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17Twenty
17Twenty
E166 || Brent Gleeson || STILL Embracing the Suck
This week we revisit Episode 30 from March 8, 2021 with Brent Gleeson.
Brent Gleason, a former SEAL turned leadership consultant, joins us with gripping tales and actionable insights. We laugh and learn through Brent's stories, including the unforgettable 'Brad and the donkey' anecdote. His book, "Embrace the Suck," is not only a guide through the grueling world of SEAL training but a blueprint for thriving amidst the challenges we all face. From the battlefield to the boardroom, Brent demonstrates the power of resilience, strategic planning, and the profound impact of jotting down your goals.
Wrapping up with a heartfelt discussion on parenting, Brent shares his approach to instilling resilience in children. How do you prepare kids for life's hurdles in a world that's increasingly comfortable?
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What's up, mountain Movers? Welcome back to the 1720 podcast. As we've talked over the last few weeks, our schedules have been crazy and trying to find time where everything lines up perfectly. It's just a little more difficult in this season than it has been for, well, the last couple hundred episodes. So as Kevin and I were talking about something that we could put out for this week, our mind immediately made back to episode 30 with Brent Gleason.
Speaker 1:The episode is one of my favorite five or six in terms of just the amount of fun we had recording with him, but also, you'll recall, from the photos back on episode 30, this was a recording studio that had not been painted. I believe there were chairs racked up in the corners, there was a whiteboard that still had something written in Sharpie and we couldn't get off. The pictures that were taken were shaky and I think there's one that's through a microphone stand. But there's a really good bit in there that finds itself sprinkled throughout all the episodes about Brad and the donkey and that makes me laugh every time it comes up. And so for some of our new listeners who have heard that bit replayed over and over and revisited from time to time, this is where it originated.
Speaker 1:In addition to the fun and sort of an epic bit that we got out of there, though, there are great nuggets from Brent Gleason, who was a former Navy SEAL and wrote a book called Embrace the Suck, and we spent a lot of time talking with him about the book, about things that he learned from the book, about teaching your kids grit In instances when it seems like they don't need to be gritty, preparing them for the future, and so there's just a ton of great nuggets in there, and so we wanted to go way back to episode 30, revisit that one for you guys and hope that, perhaps on a first listen for some of the new folks, and maybe on a second or third listen for some of the old folks who've been listening for a while, that you get some nuggets out of this one that maybe you didn't get the first time. Don't dismay, we're not just rerunning old episodes. We have a couple of great guests lined up over the course of the next couple of weeks, including an episode that has not yet been titled, but when we'll be talking about sort of all the things Kevin and I have been up to for the last few weeks, perhaps even months, leading to some of our scheduling problems. So stay tuned for that. Until then, here's Brent Gleason.
Speaker 2:What's up? Mountain Movers, kevin Carey here with my cohost, Stuart. Hello everybody, thank you for joining 1720. We're honored to have a guest, brent Gleason, with us. Thank you for joining.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me, guys. It's an honor to be on the show.
Speaker 4:Thanks for coming down right. Like we were just talking before we hopped on, brent is in town from San Diego, and so bringing you high quality audio instead of Zoom stuff.
Speaker 3:This is the main reason I flew all the way out here to see you guys, just to sit in the Texo studio for 1720.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. We're going to get a surprise invoice next week, first class flight, the whole nine.
Speaker 3:I thought we talked about that earlier.
Speaker 4:No, man, we don't pay first class, sorry. All right, so we normally kick this thing off. Just for those who don't know who Brent Gleason is, give us, like your elevator pitch, what your five seconds of who you are man.
Speaker 3:Sure, I grew up in Dallas, texas, did undergrad at SMU, worked as a financial analyst for Traml Crow Company for a year, joined the Navy, became a seal, went to war a few times, transitioned out, built a couple of companies, written a couple of books and wife, four kids, two dogs.
Speaker 4:What kind of dogs? There's a lot in there, but all of a sudden I'm interested in the dogs Of all that.
Speaker 1:I just said dogs.
Speaker 3:It must be a dog guy.
Speaker 4:No, actually I'm not, but we won't get bugged down on that. We won't get bugged down. A lot of ground to cover.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have one rescue dog. She's a Max, probably the Australian Shepherd, in lab, and then we have a crazy one year old German Shepherd, untrained and smart.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, the cool thing is, I got connected with you through LinkedIn. It was through your new book, Embrace the Suck, immediately downloaded it on Audible and started listening to it while it was running. So you know very fitting and ironic at the same time, and a lot of laughs in the book, a lot of motivation in the book. But the biggest thing is you mentioned it in the elevator pitch. You go from SMU financial analysts to at Traml Crow, to Navy Seal, and what does that transition?
Speaker 3:look like. I thought that seemed like an obvious transition.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's not what everybody did.
Speaker 3:It is actually kind of a funny story because I had a really good friend at SMU, one of my fraternity brothers, who was a year behind me in school, and he actually was one of these young men who had more or less a childhood dream of becoming a Navy Seal. Now, keep in mind, the mindset was a little different. This was just pre-911., so it was peacetime, so it was more of a personal challenge and something to aspire to, and I had really had no aspirations or visions of military service at all. I was going down the commercial real estate path and wanted to eventually probably be a real estate developer and. But he and I started training together.
Speaker 3:So I had played sports in college, played rugby, and wanted to stay fit, have an accountability partner and also kind of simultaneously help a good friend prepare for his arduous, uncertain journey ahead. And so we were training every night running, swimming, calisthenics, training for marathons on the weekends, and so by nature we were spending a lot of time together, having a lot of dialogue about the implications of what he was attempting to accomplish, and obviously it peaked my interest. So I started researching and reading books around the history of the Naval Special Warfare community, our forefathers from the underwater demolition teams in World War II to how we essentially cut our teeth as an elite assault force in Vietnam, in conflicts thereafter, and over that period of time, that growing fascination led to the culmination, ultimately, of a decision to join him on his journey. And I remember I was sitting on the 42nd floor of my office at Tremol Crow in downtown Dallas and I sat down and I was supposed to be working but I wasn't.
Speaker 3:So that's one of those disengaged employees, because I had a new vision and I wrote my parents a letter telling them hey guys, I know I've never talked about this, but I am quitting my job, that you were so happy that I have and I'm enlisting in the Navy to attempt to become a SEAL, which arguably has about an 85 to 90% failure rate. So, as you can imagine, before the cautious optimism set in, there was more of panic. So my dad actually his first step was to introduce me to one of his my parents both went to SMU too, and one of his swim teammates at SMU had graduated SMU and become a SEAL during the Vietnam War.
Speaker 4:Oh, wow, that's cool story.
Speaker 3:That guy was actually living out in La Jolla, where, in San Diego, where all the initials training happens. So he introduced me to Tom, who was a Maryland running a business out of Maryland, and I think the initial strategy, though, of introducing me to Tom is that Tom talked me out of it. Yes absolutely so. That's you know. Then it was a speeding freight train from there.
Speaker 2:I know it was in one of the books that you walk through the hallway with a bunch of papers to pretend you were busy because you had to go train and all that through that journey.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, because I wanted to. You know, every night I was living in the uptown area of Dallas so I would run about four miles from my apartment to SMU, swim a mile. Do Calisthenics run four miles back? So pretty time consuming training regimen. So you know, I wanted to leave the office around five or five thirty. But I was also the new guy and people don't expect new guys, analysts especially to be leaving before the boss. Yeah right. So the more I was trained, the more serious I got about doing it. Before I announced to my team that I was going to be leaving the organization, I didn't want to be tasked with something new at five thirty. So I would literally put a bunch of papers like this in a manila folder and walk bristly through the office from the coffee room and back and kind of look stressed to make sure that people. Well, I'll leave him alone. He looks like he's really into a project right now.
Speaker 3:It didn't work very well.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of George Costanza from.
Speaker 3:Seinfeld when I tried to fake his job and he looks really upset.
Speaker 2:He's moving papers and like oh don't bother George.
Speaker 3:He's under it. Where do you think I got the idea Really? Yes, so good that, and napping under my desk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with the alarm clock, it's a bomb.
Speaker 4:What is that? Costanza too. Yeah, the napping of the desk. I don't remember that part.
Speaker 2:He kept modifying his desk and then he put alarm clock in there and his boss heard it. It was. It's like fake, george Steinbreder.
Speaker 4:Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Man, that's a classic.
Speaker 3:Oh man, seinfeld, I was not expecting to come up in the middle of how did you become a Navy SEAL story? So a lot of subtle nuances in my journey.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, all right. So, mom and dad, what do they think? You're crazy? They're trying to talk you out of it. See what Tom will tell you.
Speaker 3:Initially. I mean, they asked a lot of questions and you know, obviously you know, being who they are, they did a lot of their own research and obviously my dad called Tom and was asking him about it and again, a little bit different, because it was peacetime, so there wasn't that immediate fear of, you know, going downrange into into a combat zone.
Speaker 4:It's time frame is here because obviously it happens while you're training or in the SEAL. So what's the timeline?
