Left Of Greg 040 Get comfortable being uncomfortable with Andy Riise

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All right, anyhoo, thanks for hopping on here with us. We'll just kind of go ahead and get started, and I know you've got a pretty good story. I think we'll start with how you know Greg and HBP RA and his program. So, I know you got a good story at least to tell on that, when you first met Greg. I think we should kind of start there.

Yeah, well, first, guys, thanks for having me on. It's a real honor and a pleasure to be with not only you, Brian, but with the infamous Greg Williams, who I've been a big fan of for a long time, ever back when he was working with the U.S. Marine Corps with the Combat Hunter program.

I'll just caveat that by saying that's when I got familiar with you guys' work with HBP RA. I was teaching at West Point, teaching mental skills training there, and we could talk about that. But no kidding, there I was at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), Washington, circa 2014. I was another nameless, faceless staff escorting the famous Greg Williams around. You know, he was really demanding. He wanted to have like holy green jelly beans. I think he wanted a smoothie of some sort, something about a martini.

Then, he's there to be able to pitch a really cool program with HBP RA, actually to do it for the Army Suicide Prevention, which we can talk about as well. We're an hour ahead of time. We're going to the venue. There's a whole bunch of general officers and VIPs going to be there. It's Greg and his entourage. They were laying out the red carpet for him because they were really demanding. Of course, the whole time I got to carry the conversation because Greg is really hard to talk to. He's got the personality of a cinderblock, right? So, I'm pulling stuff out of him. By conversation, seriously, it was literally me listening and Greg talking.

Well, that's every listener to this podcast, by the way.

For an hour straight, I kid you not, I would never embellish. And so, it was a great conversation. We really connected in terms of our previous work, and we were geeking out pretty hard. Then the generals come in, and he gets up and he's pitching. I forget the gentleman's name; he's a retired Army Colonel, you'll have to insert his name. Anyway, so I sit down, I'm in the back in the cheap seats, and I'm taking notes, right? He starts to launch into his pitch, and it occurs to me that everything that we just talked about the last hour, Greg is now saying verbatim with all the lights on. I'm like, "Wait a second, did I just get played? This is stolen! I am totally doing this again." So, Greg, I'll say imitation is the best form of flattery, and I got to tell you that since that time, I've actually played some unsuspecting staff like myself to do the same thing. So, hats off to you, brother.

Just so you know, Colonel, that's called a rehearsal. The only thing about your memory that you got wrong: it wasn't the M&Ms. You remember, I'm a carnivore. It was probably that we had to stop and get red meat on the way there.

Yeah.

That was a great gig. If you remember how many stars were in that room?

Oh, yeah.

We definitely knocked some of the dust off of the brass, and hopefully, hopefully, a few people walked out of there smarter. If you recall from that, one of the lead players for the Army in the Suicide Prevention program was the firebrand, Vicki Duffy. Shout out to Vicki. What you have to understand is, first of all, that's actually him standing at attention while he's speaking because that's how much discipline he's got. But if we wanted to just do your resume, Andy, we could do that now.

Brian, you've got to understand that axons and dendrites are coming together and all of this energy. So, Andy is like non-stop. Do you get what I'm saying? It's like adrenal cortex pumping, he's going. I'm doing the same thing. We're like yelling. Then, Vicki Duffy, she's all of like four foot nine, and she's like a whirling dervish and she's screaming at it. So, people kept looking at us like, "Is this part of the show?"

Everyone has the same description, because I mean, I talked on the phone the other day when we linked up, and he goes, "Well, you know, do you remember the female with Suicide Prevention with the Army, short red hair, firecracker?" Like, that was my thing too. What I described, I was like, "Vicki walks down the halls, and when she walks down the halls, the lights start exploding as she goes by."

So much she did for Suicide Prevention. She works for the Inspector General's office now. I truly mean this, shout out to Vicki. Vicki was the one-man gang. She did more to talk about Suicide Prevention in the Army. She did more for JBLM. I mean, other than a general who had the influence, she was the ground truth. She was the boots on the ground. She was on the action, and she was making things happen. And Andy, if it wasn't for her, I don't think I'd have been out there speaking. I certainly wouldn't have met you. I'm honored. Thanks for your service. Thanks for everything that you've done to keep our nation and our Constitution strong.

Likewise, brother. Yeah, I'll just say that we're riffing on talking about that program. One of these, I was so fired up about HBP RA, and like I said, I got exposed to it early on. Then, the Special Operations Forces Advanced Situational Awareness Training, I saw it again when I was in 7th Special Forces Group. I became a bigger fan. And then when I came across it again up there, it was brilliant because my frustration has been, and I can say this because I'm a ten-year member, and I think the government at large has this, and I also see businesses and sports struggle with this, is that we tend to focus on the attitudes and behaviors that we don't want, and prevention, and we're not as focused. To me, that's crazy because it's like when you imagine us as a bunch of Marines to the range and tell them, "Hey, I want you to take your rifle and don't miss the target." Could you imagine?

Exactly. Perfect analogy.

Yeah, I know that's a perfect analogy for, but behaviorally, that's what we're doing. What I loved about what you guys were doing is you're taking a prevention focus because we got a huge problem and we know it, right? But we're so focused on the things, what I call, before the weekend formation, and you're talking about, "Hey, don't beat your wife. Hey, don't do drugs. Don't do this." Essentially, we are priming our people towards the behaviors that we don't want. What I loved about what you guys were doing is you're focusing on a skill set that was not only going to make soldiers and teams better at what they do, just in terms of transferable behavioral skills, but it's going to have the effects that we want. The unintended benefit would be the prevention of the behaviors we don't want. Yes, so I'll shut up, I think.

No, no, no, that's a good point. Since we're on the topic of HBP RA in general, you've seen it in a few different forms, right? You've applied it to Suicide Prevention. You've seen it in the Special Operations version, very kinetic, "Hey, we're going to war" kind of thing. "Sure, this is how you do it." You have a huge background and experience in different types of mental skills training, like you said, sports performance psychology. You taught, you've studied, you have degrees, and you have the experience, right? So, you have the tacit knowledge, and you've got the explicit knowledge. I think that's a good point. What is it about HBP RA, like you said, folks in the positive, what is it that you see beneficial as for everything that you already do and have been doing for a long time?

