amazing that we don't do it like that, but that's the book summarized. Yeah.

A lot of stuff is, you know, especially from a toolbox aspect is fairly simple like i always had you know a toolbox that i always go to very very simple techniques especially if i had gotten off track you know a coach is a nolten is one thing you know go back to the basics and stuff and uh so keeping it simple um you know and like you say, keeping it three, three things to focus, um, what, what are some other techniques or tease outs we can do on the book? Yeah. So from the people aspect, uh, there's a lot of different mantras on how people look at that. And the, the common thing that I've gotten back with feedback on that specific topic of, hey, you can't always pick your people is, yeah, you can. So every time we've been given a team in the military, you said it pretty well.

We get trained a lot in leadership. We do a lot of leadership training. Every year I'm doing something specific to leadership. And one of the things we do is a very old school mentality of you give somebody a job, you hire them to do it, and then you just expect them to do it. You don't monitor what they're good at. What I found on very elite teams is the elite leader will pay attention to everyone's qualities. They'll look at the positives and the negatives, and then they'll focus on the positives. So if you've ever heard of a SWOT analysis, that's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,

and threats. This is how CEOs, they do SWOT analysis to figure out what they're good at, what they're bad at, what opportunities they might have, and what their threats are. I get rid of threats and I make it a SWO analysis. Oh, there you go. And what happens is you get the strengths, the things that you're good at, and you tell people to do those. The people that are good at those things will do those things for you and they'll do it really well. And your weaknesses, you just find somebody that's good at it, even if they weren't hired to do it,

because it's amazing what you have on your team whenever you start looking at it that way. There you go. And then you'll find more opportunities. You just drive over the threats. They go away. They just go away. And then you're just full force. And that always comes out as a question is, how are you getting so much money? And with budgeting and the government, they give it to people who win. And billions of dollars have flown through my organizations because we win and we do it all the time it's amazing if you just put the script on that so we're pretty good at it we're pretty good at um you know we develop good leaders it's kind of i've been watching the

dynamics between the russian war in the ukraine and how their leaders work. And I've seen a lot of commentary from the military leaders on why our leadership and our militaries work, whereas opposed to theirs doesn't. What's kind of interesting is, is like their military structure is a little different where, I mean, they have like top military leaders almost on the front lines because of, I don't know,

I guess they have everybody, everybody's a leader over there or something. I don't know. Do you have any, any thoughts on that? I was kind of interested in that. Wow. You're reading my mind because I just pulled that one out. Okay. So general Patton, uh, he, he came up with this thing called ground truth and World War I, he was a tank commander. He did a lot of tank things and he used to pull his tank up to the front lines. And then when he was in World War II, he was a five-star general. And one of the things he did really well was whenever he got updates from the battlefield, he called a flag. He's like, that's not right. Let's go down to the battleground and get the

truth, ground truth. So he would go and ask, what do you need? And then from the battlefield, they would tell him what it is that they need. I employed that same thing when I was in Afghanistan. If I had SEALs, for example, they needed something, I would go down and visit them as the senior guy from a directorate standpoint. And I wouldn't stay too long, but I'd be like, hey, what do you need? This is what I'm thinking. And then I would give them updates on other things we were doing. And then that drove the train faster because I asked the people who are actually doing the work what they needed. It's amazing how many times we skipped that step, but that's a military ground truth that I can plug it right into that question. That is awesome.

Definitively, that is how it works. That's how it's supposed to work. There was another thing that I researched recently, and it was the U.S. Army's be, no, do concept. You ever heard of that? Yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, the Army changes their constructs a lot. And there's a lot of leaders that have been in for a long time. Andrew Stedman, good friend of mine, worked at the White House with me. He has a website called the military leader. And he posts things like that out there, where he'll review some of the things that have gone in the past and then put

them into the current army structures. And I love following that stuff. I just love it because it's amazing how you can pull excellence together whenever you know where we've come from and what we're doing. Yeah. I mean, the amount of work we put into building great leaders, and I think it doesn't one of the successes for uh our military in the u.s uh is because leaders we teach you know everyone kind of how to be a leader for the most part and like units can basically you know do their do their own thing i mean they clearly don't go against orders but you know they can make decisions in in an extreme environment where maybe you know somebody somebody has to take over and step in

in a crisis situation. Yeah. We, we did a lot of that when I was in command, uh, the last time all the organizations that I've been a part of the air force of one major awards, all the commanders that I advise now are the top in the command right now. And, and so like, whenever you're starting to look at leadership and what works, everyone has a different cycle. So putting a label on how that works is definitely dangerous. But what I have seen is whenever you can pull somebody's strengths out and put them on a team of other leaders, they'll start to move forward. And in my situation, I had a great command team. My last command, we won best in the Department of Defense.