Speaker 3:here, Graduated SMU in 99. And immediately started working for Crow right after I graduated, and then that bled into 2000. And then my buddy and I once I did leave Crow after I think it was about nine months we moved up to Crested Butte, Colorado, to train for a few more months at extreme high altitude to really get our bodies and minds in the best condition we could, and then joined the Navy in the summer of 2000. And then I mean I went to basic training and then straight into SEAL training. So, and then we and then I went to Buds and you basically just for. So the listener understands the pipeline is well over a year and it's broken into different segments. But what you think of typically SEAL training you see on documentaries or movies.
Speaker 4:Both teams and stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's basic underwater demolition SEAL, with the acronym of Buds, and it's six months long with three phases, hell Week being the fifth week, and then you go on to advanced training, or SQT, seal qualification training, and we had a few days off between Buds and SQT, and that's when 9-11 happened. Oh man timing of that is crazy, right, well, it is. But people always ask well, what was the mindset of people? But within, obviously, the special operations community, it's go time, you're all in already and now you're really all in and it was.
Speaker 3:And this isn't just sound macho or crazy, but people wanted to get downrange and take the fight to the enemy and special operation had boots on the ground 36 hours After the second tower fell. You know tier one assets down there. But just historically looking back, we're like, well, this is going to be over before it begins. We got to get over there 20-something years later and here we are.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I actually got chill bumps when you said that Because, like the idea would have been like, I think, to the listener you think, oh, that's kind of scary that that happened when you're in middle of training. But I'm not a SEAL, but I can appreciate the mentality of that's why I'm here, like let's do this.
Speaker 3:Well, let me tell you an interesting quick story about mindset is one of the guys in the class ahead of me. We were on six classes a year, so every couple of months new classes begin, and he had tried to quit during Hell Week and one of the instructors liked him or maybe he was a friend of a friend and encouraged him to stick around. And he did. And when 9-11 happened, guess what? He quit, left the teams, turned in his credit. Really Mm-hmm, no-transcript. That's why. That's why we have the process we have thinking like they were trying to get rid of that guy or he was trying to like self.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and as an officer, if you quit during buds you are never allowed to return. Enlisted can come back, depending on the situation. That officers are never allowed to come back, man, that's crazy story too.
Speaker 2:So you're prepping to go to buds and Done some research on buds. Haven't lived it. I'm sure hell week lives up to its name and I'm sure it didn't. Your training didn't hold a candle to what you came in and expected, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. You know I mentor young guys into the program. Now I've mentored seven people. Now I'm not taking credit for their success, but all have become seals. But also, that's just being careful with who I spend my time with and the guys I select who perceivably have the right passion and vision for what they're trying to accomplish. And you know they have the same questions. I do. Well, how do I prepare? What's the hardest part? How do I get through that? And there is no real answer for that because it's a different physical and emotional Cognitive journey for everybody.
Speaker 3:Yeah, everybody has a different experience you know, with, especially hell week. So for the list, hell week is the brutal crucible that all seal share, that very few students actually Navigate. So for easy math, you might begin first phase of buds with a couple hundred students in your class. You'll lose about half of those before you even get to hell week. Because those weeks leading up to hell week are very similar to Hell week. You just get to sleep a few hours a night and then you go into hell week. Everybody goes into hell week either injured, sick or both. You're not starting off as a high performer going into hell week, which is, you know, arguably gonna be one of the worst weeks of your life, and it's designed that way Starts on a Sunday evening, ends on a Friday afternoon. The beauty of the Sunday is you report to the classroom early in the morning and you don't know exactly when it's gonna start. That's by design, of course.
Speaker 3:So they let the anxiety and the fear of failure eat away your soul before you begin and During hell week, you literally like you run the equivalent of multiple barathons. While wet and sandy, you swim dozens of miles in the open, frigid Ocean. People think, oh, california, you know the water is cold.
Speaker 3:Yeah and we were a winter hell week. It was 55 degree water and there one of their goals is to keep you, you know, cold, wet and sandy and borderline Hypothermic off and on throughout the entire week. And so you're. You know you're running the opposite, of course, multiple times a day endless Callisthenics, brutal beatings, its constant motion and, and you know, pretty much constant second-stage hypothermia. And you're doing that with, you know, broken bones, stress, fractures, joint injuries. You know severe, the most severe chafing gentlemen that you could ever imagine, yeah, in all the areas you would never want to be severely chafed. I'm saying no skin on your shins, knees, between your legs, around your waist. Your nipples are gone, yeah, and the top of your head is a bloody mass from Karen boats around.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, so it's, it's awesome that I am a hundred percent sure.
Speaker 4:The physical component of that is Unbelievably difficult to me. The part that like would be so harrowing was not the body part, though your train for that? Yeah, it's what's in your head.
Speaker 3:It's, it's. Yeah, people always ask, well, is it more physical, is it more mental? And you know, obviously, most people err on the side that it's. It's definitely more mental. Yeah, your body's broken, you're in, you know, severe pain, you're freezing cold, you know you're you're, but you're experiencing, you know, deep anxiety, a fear of failure. You know stress and you're trying to work collectively with your team and your boat crew. And, and you know people are dropping like flies. And you know, for some people, for me, when people like, well, how was, how did that react? You know how that Impacts you mentally. When you saw people quit, I was like I'm more of an analytical thinker. I was like that's great, statistically, my chances just went up. Gentlemen, yeah.
Speaker 3:So it's very hard to make friends in the early stages of us. It goes oh where's Johnny? Johnny quit two days ago. You didn't know that right, because it's chaos. You're just like, and you're so delirious by the second day of hell week that you're hallucinating you, you're just Staying in motion. And then we had a very unfortunate, unfortunate experience in our hell week. Our class leader, the highest ranking officer in the class, died on Thursday 15 hours before we were gonna be secured from hell week. Oh my gosh, he had caught really bad pneumonia and you know we can, monday morning, quarterback it all day long. But as opposed to medically pulling him from hell week, they asked him can you continue?
Speaker 3:and of course the guy he was, he was a Hell yeah, I'm gonna continue, right and he got, you know, a kick, really bad pulmonary edema, his lungs filled with fluid. We're in the pool and he drowned. Oh so, and you know what the commanding officer of buds told us we were, they had pulled us out of the pool. It was pure chaos. You could hear it in the instructor's voices. They're like get out of the pool, get against the fence, face the other way, look down, close your eyes and you could definitely tell that something is wrong. Because, seal instructor, don't panic, yeah they yell a lot, but they don't panic.
Speaker 3:And they got us up. They ran us back across the street from the naval amphibious base to the special warfare center, put us in the classroom. We waited, and waited, and waited and ultimately they came back in and they're like you know. He just walked to the straight of the room and turned around and said Gentlemen, lieutenant John scopp is pronounced dead. Lieutenant parado, your second in command, you're now class leader. He said, gentlemen, get used to this feeling you have right now.
Speaker 3:This is what life and the teams will be like. This will not be the last friend or teammate you lose, and if this was a book or movie, would call that foreshadowing, because literally, again, you know, seven or eight months or whatever was later, was 9-11 right and so yeah, and you know, as you can imagine it, I can't remember how many funerals I've been to since then.
Speaker 4:So yeah, right, do you, when you get to eventually deploy it, right? Do you go with those guys from your bud's group or are you just a new group?
Speaker 3:of dudes. You can. It depends you get in advanced training. I'm not sure what that's a similar process, now Probably an advanced training. You can Fill out a wish list of your top three teams you want to go to most people pick a coast, so I want to go east coast. We have teams in Virginia Beach in that area.
Speaker 3:We have the other teams in San Diego and one in Hawaii, and so people pick based on mostly on their geographical location or if they have friends in another team, or they're from the east coast or they're from the west coast and you know. So I picked team five and I did have One guy from my buds glass that was in my first platoon.
Speaker 4:So cool so Deployed a little. I've say two times three, three times One were those yeah, it's honestly.
Speaker 3:I'll say that. You know, my contribution to this War on terror pales in comparison to many, many of my brothers and just many servicemen and women who do this as a career these days in special operations. That's, that's nothing. I mean, I've got friends who've done 15 combat deployments and again, career special operators. Yeah that was never part of my plan and I kind of stuck to that plan. But Twice to diplomacy, iraq, and went to Africa.
Speaker 4:Eventually back to the States. I don't know what the term is for getting out of the military transition. Transition, what's what's?
Speaker 3:next for you that's you know that's always a big topic in in the military is you know the, the, the difficulty sometimes of that transition and what I've seen is people who have a very executable plan. You know when they transition out and they start. You know planning for that transition well before they get out Usually have more success or they also aren't distracted by. You know some of the other burdens they carry.
Speaker 3:You know emotionally and mentally and so because they either focused on, you know, the new career or the new path of the new vision or whatever they're trying to, whatever goals they set. So my transition plan that came together was to go to graduate school immediately after. So I took the GMAT Before my last deployment I said trying to study for the GMAT and then get ready for deployment was kind of difficult. But it was kind of funny how competitive we are in the teams, that there are a few other guys who are transitioning at the same time and they were gonna go to grad school too. So I was like what's what's? What's your GMAT? I'm like I'm not telling you.