Yeah, well, I think that the principle of having to do with baseline decisions is a universal construct. I mean, that's first and foremost. The transferability to a bunch of different performance applications, that's inherently valuable. Not everybody understands that, but it is, and we know that, and I think everybody listening knows that now.

So for me, the really the "aha" moment that I had, and I'll give you a context of how it relates to mental skills training that's specifically related to the evidence-based best practices in the research on sport and performance psychology, it's been around for about 100 years. I'll caveat also saying that I feel blessed to be a practitioner and researcher in the time when this is actually acceptable. It's not just California hot tub stuff. I can write that because, before California, it's not just this touchy-feely stuff that we talk about in the shadows. This is important.

The intangibles are really important, specifically like the attention control principles are really what jumped out to me. Frankly, anybody, here's a pro tip, is that anybody in psychology probably got involved because they themselves were stuck at some point in time in their life, and I'm no different. I certainly don't have it all figured out, and I apply everything that I teach. I try to walk the talk in a very humble way and use myself as a laboratory. The military has been no different.

The attention control principles, in terms of understanding how attention works, and again, using the brain as a weapon system where you understand where your attention goes, you have a dominant style, which Robert Nideffer really coined a lot of that, some of the research behind this too. So, you have an awareness of how your attention works. Simply under duress, it tends to narrow. But understanding retention goes and then how to be able to then direct, sustain it, and shift it on demand, and then in managing distractions, a lot of that is what brought me into this world.

We were doing, we were teaching a lot of this to different populations at West Point. We were exporting it out to different units who were demanding this type of training. It was at the precipice of that demand signal. One of those customers, if you will, for lack of a better term, was the EOD school, which at the time was at Redstone Arsenal. We had a guy, his name is Dave Suttie, shout out to Dave, who just really was an innovator. We saw there just, there wasn't enough meat on the bone to really deliver what we wanted to. So, he was a Marine Reservist, played semi-pro football, a great guy. He came across the Combat Hunter program, was exposed to it, and everything that you taught, Greg. And I said, "Hey, what if we take this program the Marine has, and we add it to, and we mix it up into this gumbo, mental skills training, that's going to make these EOD technicians in their basic and advanced school, make them better at what they do?" You know, which is, everybody's watched the movie The Hurt Locker, right? It's kind of pop culture, the guy in the bomb suit, diffusing the bomb. They talk about high-stakes situations, where attention is really fundamental. So to me, adding the situational awareness piece into that, and then all the principles that you teach in HBP RA, that's just one example that I think when you blend these things together. Essentially, from a cognitive and emotional standpoint, everybody has to understand, be aware of their baseline. They need to understand what the anomalies are in terms of how they act and react. They need to learn how to manage themselves, and then beyond self, you need to understand how to be aware of others in your environment, and then how to influence what you can control or influence within that, too.

That I want to touch on a couple of things you brought up, Andy, because there are great points. You guys, especially guys in high-performance jobs, military, law enforcement units, people are trying to figure this stuff out. There's a lot of talk, there's a lot of research on a study, but then you say a lot of, "How do we actually conceptualize that? How do we learn this, learn from this study, and go, 'How do we apply that?'" That was what, I mean, obviously, I'm biased, I teach this with Greg, but that's what caught me on right away. I was like, "Wait a minute, this is the actual application of it. This is how you actually apply all of these different studies and all of this different research. This is the way to do it."

Because you mentioned some "not enough meat on the bone" within that. I would say a lot of studies, a lot of training, there's not enough there to really go on, and that's why the academic community always says, "Oh, we need more research. We need more research." Sure, in the meantime, we're out here applying it. Anything evidence-based, which I love, there's been, you know, we've been poked and prodded by Army Research Institute, Office of Naval Research, a whole bunch of different other research organizations that went, "Holy crap, the research shows this works, and here are the knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, abilities you walk away from." They're all based on, what did the Spiker report, they're like 40 different psychological principles that said, "This is the application of it right here. This is what you're learning. This is how you take another person's perspective," right? Because we all say that, right? "Think like the enemy, think like a bad guy." They're platitudes. That's training without an architecture. They're empty.

It's a great way to do it, and it's that external and internal skill set. That's what you just mentioned right there at the end of your comments, too, is about reading your baseline. That's what I always tell people. Like, you want to get good at this skill set, stand in front of the mirror and do it. Figure out what it is that you're putting out there, what it is that you're doing, and how you're affecting your environment and reading your baseline. When you get good at that, it's easy to do everyone else.

Because you...

Yep, that comes into, like you said, there's sports performance, there's different types of emotional strength training, there's this, there's mindfulness, there's all these different terms and studies. What I look at them as is people are out there trying to figure this out. Sure, yeah, "I got this great concept, let's get really good at that." And then it might be good, or it might only work, or maybe it's not enough. That's what always brings me back to the HBP RA. Like you said, I went once I went down this rabbit hole. Greg would always say, "Hey, the answers are all, your answers are in your instructor guidebook." Well, what guys would go like, "Hey, this doesn't tell me what to say on slide 237." But what's written in there is, "Hey, this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Hey, this is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This is what game theory is." And so, I'm going like...

But, Brian, of course, just one paragraph on it. You're like, "Wait, what?"

Yeah.

Paragraph. I treated it up in my Detroit knowledge.

It was a drop on the tongue, that's the idea. Then you start going down, and then the longer, the longer I taught this program, the longer I'd been doing it, I feel like the less I know. I mean, the more, the farther in depth I could go where I went, "Oh my God, I could never, I could do this for the rest of my life and ever fully understand it." That's what hooked me. I was like, "Oh yeah, you can apply this to so many different domains." And you hit it right there with the different performance stuff. So, I'm just relaying kind of my experience, it sounds like it's very similar to kind of what you have and what you're trying to do.

