Learned Excellence: Leadership Lessons from the Navy SEALs | Dr. Eric Potterat

26:42And then, of course, if we become outcome dependent, our performance can sync based on whatever the last outcome was in our life. Whereas values are around actions you can take, win or loss, success or failure each and every day in that specific role that you're looking to perform in. Amen. I mean, you have a very advanced analysis. I'll keep it simple. Focus on the recipe. Don't worry about what the cake's going to look like. every cake has the same six ingredients at the same temperature, and they're all going to look the same. The people that worry about this, there's a quote here that we talk about often, like professionals focus on process, amateurs focus on outcome.

27:22Where do you want to be? Which side of that equation do you want to be? Now, I often say I'm dumb, but I'm not stupid. We all have someone we answer to, right? Whether you're a business making widgets, whether it's stakeholders, stockholders, whether it's a professional sport team that needs to deliver wins for the city, the players, the ownership, et cetera. We have limited control over the outcomes. We have some. We can influence and effect, but where we have total control is a repeatable, consistent process that we exercise. And then by definition, if we stay true to the recipe, we're going to get the outcomes.

27:56We're going to get that cake more times than not. And again, to go along with that, you were mentioning of writing it out and putting it on paper and what that looks like and what the behaviors and actions that go with that identity look like. And for a lot of people, they're not going to take the time to do that. And they're sitting on the couch and like, I know exactly who I am and how I behave. And these so-called couch warriors are going to be right. While they're sitting on the couch doing absolutely nothing. Who they say they are is who they are. But once tension and pressure gets put into the situation where they're outside of that comfort zone, well, now they're going to be faced with a reality of a true identity that is either going to be comforting because they are who they say they are to themselves and to the world, or they come up incredibly short to that.

28:59And well, that is just certainly scary for a lot of people because that means that what is on paper is not what's in their mind and is not what shows up in reality. And at that point, there's either work to be done or you submit to what that reality is. And that can be quite terrifying for some people. Yeah. Yeah, we have five disciplines in the book. They're more or less in order. And it starts with values. So you really, it all is, the foundation of everything is who are you and why are you doing this? Why are you performing? Why do you want to get better for yourself, not for others? But then we spend a whole chapter talking about mindset, which we've talked a little bit about.

29:44And then we get into process, which Eric was just talking about, process, not outcome. And on that one, it's very easy when you have a bad outcome. It's very natural to go, whoa, I have to change something. I did something wrong. I made a mistake. Something has to change and blow things up. And what we're preaching there is no. Sometimes you can do everything right and things still go wrong. You play right and you still lose the game. So don't overreact. Part of that comes from your identity, but mostly it comes from your confidence in your process and having a process to adjust your process. I'll say this, Johnny.

30:23I highly doubt that many, if any, listeners to your UNAJ's podcast here are going to be kind of couch surfers or couch potatoes. But given that there might be a few, I would challenge them to once they do this, and we unpack this in the book, there are some great stories of very high level performers, cliff divers, snowboard champions, Cirque du Soleil. And the minute you can codify, if you will, and really document kind of those value or identity markers, even though you might be on a couch saying, Hey, I know what those are. But the minute you not only document them, but here's the key. I have reading glasses somewhere.

31:03My reading glasses, if I gave you my reading glasses to each of you to try on, you would say, wow, Eric, your vision is screwed up because it's my prescription. So yeah, maybe there you go. But my, my point is here, I think it's, it not only becomes freeing, but once people actually make decisions based on those values, that's where the game changes. It's not just writing them down. It's actually using that as a filter saying, okay, I'm going to do things that are true to who I am, as opposed to the noise outside of the circle. And again, I know that it's just going to require some trust and belief, but if you don't believe us, like I would invite your readers, hey, read the book and read these great stories from elite performers that once they do this, they don't give too you know what's about what other people think.

31:53They're focused on their convicted kind of linear path on what they believe they ought to be doing and why. Now that process piece is, Alan, you had alluded to, a lot of times when we fail, we can want to change the process. Or you can become a bit of a process junkie and getting golf swing tips on YouTube and then on TikTok. And oh, I got to change it. And all of a sudden, you've created this Frankenstein process that is not going to get you anywhere near the performance that you need or want. So how can we know that the process that we're on is right? And who do we need to bring in to help us make sure that we stick to that process to be successful?

