Post Key-Note Resilience Report with Diego Ugalde

Participant #1:

Welcome to the Get Up Nation weekly resilience report featuring Ben Biddick, creator and host of the Get Up Nation show, and featuring former Navy Seal Diego Ugalde, CEO of the Trident Approach. First of all, I just want to congratulate you on an amazing keynote talk. People need to hire you for more of these people who are seeking to be leaders. Leadership courses for high level performers, master performers and organizations. They need to get the Trident Approach within their walls or in the company of their staff, because you're going to draw out the best from them and really Orient them to some profound lessons of leadership. And not just that, but living a full and thriving life. Really key success concepts, key concepts about the value of people. I just want to get into some of the content that you put out to this amazing group got such a good response from them. I really love. What stood out to me is at the beginning, you were talking about authenticity. You were talking about fear. And from your perspective as a Navy Seal, the things that you've faced in comparison with what's often faced in a boardroom or in a leadership seminar, as things are happening within a business, you provide a very unique insight for leaders and really seeing and really communicating the value of people. And so for leaders who come in and may have a misunderstanding about military leadership, sometimes people think that, do you ever get it? That they think you're going to be like a drill Sergeant walking in and you just start snapping people up into these types of things, these misconceptions that people have about military leadership. And then you're coming at it, talking about fear, talking about authenticity. Tell me a little bit about what you get oftentimes and then how shocked people are that you're really bringing the meat of getting inside the human being facing an obstacle or a group of human beings facing daunting or intimidating circumstances and trying to get something done together. Yeah. So people are different for sure. There are tons of military leaders and people who teach leadership from veterans and that type of thing who are exactly what people think they are. They come in and do the boot camp thing and start whatever. But there are also many of us who that's not how we roll, really. I would say people just look at us the way people normally look at other people, just naturally. What do I know about the military and what can I expect? Again, it's why racism doesn't make any sense. It's just you got to take people for face value, and it's fine. It's normal to have prejudiced them. You know what I mean? Just to look at this. Well, I'm expecting this as long as you're not attached to that outcome. Because what you can do is you can hear and see things that maybe aren't actually happening because of those predispositions. So for us. We are the way we are. We're different than most everybody. Just like most everybody is different from us. And, you know, talking about, from your perspective, what do we know about fear and what we experience in the military and on the outside? I think there's a different type of fear when you're on the battlefield. And I say I think because although I've got whatever 3D combat deployments and over 250 missions and that type of thing, I was never really afraid of what was going on and mostly because I just felt like I was with the baddest dudes in the neighborhood. And also there's a concept that seems like a lot of people know about the fighting season, right. So in the summer, Al Qaeda and the Taliban and all that stuff, that's when they're really awake and that's when they're really aggressive and really wanting to fight, and for whatever reason, it's just not that way in the wintertime Well, I was with Seal Team, too. And all the Seal teams, generally speaking, had, like this usual rotation were always we deployed in the wintertime, so we were away from home for Christmas and Thanksgiving and all that stuff every other year. But that also meant that's when we were downranged in these war fighting seasons, so we got in firefights, but it was just never to the scale of like the guys at Team Ten or the guys at Team Five where they were just always there in the dog days of summer where those guys were most out and most active. So I'm mentioning all of this just to say the firefights that I was in, they just weren't that big of a deal. I've had some buddies that got shot, but I was a medic and I was lucky enough to be a part of what was going on there. And I felt like I had a lot of control because I was a civilian paramedic before I was in the Seal team. So I felt like I was really comfortable. And like I said, I just felt like I was with the baddest dudes in the world and that nothing could harm us. And in a lot of ways, that was really true. So it's hard for me to really speak from a place of fear