Left Of Greg 082 Dr. Jannell MacAulay

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All right, does it say "live," Greg? No, it does. We are live! All right, so we'll go ahead and get started. Dr. Jannell MacAulay, thank you so much for joining us. We've got a little bit of background history with you where we've been in the same email chains before, I guess. So that's where I came from and we learned all about you. You've got a ton of cool stuff going on: high-performance psychologist, you teach a lot of mindfulness stuff, or have you, mindfulness and mindset training, high-performance stuff that we'll get into. So first of all, thank you very much for coming on. We appreciate you joining us today.

Awesome, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation and to kind of, you know, deep dive into some of the concepts that I think helped me lead a high-performing life, and hopefully will also resonate with a lot of your listeners out there.

Yeah. So let's kind of jump in to give us an overview of what it is you're doing right now. What specifically, you know, you're doing? I know your background is military, and you got a PhD, you can do all this really cool stuff. But what is it you're doing right now, and then we'll kind of get into everything from there?

For sure. So right now, my main focus areas, I have a passion for helping others find that space for peak performance, but also finding joy and sustain within their journey. And so that's really the main area I focus on with my trainings, my workshops, my keynote speeches. And, you know, I want to give people who operate in high-stress environments the tools to not only thrive and be high-performing, but like I said, find that harmony in their life so that they can do it for the long-term and be, you know, at the end of a career or their professional experience, thinking, "Hey, I didn't have to sacrifice myself, in particular, my health and my relationships along the way." So that's really the bulk of where my work focuses today.

That's amazing and incredible, because, you know, I look at it from a personal standpoint coming from a background and, you know, in a community and lifestyle where, "Hey, moderation is for cowards. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." And it's like, okay, and you don't realize that can lead you down a path where all those things go by, your life passes you by, and then you're like, "Wait, I've got this op-tempo. I'm going, going, going, constantly focused on the mission and maybe doing great things." But there's something missing, and then you start to develop different issues.

So what I like about what folks like you are doing is you come from that same community, right? You're a pilot in the Air Force. So, one, that's a difficult job, a ton of training involved. You're living life between the margins there, right? You're really like, you know, nanoseconds count. But we're finally starting to realize, "Hey, wait a minute, we can't just stay focused on that all the time because we get burnt out." And that leads to poor performance or just poor lifestyle, poor relationships, which then leads to poor performance even at our job.

So I like this approach that a lot of you, a lot of folks are taking, especially with the mindfulness. I know we talked to—I don't know if you talked to John McCaskill on Veterans Path event—yeah, he's a great guy, we love him, he's hilarious. We have also, I don't know if you know Michele Paladini. If not, we're like, yeah, she's a police officer from the East Coast. So we're having these conversations, and we love it. And what looks like you do is you actually bring, you know, not just the tacit knowledge that you've gained through life, right, and your experience, especially in the military, but also this, this, you know, an academic background to go, "Alright, here's the issues, here's how we articulate them, here's how we deal with them." So that's what always kind of draws Greg and I to this stuff, because we're used to the whole, "Hey man, let's just go, let's go, I'll grab my bag right now and we'll go, we're ready." And then people like you are like, "Hey, that's great, Brian, but there's no, no that'll," and I'm doing the, "No, that'll be fine, it'll be okay." So that's the issue I see where I'm drawn to it. So I'm sure you've probably run into that before along your journey here, your path.

Oh my gosh, that is how I lived my life. I mean, the majority of my twenties and early thirties, I was in for the hustle. And I had a lot of drive and determination, commitment, grit. I mean, my dad instilled a lot of that in me when I was a kid, and they were all great skill sets and a way to focus on the mission. But I became a victim of my circumstances, which I think many of us in the military or these high-stress occupations find ourselves in these spots where we're rewarded for the hustle, and we become successful because of it. And so, and we're also trained to do it that way.

