Left Of Greg 069 Warrior Toughness with Steve Drum

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Alright, we'll go ahead and get started here. Steve, thanks for coming on! We really appreciate you joining us here on Easter Monday when we're recording this. So I guess that's the thing now, I didn't know, but it's on all of our calendars. So we were all prepping, going, "Hey, what do we have on Easter Monday? How is that different?" So we appreciate you coming on, man. Thanks so much!

So I'd love to just kind of jump right in and start off by actually giving us a little story about how you got on here because you knew John McCaskill, who we had on in the past, but you have past, I'll say, experience with Greg. So I'll let you kind of start with that, and if you need to, like, you know, show me on the doll where he touched you, we can do that if we need to.

Experience it was so...

You go ahead, he won't do the first feel that can do that, actually.

Yeah, yeah, happy to be here, guys, to carve out a little bit of time on my busy Easter Monday. But yeah, so John and I worked together at SEAL Team 10 back in the day. I'm going to probably be doing stuff with him a little bit later, too. But, you know, I remember, I saw Greg, I saw you present. I think it was called SOF Week (Special Operations Forces Week) in Savannah back in 2012, 2013, something like that. And then you came to our command probably, you know, maybe six months later, if I have that right. Again, my brain's a little bit hazy from those days. But yeah, and I, you know, and so I actually reached out to you guys to see if I could come on. I have no agenda in terms of what I want to talk about, but I just feel like what you guys talk about is so damn fascinating. I'm just just want to see where this conversation's going to go because no matter where it goes, I know it'll be interesting for me, at least.

Just so you know, I've got an immense head, and with it goes an immense memory, Steve. So not only do I remember being in Savannah for that, I'd love to tell our viewing and listening audience that those type of opportunities come up all the time, but you know, they don't. The dude that spoke just before me, I don't remember his first name, but his last name was Diamond, and he was hawking a book about negotiations and how, you know, the spirit of the SEALs, being in a foreign country, and specifically at that time, to build stability operations in Afghanistan. You know, we were all, if you remember, we were all just shipped to Afghanistan. So this guy Diamond with his book was fascinating.

And so the other thing is when we came to SEAL Team 10, two things happened. One, nobody would let us in the gate. And there was this big fence that was around it with the grass, and we had to stand in the parking lot, and it said, "Stand here by the camera." And whoever was pulling the duty that night wasn't letting us in. So we were standing out there in a windy, blustery rain until a SEAL came by and the SEAL goes, "Hey, what are you guys doing out here?" And he let us in. So I found out later who that was during your training, which was great training. We had a ball.

A Master Chief walked by and said something like, "Hey, you can't be in a hallway unescorted." A real bright guy that was real happy to see me there. And I said, "Thanks, there, Master Chief." And he turned and he got right up in my grill and said, "At Senior Master Chief!" Because, of course, the greatest thing that you learned from human behavior profiling is the naval rank system. You get what I'm trying to say? It was fun because, you know, there's a lot of people that don't understand what we do, so they resent it. And if they're not invited to the class, you know, they get pissed because they're on the outside. So I remember that one well, and it's good to see you again.

Yeah, thanks. And my regret was, you know, in the role I was in, I kept getting pulled out. And I'm like, this is the one thing that I really, really want to sit through. And I got pulled out and wasn't able to get a lot of it. So disappointed in that. And what we did, we also sent some guys down to your ASAC course, and they came back saying great things. So, yeah, that's the back.

Well, the funny thing was, if you recall, Steve, the guy I was with — and the way SEAL Team 10 is set up is you've got that like hallway down in the center that looks almost like a factory with all the gear and stuff you guys were wrapping and stacking everything to get it ready to go. And I was with call sign Hook, we'll just call it that. And he was volun-told to meet me there because I had just flown back in from Afghanistan. I was doing some FOB (Forward Operating Base) bouncing and came back in. And you were the one that they were dragging out. You still had your fingertips on the door and you kept peeking around the corner to get the next gem of wisdom. I wasn't laying down much gems, but the program was pretty good at the time. Yeah, so we always enjoy doing the SEALs.

Yeah, it's great because, you know, I think one of the things that we do well in the SEAL Teams is we are, like, we recognize expertise regardless of who it's coming from, where it's coming from. And if there's a way that we can adapt that, mold that, and apply it towards, you know, the challenges and the problems that we face, then we're definitely always willing to entertain, to take that on board.

No, Steve, that's a great point because that's always my thing when I always say, "I love when I said trained SEALs," because it was always like, one, there was just like this level of, like, I wasn't sure whether I was going to get, you know, whether it was going to be a homicide and I wasn't ever walking out of there again, or it was, but there was like this level of a challenge.

But it was really great. I had an experience one time down with one of the teams on the West Coast. We were teaching — it was like the morning of day one, so it's like the first day, we're going through, did our intro and all that. And I'm getting, like, the whole time I'm up there, I'm getting like a little nervous because I'm getting like a lot of, like, anger cues. You know, I'm picking up people are kind of getting upset and stuff. I'm like, "Well, this, this isn't starting off well." So we go to the first break, and then their Chief was like, "Hey, Brian, can you, can you give me like, can we take like 30 minutes on this break?" And I'm like, "Yeah, okay." So, you know, I'm like, maybe something came up behind the scenes I don't know about, whatever, right?

So then he comes back with like 15 more guys who had just finished up SQT (SEAL Qualification Training) and shown up to the team, and told them to sit down and write down everything that we were saying. And I was like, "Holy crap!" And so what I found out later is he was like, "Hey, man, we were really pissed because we're supposed to be, like, we're supposed to be the best trained, and no one ever taught us this. No one taught us this, and like we're freaking pissed." And I was like, "Okay, like that's really cool," because I thought it was going to be like a murder situation where I was like, "Get out of here!" So, but it was that same attitude, who's really cool is like they were like, "No, like," and I walked around during the break and saw some of the guys with their notebooks out, they're like the most meticulous and organized notes that I'd ever, ever, and I was just blown away. And I was like, "Wow, that's so cool that they're just eating it up and enjoying it and getting a lot of value out of it." Right.

And I think that all guys are always going to just — it's going to sniff guys out, size guys up, get more doubts, whatever, and then, ascertaining, is what he's talking about, is this value? And if that's the case, then then they're on board. Right. It's like anything, right? There's tough crowds to maybe break the ice with, but once you do, they're pretty much, yeah.

And that's, and that's why, once you're welcomed in, once you know the secret handshake, you're in. What I, what I remember is, well, you had a cardboard box, and I found this at not just one CL HQ (Command Headquarters). And when everybody was coming in, that's where the cell phones went. You didn't have time to be texting and talking and everything in class. Uber discipline, everybody was focused on the mission at hand. Everybody was interacting and asking the right questions.

I was asked one time, "What's the difference between East and West Coast SEALs?" And think, you know, because we did a lot of training in Coronado, and then with the naval units out in San Diego. And I would say this, I would say the beer and the food was too close out on the West Coast, because every single time that somebody was going to take a lunch break, you know, we always ended up at that same damn place that served way too good a beer and seafood, and that's never good for a training class, and a lot longer on those days.

I recall, Marren and I, we were training in a place, and I can't tell you where, Steve, but there was a SEAL there, and as a little frogman, and he was making sure that he was laying down who he was, but he was off the clock. Now they said, "Hey, listen, I own a bar, and I'll give you it was in a Southern state along the border," that's all I'll tell you. And we were doing for attacking Boras tire, and some other folks. And he goes, "Listen, you guys come by my place after this, you're always welcome, and you know, we knew him back when he was in, and he goes, you'll never pay a penny out of your pocket." So he had a couple friends with us, and we stopped in, and he recognizes right away, and he sits down with us. He came by, Marren, what was it? He gave us like root beer schnapps or something? This is like a symbol of root beer schnapps. And he goes, "Hey, everything's on the house!" And we're dying. And so we chugged that forthwith, and he comes over and sits with us, and I go, "Hey, will you have one?" And he drinks it. He goes, "Hey, we had so much fun!" Because his cheap nature, but his welcoming nature came through loud and clear. Hilarious. It really was.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so, so Steve, you, you know, you've done a lot of time in the SEAL Teams, in the Navy, so obviously there's a ton of experience from that. And now you're taking a lot of that, and you do a lot of kind of, I don't know how you want to describe it, but there's a lot of leadership training, there's a lot of stuff you're doing with private companies now, and to kind of bring in a lot of the mindset and the mental toughness training. But a lot of it comes from, you actually helped develop something for the Navy called the Warrior—sorry—Warrior Toughness Program, right? And you actually, you actually wrote and did that with a bunch of other people, but a bunch of other folks, and then brought that in up there, I think, at Great Lakes, I'm not sure, so correct me if I'm wrong. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that program, kind of what it entails, because it's a pretty cool approach because it's not just, I mean, you know it, man, like it's not just, hey, who's the hardest dude in the room? It's, no, let's develop all these different areas, right, to become that ultimate warrior, that tough warrior.