Speaker 3:One guy who I knew was already he did this undergrad at Stanford, super smart who's in commander, and he and I was started the same GMAT prep course and he went one day. He's like this is bullshit, I'm just gonna study on my own. And he like aced it Whereas I studied my butt off and you gotta, let's say I got a good enough yeah score to get into grad school.
Speaker 2:I can relate to the ladder.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was just about to say not everybody gets dealt the same hand of courage.
Speaker 3:You just play with what you got. I guess you know it's like you know it's the same same mantra. We're like you know you got a medical school, you go to law school, you're, you pass your lawyer.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we joke about the bar exam as being an examination of minimal competency. It's like well, you're not too stupid to be a lawyer.
Speaker 2:I guess that's what the exam tells you. It's a work. This'll do you. Anyway, you can remember some things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I started the grad school program like literally a week after I got out.
Speaker 2:So and I think from we had a conversation before we got on air before taking point Launches you have a few business ventures prior to that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the first is very cliche story. I met my former business partner in grad school and, of course, we're like I never had aspirations of being an entrepreneur either which arguably has a similar failure rate as seal training and so I was like, well, I had developed a taste for calculated risk. So we actually one of our projects for our finance class, became the initial business plan for the first company, which was a Early version of it, was a home finding search engine, so early version, like Trulia or Zillow, and we raised about a million and a half. We graduated and launched it, raised about a million five and we were it's. Its rapid growth was not due to our entrepreneurial savvy and intellect, it was because we were riding the housing bubble all the way to the top.
Speaker 3:And then 2008 happened in 2009, and and it it didn't implode immediately, but it definitely plateaued. So it was my first experience pivoting on the battlefield. That's this right. Oh, we need to find some new revenue streams. We did diversify, quick pivot, and, but what we actually did? What we did was we had learned so much about digital media analytics, lead generation With just running that business and driving traffic to the site for our clients and customers To generate home buyer leads, that we started a digital agency. There's a lot of our clients like well, do you guys build websites? You guys do search engine optimization?
Speaker 3:or media strategy. We're like okay.
Speaker 3:Sure and now, and now we're like yes, absolutely, we do so. We actually borrowed a hundred thousand dollars from the first company. We gave those shareholders equal comments doc shares in the new venture because it's it's the ethical thing to do. But you could argue from a legal standpoint that it's a Quay. They call it a corporate opportunity, meaning we're kind of technically using they see it as we're using their money to start a new venture, so they definitely want a piece of that. Yeah, and it was the right thing to do, because that business took off and, you know, doubled in size and both headcount and revenue every year and Exited out of that in 2016. But, like we were talking about before, what I found was not necessarily a passion for a specific industry, but a passion for building organizations and great people, practices and designing a culture that delivers actual business outcomes, and how you develop leaders and and how leadership impacts Employee retention, customer attention and profitability.
Speaker 4:Yeah, which is, I mean, all the things we got to leading up to here. Our listeners love hearing those stories, but this is like the meat and potatoes, because I think most of our listeners are folks who are trying to figure that out, growing their businesses. Just looking for a nugget of something you know to help pick up and move the ball forward every day, sort of say. So I'm looking forward to chewing through some book talk here in a second.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, we were talking about this earlier. You know, people are like well, you know, investing in our people and developing people and developing leaders is costly, it's, it's time-intensive and you know what if those people leave? And like Henry Ford said when, he was challenged on that many years ago. He said well, what if we don't develop them and they stay? Didn't you got a bunch of mediocre people all doing different things? And the business will. It is impossible for the business to grow past a certain point.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm and we don't understand our timeline and until we can reflect back on it. But you have that seal career MBA, a couple business startups that I'm sure had a ton of adversity in the scaling and Turnover and all sorts of headaches, lot of, a lot of me in the fetal position, crying Like hell we got you, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:It's a great leadership though every day's a Monday and this is my own company. What's going on? But that helps probably launch taking point and makes you more well armed to help the business sector, Because not only do you have a well-structured program through seals, but have had two business ventures now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's you know. You could argue one way or the other, but that's you know. Our perceived value proposition of what, where our client partners bring us in as a strategic partner, is because we've also Done it and many of our, you know, director level folks have done it and built organizations or had, you know, senior level executive roles in organizations, but also have the you know, the MBAs and the PhDs and have worked at Deloitte or McKenzie or what have you, and so there's a lot of diversification of thought and experience. But also it garners a certain level of understanding from the people we're working with because I well, they actually know what they're talking about, not because they went through a training program at Deloitte, but because they've done it themselves right and failed a lot in these endeavors too.
Speaker 4:So there's a lot of lessons through all of that. Right the we talk a lot about figuring out which your lessons are through failure, yeah like boys You're not learning through that?
Speaker 3:She missed it. Well, when it comes to that philosophy of failure, one of my seal buddies said this the other day. He actually said it to my son. We're going through this cool program that he's a part of called the squire program for 13 to 15 year old boys. And I mean, when you think of the concept of failure, when you hit an obstacle, you're either winning or you're learning, you're not failing. If you look at it as failure, then you're looking at it the wrong way. Yeah, you know, I call them micro failures and they're just obstacles and things you're gonna learn from and grow. It's a growth mindset. I talk a lot about that in the, in the new book Mm-hmm.
Speaker 4:What, what? My wife Ashley, a long time ago talked about writing a book. We never get figured out what she was gonna write and never got off the ground. And the other day I was like you got lots of time she writes a book and she's like I kind of out of it.
Speaker 3:But I think everybody's got a book in them.
Speaker 4:I really do that's for you, ashley. You should write that book.
Speaker 3:What what?
Speaker 4:what motivated you to write it?
Speaker 3:The first book, taking point, is a book really about you know, leading organizational change and transformation very into leadership and culture initiatives. That was really a strategic move. People like are you gonna write a book? You know you're a seal, obviously you're gonna write a book. So they know there's a fourth phase of buds now. Yeah, writing speaking and acting during hell week.
Speaker 4:Yes, yeah, and you know an acting. Is that a big how to hone your?
Speaker 3:six pack and how to gel your hair properly. Is acting a big post seal career move a little bit it's. Some guys are, you know, they're kind of dabbling in it. They're usually start off as like extras or sniper number one.
Speaker 2:See, there's my name.
Speaker 3:But. But a lot of guys have, as you can imagine, written books and that was that was not to get off in a quick tangent, but that was obviously very frowned upon and sort of the old-school mindset of the silent warrior mentality. But there are important stories to be told and guys tell them in a very humble and respectful manner and mostly shining the light on you know the giants of whom they're standing on Throughout their combat experience and you know the teammates that we've lost and telling their stories so that we can all learn from that. And they're very important stories that have to be told and if not told, people don't understand the sacrifices that our men and women go through to serve and protect the freedoms. We have to sit around and do podcasts and I would say I've read a couple of them.
Speaker 4:He's mayor quotes seal books, right, and that you're dead, your spot on, like that. The takeaways from them are, you know whatever the sort of organic Points they're trying to make. But you get, I lost my brothers. Yeah, you get lots of that, not and. And then you get and these are, these are, these are men who lead, led me. Yeah, I feel like you get a lot of that in those books.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's what's. If you don't have At least a certain base level of humility going into the program and the teams, you will. You will either get it or you won't get far. And, of course, just going through combat in general and losing very, very dear friends is is Is part of that journey, but it's it's incredibly humbling as just part of that job. So the the first book was a strategic move to build what is now taking point leadership the company around the book. That's so. It's a thought leadership piece. It also helped me do the right research to create the foundation of many of our principles around culture transformation and leadership development, employee engagement strategies, and then sin. And so that was step one in 2017 and and then built a business around it.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about the business a little bit. What? What are you doing outside of the book?
Speaker 3:So we were essentially a leadership and organizational development consulting firm. So we partner with clients and organizations you know some medium-sized and mostly enterprise level organizations developing leaders and integrating employee engagement strategies. Sometimes, you know, fixing a broken or undefined culture as an organization. Usually it's a combination of all of that, because all organizations, as we talked about before, have the same struggles, regardless of industry and often regardless of size. Obviously, these things can get more matrixed and complex the larger the organization is or if it's global and there's, you know, silos based on just geographical location as well, and so we partner with our clients to do that. We try to make it as measurable as possible, as I've I've fallen short as a leader my previous companies by bringing in consultants we don't like that word, right? Yeah, we are a strategic partners when we did the training because we had to check the boxes where we should do training.
Speaker 3:I heard that's the thing you got everybody's doing it you gotta do it, I was doing it, and you gotta develop for people, right, and then you just you know, do like once, once a quarry. You bring in some dude who talks to the team for like half a day and people are bored out of their minds and Checking their email in the bathroom.
Speaker 4:Narky on the side like get a load of this. Yeah, can I get back to my?
