 Welcome to show Nick. Thanks for having me, brother. I appreciate it, man. So we were introduced through a mutual friend, actually one of our former clients and a buddy, Jason, who also is a Green Beret, said, you got to talk to Nick. And Johnny and I have been very fortunate over the years to work with Green Berets and work on communication skills building. And then with that, build great relationships with some Green Berets even after they leave. So we'd love to just kick things off by learning about your military involvement and what drew you to join the military in the first place and how you became a Green Beret. Yeah. Cool, man. I actually began looking at the military when I was in high school and that was mainly a product of me yearning for respect, yearning for strength. It really wasn't about patriotism, it was about me and being this small, insecure kid that wanted to try to find out where I fit in this world and I really wanted to be respected and join the military. I felt like would give me that answer I was looking for. The only thing I really stopped that from happening was I started getting recruited to play football in college. The only reason why I went to college, right? I was a horrible academic. I did the band minimum just to get by. I was decent enough in athletics for me to get recruited to play ball at that next level. So that's what brought me to college was that. And then I had just turned 19 years old. I was a sophomore in college and I'm walking to class one day and the entire student body is walking back towards the dorms, like thousands of students. And I stop a dude and I'm like, what's going on, man? He's like, dude, I don't know. All the classes are canceled. So I'm like, well, perfect because I didn't feel like going anyway. This is kind of unusual for me to even be going to class. So like, this is great. So I head back to my dorm, turn on the television and the same thing as on every channel. And those are the towers in New York. The first building had already been hit and now we're watching this live. And at first, like most of us that were at least old enough to kind of recognize what was going on. It was just a lot of confusion. I had no one knew what was going on. And there's reports of a plane and whatnot. But I wasn't like, I was watching this live going, we are under attack, at least initially. And then I watched the second plane go. And it's like, even me is that I just turned 19. It's like something's going on here. So of course there were many days and weeks of confusion and a lot of answers that we were looking for. But once the dust kind of settled from that, that was the trigger for me. It was, I know what we are going to respond to this and the amount of anger and rage that I felt watching that happen live. Watching my fellow countrymen make the choice between jumping out of a building or burning alive in one. It just sent me into this fit of rage. So I really struggled at that point to stay in school. I was ready to just drop out and enter into the military in any capacity to get into the game that I knew we were about to stop playing. Ultimately, we listened to some mentors and some family and friends. I stayed in school. I grinded out my degree, graduated. It's now 2006. And not only is the game still being played, but we're now doubling down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. So we're surging across both of those conflicts. And it was at that point that I was like, OK, now I'm actually going to I'm going to get into this fight. And did you know anyone else in the military at the time? I don't come from a robust military family. Neither my parents served. My grandfather served at the tail end of the Korean War. I had an uncle that was in the Navy for a little bit, but not much. I didn't have like a powerful military network at all. So it was it was a little unusual for me and my family dynamic for me to put my hat into this ring. And the irony of it, man, is by the time I went to enlist, I was 24 years old, a lot of life experience college graduate. And I remember telling my father, hey, man, I'm going to enlist and I'm going to eventually become a green beret. And his response was, no, you're not doing that. You know, and which is kind of you can look back and laugh because I don't I don't need his permission. It's like, dude, I'm going to ask for your permission. I don't need you to sign a permission slip. I'm just letting you know what I'm doing. And here's here are my reasons. So his immediate response was that of a protective father. Was like, you're not going, you know. And the irony of it is, of course, he's like my biggest fan now. He follows. He reads all the books. He drives his best to speak the language. You know, he's like all into it. And sometimes I remind him, so, you know, man, now going, you know, 17 years ago, you were like adamantly against me doing this. And of course, now it's an enormous source of pride for him and whatnot. So obviously at that age, you then said you were going to be a green beret. You knew not only were you going to join the army, but you wanted to be the elite. Yeah. So I felt like I'd be best suited in special operations. And again, I didn't know much about the military at large or these all these different special operations units at this point. Oh, six, like the internet's coming around. Google is now a thing so we can get access to information. But I knew I wanted to be in special operations. And I felt like my physical attributes could be best utilized there. And but more so, I wanted to make as much of an impact as a single person can make. This was not intended to be a career for me or a lifestyle or even a profession. This was I'm going to go in. I'm going to get to the tip of the spear. I'm going to kick some ass. And I'm going to get out and figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. That was the game plan. It was about payback. I launched myself into that journey and, you know, the Navy seals come to mind pretty fast when you think of like the elite and like special operations. And that still is the same way today. And that's not done by accident. They're very good at what they do with their marketing and their messaging. And they are very good at what they do. Right. So I walked into a Navy recruiter's office and said, I want to be a seal. And at the time, the Navy didn't have an option for people to go just directly into the Navy seal training pipeline. You had to enlist and become a seaman in the Navy. And then you could request to go the special operations route. So I left that office. I walked down the hall in the same building, walked into the Marine Corps recruiting office and I asked the same question. I got the same answer. I left. I walked into the Army office. So three branches are in the same building in downtown Boston. And I walk into the Army guy and I said, Hey, I want to be in special operations. And they do took a look at me and was like, perfect. We have an option here that we have exists. Notice the 18 X-ray contract, otherwise known as a special forces recruit contract option, which gives guys off the street the chance to bypass the conventional Army. And I'm like, well, that's really got my attention. I didn't make it. I didn't make a decision then I said, thank you. And I left. I went home. And I just got on the Google machine. I'm like, Green Berets, you know, John Wayne Rambo. Like I've heard of these people before, but I had no idea what they do. So I dug in and I started doing some homework. And while the speed in which the Army would give me to get to special operations was certainly enticing as I began to read and learn more about what Green Berets do, I really was drawn to them, to that mission set and their primary mission set. Our primary mission set is that of unconventional warfare, which is a very sexy term, right? But when you really start to break down what that means, that caught my attention. And then my decision was made at that point. Let's unpack that mission a little bit more because many in our audience aren't familiar, just like you aren't. And what on the Google machine? So when you think of the Green Beret mission, what comes to mind? Yeah. So unconventional warfare is a long definition. There's a lot of buzzwords that are within that. What distinguishes unconventional warfare and that of the Green Berets are really two words that exist within that definition. And those are the words with and through the Army Special Forces, the Green Berets are purposefully built to work with and through indigenous personnel. And while we are not exclusively the only unit that does that, we are built by design to do that. When you think about what with and through really means you're talking about being leaders, being teachers, being advisors. Yes, we have to be war fighters and warriors. We need to be able to go in, kick down doors, shoot bad guys in the face, jump out of planes, slide down ropes, all the cool guy stuff. Yes, we do that. We need to know how to do it. But we're built to go into an uncertain or denied area segregated from any support to be a self-sufficient 12 man assault force that can then find, recruit, train, advise and lead locals into combat. That's what enticed me. And that is the differentiator between Green Berets and the rest of the military. Now, the through piece, I think a lot of people are like, got it, Rambo thinking about the missions that they've seen in media, but the with piece, the communication piece that goes into being successful in a self-contained unit in enemy territory to gain intelligence first before you get into kicking down doors or doing any of the stuff that we see in the media. What did that mean to you when you were joining and how did you feel about your ability to communicate and build rapport? Yeah, it's a good question. When I first came in, I wanted to be Rambo. I wanted to direct action gunfighter. While I had read