Transcription
There you go. That's going on circle. All right.
So, what we're going to do next is we're actually going to be bringing up a Navy Seal up here on stage. So, a little bit of a change of pace. And this is five secrets to help you think like a Navy Seal. We have William Brandham. And William Brand is a retired Navy Seal turned leadership consultant and executive coach. Trained over 50,000 people. So, everyone, you're going to be one of those new 50,000 people. Let's give William a little round of applause as he makes his way up on stage.
All right, thank you guys. All right, I got 15 minutes to shove about 60 minutes, 65, 70 minutes into this presentation. So, I'm going to go fast and hard and uh Dr. Zapata, I got some stories, but I'm not going to tell them here because I don't have time. Uh, so anyway, I want to start this off by asking you guys a question. How many here by show of hands, how many here have ever been curious about what it takes to become a Navy Seal or how Navy Seals think? Show hands. There's like four people that raise their hand. Who here has never had that thought?
Did you think about it after I asked the question?
Okay, I have your attention. Anyway, all right. So, as I go through this presentation, there we go. There we go. Five seal secrets. Yeah. Anyway, uh so as I go through this presentation, I share these five seal secrets with you. I want you to think about how you're going to use these five seal secrets in your life. Maybe it's something up here on the board. Maybe it's something else that you want to work on. And maybe you don't know exactly how you're going to use these five still secrets. But if you don't know how you're going to use these five seal secrets, I want you to think about one area in your life that you need to improve over every other area in your life. And as I go through these five steel secrets, I want you to think about how you're going to use them to improve that one area in your life. And I want you to master that one area in your life. And then once you master that one area, I want you to go to the next area and the next area and the next area. And pretty soon you're thinking like a Navy Seal.
So, a little about me. I spent 26 years and 17 days in the Navy. Hopefully I don't fall off the stage cuz I'm excited up here. Um, 23 of those years I was in the SEAL teams. I have a bunch of combat deployments. I have seven combat deployments, 10 total deployments. I've been to Iraq four times, Afghanistan three times. Uh I measured the I counted the number of months that I've been deployed uh to combat. I've spent over four years in sustained combat operations. Uh I was a sniper. I later went back and became an instructor at sniper school. As a matter of fact, I was teaching sniper school when 911 happened. And I was the senior instructor, but I was not the senior man by any stretch of the imagination. I just happened to be in that position of leadership. And I learned a lot of valuable leadership lessons that day. Who here uh uh did I say that I was uh I was teaching sniper school when 911 happened? I get excited and I forgot. So anyway, I was teaching sniper school when 911 happened. Who here remembers 911? Show hands. Okay. More people thought about 911 then thought about being a Navy Seal. Awesome.
Um, and you remember where you were. I've been fortunate enough that jumping out of airplanes has been part of my occupation. And so there's some beautiful lessons, life lessons you can learn from jumping out of airplanes. One of those lessons is the decisions that you make from the time that you step off that ramp, like these guys up here, until the time that you touch the ground will determine what kind of a day you're going to have. If you make good decisions, you're probably going to have a pretty good day. If you make bad decisions, we're not really sure. Uh, but what's even more important than those decisions that you make from the time that you step off that ramp are the decisions that you make before you even get on that aircraft. Just like the decisions that you make the night before will determine what kind of day you're going to have today. It will have a direct impact on you. I fast roped onto submarines all around the world. Fast roping onto a submarine, one of the coolest things you'll do living on a submarine, not awesome. My very first SEAL team and my very last SEAL team was called SEAL delivery vehicle team 1 and two. This is the most secret SEAL team that you will ever hear about. And as a matter of fact, I bet very few people in this room has ever heard of the SEAL team. The missions that we do are no fail missions. The things that we do are of such strategic importance and of such complexity that failure is not an option. And because of the strategic importance of what we do, the missions are approved only by the president of the United States. He does not delegate that signature. He approves them personally. And these are the presidents that I worked for while I was on active duty.
So what are these five SEAL secrets that I'm talking about? So after 26 years of deploying into chaotic combat environments around the world, I've distilled many of my life lessons as a Navy Seal into five little secrets. And because I want you to remember these five secrets to think like a Navy Seal, I created an acronym that I'm confident that you will not forget anytime soon. And that acronym is the word naked. Now, when I originally started talking about naked, I was talking about taking that ego off, taking that armor off that you hide behind off. Become your most authentic self because that's so much more than you can do without it. You can do so much more without that ego than you can with it. But today I'm talking about thinking like a Navy Seal and taking action. And so I put the word get in front of naked. So if you want to think like a Navy Seal, you have to get naked. Now there's going to be a test at the end. And I want all of you to pass. So let's kick this thing off.
