When Life Ambushes You Feat. Jason Redman

24:08I can't explain why God allowed me to come home. And so many of my friends who are far better SEALs than I was, but I feel like it's my duty to be like the best version of myself, to not be afraid, to go after it. Because I hope that, and I would say this to anyone that's out there, that is how you honor your parents who are no longer here. If you lose a friend or a child or a husband or a wife, honor them by being the best version of yourself so that when they look down, they're like, oh my gosh, I'm so proud of them. Despite this pain and loss, look at who they are. And I think that's how we honor the people that are lost while we're on this earth.

24:45It's amazing you're saying that. It's part of a talk that I give at the event that you and I are recording at right now. I'm about to say that sentence on stage. By the way, I didn't come to it through as traumatic of an event as you did, nor am I the caliber of man you are for what you you've gone through in your life. But I do completely share that sentiment because I'm about to say it in about 40 minutes on stage. So I totally agree with that. We got to put a sign on the door. Yeah. This is a story that I know and it's resonated with me, but I just want to like throw that at you and get you give it to them and just go because this is, you guys will, you'll remember a lot of things from podcasts, but I think there are certain stories that people go, boom.

25:20I think sign on the door is probably going to be one of an all timer. So, you know, the first week or 10 days in the hospital, I won't lie. It was, it was tough. I mean, here I am. I'm, I'm, I am blown apart. I took two rounds in the left elbow. So eight bullets total, crossed the body armor, two rounds in the left elbow, rounds off, helmet, gun, left night vision tube shot off, right side plate, and then I caught that round in the face that blew out the right side of my face. I was wired shot, I was trached, my vision was messed up, I was, they were feeding me through a stomach tube and I had no use of my left hand, the nerve damage, and the doctor's initial plan was to amputate my arm above the elbow.

26:05And so I'm facing all of this, really struggling. And I think when people go through really traumatic events, I tell people it's common. I don't know as humans why we do this, but we'll place them in the victim box. Like, oh, this is so terrible. Oh, Ed, it's terrible that you lost your company, or it's terrible that, you know, you got in a divorce or whatever it is. And we feel sorry for people. and wrongly, in my opinion, almost give them an excuse to feel sorry for themselves and justify not getting off that X and driving forward. And that's what happened to me. I had some individuals that came in the room and they were overwhelmed by being in the military hospital.

26:49And it's a hard place to be during a time of war. And I know I was very overwhelming to look at in the beginning. A nurse came in and they stepped off to the side of the room and they started talking to, Oh, what a, what a, what a shame. What it would, this is so sad. All these wounded warriors that are blown apart. Like what a waste. You could hear this. Yes. I could hear it. And they were talking off to themselves, but I could hear it while this nurse worked on me. And they said, what a waste. Like we, we, we sent all these young men and women to war and they're never going to be the same. It was like this broken veteran narrative that they had and they left.

27:23And I remember laying in that bed, like thinking to myself, like, is that me? Is that who I'm going to be? And I was like, no, that is not me. I will not be that. As a matter of fact, I said from this moment forward, I refuse to feel sorry for myself. And when my wife came back in, I told her, I said, no one's allowed to come in this room feeling sorry for me again. You said that. Yeah, I wrote it to her because I couldn't talk. All I could do is write. And I wrote out that sign. And it wasn't literally that period of time was maybe 15 minutes. There wasn't a whole lot of thought. It literally was a stream of consciousness.

28:00And it said attention to all who enter here. If you're coming in this room with sadness or sorrow, don't bother. The wounds I received, I got a job that I love, doing it for people that I love, defending the freedom of a country that I deeply love. I will make a full recovery. What is full? That's the absolute utmost physically I have the ability to recover. And I'm going to push that about 20 % further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you're about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. And we jokingly signed it, the management.