That's all the branches of service for one of our facilities. And we started rolling out some things that weren't in the books, black and white. We just made the rules and said, okay, is this good? Because if it is, we're going to keep doing it because it's working. And if it's not, give us some guidance. But we're not just going to sit around on our hands because this is a problem and it affects operations um and yeah we empowered commanders to do that i empower commanders to do that right now um whenever they see a problem let's fix it and then what is somebody going to do come slap your hand for fixing a problem no that never happens you fixed that

wrong that only happens when I work in like big corporations and stuff. People are like, why did you fix that? And you didn't stay within the confines of your job. But when you're in the battlefield, I mean, you know, you're in a sometimes very alive arena. I don't know

if that's the right term, but you know, you're in a combat arena. You're under the threat of death, war, assault, attack, and then sometimes you're defending your attack. There's a lot of leadership skills that go into that. How does a lot of that translate to business do you find when you consult with businesses and companies? Yeah, that is a fantastic question that I'm going to answer right now. Did I delay that good enough? Yeah, I like your setup on the stall for that one. Yeah. So the last time we had the threat of an enemy force coming upon one of our installations, I went out and I talked

to everyone that was on the installation about their specific part if that were to happen. Now, we got attacked a lot. Just like anytime you're in war, you're expecting to be ready and happen to do whatever it is that is needed. But it's better if you communicate. So if you have a plan and you go through it and then you exercise that, that becomes training. And training cycles are now something that are a dirty word because you have company training, you have corporate training, you have all this mandatory training. But it doesn't necessarily need to be dirty. It can be helpful when it's applied correctly to a specific situation. So when we were in Afghanistan, i went through and i hit everyone

up on my team all the leaders i said what are you doing and then i was like okay show me and then they did the cycle and then if we were to be attacked i felt really good about that and when we were attacked everybody did what they were supposed to because we did the training cycle it's like practicing dialing 9- your kid, right? Whenever something bad happens, they're going to call 911 because they already know how to do it. It translates to business like that. If you've got something that you know needs to get done, why aren't you talking about it? And why aren't you engaging your leaders in their portion of it? And what I find whenever I consult is that is the common problem. Leaders will do it if they knew what to do, but they don't.

And there's no conversation there. It's just an expectation that usually falls flat. You know, what modes do you see where people fail as leaders? Where do you think when leader – actually, I'm going to throw a different – let's launch that question because I already threw it out. But I think I got another one. But where do you see in your mind where a lot of leaders fail? Yeah, a lot of leaders fail in communication. So what happens is a leader is afraid to tell the truth.

Just tell the truth. If it sucks, call it like it is. They want to beat around the bush, make it pretty, and not hurt anyone's feelings if they're not an elite organization. Elite organizations know each other really well. In fact, one of the best books I usually reference is a little bit older now, but it's a book called The All Blacks. It studies the rugby team the all blacks and they do this thing after every game where they really get raw with each other and they say hey i love you you sucked during this play still love you but you need to do better and then everyone lays

it out on the table and they're the most winningest team in history oh wow because of their not they do a little uh pre-ritual dance like the haka which is fantastic if you're if you're into youtubes and you like that kind of stuff they do a fantastic little haka dance um and that's that's also what they're known for but they are the winningest team in sports any sport everywhere so that works and it works in business too it works on on a battleground it worked in white house and it worked in special operations that's got to be really uh you know that there's uh that's a great collective self-accountability thing to the team where you help each other you know recognize maybe uh things you you haven't had strengths on or you're weak other, you know, recognize maybe things you haven't had strengths on

or you're weak on or you fell down on. And, you know, it kind of helps you do well on it. You know, one thing that's helped me is a lot of times, whether it's losing weight, writing my book or other things, is accountability teams. And so having somebody who can be like, hey, did you write today? Hey, did you eat right today? Do you write there, buddy? You know, I publish a lot of my stuff with losing weight, when I'm eating, and how I'm doing things, the fasting I do on Facebook.

And by doing that, it kind of creates a public accountability thing for me where I'm like, maybe I shouldn't go get that burger because I got to tell people on Facebook that I only got a burger. So it helps keep me on the straight and narrow. It helps keep me like, I'm like, should I eat now? Why don't I wait a couple hours so I can brag on Facebook that I made it? It gives you that added pressure. And so I think that's really important. What do you think, do you find a lot of leaders actively think about their leadership style, what their leadership mode is, their values? Many times in business, I ask people, what is your leadership style? What are your thoughts on how you do your leadership?

