3 Navy SEAL-APPROVED Mindset Shifts That Will Help You Take Your Life Back

26:33So we're done talking about work, but now everyone wants to ask me about, you know, parenting and everything else. and I said at the table, I'm like, hey, who here ended up doing exactly what their parents wanted them to do? And there's like one guy out of 10, right? Because most people, you know, your parents are wanting you to do this thing and you do something else. I mean, I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old. Like that's, that probably wasn't even on the checklist of top 20 things that my parents wanted me to do. Not even in the same ballpark, right? They didn't want you to go to war.

27:02Yeah, they didn't want that. So here you go. Yeah, see ya. that's so the more you try and kind of pigeonhole your kids into being something that you want them to be the worse off it's going to be it's it's the same thing with leadership it's the same thing with leadership if i'm if i'm trying to force my plan down my team's throat the more resistance i'm going to get from it whereas if i plant the seed and i allow that plan to grow with them the better it's going to be received like when people ask me how do you get people to buy in and well, you allow them to come up with a plan yourself. What if in your mind you're like, you really know that plan's not that good?

27:40It depends on how bad it is. How bad is it? What's at stake? If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're gonna give them, and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with, and the contract doesn't really matter, I'd be like, hey, hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple, I might give you a couple adjustments and give you some coaching on it. And then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, oh no, we didn't land it. And I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it.

28:14I said, you know, you said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, hey, here's some other things that might've worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was gonna have value to our company, I'm gonna eat her. Step in, yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction gonna be? And by the way, that's what I'm not gonna say, no, don't do it that way. I'm gonna say, tell me that again, and let me give you some objections that you might hear from them.

28:41And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with a solution. So then you're kinda going in there like you got this dialed. And then you're gonna feel like you won, which you did. That's great. Which is great. It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, confidence, belief. How important is feedback for leaders? Getting feedback from peers, coaches, or employees, team members. Feedback is how you get better. No feedback, no improvement. So if, and if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it.

29:15So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're definitely not asking for it. Even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble. What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you think you need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have? I mean, the weird thing about me is even though you might think, look at me and think, oh, who's going to tell this guy anything, right? The reality is if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down on the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, hey, I don't know if that's a good plan.

29:54So even when I was a task unit commander, and so I'm in charge, and I'm the head seal for this 40 seals, I'm the main guy. Anyone in that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it? My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that. So my friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long. They're not intimidated or scared of you? No. That's good. No. So how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team, in order to welcome the feedback or the information?

30:35Yeah, what you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like, you know, just the other day, we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year but the thing that I was telling this group of people was as a leader you should be listening 98 % of the time and talking 2 % of the time so every time you come to me and you say hey Jocko I don't like this plan I don't say shut up and do it my way I say I say how would you want to do it yeah tell me what you don't like about it and then tell me how you want to do it so therefore the next time you have an objection you're like you know the door's open you know that I'm going to be open-minded and listen to you and that's how you build it every time you shut someone down from list from from speaking their mind you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback and if there's no feedback as we just said you're not going to improve what are two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills right off the bat two things you can think of and what are two things that that wannabe leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders.

31:44So what are the two things they could add to our skill sets? Yeah, two things that you have. Number one is listen, which we just talked about. So that's fresh on my mind. And you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time. Wrong answer. Wrong answer. I'll sit through a meeting with a client or with one of my companies and I'll listen for 38 minutes. and at the end of those 38 minutes, I'll have already thought through every discussion that's been had. You know, you want to argue with him and he's arguing with her.

32:14And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. Meanwhile, you're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's given up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments and I do that for 38 minutes. And in the 39th minute, I say, hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually gonna be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter, it wasn't because I had better tactical understanding, it's because I actually shut my mouth, listened to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew, and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was.

32:59So, listen, and the other one is the word that I just used, which is detach, which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're gonna see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds, staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon, and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high port, take a step back and actually look around, I can see infinitely more.

33:42So, apply that to a meeting. This is the meeting that we just talked about. A 38 minute meeting, all this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm the boss, I could jump in there and start arguing and giving my opinion, but what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is I'm in the weeds, and I'm not able to assess what is actually happening. So there you apply it there. To your personal life, if you and I are arguing, you're my friend and you did something and now we're starting to escalate an argument and I'm starting to get emotional, am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on?

34:15If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction? No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying, and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without saying, you need to calm down or you're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no. Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me, whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say, the dang, the supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed.