Yeah, and so specifically, this was for the Navy that I developed, not specific to the SEAL Team. Just sometimes that gets confused. So I left the SEAL Teams in 2015 and took a billet, which was a SEAL billet up in Great Lakes, the Navy's boot camp. And up there, I was what was called the Dive Motivator. It was my job to kind of help with the onboarding of all SEAL candidates, diver candidates, rescue swimmer candidates, would come into the Navy under a contract, and it was our job to kind of train them, give them the running and the swimming, but also the mentoring piece.

And then in 2017, I was tasked with getting together with a Navy chaplain and a Navy clinical psychologist, and said, "Hey, we need to make our sailors tougher. We need to make them be able to perform under extreme situations, you know, should we go to war with a near-peer adversary, open seas, naval combat again?" And so we're like, "Alright." So we approach this from kind of the body, mind, soul way of viewing things.

And so obviously, like any military fighting man or woman, they've got to be physically fit. Okay, so there's that aspect of it. So with that is hard training, is a brilliance on the basics combined with, you know, realistic, scenario-based training. And then there is the mental component where we talk about performance psychology and mindfulness meditation, that type of thing. So we actually teach them how to do that.

And there's also the character development component, the soul approach. And so it's really your character because we need men and women who can perform and fight the enemy, but they need to be people of good moral and ethical decision-making, and they need to make sure their behaviors and actions align with the beliefs and values of your organization. And when they get stressed, when things get hard, they have the ability, the spiritual toughness, to lean into the sources which provides strength. Although it's not a religious program, if you are religious, that would be something you would lean into, but you'd also lean into connections and relationships, you know, because we don't do hard things by ourselves, on our own, right, not effectively, in a nutshell, what it was.

And, and that to me is, it's really cool, and you could speak to this even more than I can, but, you know, it's amazing to see how that stuff has come about. Like you said, you did that in 2015. Now, a lot of it is, is how we articulate these issues. So you go body, mind, and soul, "Hey, this is about character," because you can give someone all the training in the world, and all the education in the world on a certain area or a certain way to do things, but that doesn't necessarily mean under pressure it's going to come out that way unless you're developing them, you know, like you said, and people call it emotional maturity and the ability to do all this stuff. So it's just interesting to really see how all this stuff has changed, and now, you know, once that change occurs, it starts to happen more rapidly.

But that's totally different than when I'm sure when you first came in the Navy, or when I first went in the Marine Corps, where it was just, "Hey, man, like, we got a war, I came in when there was a war going on, so it was like, hey, we're going to war, this is what's going on, either you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem." And there wasn't that time for development. But it's really, it's really, I just think it's cool to see how the military in different areas has evolved to go, "Hey, what do we really need to focus on to develop our people?" Because that's what it's all about. It's all about personal development with someone that's going to make that team stronger. I mean, does it really matter if they get like a 90% or a 100% on their PT test if they can't effectively make decisions under stress, like, where we really need to focus on? So I'm sure you've seen that change a lot in your career.

Well, I mean, from my own experience, initially you start off, anytime you have a process, a selection process, you weed out a certain amount of people that are clearly unsuitable, right? And so you get, you get rid of that. But even through that process, so the initial part of our selection process, which is basically BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, is that first part where it's all about your toughness, right? Your ability to deal with the physical elements, but using your mental strength to be able to get you through those tough times. And so it's like, "Yes, I can keep going. I can keep going no matter how bad I'm hurting."

But then towards the second phase, in dive phase, that's when they start to kind of throw the acute stress at you. So you're under the water with your scuba gear, they call it pool comp (pool competency), and you have to problem-solve and stay very composed and not panic, and that requires a different level of mental engagement. But even with all that said, once you get to the SEAL Team, in fact, almost every, I think every platoon, every troop that I was with, we always got rid of at least one person because even after making it through all the training—and you're talking about, it's at least a year of training before they even show up and get into their first platoon—they still, once we start doing things at a high rate of speed, there's still a lot of them that don't have that ability to kind of pick it up and do everything safely as we, as we needed to be.

And back then, I wasn't given any of the performance psychology techniques. Through wisdom and experience and effective training, those things start to become more intuitive. The things such as your mental rehearsal, how you set goals, how you kind of have your own strategies for lowering your arousal, right, your energy, to deal with so you can make those clear, more composed decisions under stress.

Yeah, one of the things, first of all, shout out to my dear friend Adam Norh Hudan (phonetic), thanks for your service, Steve, and for all the SEALs and naval folks that went before, not as much the Marines, but definitely the Army. The one thing is that I notice a lot is people misattribute lexicon, certain words. And Brian and I have found that sometimes when people talk about human performance, they're only thinking about human physical performance and not mental performance and your mental acuity and your ability. Like, you use the term mindfulness, and McCaskill uses the term, and a lot of our friends use that. It's been around forever. As a matter of fact, situational awareness is mindfulness, it's the same thing. So we're all in that together. And being able to expand one's mental clarity to include external arousal and novel stimulus and still be able to overcome it, that's what human performance is about. An increase in human performance is just every bit as important as the physical rigors that SEALs put on themselves, and all warriors have to do. Wouldn't you agree with that?

A hundred percent. You know, and it's, initially when we started, we rolled out this Warrior Toughness program. We're not worried about the recruits getting it. We're not worried about the younger, more junior personnel getting it. They're like, "Alright, well, this is what you do, then. Okay, we're just going to do it." It's the people that have been around, the people that have already established those habits, like, "Alright, I already got this." Well, what they didn't realize is that people who perform at the highest levels, whether it's military, law enforcement, special operations, or athletics, elite athletes and organizations, they all realize that no matter how good I am, to your point, physically, you know, how focused I can be, I can always get better. And what's going to give me the edge, what's going to certainly optimize my performance, is that investment into the mental side. And then just in terms of simply, "myth or truth," it's that old cliché, and Brian, true, you've heard that before too, right? It's 90% mental. You know, obviously, you've got to be in good shape, but it's the mental piece that's, it's the difference made. Right.

And then there's, again, there's all these different terms that we use, and like Greg said, like you were saying, how we articulate stuff about resilience, oh, then there's grit, and then there's this, and, and I, it's just interesting to me to see how it's progressed, and now, like, we got guys like you. Like you said before, you talk to a performance psychologist, you already had tacit knowledge, right? You had experience, you're like, "I know what this is." And then when someone comes along and puts words to it, well, holy crap, now we can transfer the skill set, right? Now it's like, "Oh, I have the, I have the, you know, the explicit knowledge that you can teach and study and read in a book, plus my tacit knowledge from, from all my life experience that I can put into that." And that experiential learning helps us to actually take all the lessons learned.

Because I think a lot of times we miss a lot of, well, we're getting better at it, but we've always missed a lot of the pulling out the true lessons learned from different events or different situations where we like to place blame or say if this wouldn't happen, or this person wanted to do this, "We just need to train that now and then this won't happen again." It's like, "Well, let's, let's pull the, let's dig a little bit deeper here and look at these different lessons learning, and who's the actual person, what type of individual do we want, you know, making the decision at that time and place? What does that involve?" And I think everything's slowly going towards that, and I really, I really like it, and it's kind of cool that you guys have that.

And so I know you, you're now kind of taking a lot of that knowledge and stuff, and you're going to private companies and you're speaking at different places, and you're doing training, I believe, too, for some of these organizations. So what is it about that you're doing right now? Like, and tell us a little bit about that.

Well, I think in anything that we do in the military, you can highlight, you know, you use the hyperbole, right, when bullets are flying, and I'm certainly guilty of that myself. But there is a translation. Yeah. I think, you know, and I think you guys have both had so much time around the military that you would recognize, I think that one of the things that we bring is structure, as framework, as process to how we approach problem sets.