Speaker 3:super. Well, the people that would come in, like we talked about before word, they were and then you know, not knocking anybody's career in that arena, but they were. They didn't garner a certain level of respect because they were consultants and they were just training.
Speaker 3:On some things They'd been trained on, there wasn't a lot of diversity of experience when it comes to, you know answering complex questions about real, you know business challenges Well, what about this, what about this? And they kind of navigate, you know tap dance around. You know those answers, but you know that. So that's our, our goal. Then, obviously, sprinkling in our approach and methodology and a lot of our you know sort, more or less proprietary curriculum comes from Some of the leadership development programs in the world of special operations specifically enable special warfare. So integrating those things from how do we build high performance teams through better leadership, better engagement, the right culture that's designed to achieve results, to generate better business outcomes, and how do we measure that against our you know, financial performance?
Speaker 4:What you said earlier, something I wrote down. I want to come back to you, but I think you said something of the effect of all companies struggle from the same culture issues, or something of this effect.
Speaker 3:We always start a partnership with the client by doing some level of a needs analysis or an organizational assessment. It's kind of funny because it's very scalable, because we're like, yep, same problems as the other company. It's right, they're an airline and they're a construction business.
Speaker 4:I mean, what's the not to secret sauce of it? What? What is it? What's this? What's the same struggle?
Speaker 3:Well, from a high level. Yeah, it's. You know, organizations are flawed because they're made up of people and people are inherently flawed and we're inconsistent regardless of. You know, I'm a student and teacher of leadership, for example, but I'm not a perfect leader by any means. It's a lifelong journey of development and course correction and so oftentimes it's very much a. You know, every organization has a culture, but they think they do or not. It's usually haphazard. Very few organizations have a really good, well-defined culture, or they say they do and they put some stuff on the wall and they have their core values on the website and but that's where it ends. It's not integrated into everything they do, from talent acquisition to onboarding the right employees, to how they develop people, how their rewards and recognition programs, how they talk about the culture, how they integrate the core values.
Speaker 3:And externally, you know, partnering with the right clients and customers.
Speaker 3:You know I've seen catastrophic failures in partnering with the wrong clients Just because their money was green and they were gonna invest a lot of you know, time and resources into. You know, being our customer and those relationships, in my experience, never last because there's a big, vast difference between Between values and you know and what's important and you know they're beating up your team and you know You're not defending your team and and you put the customer first because they have a big retainer and they're paying you every month and you know the board's like, no, we got to keep them. And they're like, well, five people are gonna quit next week Because they're getting verbally abused on every call, right, so it's. All those things Are a challenge because most organizations are very inconsiderate. If they do have Development programs and the investing people practices or our culture initiatives or engagement strategies are just very inconsistent in doing it and any organization just don't do it at all one of the things you threw into that smorgasbord was like For cable it was basically.
Speaker 4:It was like aligning your comp structure with your, with your culture. I don't know exactly what you use, but that's the first time I've heard that Integrated together.
Speaker 3:Well, for example. So one of the things we work with clients on is developing something we call a team charter. That's basically could be a good calendar, culture manifesto or what have you, but it's taking your core values. You know two steps deeper. So if, like, let's say, integrity is one of your core values great cliche, core value for any organization Well, what does that mean here in this organization?
Speaker 3:What are the supporting behaviors that we will document and measure performance against, with every employee, including every leader, against that value of integrity? That's, that's at least bullet point. Three behaviors that support our definition of integrity. And then the final layer is the accountability mechanisms. Right, well, how are we gonna hold ourselves and others accountable to these three behaviors to support the value of integrity? And then, you know, we call it our results pyramid. How does that integrate? How to? What cultural experiences or rituals do we have or can build and and create within our organization to support the behavioral expectations and the values and the guiding principles so they drive the appropriate actions that people proactively take to achieve the desired result? Yeah, that's your, that's your four tier pyramid there, and that's how you align behavior with you know better business outcomes, and it's also how you create a culture of extreme accountability.
Speaker 4:Lots of I can't like. That was the first thing I was thinking of when you're talking about that. I kind of lost track of the tears. I think it's like the fourth tears, like figuring out how you, culturally, what do you say is through culture or through rituals? Rituals yeah yeah, create those opportunities to then head back up the pyramid. What's like in?
Speaker 3:the book I equate. I like fitness analogies because it's it's really easy. So let's say, your goal is to, your desired outcome is to run a marathon under a certain time, you know, in six months from now, mm-hmm. Well, what rituals are you?
Speaker 2:Very Kevin go.
Speaker 3:I got I got tired, just saying it. Yeah, my back started hurting.
Speaker 4:Oh man, I saw the chafing just sitting in his chair.
Speaker 2:So quick scroll moment. I was in a zoom meeting and I had just done my long run the day before and in the middle of the meeting me speak I had to shoot up because my hamstring cramped up and everybody's watching me and I'm like why am I doing this to myself?
Speaker 3:Oh, I almost threw my back out picking up a pencil off the floor this morning.
Speaker 4:But you're not old enough for that. I feel like I'm old enough for that.
Speaker 3:My body's broken though Accelerated path yeah, carried around a lot of gear and jumping out of planes and it. But yeah, you set a goal and you know what rituals, what is my, what is my daily routine? What rituals do I need to put in place to ensure I achieve that goal? You know what time do I get up, how do I train? What does that training look like? How do I set my right, the right mindset to be consistent in that training module? Those are rituals that help support, you know, that mindset shift towards achieving loftier goals.
Speaker 4:I Was thinking about that this morning. Actually I won't bore everybody with a story, but I was. It been awake since about three o'clock, Just couldn't sleep. You know, if that just ding in the middle of night and was.
Speaker 3:I've been laying there and laying there, and laying there.
Speaker 4:I was like I just need to get up, like stop being lazy, just get up. And Then guess what happened at 430 this morning. I was like who's texting me at 430? Kevin.
Speaker 2:Sorry, so anyway I.
Speaker 4:Like I had that moment of like it's 430. This is gonna be my first victory for the day after I've been away for a minute. You know, I was like that my alarm is set anyway and I was like I gotta get. I gotta get started with a W here Up, because you text me, otherwise I didn't like I don't like been awake for a while. I got to get some sleep, you know man.
Speaker 2:Plug that phone in in the kitchen, get it out of there by old cheesy alarm clock.
Speaker 4:I'm I'm actively and aggressively pursuing that goal, except the problem is I need to. I need something to like wake me up, only not actually also. So I've been looking at like the. I think those Fitbits will do like the buzzy alarm thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think I'm gonna get one of those anyway.
Speaker 3:No, I'm the same way, because I, especially, I'm traveling or taking the first light out. I got to get up at 4 or whatever I don't want to and with that we have a newborn. So the newborn, you know that is, they're sleeping in bed with you, most of them in between breastfeeding and whatever is going on, and so I've been trying to find a good way other than my iPhone. Loud, annoying alarm. Yeah, wake it, everybody up.
Speaker 4:Yeah, shout out Wes Butler. He was the one who told me that he's like. You just need to invest in a $95 Fitbit and you can just put that on, set the and it'll just buzz you away.
Speaker 2:I'm doing that just hadn't gotten to it yet before we jump out of this, I want to stay in it just for a second with the strategic partnership. When I'm reviewing this, I saw some buzzwords and I saw some Main concepts and I hit the start and end of the journey in mind. When you team up with a company, and with the start it's navigating and leading change in the workplace. So what's needed to make that successful and start taking off once you align with a company.
Speaker 3:One of the things we actually, before we start enacting Change initiatives within the organization, we train them on how to lead change, which, and a lot of those principles. Obviously, again going back to the first book, taking point, you know how to lead change, how to get by and how to communicate a change strategy, how to engage the participation of the majority of your organization. I mean it's. It could be and we could be talking about a major organizational transformation initiative or more small iterative Projects, such as we're rolling out a new software, project management or whatever it is. But you know and this isn't my opinion, but you know, all the data comes back the same pretty consistently usually about 70% of organizational change initiatives either fail or fall significantly short of meeting their intended objectives, and it's usually not because of a you know a bad plan or you know an imperfect operating model. It's, it's, it's people issues, it's inconsistency, it's that they don't, we don't take the time to communicate the vision of what the winning outcome looks like, because change is uncomfortable, it usually requires more work instead of less work and and consistently communicating what the benefit of that initiative is going to be, so that people do buy it and they do participate consistently throughout the whole process, because sometimes even your Initial change evangelists will experience the fatigue of change, because it usually takes longer and has more hard and soft costs. They may anticipate that's just the norm, and so even your evangelists start to pull back and Participate less. And so all those reasons, and more or why initiatives typically Will fail or again fall short of meeting the objective, and the more that happens, the less people are going to buy in next time there's a new initiative.
Speaker 3:Well, we've heard this song of dances is the flavor of the month. And here we go again. I'm gonna wait and see. I call that the fence sitter. They're gonna be well. Well, you have your three people. You have your, your, your evangelists who are bought in. Usually those are the more senior people whose idea was they're closer to the, what the outcome looks like and why they're doing it. And you go do it, yeah. And then you have your people in the middle who are gonna kind of kind of wait and see if this is a real thing. And then you have your agitators who are gonna push against it hard.