when it comes to that, because if I was afraid, I'd never felt it right now is a good time to be scared. That never happened. So it is hard for me to make that transition. But what I will say is having gone through my own internal, deep discovery of really looking myself and my soul in the face and saying, this is who you are, that's really the only time in my life that I've been afraid. Like really afraid. And it was life changing because I had always chosen not to go down that path before in my life. It was like, hey, I'm happy, I'm doing well. I don't need to see what's under the carpet over there. But what I'm seeing is that there are some similarities between fear in the workplace and the fear of looking at the self. Almost always, like literally almost everything we do starts from within ourselves. And so when people are afraid of certain things, a lot of times it's like their own judgments that they're passing. Maybe their ego is having an impact on like, hey, you better watch out for this or this is going to happen or whatever. And it's not necessarily in our culture to look at those things and dissect them piece by piece by piece. So we just choose not to look at them, which is the same thing that I was doing with myself. So almost always the fear that comes into the workplace, a lot of it comes from the self. Now if you have a tough leadership team of people who aren't aware of this and maybe they have their own fears going on, they can reach out and grab a lot of people through fear as well, just by quality of work, how they go about leading people, people always being afraid to getting fired, and all these ramifications even could be over the top. Sometimes fear can come from all of those places. But even that fear is the same as the fear from the self. It's the fear from the self that's causing those leaders to extend where their fear can touch, which can be really unfortunate and really take a toll on the team and the people that are working so hard to help support the organization. So this introspection and this look within how were you helping or how were people impacted by what you were sharing there as far as giving them? Frequently when you talk, it's really stunning to me, the level of non judgment that's there it's great. You just come clean with the truth of the matter. You just say that this is the ego doing this. These things that happen. This is are you here for money only? And you break it down without judgment, and you get to the root of those realities, and that uncovers so much of our experience. Does that lead to a liberation within them as they start to bring that awareness to what's going on within them? How does that create liberation? How does that create cohesion as you've taken these people through this process? It is a process. My process is ongoing as we speak. Like, I am not at the mountaintop of enlightenment right now, and I would say that I'm about two and a half to three years on in my notating let's see what's going on here. So when I have these keynotes for these people, it's not like I'm radically changing their lives. The one thing that I feel that the keynotes are providing is just an opportunity for awareness, because a lot of these things that I'm talking about are things that I just had no clue of. Nobody talked to me about this in school. Nobody talked to me about this at home in any spiritual sector. Nobody was talking about this stuff. And when I was like, I'm saying, just sitting there face to face with the deepest and sometimes darkest parts of myself, that was the first time I even knew that there was such a thing. Like, I'm telling you, I'm about the happiest guy I know. I'm always happy riding down the freeway with windows down and music blasts, and I'm all singing and stuff. But the moment where I was cornered and I didn't have anywhere to go, but I had to see all this. All of that went away. And I was petrified, scared, scared. And so then I had to get past to being scared and to get curious, I'm like, okay, so I'm completely petrified of what I might really look like, how I might really come across to the world, how I might actually be because I'm hiding all of this stuff from all the world. And so how can I release some of that and look at it and accept it for what it is that is taking years, meditation, mindfulness, patience and persistence and all this stuff. So all we're really able to do is bring awareness for the people to start on their own journey. Now, there are other cultures across the world who are like, what are you talking about? Of course, but it's not our culture. Our culture is, hey, you've got to look good. You've got to be attractive. You've got to put off a certain persona. You got to have this type of car, these types of houses. If you want to be an influencer, if you want to do this, there's a model that we are trying to achieve that is nothing like our authentic self. You are creating a shell of an existence.

