 All right, how's everybody doing? I know I'm the last thing between now and lunch, so we'll get right to it. To me, this is a pretty important element that I hope by the time we're done, you will find some things of relevance that you can internalize, reflect on. Do a little introspection, because you are the key to everything that's gonna go on. Chief Bass and her absence, I wanna thank her for her confidence. I will say this a little editorial remark. The guy that's walking down here right now on your left, you all should be, my left, your right, you should be mobbing him doing breaks and stuff because one of the bigger concerns I have about chiefs in my experience, as it was said, PCS 14 times, let it 100,000 people over the course of my career. So I have a little perspective on leadership, but a lot of times when we get into these positions, we're too tactical. And when we start talking about enterprise leadership and strategic, going from the tactical to the operational to the strategic, many times we invalidate or we limit our ability to be effective because when we get in the room, we're talking on a level, we got rewarded by being tactical and getting the job done, but that's not gonna get you to the next level. So my challenge to you off subject is you wanna continue to dig deep into those things that get you to a more strategic mindset. With that being said, I'll jump in. So the genesis of this program that we're talking about, where's James Carell, where's he at? Stand up James, my man, congratulations. So you can sit down right now. So here's the thing, I wanna talk about James. He knows, well he don't know where I'm going. James and I several years ago traveled around the country. We had a program in Air Education and Training Command called How to Lead and Win at Life. And it was the best practice in all ATC in 2017 and then it got different leadership and what happens is people don't talk and then stuff dies. So, but the genesis of the program, they wanted to beta test it and we did over almost 700 surveys, right? So he was the guy that traveled with me to Mississippi Defense Language Institute, Fort Lee, Virginia and various places. And in a program rated higher than any other program they ever had. They kept trying to run the numbers like this doesn't make sense. And in the middle of the presentations, people would, they would say they were suicidal. We would hand people off in real time to the military family life consultant. We would hand, people would go into rehab. We were handing them off to the chaplain, right James? And so I'm saying that to say some of the elements from this program, we started thinking about things. And so what I need you all to conceptualize as chiefs beyond the congratulations for being in this room is that we have to have a program that's deployable and agile. Because as you can read up here, we need to increase the understanding of each other and the mission through redefining culture to ensure forces are prepared for the next fight. And by the time we leave this place, it could be something else going on. It's gonna require us to get out in a demanding way. And then it comes down to performance. So I have an equation and my equation is simply this. Information minus application means you've simply been informed. And I will submit to you based on my experience and traveling around talking to hundreds of thousands of people post retirement that we don't need one more piece of information to be successful, to do what we need to do from an intrinsic standpoint. We have enough information. We don't have an information problem. We have an application problem. Information plus application equals transformed. You wanna change your organization? You need the application is based on accountability. Application is based on consistency and followup. And that's one of the reasons some of our programs or initiatives don't gain any traction because we have no continuity and we limited the ability to have continuity. And that's where this initiative about warrior heart came from that we'll talk about. I can't really get into a deep leap because I only have an hour. We have over 100 modules built. So obviously that's not gonna work. So we talk about a warrior. Anybody that I used to be their command chief, they will tell you, if you came to see me, you needed to know your airman's creed. And I told people that it wasn't so much that you memorized the airman's creed. It was that you internalized the airman's creed. I am an American airman, I'm a warrior. What is a warrior? We've given you, and then in the last line, wingman leader warrior. We referenced it a couple of times, but we really haven't defined what a warrior is. In my opinion. So when you look at this, and the embodiment of the airman culture, yet we tell you to be something and we haven't fully defined it in my humble opinion. What is a warrior? What are those attributes that make you fit to answer your nation's call? What are those things that help you understand the things that you have to comprehend and conceptualize to lead the next generation? Because don't get it twisted. The most important thing that someone will ever do to you is hand you someone's son or daughter and say take care of them. That's your most important responsibility. Yet in many organizations, we deal with self-care and personal development and enhancement measures by exception. And we can't do that. When aircraft lands, we run about 20 people up that they're gonna be making sure that that thing can be code one as soon as possible. So have we even defined what a warrior is? Man, y'all asking good questions. I'm glad you asked. Well, let me help you with that. So what I did was, I did a little research and I went and looked at the ethos that your Air Force Academy talks about. And when you think about a lot of components that's associated with being a warrior, it has to do with being stopped. It has to do with being vigilant. It has to do with being fit. But many of these things that we talk about doesn't really touch the individual in an intrinsic way. And we wonder why people come in our military and they commit suicide. We wonder why people come into our military and have poor