the definition and enticed me, it to me was more about I want to be offset in an austere environment left to me and my little crew of dudes to like figure this out and kick some ass. It takes a bit of time to be in the community and be doing the work to gain that experience to truly grasp what with and through actually mean. That's a great point. I'm not sure if I've ever gone into any kind of detail on this on a public forum, but there is a differentiating factor with involves me being alongside another human being. Right. So me and AJ are going with into that door. Like I'm right there. I'm with you. That obviously requires a high degree of communication and trust and training and rapport and relationship development and all these things for that to be real. Through is kind of a phase beyond that because through doesn't necessarily mean that I'm physically with you. I can work through an individual and be in an entirely different country. It adds to the complexity and difficulty of all the things that are required to work with somebody have to be amplified in order to effectively work through somebody. And that's really where we make our money is the green beret mission is to work ourselves out of a job and then we get tasked with the next one. We need to make you as good as is necessary so that you can do this without me with you. I may be able to continue to advise you and work through you from someplace else. But you've gotten to a point where you're so good at this that you no longer need me physically there. And a big part of that is building trust to work through someone. There has to be trust and we're talking about across cultures, across languages, completely different upbearing backgrounds to be able to then exit the mission. Trust who's left there to do it on their own and then go to the next face, the next field, the next phase of what your mission is. So how do you approach those situations coming from a football background? Not really being super familiar with the mission at the start and building yourself up to be in a place of building trust rapidly with team members and those that you're working with. Well, I could say when I first got started, my mentality was I'm just going to be that good at what I do. And that will be how I influence other people. It's going to be skill based. I'm so obviously this great at this thing that the people around me are going to want to do it. And while certainly skill plays a factor without question, as you begin to play this game year after year after year, you realize that there are the intangibles about relationship development that absolutely come into play. And you bring up an amazing point that I'm not sure but also have talked about the word trust. And it's a it can be a slippery slope in our world. And I say that because while we go in and we link up sometimes with an unknown asset or groups of people, we have to place at least a degree in trust in them. For them to be able to do the work that they need to do and vice versa. That said, you're dealing with people you don't know with guns and with lethal capability. It really can't be just this over the top, blind trust, at least out of the gate. That has to be built and cultivated and worked as you go. And there's a really difficult balance that comes into play between our own security and fostering a relationship because if I just met you, right? Yeah. You know me, I'm an SF guy. Okay, cool. Hey, man, I'm here to help you out. We're having an unknown conversation. It's me and you. And as we're talking, I've got six of my friends standing around me right now with rifles pointed directly at your head and we're having a conversation. Odd's eye, you're not going to feel very comfortable. Odd's eye, you're going to be having some questions and you're going to have a lot of doubts, right? It's a hyper secure example that I'm stating. That would make me feel real comfortable. And if you flinch the wrong way, you're done, right? Any one of these guys in a smoke you period. So I feel real secure, but it puts me in a horrible position to establish a relationship and build rapport, which is a mission requirement for me to be successful. If you go the other end of that same spectrum and I walk in to your home or wherever you tell me to meet you by myself, no weapon and six of your friends are standing around pointing guns at me. Well, you feel great and I'm totally exposed, very vulnerable. Which is great for report development, but I'm in a horrible position security wise. Right. So it's this constant play back and forth between trying to find the appropriate amount of security for us and displaying a sense of trust with whoever it is that we're trying to influence. Right. And I'll say, man, and I use this with some of my leadership curriculum where I teach where if you're in a leadership role, regardless of the capacity, with that position, there is a requirement to trust your teammates, those that you lead. Yeah, there's the expression like trust is earned, which I agree with to a degree. However, as a leader, you assume that risk that you have to trust your team to accomplish said task. That that's part of being a leader. That trust is not automatic from the team to you as the leader. That is where that needs to be earned. So as in a leadership position, because of that role, I have to trust you. Otherwise, this none of this will work. Your trust of me is something that I have to earn as a leader. So when you go into these roles, again, we're talking trust within this operational environment. If I come in, me and my team, and we're charged with leading this element, training, advising, we're the leaders. We have to trust that individual. That's part of the risk that we assume in that role. Our trust of them is something that we have to earn over time. And in that situation, going back to the guns pointed at each other's head, you trusting them, they're keeping you safe just as much as you're promising them safety in the mission. So you're coming into the six guys and guns. You need to build a relationship with them. They're going to go get some intelligence for you that's ultimately going to keep you guys in the six guns and your team safe. And you have to rely on the intelligence that they're bringing back to you for the mission to be successful. So the trust is both ways. It takes a level of vulnerability in your part, even though you have the guns in the weaponry to be able to get the intelligence you need to complete the mission. And they have to trust that you're actually going to keep them safe because oftentimes they're actually sacrificing themselves potentially in retrieving the intelligence that you need for your mission. I think all young men who come to terms with their own power, their own goals, they're looking out for number one. And we see it all the time that the mindset that that young men will then put together in order to excel out of the gate is going to be, I'm just going to lean on my skills just as you were saying in that moment. But once you get in, you start getting your hands dirty, you start to assess everything that is going on, you begin to learn that it's a bigger picture than just yourself. And if you're going to succeed, it's going to take the help of others. You can't just lone wolf it. Was there a moment for you maybe was in basics or getting into these missions where you recognized, hey, there's another skill set that I'm going to need to learn here that I'm going to have to humble myself to that is new that is going to get me to where I need to go. Oh, man, I mean, that that continues to happen to this day. And I've been doing this, you know, coming up on 17 years, I'd say probably the the first would be the first time I was in an operational environment of deployment in Afghanistan. And, you know, again, it's I've done all the push ups and I can run really fast and I can hit targets with my rifle and I've gotten decent at these like tactical tasks and that's what's going to enable me to be successful with this. And you mentioned the word humility and, man, I learned very, very quickly that those that I was advising many of them, I was learning from and it was like, well, this is unexpected. Sure, there's a lot of work that needs to be done and there are plenty of things that you do not know at all. But I'm learning myself as we're working through this relationship. And that humility for me was a new dawn of understanding of something I needed to be working on more deliberately. And yeah, you're the big six foot six tattooed green beret. OK, cool. But if you walk into any relationship development environment with that chip and that ego and that sense of of looking down on anybody, regardless of your skill, I think you put yourself in a position that makes it as close to impossible to establish any kind of rapport relationship development, effective communication. So the humility for me came in very, very early. It's something that still took time to develop, but I noticed it pretty much immediately once I actually got to work. Well, we see it in a lot of our clients, this idea of like I'm going to work on my physical strength, I'm going to work on my all the skills I need to do my job well, I'm going to become the best at myself. And much of what you're talking about is like I'm going to be the best at the rifle. I'm going to be the stacked guy at the gym. All of this is stuff that you do on your own. But these missions now we're involving other people. Now we're actually building relationships on the team and then outside the team to accomplish the mission. It's a different mindset from being that lone wolf of, OK, well, I know that I can do more push-ups than this guy. I know that I can do these feats of strength. So once you move beyond that initial skill set of developing who you are as a person and an individual, how did you approach starting to build relationships with these other team