Let me throw something in about human performance, and because Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis is all about human performance and critical thinking. I was traveling the country with some people in this thing called SUDAN back in the day, that's Small Unit Decision Making. So, the best and the brightest in the world, and I was lucky enough to be asked to drive the car 'cause I'm nobody, I've never been anywhere. This guy sitting next to me fascinates me because he's talking crap to everybody that's in the sled before our next brief. I go to one of the people with me, I go, "Hey, who's this guy?" And they go, "Well, that's Pete Carroll." And I go, "Well, I've never heard of him before."

So Pete Carroll went on and spoke before me. Sorry, Pete, because I love you like a brother. But Pete goes on and talks about his new book, Winning Forever, right? I love his strategy, and he's talking about all this stuff. He comes off the stage, and I go up there and I'm like, "This guy's full of crap. He gets to choose from the 1% of the best of the best of all college athletes to put together a team where he's also got the subject matter experts. Like, did you know the lacing of the football, the lacing of your shoe, how you hold your clipboard?" He's got all this other stuff. He's up there talking about winning forever, and the body count that was coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan was staggering.

So I walked up, and I immediately went for the jugular, and I'm like, "You know what we're missing? We're missing that combat corporal. We're missing that person that's on the ground making life-and-death decisions. And you know what? Many times, he's a GED recipient. Many times, it was a choice that, 'Hey, go to jail or go into the service.' And you know what? We have to give them something back, and that is how do you take sage 'greybeard' material and put it in a usable construct where that young person, hey, they didn't pay attention to high school. So, taking them back to high school isn't going to do it. They don't have that academic acumen. So, making it too academic is ridiculous."

I'll give an example, Brian. Our viewers don't know Andy that well yet, but they certainly will after this. Because, Brian, we, Andy, have three, we have three loyal listeners, where you have hundreds of thousands of people that know you. I just got a—I don't know if you were seeing me playing on the phone—Diane just called, and they're all excited that you're leaving because a lot of people out of the ranks, because you, Andy, I should say, they're planning on their reunion with a guy like you. When we first met, you had it at hello. Pete Carroll, who's a genius and who knows how to motivate humans and knows how to put people in their place, just didn't anticipate that he had to go back to shirts and skins basketball on a weekend in Detroit and have that same impact. Does that make sense, Brian? Do you get where I'm going there?

Yeah, I see, I see exactly what you're saying. That's the difference, and that kind of goes into a lot of the different studies or a lot of different performance stuff. You've got different, like, especially, you know, different books that are written on like, you know, high-performing CEOs or these high-performing organizations. Like, yeah, guess what? When you have the money, you've got the best and the brightest. You've got the top 1% of the top 1%, Greg. So, remove that decimal point one more spot because that's who's there. Then, in the U.S. military, it's called, "You've got who you got," right?

And that's exactly... Andy, you're not a cake-eater. Andy, you're not the platinum club member. You are now, I mean, you're, like I said, you're a legend, but you weren't always. Seriously, you had an upbringing like a normal human, like all of us had an upbringing. You were thrust into some extremity, in some amazing situations. Those situations have formed who you are, and it created the insanely wonderful body of work that you've done. So, tell us a couple of those things that did that for you. What were some of those things it took you from normal human to super?

Yeah, and I would add just to that question that, because you did touch on it, a lot of people get into psychology or studying that stuff and have something happen, or you're curious because, "Oh, I know that all fits in." So, please.

Well, first of all, I appreciate what you guys are saying, and believe me, I am not superhuman. I am every bit of just a normal dude from California who's just trying to figure it out. I will say that I've been very lucky by some circumstances that I've had a lot of inspiration. But I think first and foremost, what I like to focus on is just the going through the struggle, and having really had that at an early age. From the time I went to West Point, I was really struggling with the prep school. I wasn't good enough in terms of my math scores. I didn't even take calculus my junior or my senior year because I didn't think I was good at math. I was a good enough football player, it wasn't great, but I was good enough to go play football for Army at the prep school. Boy, did I just really struggle with the academic side of things, specifically.

It really, the prep school is 220 people at the time at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, and only about 60% get into West Point, and every service academy has a prep school. Probably by springtime, actually, I'm sorry, probably by, you know, we show up, I just graduate from high school, I'm 17, my parents have actually signed a waiver for me to go into the Army. So, it was great physically because it was like a redshirt year for me, play football, do really well, end up being the MVP offensive MVP of our team. We're playing at the JUCO level, did really well on the football team. But I did well in my strengths, which is English and math, but on the math and science side, I really struggled to the point where I didn't get a nomination to go to West Point. I did not get the nod. I sat in the back of the auditorium, just turned 18, watched my best friends and teammates get their nomination to go to West Point. Here, I got this six months logged. It went down to the wire where I had to, I think I had to pass a math test in order to be able to put me over the edge GPA-wise, just to get a shot. I had to get a B-minus on my final exam in math. It reminds you, I mean, West Point is legitimate math when it comes to, I mean, it's a premier engineering school. Everyone that comes out of there has to take an engineering track, right? Everyone almost has a math minor. And here I am, the schlepp trying to figure it out. I need an abacus to be able to add, I'm still using my fingers.

I take this test, and I just completely poured myself into this performance, and I got a 78. And I needed a B-minus, I needed an 80. I mean, I was packing my bags, I'm ready to hang it up. My dad's calling Fresno State, getting ready to, I'm going to go walk on, I'm going to go back to Oakdale, California, my tail between my legs. Then, thank God that someone, whoever in admissions, wherever you are, I thank you, had mercy on me. The day we graduated, our last day at the prep school, I got my nomination to go to West Point. It really, man, what a struggle that was, but how important that was for me in terms of perseverance and going through that. That was super important.