coping skills. We wonder why some of these negative indicators continue to replicate themselves with no discernible change. And it's because culturally, many of us have bought into what a warrior is, primarily from a physical standpoint, primarily from a agility standpoint, primarily from a standpoint that directly correlates with how you equip yourself. So one of the things that we came up with myself and Dr. McCauley, we've been working with AMC and some other organizations throughout the enterprise and actually other sectors beyond the military. So this is some of the things we came up with. When you wanna look at how do you help cultivate a warrior, we believe these four elements are important. When you talk about resiliency, people are always talking about bouncing back. Bouncing back from a physiological standpoint or molecular standpoint is not what you really wanna do. Because if you bounce back from a circumstance, you actually the same place where you started, where you have an extracting knowledge, you have an extracted lessons, you have an extracted things that will help you become more dynamic. You know, it amazes me with people. I tell people, I say, in life, what you don't repair, you repeat. What you don't repair, you repeat. So a lot of people bounce back. Why do I keep dating this kind of person? Why do you keep dating this kind of person? You gotta defend, you mean to go to P-Mail, you got a defective picker. You need to get your picker recalibrated. Can I get a witness? I only wanna have a bad picker? Like, nah, take that thing back, that thing defective. So you look at resilience. You look at self-care. Self-care is not being selfish, it's wisdom or display. But when you start talking about things that make you who you are, you go to the elements of even being mindful. Because what you think becomes your concept and then what you conceptualize becomes your mindset. And then what you start to conceptualize within your mind becomes your behavior and your behaviors become your character. So we talk about mindfulness, but then we're in the military. We have a job to do. So then there's elements that address performance. What are you doing to operate at an optimum level? What are you doing to maneuver yourself in a manageable way so you can meander through those things called life? Well, that's an alliteration for you. Alliteration aside, though, let me keep going. So focus is the key to the elements, to developing the warrior. But why is this important? Man, y'all asking good questions. Right before lunch, they doing good, chief. They getting strategic. So you think about what I said about you. So why is your issue more challenging? Well, first of all, you have a different configuration than most people in this country. Less than 2% to 1% of our nation serves in the Air Force and or Space Force. Put them together. So now you've distinguished yourself in a dynamic way. For example, if the average person wanted to climb a mountain, we simply could say we could chart this mountain to a certain, we could actually measure out the precipice of that thing to the centimeter. But the challenge that you all have as American Airmen who are warriors and who have answered your nation's call is this, the mountain that you climb continues to build upon itself as you climb it. Can I get a witness? We in Alabama. So the mountain that you climb continues to build upon itself. And then the other element that they didn't tell you is, you will never reach Deion the top of your mountain as a chief. You'll never reach the top of your mountain. Anybody wanna know why? I said you'll never reach the top of your mountain? I ain't trying to trick you. Because elements keep changing. Some of the stuff that the previous presenters talked about, mission creep, you got family situations, you gotta make life decisions, you got Airmen coming in with problems and someone gave you parameters to operate in. And then all of a sudden, your mountain continues to build upon itself. Y'all are replacing some dynamic chiefs who never got to the top of their mountain. So how can you be successful in something that you can never fully get to that precipice? I'm glad you asked. So some of the things that affect you, that affect commitments to our warriors. We talked about some of them. Mission creep, different dynamics, emerging technology, family circumstances. When James and I traveled the country doing these presentations on a different subject, there were many times that chiefs came up and said, I got issues at my house. I've been spending all my time working on some of these things and I'm about to lose my child. I got a, I'm coming home to a person that's evolving and we're not even communicating. As chiefs, when we start talking about the heart of a warrior, we have to start to understand the elements, the things that people are going through. People feel lost. They feel confused, they're perplexed. General Brown said, accelerate change or lose. Meaning, I need you to get outside your comfort zone to do things that you've never done before. And oh by the way, you're gonna fail along the way. Because that's what happens when you try to do change at an accelerated rate. So guess what? We have to cultivate an environment where people aren't afraid to fail. Because if we cultivate an environment where we're hammering people who are failing, then innovation becomes stagnant. Innovation becomes stifled. So what we did was we went around a bunch of different installations, spent dozens and dozens and dozens of hours accumulating information on what people need to conceptualize. Let me be more specific. What you need to conceptualize as chiefs, to be the most effective people in the positions that you've been given responsibility over. So we talked to a bunch of folks, and this is what they said. They said, chief, when you talk to those chiefs, because we talked to leadership and then we talked to airmen. And they said, this is what I want you to tell me. So I'm gonna tell you what they told me to tell you. They said, first of all, chief, I need you to help, I need them to help us see beyond our sight. You can read. If you wanna build the ship, don't drum up people to collect