members? Because I'm assuming a lot of the people who are drawn to Green Brace came in with the same mindset as you. It was like I want to kick down some doors. I want to shoot some enemies. I began learning it from my teammates and it took a minute for me to see what they were doing. But once I did, I was able to employ that myself. And it's the concept you're talking about where I'm the new guy on the team. I barely have a clue as to what I'm doing. I can barely get in the front door of this building. And these guys have been doing this for years and I would get assigned with a particular task. Hey, go execute this. Every single person on my team, every one of my teammates could do that task better than I will be able to do it. And they know that. So it wasn't about doing this thing as well as it could possibly be done. It was about me doing the thing as best as I could and then them coming in to help me kind of clean it up and or being OK with, let's say a 90% solution because I was the one that came up with it. If my senior teammate had done it, we get to 99. I did it. We got to 90. While we're missing a 9% gap, overall, bigger picture, my development is happening much faster. So the understanding that this one thing we're going to make a concession of this one thing because it's in the best interest of this individual's growth, which is in the best interest of our overall team. And then taking that same concept and then I began leveraging that with the partner force that I'd be working with. And it was, hey, this is the things that we need done. X, Y, Z, go knowing that I could do all of those things faster, more efficiently and with a better outcome. But that's not the bigger picture value. It's we need to be developing these people to do the things that need to be done to make them better so we can collectively be better. So just being OK with what I'd say is a lesser than result. But if you can zoom out and see the greater value in doing that and you do it again and again and again over a period of time, you can see the collective beginning to rise. And along with that, I think there's often a difficulty to ask for help when you have accomplished so much on your own. And now you're faced with a challenge that maybe you don't know a situation where you haven't encountered. And again, when a lot of people think of someone like you, they don't think being able to ask for help comes naturally. Great point. So asking for help, how is that approached in the military and your training? And how do you view that on a team basis? One of the aspects that make special operations so effective is the high degree of confidence that the individuals have. It's a very slippery slope, a very thin line between confident and cocky or confident and arrogant. And oftentimes, you know, we kind of weave back and forth. And it's when you spill over into that realm of arrogant cocky that you never need help from anybody kind of mentality, you are limiting yourself and your own growth and the effectiveness of the unit. So to bring in the point we talked about a minute ago, that the humility is a huge ingredient to keep that measured. I may be really, really good and I am good and it's evidence based. But I have a lot to still to learn. And I may learn that from a teammate. I may learn it from a local Afghan. You know, I'm willing this to continue to learn. Yeah. That I think is an essential piece of that equation. And I think that's what has come out for Johnny and I working with special forces is just that hunger to learn and all the various training that you go through. It's just apparent in every single student that comes through around how badly they want to level up these skills and recognize that part of the learning process is also failure. Great point. And I know I want to talk about the injury and obviously getting back to walking because a big part of that involved failing and failing amongst your peers people you already proven yourself to before the injury. So walk us through what happened and then your road back to getting deployed again. This was the third time I was wounded in combat on the same deployment. Prior to this I had taken some shrapnel to the back of my shoulder and then in a separate engagement I took a AK-47 round of the face and then I took a bunch of machine gun rounds to my legs. And this was the result of an insider attack. Me, a guy that we had been working with turned against us and opened up using a belt fed machine gun into me and my friends from about 25 or so feet away. Catastrophic incident. 12 American casualties, three of which were killed. Me and another eight were wounded. The result being obviously the amputation on my leg above the knee. I'd spent a year at Walter Reed learning how to live life as a one-legged guy and learning how to operate a prosthetic. The decision for me was made when I was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed. Still fighting for my life and I'm whacked out on ketamine and delotted and all these pain meds. I'm in and out of surgery sometimes two, three times a day. But I knew I was going to go back to doing what I do. There was no question in my mind about that. The decision was made. I knew what I was going to do. I hadn't a clue as to how, but I knew what I was going to do. And upon my return back to my unit, which at the time was at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, I was offered a full medical military retirement, which I wanted nothing to do with. Found myself in a bit of an administrative street fight with the Army, ended up winning that. So I was able to stay on active duty status. I had been working as an instructor during that time. And then I made it known to my leadership that I wanted to give it a shot to get back onto the team. And God bless them because they did give me that opportunity. There had never been an above any amputee to return back to an ODA and to return back into combat. So it was, it was unprecedented, you know, like with anything that has never been done before. There's usually a lot of questions and doubt and concern and, you know, confusion. I heard the term practicality quite often, like be practical. Expectation management was one of my favorites. I hear that a lot because, you know, no one around me wanted to come out and say, you'll never do this. You know, people wanted to be positive and supportive. But people also wanted to be realistic. And, you know, this, it came from a place of love. And even though there was doubt and I knew that, it came from a place of love. People wanted to protect me from either going back into that type of lifestyle or just protect me from the pending failure that most thought was inevitable, that I would try so hard at something and fail at it and that could send me down this negative kind of spiral. I was able to see that for what it was and kind of set that aside. I respect your opinion. I appreciate your opinion. But I'm driving on. I know what I need to do here. So my leadership, they did give me the chance to demonstrate my ability to return back to the team. They put me through and ended up being a 12-week assessment phase of different tests and they threw the kitchen sink at me, man. I mean, a lot of it was physical, as you could probably imagine. And then it just kind of spun out into a bunch of different aspects of performance. So after 12 weeks, where I was doing usually two to four different assessments a week was when I was giving the approval to return back to the team. I went back to the same team I was on when I was wounded. And at this point, they were real fire long in their train up. So about six weeks later, we were back in Afghanistan. So obviously there's a physical component. But then there's also the mental where you've basically heard all of these people try to manage your expectations and you've now beat all of their expectations. But there also is a little bit of a selfishness that can come across of like, well, are you going to be able to come back into the team and join the team improving yourself? And I know part of it is now you went from being able to walk being at your best, learning how to walk again and something that is going to be the first real like moment of test of failure of like, I'm doing this around peers who regard me in a very strong way positively. And now I'm failing at things that I could do before. How did you internally manage that? Yeah, it was it was hard, man. It was it was really hard. You know, when I was at Walter Reed and I first got up back up on on two legs the first time I used a prosthetic, where I took my first steps for the second time, a moment that I'll never forget. And, you know, you're in this clinic and you're walking along these parallel bars. That's just something you can hold on to. And your prosthetist is making adjustments. He's kind of giving you some like basic coaching and kind of how to make the knee work and stuff. And you're kind of I'm just going back and forth just down this one, this one strip, boom, boom, boom, and my confidence is building. And I'm starting to loosen my grip on these bars. And, you know, I'm feeling like, I mean, I got this. This isn't this isn't that difficult. I can do this. And then the inevitable happens, which is you wipe out and you hit the floor and you're down there and you're looking up. You know, my father was there. My now wife was there. My doctors are there. My therapist is there. And I'm looking up at them kind of like what just happened. And my prosthetist was like, all right, now get up. And that was it. And getting up from the ground literally is much different with one leg than with two. So I'm literally there just like fumbling this thing around. I have no idea what I'm doing. And eventually I get myself back vertical again. And I said, what happened, man? Like I had a pretty good stride, like what I do wrong? And he's like, this exercise only ends one way. You're going to keep