Then just, West Point was not easy, and I was not a good cadet. I'm going to piss a lot of people off by saying this because I was on the staff and faculty later. I mean, they were so nice to bring me back. But I'll tell you, there's good cadets and bad cadets, and I was not a good cadet. I was not a, you know, I was a dirtbag football player as they call it, because God forbid I'm out doing wind sprints at six o'clock in the morning with my teammates, while my classmates are delivering newspapers to the upper class, right? There's a rift there. But I'll say that I just struggled in every single way, specifically again in the math and sciences. Thank God for my classmates. There's a saying at West Point, "Cooperating graduates," people that really helped me and tutored me and spent time with me, invested in me. Thank God for the West Point Center for Enhanced Performance to really brought me into, they use sport and performance psychology not only to help you authentically, but also help you in the classroom and in the military side. That really changed my life. I utilized that center as these islands, and they really helped me in so many different ways. To this day, I'm the last guy, my friends laugh. They're like, "How in the hell did you survive the past your first five years, let alone stay in the Army 20 years?" 'Cause everybody else is gone.

What I found, it's the dirtbag guys like me who've gone through the struggle. A lot of people who have gone out and they may make their millions and whatever, they're looking at me like, "Okay, well you, of course, you stayed in the Army because, you know, you didn't have it, you're not good enough to do anything else." Okay, well that's maybe one thing, but the reason why I stayed, and I feel like where I am now, is that because I've struggled, I've had to really bust my butt, and I did. It has not been easy, and that's really what's cool about this book that I know we're going to talk about. I feel like I've learned how to force myself to be, to really what you guys talk about, is really raising your threshold. So, my baseline and my tolerance for pain, mentally, emotionally, physically, or whatever, I think it's a lot higher than a lot of people. My life's work is really about teaching people how to do that.

Let me tell you a little success story, Andy. I want to tell you about a career arc. Michigan looks like a hand, right? I'm from Detroit, which is right here on the hand. I, as a street kid, get a primary candidacy to West Point. So, I go and I do the visit, and I'm doing the indoc and everything else, and a very sage person comes up to me and says, "Your math scores are horrible." And they said, "All that Ritalin didn't help in all those classes." And they said, "You can understand, West Point's not a liberal arts school. You got to have a free..." So, I get this great idea. Instead of going to the prep school, I go from Detroit all the way up to that little running rabbit up here, way up here above, that's called Northern Michigan University. I spent nine months straight doing nothing but drinking beer, playing full-contact hockey and broomball, and chasing around anything I can chase around.

Finally, West Point comes begging, "How's that prep school going? We've seen no results whatsoever." Next thing I know, I drive my motorcycle, I'm in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in an induction center, taking my ASVAB score and signing. So, what happened is, sometimes life goes really, really fast. What people don't understand is it's that scar tissue. November is Resilience Month here at Arcadia. If you haven't scar tissue, you haven't lived. That scar tissue helps build... Look, you have a decision when you have that cut. You're either going to service a cut and not get another cut, or you're going to sit there and you're going to die from whatever disease. And you've done that your entire career.

Like I said with the scar tissue analogy, if you've got that scar tissue, that means, like, so I always take these different, you know, and we'll get into resilience here in a second, but because everyone has their own little definition, and I see people post and stuff on LinkedIn all the time, I don't start resilience and grit. Yes.

Yeah.

And it's like, "Okay." And then because we like to use, Greg does the Chumbawamba, "You know, I get knocked down, but I get up." I love it.

Yeah.

And you love it because you get it. I'll use people that are someone who's an academic, "Whoa, well technically, it's not just that." Like, "Okay, look, man, this is what's worked for me." But you're so, so funny with the struggles of that stuff, too, because that sounds like the first high school I went to. I detested it. It was a really good school. Then, same thing, a little way through the Jesuit priest, they were like, "Hey, you might, you might fit in somewhere else, but you've all been subjected to they can take for sure." Same things that struggle. Like, I was horrible at school. I could take tests well. They said I was a smart kid, but I just, I hated being there. We haven't seen anything about it. I hated it. But then it's funny, then afterwards and later in life, now it's just a constant, constant struggle and quest to learn and understand. I've got five yellow pads sitting here. I gotta transfer over the typed up notes. I've got this. Same thing, going, it is a struggle, it's a daily struggle, Brian, to figure that out.

So, let's get to everything you talk about. We obviously, the three of us have very kind of similar stories like that, but get into kind of what you're going into with the book and what you guys... 'Cause I know it's funny that I saw in the book, I, because I've used the term all the time is, "Okay, get comfortable being uncomfortable," which is such a great, it's, I love little, little axioms like that, little statements that you could design a whole course, write a book about just what that means. Like, we use our motto of "Training changes behavior." That's a very simple look at it, but so much. So, get it, tell us about what you're... We're excited.

Oh, yeah, yeah, so, you know, do we want to talk about definitions or...?

Well, get into the resilience and how that led you into the book and how you define it. Talk about.

I think, okay. Yeah, perfect, perfect. So, again, let me first say that, again, sometimes you get these opportunities that really kind of shape who you are, and they just don't happen for a reason. I really believe that. So when I went back and taught at West Point, I was going to get out of the Army. We had a long deployment, typical. I missed the, again, a struggle. I mean, I was forced to be a combat advisor, to do a job I was not really well prepared for. I had a lot of success, a lot of failures. I missed the birth of my second son. My wife is just like, "Hey, we're done." We had two kids.

Then I get this incredible opportunity where Carl, Dr. Carlson, just a great friend, long-time mentor, who was a captain working with me when I was a cadet, goes back, gets his PhD at Penn State, and comes back as the director. Another really great friend named Doug Chadwick, who is now the head sports psychologist for the Colorado Rockies, he reaches out to me through the Army football network there and says, "Hey, are you interested in coming back to West Point?" I get this amazing opportunity to go back and teach. To me, my intent, at least going in, was like, you know, "That's my wife, hey, you want to go to West Point? Hell yes." I was looking for the opportunities to pull off on the roadside of life, reintegrate my family, and then figure out what's next in my life. I just discovered this love for teaching, especially at the university level. I went through a certification with the venerable Dr. Bernie Holliday. It was the best class I've ever had.

