 Thanks everybody. Thanks. Thanks for moving up. So I'm 17 years old. A high school senior, a hundred and one pound soak and wet. I have not played sports in four years. Yet I'm standing in front of three Army sergeants at a recruiting station in Miami, and they asked me, why are you here? And I tell them, I want to join the Army band. They laughed too. But one of the sergeants, Sergeant Kyle Fleener, a good old boy from Tennessee, agreed to work with me to arrange an audition. That audition involved my very first airplane ride from Miami to Atlanta. And on the way back from that flight, something didn't feel right. Waiting for me to hear how it went with Sergeant Fleener. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna join the Army band. But I really like flying on that airplane. I'd like to join, jump out of planes, and be the best trained medic in the Army. Well, son, you've described an Army special forces soldier. Sergeant Fleener, I don't want to be a military policeman. No. Special forces is the Green Berets. Hands me a brochure. Sergeant Fleener, these men look like superheroes. I can't do that. And he looked me dead in the eyes, and he said, yes, you can. And I believed him. Now, there's just one problem. In order to become a Green Beret and jump out of planes, you have to weigh 103 pounds. And get a doctor's waiver. Otherwise, when you jump out of the plane, you're gonna hit the side. So, with a diet heavy on milkshakes, I got up to a whopping 114. And joined two weeks after high school graduation, still 17 years old. And all along the way, and everywhere I looked, I had people telling me I was going to fail. In fact, my dad bet me $1,000 I would get sent home from basic training. He bet me $10,000 I would not get my beret. He says, I'll never die broke because he will always owe me money. So, but the training to become a Green Beret for me was grueling. The hardest part was the rucksack marches. The speed of the march was anywhere between nine and 12-minute miles. The weight I was carrying was half my body weight to all my body weight, depending on the day. And the worst part was just when you thought it was over, you could see the compound, the lights, and you're finishing up. And because they were always before dawn. The cadre, you come into the gate, and the cadre would march you right out the other side of the gates. We called it a mind something. Mind something. But the problem was, we didn't know if we're going to go an extra five minutes or an extra five miles. And that was the point. When people no longer know when the pain and suffering is going to end, they tend to drop like flies, never to become Green Berets. I just knew, somehow my 17-year-old mind knew that pain is temporary, quitting is forever. I didn't want to tell that story about, well, I tried to become a Green Beret. But that adversity was teaching me something about myself, about persistence and determination and grit. And this insight came about because I faced a real test, a crucible I endured to earn my Green Beret. Now, I don't know if you can tell which one is me in the photo, but that was a proud moment. Now, a crucible is a ceramic container in which metals are melted and forged into something stronger. It also describes a severe test in which we can be shaped into something indomitable. When we create our own crucible, we change our narrative. When you lead a crucible, you change the narrative of your team. And why should we care about this narrative? Because when we're too comfortable, we don't stretch ourselves, we don't innovate, and we don't align our goals with our values and what we hold dear. So one of the things that I do is I lead expeditions, and we call them crucibles. And they're a combination of military and executives, and this is Patagonia. Rocky Mountains and glaciers and marine, and we're hiking in a trance-like cadence across a glacier that seems to go on forever. It's half military veterans, half executives, and all of a sudden from the front, we hear, we're at the Poner. Poner? Poner? The point of no return. It's three days that way. Three days that way. Too windy for choppers. If anyone gets sick or injured, it's going to be really an arduous evacuation. And that's when it hit us. We all need poners in our life, a no coming back commitment like creating a big, hairy, audacious goal. And now for this expedition, one of the things that we did was we conducted a behavioral analysis before the trip and a year later, because we wanted to see if being a little cold, wet, tired, and uncomfortable changed perspectives on resiliency. And what we found was fascinating, and this is a big deal, the drive for success and the willingness to overcome obstacles changed significantly and it persisted. In fact, within a year, a majority of the people on the trip made significant changes in their work to focus on things that have more meaning. You just heard from Jim Vassilopoulos. He was on this trip with us. Before this trip, he didn't do the work that he does now. So if an experience like this can be a powerful transformation for executives and military veterans alike, think about how creating a crucible