And so when we developed this Warrior Toughness program, it was about bringing a couple of things. It was about, first, it's got to be comprehensive, it's got to be holistic. So just like you do military planning, you start with, you know, with the concept, and you walk that all the way through to the after-action review process and everything in between.

And so, but we also wanted to bring with that a level of consistency. And so while I mentioned that certain things were intuitive to me, what I lacked, and what it was very important that I brought to this program, was how to apply this consistently. And I'll give you an example. So I could feel like I could maintain my composure and my critical thinking skills on operations, right, in combat or training. But yet, when I get home and the kids are behind me chirping, or I'm getting stressed out, I didn't have that same level, I didn't have that consistency there.

And so it was really important that I'm like, "Alright, well, if I can take a skill set and make sure that I apply it deliberately for all those situations where the amygdala starts to kick in, whether it's anger, fear, frustration, you know, if I can apply that, if I can approach it in a consistent manner, I'm going to be more effective in all of those areas." And so when I approach organizations, I try to say, "Okay, usually the extreme examples. Now, here's exactly how you can use it."

"Well, we face a challenge. Let's bring a framework." And the framework that I use is "Commit, Prepare, Execute, and Reflect." And that basically is a pretty complete framework. It starts with "Commit." You've got to be all-in. You've got to know exactly to make sure your behaviors and actions are aligned with the goals. When you "Prepare," it's figuring out those core skills that you need, it's sharpening your mental game. When you get to the "Execute" part, it's about having agility, it's about having situational awareness. And then lastly, it's your ability to really distill the value from your experiences and not just say, "Alright, I got it," but to intentionally put that into a plan to execute better the next time around and not get mired down in the negativity with emotional baggage when we don't execute well.

You know, the magic of that, too, is that most agencies that we run into, when an agency finds itself lacking, there are key prominent features that they might not be able to see internally that externally, all of a sudden, you're, you know, "the battlefield to the boardroom." You go, "Hey, wait a minute, here. Here's a stress fracture that you might have to work on." And one of those is institutional memory.

And Brian and I harp on this all the time, that these sage graybeards passing down that gem of knowledge, sometimes a new generation doesn't have time for it, they don't want to see it. So that structure, that framework, makes sure that those gems don't slip through the cracks, because when we're shaking that sieve and trying to get the rocks out of the sand, we have to think in our fragile ego systems that we're the first people that came up with this epiphany, that this moment is ours, we're the only people that have ever been at war.

And I remember, you guys might remember Dan Yeager, God bless him, and his dad Chuck Yeager, and his son Kip Yeager, a hero of Blue Star (military families), three generations, three generations of warriors. And so Dan Yeager's a hero in the Central Highlands, 173rd in Vietnam, and just surly as they come, looks like Ho Chi Minh. Now he's all old and lives about an hour from me. I only see him about once a year foraging for food in town. And then if you startle him, he'll run off like a scared deer.

And we were sitting there and this kid had just come back from kinetic Iraq, and I was going into kinetic Iraq. So we had them come up and do our intro for one of our briefs on Pendleton. And the kid said, "It's nothing like anybody in America has ever encountered. We use one trail, the next day we go back and there's IEDs on that trail, and they're shooting at us with AKs and there's sniper rifles, SVDs."

"Hey, fing stop!" So he goes, "Hey, fing, we were doing that in the Central Highlands!" And we're shaking the kid, and they're actually getting in a tussle on stage. Why? Because we think that each generation doesn't face the same array of problems. And I think that's a huge part of the root of the fabric of an organization. If they don't listen early on, and if they don't build a framework that incorporates that history, those hot washes, those after-action reviews, they're going to miss something. And most times, it's going to be something critical, simple, yet critical.

Well, and I look at that sometimes when I'm talking about situational awareness, it's that, I feel like, to your point, sometimes we get sucked into the minutiae. We're looking at, like, as we say, the five-meter target. And so whether that's just the immediate actions we need to take, it's, you know, fussing with all the gear that's supposed to make our lives easier, but typically is an added encumbrance, and we kind of become disconnected in what the overall theme is. And so when you have frameworks, it's not about—it's about keeping you tied to what your overarching goal is.

Yeah, you saw that in Iraq sometimes, you know, the latter part of '07, '08, we were very much trying to get, you know, support the Awakening Movement, right, where you asked the Sunnis, who are now really like, "Hey, we're the enemy of Al-Qaeda," with true Sunnis as well. And so we're trying to support that. And then you have an Army strike force that comes in and basically just shot up a whole bunch of those dudes. And not judging them, it immediately made a cult based on what it was, not trying to lay fault. But when things like that, when the tactical objective really undermines the strategic objective, and I feel like that, that's, those are things we always have to keep in mind from any organization.

No, that's, that's a great, that's a great point. You, you brought up something like, we're so focused on that, that five-meter target. And same thing, I call it, and I, I do this in a lot of the resiliency stuff and talking about different like PTSD and working through different issues and stuff, is that I used to live my life, I call living your life at your, at your front sight tip. You know what I mean? When you pull that thing out and you're shooting, what do you focus on? Front sight, front sight, front sight. That's all you see. And you're living your whole life that way, man, it can get, you can go catastrophically wrong real fast 'cause you have no idea what you're actually getting yourself into.

And you brought up a couple examples, too. I mean, just some, some great gems, if you will. Yeah, you know, I'm the same thing. I was '07, working with the Awakening folks. I was out in Anbar, out in Ramadi. I remember we had this, we got a platoon of, I forget what they call them, I don't know what unit they were, but they were just, they were a special operations force from Iraq, and they were awesome dudes, right? And I was like, "Hey, we got dumped out," I'm like, "Hey, why don't you take care of these guys?" I'm like, "Hey, guys," like, we're, you know, trying to talk to the interpreter, like, "Where are you guys from?" "Oh, we're, you know, who do you typically work with?" And they're like, "Oh, we work with the Navy." And I'm looking at them. I was like, "Alright, I know if you're saying the Navy, I know who you, what that means," right? So they could, like, clearly they're trained by SEALs, where these guys were awesome.

And I was talking to him, trying to build that rapport, 'cause we're going to go run some ambush operations along a couple different areas. And then I was showing them some different hide site stuff and how they could do, they could operate at that time differently, like they could go out and do some, you know, vehicle hides. So all this cool stuff. And they were digging it. And so we're going through with the interpreter, and I'm like, "Oh, so where are you guys originally from?" And one guy was like, "I actually grew up, and up until a few years ago, I lived here in Ramadi." I was like, "Oh, you're kidding me." And just, again, I did this, and I was like, "Oh, well, what were you doing back in 2004?" And he looked right at me, and through the interpreter, goes, "I was shooting at the Americans." And I'm just like, "Wow!" 'Cause that was me. I would have been in that same city a few years prior. And I'm just like, "Okay, so here's this guy, he's about my age, just told me he was shooting at me a few years ago. Now we're running missions together." Like, "Oh, you know, 25-year-old Sergeant, Marine Corps sniper at the time, team leader, going like, "Well, if that doesn't explain, you know, geopolitics, that doesn't explain, you know, the strategic mindset here, like, I don't know what does." Like, it was just incredible, was a lot to swallow.

But it was that same thing, just being able to take a step back and go, "What's the overall picture we're trying to do here?" And I mean, that, that spoke to just that, that a bunch of that stuff really reminded me of those stories, as incredible. But it's same thing, it's taking those, those lessons learned forward. You know, what, what am I going to do to sit here and go, "Oh, yeah, you were killing, shooting at my friends." And I'm like, I put myself in his shoes. What would I be doing if Iraq came into my neighborhood and took it over? Every day, I'd be with my buddies going, "Hey, how many Iraqis are we going to kill today?" You know what I mean? I, so I, I get it, you know, this guy wasn't doing it for ideology at the time, he was just, just going, "You guys came and took over my country." So crazy how that stuff, that stuff works.

But so I know you're, you're, you're taking this into like that because you're doing a lot with private sector and stuff now, too, because, you know, we do stuff all the time, and our thing is, you know, at first a lot of them are like, "Well, like, we don't know, like, you're talking about it's military stuff, it doesn't really apply here." And we're like, "Okay, like, well, this is different." It's like, "No, the consequences for being wrong on your end are very different than you got it." But the problem to us, and I'm sure to people like you, is, is the same. It's the same issue everywhere. So I'd love to get your kind of view on some of those, maybe those situations you've had where you're trying to go and talk to a private organization, telling them, "Hey, this is no different than the other things I've learned," or some of those parallels that you've seen between, you know, stuff you had to do on active duty versus now working with a private company.