Then, shortly after that, the Army developed its resilience in the Army and Air Force, actually the Army's Resilience Program, which was then called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. It was a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania's Resiliency Program, and obviously they were bringing together these other parties in the space. So, I happen to just get tagged for, "Hey, you go down to the University of Pennsylvania in downtown Philly and figure what this was all about." Lo and behold, I end up, someone called me the architect of the Army's Resilience Program, one of them. I'm like, "I don't really see myself that way." But I was a young officer who really helped develop the curriculum for that and really went deep with that, and met with guys like one of the giants of modern psychology, Marty Seligman, Dr. Karen Reivich. I mean, here I am, I'm brand new. I have no master's degree in this field, and here I am trying to make sense of what is performance psychology, what is positive psychology, how are they interrelated, how can we make them work together to make soldiers better and teams better at what they do.

One of these I really walked away with was because words mean things, guys. You know that, and it kills me with these bumper sticker platitudes, just like you talked about, Greg, it really is like fingernails on a chalkboard. My inner geek is just like, I have to always like temper it down. To me, in very, very simple terms, but I think the beauty of taking things that are very complex is then to take the variance, make them very simple so you can apply them and get good quality reps in. What I say when I talk about the difference between resilience and performance, and even other things like grit, perseverance, is really, performance is like playing offense. Let's take football, because I'm a football guy, right? You know, let's take a football team, defense wins championships, right? That's what they say. Bill Belichick has proved that. So, you have to have a really stout defense. To me, from a mental and emotional standpoint, that is really the prevention side of things because you're preventing the other team from scoring, right?

I think performance psychology is really all about scoring points. That's winning, that's executing tasks at the upper your potential consistently over time. It's not the zone, it's not this unicorn and rainbow magical fleeting moment. It's how well do you do when things really are, when shit's hitting the fan. And that's why I use the word, it's optimal because you're getting the most out of what you have in that moment to execute tasks at the upper range. Then there's interrelated things in there as well too. Obviously, grit is a bridge, adaptability is a bridge, that I call special teams. Those are the things that help bring all those other aspects of blocking and tackling from a psychological standpoint together. What kills me is that, like you guys say, is when we use these really niche areas, when they take, you know, mindfulness is the latest one. And I love mindfulness, don't get me wrong, but what I don't like is when people think it's the end-all, be-all, hack, quick fix. It's the only tool in the toolbox that you need to unlock your potential. That is false.

People get wrapped up in that, not just with that, with a lot of things that they do, right? 'Cause like Greg and I are good about saying, like, "Look, we're one piece of the puzzle." I think it's a pretty big piece, and I think if you get rid of this piece, it'll lead you to a lot of bad areas. But we're not everything, you know? A lot of people go, "No, you just gotta do this, and if you focus on this," and then what has to, right? That goes through a cycle, and then the next thing picks up. So, yeah, you continue, but I see that in so many different areas, and so I'm not knocking it, I'm just saying.

Just on a timeline, what you just had, Andy just brought up. There are people that are legends in taking and blowing the dust off the psychological and actually putting it on ground truth application. So, you named Marty Seligman. Marty's a genius. When we joked about the potential of the triangle—leadership, resilience, and suicide—and how to use these applications there, we used to call that the Penn State to the State Pen, because you had to go to both of those institutions. Dr. Karen Reivich, Gary Klein, next week we've got Dr. Joan Johnson. These are the people that had it at hello and have been doing this since the '60s. And then if you go an hour and you go to the Army Research Institute, the information is there, folks, it hasn't changed. But the problem is you have this mentality at higher levels, first of all, that you can't do it unless you have a PhD. Then the second part is that the Government Accounting Office says, "Well, wait a minute, who are your sources?" You go, "Yeah, I invented this stuff." And they go, "Well, you can't, because you have to have them source everything." I know you've been into that a lot, Andy. When we were doing the counterterrorism ninja manual, they go, "Well, who should we cite?" I go, "Cite me!" They go, "Oh, we can't cite you." And so, how did I fight through that bureaucracy? How did you, and you really got an inside track, which is amazing, but you earned it, brother. How do you keep your head up every day and keep fighting the good fight? And where did the book come from? Where did your inspiration for the book come from?

Yeah, so to answer the first part of that question is, I kind of saw a little bit of a train wreck happening, and so I ended up leaving, or I actually made a choice that went to Special Operations, because 10th Special Forces Group was developing a really holistic human performance program. I ended up going to the Special Forces community because they were really truly adopting the athlete model that I felt like where this mental and emotional piece fit into the other components of the human dimension. So, that's, in part, why I ended up going to the Special Forces community. We have things like "Four-Three" and "Preservation of the Force and Family" who really get it. And then, granted, they don't have it figured out, and every practitioner and leader in those organizations will say that, "Hey, we're struggling with scale and scope," and everybody struggles with that.

One of my frustrations that I ran into was as we rolled out the resilience program, is that resilience became a four-letter word when we asked those strategic corporals we were talking about, who don't have PhDs and masters, to then stand up in front of the classroom and give mandatory resilience training via PowerPoint, right? We took this incredible program that would otherwise probably have actually really had maybe some potential good effects on the behaviors we wanted and ones we didn't want, and we ended up bastardizing it, I'm just going to say it. So, to me, right now, the good news is it's still alive. The good news is we're, this opportunity now, we're having the conversation where we can say it's really about application.

To me, what I'm trying to do at the grassroots level, like with the 75th Ranger Regiment here, who is just a phenomenal organization culturally. But again, they're trying to wrap their head around how do we then take, because mental and emotional skills, because they're intangible, as you guys know, were never designed to be beholden into the classroom first and that's it.

Yep, they remain the key.

Exactly. They were meant to be applied and practiced, and with feedback from expert coaches and leaders, to then learn yourself, you get feedback on how to do it right, you improve. Then, that makes these intangible skills then tangible. So, let's get it out of the classroom. I'm not saying kill the classroom, right? Let's move it out as quickly as possible.

And that's the biggest difference between, you hit it, between training and education, right? Or "special education." That's what happens. It turns into a PowerPoint, and then I go, "All right, hey, Andy, here you go, I'm going to give you this PowerPoint." You go, "Got it, all right, cool. Now you're going to turn around and give it to the next guy." And that's just a third-grade teaching the second-grade. It's, you got to have that expert model. That's training. What you're talking about is absolutely that code. It is mentoring. It has to be a process of, "Okay, man, like, look, here's what you're doing, here's how you need to fix it. Are you skinning your knees a little bit there? Okay, well that's called this." And now I get to that next level. "All right, hey, you see how you made that mistake?"