going until you hit the ground. This is done by design. And we give you the guidance of stand up. And while these guys are not psychiatrists or psychologists or behavioral health docs or cognitive docs, they're prosthetists. In that moment, they enable you. They equip you with both physical capability and mental capability to your point. Not just can you physically get up off the ground because you're going to continue to fall a whole bunch as you try to figure out how to do this thing. But mentally, getting back up after getting knocked down, you're going to continue to fail at this. And they were not about to rob me of that training opportunity. So that was my kind of my first segue into that experience of failure in front of people that I want to impress and people who care about me. And very slowly over time, I just became more and more comfortable with with failure. Now, when you're at Walter Reed, you're in this bubble. Yeah, you're in a bubble and you're surrounded by people, especially the time that I was there in 2013. I mean, Walter Reed was packed with service members dealing with a variety of injuries. Not only did that give me an amazing gift of perspective because, I mean, you look at I'm looking at quadruple amputees that are getting after it. I'm looking at guys that have such severe traumatic brain injury that they don't recognize their wife and their kids. When you're surrounded by shit like that daily, this is a paper cut. This becomes nothing. So it put me in this position of, oh, like, let's go. Right. Let's go. And so failure at Walter Reed when I was there was very easy to do because I was around. A whole bunch of people who were failing at things constantly. Yeah, they're there to support you. You're now joining, rejoining a team that has their own doubts because no one has ever done this before. Well, that's where it got different. So when I left Walter Reed after a year and I was one of like the guys in the rehab gym, like getting after it, right? I go back, I go to Walter Reed. I go from being kind of at the top of this mountain in terms of physicality and capability in this Walter Reed bubble where, well, failure is not only extremely common, but it's necessary. And now I'm back at Bragg. Now I'm back with my teammates. Now I'm back with able-bodied, savage green berets. And I just went from the top to the absolute bottom in terms of capability. And it totally shook me. And I was like, oh man, I cannot be perceived as weak in front of these people. And these are guys I consider brothers. We've been through a lot together. Guys that I love genuinely and who love me. I cannot let them even get a glimpse of me in a weakened state. I need to earn their trust. I need them to know that I'm capable. So I tried to almost hide the fact that I was an amputee. I'd have like long pants on all the time. I would never take my leg off, my prosthetic off in front of anybody else. The mere image in my mind of people seeing me in that makeup, just I couldn't handle it. I need to be seen like everyone else here. And we're in the gym and we're training. I'm doing all the things with my teammates right alongside me. And at one point it was a long day. We had like two, three training sessions. And my leg is just hammered to shit. And I'm hobbling around. Whenever I needed to take my leg off to kind of let it air out or let it dry off, I would go to like a closed off room, do that, put myself back on reconfigure and then go back out to where everyone else was. And one of my teammates came up to me and he's like, hey man, why don't you just take that thing off and like let it breathe or just like take a minute. Like you're clearly in pain and you're not doing yourself any favors right now by this. And of course I knew my reasoning was I don't want you to see me as a one-legged guy. I want you to see me as just another SF guy. And he goes, you do know, we all know you only have one leg. Like you're not fooling anybody by this. You're causing yourself unnecessary damage and you're regressing what you're able to be doing based off of pride and ego. He goes, you know, we all know you only have one leg, right? And I'm like, shit, yeah, you're kind of right, you do. And that was like a big spark for me, because it was just a quick impassing. He drops that on me, a guy that I love and respect. I'm like, you know what, you're right. So I just became much more cool and comfortable with being vulnerable in front of these guys. And then what I noticed, the magic happens, which often happens on the backside of most fears is when you can get past it. That's where the magic sometimes exists, is when I would do that, I would let people see me for what was really me. And you can take this literally or metaphorically because it's true either way. It actually began to uplift people around me just that much more, right? Not only is it just that much more obvious that we got a guy with one leg over here that's getting after it, but he's willing to expose who he is. He's being vulnerable in front of us. He trusts us. And he's not making any excuses about this. He's still getting here, getting after it. I was watching these other guys elevate their game. And then that, while phenomenal for us collectively, for me, selfishly, I began to thrive off of that. And I just kept wanting to double down and double down and double down. And seeing that kind of impact on those that I care for was pretty powerful, man. You were stating in the book that you did not want to rejoin your team if you could not be an asset to those guys, right? And added to that team rather than to take away from that team. And there's a self-awareness there that says, listen guys, I'm not willing to put you in any danger due to what had happened to me if I can't get it together. And I'm only rejoining if I'm going to be not only can pass all of the requirements but to be an asset to this team and added bonus, right? And that also allows those around you to relax a little bit as well because now they don't have to worry about like, well, who's gonna talk to Nick and let him know he's not cutting it or it's allows everyone to like, well, let's get you there. You have that wherewithal to understand that you didn't make it just about yourself and to be selfish in that moment but it was to the collective. It's the totality of that team and everything. So it's like, I think in just stating that allows them to feel good that they can talk to you about what you're going through and how you're going about it and help you get to being that asset. That's a great point. And I wanna be clear that I didn't have that viewpoint from the beginning. I eventually, I did get there. When I was in the hospital and even when I first got back to Bragg and I was working as an instructor and I was just training like an absolute madman. In the book, I actually outlined what a typical 24 hours looked like. I mean, it was just dialed into the minute. Every gram of protein, every calorie, every minute sleeping. I mean, this was all I did. It was like nothing else mattered to me. It was completely all in and it was certainly extreme. But when I was operating in that capacity, it was almost entirely about me doing what I believed I needed to do. Proving to yourself. Proving it to myself. Proving myself right. Proving the naysayers wrong. Making the enemy regret not killing me when they had the chance is about getting back to an industry that I love and a lifestyle that I love. It was about me living my purpose forward. And it was around the early portion of this 12 week phase I was telling you about where I was doing these assessments. And I knocked out maybe four or five of them. I had a lot of momentum. I felt really good. I was confident. I'm like, bring it on. There is nothing you can throw at me that I will not be able to figure out. And I wake up in the middle of the night. My wife tells the story better than I do. I mean, I popped up like the exorcist. Okay, it was like 2 AM, 3 AM. Sweat, hot rate, right? Like I feel like I'm gonna die. And it takes you a minute to realize where I am. And Tony, my wife like pops up and she's like, are you okay? What's going on? I don't know what's happening. And then it dawns on me exactly what was going on. And it was in that moment, I realized I was going back to a team. And it scared the hell out of me. For one, it scared the hell out of me. And two, I felt horrible about myself. Just this wave of guilt for having really not thought about them up to this point. I was so obsessed with doing this, this tunnel vision that I didn't even recognize them. And this team dynamic that we're talking about felt horrible, didn't sleep the rest of the night, going to work the next day. And again, I'm working as an instructor and these guys are on the team. So we're in the same vicinity. We see each other all the time. We're in the gym together all the time. And I bomb into their team room and I said, guys, I need five minutes, please. Of course, what's up, man? And I tell them what happened. And I said, man, first off, I apologize that I have yet to not only think about this but bring this to your attention. Is this in the best interest of the team? Have you guys discussed this at all? And I mean, really discussed it. You know, we're in the gym yesterday and you're telling me, yeah, man, let's go get after it. You got one more rep, like you're right there. But have you guys really discussed this? Because I'll say it right now, as bad as I want this, as obsessed and driven as I am. If you guys tell me that there is no spot for me back on this team, I will cut this mission off right now and figure out what the next phase of my life will look like. And they said, look, man, we've talked about this probably a dozen times at this point. And the answer is we don't know if this is gonna work. But what we do know is we want to be the ones to decide if it will work or not. If you're able to make it