32:32I have a few pet peeves in life. One of them is watching performers or people make changes without measurement. Drives me bananas. And this, to your point about like golf swing on YouTube, we document a very high performer who will remain nameless, but was literally taking athletic advice from a Starbucks barista. For those baristas listening, for those baristas listening to your podcast here. I appreciate what you do. I could not function in this world without what you do. So thank you. But you have literally no business or little business giving feedback to a tier one athlete. So my point here is, is if you're going to iterate a change and all of us will, we're going to iterate process changes as we age and stage, whether physicality changes, whether, you know, I'm talking to Johnny, a musician as well, as you age and stage, you may have to iterate changes as well.

33:30My point is change one thing at a time and measure that. Because if we change all three, I often bring up fly fishing as a great example. I'm a part-time, obviously, resident of Montana. I love to fly fish. There's only three ways. If catching fish is important, and it isn't, catch and release, I really don't care. But if catching fish is important. There are really only three ways that you can catch fish, right? Where on the river, how many casts and the type of fly you're using. If I don't catch fish and I change all three and I start to catch fish, how the hell do I know why? So I think it's important to really adopt an iterative process.

34:05I'm going to make a change. I'm going to measure that. I'm going to bounce it off valid and vetted board of directors or coaching staff or the people I trust in my life. And then I'll measure it and then make another change if necessary. Now, Alan, you brought up contingencies. And for some of our audience members, and sometimes myself included, it can feel like catastrophizing to think about all the contingencies and all the things that can go wrong. So how do we put together a contingency plan that will actually work to better our performance and not bog us down in a negative mindset that might keep us from taking the actions we need to?

34:41I don't see why it's catastrophizing to be prepared. Because things go wrong. Um, it's as simple as you're giving a presentation and it always happens. Suddenly your, your laptop decides that's the time to reboot and download the latest install. Right. And now you got to kill 20 minutes. So be ready for that. Have a second laptop, be ready to do it on a whiteboard. What, what have you, and think through these things. What if this happens? What if that happens? Uh, it doesn't mean it's going to happen. It doesn't mean you have to focus on that happening, but it reduces the stress. Because when that happens, you go, all right, I'm ready for that.

35:20I gave a speech last year at a conference. And I practiced that speech. I was ready to go. And I was two-thirds of the way through it. And boom, I forgot what was next. And I did not prepare for that contingency. So I muddled through it. I figured it out. But there were several seconds of stammering on stage in an awkward audience. I tell you what, next time, I'm going to be ready for that. What if I forget what's next? Maybe I'll have a cheat sheet with me. Maybe I'll have a joke ready to go. I don't know. But it's simple things like that. The only thing it can do is reduce the stress. The other thing I'll add, I'm somewhat biased as a 20-year retired commander in the Navy, obviously.

36:02But in the military, we have this thing and had this thing called readiness. I think outside of the military, aviation has it. You want your pilot and co-pilot to be very well versed in multiple contingencies if you're 35 ,000 feet or 36 ,000 feet above earth. In medicine, I hope none of us have to go through surgery, but when you go through a surgery, there's a medical team that has multiple contingencies in place. So we often view contingency planning as just kind of something that the really high-end astronauts, surgeons, Navy SEALs do. I actually say false. I scream false. I think all of us can can iterate and be ready with multiple contingencies.

36:43The good thing about having a contingency plan is it ideally won't cause you to catastrophize. Instead, it causes you never to exhibit the human stress response. If I have plan A, B, C, and D, and plan A and B die on the vine, and I had no plan C, I'm going to have stress. I'm going to be Alan on that stage going, you know, God, now what do I do? Or if I have this plan built, it seamlessly flows into not a big deal. So I think, you know, for the listeners, I would invite you to also start to build in contingency planning into everything that you do. And people talk a lot about visualization, and we include that as one of our techniques in the book.

37:26And people tend to, I think, visualize what I'm going to do, what's going to go well. When I was practicing for that talk, I visualized giving the speech. Of course, I did not visualize forgetting the speech. And so when we're talking about contingency planning, bake it into your visualization. It's not going to make it happen. It's not going to add stress. It will actually reduce stress because you know, no matter what happens, I'm ready. Yeah. So I'd love to unpack the management of stress because obviously we know stress impacts performance. And even with the best plans and process and contingencies, as we heard, you could have that blank out moment on stage in this big moment and this huge spike of stress.

38:08So what can we do to get ourselves ready before performance to manage stress? And then can we also talk about what to do in the moment when that stress is at an all-time high? Yeah, we have an entire chapter called Adversity Tolerance. And I think that when you look at the top, you know, thousands of performers, irrespective of their discipline and what they do, these men and women are just doing more of these more consistently than most. And some of those things that you talked about are pre and post performance routines. So I would invite all of us on this podcast, as well as your audience to really think about how, what are those routines that get you kind of catalyzed, ready to go?