And this part of the problem there, Brian, is that God told me to shut up, I'm no longer beholden to the Beltway, and this is our legal advisors telling me, waving, "No, don't say it." When I was beholden to the Beltway, Andy, absolutely everything was about, "How do we package this and get it to the most agencies?" Spend $37 million on it, rather than, "How do we teach that young instructor writer from the U.S. Army, that young E6 from the Marine Corps, get him good enough to get out there and start influencing, and then mentor him?" We started T3 at the very beginning.

Yeah. That's great, the "Train the Trainer" component.

Your pain forever for the good idea fairy to come in and repackage the program and give a new name to the program, and every four or five years it's back in the show. Yes, I know you face that.

No, absolutely. I think what you have is that, because we've tried to do that with a Master Resilience Trainer program, but I always say there's no evidence that suggests that it's made the headway that the price tag called for, because again, our focus isn't on aiming, or is aiming to miss the target or aiming to not miss the target. I think, and the good news is, is that performance psychology is still around. There are experts at local installations who are available. It's just not the coin of the realm. It's not the focus. It's kind of an afterthought, which is, you know. But I think the fact that it's still alive, there's still an opportunity. The good news is that there are pockets of junior leaders who get it and who are getting after it, and I think they're seeing the results. I think there are lots of case studies that are out there. I won't spend the time mentioning what they are.

But what's interesting is that the reason why this kind of led to what I do outside of the military is that the Army, the military, we can rip on it because, guys, we're products of it. But hey, in our first responders and emergency medical services, Greg, our business leaders, they are probably even further behind in terms of, "Hey, how do I develop these intangible attributes that I know are going to impact our bottom line in terms of developing our employees?" Right?

Yes. I'm sorry, continue.

Oh, but yeah, no, no, yeah. So, anyways, I'll pause there. We can talk about...

That's a good spot, everything you brought up, because I was kind of going to get into, you know, organizations talk about, you know, culture and resilience and performance and doing all the stuff. Like you just said, people are realizing that now, what that is and how to do it. People are batting around. We've worked with Israel, with a bunch of great law enforcement agencies who hopefully we should be starting work with them soon as well, but that are taking that, there's one group from there, we don't have to talk about where, but they're literally taking that SOCOM kind of model and doing it for every one person at their agency. This is what you're talking about. They come to us because they hear us, if they hear a podcast, and they go, "Hey, this is exactly the things we're trying to figure out. You're saying the words. This is what we mean. This is what we need."

That's right.

So, I just talked to a Turner Construction Company at a veteran event at their headquarters. Same thing, it's about building culture, and their leadership is involved in that, and that trust. What I told them, you know, a good high-functioning, you're at the speed of the trust, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's the ideal, that's optimal performance. But I would be interested in getting kind of your take on things and how you see, 'cause you know, people talk about the culture of an organization, but that really, a lot in leadership places so much into that. So, I know you kind of deal with that with private organizations and sports teams, so how do you see that and how it compares to the military?

Yeah, this is actually chapter one of our book, and it's there for a reason, you're going to find out. I think one of the cool things I got a chance to do now, in the twilight of my career here, is that so I helped support a faculty, a university-sized Army school here at Fort Benning. I spend most of my time supporting our faculty and our instructors, but I get a chance to teach once in a while. I actually teach this kind of talking about the psychology of trust. What I call it, again, in very simple terms, but I think it's effective in communicating how and why trust is important, how it works, is calling it "the currency of optimal performance" at the individual and organizational level.

There's been, and again, it's based on some really good research. Paul Zak's Trust Factor, who I know you're aware of, Greg and Brian. And also, Dr. Bob Rotella, who talked about a lot with sports psychology, it was this idea in the book Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, this idea about training yourself to trust yourself. A lot of people think about trust as being this interpersonal exchange, which is true, and that's where a lot of Zak's work is on this too. But what I like, the Rotella approach really starts from the inside out. When I talk to my students, I say, "Hey, think about when you're in the Wild West, and you're in the 1800s, and you're opening up the bank of trust as a leader. What's the first thing that you got to be able to do to be able to get people to invest in you? You got to secure the people, right?"

So, the inside-out approach of learning how to train yourself to trust yourself, I think is incredibly important. I think it starts there. Then learning how to then be able to, I think a lot of people think that, and I think when we understand neurologically how oxytocin works, which is statistically probably insignificant outside of, probably, trustworthiness, or when somebody else is constantly, we constantly evaluate each other. We're not worthy of each other's trust, right? We get into these dynamics, and I think a lot of leaders think they go one way or the other. I don't want to make it binary, but it's like, "Hey, well, they've got to earn my trust before I trust them," which I think is a false assumption.

It really is. It should take a while.

Good luck with that. How's that...?

What, exactly? That's what I say. The reality is that you have to be a trust-giver. It means that you have to be ready to loan trust, but you get to loan trust as a currency, but with terms. That has to be, and then there comes in the sister of trust, which is communication. The military, we talk about counseling, but we talk about communicating expectations and accountability and what that looks like. We get into the nuance. I kind of use a stoplight model when it comes to interpersonal trust. So, there's intrapersonal, which is within self, and training yourself to trust yourself. Then there's interpersonal, which is beyond self, between one or more people. I walk through what I call a stoplight model, which you get, there's green light behaviors that we want and we encourage. There's yellow light behaviors that kind of become warning signals. They're habits. Then there's red light behaviors that are the red lines that we say that people can cross.

Then the other really interesting conversation is, "Okay, let's say somebody crosses a red line," and which is where we, as people, we tend to, especially leaders, tend to focus on the red lines and not the green and amber behaviors. But then, "Hey, how do I rebuild trust once it's broken?" Because people, people are, people are screw-ups, and we don't want to be this adverse to failure in all its forms or mistakes. So, how do we, at what point in time, how do we rebuild trust once it's broken? First of all, is it reparable? Yes or no. Then if it is, how do we go about doing that? I think that's the really interesting conversation because what happens a lot of times, I see on the corporate side, is that, "Hey, they just get terminated."

