Practice Makes Permanent: Transforming Leaders with Dr. Anthony Randall

0:00Mick:To the me I used to be, before texting 988. When another argument with mom felt like the end of the world, and school got too stressful, I felt alone. But when I texted 988, a real person texted back. Someone listened without judgment. I'm still here, and I'm stronger than I thought. We hear you. Call, text, or chat 988. It's free, confidential, and here for you 24-7. Brought to you by the New York State Office of Mental Health. Hey, it's Howie Mandel, and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do It gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and Wallow 267's Million Dollars Gaming in an epic Global Gaming League video game showdown.

0:43Mick:Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi-platinum artist Travi McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Nioh right now at GlobalGamingLeague.com. That's GlobalGamingLeague.com. Everybody games. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged. And today we're joined by international award-winning author, a force behind transforming leaders. And we are talking to a man who has more black belts than I do around my waist. He is the masterful, the transformative, the unforgettable Columbus George's own, my God, Dr.

1:26Mick:Anthony Randall. you're listening to mick unplugged hosted by the one and only mick hunt this is where purpose meets power and stories spark transformation mick takes you beyond the motivation and into meaning helping you discover your because and becoming unstoppable i'm rudy rush and trust me you're in the right place let's get unplugged dr anthony how you doing today brother good mick how are you great to see you great to see you too man you know just catching up a little bit um talking to you for a while on social media i don't think i realized how close we were to each other so that's that's a mick error right there but i'm honored to have my neighbor i'm on the show so i've been looking forward to this one for a while bro that that sounds great i've got probably more errors in life than you do i'm just glad that uh herb and cory thompson could connect us through liberty speaks and it's great to be working together absolutely absolutely shout out to to herb and Corey or peaches and herb as I like to call them when we're together.

2:31Mick:Dude, you know, I always start my shows off by asking my guest, what's your because, right? Like Simon Sinek, good friend of mine, taught us to all start with our why. And I like to think that once you know your why, you're fueled by your because, that thing that keeps you going, that promise that you make. So if I were to ask you today, Dr. Anthony, 2026, what's your because? Why do you keep doing the things that you do? Yeah, well, I love the question. And I'm going to go a little counter to Simon. I've got his book on my bookshelf, but I always want to press like you do. I don't think it starts with why.

3:08It starts with who, and it starts with what. And that's the because. And so my because is to help people live a more excellent way. And I believe that there's a way to live a more excellent way of life when we align our passion, your because, our purpose, and our precision. And we can go in depth on that today if you'd like to, but that's the bottom line. How do we live a more excellent way by aligning passion, purpose, and precision? And that's what I love to do. I love to see human beings flourish.

3:38Mick:Dude, and we're going to go there because as I've gotten to know you and your work, one, I realized we had a lot in common. And then two, I've learned a lot through you and your work. You know, you've mentioned numerous times that practice makes permanent, right? And that kind of became the foundation for your book, Practicing Excellence, which is a great segue into what you're going and saying. You know, I've had this thing, everybody that's listened to the show or watched the show, you've heard me say this a thousand times. Michael Jordan never took a shot he didn't practice. Steph Curry never takes a shot he doesn't practice.

4:13Mick:Kobe Bryant never did a move he didn't practice. And so when you saw those guys do things, it was because they made those skills permanent. But you never see Michael Jordan take a full court shot because he never practiced those things. Right. He never tried to master those things. So talk to us about practice making permanent, both the mental, the physical and the psychological aspects of that. Yeah. So practice makes permanent, not perfect. I think that kind of destroys one of those isms that people typically think is practice makes perfect. Practice makes permanent. Practice does not make perfect.

4:48So practice excellence. And that was kind of a smaller book that I wrote a few years ago leading to practicing excellence, focused around what you just talked about. And I truly believe that living a more excellent way is found in the joy of practice, the joy of everyday disciplined obedience. We can talk about that today, about training your trust, trust in your training, but the art of practice. And I think I learned that art of practice in two different places, three different places in my life. I would say one, my faith, the second, martial arts, and then the third one in the military, specifically having an opportunity to serve in the ranger and the special operations and special forces community as an army ranger and as an officer and as a chaplain.

5:34So those are the three places that I've learned that practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So make sure what you practice is excellent. Yeah.