38:46I mean, obviously Johnny's nodding and I mean, he's a musician. So music, ironically, and I'm not saying it because we have a musician here on the podcast, but music is probably the most popular. Like if I want to go and practice an athletic performance and I listen, I'm going to age myself. If I listen to Metallica or ACDC's Thunderstruck, that's going to get me going with a mindset of performance markedly different than say Beethoven or Mozart, which may be a post-performance routine. So pre and post-performance routines are one thing. I think as Alan said, visualization, pre, you ought to visualize many contingencies as possible.

39:23I think positive self-talk and thought management, managing that positive self-talk during the performance. I think being able to black box, the psychological term is compartmentalized. So when things don't go well, and by the way, we're human and we interact with technology, there are going to be failures all the time. Athletes are going to drop a pass, strike out. and I was at a Van Halen concert years ago with my wife. And this was a handful of years ago, not too long ago, but it was when David Lee Roth came back with the band. And I think Sebastian Van Halen was playing as well with, anyhow, not unlike Alan, David Lee Roth in the middle of a song literally forgot the lyrics, like literally forgot.

40:10And I was just sitting there going, wow, this is crazy. And he dropped an F-bomb and turned to his band saying, let's start again from the top. And my point is you have to be able to compartmentalize what we call black box it. You can't let that derail, in his case, the rest of his concert. And in athlete's case, the other innings or quarters that he or she is going to play. So I think that a long answer to your question, AJ, is there are multiple factors or disciplines. We unpack 10 specific ones in that adversity tolerance chapter that we believe move the needle and we're learning from the best performers in the world.

40:45So in a way, we're inviting the reader to reverse engineer what the best are doing. And it's not hard, by the way, no pun intended. They're all learned. None of us are born with any of them, by the way. Well, those processes are incredibly important to put yourself in the emotional and mindset that you want to be in to perform at a high level. And what I loved about the book was that you also brought attention that regardless if you know it or not, you have these processes. And if you take the time to look at what your morning process looks like, and sure, to you, you're hanging out in your pajamas making some coffee and then maybe you'll get a shower.

41:30But if you look at that as that's the process in which you're getting ready for the day, you can make changes to optimize that to get you in the best state to perform at your best. But we never look at those things to that manner. They're just that's just how we go about the day. But they have a purpose regardless whether you know it or not. Yeah, we have a section in the book about time management where we talk to several people, a lot of top business people about just how they organize their day and they organize their morning. And they are investing time in family things. It's not all work, work, work, except while they're doing that, they may say, okay, when I'm doing this, I'm going to start thinking about work.

42:15I'm going to start getting myself in that mindset. So a lot of it, like you said, are things we're already doing. And we're just saying, be a little more intentional in how you're using that time. If you loved your couch potato time in the evening, that's great. Put it in your calendar and be intentional to not do anything during that time. Like not think about shit, you know, like that. Just be intentional in how you're using each of those times and adopting the right mindset. Now with that black boxing, just like in a plane crash scenario, we have to go back to the box and check the tapes. So not good in the moment, should never derail your performance, but we got to figure out what put us in that state.

42:56So walk us through what you do after the performance then to actually take meaningful data from that experience. Yeah, so Eric Spolstra, I believe obviously one of the best coaches of all time, Miami Heat coach. He's in the book as well. And he talks about a term that he learned from the military. We have something in the military called after action reviews or AARs. And that's a really important, I think, tactic that all the listeners can think about how they want to employ in their lives as well or deploy in their lives. And I think that it's one thing to put something in the box to stay mission minded, whether it's a concert and you forget the lyrics, whether it's an athletic performance, whether it's a business presentation, you can't let that derail you.

43:40The non-elite performer gets completely derailed and shaken up and they literally have action paralysis. The elite performer boxes it. And then as you appropriately mentioned, now in a safer space, not trying to sound touchy feely here, but literally away from that performance, unpack it with people who can give you honest feedback. If you're an athlete, there's a tremendous number of, I think the the average professional athlete has between nine and 13 various coaches. So the, you know, the strength and conditioning, nutrition, everything there's video. There's also, and in the business world, there's a professional coach.