34:58If I say, hey, calm down, right? If that's my reaction, then you realize that I'm against you, right? I don't get it. And so now it's me and the supply department against you. No one understands. No one understands. So I do a little technique. What is that? I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit so that we're not escalating the situation. How would you do this with your wife? So if you, well, if you come to me and you go, the supply department's been late, they're two weeks late on this stuff. I don't say, calm down.

35:35I say, oh, you gotta be kidding me. Two weeks? And you go, yeah, can you believe it? Ah, that's horrible. We gotta put a solution, we gotta get that figured out. In the meantime, what do we need to do right now to get the problem solved? So we already, now we're on the same team so we can work together to find a solution. We bonded on the pain. Yes, yes. We felt the pain. Yes, we're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's gonna make my wife mad? The ice machine's not working. The ice machine's not working. It's your fault. Whether it's my fault, we don't know. The ice machine's not working. By the way, this is a real story.

36:08This is happening today. The ice machine's not working. She didn't get mad about it, but the ice machine's not working. If I go, hey, you have a refrigerator and a house and you have plenty of things, just calm down, right? How's that going to go? It's not going to go good. Now she's going to get mad. Now it's me against her. So instead, the ice machine's not working. Ah, man, that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden we're on the same team. And she's like, well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. as opposed to the ice machine's not working.

36:42Well, okay, do you want me to have ice shipped in from Alaska there, princess? Right? That's not going to go over well.

36:51For those who are looking to accomplish their goals, but they feel stuck in life, what would you say were the strategies of the SEALs in accomplishing your goals at the highest level? What are some of the things that you guys did strategy-wise to make that happen? Structure and discipline. So muscle memory would be the biggest one, which is now many of the things that I teach in both Overcome and in my Point Man for Life program. And it was something that I was missing. I felt like I was missing when I left the military. And I think a lot of military members feel the same way. The SEAL teams are incredibly effective at what we do for a lot of reasons.

37:32One of the reasons is selection. So, and that selection is, there's a lot of things you have to do to qualify just to get the SEAL training. A lot of people don't realize how smart SEALs have to be. So there's a level of intelligence. There's a level of physical ability. There's a level of obviously resiliency that has to come into this. And then we put everybody through this meat grinder called SEAL training that eliminates anybody that doesn't have that ability. And then once you get to the SEAL team, it's how we train and build teams. And it's forged through tremendous adversity. Because our training, even once you get to a team, is designed to be very hard.

38:14I mean, some people would say almost sadistic in the way we would train. We would look for what is the absolute worst case scenario we can think of, and then how do we amplify that just a little more? To make it even worse. To make it even worse. And then train from that. And then train from that. And it was grueling and painful and sometimes we got guys killed in training. I mean, you try to reduce the level of risk, but we also recognize that in order to be ready for combat, we have to train at the highest level. So and in order to do that, it was a lot of repetition and crawl, walk, run was the mentality.

38:50And it was not these big goals of, hey, I'm going to take down this entire town, like, you know, right off the bat, because that's really complicated. That starts to get into all kinds of very complicated things. It was, how do I take down a single room? And we walk as we flow through it. And then it became, well, how do I take two rooms? How do I take three rooms? How do I take a house? How do I take a compound of three houses? How do I take a village? So it was a crawl, walk, run mentality all the time. And then structure and discipline and the way we trained, everything was built up that way from shooting.

39:30You know, oftentimes I was a marksmanship instructor and I've trained some other people to shoot and they're always, they're a little funny because the very first thing to do when I train anybody to shoot is you shoot at the three yard line. A little black dot and we're shooting at the three yard line and they're like, hey man this is stupid i'm like no you're not you're learning and the repetition that you need to effectively pull your weapon out and and get a positive sight picture trigger squeeze release that round second sight picture and follow through so that we can do that over and over and over again until you know at that at whatever point you know you're shooting from 50 100 yards or more yeah So all of that comes together to create small victories and repetition, structure, and discipline that all come together to be successful.

40:20How does someone create that for themselves when they're not in the military? Or not on the sports team? When they left. So what I began to realize, so overcome, when I wrote The Trident, which was my first book, it was just the story. It's a story, it's my story of a young punk kid who did well enough to become an officer or a leader and then totally failed because of ego and arrogance, got a second chance and then redeemed himself and then got wounded and kind of realized there was another level of leadership. And when people would read that, people would say, how'd you do that? And I couldn't definitively answer that question.