28:33And I told my wife to put it on the door. And as amazing, supportive wives, her initial response was, are you serious? Of course. And I was like, yes, put this on the door, make sure everybody reads it. Can we go to something you said there? Yeah. I want to ask you, and then we're going to talk about the relationship piece for the book, too, with you and Erica. but you said something there I've not ever heard before, but I think it's worth just unpacking this a little bit, which is that a full recovery, but then you defined what that meant, which is I'll say it the way I heard it, then you correct me, to the maximum of whatever that capacity is, my maximum, and then push it 20 % past that.

29:10And I think maybe that's important that I think some people think I need to get back to who I was before. Why don't you talk about that for a second? Yeah. In my book, Overcome, I write about this and I think it's normal. All of us. I did it too. Even though I wrote it on the sign, I wanted to get back to the Jason Redman who I physically was prior to my injuries. But the reality is when you've been through trauma, physical, mental, emotional, the parts that are part of the human spirit, you will never be back to the same as you were because you have been forever altered, period. But what you can be is the new hundred percent.

29:47And that I realized that as I started to work out, originally, I thought I could get back operational. I sought out doctors to put me back together so that I could continue to be an operational seal. And the damage to my arm was too great. Even today, I can't bend any further than this. I'm limited to this and I can't extend any further than this. And I still have nerve damage. I have to use straps when I'm deadlifting because I can't hold more than about 55 pounds for a very short period of time. And I wanted that back. Like all of us in life, I want back where I was, you know, physically, mentally, emotionally.

30:23It's never going to happen. Emotional trauma in our mind, I had to deal with that also. I carried a lot of demons and it took me years to come to grips with that. I think people think that they'll just overcome and the trauma will just go away and they heal it, it's really not true. You learn to live with it. You learn to tame it. You learn, it's still in your mind. You just learn the tools to deal with it. And so you own it and it doesn't own you. But in many ways you come back better in certain areas. Like I'd imagine your ability even to, I mean, I'm picking up little things when I'm watching you.

30:56Obviously this dude was a complete stud, a seal for 21 years. There's this version of you, but now there's this version of me in front of me who's like this exemplary communicator. I would bet that that part of you, that even the day before you were wounded, you couldn't communicate like you do now. In other words, you came back different than you, but sometimes that sounds like, well, I'm limited. You're actually in many ways, your faith, everything about you has exponentially changed since that time. So you can come back better just in different versions of you and in different facets of yourself that didn't exist before.

31:26Do you agree with that? A thousand percent. The end moments become new beginnings. And so often if we're willing to embrace that new beginning for a lot of people, including me, yes, what I've been through is hard. But God gave me every time it's been an opportunity to level up in my life. And I think for many people you will meet that go through some horrendous thing, some traumatic life ambush, as I call them, the ones that embrace it and embrace the new beginning, frequently they become a better version of who they were. And so often people always like to ask me, you know, oh, if you could go back and that day would never happen, would you?

32:05And I think the answer is no. As hard as it was, God gave me a new path, a new beginning that I'm impacting millions of people now. There are amazing young SEAL officers who are killing it. They're incredible. They are the future of our nation. And they're probably doing it much better than I ever would have. But instead, God gave me this new path and this new beginning. And I tell people like, hey, be thankful and navigate through that hardship because it will make you better. You don't know what that new beginning is going to be until you start to walk that path. You're a remarkable guy, bro.

32:37Well, blessed. I've lived it. Everything that I speak on isn't made up. Well, that's what's special about you. There's nothing theoretical about you. Yeah. You've lived it. And so this isn't some philosophy you came up with when you went to a seminar. You've lived it. And I think there's some authenticity there that you can't replace with just, you know, scholastic understanding. You've lived it. There's something else that stood out. And then we're going to talk about the relationship stuff at the end. But there's a term I believe I'll get right. And, you know, like sometimes I'll be reading something.

33:05Gosh, I wish that was mine because it's so good. And I want you to elaborate on this concept. I also like to pull things out for the podcast. People go, I remember this phrase. And then this man talked about it, which is suffering productively. Never heard that before. Yeah, I think it comes back to SEAL training and it is part of the overcome mindset that I try to talk to people about. You cannot build an overcome mindset or overcome muscles, as I like to say, or grit or resilience by doing easy things and by constantly embracing comfort. It's a problem we're having in America. I mean, if you look at the foundations of our country, if you go back to the beginning, we were really a country that was built on sacrifice and grit.