And many just aren't aware. They're just like subconsciously, they've kind of learned kind of a pattern that they're utilizing do you find most people aware they've thought through it or maybe that's something that people need to do more and say what is my leadership style what are we trying to do here yeah there there are two schools of thought on leadership there's the great man theory which is you're born a great leader and then you build on that i think that those type of leaders are the ones that reflect on their leadership style how things hit and how they didn't and they write notes like like me um and then i think there are people that try really hard to be leaders and they're just better suited for management where they they can they can take a

task they can hold people accountable. They can be truthful. That's not really pointing anybody in a direction. It's holding them accountable. So the leadership portion in your last example is you're leading yourself. When you look in the mirror, you're holding yourself accountable to some other people. There's a management aspect to this, but you're internalizing leadership by making a path forward. And I think people get that twisted a lot. So the great man theory,

you're born with it. Those people definitely look and reflect and are always looking at what they can do to be better. And the people that aren't good at it that are trying that aren't they're learning how to be leaders yeah they just they they're not as good and they don't do it as much they might do it every once in a while when they're made to in company training yeah i mean i i i used to be an introvert i used to watch more than i talked and be very, but I was an analyst and I was also a strategist. I mean, I was playing strategy games very early on, just like almost like an addiction. And I still do a lot of the online games that I play.

I'm all about strategy. You know, I mean, you can throw meat to an attacker or you can just act as a blunt object. But to me me i'd rather do things strategically you try to do things strategically and one of the biggest challenge that i get from those games is you know being able to do strategy on the fly and plan and and even in the heat of the moment or in a situation where um i don't know what a military term would be but where you're you know but where you're in a fight or flight attack situation

or defense situation where you can take a breath and actively use your brain to teach you other things. We had one of the astronauts on the show from the Apollo 13, was it Apollo 13 failed flight? And one of the things they do is they condition the astronauts to not react emotionally to anything to um to uh uh to to think through the process and they teach them so many different processes on what to do if this fails what to do if that fails and they practice them like through thousands of of potential failures and basically to teach them to have this thing where they don't react emotionally

and i forget the term that he is it was the title of his book but it's basically uh oh yeah don't panic early i think was the title of his book and um and so it it was it was a an important aspect in them surviving the apollo 13 failures um early and uh I've really stuck with that and I've tried to get to develop myself to get to a point where I can um where I can you know utilize that where I'm not panicking where I'm going through the process okay where are we at you know sometimes on my you, online gaming Call of Duty teams, I'll say to people, hey, hey, hey, let's all calm down. Let's take a breath.

We're getting lost in the moment. Let's take a breath. Let's reanalyze, reposition, figure out where we're at. And it makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, it really does. We employ in the military a thing called box breathing, and that allows you to kind of take the situation in and then assess it. And it looks like this. You take in a deep breath for three seconds and you hold it for three seconds. And then you let the breath out for three seconds and then you hold it for three seconds and then your mind and body connect.

Really? Yeah, I've modified it a little bit for whenever I get on stages. hold it for three seconds and then your mind and body connect. Really? Yeah. I've modified it a little bit for whenever I get on stages. You know, when you're looking at thousands of faces or you're looking at bright lights, one or the other, people get freaked out like a deer in a headlight. Sometimes I modified it to be just a three breathing cycle. So I do three things.

I breathe in and I hold it and then I let it go. And then by that time I'll feel my mind and body connect. And then I know what to say. Yeah. And then it's a great way to center yourself, huh? It absolutely is. And the best thing about public speaking too,

and I always teach everyone this is when you get on that stage, take in that power because you're going to feel that presence in silence and everyone's waiting for you to speak. And that's how you capture the room every time. I usually just explain, I have all the power. Do you rip your shirt off too? Cause I do.

I do. I was thinking about doing it. Just like the Hulk. But then the HR departments came to me and said, I can't do the rip shirt, strip down thing anymore. Um, I think I've been thinking about it a lot lately. departments came to me and said i can't do the rip shirt uh strip down thing anymore um i think i've been thinking about it a lot lately and i i think i might not do it either

uh this might be bad yeah especially those big fortune 500 companies on this they're like they're like certain rules but you know you can still turn green and everything. Yeah. Hulk smash. Hulk speak. So this is really good. What other sort of aspects do you have in the book or anything you want to tease out to get people to pick up the Nord of the book? Yeah. So for me, I talk to an elite mindset. And this is something I think is missing right now. So where I will tease this out is Simon Sinek.