to reveal a new path forward can be powerful for you. Now, one of the things that we hear in the business world all the time, the complaints, and these might be familiar to you is, I want my people to take ownership. I want my team to have shared accountability. I want my organization to be aligned. Now, to me, these fall under three pillars. It's leading yourself. It's leading others, mostly what we think of as leading a team. And the real hard one is leading the organization. So this whole idea of a crucible, it's about cultivating your grit. It's about creating a sense of duty and it's about setting a pace. Now, how do you go about doing that? Well, to me, leading yourself and cultivating grit is really all about character. Now, I don't have to look very far to find the definition of character. I can look at the Stoics and the ancient philosophers and you can look at all kinds of religious things for what is commonly referred to as the six virtues. Now, which one did Aristotle say is the mother of all virtues? You can't do anything if you don't do this one. Courage. Now, in the military, it's easy to define courage. In the business world, it's much harder. I think, like all these things, there's a yin and yang. We have to balance courage with vigilance and we create people that are more resourceful. They take responsibility for their own development and that's what we want. This is a vessel by which you can be developed. But your career, that's your personal responsibility. You've been taught that since the very beginning. When we're really good, when we have good character, hopefully we're really good coaches and we take the time and we have confidence. But what we also need is to combine that with humility and we create a really collaborative team. The last one is about choice or about decisions. And to me, this is one of the hardest because you've got to balance discipline with innovation. You've got to balance vision and the why and the purpose with operation and executional excellence. Very difficult. So one of the things that we do is we play with these pillars and experiment. Recently we did the Sacajawea Crucible in northeast Oregon and the mountains called the Wallauas. Really beautiful place. We had 14 people, half military veterans. One was an F-16 pilot. You'll see him in a little video clip. And one of the things that we did is we divide the team in two and we said, climb aneroid mountain. What's really cool about aneroid mountain? There's no trail up there. There's very few mountains in our country where there's no trail. And I thought this is really interesting. Let's see what happens when we have two teams and let them decide to get up there. The only guidance we gave them was get to the top and come down safely. That's it. So here's one of the routes that we took. So there's two teams. One team took this route from the lake and they went around and you can see they curved around the spine or what we call the spur to get to the top. Now the other team took the spine, the spur. There was one team called Team Wally. One team called Team Aneroid. Now I need two cadets to be volunteer. One, grab somebody, grab another cadet and an officer and head over to that mic. And same over here, two cadets and grab an officer and head to that mic. And the officer is basically, you're not there to be in charge of the cadets, you're there to learn from the cadets. So that's the purpose here. All right, come on, let's go. All right, you got two cadets. Do you have an officer? Just grab one, there we go. All right, so what you get to do when we play this four minute clip is you guys get to whisper because your job at the end is to answer one question. You ready? You ready for the one question? Okay, two teams, Team Wally, Team Aneroid. The question you have to answer is, which team was more effective and why? Okay, you ready? So it'll be interesting to see today after we get up to the top of Aneroid Mountain, you know what the lessons are both as a team and individuals. We decided to take the little bit more challenging route up and we had a couple of planned break points along the route. Did we know it was gonna be more challenging? I know, you know. I knew in my mind it was gonna be. Okay. So guys, I wanna introduce a new rule. We have another group ahead of us, blazing ahead, but we're out here so let's take a minute, enjoy it and have fun along the way. They don't give us grief once they get up there for being like 15, 30 minutes behind them, but we're gonna actually enjoy the trip. We'll support what they help create. We would walk to the next rock and then we'd all go put our options. And we put the options on the table and we decide together what the next objective was. I think we probably did the same thing you guys did. We just didn't verbalize it as much because nobody had any issues. If there was entire trust across a team that when somebody needed to stop, we'd stop and did whatever we had to do. Except for that moment because you could not stand there for too long and wait for me because you guys would all die. So you guys had to keep moving, which I understood I was telling someone, like it