33:49I mean, people spread out all across the country and, you know, they had to down forest to build houses. And it was very hard, grueling work. And you get into the Industrial Revolution and often at times it was very hard, backbreaking work. And I think that built just natural grit and resiliency in our people. Well, now we're into the information age where people aren't having to do hard things. We can live our entire lives without doing that. And if you don't play sports or if you don't do something that forces you to do these hard things, when you are finally hit with something traumatic and very hard, there isn't some magic switch that you turn on and do it.

34:29You have to have done hard things before. So suffering productively means the greatest desire in a human being is to reduce pain and suffering that they're going through and discomfort. It's why SEAL training has an 80 % attrition rate. It's because they do everything they can to make us as uncomfortable and cold and miserable. and what enables guys to make it through training is the ability to suffer through that but still be able to function to still be able to motivate and do the things that need to be done despite that pain despite that cold despite that suffering what that builds is this overcome mindset is the core of the SEAL teams you don't have to be a SEAL to do that there are many things in life you can do get you know working out is probably one of the biggest things that you can do that pushes you to have to get out of your comfort zone.

35:20Do things that you're afraid of. Do things that you don't like. If you're afraid of heights, go climb, go jump out of a plane. If you're afraid of speaking, join Toastmasters and start speaking in front of people because that fear and that discomfort makes you stronger and better. Let me ask you about timeframes on this stuff. I want to be granular for a minute. I was going to quit business that ended up making me a pretty wealthy guy at one time. And I had every reason to quit it. I sucked at it. I was suffering. I was broke. I was making tons of mistakes and I went to my dad who had uh you know that you know the story but in case someone has it my dad ended up getting sober and my dad his my dad when he got sober I said dad are you never going to drink again he said I can't tell you that Eddie what I'll tell you is I'm not going to drink for one more day at a time and my dad stacked up those one more days the rest of his life for 35 years one day at a time my dad didn't drink so I was going to quit the business my dad says to me why don't you just do this by the way maybe you should I don't know just don't quit for one more day just don't quit for one more day see how you feel tomorrow and I would get up the next day and still wanted to quit but not quite as much and those one days stacked and all of a sudden at some point I didn't want to anymore at least not as much I've asked other seals this Rob O 'Neill's a friend and he said bro like I'm paraphrasing but he goes I shrunk my time frames down meaning I was just trying to get to like to the next meal the next hour the next thing is part of when you're really going through suffering do you think one of the strategies is you can have a big vision for your life, but maybe just shrinking the time frame, get through the hour, get through the day.

36:47Is that, is that part of what you did to put yourself back together, both emotionally and physically? Absolutely. No, it is a key strategy. They teach you in SEAL training. I've applied it to my life going through surgeries. It would be get through the surgery recovery. And now we get to the next one. Now it starts over. I got really sick in 2020 and it was, I just, I need to keep driving forward and push, you know, let's go for the next couple of weeks. Let's get to, I couldn't even speak now. Thank God. And thank God COVID happened and it actually gave me time to recover, but I had to figure out what was wrong with me.

37:19The doctors that took a while to do that. When I messed up as a young leader. Yeah. You talk about taking it evolution by evolution. Many of the guys, when I was assigned to a new troop did not want me there. And I heard that on a regular basis. Like, yeah, my nickname was Rambo red, which was not a compliment and I had to take every evolution at a time and and hear the naysayers say yeah it's only a matter of time before he screws up again and I just focused on okay just try and crush this evolution and it doesn't mean that you're you're not going to waver and you're not going to stumble um I a lot of people if they've never read my book don't know I quit in ranger school.