Well, yeah, it's funny you mention that, right? You've got to be very careful with the language that you use. And so I actually made a, I released a video last week where I talked about kind of the difference between mistake and resilience. Now, granted, everybody's got their own, but we would get like, we'd brief our program. As our program started getting more popular, we started briefing, you know, senators and senior military folks, et cetera. And they would always be like, "Is this some kind of resiliency thing?" And we would always say, "Well, no, resilience is this." And so we were like, "Alright, well, what's the difference?" And so resilience, as we looked it up, you just people run with it, but it was your ability to bounce back from setbacks, from challenge, whatever, what have you.

Whereas what we were talking about was Warrior Toughness. We identified it in three areas: one, your ability to take a hit and keep fighting; your ability to perform under pressure; and your ability to deal with that day-in, day-out grind, you know, that long deployment. And whereas resilience, it's absolutely a part of that. But I would be guilty of, and I still do, because resilience just is like that warm, kind of sounds good. Yeah. I don't want to bring a SEAL in to talk about toughness. That, that's, that, that wouldn't play well. Yeah. But if we talk about resiliency, that's going to meet, you know, face a little, little, little bit better.

One of the things I talk about, one of my—I tell a story about how one of my friends who's a pharmaceutical sales rep. When I would go in and I talked to pharma, I talked about this story about how she had this agenda, the sales agenda that she wanted to drive this doctor. She'd been waiting to come in to see and finally get some meeting with this guy, and she's so ready to just, you know, drive out that game plan. But then she realizes, like, this doctor is so busy, patients lined up outside the door, stuff piled up on his desk. And she actually has the awareness to stop and say, "You know what? What isn't the value of my customer right now? How can I, with the long game in mind, give some value here?" And that value is simply to say, "I'm going to come back again another time. I'll drive the three hours back to Chicago." You know. And so it's our, you know, it's our ability to just, regardless of whether you're going to get shot at, or whether you have a pitch or a tangible leadership situation, you need to be, when you're on the X, as we say, you need to be able to think critically, you need to be able to think clearly, you need to not be emotionally hijacked, and keep in mind where that desired outcome is, where you want to take that engagement and drive your behavior towards that.

Many times when we're dealing with a company, you know, like we're dealing with healthcare, and so we're briefing the healthcare folks, they get done with the briefing, and every single one of their folks that were in the briefings that we did over this couple of days come back and go, "We need more of this. We're not even sure exactly what it is yet, but holy crap, where's this been hiding?" Which is the most common comment that we get when we're training pre-deployment folks. And then we go up to the single point of friction, the single point of failure, the person that's writing the check, and he goes, "I don't know, it seems a little too military for my taste." Okay, got it, got it.

And so then you go to the schools, and the schools sit down and they get the brief, and you're saying, "So we're going to increase resilience, up-armoring, the mental toughness, we're going to create advanced critical thinking skills in all your people." "But what are we going to do for when the guy comes in the room and he's already shooting?" And we're going like, "Well, timeout. For school shooters, we're going to be identifying them well, 'left of bang' pre-event indications, and they'll coalesce in these clusters of cues." They go, "Yeah, but, you know, this other guy, they're booting doors and ramming carriages."

And that's really fun. Muscatatuck, and we were a day before Christmas this past year, and we're watching that, the show at Muscatatuck, so it's got a great show. And I remember a wonderful SEAL, Adam Shapiro, or Lieutenant Commander, probably Commander by now. And Shapiro comes up and he goes, "You know what the problem is?" And I go, "Yeah, I'm pretty well aware." He goes, "The problem is that over there they're doing plasma charges, over here they're doing explosive breaching, over there, dude, they're doing live tissue testing. And you're saying, 'Hey, let's sit down for a minute and let's talk about what's going on in here.'" And nobody wants to hear that.

So two-pronged, two, two-pronged thing here. One, legal, moral, and ethical. It's as misunderstood as the word resilience is. Okay. And LME (Legal, Moral, Ethical) every time we go into a place and stress LME, they go, "Well, don't worry about that, we've got an ethics advisor that works with our Human Resources folks, and we, we do a nine-question test every other year, you know, once." Shut up, you have no idea what you're talking about.

And then the second part is that the LME, they don't understand that if you don't have to worry about that, if you unburden yourself from worrying, "Is my activity legal? Am I acting in an ethical fashion?" If you never have to consider that, imagine the scales falling from your eyes and seeing the world for the first time like it really is. And that's what people get out of training. That's one facet of all the many things that they get out of situational awareness training and human behavior pattern recognition. De-escalation and crisis intervention training. They're all the same training, they're all facets. It's a Fabergé egg. I'm just looking in a different hole. And what you do is essential, but how come it's so hard? Why is it so hard that when you're briefing people they got a chip on their shoulder and it's just not what they're looking for? How does that make you feel, Steve?

It makes me feel like I need to be very, very deliberate how I craft that message. Yeah, lead with the results and say, "This is, if you want to be able to do this..." And so now, like, a lot of my masters, I talk about peak performance because that's what I want, regardless of—here's a framework—regardless of what, you know, the two things you can control, right: attitude and effort. Everything else is maybe beyond your control at times. But you want to be able to have a peak performing performance, right, regardless of what the circumstances are.

And so in our current set of circumstances, I have had to back that off a little bit because people were thinking "survival mode." In a lot of cases, they're not thinking about how necessary outflanking the competition is at this very moment. Some people are, a lot of people are just, they're dug in. And so we want to be able to say, "Alright, your survival, but we still want to have an eye on peak performance," because, you know, a good friend of mine used the analogy, he's like, "There's so many, there's so many organizations that are pitting right now. They're coming off the track, they're in the pits, they're hunkered down to kind of wait to see." He's like, "You need to figure out how you can stay on the track." Yeah, it's going to look different, outcomes are not going to be what we hope they're going to be. Engage, we've got to stay in the fight.

And so, and so I guess I just got to be careful with the language that I use. And that's sometimes different depending on the culture. You know, you have a couple of guys that are like really pro-military, they bring you in and, and, you know, they're excited, where maybe there's some other folks that don't know anything about the military, they have a lot of misconceptions. And so knowing how to speak to those different types of people. Yeah.

That's the key. Brian can attest to briefly. Law enforcement officers, being a law enforcement officer for such a long time, one of the things is there's this thing between military and law enforcement. Like even now, I'll say, "Hey, I was in the military and then in law enforcement," but I wasn't an MP. Why? Because that's like an insult to law enforcement people that you started out as an MP, just like law enforcement hates firemen because they just sit around waiting for the bell to ring, they're not proactive.

Well, the same thing was happening when we were on the West Coast, Brian. You'll recall that we were going in these small agencies and we were trying to bring them up to speed on what they're going to expect when a soldier comes home. And if that soldier's a fragile human being and he starts to unwind, this is the knowledge that he knows, so you might have to be prepared for this. And the cops were sitting there sometimes with their arms crossed, with a distance, with a cigar in, and going, "Hey, listen, I've been at this 12 years, 15 years, 18 years, 22 years, and you, kid, you got one deployment. You're not going to come in." See, sometimes we wear the glasses and we fail to see the forest for the trees because we don't want to accept the knowledge that somebody else is bringing through, because it challenges our world state, how we view the rest of the world. Would you agree with that, Brian?

Yeah, and the other thing is getting, and I notice kind of with, with anyone, you know, there's a big difference between education and training. And what you're talking about, Steve, is training. Like, alright, how do you get better at critical thinking or making better decisions under stress? Yeah, you could read all the books in the world that you want, man, but like if you don't put it to a process and put it to a plan and work on that, there's different ways to do that. So our big thing is there's always a difference between education and training. Education is important. Like, I would read all the books in the world, I, I do as well, but training changes behavior.

So if I don't come up with a process to change the way I'm doing something, it's very, very difficult to just to read something and then extrapolate the lessons learned and apply it to my life, right? So I need someone to come in. And so with that, I would say, and maybe, maybe your experience is similar or different, or no, but, but training with, like, the private sector is, it's, it's different and it's not what they think it is. And they, they look at it, "Hey, that's a cost," rather than "that's an investment." Right? Training the military, yeah, is training and readiness expensive? Yeah, to have liberty, you're going to pay a whole bunch of dudes and girls to sit around and be ready for something and train for the event. Well, that costs a ton of money, right?