wood, don't assign them task and work, but teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. See, sight is based on sensory. It's based on the senses that you have. It's based on experiences. But vision has nothing to do with your senses. You can be blind and have vision. And you have a lot of people who are basically coming to your organization. I'm gonna deviate to give you a statistical piece of information that I think is relevant. And y'all doing good, but I'm gonna ask y'all to participate just by putting your hands up on something. So in America, by the age of 14, 50% of Americans have experienced a PTSD traumatic event. Anybody besides Anthony Brinkley, before the age of 14, experienced a witness, a PTSD triggering type of it, put your hands up. Okay. Now, by the time we turn 24, that percentage goes up to 75, between 75 and 80%. Anybody here before the age of 24, experienced a PTSD type event, put your hands up. Everybody look around the room, put your hands up high. Look around the room. Y'all are bearing this out and some of y'all just don't wanna put your hands up. So what point am I trying to make to you? Some people's sight has been skewed because of their experience. Some people's sight has been blemished or they've become myopic from a heart standpoint because they witnessed trauma. They witnessed tragedy. And guess what? How do you, before your brain is fully developed from a physiological standpoint? By 25. So about 80% of people to come to your organization, they have experienced trauma. They may have undiagnosed trauma and by definition, untreated trauma. War your heart. The heart of the matter is, it's a matter of the heart. So they say, chief, tell them to help us figure out to make sense of our circumstance. You might see a person that has an attitude in your opinion. They might be distracted and they're dealing with trauma. But what great leaders do is they bring people together. They create inflection points that draw people in. They don't, this is what people keep, I do a lot of D&I stuff. And people are like, those are hard conversations. I'm like, they're not hard conversations. They're just conversations. But when you're not used to having conversations, then everything becomes hard. But they're not hard conversations. I remember I did some, McDill had me come down when all of the rice was going on. I did like, I don't know how many sessions, like a bunch of hours of focus groups. This one guy came to me, Caucasian guy was like, chief, man, I thought when you came here that you was gonna hammer me. I said, why? Did you do anything to me? He said, no. I said, why would you make an assumption that I would treat you wrong just because we're talking about equity for all? And so I'm trying to tell you that as chiefs, as the air was like, help us understand. Anybody besides me by a show of hands never thought they would live to see the age of 25. Put your hands up. Look around the room, y'all. You got people in this room who never thought they'd be 25 and they're chiefs. And I'm trying to get you to understand something. The biggest thing about diversity it's not about having four of them, two of those, one of those. Diversity not about how you look is how you see things. It's all about perspective. But we bring the wrong people in and we blow up half our organization and you gotta do damage control after they leave. They also said, they want us to be, I already touched on this. It's impossible, says pride. It's risky, says experience. It's pointless, says reason. Give it a try, whisper it to heart. When you cultivate an environment that's rife with innovation and getting people to understand that there's something greater than themselves and on the other side of that pressure point is an awakening. It's a moment of clarity. Now you can start doing things that others have never done before and having results that others have never achieved. But let me get y'all somewhere. Why do we need a deployable program? First of all, there's some people, I won't say about it in this room, but there's some people that don't need to be deployed anywhere. They need orders to their house. I worked with some of them. I ran a whole bunch of people out there for it. When I retired, it was like 1,000 people at my retirement. I think most of them came to make sure I was leaving. They said, he got to go. I said, it's cool. I PCS 14 times, they were like number 15. I said, nah, I don't want to be a picture on the wall. Don't be a picture on the wall, chief. Don't be a picture on the wall. Every time you show up, it's an event. No, you ain't getting out enough. Here come the chief, that's an event. No, you don't want to be that chief, but let me get back to this because I don't have a lot of time. So first of all, for those you put this in your mind, before you can be deployed, you got to be employed. You got to be strategic in your mindset. You got to be a deep thinker. You have to be approachable. One thing I tell people is this about chiefs. You got to be two words, coachable and approachable. You got to be coachable from everybody because you got people that you don't know. The odds of you being born is 1 in 400 trillion. That person you met, you didn't meet them until you met them. Don't treat somebody like somebody else that reminds you of that person. You need to figure out what makes them different. So you have to be coachable from anybody. And then you have to be approachable. I never will forget when I made chief, this person said, Brink, I want you to remember one thing. Whenever you talk to an airman, it may have taken him a day, it may have taken him a week, it may have taken him a month to get the courage to come talk to you. And to that person, you might be the most important person they talk to that day. And if you're distracted or you got your phone in your hand or you seem inconvenienced, you probably don't need to be anybody's chief because that will proliferate through your unit. I know that there's nobody in this room like this, but the people back at your base, let them know. So, so now you need to be employed to be deployed. This is what happened in my opinion. We went, oh, went the wrong way. God, I got caught up. So what