37:59True story. I quit in ranger school. I got into one. I hadn't quite hit rock bottom navigating through the journey of becoming a better leader. And I failed the land nav course. And I still had a chip on my shoulder. I still had that victim mindset. And I got into the ranger instructors were giving me grief about failing. And I let them, I told them exactly what I thought and where they could take that course. And they said, are you quitting? And I said, yes, we feed ourselves lies when we're struggling. I'm sure in those moments in business, you were like, I suck at this. I'm never going to be good at this.

38:33I tell people it's never too late. If you're still alive, that means it's not too late. And, and I, I felt victim to this when I was in ranger school, I was like, it's too late. The guys will never follow me again. And thankfully I had the ranger colonel KK Chen, huge shout out to you. He retired a two-star our general. I'm still friends with him to this day. He happened to be friends with one of our most senior respected SEALs. And he said, I got a young guy in here. He's really struggling. He's like, I think we need to talk to him. They got on the phone and, um, and, and this very respected SEAL leader, I said to him, it's too late.

39:10I'm never going to be able to recover. The guys will never follow me again. And he said, red people will follow. If you give them a reason to. That's all leadership is. He said, I don't care how bad you messed up. He said, go crush this course and then come back and give the guys a reason to follow you. And, and, and that's what I did. He motivated me, gave me a second chance. Um, so I tell people that it's so easy to listen to the lies. It's too late. I'm no good. I can never do this. Uh, my family is better off without this one of the lies that takes you down the deepest darkest holes. And I'm like, that's not true, man.

39:47Just, as you said, you take it one day at a time, you keep pushing. And that's what I had to do to rebuild my credibility. And it's what I had to do to rebuild my body. Uh, both times, you know, once wounded, once sick, it's what I had to do when I had to rebuild our business, when I got sued and accused of something I didn't do, I just had to keep driving forward, ignore the naysayers, focus on that tight group of people you have around you and, and, and God above. And it will be amazing what you owe. Oh, you're so good. I want to finish with something. So I was thinking, get this guy as a seal.

40:18He's obviously one of the baddest men in the world. He's been shot, you know, was 21 years. I'm like, is that the guy I want to take marriage advice from? You know, and then I read the book and I was like, actually, it might be perfect because you are bringing bags into a relationship, theoretically, right? Like we all bring our bags into the relationship. And what you've gone through, several traumatic events, you bring in some real bags with you, with you and Erica. By the way, the name of the book, by the way, is Mission Invincible Marriage. Let's just talk about this just for a second. What was harder to heal?

40:51Like your relationship with Erica, with the trauma that you'd been through? And I assume there's one way that you speak to fellow SEALs, and that's probably not the same way that we would interact with our spouse all the time. What made you write this book? And how did you end up rebuilding an even stronger relationship with Erica? that it sounds to me from reading wasn't always perfect all the time. It wasn't always perfect, but we had a good marriage. We had a strong marriage. It got tested to the highest level with my injuries. And I think, you know, there were a lot of things that led us to write this book.

41:27I told one of the things when I wrote The Trident, my first book, I wanted to share the story of what our spouses went through because of what Erica had gone through. I mean, our military spouse is such a huge shout out. And I'll even take that further to our law enforcement and fire spouses to have to marry someone who is a natural protector. We are mission driven. We have this tendency where the individuals who want to write to where we want to run to where everything's burning down, where everybody else runs away. And to be married to someone like that is difficult because we want to help people sometimes even even at a sacrifice to our own families.

42:04And finding someone strong enough to understand that is really difficult. in America, we're at over a 50 % divorce rate now. And you said SEALs are 90? We're 90. We're the winners. We're the winners. And the military at 60 to 70%, that's pretty common with law enforcement and fire. Special operation gets up to about 80%. Across soft, SEALs, we're at about 90%. It's just a really hard job. And I don't know if we always do such a, we also are not, our courting period is very short frequently because we met at, we meet women in bars, no different than I did with Erica. And sometimes we're just constantly on the go.

42:42So you're not able to build a strong foundation. And now you're continuing a job that's dangerous and hard. You're gone all the time. Erica and I were able to build a strong foundation. Once again, I'm about frameworks. I'm about like, what are the systems I can put in place to make this work? And there were things Erica and I did. One, building the strong foundation. There were also several other things that occurred. Eric and I both came out of bad relationships when we met. We also both came from broken homes. Both our parents were divorced and a little bit of divisiveness between our parents that we witnessed all the time.