So the N the N stands for never quit. Every guru on the internet is going to tell you to never quit. Not a single one of them is going to tell you how to do it. The Navy Seal Creed says, "I will never quit. I persevere and I thrive on adversity." When I talk about never quit, I'm talking about you're rolling through life, life is good, everything is great, and then adversity comes and punches you right in the face, knocks you down. Overwhelm stands on your chest. What are you going to do? You have two options. You can lay there and quit or two, you can get up and move. How do you do that? Overwhelm is a powerful force. I say to create small victories. So, for example, if I'm in a gunfight, create creating small victories is about taking back control when you feel like your life is out of control. So, if I'm in a gunfight, I've been ambushed by the enemy, overwhelming force, outnumbered. The only thing that I can do is control my thoughts and my actions. I can't even control my team. I can try and influence them. They have to control their thoughts and their actions. And then eventually, we maneuver. We outmaneuver the enemy and we come home safe and sound. In SEAL training, there's a week called hell week. It's week number five of 26. Has anyone here heard of hell week? Yeah. God, good good more participation. Uh hell week, for those of you who don't know, it's 5 and a half days where you're cold, you're wet, you're miserable, and you do not sleep the entire week. Actually, they I think they let us sleep for about two and a half hours, which was actually the worst punishment they could have done to us cuz when I got up from that, I was like, "Oh my god." But another thing that is constant during hell week, other than you're cold, wet, miserable, and you don't sleep, is they feed you four meals a day. Awesome. Every time you make it to one of those meals, that's a small victory. So, all you got to do, no matter how much it sucks, no matter how miserable you are, no matter how much you don't want to put that boat back on your head or run one more mile or lay there in the surf zone jackhammering with your the man to your left and to your right, it doesn't matter. All you have to do is make it to that next meal and the next meal and the next meal and pretty soon you graduated hell week. Later on you graduate SEAL training and you're off to become a Navy Seal. Super easy, right?
The A is accept failure. So you have never quit except failure. Failure has taught me more lessons than any amount of money could buy. If you offered me a million dollars for my failures, I would say keep your million. I'll go make my own. If you offered me a hundred million, we could probably have a deal. I do have a number. So, it's super interesting. SEAL training attracts some of the best athletes in the world. High school, collegiate superstars, professional athletes, and Olympians. When I was going through SEAL training, I trained with every one of those categories. But something is very common in SEAL training that no one thinks about. Every student fails every single day and oftentimes multiple times a day. It's hard. They want to make sure that you have what it takes to go into combat. The Navy Seal Creed says, "If knocked down, I will get back up every time. I am never out of the fight." And you know, all of those superstars that I just talked about from high school, college, professional athletes, and Olympians, every one of those guys quit. It blew my mind. I couldn't I was like, "How? What? When I saw them, of course, you're going to become a Navy Seal. You're good-looking, you're strong, you're charismatic, everything is effortless to you. For them, it wasn't about discipline equals freedom. As Jaco Willing says, those guys were extremely disciplined. They were superstars in everything that they did. They were used to putting in the work, going out and winning, and being rewarded for it. Your only reward in SEAL training is you fail. and you fail again and again and again. You have to accept that failure. I have a lovehate relationship with failure. I hate failing, but I love failure because failure is feedback. One of the speakers up here on the panel right before me said something about we like companies that fail. We got we like to push people to fail so we know where their edges are. Failure is feedback. Failure is data. And if I can measure it, I can make it better.
K is kill mediocrity. So you have never quit, accept failure, kill mediocrity. Usually when I have more time, I talk about this picture right here, but basically this is a evolution in SEAL training called drown proofing where water survival. You're tied up, hands tied behind your back, feet tied together, and you're thrown in the water. Actually, you jump in the water voluntarily, and you are given some tasks to do for the next hour. And if you are 0.00001% 0000001% mediocre. When you do this, you will not make it. The Navy Seal Creed says, "In times of war or uncertainty, there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call. A common man with an uncommon desire to succeed." I believe every one of you in this room are warriors in your own life. And every one of you have an uncommon desire to succeed. That's why you're here today. You want to get better. you want to succeed. But make no mistake about it, we are surrounded by the enemy every single day. And that enemy is mediocrity. And if you don't think so, tell me how easy it is to not get sucked into scrolling this thing, looking at social media, finding excuses to not work out, to not attack your goals for the day. That's when you become mediocre. So, how do you kill mediocrity in your life? I say to compete. Whoops. Compete in kindness. Can you be the kindest person you know? Compete in generosity. Can you be the most generous person you know? It doesn't have to be financial. It could be your time, your effort. Compete in gratitude. I found a few years ago that gratitude is a superpower, especially when you can be grateful for the overwhelm that you have gotten out of. for the pain that happens in your life, for the tragedies that happen in your life. Can you be grateful for those things? That is a superpower. And if you can do that, nothing can stop you. And lastly, you have to learn to compete against your ego because your ego knows all of your strengths, all of your weaknesses, and it knows exactly what to tell you to make you mediocre. We have a saying in the SEAL teams that says, "The only easy day was yesterday." And I didn't really understand that when I first got to the SEAL teams. But as I grew and learned and got more experience under my belt and I became a leader and I expected more out of my guys and they expected more out of me, I learned what that meant. The only easy day was yesterday. And I'll say this again a little bit later because mediocrity lives in yesterday and it lives in tomorrow. And what I mean by that is most of us are very successful in some capacity. We did something awesome once upon a time. We closed that deal. We got that sale. This event was awesome. We did that. That was awesome. I spoke at an event. I did awesome. What about today? Am I prepping for today or am I living on what happened yesterday? Or am I putting things off for tomorrow? Mediocrity lives in yesterday and tomorrow. Can you be present today? Can you do the things that you need to do today to crush the things that you need to crush?