didn't bother me, you guys kept going and Mike stayed back, which was good. I find it super interesting. Like when there's a moment of frustration is to look for blame, like immediately. It's like an instinctual, it's like human nature, right? It's like I wanna blame someone or something. But what was really cool about it is you both, you expressed your moment and then... I was pretty loud about it. I think a lot of people heard me. I was saying, what the hell are we doing? Why did you go down this? It was pretty loud. I think this is a mistake. But what I think what was really cool in the end here was this moment of tension, crisis. And eventually who is the guy who hung out with you to get you across that mountain? The guy who felt guilty. You know, sometimes people just need the verbal recognition and like the understanding like, hey, and I think if I had done that quicker for you, you would have felt better coming up that little spot. Lesson learned is, hey, if the team, you put the team in a maybe a spot that maybe we shouldn't have sent them to, I think it's okay to say, hey, I'm sorry. That was actually our bad. It actually goes a long way for the team to hear that recognize it. I think over time doing things that are hard you go confidently yourself because I felt kind of the same way that you were describing, John, that I needed to get across and I was in my head and I needed to get across on my own. I knew I was aware of what was going on around me, but I also knew they needed to get across and that me slowing them down wasn't helping the team either. I think one of the challenges sometimes is when we're used to coming into really high performing teams, you have to really evaluate how high performing that team is and where you can push and where you can't push. One thought I had in mind is like, we were very risk adverse. I never felt unsafe. I mean, I don't know. And then I'm not saying that our team is bad. You know, I just, we had zero drama. All right. There's gonna be cases where we get to a challenging situation like you experienced and we were fortunate to make some choices to keep us on the less risky route. But in life, we're gonna find those challenging calendars and meet our best. I'm super impressed at how you showed up as a leader and still being scared. Yeah, when I was 14, I saw someone fall off the side of a mountain. I had to help get them out. So. No, I don't. But yet you were, I think to the team would say, clearly showed up as a leader. Yeah. I was kind of envious in some way of like, and I kind of want to do the tougher one. I want to be, you know, I just make me, I want to be at the top like out of breath. All right. And I'm like, there's a time and a place for that. And that's called combat. That's called war. And I think the biggest thing that the paradigm shift for especially the military guy, you're like, you know what? What was the mission objective? We had unlimited budget, unlimited time, unlimited resources. The objective was to get to the top and play, I just commend you. Just, it was just awesome. I had so much fun. I almost think like it's like a difference in like short-term and long-term viewpoint, right? Like, so like you take the smoother route and it's pretty frictionless. And you get to the top, you accomplish the goal. Like, are you best prepared in the long-term if you've worked out the kings? Oh my God! What happened is, in my mind, is was perfect that you guys took two different routes, two totally different experiences, very different leadership styles, but did everybody accomplish the objective? Yes. Is everybody back down here safe? Yes. Did we learn a ton about comparing contrasts? And to me, one of the biggest things is, different situations call for different styles of leadership. And I think the big takeaway is that people do support what they help create. In order to do that as a leader, you need to empower and delegate and give up power. And you've got to prepare and plan. And once that happens, you actually have to lead less. Okay. So, you're pow wowing, you guys are gonna pow wow? Anybody, any comment from the audience before we go to those groups? How do you get out? Well, if you're still in the military, you gotta transition out. And I'm not here to recruit you out of the military. Yeah, we take people that are transitioning out and help them transition. As you know, we're really good at bringing people into the military. We're not so hot at transitioning you guys back into civilians. So, this helps a lot. And we ask the people, the veterans that come on needs to be a mouthpiece and share their experiences with what they learned. All right, you ready? All right, who's a more effective team and why? So, we chose Team Aneroid. Unlike the Team Wally, Team Wally was able to experience the trip, have a good time, have a little bit of fun. But Team Aneroid was able to experience storming, norming and forming, storming, forming and norming. So, they were able to go through adversity, go through experiences, fight with each other a little bit. We get to really understand who's gonna be by your side in the event if something happens. So, in regards to who