43:14We both came out of these bad relationships. So when we met and we decided we were going to get married, we were like, this is it forever death. That's the only way out of this. Um, so that was kind of the initial thing. And it was also understanding where we wanted to go, both in my marriage. How do you do that? Do you guys talk about it? Oh, 100%. You have to. Throughout the book, you will see communication is number one thing. You must be constantly communicating because you will change. Years will go by and you will change. The Ed Milet today is different from the Ed Milet 10 years ago, who's different from the Ed Milet 20 years ago.

43:49No different for me and my wife. Would you also say, I just want to jump in. Would you also say, because people that listen to this type of work, my show, are typically growing people, meaning they're embracing growth. And I think when you're in a relationship with someone who is a grower, not everybody is, everyone changes, but as a real grower, you've got to even be more vigilant about this stuff because this person is changing year to year, month to month, decade to decade. You've got to really have it together in relationships when you're with a grower because their life and personality is going to adjust and change over time.

44:23That's right. Yeah. So that's why the communication is critical. No different in business. I mean, we must be communicating our team where, Hey, our strategy and vision and where we're going to go. We broke the book into three parts. It was built on a foundation of mission and values. Most critical thing, your mission for Erica and I, it was, uh, we, we wanted kids. We wanted a level of success. for me in that period, I had been in for eight years. So I told her I'm doing 20 years, no matter what, like you're, you have to be on board with this because this is my mission and part of my values. Her mission was she wanted a level, she was always a natural entrepreneur.

45:01So there were some entrepreneur goals she had, and it was also to be a mom and have kids and do these things. It gets down into vacations and how we spend money and how we save all these things are part of your mission. The second component becomes training. No different in the SEAL teams. We're constantly training to do different missions. And the training changes over time based on what's happening in the world around us and what we see. You need to be doing the same in your marriage. How are you training? Well, it's you're going out and you're talking and you're doing things and you're going through the finances together and you're understanding what's happening in your spouse's life and what's happening in your life.

45:35And you're communicating through these things and navigating through them. That's training. Wow. And then the last one is under fire. How do you deal with crisis and adversity and how do you fight? Eric and I have rules of engagement no different than in a no different than a military unit. Eric and I from a very early phase said, hey, there's no ultimatums. There's no name calling. You can't bring up the past. And well, you don't do it. So yeah, I think that was it. Yeah. So those are our rules of engagement. that being said by having those things when you listen better so coming full circle to you asking me about how did you guys heal yourself emotionally i i kind of went off a cliff like many wounded warriors about three years after i was wounded maybe four years and started pushing everybody away i wanted to fix it myself but i was breaking i was the the mental demons that dragon in my head was eating me.

46:33And, and like many protectors and type A's, I didn't want to admit I was the sign on the door guy. I'm the overcome guy. Like I, I don't have these problems, but I was, and I started nursing it with alcohol and really spiraling down. And one day Eric and I were driving to an event and she shocked me because we had our rules, we had our training, we had our framework. and she said to me, you know, this, the way we're going, this could be the beginning of the end. A warning of an ultimatum. And it was so shocking to me because we had never, we had agreed we never bring this up. It was like a punch in the face.

47:15And I said, what are you talking about? And she said, if you do not get help, we are not communicating. We're not following the rules and the framework we laid out in our marriage. If you cannot do this, we are moving down a path to the beginning of the end. And it was a shock to me. And it was enough for me to recognize it jolted me out of the depression and being on that X to say, I got to go get help once again in life. So often you don't have to do it alone, man. And I did same thing I did when I was sitting in that chair. I went and found a chaplain. I went to our command where we had chaplains, the Sykes, And that started me on this path of all these different modalities that we can do to heal trauma.