happened was, I think people are starting to use COVID as an excuse right now. I told General Brown when he took over, I used to be his command chief when he was a wing commander. And I told him when I was at his ceremony, I said, General Brown, if we can get all these people in the hangar to come commemorate or talk about this transition from General Goldfiend to you, organizations need to figure out how to get their people together. If you got people in your organization, I don't care what the policies are. People aren't designed to function in a silo. Silos, they keep a lot of stuff in. You can keep barley, you can keep grain, you can keep different types of agricultural things, you can keep weaponry in a silo. But the thing about a silo is nothing can go in and nothing can come out. And when all this stuff happened, we started functioning in a silo mentality. So now people have separation anxiety. They don't know how to connect. People were missing people so much and then we got y'all back together, you ain't having any patience. Man, why they talk so much? Last week, you was like, well, anybody talk to me. Right? Except for that dude named Jack Daniels. He talking every night, but I don't have time for that. We got into a silo mentality. But people are designed, I keep, I'm having too much fun. People are designed to connect. They're designed to interact. Any introverts in here besides me? See y'all laughing. Introverts get it. I'm an introvert. My gifting is an extroversion. When I finish with y'all, I gotta go lie down. Am I right introverts? Heck yeah. But okay. Time to be fragmented cheese. So we talked about the attributes of the heart when I showed you that slide with the academy. But this is the thing about the heart. When you look at the term heart, cardiac, the derivative of the word is cardia from the Greek. And the thing about the cardia, it means it's like a pump. And it pushes things through your circulatory system. It gives the ability to everything else to function the way it's designed. Do you realize you can cut your leg, your arm, you can take your ear, your eye? You can't live without your heart. And some people are walking around with a deficient heart. It's your physical center. It's the seat of your emotions. I feel this way. And then your feelings turn into concepts. That's why I can't trust. That's when you come up with those definitive statements. That's why I don't do this. That's why I do that. It's where your values are contained. As my Godfather said, the heart is the snitch of the soul. How you doing? I'm fine. Look in your eyes. Your eyes don't speak that statement. The heart's the snitch of the soul. That's why a lot of people, they take horrific acts. And they do different things because they've been spending their life and see if anybody knows. Where in the what? Nobody remembers? I don't even know who in this room. James, you should remember a mask. We done taught people in this culture when stuff ain't right, don't act like it. How you doing? I'm living a dream. Man, I wish there was two of me. I'm doing so well and you going home crying. And guess what? I ain't trying to be funny. It's people in this room depressed. And when you laugh about something that's not funny, you can dismiss the person. Every time I do presentation like this, people pull me aside. I do work at the first sergeant academy. I train every first sergeant in Air Force. I've been doing it for four years. Since I've been teaching this program at the first sergeant academy, first sergeant withdrawals have dropped 75% in Air Force because we're teaching them stuff's gonna get hard. And when it gets hard, what do you do? We've given them tools and I'm trying to get you to understand we laugh about stuff cause we don't talk about it. The hard is where your past is pursued or extinguished. You can be in great shape. We can do a check on your art, your EKG and your fit and you've been training for a race and you get into the block and your mind's saying, man, I can't do this. I can't beat that person. It's where you, that's where you start to make aspirations or you start to make excuses. Some of your children have heart issues undiagnosed. It's the place where your connection is centered. It's where intimacy takes place into me see. You want to help people? You have to help them understand the things that they're going through. It's where your memories reside. It's how you develop all these things. Y'all can read. It's where the sins are made. And lastly, you're the key to help people heal. That's why they made you chiefs. You have people, I was trying to go back into my 14 PCSs to try to go back and say, at what point did I not find a person that wanted to kill themselves and they came out to me because they felt like, even as a command chief, and they felt like they could connect with me. I'm not trying to make this about me. Please don't get it that way. I'm trying to make a point. Most people don't want to run to the chief. They was running from a lot of chiefs. A lot of them came to me and I'll tell y'all a quick true story. I was a command chief for Little Rock Air Force Base in 2010 and I would walk around all the time. I'd walk around so much people didn't even know I had a car. And I remember I'd be walking and people like, chief, you need a ride? I'm like, nope. Cause I gotta clear my head. Why? Anybody besides me pray sometime? I pray to life. I pray for y'all. But I would pray the wrong stuff, James. Deon, I pray the wrong stuff. I'd say, God, God in my hand. What's wrong with that? That sound good. With the rest of it, with God, God in my hand as I hit this man. I said, I gotta walk to get my mind right before I go on this next meeting. So I'd walk around the base and I'd talk to people. And I remember one day I was in passing registration. It was a young man. He was a listed aviator, but he heard himself. And what happened was he was like, he's like, chief, what's going on? I said, nah, man, what's going on with you? If you're gonna talk to somebody don't ever be in a rush. I would be late for stuff. But if somebody taking the time to talk to you, you can't be in a rush. Or you need to reschedule. Because especially at Little Rock.