So for a private company, it's like, "Hey, you gotta pull these folks out of line and you gotta train them up, and it's like, 'Well, that's going to cost us this.'" They're like, "No, that's going to cost you in the short term, but over the length of their career here, or what you're trying to do, what is, what is the benefit you're going to get out of it?" And I think there's a lot of organizations that can accept that and go, "Yeah, you know what? You're right. We need to spin these people up." And there's others, and they want to do it by the company that sells them the online click-through video thing that my wife has worked for. All these major companies, she goes, "This sucks." And just clicks, clicks. She's like, "Oh, this one actually makes me wait 20 minutes before I can go to the next slide, like they think I'm going to read it." She's sitting there on Instagram doing that. And that's like, so that's not training. That's just, that's just checking the box. And but the company can go for their safety, so you can go to their legal team, "Well, look, this person did all this, we give them the tools."

But I think that difference, and that's, I know for us, that's resonated a little bit with folks where we say, "Look, there's a difference between training and education." And the light bulb kind of gets a little brighter. But I, so I don't know if you've seen that, too, with the private sector on what they're willing to do and not, and how they look at training.

Well, it's like you said, I mean, that online stuff, that's, that's kind of in many cases, it's to see, well, you know, a lot of stuff you've done, like trafficking in persons training. And, and, but you see that also in the organizations. And here's an example: a friend of mine, they were out doing, they were out a few months before this whole thing had, like, right in the beginning of the year where they did their annual sales training. And so they bring in, they spend God knows how much to bring in, you know, I don't know what organization it was, you know, the guys, the pilots in the flight suits, they talk, it's, you know, we can, we can have a laugh, right? But a lot of the stuff they talk about is military process distilled down, and it's good stuff, really stuff. And she was telling me, she's like, "Ah, we're getting all this stuff, you've got this great keynote, and they don't use any of it, they don't even address it." It was just like, it would've been a great opportunity to go right into our breakout sessions and start, frankly, the one part where we bring in a speaker that we vetted through the agency or, you know, or the bureau, and that's good to go, but, you know, that's not connected to the actual training plan that's going to execute this thing. I see a lot of that.

Yeah, one of the great things about how SEALs train, and not to divulge any secret handshakes out of the shop, but we would go, we would do some classroom stuff, and then the next thing, we're leaving Dam Neck in Virginia Beach, and we're right out on the street. And then we would go from there to a place that's way down south in Texas, and hit the tactical implications. And then the next thing you know, we're back in a big city doing it from a hotel room with my nose down onto the street. And it was amazing because you could see this change.

So Brian and I, thank God, the great organizations like Carry the Load, great folks like SEAL Cody Banning (phonetic), you might remember Cody back in the day, and then T-shirt Atkinson down in Dallas, all these good folks. We're down there and one of the things that we do is we hit this really big business. And during the business, a guy takes me out to the side and goes, "Hey, one of the things that we think that we could use your stuff for, which is amazing to us, is that we don't want to leave money on the boardroom table." And so, you know, you quote the Kandahar, which was necessary back in the day, you know, that leave behind. And so I go, "Hey, you know, you know, it's battlefield to the boardroom, it's going to work the same way." And the guy loved that statement. So we sat down and gave him a couple of examples of how human behavior and different cues and these things and how to set up the room. And the guy was amazed.

And so I called back in a couple weeks, I go, "Hey, how is it?" Something goes, "Yeah, but, you know what, we got this 'wait and see'." We've heard "wait and see" more times from folks. And I will be the one to tell you, I've been around longer than both of you combined, the idea is you're going to pay, you and your organization are going to pay one way or the other. You're going to pay in body bags. You could pay, you know what? One of the things Jim Mattis said, he said, "It costs a million dollars to train up a Marine, to send him into combat. And it costs a million dollars to keep him there. And if a Marine dies in combat, it costs a million dollars to bring him back and do all these other stuff. So I know every drop of blood, I know every drop of sweat, I know the investment of every Marine and their families." And he meant it. I don't think sometimes that we see it as Americans. You get what I'm trying to say? I think that sometimes we lose the eye on the ball and understand that all of this training that we do before the event is going to pay dividends later on. I think we miss that.

Yeah, and I think it's, and there's because a lot of it comes from the lack of commitment that you have, that the employer has to the employee, and vice versa. Absolutely. Everything's so temporary. There's no gold watch, there's no, there's no retirement. And so it's, how are you really going to make sure that you're driving the culture that gets somebody to commit, to give you all they have? And so those are the real challenges. I think it's different from the military. Military, we don't have to contend with that. We're all in it. Hey, we're going to, you know, maybe, maybe we're not excited with what the mission is, but right now I'm going to give the guy to the left and the guy to the right of me, you know, all I have to get through this. And then we don't really have that. So we have to come up with other different creative ways in a professional business culture to garner that love or commitment. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And that's, and that's it, that's a great point because, you know, it is, and we do see companies are like, "Well, look, like this person could leave tomorrow and go get a different job, this person could do this." I don't know. And but yet all those, all those people post that stuff on LinkedIn where it's like, "Hey, the CFO says the CEO, you know what, you know what if we train these people and and they leave?" And then the guy's like, "Well, what if we don't train them and they stay?" And people go, "Oh, that that makes perfect sense, like you should invest in your people." And what I can do it, it's like, "Oh, it's too much." It's like, "Alright."

But there are some folks who do try to do that, create that culture, and culture to me comes down to that leadership. What's the guy in charge or girl in charge or people in charge, what are they modeling? What are they setting forward as that is what they want in that organization? Because people are going to either get on board or they're going to get off, and that's fine. Let the people get off who want to get off, and let people who want to get on, get on. And, and well, and they're going to drive for, because that that mission, that train's moving down the tracks either way, you know?

So, so there's a, there's a lot of issues that the private sector has to deal with that the military doesn't. And then there's issues that they don't have to deal with, you know, in terms of consequences and and budget things that are a lot different. But but I, anytime we have someone like you on, Steve, I was kind of asked, like, what, you know, is it similar to John McCaskill when we had him on, and Michelle Palladino, we had her on, because, you know, you teach this stuff, and yeah, you're a subject matter expert. So what is it that that you do? What's your, your daily routine or some of the things that you do for this, this mental toughness and and to not get, you know, the emotions get in the way, or the emotions allow you to deal with the event? You mean how to, how to create that balance? And what is it that you specifically do? Like, what is your mindfulness or what is it that your everyday that that you go through because there's a few things I do, I always talk about it with our folks. So I'd love to hear it from from your side and what you do as an expert.

Well, in being authentically consistent, I would say, you know, I'll break it down to that body, mind, soul approach. And every day I'm going to, I'm going to do something physical. And these things overlap, obviously, they're not all separate things. But every day I'm going to make sure, and what I do now is every morning I get up and I go for a walk. It's about a 40-minute walk. And that's good for recovery, if that's not my workout. But it's good for recovery, but I, it's also where I do a lot of my, I sit there and I walk along and, you know, and I talk to myself, I talk out my content. And if somebody comes by, I kind of pretend you're on a Bluetooth phone, my AirPods in, right? And that, what I do, that's my, that's my moment of reflection. It's my moment of content development. And it also gets me, it's also something healthy to do.

I heard on another podcast, Brian, you talking about bourbon. I love me some bourbon, but, you know, I could easily do that every night, but I can't. Yeah, I've got to be, I've got to have that element of self-care because if I drink bourbon, especially towards the end of the evening, it's going to interrupt my sleep. And so that's still that's part of that taking care of my body, trying to eat some good food, make sure I work out.

And in the mind part, I do, I do my daily, I use my Headspace app, nothing overly complex, and I do usually 10 to 15 minutes meditation. Right now I'm on like the Advanced Finding Focus part, which is, which is good, which the more meditation you do, the less, the more it's just quiet, they'd reduce the amount of cues that you, that you have, the reminders, the prompts. And then I try to always figure out when it comes to execution and reflection, I try to figure out, "Okay, what, what have you accomplished?" It's good to finish your day saying, "Alright, I've been productive in these areas." And the reflective piece comes in to say, "Okay, am I being productive in all of the areas?" Because I've been guilty of that, like you said, living your life just within the front sight focus, how that negatively impacts the other aspects of your life when it comes to relationships. So right now, am I being productive professionally? Am I being productive as a father, as a husband, and a leader in my home, and really striving to have that balance? So the physical activity, nutrition, sleep, try to get good sleep, try to make sure that I'm productive every day professionally and, you know, personally, and make sure that I'm taking some time to step out of the noise and just look at how things are going.