41:03So, Overcome came out in, I think, five years after I wrote the Trident because it took that long to kind of think about what enabled that. And a lot of that had to do with when I got out of the military, I missed that structure and discipline. I missed, you know, a lot of people don't understand that the military is sometimes a really simple existence, especially when you're deployed. Like when you're in the combat zone, it's a very simple existence. You eat, sleep, you work out, and then you train and conduct missions. And you worry about the guys around you. And the real world is really complicated.

41:44There's all these distractions. There's no one that gives you the guidance. No one hands you a mission and says, hey, man, this is what you're doing today. You got to figure out your own mission. Exactly. Exactly. And as I got out, I realized that I had to figure out my own mission and all these things were not there. So I started with, okay, so how was I successful coming out of these injuries? Because that's what everybody wanted to see. How were you so positive? How did you write that sign on the door? How did you lessen a year and a half after your injuries launch a nonprofit? How did you later create your own speaking company and all these things?

42:22and I realized that I was super balanced as a leader when I was wounded. When you were wounded? When I was wounded. I wasn't prior to being wounded. Really? Not when I had the leadership failure. And at other points in crisis in my life, I realized I wasn't as balanced. I think I saw one of your videos recently talking about the key to successful leadership is balance. It is. I believe it. But balance is a misnomer too because it's not like, well I put 20 % in this bucket, in this bucket, in this bucket. I teach five, I teach something called the Pentagon and peak performance. So five key areas that a leader should be balanced in.

43:01The foundational level is physical leadership. And it's something that I've come to find that all of us as we get older have a tendency to let slide. We do the opposite of probably what we should be doing. It's going harder. Yeah, because as we get older, we're breaking down. We need, We need to take care of ourselves better than we do when we're younger, where your body's so much more resilient. And that's why I tell people as a leader, you need a lot of energy. You need to be able to think clearly. You need, you know, sound mind and everything that you're doing. So that foundational level of physical leadership is critical to what you're doing.

43:43And that consists of sleep, nutrition and fitness. So those three components.

43:51and my physical leadership saved my life when I was wounded. Now, for most people, hopefully you're never at that level. But in some ways, right now, you look at today, you know, COVID is kind of a strange thing. But for the most part, you know, it is individuals who are not healthy that are having the greatest problems. And those with a stronger immune system seem to be doing better. And it's like that with other diseases. So once again, physical leadership to have the energy and the ability, we manage stress better. So that's the foundational level. Number two was mental leadership. And when I became a junior officer and I was super arrogant, I really thought I knew everything.

44:39And I didn't challenge my beliefs. I didn't question my own capabilities. Do as I say, not as I do. I didn't do things to get out of my comfort zone.

44:51And those are the things that make up mental leadership, constantly educating ourselves, constantly challenging our beliefs. We're in a day and age where it's dangerous, in my opinion, because social media feeds you the information that you like to see. And so many people don't go seek out, they don't challenge that belief system of what they're being fed. Right. So it only furthers their belief in things that may or may not be true, but because you keep clicking on that line of thought, you're being fed all that information. The news is no different. The media, people watch what they like to see and it's very biased in this day and age.

45:28So mental leadership is constantly challenging your beliefs. It's doing your due diligence to find out what's really true and how does it play into who I am and what I'm trying to do. Mm-hmm. It's getting outside of your comfort zone. It's finding the individuals who are where you want to be and identifying them as mentors so you can be better, so that you're not surrounding yourself with individuals who are pulling you away from where you want to go. Right. Number three, and this is the biggest one of my weakest point, and that's something I've found about the Pentagon. Most people have one area, they're super strong naturally, and then they have an area where they're super weak.

46:09And my weakest area was emotional leadership. And emotional leadership is our ability to maintain. As a leader, it's critical to be even keeled. We're not too hot. We're not too cold. We're not too excited. We're not too angry. Because people can count on you with that consistency. They know as a leader, I can come to you and tell you bad news. And you're going to take it well. And I can come in and tell you amazing news. And you're not going to burn it down drinking and be an idiot. Right, right, right. You know, I mean, you got to ride that balance. And I really struggle with that because I was an emotional roller coaster when I was younger.

46:47And I came to realize that that really damaged my credibility as a leader. Yes, yes. And it's also choosing that positivity in the face of negativity. Nobody wants that leader that is just an emotional train wreck, you know, or a negative Nelly. They want that leader who they can count on, that's positive, that's going to push you forward. They also don't want that leader that's something I call a leadership wrecking ball. A leader who they're all about the result, but they leave a path of destruction behind them. They'll crush you in their path to get things done. And that, in my opinion, is weak emotional leadership also.