44:18We can unpack that at nauseam, but it's really important. What am I learning from that? Um, and, and I think there are three, in addition to the AAR, there are three things that I would invite the audience to think about. what did we do well? What can we do better? In other words, what failed, right? What did I have to black box? And the most important thing are what are the processes we can put in play to make sure that doesn't happen again? So as Alan talked about, right? The first time I'm hearing about his failure on stage, which I think is a delicious example, but he put a process in play to make sure that doesn't happen again.

44:54So I do think the AAR is the unpacking of the box is a really important tactic. And Eric, you talk about putting distance or a safe place, like it's a touchy feely thing. But I think that's the critical aspect of doing an effective unpacking the black box. Get past the emotions. Because when you make a mistake, you're mad, you're upset, you're sad, you're feeling down on yourself. And you need to put that in the black box and move on. And then after the event, after the interview, after the presentation, after the speech, what have you, you may still be feeling a lot of that buzz. You're not in a position to unpack the box yet.

45:34So we talked to Eric Spolster and he talks about, you know, maybe a couple of days after a game, he'll get the team in the locker room and they unpack the box together as a team. The emotions have subsided. There's less opportunity for finger pointing. And you can be much more rational. What happened? Why? What do we learn from it? Yeah, I remember our first experience working with the military. We were excited that they got great results. And we wanted to get that after action report immediately. And it took a couple weeks, almost three weeks. And we asked, what's taking so long? And exactly that, for that reason.

46:07Listen, at the end of any training, there's going to be highs. There's going to be emotions involved. and it's going to feel like we achieved our objectives and our outcome. But it is important for us to create the space for the emotions to dissipate to then look and say, okay, these were the outcomes that we wanted out of the training. This is specifically what we were trained on. Where are we now beyond any emotional high or low? Because to your point, there's definitely low and failure, but you can't learn much either in success if you're just going to ride the high of that emotion. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head.

46:39I mean, I think for me, this could be an entirely different podcast. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but emotions are contagious. And that's probably why the military kept you at arm's length for a little bit as well, is they're digesting that. The worst decisions that I've seen made ever as a performance psychologist and coach for high performers are the ones that are made out of emotion. They're horrible, horrible decisions. And generally, it causes everyone else. Like, I know when I'm around someone who's anxious, I feel more anxious. When I'm around people who are angry and irritated, guess what I feel?

47:12I feel angry and irritated. So again, if you think of an emotion as a contagion, I want to make sure if I'm giving people feedback or if I'm receiving feedback, I want to try to be emotionally neutral so I'm not swayed one way or the other. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. Now, there's an entire section of the book on balance and recovery. And I think it's very easy in the social media world to see top performers with their crazy schedules and everything they're doing and all the hours they're working on it and to think they're superhuman when in actuality we all need sleep, we all need moments to recover, and sometimes there's going to be other parts of our life or other identities that are just going to have to be deprioritized for us to perform at the level we need to in this specific situation.

47:56So how do you both approach balance and recovery in your performance identities? And are there any things that we might be doing wrong when it comes to balance and recovery for our audience members who I know we had an episode recently around burnout that was really popular. I think a lot of our audience are feeling burnout for this reason. I really like the metaphor of a beach house. Like if we're all a beach house, I don't invite your listeners to think about the same thing and pretend you are all of a sudden objectified as a beach house. Those homes that are on one or two pillars are going to be less stable than those homes on five or six.

48:33When the waves of adversity, to stick with the metaphor, come, obviously it's going to wipe out a lot. When I, as a performance psychologist, both now within a career in the military and a career in professional sport, and I'm not going to use names here, but I think we could each name five or six people in most disciplines that have become what they do, literally. They are a really good, insert the blank. And they've fed and watered that for an entire career, an entire life almost. And then when it's time to transition based on ages and stages, whether we call that retirement, whether we call that whatever, what we see is, again, I'm not going to say names here, but we see a lot of these lives fall apart because, again, they're so enmeshed on what they do.

49:19So I invite the audience members to think about six different pillars. Work, relationships, which are both friendships, romantic, as well as family. The third pillar is health. Fourth pillar is hobbies. Fifth pillar is spirituality. Can be religion, but doesn't have to be. You can be spiritual and just be in awe of this universe and this planet. And then lastly, legacy. And I would invite, you know, the audience members to think about how they're spending time and emotional and physical and financial resources within each of those areas. The last thing I'll say is I'm a research geek. I'm going to geek out here a little bit.