Speaker 4:We've done it this way for 20 years.
Speaker 3:There's no way I'm doing it yeah exactly, and oftentimes, though, you have to listen to those people. Oftentimes those people have valid reasons, because if we don't go through a process of Most, change initiatives fail because they start on step six and should start on step one, and you haven't engaged. The feedback also of all those people, especially the people who are closer to the customer, closer to the front line or closer to that process, that's gonna change. Well, we should probably get some ideas and feedback from them before there, especially there if they're the ones who are gonna have to roll it out, but oftentimes we skip that process. Those people push back and If they're not listened to or heard, it becomes very toxic and cancerous, and then that cancer grows, and oftentimes those agitators are Listen to because they have subject matter, expertise or tenure or both, so people listen like. Well, frank, I think Frank's right, you know I'm not gonna participate in this and then you have a big divide.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and then it fails and it fails again.
Speaker 3:And then you have, you know. So you create those culture gaps to where you know the organization isn't successful on any type of Ability to lead change man, you know earlier you felt like he was talking to you about that marathon thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's we're in the middle of trying and I won't won't put anybody on blast, but we're in the middle of trying to initiate or lead some change on a small subcommittee. And we had that, that one of those moments you talked about Middle of last week, where some of the evangelists were like I'm out. Yeah, they kind of like reached the tipping point and there's a lot of, there's a lot of rich even those like this four minutes right there a lot of rich, like speaking directly to me about something I'm expressly working on right now, just trying to help you out, buddy. Yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 3:Bill's in the mail. Yeah, put that up. And boys just got a little bigger.
Speaker 4:With the plane fight. Yeah, just put it up.
Speaker 2:So then we fast-forward to call it the end of the journey, and you might debunk that, but what I envision is you have a team of qualified professionals that bring energy, great ideas and start getting the business you're speaking into to start acting on those ideas and you start seeing the change. How do you sustain that once you pull out?
Speaker 3:Oh, it can be, it can be pretty difficult. That, and that's often times why in this benefits us too, obviously, as our clients stay with us for a long time. Also, and also too, if they're you know, just, there's general turnover. There's new people coming in or people you know who have upward-movement, but mobility and organization are taking over these initiatives to make sure that they're trained. So there's a train the trainer element too, but also usually these programs we want to make sure they last long enough so there is consistency in the new actions, because Culture change or behavioral change or mindset shift doesn't happen at the beginning of a transformation.
Speaker 3:It happens at the end. You have to put in the best practices and the new procedures and the new you know, the new actions that need to be taken, just like almost every business has had to do over the past year due to COVID. Oh, and they start. You know you got to start, sometimes on tier two of that results pyramid on. Okay, we got a shift to new, new actions, new best practices, new procedures.
Speaker 3:How do we lead and manage remote teams? You know, how do we show up, how do we engage your remote workforce, and what practice are we gonna put in place to make sure we do that Well. And then, gradually, over time though you know, the culture shifts towards the new way of doing things, hopefully, but not always. So you have to make sure that the organizations have the right Accountability mechanisms over the course of that, whatever that engagement is. But again, a lot of our clients stay with us for years because they understand the, the return on investment for making sure these things continue and then the organization changes, or it grows, or there's new priorities that we need to you know.
Speaker 3:Work with them on.
Speaker 2:So yeah, the huge thing is Saying the piece about the culture and mindset shift happens at the end, not the beginning. So the sales pitch Isn't to change the mindset, it's the opportunity and potential behind it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, day one. Here's your new culture.
Speaker 2:This is you now. Welcome to your new identity. Let me read it.
Speaker 4:Let me read that first.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's stuck yeah exactly so the other other cool thing we talked about at lunch that total gut punch for me and our journey is the idea of 360 reviews.
Speaker 3:So you want to talk about the importance of that and the framework of that we almost always integrate that into, especially like, obviously, leadership and management training programs, because you want to take a data-driven approach to it. You want to see what is your baseline, what are you working with, how do you customize a program to that? And then also, how do you integrate one-on-one Development, action planning and coaching for the individuals you know?
Speaker 3:in that cohort of managers who are going through the leadership program and you know I learned this process by doing 360s. You know, myself at my last two companies and oftentimes people don't invest. You know we all think, oh well, we got to. You know, do this because things aren't going well. But I remember One of my previous companies. Things were going great, you know. There were no threats on the horizon. We were doubling in size, the board was happy, customers were happy, it was just all you know roses and sunshine every day, and which is a really good test of your leadership capability yeah, no bullets flying whatsoever.
Speaker 3:And so clearly, you know clearly, all that success rolls up to this guy right here, me, the awesome leader of the organization I was like well, you know, but I also. Well, like we talked about earlier, I heard that people are supposed to do these gets feedback from the team, so like the feedback is gonna be good, so screw it, let's do it Anyways.
Speaker 3:I can use this one. Yeah, just be some affirmation for how awesome I am. So we rolled out a the 360 process for just a few of the senior leaders and founders and To start there, and then we're gonna sort of cascade it down. You know two other director levels and then below and, and so we it was a there's different versions of the 360 is a pretty robust one. So the report can't printed out like 35 pages of data and feedback. And for those listeners who don't understand, it's an anonymous peer review process. So they call it a 360 because in a best-case scenario, it's people your peers are reviewing you, your direct reports are reviewing in you and if you have people above you, they're reviewing you too, and usually there's an other category, meaning you can select a few other respondents to participate.
Speaker 3:And obviously we you first really should educate people on why you do a 360. What is the outcome? So you go into it with the right mindset because it's a little bit uncomfortable, because you're getting transparent, anonymous feedback from people, and so I printed this thing out and I remember I got on a. I was flying from San Diego to New York to meet with a client and you know I sat back and I was really excited and ordered a cocktail. I was like, all right, stretch it out a little bit, let's look at this bad boy. You know page one. I'm like, okay, let's, you know. Looking at the numbers is like not quite where I, not quite, the average is not quite where I Expected to be.
Speaker 3:And then I started. Then, of course, I just jumped straight to the comments. So the comment section is where the, the, the responded, gets the opportunity to expand upon their Feedback and they get some people get very specific Because, well, and as they should you you also educate the participants in why we're doing this. This is your opportunity to have a voice and improve the organization, improve the managers and leaders in the organization and ultimately it's going to benefit you as a team member of the organization. And so, especially those oftentimes it's not, you know, you're, you're disengaged or actively disengaged, people who are, you know, bitching and moaning about stuff. I'm the name is your highest performers like great, I'm gonna Show everybody what's broken in the organization. I'm gonna show Brent what he's doing wrong every day. So the first comment was what exactly does Brent, as the CEO, do? All day long I was like, oh, that's not good.
Speaker 4:Rough start. This must be someone else's report.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and another yeah, this, this is flawed. And then you know other small things like what is our vision? What's our strategy? Who are we as an organization? Where are we headed? How are we gonna get there? Like people had really no clue, because in my mind we had clearly articulated what the vision and strategy were, but we clearly hadn't. You know it was all living mostly here in my cerebral cortex and you know. And then you know a few more cocktails later, a little more crying, sniffling. Yeah, I went through the stages of grief for the surprise, the anger, the rationalization. You know the comments, sometimes two or so specific. You're like well, I know who wrote that.
Speaker 2:So I'm firing that guy tomorrow. Bankers box Brad, You're out. You're out of here, Brad.
Speaker 3:I didn't really want to give you a voice, brad.
Speaker 4:If you're.
Speaker 2:Brad out there listening it's no, this isn't you man, I promise.
Speaker 3:So, uh, you, you have to go through some of the you know the digestion, um. So, you know, it's not about turning lemons and eliminated, it's about better digesting the lemons and using that as feedback to improve yourself, improve the organization, and that. Going back to the philosophy of ownership and accountability, well, if you want a culture of that, where does that start? Well, it starts with me, uh, and being disciplined in that regard. And if people see that I Not just accept but crave their feedback on a regular basis on how I can improve or how the organization can improve, then they start behaving that way too. We have that very much, that peer-to-peer feedback learning culture in the SEAL teams. That's where, you know, I kind of learned about the importance of really good, transparent feedback and creating a feedback loop and culture around that so that you can learn quickly and, of course, correct quickly.
Speaker 3:Not, you know, no, don't wait for the mid-year conversation or your qbr or, you know, an end of year review to give someone on your team feedback. In these these days, it needs to be, you know, a little more, sometimes even more informal and regular. So what I did was I put a plan together, built a presentation and, you know, called a meeting and it started as a company-wide meeting. You want to make sure first, am I hearing this right? Here's some of the main things that I took from this report. Here are the insights and asked some clarifying questions on am I hearing this correctly and, if so, great. I'm putting that on the list of developmental opportunities for me or for the organization and things like that.