Right. Your HR doesn't have an architecture with fixing. HR has black and white. Right is wrong, this is out. The reason that Brian and I and everybody at Arcadia is going to work so hard to get your book out there and to make it better known than—it's impossible to say that again, we only have three listeners—but the idea is that, first of all, shout outs to Benning, shout outs to the 75th, the Pathfinders, Sniper School, U.S. Army Sniper School. Everybody, let's embrace these principles. But here's the thing, here's what you've done, Andy, is we talk about all the time, "flashlight and laser," and that you have to do yourself and do others. We talk about being able to take it from the battlefield to the boardroom, because these same skills of resilience, of accountability, of suicide prevention, nobody at that business knows anybody in that business better than somebody else that works there. Nobody knows a soldier better than a fellow soldier. And it's so, the buddy, that idea that your buddy can come up to you and go, "Hey, timeout, you're driving out of your lane, you gotta get back to focus." We have to establish that as a normal part of the culture of an organization.

That's right.

And we haven't as a nation fully embodied that yet. So, we'll take Kerlix. We see Kerlix in a battlefield, and we'll take that, and now it's at all police stations and emergency rooms. But we won't take the principles of leadership or accountability or any of those.

It's exactly kind of what Andy, what you're talking about, and we obviously use a similar analogy. You said, "green light, yellow light, red light." It goes back to, "Hey, here's what everyone focuses on, that red or amber area, where this is where it's at."

Well, that's what I was getting at.

That goes right into a school shooting or preventing workplace violence or this. Everyone goes, "We'll just give me the ten things I need to know. Give me the list of things I need to know to look out for." And that's where a lot of people come in, and they'll go, "All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to come with this plan." So, when a guy shows up with the gun, and we're going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're at red, why don't we start this process back here in green?" And then you can look out for those yellow indicators. Now you're there. So, that way if we nip it in the bud there, it never gets to red, 'cause red's obvious and easy, and we keep focusing in that area, just like you talked about, is that focusing on, "Hey, don't miss the target."

Put more rounds downrange. There's some more assassins doing the flashbangs in a classroom, and all that other stuff is fine, of course, that component is absolutely necessary, but it does make a better decision maker, and it doesn't fix broken humans, and it doesn't increase human performance. So, that's about your book, Andy, and we, we really want to do something about that. And talk about the book real quick, 'cause it's written to folks and you bunch of really great folks. So, I just checking out some of the backgrounds on your website, mission6zero.com. It's like super, super impressive. So, get into the book, name of it, and we can't be on there.

Yeah, that's going to be in the next, the next book, you know, we partner up here. But so, real quick, Mission 6 Zero, a management consulting company, blends the evidence-based best practices of U.S. Special Operations and various behavioral science disciplines. This is our book. It's been around for about seven years. I think one thing is that we had this amazing stable of folks who have these many war heroes, legitimately, Medal of Honor winners in Florent Groberg. We've got the only man who's been Steve Mueller, who's been an Army Ranger and Navy SEAL and an Army Green Beret. He's a real-life action figure, one of the most humble, incredible human beings you ever met. All he wants to do is be a football coach at the professional level. He's telling his story. We bring their real-life stories together, which would otherwise be independent, and wove it together to be able to, let's imagine these guys are on a Special Forces team, and our founder, my great friend, Jason Van Camp, my Army football brother from another mother, who's our founder and president, he's essentially, imagine he's the Special Forces team leader, showing up out of qualification course for the first time. He meets his commander for the first time, and the commander tells him to take a journey, talking if he really wants to be successful in his unit and to take them to another level as they get ready to deploy. Imagine he just has to meet all these incredible figures and learn about their stories and take and get the takeaways from them.

So, he does that. What's cool about our company and this book is there's really, it's not just your average self-help book where you can pull it off the shelf. It's, you know, Navy SEAL sniper, and you know, talking about awesome.

Yeah, that's plenty of those books out there.

There's a lot of them. God love them, God love them. But I mean, they have some incredible stories, but really, it's the "so what" and "now what" that we bring to the table. That's where our stable of scientists that I'm fortunate enough to help kind of lead and be the lead cat herder there, is amazing practitioners who are established in various fields of psychology, sociology, who not only teach but practice and have amazing stories themselves. A lot of them are former athletes, leaders of business, and they write the science section, which really, for every single chapter, we have a specific takeaway where we get into not only briefly the science but the usable application and how to take what you just learned from this amazing Medal of Honor winner, which a lot of people think, "Okay, that's great. How does that relate to me?" Right?

That's where we connect the dots.

Yeah.

We call that the "so why, so what?"

Right to the "so what."

Yes, so right to the "so what."

I'm really, as a contributing editor, that was my job was to be the keeper of the "so what," and hopefully I've done right and hopefully that I've done a good enough job. I'm really proud of my team. This was, it's one thing to write a book, which I didn't appreciate, but it's another thing to have 24 co-authors and try to cobble this together. But our goal is to provide this tangible artifact we can put in people's hands that's going to make them better at what they do. That is the flat-out.

That's exactly what things we're trying to, we always try to do, right? With giving that "so what." Like you just talked about, there's a book or a movie out all the time, and everyone's like, "Wow, that was cool." You just go, "What do we get out of that?" And that's hugely important. I see that stuff too, with different, even writing stories. Everything, so Greg writes these great lessons learned, we put them up on the website. They'll loop together three events or some topic, and you're like, "Wow, that's incredible." So, he did one called "April is the Cruelest Month," and it's about, you know, significance of May or something in a name. He tied a bunch of different stories together, school shootings, and he talked about the kid, Jeremy Delle, who's a kid, high school kid in Texas, committed suicide in front of his class years ago. Pearl Jam has a song, "Jeremy."

It's in Rough. Okay, okay, I didn't know that.