Participant #1:

It's not for me. Even though that has never really been for me. I didn't even know that I was actually doing that the whole of my life. And I was doing that. Not in a sense to be successful or so that I could be an influencer. It was so that I could just get along in this world. I learned from a very young age that it's not cool to be angry. If you get angry, I'm going to get in trouble. I'm going to get grounded. I'm going to get put on restrictions to all this stuff. Instead of realizing, hey, that anger is coming from somewhere. Where is it coming from? What is it all about? How do you fix all that stuff and move on? None of that stuff was happening. It was just, don't be mad. Don't lash out. Don't act like that. But that was the end of it. So having those types of conversations in these keynotes and then showing explain to them what is the fallout for living this kind of faked life can be is really impactful because I feel like most of us have experienced what it's like to be on the losing end of leadership through fear. Yeah, right. And no one likes that. It sucks, it's hard, and then it takes a toll. All people are different, but some people lose sleep, some people manifest, like, physical injuries. There's all this whole thing that can happen when you are in this environment of fear and resistance and all this. We are talking to leaders because we know that they have influence on what's going on around them. And like, hey, if you haven't heard of before, that's fine. But just understand, if you are going through it in this direction, you can be having a huge negative impact on people who don't know you. They don't even know themselves. So it can have these really terrible effects if you don't know how to manage it. Yeah. And one of the topics that you were talking about was that concept of you felt like you were the happiest guy on Earth. You were happy. But one thing kind of jolted that perception and that's getting cut off in traffic. And you talked about how when that happened, it would be instant anger. And then the question of, well, where does that come from? Because whatever it was like 97% of the time you're happy, you're flowing, you're having a great time. But that moment was the thing that got a hold of you. Were there other leaders that had other similar things where they were like, that's what really gets me, or that kind of triggered me to really start some introspection or really thinking about who am I as a person, who am I authentically, truly within? Because I don't like what behavior I'm exhibiting at this point where I've seen how it's impacting these people that I'm responsible for and I don't like being that type of person. To create that in others, I would much rather have create a sense of happiness, a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment in others. As you work at the Try Dan approach with these CEOs and leaders, are those some of the things you're seeing happen where they're finding that introspection for themselves and getting out from under fear a little bit? Yes. With the keynote, not so much because we only have so much time. And there wasn't a whole lot of Q and A at the end. It was just was in there and I was out. But for sure, with our events in the Trident approach, our program is designed to uncover this stuff, and it happens a lot. Not so much where this is my trigger, but things like I didn't realize I don't trust people, I don't trust myself, I don't trust my organization. And these are like high level CEOs that have, like tens of thousands of people working for them. And you think for me, I'm thinking, wow, what a burden. Imagine if you're a boat and you got propellers and you got three propellers on the back of the ship or whatever. Only one screw is turning. The rest are just if you don't trust your organization, you don't trust yourself, you don't trust all these things like you are not going at full speed. But that's what our events are designed to do is to bring that stuff up to the surface of things that I'm guessing for the most part there are things that people are aware of, they know they exist. Like he might have said that in the past like I don't trust myself or whatever but he's been able to move on our events. You're there, there's nowhere else to go and you can't just move on. There is a very big difference between just, oh I don't trust somebody to being I don't trust anybody and we have to move forward. It's just a different thing. So yeah like I said triggers, I'm not so much, I'm not so sure I would love to just be able to sit down and talk with that's why we've opened up the coaching. Now

Participant #1:

we can take all the time we need to from wherever they're at to where they want to go and because I would love to hear those conversations because those triggers, those reasons, those elements are going to be different for everyone and also for different reasons because my next thought is why don't you trust yourself? Let's go there and it's so hard to go to those places. It is scary, it's uncomfortable, it's something you don't want to do. But freedom is on the other side like sitting there and being maybe even power washed by that fear is the only way to get clean of it. Just being with it and just really why don't I trust myself? Oh well this happened through discovery and it takes time and it takes patience and it definitely takes honesty, it takes effort. But you go through and that individual who's looking at this whole idea of not being able to trust, he now knows but he doesn't know why yet, not either. But he's going to need somebody to sit with him and help him light his own path because it's not my path. If I didn't trust myself it would be a different reason than him. So I'm helping him light his path and just the power that comes from knowing, you know what, I don't trust myself because of this and this and this and this and then of course there's further to go further to go into words like at its element, this is the root cause of most of your fear. And yes that's where all the work comes from. One thing too that I love is I love how at one point you had talked about how you were witnessing some team dynamics happened and a leader had made a statement, something along the lines. I've sacrificed my thoughts and I forget the specific words that you use, but it was something along the lines of a leader sacrificing himself for the team. And you kind of checked him on that. You really articulated, okay, sacrificing for others has a place and things like that. But to be for sustainable leadership over time, the importance of self care, the importance of practicing this introspection, this authenticity, you have to sustain yourself as a leader if you're going to sustain others. Will you talk a little bit about that? And a lot of the misconceptions that people have, especially around military concepts about sacrifice and delaying any kind of satisfaction and shutting off all our own needs for a cause that can lead to some really unhealthy behaviors, right? Yeah, absolutely. So specifically, what you were talking about is we had an event here in San Diego where we were running people through one of our half day events. And at the end, you know, our events are very emotional and loving and things like that. Everybody kind of circles around at the end. And I turned to one of the executives, and I said, what did you get out of today? And he said, I learned that I can put all of my needs to the side in order to sacrifice for the betterment of the team. And the way he made it sound, you know, everybody in the group was like, yeah, that's awesome. Team is number one. And I was like, Whoa, bro, again, we only had 4 hours. And I think with that event, we had something like 50 or 60 people there. So you don't get that one on one. But I was like, Whoa, I appreciate what you're saying, but like you said, there's no sustainability in that you can continue to minimize and relegate the self and pretend like you don't need, but we all need. And so if you aren't in a place where your needs are being met and you have been able to focus on yourself to get yourself to this place as a leader, you're not necessarily able to sustain a way of leading your team where you're always putting them first. You're going to break. You are going to break if you're not paying attention and caring for the self. So he looked at me and he was like, oh, man, I made a mistake. I'm like, you didn't make a mistake. We're all in this process of learning. I only have 4 hours with you. There's more to go. But you are number one. You got to take care of number one. Once you've taken care of that and you've grown deep roots in strength and stability, emotional stability and all those things, then you can start shouldering all the problems of all the people in your team because almost always it's a team full of people who don't have strong roots themselves. They're not caring for themselves. Also, there's all these things that are going on. And so it takes a lot of strength to deal with that in the best way possible. And so if you're not caring for yourself, that can really lead to a lot of problems, even though it seems really well meaning. I mean, the guy is like, I'm not a selfish person, and I refuse to be a selfish person, that type of thing. So you can really very quickly go down maybe a not so healthy path, thinking you're doing the right thing. Sure. Yeah. It's that fine balance between doing good for ourselves, being satisfied, having our cup filled to overflowing so that we can give to others at the same time, not being indulgent in that or not falling in love with ourselves, and becoming like, thinking that we're some sort of superior to everybody else or something like that a fine line, though, of treating ourselves with love and respect in that leadership position. Now, a couple of the concepts that I thought were just amazing, and I kind of got chilled at a few times during your keynote, but one of them was you said mistakes are coming, especially in this concept that you've talked about how oftentimes we're just spending all of our time trying to create this image of ourselves in the world or for ourselves or for others or for all of that. And the big fear can often be, if I make a mistake, will I not look cool? Will I not get it done? Will I not make enough money? Will I not be the cool guy that needs to show up and dazzle everybody? Will I not be enough? And you said mistakes are coming. And then you really articulated how that's not to be something to be scared of. That's not something to try to resist. It's just the truth and the fact of the matter that mistakes are coming. Will you explain a little bit more about that