50:00It used to be thought that the most balanced performers weren't the best at what they do. Not only false, patently false. When you look at the meta-analyses and consolidate a bunch of different studies, those performers who are more balanced are actually more likely to innovate. They're healthier. They live longer. And oh, wow, how ironic. They tend to be a lot more productive as well. So whatever they do for a living will actually become magnified if they feed and water multiple pillars on their proverbial beach house, as it were. Beautiful metaphor. Thanks. I think it works so well in this category.

50:39And I know many in our audience are thinking of some of those pillars, but maybe not all six. So thank you for outlining it. Another question that I have for the audience members who are new parents or our parents, when we think about performance, we often think about our kids. So you talk family and legacy. Those are two things that come up and immediately the parents in the audience go, okay, but I want my kids to perform at an elite level. So what advice do you have for parents when it comes to getting someone else to perform, not looking at themselves? Well, first, just reflecting back on the house on stilts, we're also realistic.

51:12Let's say you're one of those parents and you're raising kids and you're in the middle of a career. And boy, you really just don't have much time to work out or to focus on spirituality or what have you. It's just not realistic. And so we're realistic about that. And these things will adjust through your ages and stages. Our perspective, though, is when it comes to balance is be aware if there is a pillar that is being undernourished. because you just don't have time right now. At least be aware of it and have a plan. Maybe three months from now, you're going to take a vacation. And during that vacation, you're going to go for a walk every day for 45 minutes.

51:48You know, whatever it is, have a plan so that you're going to be investing in balance at least over the longer term. And then on the parent side, Eric, you get that question all the time. What do you say? Yeah, so here I'm going to skate on some thin ice and hopefully I don't fall in the proverbial lake, but I'm going to tell you, I'm a big fan of having kids start to navigate working outside of comfort zones and iterating failure and failure with, let's call it controlled failure. Again, I don't want CPS, Child Protective Services to be called here saying, hey, Dr. Padra, it's not what I'm saying.

52:28I'm saying the world is a very difficult and complex place that is going to become more difficult and more complex, whether it's climate, politics, population, resources, COVID, weather, whatever. I mean, we could go down this rabbit hole a thousand days until tomorrow. My point is we need, what I want ideally is if you're listeners with kids, A, get the book, sorry, but I mean, seriously, because I'm a big believer that these tools and techniques are not being taught in schools and ought to be. It's shameful. And I'll get off my soapbox. But I think it's important that if we're going to ask kids and children to navigate in iterations of discomfort, then the onus is on us as parents to make sure and as mentors to make sure we're arming them with tools and techniques that are empirically based to navigate those adversities.

53:23Meaning, I want you to try something outside of your comfort zone. Again, back to what I said, the worst mistakes kids can make is working too fast out of that comfort zone or too far. But if we iterate and teach them breathing, teach them visualization, teach them black boxing, teach them contingency planning, teach them positive self-talk, and then they challenge themselves to work further and further, then what we have is a 25 to 30-year-old who knows how to navigate adversity. Right now, I fear that there are going to be a lot of people that are risk-averse who are not practicing working out of the comfort zone.

53:59So I would challenge those parents on the call not to all of a sudden put your kids in crazy positions of failure, but make sure that they're challenging themselves to try something new and what are they learning from that every day. We interviewed 32 people. I think we asked almost every one of them a similar question, and we all got very many similar answers. Put them in a position to experience some adversity. And we had this one story, which I just loved, which was from a former Navy SEAL named Peter Nashak. And he went to Hawaii with his mom when he was 10, 11, something like that. And he saw some guy, he said cliff diving.

54:39I'm not sure what they were doing. He saw some people diving into a lagoon. And he said, well, that looks sort of fun. Mom, why don't you go talk to them and see if I can join them? And his mom said, no, you go talk to them. And he said, that was scarier than diving off the cliff. going to talk to some stranger. And his mom's right there. She's not sending them off in any dangerous situation. But there's a small thing where she just said, no, you go try this thing that pushes you out of your comfort zone. And to this day, former Navy SEAL, he remembers that as a watershed moment for him. For children, the idea of facing boredom is plenty adversity, right?

55:22But it's like, here, go outside and entertain yourself. Well, I could be completely entertained by playing these video games. That's right. That's why you're going outside, go find a stick, and go find something to whack with it and occupy your time for four hours. And when kids are able then to go out there and then figure that out, they enter into their imagination and create worlds unto themselves that they can explore. But without that adversity, they can't plug into their imagination. They can't plug into being resourceful. They can't plug into their social skills, which all are going to help them succeed in the world.