You mentioned it a couple times, you keep, you keep saying the word consistency. And that's what I always tell people, too, it goes back to even just like, like shooting, right? The full term consistency is accuracy, right? You're zeroing a sight or a weapon system, right? You have to be consistent doing the same way, otherwise your adjustments are all off. Your body position has to be consistent. So I, so that, like, consistency is accuracy, will apply that to, to everything. If you can maintain consistency even during stressful times or times where you didn't get sleep or times when this is going on or you have extra stuff to deal with, that's actually more important during those times to maintain that level of consistency.

So like in your case, like, hey, you know what? Maybe you have 30 things now you have to do today that popped up, while you can't do your 40-minute walk, but can you do five? You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's just that, hey, I can't do my full workouts anymore. I'm not throwing a barbell around because I don't have access to a gym right now. Guess what? I can still, I can load up the ruck with different sandbags and just, I could throw that around. So I'm still getting it. So it's just, you might maintain the consistency.

My EQ is not strong enough to carry me through everything because I carry all the baggage for everything in my life. And so unpacking that is a horrible thing. So what I do is I enlist cohorts. And so absolutely everything that I do... exactly what I'm trying to say. So, when I'm out anywhere and I'm going, "Okay, I want to go to bed early, I want to get sleep, I want to eat a high-rich meal," this stuff, what I do is I say, "Okay, what would Marren do?" I got me a little wristband. And so when Marren and I travel, the very first thing, we go to a healthy food place and we pack it up, because if it's there, then I'm going to eat healthy. And then I say, "Okay, well, I'm there, and what's he doing right now? He's got to work out." So Marren and I, we challenge each other. I clearly can't do, I do more parkour and clearly a lot more cardio than Marren. But what I do is I create this world in my head where I have these challenges that I have to do, not because of me, 'cause I'm too weak, but to make sure that Brian's like, "This, when we travel, I only vegan-ish, when we travel, I get good sleep, when we travel, I do..." Now, I'm okay with that. I know I'm selling myself out, but it motivates me. So, so if my emotional register isn't deep enough...

And the second part of that is listen, there's a person listening right now that's going, "Oh, yeah, but this guy was a SEAL, so, you know, he was handed a silver spoon." No, every one of us is a damaged, broken little kid that's scared to death of the world in our environment, and we've all got skin needs and, like a sieve, our emotions leaking out. What, it doesn't take a lot of money, it takes you to say, "One day" or "Day one." It takes you to get up this morning, go, "Today I'm cleaning all that crap out of the fridge." I mean, the biggest investment that I've ever made for me was to build the gym downstairs. And it wasn't really hard because I stole most of the equipment and what I didn't have I got donated from some sketchy sources. But the idea was you have to say, "This is the line. This is the day that I'm going to get up and do it." And it's hard for people like me, it's hard. I look at Marren, not so hard, because, you know, Marren is mentally tough. But I want you to say, Steve, and Marren, for those people out there that say that they can't do it, what's going to get them to the finish line? How, how do they get up and, and, you know, bootstrap it and go to work tomorrow? What's a good way of thinking of that?

No, I think you hit on a lot, you hit on a lot of it. It's, it's, it's basically just having, it's basically saying, "Hey, I choose to commit to this." And I think a lot of it is getting, getting confidence and comfort through routine. And I don't, I always think of this in terms of routine. I don't know if this was your experience as well, Brian, but, you know, when you deploy, you go back overseas, you maybe go about, you're going back to Iraq or back to Afghanistan, you've been there before, but maybe now you're, you're deploying to a different area. And so you deploy there with your, with your unit and you're, you're waiting to, you know, maybe you guys will do a couple turnover operations together, a joint group. But you cannot fast enough get into that routine where you're doing your permanent place that you're going to sleep, you know where the chow hall is, you've got all your gear put up. And you just, you know, and then you feel like, "Alright, I got my battle rhythm. I'm going to wake up, we're not doing operations, I'm going to be in the gym here. Chow's at 0700." You know? And so once you get that kind of, you set that routine, if you can commit to the routine, then everything else kind of falls in place. Then you can say, "Alright, well, I don't feel like getting out," but, you know, I've got, I've got this framework, and, and, okay, you know, it gives you, otherwise you're on, you're sitting on your ass all day watching Netflix, you know, you're, you're...

So true. Yeah, it's, it's tough. Yeah, I mean, you guys both hit a lot. But same thing for me, it's like, that's why it, it, I mean, I've been, I've done this for years, only because I used to have a lot of sleeping issues that took a long time for me to figure it out. But, you know, it's getting up, you know, but I have no problem being wide awake at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, you know, maybe so. But then, then I just said, "Alright, well, then I'm going to stick with that. That's, that's wake up time. I get up and start my day." You get what I'm saying? So now that's slowly come to later where I sleep in till almost 5:00. But, but for me, that works. It's getting up. You know what? I wake up and I'm like, "Man, I'm dead tired, I slept like crap." Like, "Okay, I'm just going to take the dog and do a half-hour walk today. I'm not going to be able to throw the weights around." But it's still taking that time for myself, because I don't care who you are, getting your ass up and not hitting that snooze button is always going to be better for you. That 15 minutes or five or 20 minutes extra of sleep is just not going to help, it help you.

And so I think taking that initial step of getting that routine is always difficult. And I always do it first thing off the bat because I know like, it's just like, you know, it's a, it's a ticking time, you know, we're taking a clock, right? It's countdown from when I wake up, and I've only got so much energy, I've only got so much gas in the tank, I've only got so many calories I can burn. So if I try to put something off till later in the day, I know there's a good chance I'm going to come up with a hundred excuses on why I can't get it done. Absolutely. So if you just, you're forcing yourself to, you know, it's getting comfortable being uncomfortable. You know, all the sayings, all that stuff. It's so funny that we've got all these different sayings that come out. I use a bunch, you know, "attitude and effort," it's this. And, and because they get you so much, everyone forgets how powerful they all are. Like, they're, they've been written down and said over and over and become cliché. Even, exactly. It's the whole, you know, "make your bed." Like that, that's, that's the oldest one in the book is make your bed. And everyone, no one realizes how powerful that is. You get up and accomplish one task in the morning, you've started your day off with a win. You started it in the right board. But it's also about organizing your life and staying focused. So all that stuff is interesting how it becomes cliché.

Brian, I would challenge this to our listeners, both of them, and the people that watched us on YouTube, that one guy that calls all the time, he goes, it's this "Family Guy" idea that I would tell you guys, is that negative attention is attention nonetheless. And don't forget that, because your sons and your daughters that are craving structure during their teen years, that their catecholamines are jumping, and that they're not understanding that the neurochemistry of the brain that's stretching things and growing hair in places they didn't think of, they're going to crave it. And either you're going to give it to them, or the Bloods and the Crips are. Either you're going to give it to them, or they're going to check out and they're going to be based on the rock. There's a very simple number of gateways. And if they don't enter into one saying, "This morning I'm going to get up and go for a run," or, "I'm going to emulate you and I'm going to paint or I'm going to draw, I'm going to write or do these positive things," those negative are all around them. And it's a very easy fall to delve into when it's a good motivation factor for a lot of people.

I don't know, like, I, I'm horrible at being motivated. I always tell people I have like zero motivation but I got a lot of discipline. So, but some people are, but meaning like, that's, that's another way to look at it is like, you know, what do you, what do you want your kids to do when they grow up? What are you modeling? What behavior are you showing them?

Wait a minute, you were then, okay, we might want to, we might want to edit that part out and start over, Brian, with a different one because Dad's gonna tell you what!

Oh, you bastards! Throwing the empty bottle at him. I've seen that many. Yeah. So, Steve, I kind of want to like get to a couple things that like maybe you looking back with the experience that you have now, you've transitioned, you know, from military, you know, from active duty out, which is difficult on its own. It's another challenge in itself. I don't care how long you were in, where there was two years or 20 years, like, that's, it's, it's just a process that, you know, we, they're getting better at setting guys up for success, but it hasn't always been that great. And when you come out, man, it's, it's, it's a grinder out there. So you suddenly lose a lot. But you've transitioned well, you, you're doing your own thing, you're working with private companies now. So you, you've had this experience. So if you were like looking back, what are, what are the some of those, those big takeaways or now looking back, "Old man, like, I wish I knew this," or, "Oh, man, this happened everywhere in every unit and every team, no matter who it was." Like, what are there, what are the little gems that you have from your personal life, if you can think of any, you know, in terms of just the lessons I learned in the military, in terms of transitions? Yeah, all of it. Just how any of those lessons learned, like, what is there anything that's stuck with you that has worked the entire time through all these different events, right, through these different types of life changes or different types of jobs that you've had? Like, is there certain ones that have, you've always stuck with you?