47:57You impressed me with your vulnerability. I think it's one of the signs of a strong man is that he's willing to reveal his imperfections. I got lots. Well, so do I, right? And I appreciate someone who's willing to share that. I want to finish with one question with you, by the way, I've enjoyed today. Yeah. This is like a conversation. I prefer we had a cigar and a little, you know. I would agree. A tasty beverage. A little beverage. But that's what I feel like this conversation's been. We'll take a rain shack for another time. I would really love that. Yeah, me too. I don't want to go to the interview, though, I'd ask you because you've mentioned chaplains a couple times.

48:32And you and I are actually sitting right now backstage. We're recording this at a faith-based event that we're both going to be speaking at here, me in about eight minutes. And I just want to know how all of this journey of your life has affected or made an impact on your faith. One of the things that I see on you is like, God's given you a lot of grace in your life. You not only have other people, but you're blessed. You've got a beautiful family. You know, you've got a career that's flourishing. You've got success. You're jacked. You seem to really have a self-awareness about you that very few people reach in their life.

49:07So when I see that on a man, also a man that's strong but has a gentleness to him, I usually think, that's the Holy Spirit. There's something on this dude that I want more of and that I really admire and appreciate. So anything you wanted to add on your faith is kind of a final question. Yeah, I'm a walking miracle. That night on the battlefield, I was bleeding out and dying. There's no doubt in my mind. And I called out to God and I suddenly had energy. And I went from not being able to move a muscle to getting up and walking 75 yards and getting on that helicopter under my own power. The doctor said it's a miracle.

49:40They said you lost almost half of your blood supply. Like you should not have survived. God enabled that. And I'd love to tell you that I'm like the strongest Christian that I'm so convicted and I never have doubts. And that's not true. I'm very analytical. Faith is a hard thing. There are times where I'm like, God, where are you? Like when my best friend died and took his life, I was like, why? And I'm going to talk about that today. And that's okay. I sometimes feel bad. Like maybe I'm a terrible Christian because I doubt you. You gave me this gift, this miracle. and I doubt you sometimes, but where I have solace is the fact that Jesus' own disciples who walked with him were like, you know, he was like Oprah, like throwing out miracles, like you get a miracle.

50:25You know what? You want to walk? You can walk and have some sight. And like, you know, when he was, when he was captured and taken to the cross and then died, all those dudes doubted, you know, he even told Peter, like, you're going to deny me, You're going to deny me three times. And he did. And Thomas. So I have, there's a Roman guard. There's a story, I think it's in Matthew, where the guard comes up to Jesus and says, please help my son or daughter. I can't remember which it is. And Jesus says, all you need to do is believe. And the guard says, please help me with my unbelief. So I live this and I talk about it because I think sometimes in churches, they're afraid to talk about this.

51:09It's like, oh, no, we're never going to talk about doubt. But I'm OK with this. Like, man, walk in miracle. I still have doubts. It doesn't make me a bad Christian. I just I pray the Lord. I pray that prayer a lot. Lord, help me with my unbelief. Brother, I love that answer. We have a relationship with God and relationships go through their ebbs and flows. I was thinking earlier about what you said. By the way, thank you. What a great answer, by the way. But I have to tell you about what you said in your relationship with Erica, that there's training and training for me is reading my scriptures.

51:38And then there's rules of engagement, which is what those scriptures teach me. And so that is a relationship. There are ups and downs. I think when you have doubts and those questions get answered, your faith deepens. And if you don't have any ever, where are the opportunities to deepen your faith? So my relationship with you has deepened today. I've really enjoyed this, brother. Very much so. I want you guys to go get the book because we didn't get a chance to cover as much. And it's actually really good for you because you get this killer podcast, but the book hasn't been covered. So they got to go get it.

52:05So Mission Invincible Marriage, go get it. It's by Jason Redman. Jason, this was a great combo, bro. This was outstanding. Yeah, I'm so glad we finally did it. I'm so glad we finally got together, and I would love to take that rain check for that cigar. Oh, we're doing the cigar. We're doing that for sure. All right, you guys. God bless you. Max out your life.