56:06Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'll say three simple. I'm a simpleton, right? I try to keep things relatively simple. For your audience members who have children, if you can just do three things with your kids, I'll consider this a strong victory. Ask them what they've learned new today, every day. Just literally three questions every day. What did you learn new today? Were you brave? So if we go back to the learning question, that forces them to actually try something new and adopt a new skill. Were you brave? It forces them to work a little bit incrementally outside of a comfort zone. And then the last question, were you kind?

56:42And we all know there's a ton of research around being kind and being empathetic and it builds adversity, all of that. So if parents can just focus on those three things, what did you learn? Were you brave? And were you kind? Over time, it's going to be like compound interest, man. That's going to deliver deliciously, to be honest. Now with that, I think a challenge is when to quit. So we talked a lot about adversity, facing adversity, putting yourself in uncertain situations. But then there's the flip side of, well, maybe I'm just not going to get beyond that place of performance. And maybe there's something else that I should be putting my focus or effort and energy behind.

57:15Do you have any rules or strategies around knowing when to quit or how to identify when it's time to hang it up? Not to come full circle intentionally, but I do think it's this ought to be values driven as well. Like if we use that as a compass, right, that should be true north as long as I'm hitting my values. But I don't like the term quit as much as I love the term pivot. And I think it's important that times people have the freedom and flexibility to realize, hey, this isn't for me, but I'm still going to leverage the exact same identity markers or value markers. I'm going to find a way to scratch that itch.

57:52Right? I may be competitive. It's all hell. And that may be one of my identity markers or value credo markers. But if I can't be a professional athlete or professional musician, how can I still scratch that itch of competitiveness and pivot elsewhere? Yeah, we have this great story. We talked to a guy named Derek Walker. He's a finance executive at Nike. Derek initially wanted to be a pro baseball player. And he was in the minors for, I think he was in the Diamondbacks organization for about four years. Didn't make it. He didn't quit. He talked about pivoting and he talked about, what did I like about that experience?

58:29What did I learn from that experience? Where can I get a similar experience? So he went for the Navy SEALs and made it almost all the way through training, but he did not succeed. Isn't that right, Eric? He, he failed in training. So here's a guy that almost all the way through, uh, uh, hell week and buds training and failed again. But again, learn from that. What can I learn from that? Went into business, got an MBA is done very well. Uh, and so just his simple act of retraining a failure from reframing it from, from quitting to pivoting, I think was a very powerful for him. Absolutely. Thank you for coming full circle.

59:07It was so great to have both of you join the show. We're excited for the book to come out and share with our audience. Where can they find out more about the book and the work you do? Yeah, so the book comes out February 6th. Thank you for mentioning that. The invite, I invite the listeners to go on learnedexcellence.com. The book is called Learned Excellence. And yeah, please pass the word for sure. We certainly believe it's a very fine, I think, hybrid of really great stories, as well as the empirical side, which I think it needs to be research-based, evidence-based as well. And hopefully it's helpful and valuable to everybody.

59:41Absolutely. And I love the one, three, and six-month plan at the back of the book. I think tons of value there for audience members who love taking action. So thank you again, Eric and Alan. It was so great having you. Thank you. Thank you both so much. Thanks for having us.

1:00:03AJ, I don't know about you, but I love hearing stories from the Navy SEALs and all of our special forces. I completely agree, Johnny. And it's amazing to see how many of Dr. Potterat's principles align with our X-Factor Accelerator program. Absolutely. And certainly the pragmatic way of going about it certainly aligns with how we do things here. All right. Well, this week's shout out comes from Chris and I'll let him tell you directly. And we hope to see you guys in the X-Factor Accelerator. Hey, everyone. My name is Chris Rafteri. I'm a financial advisor, and I joined X Factor to build better relationships, really, with my friends, at work, and also with my family.

1:00:44And X Factor really helped me implement all of these different teachings, giving me an outlet and a network to practice these things, to troubleshoot in a way a lot of situations I was going through and really provide some real world applications and have fun along the way too. And the thing I'm looking forward to the most is continuing to develop. They say iron sharpens iron and being able to work with the other guys in the group has really proved that. And I'm looking forward to continuing to build better relationships with the existing folks that I hold near and dear to me, but also meeting new people out there.

1:01:26So, you know, looking forward to hopefully meeting you guys in the future as you join the X Factor. Thank you, Chris. It's been an honor and a pleasure working with you. All right, before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and review it in your favorite podcast player. It helps us get amazing guests and we definitely appreciate the support.

1:02:03Thank you.

1:02:24Amen.