Yeah. So, you know, we'd posted that. We post some of our articles on Medium, which is a writing website. They publish stuff, and it's really cool, they got all kinds of great stuff on there. And then recommend, but we had it on there. And so, you and I get my daily email from them, "Hey, articles you might be interested in." And that one pops up, not Greg's, but about that story. I was like, "Oh, this should be interesting." I click on it, and it's a page long with one photo in there, and it says, "Hey, this happened, and this is actually related to the song Jeremy by Pearl Jam." It got all these likes and shares. Most of them like, "Um..." So, I never do this, I try never to do this, but I commented out there. And I put a lawyer in comment.

You went for the jugular, brother.

I put a link to Greg's story. I said, "Hey, if you want a better understanding of what this is about, try this." And they go, "Hey, what's wrong with my..." Like, commented, "What's wrong with what I said?" I go, "Nothing's wrong with it. I go, 'A child, a broken human, killed himself in front of his friends. Can we actually learn something from that to prevent the next one?' Like, your story is clickbait. Like, you got a bunch of, you got paid money for that. And what's the takeaway? What did Jeremy learn? You profited off his death. Like, why don't we learn?"

Right. It's just like, you know, and it's amazing to me how many of those stories like that are out there. We're just like, "Hey, here's the story." They're like, "Well, and..." Andy, you had industry leaders and the biggest brains and everybody else in the same room. And you said, "Okay, let's get this done and let's pay it forward." And there's some people out there that aren't paying it forward. There's so many people out there that say, "Hey, my little band with my little transmission here is more important than everything." That's why I get on my rants.

And first of all, you crushed Marren's spirit because Marren has been trying to write a book that's not Brannon, there was a clicks and grunts. And so now he doesn't know what to do there. The thing is that I would caution you, Andy. Mission 6 Zero, first of all, shout out to them. Folks, look it up. Look up these real heroes. I'm nobody, these guys are the ones I want you to take a look at. On there somewhere on its site, it listed you as the science officer. Star Trek. And remember what always happened to the science...

Yeah, I'm trying to change that because it's like, I call it like, "Hey, we've got, you know, the Team of Teams approach, and we've got the freaks and the geeks." It's like, really, it's like, and I'm the chief geek. So, I'm going for that title. You know, I could care less about title, just like you guys. Yeah.

Yeah, he's like mad.

Yeah, you know, it's like, "Hey," but to me, it's like you said, I'm glad you said that because I think sometimes there, people are going to look at us, and I think especially, especially, in some of our Naval Special Warfare community, there's really, and I hate to keep frowning on it, but they, and I'm not going to bag on them because they got a bad name, and they've been, they really tempered it down. So, I'm not going to rip on the SEALs. I'm not going to do that. But because frankly, people can look at what we're trying to do and say, "Hey, well, these guys are trying to tell their war stories to make it, you know, yeah." And I think that's not really the intent.

Oh, it's not.

It's not.

Listen, you don't have to defend that at all. Sitting in an airport, I won't tell you the airport, and it's a young guy, obviously with his Under Armour, I know his game. He picked, sitting down next to me, which is a big mistake, and so as he sits down next to me, he pulls out a book, and I recognize the title of the book immediately. And I go, "Hey, I either like the book," and he goes, "Oh, that's great." I go, "Where do you work?" And he worked at TreyGowdy.com or something. He goes, "Oh, it's excellent reading." And I go, "Yeah, that's really good stuff." Well, the great thing about it is, the book that he happened to be reading was just stolen liberally from the cover to the title to everything else by people we traveled with back in the day. And it took me years to get over the fact that who cares, as long as the information is getting out there.

Right.

Is you know, you got something good when everybody else in the world is claiming it.

Absolutely, and it's right on, it's spot on.

So, there's a couple of things I want to make sure before we close, because Marren's always got an agenda, and he's always sending me texts saying, "Shut up and let him talk." But the idea is, Andy, one, I won't make it, you're going to be back on with us. Can you do another pod with us, 100%? And two, can we dig deeper into the book as it's starting to come out and we're talking about it? Then I just want to thank you again in November, not only for resilience, but for your service to our great nation and for everything that you've done to keep the Constitution in place and to make me safer.

Yeah, well, thank you, Greg. I really appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me on. It really is an honor and a pleasure. As I said, I've been big fans of your guys' work for a long time. Hey, and you know, it's really, I appreciate people say, "Thank you for your service," you know? But really, your service goes well beyond the uniform. I'd be remiss if I didn't thank you guys for that too, because you guys are continuing to serve.

So are we. We've got a servant's heart.

That's what we're all about. That's what we're trying to do, using this platform, using this platform to make people and teams better at what they do. I'm fired up to join you guys again as appropriate.

I'll put all the, and everyone listening, I'll put all the links in the description. Everything, I know it goes on pre-order soon, the book, Deliberate Discomfort: How U.S. Special Operations Forces Overcome Fear and Dare to Win by Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable. I love that saying. My other favorite one that I like to use is, I kind of got it from my brother, but it's, "You know, no one, no one can kick my ass like I can." And, you know, it's kind of more like, it's my own mental health resilience kind of way of looking at it. Like, there's no one that's going to be tougher on me than me, and I try to be positive about that, right? So when I'm, right, go, "Well, what would, what would someone else say about me right now?" Hey, you know, they might be actually pretty impressed at that, or I'm kicking myself on the ass. So, I like that one as well. But I'll put all the links up, and then I'm going to check out the book. What I think maybe would be cool is like, you know, I'll take a chapter or story, and we come back, we just talked about just that one story and the science behind it. So, we can be almost laser-focused on one. Yeah, I think that maybe something like that, or if you've got one specifically in mind that you think would be great.

I think after the book, I want to make people, you know, I want to make people faster and smarter and harder to kill. We want to make them more resilient. We want them from the edge and take another look. Andy, you're helping us do that. So, you're to be applauded for that. I will have to call the other guy that pays attention to our broadcast and make sure on the same page. Listen, thanks so much for being on, Brian.

Yeah, we appreciate it, Andy. I'll reach out with you, with everything, and thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, guys. You guys rock.