back here, we wanna see for ourselves if it does work. And if it won't work, we're gonna be the first to tell you that. And I'm staring in the faces of eight or nine of the guys that were there, men that I love and trust, that are all looking at me just totally candid, no bullshit, we will be the first to tell you if this isn't gonna work. But we wanna figure it out for ourselves. And I left that discussion with just an entirely another degree of energy, like running through my body. And not only to Chris's point that I was able to put my trust in them to have that objectivity. So you know what? I may never be able to see this that logically because I'm so emotionally attached to it. But you can. So you know what? I'm gonna just focus entirely on execution and I trust you guys to be that objective observer. And I trust your opinion and I respect it. So it enabled me to again kind of hone back in on what needed to happen. But what it also did was rather than me walking into the gym for my third training session of the day when I'm just beat to shit, I'm exhausted. All of the excuses are sounding the most convincing to do anything other than this. Rather than me thinking about this like glorifying moment returning back to Afghanistan with my arms in the air saying I'm back, right? Which was a vision that I had playing in my head over and over and over and over again for months. Rather than thinking about that, I was thinking about my teammate's five year old son. I was thinking about my teammate's wife. And I need to destroy this next training session not so that I can have that glorifying moment but because that kid is depending on me doing this workout right now. So it allowed me to weaponize my love for them that took my output to a whole nother dimension. So that finish line in your head was focused on getting back to Afghanistan and it was very personal for you. And in that moment recognizing that, hey, this is the team and this is them being honest with me around the self-awareness that I may be lacking due to my drive and desire personally to get back to that moment. Yeah, and like I said, it kind of became an asset for me on both fronts where while I needed to be aware of my gaps and weaknesses, I had an entire team of dudes that I knew were keeping a close eye on that and would hold me accountable to those things. And as you were saying earlier, wearing pants, avoiding them seeing you, that was acting in an inauthentic way and everyone knew it. But for you, it was out of pride. 100%. And once you actually shifted into just being authentically you around your team members, allowing them to give you the feedback that you needed around how you were progressing and how they were feeling, talk about that moment of actually rejoining the team and getting back and what that meant for you. My last physical assessment that I ended up doing. And again, I didn't know where the end of this road was. It was just, they just kept throwing things at me. What would end up being my last physical assessment was one that my unit at the time was third group out of Fort Bragg. We had a lot of casualties. All third group did was Afghanistan. So the unit had a bunch of guys that were different degrees of banged up, most of which were trying to get back into operational status. So third group developed a physical readiness assessment specifically for wounded guys as a metric to figure out if they could go back to the teams. That's what ended up being the last one for me. And it was a brutal assessment. And actually it was the day before my test, I walked into the gym to kind of just loosen up, get ready for my big day tomorrow. And the group Sergeant Major, the group command Sergeant Major was in the gym, him and one of my buddies Chuck, who took a round through his hand, they had just completed taking that assessment. And the group CSM did it just to do it alongside one of his guys, perfectly abled body dude. And he's an absolute stud, his name's Mark Eckard. He's recently retired. He's an absolute savage. And they're both laid out on the turf, drenched. And I walk in and I'm like, Hey Chuck, he's like, what's up man? You know, he's like in barely breathe. He's losing peripheral vision. Hey, more in Sergeant Major. And he's like, dude, is it true that you're taking this test tomorrow? And I said, yeah. And he's like, all right man, good luck. I said, I just took it and it just kicked my ass. But I'll be here for that. I said, cool. Next morning, show up to the facility. And there's probably 75 people in there. They basically had to close the facility down because I had this, this entourage. My entire chain of command all the way up to the group commander, Command Sergeant Major was there and everybody else. I go through the assessment, I get it done. And I'm standing there. I'm on the verge of passing out, AJ. I can barely see straight, okay? I'm standing there trying to look tough, right? Like I could do it again if I needed to. I am on the verge of passing out. And Mack Eckard, CSM walks up to me and he goes, you know what man? You know I took this assessment yesterday. And I said, yeah. And he says, if I wasn't here to witness what you just did with my own two eyes, I would have never believed that that was possible. And I'm a little incoherent at this point. And I'm at the end of 12 weeks. And I looked at them and I said, man, that's great. But what the fuck else do I need to do to prove that I can go back? And my entire team, they're all start laughing because I'm talking to the group Command Sergeant Major. Like you don't talk to that guy like that. Like that. Yeah, you don't talk to that guy like that. But I'm slightly incoherent. I just blurted out. And he just smirks, you know, and he looks over at the group commander and he goes, the group commander goes, hey, CSM, this is your decision. This is a manning decision. I trust your call. But I don't know how we're gonna tell this guy no after what we've just put him through. And CSM looks back at me and says, all right, man, I'll have your orders ready tomorrow and you'll be back on the team next week. So next week, two short days rolls around and I walk back into that team room. And, you know, man, we had that moment. Me and my teammates had that moment, you know, high fives and hugs and all right, man, let's like, let's go to work. And then it was very quickly, let's go to work. It was a very short celebration. Couple minutes, right? Couple minutes and six weeks from now, we're gonna be in the box, like it's game time. So it was rewarding, something I'm certainly proud of, but I just didn't have the time and I'm blessed I didn't have the time to kind of bask in the sun of that success for longer than a few minutes because it was like, oh, shit, you worked to get here and now you're here and now it's really time to go to work. Why do you think so many men crave going back there? For you personally, what did it mean going back there? Because most people listening to this would be like, why would you wanna go back there where the enemy is shooting off your leg? Yeah, I'll answer for myself, but I know I speak on behalf of a whole bunch of people. My why I'll say is threefold. It's like three layers to it. On the exterior, it's competitiveness, a need to compete. And that's with 99.9% of special operators in this country is just we love to compete. And as much as we love to win, we hate to lose more and there is a difference. I get a greater emotional high off of losing than I do winning. So just the fact of me losing in that manner didn't sit well with me. I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna find a way to win. And for those that love to compete, whether you group an athlete like myself or not, there is no greater stage for competition than our world. You're competing with yourself. You're competing with your teammates. You're competing with the adjacent units, right? Green Berets versus Navy Seals. You're competing with the enemy. It is competition at the highest level. So those of us that enjoy competing, where else are you gonna get it like that? The answer is nowhere. So there's competition. A layer deeper than that is a word I've mentioned already and that's passion. I mean, I just love what I do. I love what I get to do. It's truly a privilege amongst mathematically just over 1% of the United States military is a green beret. So that's a privilege that's earned and one that I genuinely love to do. And most of that passion and that love comes from the people I get to work alongside of. Just amazing human beings that you witness with your own two eyes consistently what these people are willing to sacrifice for you and for each other and for a belief in something and for this little experiment known as America. Again, I simply cannot fathom finding anything remotely close to that anywhere else. And then lastly, kind of at the core, I would say is purpose, a sense of purpose, which is a term that I think has several different definitions. I view purpose as being a part of something bigger than yourself that creates an impact on other people. So it's externally driven. Passions for me, purposes for you and I am amongst the very few walking this earth that get to live a lifestyle of both passion and purpose professionally. And that's very rare. And when you find it, I think it's something that you owe it to yourself and those that you serve to hang on to it. So that's the why in real time when I was going through it, I didn't have that degree of clarity in my vision. A lot of this is like retrospectively analyzed after asking myself that question so many times. And why? Especially when you're in the face of people you love and respect that are essentially telling you this is impossible. As politely as they can. And they're asking the question. Why haven't you sacrificed enough? Like why go do this to yourself? Why go back? When I first began being asked that question, man, it angered