So you have never quit, accept failure, kill mediocrity, and expose your fears. I don't mean like tigers, lions and tigers and bears. Oh my, or being tied up and told to swim across the pool 100 yards or you don't pass. I'm talking about those fears, those thoughts, those stresses, those anxieties that live in the deep dark place in the back of your mind. Those are the fears that I'm talking about. Those stresses, those anxieties. I think about fear to be like a vampire. Vampires live in the darkness and they suck the life out of you. Fear does exactly the same thing. It's living in that deep, dark part of your brain and it's sucking the life out of you. So, how do you kill a vampire? You expose it to sunlight. How do you kill fears? Exactly the same way. You expose your fears. Go do something that scares you. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It doesn't mean go jump out of an airplane or tie yourself up and jump in the pool. Go do little things that scare you. Create those small victories. Create that momentum. One of my uh old coaches and now friends is uh he I think he's he's exited seven different companies. Two of them have been well over a billion. I know the first one was was 3.4 billion. The second one was like 1.2 2 billion. And he likes to say that fear does not exist on paper. I was like, "What do you mean by that?" He's like, "When I go out and I'm having all these stresses, these anxieties, these fears, what I do is I'll take out my my pen and my my notebook and I'll write down every one of those thoughts, those stresses, those anxieties that are swirling around in my head that are starting to control me, and then I read them back to myself. I've exposed my fears. Fear does not exist on paper." Mark Twain once said, "Courage is the resistance of fear, the mastery of fear. It is not the absence of fear." So if you want to live a life free of fear, that fear that controls you, that consumes you, you have to expose those fears. And once you expose those fears, you will start to control those fears. And those fears will no longer control you.
Okay, if you guys don't mind, pull your phones out and scan this QR code. This the number of phones that I see tells me if I'm doing an okay job or not. So, this QR code, basically what I'm doing is I'm giving you this presentation so you have it, the pictures, all of it. Um, so you can take it with you and it also tells me if you're doing a good job and the So, you're going to get an email from me and uh if you want to contact me, that's a great way to to contact me is through that email that you're going to get. Look in your junk folder. That's a great way to do it. So, while you guys are filling that information out, it's like name, email, and phone number. I'm not going to call you unless you want me to. Um, there was a a what do you call it? A speech written in 1910 called a citizenship in the republic. And I believe that speech embodies what we're talking about here. What I'm talking about these five seal secrets before I get to the fifth secret. So that speech goes something like this. The poorest way to face a life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism. There are many who confine themselves to the criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being. No man less worthy of respect than he who either really holds or fains to hold an attitude of sneering disbelief to all that is great and lofty. Whether in achievement or in that noble effort where even if he fails comes the second achievement. It isn't the critic who counts. It isn't the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man or woman who was actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Who strives galliantly, who errors, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who at the best in the end knows the triumph of high achievement. And at worst, even if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his fate shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Now, if you guys didn't guess, that was Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena. Just a little bit of a longer version of it. And I believe it truly embodies the fifth seal secret. So, you have never quit, accept failure. Kill mediocrity, expose your fears, and the D is to do the work. You see, in today's society of Tik Tok, social media, and instant gratification, we've forgotten what it's like to actually do the work. You've probably heard the saying that Rome wasn't built in a day. Well, I guarantee you it was built every single day until it became an empire. We have a saying in the SEAL teams that you have to earn your trident every day. That's the gold pen that I wear on my chest. That's it right there. You have to earn your trident every single day. You have to do the work. And I'll be honest with you, when I graduated SEAL training, I did not have that mentality. I did not think that way. I thought, I've graduated the hardest military training in the world. It's going to be easy from here on out. And I could not have been more wrong. When you get to the SEAL teams, no one cares what you've done. They don't care where you've come from, what you've done in your past. What are you doing today? What are you doing for the team today? What are you doing for yourself today? Are you getting .00001% better every single day in some area in your life? That's again why they say the only easy day was yesterday. You always have to improve your fighting position. You always have to get better.
So, in closing, I'm a little bit over time. In closing, I have two questions for you. I told you there was going to be a test in the end. The first question is, if you're going to think like a Navy Seal, what do you have to do?
I'm going to try that one more time.
So, hold on. Maybe I didn't bring enough energy. Stand by. So, if you're going to think like a Navy Seal, what do you have to do?
All right. So, we're gonna I don't think anyone outside heard you. I barely heard you up here. One more time. Hold on. Wait. Wait for it. If you're going to think like a Navy Seal, what do you have to do?
Get naked. That's right. You never quit. You accept failure. You kill mediocrity. You expose your fears. And you do the work. And you do it every single day. Now, my second question for you is, are you ready to get naked today? Thank you very much. You guys are awesome. Stand up. Give yourselves a hand.