is a better unit, who is a better team, we think that Team Aneroid wins the competition. All right, and what's your name? Jonas Nava, Texas State University. Okay, all right, good, thank you. Thanks. All right. What say you? So, we went with Team Wally, Cadet Murdoch from Carnegie Mellon University. Okay, great. We decided to go with Team Wally because it seemed like for this experience, everyone wanted to kind of have a challenge but also enjoy the experience and get to have fun with other people around them. And so, Team Wally was able to have no drama, just kind of have the experience. They still reached the top and accomplished the mission, but overall, they seemed to have, so I've enjoyed it more. Okay, all right, good. Hey, thanks, thanks guys. You can grab a seat, thank you. So, what I didn't tell you is, each of the teams had very different direction from me. So, Team Aneroid, here's what I said to them at the beginning on day one. Hey, you guys, you know, here's some things to think about, you guys figure it out. I was trying to see, could shared accountability just create on its own. The other team, I designated a different leader every single day. So, Team Wally. So, that day, Clay was put in charge. To me, what's interesting is, the team that had structure, that I, you know, I provided a little guidance as the organizational leader, I tried to shape the environment. I designated a leader. What I found, again, my observation is, that team actually had more collaboration. Even though I had to designate a leader, it wasn't top down. Team Aneroid, basically, they had the special operations commando on there. Josh, the big burly guy. And they, because everything was wilderness and outdoor, they deferred to Josh on everything. And Josh, thought he was leading a bunch of commandoes in the sandbox, the whole time. You know, there was a lot that was cut out of that video, a lot of debate, but there were people that were scared to death up on that spur. And so, again, I mean, great point about, you know, they went through all that storming and that's the point Michael was trying to make in that video, that that was good for the team. But the other team, again, the pace was a little better. I think if they had been on a four or five, 10-day mission, Team Wally would have ended up being better prepared along the way. I think Team Aneroid might have gotten somebody heard. I think somebody might have went AWOL and left the team. Again, no right or wrong answer, but as you move up the chain of command, a lot of the problems start to become system problems. It's not just how you relate to people, but how do you create an environment where you get the behaviors that you want? So to me, that's really interesting. This is what they took back, one of the civilians took back from you guys. And here's what's interesting. Look, is, if I can go back, come on. Look, from you, from the military, be kind, have fun, seek feedback, take risks, have empathy, healthy balance, that wasn't what they expected to learn from you. So it's interesting. The problems are pretty darn similar, pretty similar. So the last story I wanted to leave you with is sometimes we can't create our own crucible. Sometimes we get a crucible thrown at us. And one of the hardest crucibles I ever went through was emotional. You know, the day we dropped our son off at West Point, the priest thanked the parents for giving, giving our sons and daughters to our country in a time of war. I was okay being a soldier. I'm not okay being the parent of one. It's way harder. And when my son marched through those big doors at West Point, and I realized I was kind of done with my parenting duties to a large degree, and I looked at those doors and I thought, that's the same doors that Patton and MacArthur and Eisenhower had crossed. And when my son comes back through those doors in four years, he will have transformed from a boy to a man from a cadet to an officer. And it hit me, you know, what's my life gonna be like four years from now? What sort of environment must I create for myself to realize transformational growth? Because if we're not growing, we're dying. And what it made me realize is I need to go back to what I learned in the military, a good after-action review. And that process of going through those steps helped me understand what I needed to do is slow down to speed up. Write that book I've always said I was gonna write. A lot of different things. So one of the things that I'll leave you with when it comes to creating your own crucible and changing your narrative is it really comes down to three things. And that is it's knowing which questions to ask. It's having the courage to answer them. And the audacity to act. And, you know, this isn't about singing kumbaya and naval gazing. It's about cultivating your grit to change the narrative. 18th century moralist Vavarnik said, he who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything. If you're willing to step back and face your own hypocrisy, you can create your own crucible and change your narrative. And you actually must because it's the only way to affect real change for all of us. Thank you.