5:45Mick:And, you know, just doubling down on what you just talked about. So, you know, you've got a diverse set of experiences, like you just said, from martial arts to military service and a ministry, right? Like, that's a lot of profound insights and growth that you've gone through. How did how does that inform your approach to what you do when you work with companies and individuals today from a leadership? Yeah, I think, you know, Miyamoto Musashi said that, you know, every warrior should carry a pen and a sword. Right. From my military days, you know, the guys that knew me before I became a chaplain, they just remember the Ranger Randall.

6:27And I tell people all the time, you can put the chaplain into the ranger, but it's hard to take the ranger out of the chaplain. And I used to think that was a tension or a disconnect. And what I found over life of practicing is that really it's holistic. And so what I try to bring to leaders, to organizations, and to the public square is how do you bring your fullness of yourself to the public square? And how do we take that fullness to better understand others and to seek understanding and to have that intellectually rigorous dialogue and discourse that allows us to collaborate, allows us to accept our differences, find our unity and get things done.

7:07And so for me, you know, when I do coaching, we do leader development, we just take a very holistic perspective to that. You know, I began learning that in the martial arts and then my time in the special operations community, allowing my opportunities there to work on human performance and then taking that into my time in professional college sports and then what we do today. So it's very much a holistic transformational process. dude and you know once I started following you I saw something that you wrote and I stood up out

7:43Mick:of my chair and it was like my skin was on fire because I was like yes I needed to hear that a lot of times in in leadership in business in entrepreneurship in sports we always talk about resiliency, right? And so resiliency went from a mindset, I think, to more like a trendy buzzword, right? Like if we were talking social media, it was a trendy hashtag for a while. And then I saw Dr. Anthony Randall say, where you really need to spend your time is understanding the concept of anti-fragile. So I want to give you some moments to break this down for everybody that's watching or listening about being anti-fragile?

8:27Yeah. So the concept of anti-fragility comes from Nassim Tlaib and his book, Anti-Fragile, which is a great read. But, you know, my time in the military, especially the chaplain and combat tours and all of these things, the military started working on a resiliency project. They spent a couple hundred million dollars on it, actually. And when I was doing some graduate work several years ago, found that 52 % of people, of soldiers that went through the resiliency training program actually had greater catastrophic thinking after the training than before. And my belief is that we need to go deeper.

9:04We need to go deeper than positive psychology. We need to go into this place of character formation, establishing virtue and faith and freedom as a triangle, a golden triangle that shapes who people are, to give them a greater foundation to resist and respond to evil and to adversity and the things we face in this world. So the concept is pretty simple. You have people that are in a place of fragility, right? You have a place of resilience or a place of anti-fragility. And I think the illustration that I've seen, and I can't remember it came from, was using Greek mythology. If you're in a place of fragility, it's like Democles, right?

9:42The guy laying on the couch with eating the grapes and the swords hanging above him with the horse hair. If you don't practice in each and every day and prepare each and every day at how to overcome adversity, destroy self-limiting beliefs, and learn how to show up and play up and finish every day, you're like Democles. The tension on that sword is eventually going to, that horse hair is going to snap and you're done. Resilience is the concept of the phoenix, where you get hit, you get knocked down, you bounce back up to the original place that you were. and being a martial artist and doing the things that I've done in my life, man, I've just never been satisfied with mediocrity.

10:20And I think truly being a resilient person is just being mediocre. You get knocked down, you get back up again, and you stay there. And so just like the Phoenix, it dissolves, you know, it can fire and then it dissolves and it reconstitutes itself. But being anti-fragile is like the hydra, right? If you remember the Greek mythological creature, of the hydra. And you chop off a head, another one's coming back. And so being anti-fragile is about not just responding, resisting and responding to the things in life, but getting better from each and every one of those sets and reps. And an obstacle in life shouldn't be something you're fearful of.

10:55It should be something that you embrace and say, okay, how do we go by with and through this thing? And so whether it's the trauma that I've seen in combat, whether it's being in high performance environments and sports or special operations, or even doing martial arts. There is a stress that we need to put ourselves under every day, emotionally, physically, psychologically, spiritually, mentally, physiologically, to help us get better every day. And I think some people have termed that post-traumatic growth. I just prefer the term being anti-fragile.

11:25Mick:I love that so much, brother. For the person that's listening or watching right now that's like, yeah, I like that. But I need to understand how to put that into practice for me or a couple of things that I could do to reverse that mindset or to embrace this new anti-fragility or anti-fragile mindset? Like, what are some things that people can do that's in their common day to day? Well, I've learned a lot of this practice from failure, right? And so I think just having the courage to get up every single day and to step out in the public square and get in the arenas is one thing, is being willing to just be willing to show up every day, to play up when you have an opportunity to play up and then be committed to finishing.