47:28I mean, as a leader, we've got to think about the others. The health of others, yes. And then the last point. Well, the last part of emotional leadership is managing our mouths. Our mouth? Our mouth. Yes. Yeah, because so many people. So true. So many people, and I was guilty of this. And I'm not impervious to this. Like I said, this is my weakest area. But I'm really aware of myself now. because when we let that zinger fly 90 % of the time it doesn't do anything to further what we're trying to accomplish as a leader all it does is massages our ego you know well I was angry in the moment so I wanted to say this I see this in relationships all the time husband and wife that let these zingers fly it does nothing to further that situation in a positive way no that's part of being a leader also right that people are gonna disagree with you so what you know if you have conviction in who you are it's just going to happen i mean in this world yeah another navy seal that i had on uh chad wright said your tongue is like a rudder in a boat it's like whatever you speak like it's going to start guiding you in that direction or you know influencing you in certain directions in your life so make sure you really use your words correctly and based on where you want to go kind of back to the no negativity if you're negative it's going to affect you and take you down a negative path in your life.

48:56Feeling that way emotionally, you know, you're going to attract negative people. So, you know, you made that decision in that moment to speak differently, use words differently, which I think was powerful. Yeah. Okay. So that was three. Number four? Social leadership. Social leadership. How do we build the rings of influence around us? So, and I break that down into four rings of influence. The outermost ring is our work relationships. The innermost ring is a lot of times our work acquaintances slash friends. The third ring is our close friends. And then that bullseye is our immediate family. And in Western culture, there's a tendency to put a whole lot of time and effort into the two outermost rings, our work relationships and our work friends and acquaintances.

49:43And we have a tendency to take for granted our close friends and our family. Yes. And we think they'll always be there for us. But when a major crisis comes, when you're on the X, that may or may not be true because that's when everything is being pressure tested. And if you haven't put the time and effort into your immediate family, then oftentimes it will break. And Jimmy Hatch, a friend of mine, described it like this, we all ride on trains in this life. I rode on the SEAL train. You rode on the football train. and we never know all of us hope that someday we'll get to wherever we want to get off for some of us it's the end of the tracks for others a specific stop they want to get off on but sometimes there's a catastrophic event that occurs in our life and we get thrown off the train and those outermost rings don't get off with you because they're still on the train and it's not that they won't like you or anything like that they're just still riding the football trainer the seal training you're no longer on it but who gets off with you is your close friends and family.

50:45And so often I have watched individuals that get into a major crisis and you also know so many successful people that have been super successful but got to the end of their career or even the end of their lives and said, why didn't I put more time into my family? That's true. So social leadership is making sure that we are investing in those relationships to be ready. The key question I ask everybody is, will you be ready? For what? It doesn't matter. will you be ready for that moment when it comes because we don't know what that moment is right so that balance enables us to be ready for almost anything having a mindset of the next ambush is out on the horizon if i maintain balance if i have a leadership mindset of being ready for it i'll be ready for it no matter what it is no matter what it doesn't mean it's going to hurt less but at least i'll be ready for it to drive forward but it takes those things that's why i was so successful when I got wounded.

51:41I was balanced in those areas. The last one is spiritual leadership. And for me, faith played a part of that. But for others, I tell them it's our ability to get outside of ourselves and have perspective in this life that what you're going through, we all live in our own personal hell when we're in a crisis, but spiritual leadership enables us to recognize that there are a whole lot of other people out there that are going through much worse than you are. And if you can do things to get outside of yourself, and and recognize there's a great big world out there that what you're going through is temporary even though it's painful super painful um you will get to the other side and and and and and be able to get beyond it and what I talk about is that if you're alive man it's a gift yes it's a gift and uh and it may be hard it may be tough but it's still a good day and it's up to you to drive forward to get off that X.