You know, there's a ton of eternal lessons, you know, and I think people talk about this, that I think Jocko Willink talks about, like, the dichotomy of leadership, is being close but not too close. It's really kind of finding, and everything we do in life is about balance. It's finding those pieces where you're like, "Alright, I've got to, as a leader, I've got to be connected and have relationships with the people within my sphere of influence, but at the same time, I've got to drive the, I've got to drive the mission objectives, I've got to drive the organizational objectives." So really seeking to find how I can find that balance. And I think that really comes down to, and I wasn't always able to successfully do that, at least to the degree in which I wanted to.

And I think it's like, you've got a certain point, you've got to develop that personal philosophy for yourself that says, "This is who I am, this is what I stand for, and, you know, as a leader, you're going to be making unpopular decisions. They're going to be making decisions that you're going to cause you to fall out of favor with the guys that work for you because you're seen as like, 'Now you're just a yes-man,' or you're going to be seen by your leadership as a problem child who's like, you know, like that Captain Crozier, perhaps, right, on that aircraft carrier who was, you know, now he's so focused on the well-being of his crew that maybe he's not making decisions in the framework of the national, you know, national security objectives. You know, strategic focus has kind of been lost there."

I mean, in terms of, so I feel like, "Who are you? Who do you stand for? Where do you want to go and how do you want to be seen?" And so for us, it's like, as parents, as organizational leaders, when we navigate through this COVID thing, you know, how do we, how do we want to be seen as? What kind of a job did we do? Do we model good behavior for our kids? Do we provide leadership and value in the world?

And so I look at that in terms of just being a military guy and transitioning. You know, I feel like I had it pretty easy, compared to a lot of people, because I kind of left the SEAL Teams in 2015, and even though I took a job as a SEAL up at boot camp, I kind of ripped that (Band-Aid off gradually). I think whereas if I was in Virginia Beach and had a retirement ceremony and next day woke up in my bed with no Navy, it would be different. But I think, like, for people, for veterans that are or for military folks that are transitioning, I mean, really find out exactly what you wanted to, in terms of, you know, not that you can always find your dream job, not that you can always pursue your passion, but really think about what kind of value you can bring and, you know, let that drive your decision-making. That's, that's kind of what it did for me. I was like, "I am good at instructing, I'm good at, you know, speaking. Let me, let me figure out how I can take that and a message and help people."

No, that's, that's like, that's a good message and it's always about you, you said it right there, it's, you know, what, what value do I add? To yourself, to your family, to your organization, to your team. It's like, if you're, as long as you're focused on, how do I add value to this mission or this job or whatever it is that I'm doing, then at least you're, you're helping out, right? Because you get into something new and you're not a subject matter expert at where you used to know everything really well. And now you've got to have a new process or a new place that you're starting from or whatever that situation is, right? I was like, "Oh, well, what can I do right now to add value?" It's like, I gave my brother some advice actually, before he went off to boot camp and BUD/S and everything. And he's like, "Well, what," you know, talk a little bit. Well, Christmas, we almost got a fist fight on the front lawn because he was, I had to put him in place because he was, had a bit of an attitude before he went in. And when I'd tell him like, "Hey, dude, no one cares how big of a stud college football player you are, big, strong, fast you are, or there's going to be some dude who's half his size. My brother, like twice my size, there's going to be some dude half my size who's just going to tear you up and he's going to eat you." So I didn't break him down a little bit.

But then when I gave him one of the things I said, I was like, "Hey, look, when you're going through there," I go, "Volunteer for everything." I go, "You know, someone's going to say, 'Hey, I need, we need a guy for this, we need to go do this.'" Like, I go, "Just volunteer for everything." I go, "It's going to suck because you're going to be tired, you're, everyone's going to be hiding out, like, maybe they won't ask me." They will. "Volunteer for everything." I go, "That, that you're going to meet someone, you're going to make an impression that's, you're not going to think anything of it. Then two years later, that guy's like, 'Oh, yeah, you helped out when this,' and I remember and they're going to hook you up in some other way." I go, "And plus, it just, it's, you're going to learn other stuff that that no one else did or you're going to get in." And he's like, "Hey, man, that actually worked out great." But he would then do it. Like they're like, "Hey, Marren, you know anything about, you know, boat motors?" And he's like, "Yeah, you know, inboards, outboards, what do you got?" He knows nothing. That's perfect, because, right, you're about to get schooled, but say, "Yeah, yeah." So, but, but that's the idea of is it anywhere I go, it's like, "Alright, even if I'm the lowest guy on the totem pole," or I've worked with guys where I've been on teams where, where I've seen like you, there are all backgrounds like you, it was a lot more experience than I. And I'm sitting there like, "Alright, well, I gotta, I gotta pull my own weight here. What else can I do?" And as long as what you're doing adds value, the rest of the team sees that, the leadership sees that, the team sees that, and they know you care about mission. Then next thing you know, all the doors are opening up and you're getting a call two years later, "Hey, man, we need some work down here, can you come?" It's, it's weird how all that stuff works, and it's just about focusing on, on adding value like you just said.

This pandemic is the end of entitlement. So a lot of people figured out what they were worth during this pandemic because they were so easily replaced or didn't show up and the world didn't collapse. And sometimes we need to know that. We need to know sometimes that that that guitar behind Marren's right shoulder is just a prop, and thank God, and we'll never play that son of a bitch because we would bleed from our ears. But no, I mean, the problem that I run into all the time is I try to be humble. And there's certain circumstances and situations, we envy that. Yeah, not on a podcast if you try to shut up for a minute. But, but the idea is the same thing is when you're not the smartest guy in the room, sometimes you got to take a step back and sit down and listen to everybody else. Marren and I were working this program for DARPA, and everybody is a PhD and a doctor and a genius and everything else. And you know what? I know my stuff works, but I got to sit down, shut up, and watch the mathematician go and do his part too. So if everybody is leaning forward and everybody is contributing, we'll get through this. But it's also going to expose the weakness. It's going to expose that person like a neon glow stick that's not pulling their weight. And I think that's important as well.

I think so, so often we, you know, as Americans, it goes back to something you said earlier, Brian, is why aren't people willing to do things? Why is it? Because they look at, we look at YouTube stars, we look at influencers, and we like to make the assumption that they had it easy, right? That they, that came naturally. And they forget it's that how many people who are successful are because they put the work in? You know, you talk about, you Brian, that you don't have the motivation but you have the discipline, right? A lot of people talk about that. There's one, I don't know if you've heard of Jim Wendler, he's a strength guy. Yeah, everyone, right? He always talks about, you know, discipline over motivation, because motivation is great, it makes us feel good, it gets us to the door, right? It gets us to want to, you know, join Marine Corps, join the SEAL Teams. But somewhere between the start of that journey and the finish, the motivation is not going to be there, right? It's going to be the discipline that's going to get you aligned. And so that's what's required now is it's, hey, we've got to put the work in, because if we don't put the work in, we are not going to be able to adapt and pivot to make what with the new normalcy is going to be on the back end. And so, yeah, you've got to be committed.

Yeah. And, Steve, I would go one step further, and I figure assessment is spot-on. I think that we're in violent agreement on this. I would say, go to every talk you do and you're teaching when you're up there, we just have to do this with young lieutenants and wonderful law enforcement professionals of first responders. They would get up there, and I would say the very first thing is go through with your eraser and cut out all the crap, extraneous, all the stuff that says "self-promoting" and all of this other stuff. You get down to, and then once you have those elementals, and it's perfect, now start building your story, now start telling us a little bit more about you. Because when the mottos at the end, if I'm done with all the platitudes in the motto and you didn't give me a gem of wisdom, I don't get that pearl in my hand, then guess what? You just wasted my 40 minutes or 60 minutes or my, my keynote address. Yeah.