12:10And so, you know, the first part of that, I think, goes back to practicing excellence. When we identify our passion or our because, it helps us overcome adversity.

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14:23Mick:Whether it's enriching leads, coaching your sales team, resolving tickets, or streamlining marketing, Zapier makes it simple. Join the 3.4 million companies already automating with Zapier and transform how you work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash mick. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash mick. Right? And then when we align that passion with purpose, the purposeful use of our gifts and our abilities and talents, we focus on practicing our gifts and our abilities and talents and skills every single day. What that does is it prevents us from getting just consumed with the dilemmas and the distractions of self-limiting beliefs, the inner voice, the external voices, all of those things.

15:12And instead, we're able to stay focused on purposeful practice of what we're good at. That requires what I call disciplined obedience, right? No one likes, I mean, I don't know about you, I've got three kids, right? Discipline and obedience aren't their two favorite words as they're growing up. But I've got two in college now and in a high school, and they sure appreciate some disciplined obedience now in what they're doing. So discipline is the art of just practicing well every single day. And obedience, you know, as a theologian in Hebrew, there's no word for obedience. The word is actually Shema, which means to listen.

15:49So people that have disciplined obedience are people every day that are willing to get in the arena, to show up and play up and finish, and not only be disciplined in their practice, being willing to listen and learn and apply, being humble to be taught every day. And then the last thing is precision. When you align your passion and your purpose, then that gives you precision to focus on exactly where your feet are at and be present in that moment and get after it. Right. So I'll just I'll stop there. But there's some more depth there that we can get into on practicing excellence.

16:25Mick:Yeah. You know, I I want to go as deep as you want to go in practicing excellence. And you and I have already talked about we're going to have a part two and maybe we'll do a masterclass for people, because I totally believe everything that you just said. And I think what I heard you say, and I'm going to repeat it my way for everybody, I think the first step is just acknowledging failure. I think a lot of times we hide from we made a mistake or we messed up or we didn't we didn't do as good as we wanted to do or someone else wanted us to do. It's OK to accept that as long as you're willing to correct and get better.

17:04Mick:Right. I think a lot of times we take we take failure and we begin to stack failure. You know, like me and my background, I'm all about stacking wins. Right. Well, in order to stack wins every once in a while, I have to not win so that I understand what I have to do to course correct. But the opposite is also true. A lot of times people will get into the woe is me or, you know, I'm not good enough. And then they start stacking losses and they can't get themselves out of it. One of the things that I have always appreciated about you, and you call it using your four vowels, and I put that into place not only with my team, but myself, right?

17:46Mick:And so I'd love for you to walk us through these vowels, using our vowels. And I love a person that has easy ways for me to remember things. So thank you for doing that. So everybody watching or listening, Dr. Anthony is going to teach us how to use our vowels. So you mind if I share a story leading up to that? Yeah. Okay. So we're starting with vowels because you keep saying Dr. Anthony. That doctor took a lot of long, long hours, right? I mean, I never, I took the SAT three times, Mick. I never broke a thousand. I was the third alternate to get into West Point, right? Right. My my junior year in advanced English composition, my professor sat me down, took out an essay that I'd written.

18:29There was more red ink on it of his handwriting than black ink that came out of my computer. And he said, wow, he said, Cadet Randall, he said, when was the last time you had a urine analysis and drug test? And I said, sir, he goes, are you on drugs? I said, no, sir, I'm not on drugs. He goes, you've got to be on something because this is the worst writing I've ever read at the United States Military Academy. And then he failed me in advanced English composition. Right. So it has been years of practice and a couple other opportunities and stories I share in my keynote of people speaking into me to overcome self-limiting beliefs to love to write.

19:10And today we've written a couple of books and I love to write. So we'll go back to the vowels now, but just know that this guy ain't no good at grammar. You know what I'm saying? So my seventh and eighth grade grammar teacher is like, son, you don't write no good. And I said that once in a keynote, and I had a person in the audience go, you mean you don't write that well? And I'm like, if I got to explain the joke to you, then it's – so anyways, the five vowels, right? So I think for leadership, you break it down in these five vowels. Acronyms are always a good thing. When you're walking into an organization and you want to create a culture of excellence, A is assess.