me. I got mad about it. Yeah. Like how dare you ask me why? It's because this is who I am. It's because I was put on this planet to do something. I was born to be a warrior and to pledge an allegiance to a society in which I will defend at all costs. Like how dare you ask me that? Right. I still have that allegiance. That's not gone. No. Regardless of what happened. With anything, it's been amplified. Right. So for them to ask you why, it's almost like an insult to- I took it that way. Yeah. How you were feeling personally. Yeah. So there's this personal journey proving it to yourself, the team getting back out there. And now there's this complete shift where you're an inspiration to others. And in this situation, you don't go in saying, hey, I want to come out being an inspiration, certainly not with this injury. How did that feel when you start to realize that your journey has now gone beyond yourself, your family members, your team, and it's actually impacting others who have been wounded, who've gone through hardship in their life? It's an unusual position to be in. It's one that I'm slowly getting better at embracing, but you said it. I didn't come into this industry to inspire people. I had never ever been a part of my decision-making process. It was based initially out of anger and rage, and then I began doing it, and I began loving doing it. And that was it. Just living my life the way that I choose to live it. I got thrusted. I got forced into this kind of inspirational position. And it was when I got back from my first deployment as a one-legged guy, something that had never happened before. And the army and special operations command and wanted to highlight what we did here. Of course. It's a hell of a story, but I think more so it was about what you're talking about. Let's enable somebody else. It wasn't about me or them trying to give me this spotlight moment or like fame or anything. It was, wow, we did something pretty unique here. Let's not keep this to ourselves. That was the idea, but I began being asked to go to interviews and go talk to senior leaders and speak on behalf of our strength and conditioning program. I became this kind of asset that our leaders would use to demonstrate what is possible with the collective, because it wasn't just me by myself. Anything, father, I had hundreds of people that enabled me to do this. And I fought that kick in and screaming. And I learned very quickly when a force that general asks you to do something, he ain't asking you anything. That's an order. You will show up here and you will do well and you will effectively communicate what you did and what we did to this target audience. I learned that pretty fast. So, and I fought it, I just wanted to be a team guy, man. I'm an SF guy, I'm on a team. This is my job and this is what I want to do. Please don't treat me any differently. And I realized very quickly that there is power and uniqueness. In fact, that's what special means. People think special forces, many think elite or like the best of the best. And while that is true, special just means different. It's synonymous with different. We just do things differently. And it is by virtue of just how different we are, that's what makes us elite. So yeah, I am different. Mathematically, in reality, I'm one of X number. There is value within that. And it took me a minute to see that, but once I did and I began to see the effect that it was creating initially on just my little small bubble of my teammates, family, friends, I began to see that sphere of influence kind of grow. And the effect is something that I've started to become more and more in love with. Just that feedback of, wow, I've taken things to another level or thank you so much because I didn't know how to do this one little task and now you've given me some insight. And it just kind of slowly builds and it kind of keeps going and you expose yourself a little bit more, you let yourself a little bit more vulnerable, you battle with that question of, am I violating this ethos of being a quiet professional by putting this stuff out there and just a lot of internal conflict with am I doing the right thing for the right reasons? And I continue to struggle with that to this day. If I go do a piece of content or if I go to a public event and whatever it is, it's like, is this okay? Because I owe so much to this organization, this community and I wanna be representing them accordingly and professionally and with respect. And I've just learned that I know what my values are and I know why I'm doing what I'm doing and the effect is obvious. And thanks to the internet and social media, the world's gotten really small. I'm able to see that with my own eyes. I'm able to feel that impact that is created. So it's an unusual place for me to be in a position to inspire people, particularly people on the other side of the world. But it's not only is it humbling, but it's also a great honor. And I consider it to just be a responsibility at this point. Yeah, I mean, I can't even imagine coming back from that next deployment and now getting all this recognition for all the work you put in when all of the training up at that point is not to seek the spotlight, it's to be the ultimate team player and that duality of being pulled and told in one direction. Hey, we need you in the spotlight now. And all of your training saying, no, this isn't about the spotlight at all. Yeah, and you know what? While uncomfortable and awkward and difficult that was eventually and relatively early on, I was able to see it as an opportunity to highlight what the people around me did and the role that they played. And this idea of being self-made is ridiculous. And in fact, it's extremely debilitating and limiting. If you think that you're gonna go at something literally on your own, you will lose in the grand scheme of things. You may win some battles, but you're gonna lose. You're gonna lose to the person that has the humility and recognition and self-awareness that they've got weaknesses and gaps and they go deliberately out and find humans or opportunities that can help make them better and fill those gaps. That's who wins consistently long-term. So even though I would became this dog and pony show slime light target, every time it gave me a chance to say, yeah, I'm the guy up here with the one leg and I'm the guy that got back from the thing and I'm about to go on to the next thing. And yeah, I had to put in a lot of really hard work and make a lot of great sacrifices and the discipline and the work ethic and all those things. I had to do that myself. No one could do those things for me, but I would not be standing here in front of you right now with any of these accomplishments. Had it not been for hundreds of people that you may not be able to see them, they're not literally standing next to me right now, but they are very much standing next to me right now from the people that pulled me off the battlefield when I was originally wounded to the surgeons that kept me alive through some miracle, the PTs at Walter Reed, my docs, my orthos, my dieticians, my strength coaches, my teammates, my friends, my family, none of this happens without them. And that enables me quite a bit to continue to do things like I'm doing with you right now, literally a spotlight is on me. As you and I sit here, it's not me, man. There are hundreds of people sitting in the same exact seat right now, you just can't see them. I think it speaks to the relationships that you've been able to build and foster and your view on relationships. And I know we touched on this a little bit earlier. We talked about your leadership training. Leading is all about influencing. In order to influence people, you need to build trust and you need to establish a relationship. So how do you view relationship building, whether it's on the battlefield, whether it's gaining intelligence or even now that you're in this role where you have all these opportunities to meet dignitaries and build relationships as a civilian? I would say that there's a handful maybe of core competencies that are not going away in terms of relationship development. And one is put it bluntly, you have to give a shit. You have to care, actually care, especially in a small team environment, that's athletics, corporate, military. Even the untrained human is going to be able to get to know you well enough quickly to realize if this is a facade, if you don't actually care. If when you walk in the office and you say, hey, how are you doing? And you're looking at your watch, you're looking at your phone, like you're not actually asking me how I am, right? You're just, you're throwing it out there. You don't actually care. Versus coming in and look at someone's square in the face and sitting down with them and say, hey man, how was your weekend? So it was like small investments, but it has to be backstopped by legitimately caring about the person and about the overall mission. And that sounds like it's easy. I would say it is simple, but it's not necessarily easy because we got a million things going on too. We got a million responsibilities. And my wife is just, I forgot to take the trash out last night. I was hearing her this morning and my kids are going crazy and all these responsibilities, it's hot. It's simple, but it's hot. Not just as a leader, but as anyone that's trying to establish any kind of relationship with anybody, whether it's an Afghan that I want to take on to a direct action operation or a girl I want to meet in the bar, like you actually have to genuinely care and let them see that you care. Without that, I think you can have all of the persuasion techniques locked down to memory and your pitch had be dialed in. But without genuinely caring, I'm not sure any of those things go very far. Well, I want to add to that as well. I mean, just one move of asking somebody how they're doing and then picking up your phone and scrolling, no