Speaker 3:So it's it's uncomfortable, but if you start doing it on a regular basis, it's a phenomenal way to develop yourself, develop others and and also again shift the culture towards one of of Transparency and accountability and discipline and in the fact that we will learn from each other. And it's uh, and that's really a core tenant of a high performing team.
Speaker 2:Just the framework of that makes me want this, as opposed to being afraid of what's coming, and I would assume that's the natural progression of 360s. As you get them more and more, you start craving it like how can we get better? How can I get better? So we get better.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just just In its simplest form, just going through the process with a team shows positive intent of we want to develop, we want to get better, I want to get better as your leader and and that builds trust and trust, you know again is you know one of the? You know Trust and accountability are the two most important culture pillars of any high performing organization. Pin that and that. I'll let you guys have them, yeah.
Speaker 4:Is that?
Speaker 2:over free. That's not going on the invoice Okay, quoted by Kevin carry.
Speaker 4:The. Uh, I've never done it. The 360 thing. I think y'all done it before, hadn't you?
Speaker 2:haven't you done one? We've done surveys, but no, not 360.
Speaker 4:We need to do a 360 my instinct is exactly like yours was, which is like I have blind spots and the only way I'm going to find them is if we do something similar to this. And then my second one was like Kind of probably more what you were talking about. I was like I just want to hear how awesome I am.
Speaker 1:I don't really actually want the bed.
Speaker 4:I don't really want the bad feedback, so that was a real like roller coaster of emotion that had immediately Simultaneously but I mean to your point though, originally, which is it has to be the pillar of a high performing team, like you have to.
Speaker 3:You have to have a feedback loop, yeah, and oftentimes, of course it's, you're going to get some, some feedback and data that you expected to have. You kind of already, you know, know as a reality. But oftentimes, because we always ask you know, and our team asks the, the people that are coaching through the process is you know mainly what like what? What stood out to you, what, what was, what did blindside you? Uh, that's a good question. Doesn't happen all the time. But sometimes I was like, yeah, I had, this was nowhere near on my radar.
Speaker 4:Uh, just like when I went through with the yeah, because you get like from, and I don't know what mine would be, but just hypothetically speaking. You get the like every once in a while.
Speaker 3:He's a little angry about things and you're like yeah, I knew that was coming, yeah, but not like he's not compassionate and he hates my family.
Speaker 4:I'm like whoa Didn't know that.
Speaker 2:That's brad yeah that's why you're fired. Classic, classic, brad.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be the title of the episode, yeah brad, you're fired. Back your box, brad.
Speaker 3:Again, no offense to the brad's up, that's right.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I want to transition to the second book, embrace the suck man. Really well written. I really enjoyed going through it and I've I don't think I've ever seen a book that opens with a forward that really sets the tone for the book. You know what I mean. Like, all right, embrace the suck. It's a you know, a seal term, part of the ethos.
Speaker 2:I think you could military term, yeah right and what changed in my mindset when about to get through this book was Don't just wish for good weather, you know, expect bad weather, hope for bad weather, hope for adversity. Don't wish for things to be smooth, hope for it to be rocky. And then you get onto the start of the book. So, man, well done, frame working that, but I guess let's go back up high level. Brace the Suck. Your newest book, ford by the Beast David.
Speaker 3:Goggins yeah, david and I we went through buds together, for I'm sure many of your listeners know who he is retired seal, world renowned ultra athlete and broken some Guinness World Records, like in pull-ups and probably some other stuff. We were his third class, so he had been at Buds for 10 months, gotten injured in both hell weeks, so he'd done hell week a couple of times, or at least a good portion of hell week twice already, which I literally can't imagine. I'm like I gotta be one and done. I don't wanna do this more than once.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:I'm not that strong mentally or physically, and so he rolled into our class and I just remember, you know, just the beast of a guy. I didn't smile. I wouldn't smile either if I'd been at Buds for 10 months. But Like it just embraces, suck.
Speaker 4:I guess yeah, holy man.
Speaker 3:And so he was in my boat crew. So we were. He talks a lot about boat crew too, and so we were. I was in boat crew too. Just some hard dudes in that boat crew, buddy mine drew sheets. He'd been a logger up in Washington. You know never I don't think he'd ever like swam in the ocean before but just a hard, hard dude. He finished hell week with two broken shins and just kept his mouth shut because he didn't wanna get medically rolled during hell week. If you, if you, if you get rolled back for an injury, for example on like Wednesday, then you gotta do it all over again. You start at the very beginning. So if it's like Thursday and your leg's broken or whatever, they'll usually roll you forward. So you'll pick up with the next class after their hell week. So a lot of people and myself included. I had a fractured elbow, I had severe flesh eating bacteria in my right leg, joint injuries in both you know both legs, and you just gotta keep your mouth shut. You know, at Med Shack you're like I'm good.
Speaker 3:Good to go as the tears are streaming down your face. And so so when I, you know, was inspired to write the second book, the second book for the listener, embrace the Suck. First of all is a military term. It basically says look, you know the battlefield and we can use that term figuratively the battlefield is hard. Don't just expect it to be hard, like, want it to be hard, no, it's gonna be hard and lean into it, you know, find ways and tools in a mindset to move more quickly from, you know, the bunker of normal human emotion when adversity strikes of, you know, causal thinking why me, why this? Why now? Why COVID? Why am I losing my business and clients? You know, why are we losing life? You know, and moving more quickly into action oriented execution, taking stock of your current situation, focusing on what's in your control and not ignoring the rest, because you want situational awareness, but using that to develop a plan and continue to step back onto the battlefield of life, business. What have you and you know.
Speaker 3:So it's really about, you know, learning to use pain and suffering and adversity as a pathway to enlightenment and wisdom. You know, putting better constraints on ourselves so that we can avoid temptation and all the shiny objects that derail us from achieving the goals we had already set. Learning how to set better goals, loftier goals, take a little more calculated risk. You know planning better, executing better, debriefing with yourself on a constant basis so you can, you know, be in a constant state of improvement. Doing all those things to really, you know, live a more purpose driven, fulfilling meaningful life where you give back to causes greater than yourself and you achieve or exceed more of the goals you set. And you know learning how to use adversity as a stepping stone to growth so that you can continually bounce back faster. So when I was coming up with the concepts really, you know, I had never the book falls into the self-help genre I was like, hmm well, I've never read a self-help book before. I was like that's for losers.
Speaker 4:I don't need any hope.
Speaker 3:And which of course, I do, we all do. And so I was like well, maybe I should, maybe I should read some self-help books.
Speaker 4:We get a wide variety of that. Oh God, I had no idea.
Speaker 3:It's like a multi-billion dollar industry books and podcasts and things like that being at the top. And so you know, I did some research to find. You know I ordered a bunch of books on Amazon and some of them I read fully. Some of them I flipped through a lot of just fluff and happy talk and just a bunch of BS that I didn't connect with, but very popular books that obviously a lot of people do connect with. But I connect with things that are more actionable. I like some of the books that I read that are a little more gritty and counterintuitive. I love Mark Manson's work. It's very creative, like the subtle art of not giving enough, and his second book, aptly titled Everything is Eft A book about hope.
Speaker 3:I like the best subtitle ever seen associated with that title and I liked his style. Also, I didn't see a lot. You know, as much actionable stuff as I wanted to put into a book. As far as tools, I call them mental models in each chapter. So first, you know talking about a chapter I know we'll get into this in a bit. You know about how to be more successful in avoiding temptation. Okay, cool, what is the model? What's the mental model that I can use? What's? What rituals do I need to put in place?
Speaker 4:Well, just don't just be strong.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just be more hardcore.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think you hear a lot of that. If you like, cool, how Right? Or?
Speaker 2:So we call it. The tagline for us is wisdom nuggets. Yeah, what do we pull from this episode? Or books, et cetera. So the two main ones I had from this book rewind to reading living with a seal and the mindset is it's 20 degrees, but in your head it's 75 and sunny. So that's what I ran with. I thought it was a good thing. Embrace the suck change that it was no, it's 30 degrees and snowing and smile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, smile like a psychopath on the sidewalk because you wanted it and you know you're gonna be tougher from that adversity. So that was the biggest thing that I pulled from that book just my mindset shift of just getting a little bit stronger On that point.
Speaker 3:Going back to the forward that David wrote, so I was like, well, I wanna write out like a gritty, more in your face, raw self-help book. And it does draw on many of the leadership development principles that we actually teach leaders, because you can't develop, you can't generate better results in a team, unless you generate better performance of the people. So it's very much a personal development strategy. So that was what kind of was the foundation of the inspiration of writing this type of book and it was really fun project. I was like, well, who better to write a book about resilience than my buddy, david? And so one of the interesting things about the forward not to give it all away, but a very interesting, fascinating but unfortunate story is one of my most recent mentee.
Speaker 3:I had met him. My wife met his mom. They live in Rancho, santa Fe in California. That's where he grew up. Very similar path of mine went to college, was working in finance in Miami and then just decided to become a seal. And I have so much respect for these guys now and obviously men and women who joined the military during wartime, because especially in special operations, you're at the tip of the spear and you're gonna go downrange to take the fight to the enemy. It is inevitable. Obviously, things fluctuate, but more likely than not you are gonna go on a combat deployment.