19:50Assess the situation. And I always try to assess the audience. Who's my influencers and who are my influential leaders? And I think we see that in society today. We have all sorts of people that are influencers. Way more followers and likes than I'll ever get on social media. But what are they influencing? What impact are they really having versus an influential leader that gets stuff done? They're committed to the process, right? And they lead by influence, not by power or role or responsibility or title. So that's A. The second one is enlist. Enlist, and a good friend of mine, Clint Hurdle, who I had the privilege to serve with in the Pittsburgh Pirates for eight years, Clint used to always tell us to pick your Mount Rushmore.

20:34Who are those four or five people chiseled in stone that are always going to be there for you foundationally? So A is assess, E is enlist. Enlist your Mount Rushmore or the Knights of the Roundtable. Who is going to have your back? Who captures your vision, builds your strategy, and drives your execution? With passion, purpose, and precision, by the way, right? Who demonstrates trust, adaptability, and execution? who develops leaders of character as more unethical thinkers and high EQ, right? Enlist those people. And then who's also in that team willing to, to confront you and be candid. I mean, we've got an amazing team at Vanguard 21 and I've surrounded myself with a whole bunch of people that are willing to just bludgeon me in the face if I need it, because, because I need those kinds of leaders around me.

21:24Right. So you've got to surround yourself, enlist, enlist. I identify the people. And I'll even go so far, say, identify the terrorists. Because if you've ever been in an organization, you know, there's always someone out there that's trying to destroy everything they try to put together. They're trying to destroy the organization. And it's always about they're out for themselves or they've been wounded or hurt or they've always got some sort of motive, you know, hard heartedness, self-righteousness, whatever it is that they'll do everything they can to destroy your organization. We talk talent management.

21:58I talk all the time about, you know, you can hire high character individuals and create a high culture organization or you can hire a bunch of characters and they're going to destroy your organization. So you've got to identify the people that are going to do everything they can to break that down. And frankly, HR people, we can talk about this on a more empathetic level, but you've got to identify them. You've got to isolate them. And then, frankly, you just have to eliminate them. Do you want a championship culture or not? Do you want to be a transformational change agent in the public square or not?

22:33And quite frankly, some people just don't want to get on board with a growth mindset and be a team player and win. And they need to go find someplace else. So that's the A, E, and the I. The O is observe. And I'm a big fan of emotional intelligence. We teach a lot of emotional intelligence in our leadership courses. We teach EQ. We facilitate EQ 360s. And so I think observe. Observe. Have some social awareness. understand empathy and compassion, but also understand cultural values, understand the written rules and the unwritten rules. I know you're an athlete. You and I spent some time in some locker rooms, right?

23:07I mean, how many of us know that there's written rules and there's unwritten rules, right? And there's always the clubhouse boss, right? That runs the clubhouse, that runs the locker room. And you either follow those rules or not. And so observe when you come in as a leader, observe what the written and the unwritten rules are, right? Legacy is a great book about the all-black Kiwis and the all-blacks, the Kiwi, the New Zealand rugby team. They have some written rules. They have some written principles that make them great. I guarantee you there's probably also some unwritten rules in there too.

23:39Mick:Yeah. So observe. And then the last one, U, is utilize. So assess, enlist, identify, observe, and then utilize. Utilize a coaching language and a coaching culture. we're finding just study after study today that when you implement a coaching language in a coaching culture, when you bring in leadership and development, executive coaching, when you build an internal executive coaching bench, when you teach your leaders in depth to spend more time coaching and less time directing, you begin to empower people and draw the full potential out of people rather than enabling people to keep asking you for the answer.

24:16And that's one of the hugest things that's in our marketplace today, in our society today, that's why we've got so much instability in the public square, is we're overwhelmed with information and misinformation, and people today are just comfortable being told what to think. But high-performing organizations, high-performing cultures, high-character leaders, they coach people how to think. And when you can coach organizations in depth how to think, you begin to create morally and ethically autonomous leaders that get stuff done and you flatten out organizations and you begin to move much faster and that's how you win.

24:53Mick:Bro, I couldn't have said it any better. Again, we have so much in common. We have a lot of principles and theories and teachings in common because I say the same thing. It's not about titles. It's not even about roles, assignments. It's have you done enough so that this person can lead on their own so that you can trust them to walk away and the job is done. And when you when you're able to do that and there's trust two ways, right? Not just one way, but when there's two way trust, that's the secret sauce to scaling. I don't care what business it is. I don't care. It could be a sports team. If you want to know the way to win and to always win, there's got to be two way trust because everything that I believe starts with trust.