He did the most popular TED talk ever called Start With Why. And he explained the golden circle. So Simon said, why? Next up is you. All right. Your mindset, what you do in the mirror, like Mel Robbins will tell you to do a high five in the mirror. That works by the way. I teach that people are like, Hey, that must be something you just teach. No, I mean, I've done it and it works. I don't do it all the time,

but when you start looking at your own mind and what you're letting in, then you get, you get a Mel Robbins action tied to a Jim Rohn theory, which is you got to pull the weeds out of your garden. And if you're not doing that, you're going to start beating yourself up on what you didn't do instead of all the awesome things that you did do. And it goes right back to a lot of the theories that I talk about and summarize in my book. But it's an elite mindset. It doesn't matter what you do. If you're part of a team, you got to be the best at it that you can. You have to be elite. So for my community, as a warfare communications operator, if I don't do my job, books get written

and movies come out and people die and it's never a good day. So I used to tell my team that I'm like, guys, that can't happen while I'm here. You do understand the importance of your job. Like you're not the guy pulling the trigger, but you're making sure that guy goes home. So you're an elite person on this team.

You're a special operations communicator. You better live up to it today or i'm sending you home yeah i mean life or death i mean you know this isn't this isn't a you know this isn't my call of duty love yeah you know i can always recover if i have a shitty game but you know in the real world whether i mean even business can be life or death it can it can destroy you it could destroy your finances your future. It can be very destructive. And yeah, keeping a clean head, keeping the weeds out of your brain is really important. Because sometimes it's just, you know, like I said, I used to adhere to coach, is it Noland? No, Nolington.

He was the guy who, big winnings coach in college. I always forget his name. But one of his aspects was going back to basics. And sometimes I would take a feature in our business or some sort of process in our business and I would modify it. I'd be like, hey, let's tweak this a little bit. Let's add a few little sparklies and we'll try and make it do some cooler things. And then things would stop working. Somehow you'd screw it up. Sometimes

my brain would be focused on having a good time and enjoying all the money instead of doing the hard work. They got me there. I'd have to go, hey, well, okay, partying's got to stop. We've got to get back to basics and focus on the important stuff. Let's quit running through the weeds, basically. Yeah. I think that is a common theme in coaching. Vince Lombardi put mastering the fundamentals on the map.

That's how he explains it. But I think he stole it. Maybe I shouldn't say that on your show. There's creative swiping. Tom Peters calls it creative swiping. We creative swipe. It's not stealing. Yeah, it's creative swiping. Paul Peters calls it creative swiping. We creative swipe. It's not stealing. Yeah, it's creative swiping.

It's, you know, everybody knows what I meant there. And to correct my title of the book from Fred Hayes' book from the Apollo 13, it's never panic early, which is probably better than don't panic early. Like never. Like just never do. Just never panic early which is probably better than don't panic early like never like just never do never panic early and it was an interesting discussion in how they're taught and uh and you know he even told me uh he said the movie is you know it's a little drama up when you see the paul 13 movie he goes we never panicked he goes the only time we we i felt a little bit of panic was when they were coming in into the atmosphere.

There was some sort of issue, I think, when they were breaking the atmosphere. But other than that, he said, I wasn't worried. I wasn't afraid. We weren't going to make it home. We were all pretty calm and collected. And I was like, holy shit. I was like, this guy, I mean, you see the movie and you're just like, I'd be freaking the freak out, you know, the first time. It's I think I think you think that I don't know.

There's different levels of stress. So whenever I'm getting attacked for the first time in combat, that was a different level of stress. For sure. First time I ever got shot at. That was different than being attacked because I was physically being attacked. The first time I had to put the president on the phone, different level of stress altogether. The first time I got up on stage in front of thousands, another different kind of stress. The mindsets that you go through all get

quilled with more cycles. You know, the fact that he was calm is because he practiced that he put the cycles into to just respond instead of react, which a lot of people don't get the opportunity to do that. So yeah, if I was put in that situation, I'd be freaking out. But I know he's probably been through the cycles and he's like,

I'm going to, this is your pilot speaking. I am operating a spacecraft right now. So that, you know, my smooth voice is going to come. It was coach John Wooden that I was earlier. I had to pull that reference.