matter what you've built, that one action can totally change that dynamic and influence how that conversation is going to go and how that person is going to feel with you. Because if that, to them, insults them at all, if I thought this guy cared, he can't even be bothered to be present in this conversation, it's over. And to get that opportunity again is slim to none. Yeah. I mean, a lot of work has to be put in to make that happen. Yeah, it's so true. And I use the term leadership role, but this really applies regardless, is you are creating an effect every time you engage with anyone within that team or with anyone that's within your target. They're either taking away something that they wanna replicate for themselves or they're taking away something that they never wanna do themselves. Either way, like one of the two things is happening. And of course you wanna be batting as close to a thousand as possible, right? You want every single engagement you have, whether it's a 10 second conversation or a three hour meeting for the audience to go away with, wow, I just learned something great that I wanna use myself or replicate or build on versus that was horrible, this guy sucks, he doesn't care. But I just learned what I don't wanna do. And oftentimes I think that that pressure alone can be enough for some to just wanna off ramp and be, you know what, like maybe I don't wanna do this, maybe I just wanna be just in the gray and just do this one thing and I don't wanna be in this space because I just can't handle the stress and pressure of what it takes to influence consistently and be a positive source of inspiration or leadership to an individual, it can weigh on you. And of course no one does bat a thousand, right? Like we all have our off days. Like there's gonna be a time, even if it's inverting where you do the handshake with the phone and you're just, you're going at a thousand miles an hour. So I think that in itself is also powerful. The goal is to bat a thousand while knowing that that is never gonna happen. You're gonna make those errors and if you increase yourself awareness to be able to see when that happens, even retrospectively and you can come back and be like, dude, I'll own it. Hey man, yeah, you know what, dude? I came in, I said, what's up? I had the phone going, that was a dick move. I apologize. That's on me, I need to be better at that. Or the feedback comes from one of your teammates, one of your colleagues, like, dude, you've been kind of off. Right, out of it, not engaged, what's going on? Well, yeah, what's going on and be able to respect and appreciate that and then take that hard look under the hood going, what is going on? Because if I'm a trained wreck or suboptimal even, what would get am I gonna be to my team? So it's a balance of internal self-awareness and being very deliberate about that. And then we keep talking humility when you're getting that, whether it's from the lowest ranking person around you or from the highest or from a lateral, we talked about opportunity to learn and get better in humility, whether it's an Afghan or one of my teammates, these principles, I feel like we're almost talking in circles because it keeps coming back, but it's absolutely true. And you can't rush through it. Like, there's no strategy or hack to go beyond authenticity or caring or actually being engaged and present. So at a core level, these are just foundational to building and fostering that relationship, to opening that person up to a real conversation. And you know, some of our clients that we work with, they wanna skip the small talk. They wanna skip the caring part. They wanna get to the meat. They wanna get to the deep part. They wanna talk about the things that really matter to them. When in actuality, we all wanna get there, but we have to establish first, are we playing on the same field? Do you even care? Are you present enough to allow me to get to that place with you, allow me to get vulnerable in your situation to allow that Afghani to trust his life with you? Right, it's a phased operation. You have to earn the ability to get to those, you know, deeper conversations or more impactful transactions or whatever it is. That's earned. I'd say one of the more difficult types of missions that we get to put this back into kind of my world context is, you know, you go in and your early phase development of a partnered force, we got six months to work. Let's just say it's a six month rotation. We wanna be kicking down doors or shooting bad guys in the face. That's what we wanna do. Okay, at least get to the point where they're doing that with our capacity. Well, if you're at that early stage, man, of that relationship development, you can't just jump right to machine gun battles with these guys. So you have to earn that, you have to build that. You have to know going in, like, here's where I'm at, here's the current status, here's my mission. I'm gonna get these guys from here to here at no point are we gonna be doing the cool guy jumping out of planes, sliding down helicopter ropes and breaching doors with these dudes because it's just so early on in the relationship development. Yeah. You have to know that going in. The guys coming in behind me to replace us, they may get those glorifying moments, but we're not. Right, we're planting the seeds. We're planting the seeds, we're cultivating, we're watering, we're building. That's my mission right now is this. And then the flip side you just talked about is there are times where you're back home and now someone else has to take that relationship that was blooming to fruition, to move the mission forward. And there's gonna be that same moment of like, does this guy care? Does this new guy that I got passed to you? I know his partner, his team member said, yes, trust him, but I'm not seeing it. Seems like he's checking his watch a lot. It seems like he's checking the door. What's going on? You have to not only have the skill to be able to develop the relationship, to nurture the relationship, but you have to be able to have the skill to take a relationship that's established with the team member and transfer that trust over to you to complete the mission. That's funny, cause there's an expression that is relationships are non-transferrable. And I was told that early on in my career and then it was immediately followed by, but that's your job. And it's like, you just said that you can't do it. He's like, right, this is one of my early instructors. It was framed perfectly. It was like, everybody knows relationships are non-transferrable. Everyone were all like, yeah, Roger, that makes sense. And he's like, that's exactly the job you guys just got into, because that's how we operate. It's these short stints and that's exactly what you are gonna do. And everyone's gonna have a different perspective and a different way that they're seeing things. So I think to go into it expecting this linear progression, and this is just value regardless of what we're talking about, this linear progression that as long as I keep moving across time horizon, I'm gonna continue to get better and progress things at a linear pace is ridiculous, yeah, it's impossible. It's gonna go up, down sideways. You wanna be generally trending up and right, but it's gonna have some curveballs built within that. And those of us that are a little more experienced in this industry know that going in. So you navigate through it and you just wanna keep things trending. And if things take a left or a right, I spent six months working on this and now I'm home and I'm reading the reporting and I'm still kind of keeping an eye on it. Sometimes I just wanna lose my mind. Like, what are you doing? What are you guys doing? Things were trending great and now like you guys are off track. That can be frustrating, certainly as a more junior operator on a team, but as you do it and you get the vantage point from both sides multiple times, it's like for one, I can't control what they're doing. So let's like employ some stoicism and let's focus on what I actually can't control, which is me, because I'm just gonna lose my mind. I'm not over there right now working, I'm here right now working. So there's that and then there's just, these guys are professionals and there's a reason why they're doing what they're doing and they need to handle the game that they're playing the way that they need to and I need to trust that they're doing it for the right reason. Yeah, and with the report, you're gonna build story in your head, you're not fully there, it's not a complete download and your own ego's gonna get involved. Hey, I moved the relationship this far, like what's going on? Why are we sideways? And I know we talked a little bit about finding your core values. I think that's step one to self-awareness to be better at building relationships. But step two is being able to take that small talk and start to piece together the puzzle of who this person that I'm sitting across from is. What are their core values? What's motivating them? And how can I start to either meld the two, mine match their own to show them that there's some trust being built here or how can I leverage the fact that these are their core values to take that relationship deeper? Right, and that's gonna change. This is a great point because I'm on a six month rotation, I'm working all this stuff. You come in. Well, me and you are different. Do we have aligned values? Probably, but we're different. So you need to do what you just said based on you and that person. Who's different than me? So there has to be a bit of play that's not only tolerable, but forecasted. Like this is gonna happen because you have to establish that with this individual. And you just go around and around and around. And again, it can get frustrating at times. Yeah, for sure. But the alternative is we go and we don't come back. And I'm not sure how practical that really is for us. In