concept? Yeah, especially this really, it rings very loudly for me because coming from the Seal community, there are no excuses. It is 100% top notch elite performance. That's the way it is. That is the standard. That's the expectation. You fall out of line in any one of those things, and there's going to be hell to pay because lives are on the line and all this stuff and still mistakes happened. Mistakes are coming. We are human beings. We make mistakes. We think we have information that actually isn't true. I can go on and on for all the reasons why anyone can make any mistake. And the thing is, as leadership, it always seemed to be if a mistake happened, like the first reaction was like, who do we hold accountable for this? How did this happen? What's going on? As if there was some sort of surprise that a mistake happened at all. Where does the surprise come from? We are dealing regardless of whether we're dealing with Navy Seals or whatever, it doesn't matter. Mistakes are coming. And so we are now we're talking about elite leadership now. So if you want to be in a place of elite leadership, there's different ways to handle when mistakes happen. You can react in a negative way and looking external and figuring out whose fault it is and all this stuff or

Participant #1:

that's. One way of dealing with this, another way to deal with the mistake is what happened, like what's going on and how do we fix it? It's not like you don't make a mistake. Every human being in the world makes mistakes. And that's the funny thing is because it's something that we know. If I were to ask any one of you or your listeners, hey, do you make mistakes? Of course I do. But there's a gap between that understanding and embodying that way of life. Yes, mistakes happen. So now how do you deal with it? One of the examples that I use to kind of really fully explain what I'm talking about. When Solely Sullenberger was taking off from the airport and he got the bird strikes and killed both of his engines, his first reaction wasn't like, who let all those birds on the runway? Or how come they don't deserve how come they don't design these engines to withstand bird strikes? How come there isn't more like safety mechanisms in place to prevent this stuff from happening? None of that happens, right? It was like bird strike. Both engines are failing. I'm going to come back with a solution in a second. Nice. And that's what he did. And he saved all those people by landing in the Hudson River. And of course, people wanted to burn them alive. So they did all those if you saw the movie, you saw really how the whole investigation process and all that, they wanted to burn somebody again. And so that's what creates the fear. And so when you set an environment like that where everybody is afraid to make a mistake, guess what? Mistakes are coming. That's right. They're coming either way. But now they're coming from a place of fear. Now, if you are able to create these environments, we're helping people understand and embody the culture of the organization. They understand the values and the principles. They understand the mission. They understand the direction and all those stuff. And if they make mistakes in the spirit of those things, they're kind of falling forward. They're making mistakes that are clearly recoverable from. And you can much more easily move on from those. It's when you make mistakes that are counter to the culture, counter to the mission, counter to all those things that make it harder to recover from. But that's still normal. That still happens all the time. And it just doesn't make sense to me that in our culture, it's just like, hey, this person made a mistake, they're fired. So you're going to hire somebody else so that they can make a mistake and fire them, too. I just don't understand that mostly because when they look at these people who are making mistakes, the way I've seen it is that they look at what they did and they're upset about the thing that they did. Instead of saying, how are you? Like, what's going on? How did this happen? And all these types of things and taking care of the root cause of that mistake, this person might have forgot to put a TPS sheet, cover thing or whatever on their TPS reports of like, oh, you're fired. Instead of being like, hey, what's going on? I'm absolutely miserable. Why? Because of this? Oh, well, how can we do this now? Can we do this now? How can we do this to me now? You're starting to create an environment where people are okay with the normal existence of making a mistake. Honestly, it's like getting mad at somebody for farting. Sorry to tell everybody. And how comfortable is that right now? This is time. Like, oh, my God, dude. It's something we do something like, 100 something times a day, maybe even more. But we're like, don't talk about that same thing. We're living human beings. This is going to happen. This is a thing. Why in leadership are you like, this is unbelievable. How could you? Well, I could because I'm a human being and I made a mistake. And there's a thousand things on my mind right now. I'm having trouble sifting through them all. I'm doing my best, and I made a mistake. What do you want? Like, oh, it's not good enough. Fair enough. Create an organization where you think that everyone's going to even that is mistakes are coming. That's right. And then what