So I got that right. Cause people in the audience are like, you're an idiot. Why can't you remember that? But for some reason, I always forget his name, John Wooden. But yeah, he had a lot of great principles of leadership. I think it was like the 12 steps or 12 peers. It was a tiered pyramid system. But going back to basics, sometimes you really get off brand, especially

when you become successful. And then you're like, why is everything failing right now? Why is everything getting mucked up? And it's like, go back to basics um so there you go anything more you want to tease out on your book on leadership uh etc etc before we go out you know um there's one of the things that that really put me on the map this last book my son and i actually worked together and tried and the premise of this last book called The Fox and the Talks, very similar title, was it's not what you say, it's how you say it. So as a leader, as a parent, as a teacher, as a whatever teammate, whatever you have to say needs to come through a process somehow to come out correctly.

And I didn't know the world needed that, but that one popped that red ribbon on our last book so quick because of the message that it carries. And I just wanted to put that out in your audience, too. I know podcasts are exactly, you're hearing exactly how we say it, and the message isn't the first time. It's not the first time I'm delivering a message to a larger audience. It's different every time I say it, but it's how you say it that matters, not

exactly how it's said. I wanted to give that to you. What do you think about that? Let me turn the tables. What do you think about that let me turn the tables what do you think about i love that idea um i there's sometimes i screw with my dogs where i'll i i'll someone will come around and i'll and i'll start talking to them and swearing at them but i say in a loving tone swearing at them a little and then you know they're with their toes a wagon and uh and my friends will be like you're

currently you're cussing out your dogs and i go but it's the tonality it's how i say it to them that makes a lot of difference so uh yeah i love that sort of example you know and and i call my dogs they have like 5 000 names and you know so i call them all sorts of names but it's the tone they hear that you love them you care about them through their voice and i think you know i i was i heard someone say recently that you know your people need to know that you care about them and empathize with them how important is that in leadership and in having your people be aware of that yeah people don't care about what you know until they know about how much you care. Really? I love that. Yeah.

That's my 10% change to a very popular phrase that was put out by Carnegie Mellon. But the premise is there. So I have a product that I provide to CEOs that are taking that next step. When they grow to a certain point, usually it's between the eight and ten million range they have to grow their team what that looks like is a new person comes in after the success and then that whole dynamic changes so what i what i tell them to do is this little thing i call an owner's manual and every general officer does it every commander does it and i did it i stole a whole bunch of things from a whole lot of places and put it together to make my own product. And I call it an owner's manual.

What it is, is it's how I operate. But it's not just how I operate. It's who I am. So it describes all the things that would cause a rumor mill. Like, hey, I'm not married. Hey, I have kids. Hey, I have a dog that I like to cuss at every once in a while

because it's a shih tzu. They're a lot like Siberian huffies. It's hard lines. Whenever you put those out there, it goes back to the communication. Whenever you explain to someone

how they need to be a part of the team, they'll fold into place and they'll become a very productive part of that team. But that product fast forwards all of the things that make things awkward for the new team member instead of a competition or an obstacle or somebody to work around because that product helps tease out some of those questions. There you go. There you go. Well, this has been really insightful and stuff to have you on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. This is awesome. I've been a fan for a couple of weeks now. I'm kidding. There you go. There you go. Well, we'll make you a bigger fan and then uh and all that good stuff so uh give us your dot com one more time so we can find you

on the interwebs it's leaders dash kit dot com there you go and order up the book folks wherever fine books are sold uh actually you'll you'll be needing to order it on his website uh rule of three how elite leaders win all right you're going to release this on amazon when it comes close to the thing or is this going to be still a private affair yeah it's going to go everywhere so uh amazon barnes and noble wall street journal let's be on the bestseller everywhere there you go that's definitely important and all that good stuff so you want to take advantage of that uh Uh, let's give a shout out, uh, to one of our,

uh, let's see, what is the latest review on the Chris Foss show? This came out February 26, 2023. Uh, thanks to Al Z O two from Canada, all the way from Canada.

Wow. Our wonderful neighbors to the North, a takeoff, a I'm big rush fan. So there's that. Uh, he wrote passionate, powerful, and potent. Latest reviews.

Wait, is this on my show? Get ready to explore topics from all perspectives. Unabashed commentary with compelling and thought-provoking ideas. A breath of fresh air in a much-needed time. I'm touched. Thank you very much, AllZ02, for the five-star review on the Chris Foss Show. There you go. And we couldn't do it without brilliant authors and people on the show uh like atlas altman today

thank you atlas again for coming on the show we really appreciate it thanks chris there you go thanks monics for tuning in we couldn't do it without you either because we need you guys uh otherwise you know what else would we just be sitting here talking to ourselves. Go to goodreads.com for us, that's Chris Foss. YouTube.com for us, that's Chris Foss. The big LinkedIn group, the LinkedIn newsletter, all the stuff on LinkedIn, it's pretty crazy what's going on there. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

That should take us out.