the training component to the active duty component, obviously there's simulation, there's trying to get up to speed, but then you're actually in the theater of war. And there are team members looking at you to keep them safe. Can't simulate that in a training environment as best as we can. How do you deal with the internal self-doubt around what you've been trained on, what's happening around you, and move beyond that fear or doubt that you're feeling to actually perform? I'll speak for myself. Out of the gate, first deployment, first time operational environment, for me it was more fear-based. Like I am petrified of letting my teammates down. So while I may not know exactly what to do in this exact situation, I'm gonna do something and I'm gonna do it like as best as I possibly can at 100 miles an hour. And these guys are gonna kind of course correct me. Because you're right, no matter how aggressive you train on something, the game's gonna be different than the way you rehearse it. And you can talk contingencies all day long and what ifs and we do, but the game's different. What I began to learn early in my career, which is now something I employ with my guys, is the value of planning and preparation and having a plan. There's an expression that we have that no plan survives first contact. And we spent hours, sometimes months, planning on something. And then rounds start flying and the plan goes out the window. People start solving small problems in real time, really, really fast based on all the variables. And you could then look at that and say, well, then what's the point of planning at all? You mean to tell me, like, we are warriors and we're gonna go into a place where people shoot guns at us. You mean to tell me that we're gonna spend months planning for something. And the second a round goes off, the plan goes out the window, then why bother planning? And it was framed to me in a way that I think was brilliant. It's a plan is a known point to return to. So everyone can get back on the same page and continue to progress forward. But in the instance of chaos, there are countless individual problems that have to be assessed and solved in real time. And there's 12 or 15 of you that are all doing that at the same moment. It's impossible to forecast that out. So the plan is a known point to return to. And the training that we do can be viewed as the same way. The training is the foundation. We're not going to be able to train for every variable that could happen in combat. It's impossible. But it's the default you return to in a high stress environment. It's the having the firm grasp of the basics because what separates the elite from the average, it's not the new cool way to draw your pistol. It's the ability to do the basics in just more complex environments. The tasks are the same. The execution is the same. It's just how you do them as the environment gets more complicated and complex. That is how you scale from basic to advanced. The actual tasks itself is the same stuff. So you get really, really good at the basics and then you are trusted to make adjustments off of those as you employ those basics within the complex arena that is combat. You can't handle the complexity without understanding the basics. 100%. And unfortunately, a lot of times it's frustrating to train the basics. Yeah, especially if you've been doing it for a while. Yeah. You can almost get to be like, I've done this so many times. And then I think that that in itself is a great point is what separates experienced, I'll use the term operators because if I talk about myself and my colleagues, experienced in elite, it's highly seasoned experienced guys can very easily become frustrated or annoyed by doing these very simple tasks. Elite members of the same exact community are the ones that recognize what we're talking about and say, this is how we get to be as good as we need to be. And yes, I've done it 100%. I've done this a million times, but that's done on purpose. And it's because as the complexity becomes more and more uncertain in the environments in which we're gonna have to do these things, we have to be able to do them that much more automated and that much more seamlessly. That way we can focus on decision-making on all the variables. Yeah, it's so well put. And it's funny to watch in training moments where it's like, why are we training on this? Why are we doing this again? And that frustration comes up. And it's like, because in the moments that really matter, the boardroom, the opportunity to actually share that story where you need to be at your best, influential, persuasive, you're gonna have to draw on this basic framework for storytelling that we've practiced in this environment with people who aren't stressing you out, with people you already know and have camaraderie with because exactly that. There's gonna be a bunch of other things putting pressure on you in that moment. Other eyes, people judging people, you don't know, unfamiliarity with where you are and you're gonna be expected to perform at a high level in that moment. Yeah, in that arena. And the brain can only process so much information at a given time. It's like, don't quote me on the stats, but it's like 120 watts or some unit of measure. And through neurology, we've seen that basically anything more than three conversations happening and you're already at overload. Like your brain cannot be processing any more information outside of that. These are just three people talking to you. So imagine in these environments where the stress is going up, the heart rate's going up, the more automated and the cleaner you can do, your foundational framework is going to free up your mental bandwidth to be able to focus on all the other unknowns that are coming at you because this essentially happens automatically because you've done it so many times. So it gets wired and your brain gets fired. That's it. Under moments of tension and pressure, you're reduced or rise to the level of your training. Well said. We love to ask every guest what makes them extraordinary. What do you think is your X factor? Ooh, what is my X factor? Man, I'll tell you, I'm not stalling. Maybe I'm a little bit because it's a good question. You've thrown some questions at me that I have not talked about before and I'll be honest with you, this is on no bullshit. I love being caught off guard. I've done a lot of podcast interviews and stuff and I get it, a lot of people have the same question. This has been a lot of fun, man. I'm not closing too early. This is just an example of one that I've never been asked. What is my X factor? I'll use the term resilience and that's not intended to be bump a sticker. Resilience is a skill in my opinion. Resilience is earned and it's learned. It's learned behavior and I am now able to be appreciative of the way that I grew up and the challenges that I struggled with growing up as a young person, being the new kid in school every year and all the social difficulties that came with that, making friends and losing them and then being bullied and being the new kid year after year after year, really hard as a young person. But I can look back now as I've continued to pray and reflect and ask myself some of these similar questions. How did you do that? Or how do you do this? And resilience is one that keeps coming up and I was blessed to be put in a position of adversity at a very young age compounded with an amazing support system around me. It was to be my family, my parents, my younger sister. So that constant back and forth, that ying and yang where it was, get your ass kicked, scared, hurt, alone, reinforced by people who love you. And then back, that constant back and forth. And slowly over time, just like building calluses on your hands, lifting weights, you build up calluses in your mind and just get that much tougher. That's what toughness is. It's mental, toughness is mental, mental toughness and resilience. So I was able to begin building that from the age of, I don't know, four. And I point that out because I've yet to meet or know of anyone that's reached a high level of success or reached greatness that was able to do that without a degree of resilience. I think it is absolutely essential. And if for whatever reason you've managed to get to wherever you are without that, that you have set the bar for yourself incredibly low. You're not moving fast enough. You're not moving with enough aggression. You need to be pushed and challenged and fall on your face and put to the test and build up those calluses in your mind and continue to go rep after rep after rep. That is a common theme and common trend amongst the greatest people that we know of regardless of their industry. And I was able to start earning a lot of those reps and just build on it and build on it and build on it. So when I was met with the greatest adversity that a human being can really be put to, which is death, I had that in my arsenal. I had that in my tool bag to be able to pull that out and wield it. So I'd say just the gift, although very much so earned the gift of endurance and the gift of grit and the gift of being able to be continuously beat down and lose and have the willingness to get back up, learn from it and just keep going. Remarkable story of resilience. Thank you for sharing with our audience and as well as getting into the strategies, communication, relationship building. It was a lot of fun for me and Johnny to have you here with us, working our audience find about all the great work you do. The One Stop Shop would be our website. It's teammachine.com, machine spelled MCHM. It's got links to the socials and the book and a way to get a hold of me personally if anyone's got any questions, things on their mind. Beautiful. That's the spot, man. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate the time, bro. It's been fun. Thanks, man. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks, brother.