I really love is and this will always be in my head. But what you've written here, what you presented, metals are earned when things go wrong. And you touched on that topic where the pilot didn't go into he didn't waste any seconds of time. When seconds counted, he didn't waste any time on anything but the solution. He wasn't trying to point a finger. He was just so solution oriented at that point. And that's what keeps people alive and what shows heroism in a moment. That's what opens us to the opportunity to have profound impacts on other people's lives is not when we're pointing the finger and blaming and pouring out fear, but we're actually connecting. And as you speak about creating that environment where the fact is that we're all human beings, nobody is perfect. And yes, we want to achieve great things. We want to do amazing things. But part of the amazing thing is the people we're with the solution. Part of the joy of finding a solution is finding it with other people or finding the greatness. You've also talked about different people in your teams and how you love seeing your people thrive. One, you mentioned one of the Navy Seals and the Trident approach. I believe he was a Navy Seal. He loves to Cook or as a chef. And so at certain meetings, that's where he loves to be at. That's where he's at his best. That's when he gives great gifts to other people of augmenting the atmosphere with amazing food. It's these environments where people are involved in the solution, in the process, where there is the idea that things will go wrong and we'll work together to solve them, and we'll grow through that process. I just can't imagine to want to talk about cohesion when we talk about teams and the elite Navy Seals who get sent to these dangerous places, some of the most disturbing realities on Earth, and you go there with your team. It is so profound to hear this talk, to hear this culture that you're creating, to share this awareness with people who are seeking to be their very best, that it might just be about also the people that are with them in it. And that at the end of the day, part of the satisfaction part of the solution is the people you're with at the time. Is that accurate? Yeah, totally. So what we're really kind of talking about, I think, if I'm hearing you right, is micromanaging. So I'm in charge of this. I'm going to make all the decisions. I'm going to do all this. Why have a team then, right? There is so much value. There is so much talent. There is so much genius, literally, in everyone. If you have people that work in your organization that you don't believe are on a genius level, I don't know, you might be missing something. It's there. Maybe they're not. They don't feel like they're allowed to be. But I believe that we all have these levels of genius within us that just need to be tapped into. So instead of relegating somebody to the back of the room, it's just like when something goes wrong, bring everybody in. What's going on? How do we handle this if we're going to continue to talk about Sully? I mean, that was one thing he asked his co pile. Sally has got 50 years of experience in flying and all this stuff, and he looks over his co pilot was like, what do you think, man? What do you got? Do you have anything? It's that kind of inclusion and talking about. And just to put things in perspective about this whole idea of mentality and what it does. And yes, putting the pedal to metal is a harsh thing, but it creates a lead performance in this. I've seen both sides. I've been in the teams with that mentality, and I've seen us perform, like, unbelievable feats of unbelievable things, things that I just sometimes think that humans are capable of doing that. And then I have also seen the other side of where guys eventually get out of the military, and they're really, for the first time, able to even show or acknowledge any weakness. And not every single team guy that's out there who's been in the teams, who is now out, is running a million miles an hour. In fact, where I spend a lot of my time when I'm volunteering and things is to really help team guys who have been to all these places and done all these things, get their baseline back to a place where they want it to be so that they can go out and be successful and really contributing members of society. There is a toll that is taken. Whether you want it to be or not, whether you understand it or not, whether you know it or not, it doesn't matter. It's being taken. And these guys who have put themselves in these positions and been on the front lines and all that stuff and lead standards and lead performance and go, even the best of the best don't have this endless gas tank. They don't have this endless ability to be crust and insulted and maneuvered and twisted and turned and bent and all that stuff. You can do it, but not for long. And finally something breaks. And when it breaks, it's not good. I mean, we're talking about depression. We're talking about drug use. We're talking about suicidal ideation, especially in the military. We are starting to add on, like traumatic brain disorder, post traumatic stress. All of these things are really like terrible recipes for what can eventually come to be. So all these people who are performing on these standards that everybody's like, oh, we got to be just like them. We got to be just like