Speaker 4:That's just a deployment.
Speaker 3:And so I you know my wife Nicole come home for this charity event. She's like I'm at this amazing woman, she's so awesome, and her son is in boot camp right now. He's going to Buds. I was like cool, you know, get me in touch with him. A week later, and this was a week before he was checking into to Buds, his mom died of a brain aneurysm out of nowhere in Manhattan in a limo. Wow, A week before his mom dies, a week before he checks into what's arguably the hardest military training program in the world.
Speaker 3:So, of course, for some people, that would crush, crush, crush, crush their spirit. And other people find ways to use pain as a, as a fuel for their journey, which is what he was able to do. And you know, I mentored him all through Buds and he had a little bit of a rough go, Like actually the majority of people do. He got a back injury right before hell week, so they rolled him back, so he's, you know, doing the rollback thing for a few months and then he classed up again when he was healed and then he made it through. And that's the thing I love about about hell week Is it like it doesn't ever rain in San Diego, but God knows when hell week comes.
Speaker 2:Cause come.
Speaker 3:Sunday night, it's fricking pouring rain.
Speaker 3:You're like, oh, there must be a hell week going on, literally our hell week was a winter hell week and it rained every single day, every day. And so before he was about to start the start hell week, you know I texted David and I was like David, it'd be really cool I know you're busy man It'd be really cool if you could like send a video or like a text or something, a little message to, to my guy Charlie, before he goes. You know he's had a little bit of rough, rough ride so far, you know, other than the fact obviously he lost his mom too. And about an hour later David responded with and I put the text in the forward and it is just the most gut punch and, of course, using David's classic, very colorful language, we won't use it all in the show.
Speaker 3:He doesn't hold back in that regard, basically, kind of to your point, you know he said. You know he said he starts it all by saying, like what are you gonna do when you're so cold? Your balls are in your stomach. All you do is want to quit. Your boat crew's quitting, you know, and you're, you're miserable, it's cold, he's like you. Better, pray for the weather to be the worst possible weather. Pray for it to be the hardest hell week anybody's ever gone through, and and it goes on and on and on.
Speaker 3:It's it's pretty, pretty interesting, and so that's that mindset. Like you said before, don't, don't just like so, okay, I'm gonna navigate this adversity. No, want it, you've got to lean far into it and expect it, and the more you do that is part of sort of the mental model that is. The foundation of the book is being proactive in the fine art of comfort zone expansion, being intentional on how you do it. Find the things that make you uncomfortable but that are imperative for achieving a specific goal, or the things that you're not good at, that you really probably should be better at, and find the roadblocks and the things that will make you cringe, that stand in the way of achieving that goal, and then practice them with intent on a regular basis. And then, after time, of course, those things aren't so uncomfortable anymore and they become, you know, things that seem possibly insurmountable become part of your everyday life. And then you move the goalpost and you do it again.
Speaker 2:It becomes part of your mindset, transformational If you can grab onto that and take action, right. Okay, other one, you kind of teased it a little bit, but there's a section in their taming temptation tiger, and that ring home true on a lot of levels for me. But go ahead and take off with that concept.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was a fun part of the chapter, right? Because I actually created a persona around who temptation tiger is.
Speaker 1:This is an evil thing, tony the Tiger.
Speaker 3:It's a guy wears a smoking jacket and a ascot tie and he drinks martinis, perfectly groomed for, you know, pearly white teeth, and engages in extreme debauchery on a regular basis. And and really the chapter is about because the book is very much about achieving goals. The book is not necessarily designed to help someone who is at complete rock bottom. It's also very much speaks to, I believe, people who who just want to get better. It's a sort of a good to great strategy.
Speaker 3:I want to push past my current comfort zone.
Speaker 3:I want to push past my current current level of achievement in anything in your personal professional life.
Speaker 3:But at the same time it has I have gotten a lot of messages that it has helped people who are battling cancer or who just lost a child and things like that.
Speaker 3:So that's very humbling and awesome really to know that it can touch people in that way. But chapter four is about putting better constraints on ourselves so that we can be more proactive and how we avoid temptation and not get, not temptation to do drugs or be led down a dark path to do bad things, but just the distractions we have in our life constantly, in our businesses, constantly the things that get in the way of achieving initial goals that we set, the shiny objects that constantly fly past our face or that seems like a good idea and the next thing you know you're going on a different path and you're inconsistent in how you pursue goals personally and professionally. So the mental model from that chapter really is about. It kind of goes up into a lot of what I talk about about having a better plan of what you're trying to accomplish and knowing what your threats and blockages are knowing what the potential temptations are going to be and listing them, documenting them, putting that as part of your plan.
Speaker 3:Okay, you know, I know where I fall short in this. I know where I'm weak and need to be better when it comes to being tempted to do things that I shouldn't or things that are going to get away in the achieving of that goal. And once you kind of list those and make those part of your, you know, strategic imperative when it comes to achieving those goals, then you're more likely to have those things on your radar screen and be able to, and you will fall short but you're able to course correct more quickly.
Speaker 4:There's something we talked about this last week. There is something about writing it down that is powerful and we were talking about with Elias last week about his journaling, remember, yep, and I feel like journaling sort of is invogue and out of writing it down, and I got in a bad road of like, oh, I'm just going to do it on my iPad. This different like boarding it is, doesn't work 100% boarding.
Speaker 3:It doesn't work. And some people, some people like doing that. I'm very much a write it down kind of a to do list guy. You know I like and I do like. You know people like journaling. That's journaling, I'm gonna journal.
Speaker 4:It's read about that in a self-help book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my seven year old daughter journal again. But but it is, and to your point, and that's a very interesting point writing it down, handwriting it down, journaling or making lists and things like that, and not have to get it on your you know it's on your iPhone or iPad it's. You know, that's everything in this, right here. This, this book I'm holding, is everything that I need to do every single day.
Speaker 4:I was just about to say probably with about 90 to 95% hit rate. The people who have set in that chair over the last, you know, nine months or so have a journal sitting right by them. Everybody brings one, and here I am with a piece of paper I didn't write anything on. Well, that says a lot about you. I think it does actually just off the just gunsling your seat in my pants. That's how it roll.
Speaker 3:Well, it's the same like having something available like this, like I might think of something in our conversation, like we need to write that down, and for me, if I don't write it down, and then you know and follow up on it consistently. You know we're busy, you know forget it's gone. Yeah, it's gone. Or it won't happen.
Speaker 2:Well, that's. That's why it was so important to be taming temptation tiger. I kind of correlated it with habits and choices. I was coincidentally reading atomic habits with a place to suck at the same time, and what a combination.
Speaker 3:I quote James Clear in in the book.
Speaker 2:Oh, really yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, Really you know. And and then atomic habits. I haven't read the whole thing, but just awesome stuff in there.
Speaker 2:Oh man, it's just so good. But the how I, how I contain temptation tiger is being self aware. You kind of hit on that. I have to know where I'm weak and where I can become weak and when that moment or opportunity or whatever comes up that this doesn't align with who I'm trying to become, right, and that's how I've been able to take those words and apply it to my daily life and I fall short a lot, but it's making me better and making me self aware that that doesn't align with who I'm trying to become. And it's about something bigger than me. I'm trying to lead people and make an impact and lead my family, and if these things are blocking that, then I need to do the right thing and get rid of them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. It's when you say that it's so simple, it's again going back to put better constraints on yourself. So you don't have to be tempted, because we're human, we're, we will fall short in those areas where we're kind of weak. So if you're trying to use a simple analogy we're trying to lose weight and getting better shape Don't say, well, I need to have a little bit more discipline when it comes to junk food in the pantry. Well, just get rid of it Right. Or like I need a drink class. So well, stop buying the huge handles of Tito's, stop.
Speaker 4:Well, that's junk foods kind of kind of hitting home there. Sorry about that, sorry, now I feel like Brad.
Speaker 3:Oh, Brad.
Speaker 2:Okay, so one more thing on that book I just wanted to share Funny moment I'm on the second leg for my 10k run. There's electrical box that I slapped and then I turned back around. And when I turn back around that's why I loved your book that, because I could get lost in it a little bit you were talking about your sibling and I think the sibling won like the chicken nugget award or something. My son oh, it was your son.
Speaker 3:This was. There was a subtitle in this one chapter about the, about the everybody gets a trophy culture. That's right Right now, and I was joking on my my well, not my youngest son. We have a newborn, so my now five year old son. Last year, when he was four, he and his sister were playing soccer and you know as a seal I was, I was hoping for a little more discipline and accountability when it comes to training and mindset on and off the battlefield, and you know how young soccer games are as a bunch of Catholic kids aren't even paying attention.