52:39So I have a motto, no bad days. You know, because I'm still here. That's right, man. No bad days. What do you think is the skills that we should learn to match more to help us reach at the top of our field, our industry, or to set us up to be prepared when that ambush comes? So we stay ready. We don't have to get ready. So I, it comes, in my opinion, it comes back to four key things, which I call the point man principles. Point man principles. Last year I wrote a third, a planner called the point man planner and, and it came about cause I got really sick. And while I was really sick trying to, they were trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

53:28I had a parasite and a blood disorder that attacked my central nervous system and I was super messed up. I thought I was dying to be honest. And at one point I was like, man, I wish I had a point man, like when I was in the SEAL teams to lead me out of some of these bad situations. And it made me think, well, why? What made them so effective? And when we were talking about what makes the SEALs effective, like it became really clear to me that a really good point man, a lot of SEALs live their life in this way. And there's four principles. And I think this is how anybody out there can be effective and bring their game to the highest level number one relentless belief in your mission and there's a lot of people who don't know what their mission is they've never written it down they've never defined it and if you write down your mission it's got to be built on the foundation of your values and there's a lot of people that don't know what their values are they'll tell you cliche things they'll say you know faith family finance fitness but when you hear those things you're like dude you haven't been in church in two years yeah I'm at a gym I haven't seen you in you know, we just throw these things out there and, and understanding, because whether you know what your values are not, know what your values are or not, they are driving you and they're driving your decision making.

54:41Right. So if one of your values maybe is fame or, or recognition, that's okay. You should be aware of it. Doesn't mean it's a negative thing unless, you know, you're stabbing somebody else in the back to get it. But knowing that is important because now you can build your mission in this life upon it. And because my mission now, now that I'm out of the SEAL teams, it's about setting that example as a leader. I want people to regard me as a point man for my own life, someone that they want to learn from someone, you know, that is a leader that sets the example that communicates well. So that has become my new mission.

55:23Number two is a clearly defined destination and a set course. So in the military, we always knew exactly where we were going. And in life, people often don't. In life, people say, well, I want to be rich or I want to be in better shape. Well, those are not clearly defined things. It's kind of like saying, I want to go west if I needed to go someplace. So a clearly defined destination. In the military, we use something called the universal transverse Mercator system. It's a grid system that covers the entire Earth, and it breaks it down into a... Wow, to this exact point. Exactly, a one-meter square, almost the size of this table.

56:04Yep. That's crazy, in the whole world. Well, all the way, the north and south poles become an issue. Yeah, sure. But yeah, all the way almost to the north and south poles. Yes, where most of the people live, yes. Exactly. So when we identify a target, it's broken down usually all the way to that 10-digit grid, meaning a one by one meter square that's crazy so a very clearly defined destination and that enables us to not have any deviation you know and we're not going west we know exactly where we're going and then the second part of it is a clearly defined course and that course is a bearing on how we get there or how we follow our compass to get there most people may have one but they don't have the other and you can't get to where you're going without having both they may have the destination but not know the how to get there that's right because the course becomes the how to it becomes our way points like i give the example of when i wanted to be a seal as a kid i knew that was my destination that was a very clearly defined destination and the and the course was all the things that I had to do.

57:16So I had to enlist in the Navy. I had to get accepted. I had to get a seal contract. I had to physically pass the seal screening test. I had to academically pass the ASVAB score with a high enough score to get picked up for seals. I had to get a seal rating. I had to graduate from my A school. I had to get the seal training. I had to make it through seal training. I had to make it through hell week. All these things were way points on the course. So, if people can break their goals down in this manner and I break them down in the Point Man Planner quarterly and then every day we make sure I do something called the rule of three Ps, one physical, one personal, one professional.

57:56Every day we're moving the needle just a little bit towards those goals. That's how we stay on course. Number four or I'm sorry, number three of the Point Man Principles is risk assessment and situational awareness. So many people walk through life totally blind. When we talk about, will you be ready? They're not ready for the ambushes that are coming. And oftentimes they never see them coming, even though the signs were there. So one, are we regularly doing risk assessments of where we are in our life? Are we still balanced? Are we still taking care of ourselves, you know, both in the Pentagon at peak performance?

58:40Are we making sure that our destination is front site focus, that we're on course, that we're hitting the waypoints we should. So we're consistently doing a risk assessment. We're also looking for the indicators that an ambush is on the horizon. And so many people don't. So then they walk into these ambushes and they're like, oh my God, I never saw that coming. Okay, and number four, so it's risk assessment and situational awareness, right? Yep. And the fourth one? Is an overcome mindset to get off the X as quickly as possible. Overcome mindset. Yeah. So you can't prevent every ambush.

59:18Most, I estimate that most people in this life will go through five, at a minimum, five major life ambushes. And I define a major life ambush as anything that will forever leave physical, mental, emotional, or deep financial scars. And you'll never fully recover from it. Or let me rephrase that. You will always carry the pain of that ambush. You will always look back and you will think, God, that was painful. It hurts when we think about it. And I tell people that on the lower end of the scale, it can be the ending of a relationship. It can be the ending of a marriage. Job. Job. personal failure, professional failure, lawsuit, bankruptcy, the failure of a business.