them. Like, it's a harsh world where we come from and performing nonstop to that level. It's coming out somewhere. And I wish more people could see that because, yeah, we do a lot of things right. We do a lot of things that are good, but it's not perfect. And ten years down the line, 20 years down the line, 30 years, 40 years for some guys, it's really apparent that some work needs to be done. And all of that work is all stuff that should have been done as we're moving along. But it seems like we just never feel like we don't have any time to address that stuff. Which is ironic, because if you don't have the time to take care of yourself, time is going to take itself from you know what? Now is when I want to deal with this, and it's going to be an inopportune time, most inconvenient time. And you never know what the fallout effect is going to be when time says, hey, we need to deal with this, and we need to deal with this now. Sometimes it might not be noticeable. And other times you can lose your family, you can lose your job, you can get a DUI, you can kill somebody. All of these things can happen. So those things have to be taken care of as you go and really, very honestly, it can't be any of this. Nothing is wrong. I'm good, dude. Wow. What's up? It can't be that because that doesn't help, man. Amazing. We've talked a lot about how the selfcare aspect of it, the fullness of recognizing what we are as people, the depths of us, and how when we're facing these challenges, that it can take its toll. And one thing that I wanted to highlight here is when you were talking about being comfortable in the water, having air in your lungs, basically you're in an elite training that you can articulate what that training was and everything, but you were at the bottom of your underwater 15ft down, basically getting tore up, attacked, beat up by an instructor. And this was like a pivotal exercise to determine whether or not you would go forward from there. Are you comfortable in the water? And we talked a lot about self care, but one of the things that I would love to hear you talk more about is the value of being tested, the value of we have all these thoughts on our heads about what we may think we are. We may think we may perform a certain way down the line or down range, but then when you're actually there and you're actually in it, we can have different outcomes. Right. And it teaches us a significant amount about who we actually are versus what we may dream in our head. Will you talk a little bit about those concepts? Yeah. So as fast as I can, I'll try to bring everybody up to speed of why this was so significant on paper, from the time you start to the time you're actually a Seal, it should take you about two years or so. For me, it took about twelve years. I had tried. I had failed. I had done all these things. I got injured injuries, I failed tests, I failed time runs, I failed all this stuff. And I was just at a point in my life where I knew that the only thing I could do was I had to go back and try Seal training again because it was just like, this is the way I thought that. I don't think this way now, but I did at the time. I just got to get this monkey off my back. And the only way I'm going to do that is by going back to Seal training. And so the first time I was in Seal training, I was there for about four months. And they threw me out of training Friday before a week because I couldn't pass any time runs. And so I knew what that was like. I knew what it was like to be in first phase, pushing logs and boats and soft sand runs and swims and all that. Well, once I made it to Hell Week and everything after Hell Week was a complete, genuine surprise to me. I didn't know what it was like, I didn't know what to expect and all those types of things. So we ended up graduating first phase, which was like the Indoctrination phase of Seal training. If I said buds before, I mean basic underwater demolition seal training, which is how we the first step is really becoming a Seal. And so from first phase, from the indoc phase, then we will go into diaphase and die phase is where we learn how to basically do all things that we do under the water. And in the beginning, before we really get out to the ocean and the bays with the currents and minimum visibility and that type of stuff, we go to our swimming pool. It's a huge swimming pool. It's enormous. And parts of the swimming pool are about 15ft deep. And so everybody knows about Hell Week. It's a very famous thing, but not so many people know about this evolution. During second phase dive phase, which is called pool comp, which is pool competency like you're competent in the water, and it's a week long, if I remember right, and there are all these skills that you have to do that are very difficult, and it's like one builds on another, and if you fail, you get rolled. And I had failed Seal training before, and I felt like if I failed, pull comp and I was done, I was out. And that was such a horrible feeling, really. Just this fear that was hanging on me, really. That monkey never went anywhere. It just chose to be afraid of the next requirement that was coming up. One of the more difficult parts of pool comp during that week is you get down in the water and you get on your hands and knees while you're on the floor of the pool, and you start crawling, and there's