So, Steve, do you, do you see any common, do you see any like common themes or patterns among like some of the private sector folks that you work with, with some of the issues that they have and what they're trying to do and why they bring people in like you? I mean, is there a typical like recurring thing? Because there's a lot of ways, I'm especially interested, like, you know, organizational management and structuring and how companies work and operate and leadership and culture and this, like, there's a ton of different, there's a lot of, a lot of ice cubes in that tray, right? And so what are, do you have any like common themes that you see where, where, you know, companies need to focus on or where they have issues with and don't know how to address them? Like, you get what I'm saying? Like, there's, they're having an issue and they don't know how to deal with it. Like, what are those two other typical patterns and the issues that you see?

Well, there's, there's only so many hours in a day, and a lot of times, you know, you're so, you're so focused on production right now. Okay, we're so focused on executing right now in terms of, of, you know, providing the value to the stockholders that we're like, "We don't have time to train. We don't have time to train." You know, yeah, maybe there's some folks in the organization, they're going to innovate. But generally, we're not going to be, we're not going to take the time to prepare. We're going into a sales call, sales meeting, you know, "I don't need to be on this before." Or, "Okay, we've, we've just got done, yeah, we, you know, we've been doing pretty well lately to really assess and analyze that sales call that we just had. There's no need to sit there, sit around and discuss it."

And I think it goes back to what I said earlier, what I'm bringing is to say, "Okay, let's have a comprehensive framework that considers all of it, that considers the contingencies. And know that you're going to address each one of those categories. Know that you only have so many hours in a day to get after for each one of those things. But if you and if you don't do it, but you're aware that it's there and you're aware that you're taking, I'm taking a risk if I don't put this much time into training, this is what could happen." And I think in most organizations they don't, for whatever reason, they are not good at things we do great in the military, right? It's our pre-action review process. We're so good, and we do it for a couple of different reasons, right? We do it, obviously, to get lessons learned. We use it to kind of to get them, to disseminate them so other people can use it. But we also do it, you know, as a way to really establish that culture of accountability, right? If we know, for us, it's, and we get done doing CQB (Close Quarters Battle), right? We get done and now we're going back up to the whiteboard and we're like, "You were in here, you did that, you were over there, you did this, you're going to get called out." And we create that a culture of accountability. We give that very succinct and actionable feedback in the military. And a lot of times the organizations are not willing to do that. They're not willing to do it because they don't see value in taking the time or they don't really know how to give feedback in a way that is actionable and useful.

No, I would totally agree with the, with the after-action review, whether that's for a single small operation or training exercise or whatever, the sales call, like you just said, or you're looking overall at an organization as a whole, because that feedback, man, I thrive on it. It's like, you know, instead of, obviously, to the point, this has to do more with being in the Marine Corps than the psychological and emotional abuse growing up. But like, when someone gives me a compliment, it's hard because it's like, "No, no, you're supposed to tell me what I did wrong first." Like, you mean, it's, it's that, it's that sit down and same thing when I would do it, is, "Who gave you a compliment? We need to get to this, right? So I need to fire that bastard." So we had same thing, except I'm running the team in the, like we do training where the real mission doesn't matter, it's just like, "Alright, I'm gonna go first. Alright, here, here's what I did wrong, right? Here's where I screwed up, here's what I had, this was the point of failure for me. I should have done this, I should have let you." And then you go around the room and then it's very, you know, it's difficult. Those conversations can get very difficult. And I've noticed, too, especially when you're not used to that, you know, in the private sector, things are different, you have to word it differently, I get it. But, but having that like you said, that accountability as a team and person and personal accountability, and it starts with that leadership going like, "Hey, you know what, this is what I did wrong, this is how I should have done it, this is what you need to do. Now what did you do wrong?" And people go, "Oh, yeah, you know, I could have handled this situation differently. I didn't have to react like that." But it's just like you said, that that preparation and training and all that stuff.

Like, you know, I see my wife doing sales call stuff like that or doing whatever work at home and like, same thing, I'm like, "What did you do to prep? Or how did you see, did you account for this or account for that?" And she's good at, where he can tell some people. I've heard her conference calls, they're hilarious 'cause I'm like, "Hey, you need to tell that guy to shut the hell up!" And she's like, "I can't say that." I was like, "Alright, well, then you need to tell that guy what he's, he's, he adds no value to the situation. You don't respect his opinion." She's like, "I can't say that!" And I'm like, "Well, you gotta come up with a way to get the guy off the phone call because he's ruining it for your own company, he's, he's doing this, he's doing that." She's like, "How did you know that?" I was like, "Just listening in while I'm typing something, I can tell like, 'Oh, man, he's got to stop, he's got to pull back'." And she's like, "Okay." I was like, "You need to take that approach when you're listening, think big picture, look up and out, just don't look down and in." And she's like, "Oh, I see what you're saying, he came in here when he shouldn't have, he should have waited for me to finish this part." And I go, "No need to reinforce fires if they weren't needed." You know? And it's just funny how it, I think it translates directly over in the private sector, but they sometimes have a hard time seeing that.

I don't know, I like what you said about the, you know, when you talk about debriefing, starting with yourself and acknowledging things that you could have done better. And that's definitely things that you don't see a lot in the private organizations that I've, that I've worked with. Some, and when they do—a couple of ones that I do—where they're like, "Yep, I didn't get this right," and they're leading the executive suite. I mean, I'm like, "Man," I'm like, "that gives me goosebumps. I hope you all see this." Because, you know, you think if you're not going to talk wrong, you think that people are going to know it? Of course they are, right? And you think that organizational leader fails to acknowledge mistakes that were made, you think people it won't occur to people? And that's not, that's not the truth, right? Of course they know, they're not stupid. But you miss an opportunity to establish credibility. You miss an opportunity for humility to get people more bought in, more like, "Yeah, I guess this is an organization that I want to kind of invest more in." You know, it's, it's sad to see that.

Yeah, but I think in crimes, you know, you see recidivists are responsible, a small group are responsible for the large part of the criminal activity and hordes. And I think one of the things in corporate America that I see is the same is true. You've got a couple of people that started something, and it's a really great thing that they started, and now, guess what? They're locked into that, and they're not going to look elsewhere because it's always worked for them. And then you've got the performers, and that small band of performers are juggling and spinning all those plates and moving the company forward. And then the soft underbelly, where the mistake is, where the stress fractures are, is never going to get exposed. But when it does, it's going to be catastrophic. And that's what happens during school shootings, and that's what happens during domestic violence incidents that spill over. And instead of threat, that's the guy that's stifling it. It's all its it. So training separates it. It creates a behavior that's not going to fall apart at the first big gust of wind.

Yeah, well, Steve, I mean, we, we appreciate you coming on, man. And if there's, I don't know if there's anything else you want to talk about specifically about what you're doing and what you got going. I know you're right outside of Chicago. We actually have a good amount of listeners from that area. So some of my, yeah, so it's my, as I said, told you when we were thought it's my hometown. So I love Chicago. I'm always partial to it. I think it's the greatest city in the world. But, you know, here, I know you're right in that area, so I don't know if there's anything you got going on near you that you want to talk about.

Yeah, I mean, nothing specific right now. I'm just trying to, you know, a bunch of speak gigs, and of course, those, those all get shut down. That, those are the things that I like doing. I love engaging with people, whether it's on stage or whether it's, you know, in a smaller unit, you know, workshop session. But now I've got to be like everybody else right now. I've got to pivot, I've got to adapt. And so now I'm figuring out different ways that I can add value. And sometimes it's just like, hey, if people want to reach out and get me, my email is StevenDrum.com, my website StevenDrum.com. And just ask if there's, if they're, if they're struggling and I can help them, maybe with, with providing some value, then I'm happy to do that. And of course, doing stuff with organizations, doing some, doing some WebEx style presentations for them also, right?

Yeah, I'll definitely put your, your links up in the, in the detail episodes of the show and share all that stuff out as well, man. So we, we really appreciate you coming on, man. And let's do something together. Let's plan something outside of this pandemic. We love Chicago. I'm sure our paths cross a bunch of times. It would be great to see you again in person.

Absolutely! I'm down, man. Just say the word. I came on, I come on a podcast, I want to talk about the things you're doing, but I'm like, I told Brian, like, "Entertaining." So, yeah.

I was like, "Yeah, blast!" We appreciate you coming on, man. Alright, Steve Drum, really appreciate it, man. Thanks for coming on. Everyone listen and thanks for listening. We appreciate it. Don't forget, training changes behavior.