1:00:01It can be a life threatening illness or injury, life threatening illness or injury to someone you love. It can be sexual trauma to you or someone you love. And then at the higher ends, it starts to get into the loss of a loved one or one of the highest I've seen is the loss of a child. Oh man. Yeah, that's tough. So having a mindset of readiness and knowing that unfortunately those things could happen, and I teach something called the REACT methodology, so it's a system to use when these ambushes come. What's that system? So REACT is an acronym for when an ambush comes, the very first thing we have to do is recognize that we are in a crisis.

1:00:45And it goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning. When you're on the X, there's a natural tendency to procrastinate and deny and look at the past or the future or - It's hard to recognize, yeah. It's usually the hardest and depending on the level of ambush. And I want to make sure that people understand if you lose a child, timeline is relative. I don't expect you to, you know, it's going to take time to get off the X from losing a child. but also recognizing that you're already thinking, I can't lay here forever. Like I have to, um, some point get up. Yeah, exactly. So number one, recognizing you're in a crisis or recognizing the reality is what I say.

1:01:27Um, number two is evaluate your assets. So when we are hit by a life ambush, by any kind of crisis or catastrophic event, it's natural to feel totally overwhelmed in the moment because your world has just come to a grinding halt for whatever it is. It's like you suddenly stepped into a raging storm. You're in the darkness. You're trying to figure out what's happening in this chaos with the wind howling and lightning and thunder and people beating on you and it's overwhelming. And we tend to think, you know, there's no hope, there's nothing I can do. It's all outside of my control. But we have to, in that moment, figure out how we control what we can.

1:02:07And one of the first things we can do is evaluate what assets do I have to bring to bear to this project? I was talking about it's like tools in our toolbox, you know, so what can I either buy, borrow, use that I already have? If it's a, you know, business crisis, it may be an accountant or an attorney or it may be advisors or a board that, you know, or maybe whoever that's helping you to get out of this crisis. It may be outsourcing someone that has specialties that help you deal with whatever problem you're in. If it's a personal crisis, maybe it's a relationship crisis, so it could be a marriage counselor, a priest, or whatever it is.

1:02:47Having those things, though, makes you suddenly say, okay, this is crisis, but I can deal with it. Number three is assess possible options and outcomes. and what usually tends to happen when we go, the slowest part is A, recognizing, B, starting to gather, hey, I have tools or what's in my inventory to deal with this. And then there tends to be this tendency, if you will, to suddenly rush. Like, oh my God, this sucks. I want to get off the X and I have these tools, so let me use these to get out of here as quickly as possible. Right, okay. And I tell people, you got to slow down. You got to take a tactical pause in the military, we called it, let the battlefield develop.

1:03:35And look at all the outcomes. Yeah, all the outcomes. And also maybe there are things that are happening that you haven't seen yet. Behind the scenes, yeah. So getting your team together, whoever is helping you, whoever's part of this inventory, this is where we now assess both the short-term and the long-term impact of the decisions that we're going to make. Okay. And the C? choose and communicate so you choose the direction you're going to go and you communicate it to the people around you you're never on the X by yourself the X has its own gravitational pull any kind of life ambush so if you are in a if it's a personal ambush your family your kids your friends get pulled on the X with you yeah it's a business ambush your team your team believe it or not even your clients can get pulled on with you.

1:04:26So it's important that we choose and then communicate because frequently as a leader, especially when we're in a crisis, sometimes we want to internalize and we don't want to, even though everybody around us can see you're in a storm, man, you're on the edge. But it's important to communicate for three different reasons. Number one, when we communicate, we verbalize what we're going to do. And there's a level and there's that lead yourself level of internal accountability when we say we're going to do something now it's like yes this is what I'm doing. Number two it tells others and they're like oh my god yes we have a plan this sucks let's go and that third component of that is hope.

1:05:05It gives people hope it's like a positive direction yes we have a plan this is where we're going and then the last one is take action. Execute on that plan. There are so many people who will go through this process and then they're waiting for the perfect moment. and the perfect moment's never going to come. The time to act is now, you know, imperfect action is better than waiting for this perfect plan. Exactly. And it creates momentum. It gets you off that X. And you may go from one X to the next and that happens sometimes, but use that momentum to keep going. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

1:05:41Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

1:06:25And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.