a Seal instructor who's at the surface, and he times it to where on your exhale, he just hits you and he rips your mask off. He rips your regulator off. He turns off your air, he ties all your hoses into knots, and he kind of roughs you up a little bit. And there are a series of basically procedures that you've got to go through in order to successfully manage that evolution. Going into Sale training, I always thought, hey, no matter what happens in the water, I can handle it. I've been through a lot of first phase stuff where they fill your mask up with water and you're laying on your back doing exercise and having to breathe without choking on the water. All this stuff. I jumped in the San Francisco Bay to swim to Alcatraz for fun in the middle of the night in November, I surfed. I've done all this stuff, big old waves, everything. And I'm like, I'm comfortable in the water, like I'm good. But all of those things, in all of those times, there was always, like, the safety measure. If I was really in danger. I could call for help, but that didn't exist here for me, because if I did call for help, then everything was over. Everything was over in my life, I thought at the time. And so I'm sitting there at the bottom of the pool. When you do that, when you're out of breath, 15ft down, and I can't breathe. And there was just a decision to make. I mean, are you going to go through these procedures like you're supposed to, or are you going to panic and Bolt to the surface and just be removed from training eventually? And I'm like, no, I'm not going anywhere. You're kidding me. I fought everything and everyone in the universe to get back here, and I'm not going anywhere. And so I managed. I did all this stuff and did everything I was supposed to, and I surfaced. And believe me, it wasn't pretty. It wasn't like I surfaced and my hair was done, and I looked like I had a Tan. And all this stuff, I'm sitting here, like, coughing, and I'm, like, choking. And I'm like, FLEM is coming up. And I was almost passing out. It wasn't pretty, but I did it. And the only thing that I can say is that once I was able to kind of collect myself and I realized where I was standing and how I got to be standing there and what was going on around me, this ultimate feeling of absolute triumph, because I had a choice to fail. I did, and I didn't take it. All of this whole idea that I thought that I was comfortable in the water and all, I can do that as much as I wanted to, but I didn't really know, not really. Now I knew

Participant #1:

I was in the worst possible position that you could possibly be in. In the water. And I was good. I was calm. I could think my way through things. I was managing. Even though I was struggling for breath, I was still doing everything I could, and I've had just from being a seal and having to do so many. I don't know how many dives we did. Things happen underwater that you don't plan and don't expect, and you got to manage those. And I was always able to. But a lot of those times when I was managing those problems, I was like, I've been here before. I can handle this. This is no big deal. But that only came through that really genuine trial of, can you do this or not? And it was a very different existence to me of thinking that I was and assuming that I was into knowing that I am. And that only came through struggle. It only came through the mocking of the training was like, well, what if something goes wrong and your air goes to crap? What do you do? So it was more about than being beat up by the seal. It's like when things go wrong. How do you handle this? And that was really the learning point. So for me, I'm sure that I didn't do this every single time, but I genuinely felt like, okay, when things are going wrong, how do you handle it? What do we do next? How do we make the problem smaller or prevent the problem from getting bigger? And how do we take care of people in the meantime? If somebody makes a mistake, they're already going through their own trauma Because everybody else is dealing with the mess that they created. Number 01:00 a.m. I helping to solve the problem, but number 02:00 a.m. I also taking care of the hatred. It's cool. We all make mistakes. We're going to get through this. It's fine. So they're not just Jack hammering away at themselves, causing bigger problems that later on need to be handled in a different way. Unreal people check it out. Today the Trident approach.com elite leadership. You need to check out this is Diego Egal day. He is an amazing human being. He is a warrior. He is an amazing leader. He is somebody that you need to hire today to help your organization get through the challenges that you are facing to take you to the deeper level of living. I have an honor of getting to speak with him almost weekly here and I have grown so much as a result of it. So if you want to know anything further about what Diego and his team can offer you and yours, then hit me up on social Because I would be more than happy to share with you and give you a testimonial of the power that this man carries, the empathy and compassion that he carries. You need to hire him so reach out to the trading approach.com, get him and his team over to you wherever you are on this globe. If you want to overcome live life at a deeper level and learn some elite lessons of leadership, this is your guy.