Speaker 4:I mean he's chasing a butterfly and pick at his nose and the the rest of them are all standing in a four foot circle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is cloddle ball and you know most of the time writers, his name is. If he did ever connect with the ball, he kicked it in the wrong direction. Anyways, he and that you know, at the end of the end of the season the coach, you know, he rounded everybody up and he was doing a trophy ceremony and and of course everybody was getting trophy. I don't think they won a single game, but but they're four, so who really cares? Right, and he was like all right. So there was this one game before I tell the story. There was this one game where the one of the parents had brought in snacks for half time and usually you think like juice boxes and orange slices. The person they brought like a whole box of huge chicken fingers, a half time snack.
Speaker 3:I was like that's the strangest half time soccer snack for four girls I've ever seen. And so writer grabbed himself a chicken finger and then before them the second half started, grabbed another one and took it, took it onto the battlefield and so he was just wandering around aimlessly eating a massive chicken finger, and I was. It was hysterical, obviously, and and so I got. It was writer's turn to get his trophy, and the coach was.
Speaker 3:You know, in that voice you talked to four year olds and you say all right, everybody, you know who knows who the next trophy goes to. I'll give you a hint. He likes to aimlessly roam the field and eat hard chicken fingers and you know all the hands. That's writer, it's writer. And he he went up to you know he was so happy and the whole ride home. He's like can you believe it? It's my first trophy. And we got home and I snatched that trophy right out of his hand. I said we do not celebrate mediocrity in this house and he burst into tears and of course I'm kidding. I, you know, happily helped him find a prominent place for that trophy in his, in his room and congratulated him once again on a successful season.
Speaker 4:Right so, right there.
Speaker 1:So, oh my gosh, so hold the presses.
Speaker 2:So you, he does the dramatic pause while you're listening to it and I said out loud no, freaking way.
Speaker 4:He did not say that.
Speaker 2:And then you go on a course of kidding. I'm like I can't believe.
Speaker 3:I did on that one. I did the exact opposite of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, hey, like I said that you know, in that part I was like, when you know, when is it? Is it ever too early to teach our kids to embrace the suck, and when is it too late? You know why? Because that you know that very much is a, you know, a burden. The burden of command, of being a parent is, you know, doing the hard stuff and saying no. You need to say no to more stuff, by the way, if you're over committed.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, this is working aggressively.
Speaker 3:We'll take that offline, yeah.
Speaker 4:Aggressively working on that. Is that? Is that like rhetorical when is it too early to to teach someone to embrace the suck? Or is that like? Is that real Like? No, I mean.
Speaker 3:I reference it. I don't really answer it in the book. It's just sort of a question to invoke some thought around. You know how we parent. You know like one of my developmental opportunities. You know people always think they assume because of my background as a seal that I'm like the hardcore militant one in the house where it's. You know, nicole, my wife is much more strict than I am.
Speaker 4:I'm like, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3:And I need to do. I need to do a better job of that, because obviously you can. You can inadvertently create, you know, some well, not lifelong necessarily, but some lingering impact on, you know, on their behavior and their mindset and how, how they think about adversity. When they're just given everything they want, there's no real hardship.
Speaker 4:Well, the reason I asked that is like very specifically for me, because, like we go through those moments in our house, right, and the ebb and flow where you're just like man, we live in suburbia, dallas, and, like kids, never want for anything and then you know there'll be a discussion about whether or not we're going to get, you know, hamburgers or hot dogs for dinner and it turns into full scale warfare and it's like what are?
Speaker 3:we talking like dude, you know where? Other people out there like wondering if they're going to get dinner.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:It's not to be cliche, but you know what I mean it's. You know we live in a ranch or Santa Fe, and you know a nice neighborhood, and our kids go to great schools and there's like no hardship on the horizon. And so sometimes you have to, you know, manufacture that hardship by, you know, giving them harder stuff to do and more responsibility, and you know if they don't learn it in your house, life will teach it to them, right?
Speaker 4:Like that's kind of. What I'm wrestling with right now is like I have to figure out how to manufacture it, because if they leave my house thinking it's sunshine, rainbows out there, life is not going to be kind to them.
Speaker 3:They'll have a tougher time navigating complexity, university uncertainty, if we don't give them at least some baseline of tools, of what they're going to you know, inevitably experience.
Speaker 4:Right, I'm going to make the boys read the book. Just hardcore, embrace this my children.
Speaker 3:I keep asking Tyler, my 14 year old, like when are you going to read it? He's like, yeah, I'm not that much for a reader, but like you really need to read this book though, these are my expectations of you young man, that's right.
Speaker 2:This is our family and houses core values.
Speaker 4:What are your kids into these days?
Speaker 3:Tyler's he goes to a cool school called Cathedral Catholic in San Diego, plays football. And then Parker Rose she's into horseback riding and takes ukulele lessons of all things. Ukulele is super popular these days, yeah.
Speaker 4:I was like where did this?
Speaker 3:come from. This is a thing. Yeah, I feel like America's Got Talent made the ukulele popular.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's where I came from.
Speaker 3:But yeah, she does it every week and she is very much into riding, which I was very disappointed about because it's insanely expensive, a very, very expensive hobby, and we live in a very equestrian area. So I was like, oh, come on, Don't you have anything else?
Speaker 2:There are any mule riding lessons, minigolf.
Speaker 3:Or something you can just do at home Mule.
Speaker 1:You know, he rides a mule, brad.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, brad is a big mule guy.
Speaker 1:He's a big mule guy.
Speaker 3:And the little rider he's five, he's into superhero stuff like that. And then Walker, who's eight months, is into breastfeeding.
Speaker 4:Who isn't oh baby in the house? Man, my buddy Tim, I think. Probably today or yesterday I've adopted an infant, a new baby, and I'm just like, oh man, because he has like older kids, I'm like well, yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 3:Talk about hitting the reset button Right In where we live. I was like, who are all these old dads here at preschool? I'm like shit. Now I'm going to be one of them.
Speaker 4:I'm the old dad, that's right.
Speaker 3:Well, not yet, but I will be. I'll be that guy who's 60 and dropping the kid off in eighth grade or whatever.
Speaker 4:I've found with my kids that progressively of like like man, I can't get super involved in school and overcommit it everywhere else, so poor still are eight year old, I'm just like I don't know who her teacher is.
Speaker 3:Like I just like I can't keep up with everything.
Speaker 4:Man Can't do it all Can't do it all All right. We've been going for a minute here, I think. Unless, kevin, you're our notes taker, do we miss something?
Speaker 2:No, unless if you want to talk about anything that's next in the journey, or one thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, what's next for you, man? Two books. What's next?
Speaker 3:Next For us just continue to build the company and spare time obviously focusing on our fire team of four children, but, yeah, just really and doing a little bit of rebuilding of the organization. Covid kind of stalled us a little bit because much of what we do traditionally was in person.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have events and speaking at events is a great revenue stream for us but also a great business development strategy. So rebuilding those things and, and you know, obviously keeping a close eye on, you know, the progression of COVID and its impact on organizations, but but yeah, just keep forging ahead. And my daughter wants me to write a children's version of embrace the suck with puppies in it, so maybe I actually love that idea.
Speaker 2:No Goggans forward.
Speaker 3:No, no, no. They will not be afford by David Goggans in that one.
Speaker 4:All right. So the way we usually wrap these things up is just what we call the one big thing. Like you get a second to just say one big thing to listeners that you want them to take away from our talk or they should implement in their life, or whatever. So what's? Your one big. Thing.
Speaker 3:It's a good question because it's actually how I end the book embrace the suck. The last chapter is titled we're All Going to Die, so Get Off your Ass and Execute. And it really is inspired by Stephen Covey's habits. You know seven habits of highly effective people, number two being, you know, think with the end in mind, act with the end in mind, plan with the end in mind, have your own personal exit strategy, if you will.
Speaker 3:A lot of people have been, you know, very negatively impacted, you know, with COVID and everything that's changed and the loss of business, the loss of life, the uncertainty, the anxiety, mental health issues.
Speaker 3:But start thinking about managing that list of what I call life regrets. You have a huge impact on what you're going to regret when this short life comes to an end. And start thinking about what don't you, what do you not want to regret. And there's a, you know, there's a little model in the back of the book that says, when it comes to this, I don't want to regret this, and that could be family life, business, faith, love, relationships, you know, again going back to writing it down, or write it down and then act accordingly. So really, you know, think with the end in mind and and and have that impact how you think about your career, how you parent your relationships, who you surround yourself with and who you shouldn't surround yourself with all those things so that you can live a more fulfilling life that has, much you know, at least fewer regrets than than you want to have when it, when it comes to an eventual close Love it.
Speaker 4:Thanks for joining us, Brent, oh thanks guys, it was awesome had a blast All right Brent, brent Gleason. Two books Taking Point Embrace the Suck Yep.
Speaker 3:The books are on all retailers, both, you know, brick and mortar, and, of course, the, the Amazons of the world, company websites, takingpointleadershipcom. And I'm on social media, on LinkedIn, of course, and I'm on Instagram now. I was told I needed to do that. So Brent underscore Gleason.
Speaker 4:There you go If you're looking for them. That's how you find them. Check those books out, man. Thanks for hanging out with us. Thanks, guys, appreciate it, appreciate it.