And, you know, it's no real fault of the systems because they are built to train people to operate in high-stress environments. And one of the prevailing thought processes around that has been, you know, simulate high stress, so rob people of sleep and create high-stress environments so that they could practice. So that when they're in real high-pressure situations, you know, they felt that sympathetic nervous system activation before and they know how to handle it, which is, which is great. Like, we do need to exercise that side of our stress response so that we can find a little bit of comfort in that to operate at our best. But the problem is, is that we never are taught the corresponding opposite system, right, like the parasympathetic and how the parasympathetic work together to, you know, make us these high-performing human beings.

And so when you're only taught one way and you become comfortable in the sympathetic nervous system activation, that creates what I think is one of the problems in our culture today: is that people get addicted. It's just like a drug, and you get addicted to high-risk behaviors, you get addicted to busyness, you get addicted to like this go-go-go lifestyle. And then when suddenly things stop, or there's a pause in your life for some reason, people feel very uncomfortable. They don't know how to handle it. And so then they go out seeking more risky behaviors and that sympathetic activation. In some ways, that's drug abuse and substance abuse, riding motorcycles fast, or, you know, verbally and emotionally abusing those around you too because it gives you that high.

And so I think that's a very dangerous place for many people. And I think it's contributing, you know, a contributing factor to the rise we have in some of these maladaptive coping mechanisms to adversity and stress, whether that's suicide, or, you know, self-harm, or harm to others. So I think that if we get to the root cause, which is I think the way we train people to operate in high-stress environments, and we just add that corresponding parasympathetic space, right, that's where the mindfulness, the yoga, the calm, the focus, the learning how to kind of breathe—and you could call it whatever you want, tactical breathing even—but a way to find comfort and restoration and recovery in that space, I think, is vitally important.

I know you guys had Mike Trebay on your show recently, so I work with him. And I can talk about our collaboration called Warrior's Edge later, but you know, part of our intent in pairing together and creating this program is we know that you can train three things as human beings: your body, your craft, and your mind. And high-stress occupations get the body and craft piece right. We spend a significant amount of time working out in the gym to make big dogs, and training our craft, right, our job-specific. Right, as a pilot, I trained for years just to be a pilot. We did not value or understand the necessity of training our minds, right, doing the mental push-ups to be able to experience psychological and emotional trauma, high-risk and high-stress situations, and then not just bounce back in a resilient way, but bounce forward from it. Yes, so that's really where I know they don't want to fill that gap.

And that's why what people like you and Dr. Gervais and all these folks do is that, you know, because Greg and I talk about the same thing. We always go, "Everyone wants to go to the gym and lift weights. Everyone wants to go to the range and shoot guns. No one wants to train the brain." And everyone's approaching it like you guys approach it, from a mindfulness, and this is true. We approach it from the same thing, you know, it's still about human performance, but it's about sense-making and problem-solving in your environment faster. So I don't care what the environment is, it's just how do we articulate it scientifically so I can understand, I can describe it, and then I can prescribe, you know, some sort of action to that, right, and then get predictive off of that, right?

So we're all talking about the same thing, literally, just in a different format, which is why I love what you guys brought in. And kind of what you talked about is, you know, I looked at—I learned the hard way. Oh, I'm now in my late thirties, I look back and go, "Okay, well, I can still take what you guys"—and correct me if I'm wrong—"but what I like about your approach is that I can still have that, that, you know, that ethos of, 'Look, moderation is for cowards.' I just have to do it in every aspect of my life." Okay, if I'm going to go, go, go, go, go, well then, "Guess what? I have to do the same thing for myself when it comes to mental training or mindfulness or eating properly." Like, I just do all of that as, as, you know, the hardest I can do it, then, well now I start to get a little bit better, right? So meaning there's, there's balance there, versus like, you, or I guess I don't like the word "balance" because it's like, "No, I still hate that because it's like, it's just if you're going to go, go, go all the time, then you have to understand what you're doing to your body, and then you have to recuperate from that, or restore it, or learn from it." And that was kind of the shift. And then when I found folks like you and everyone out there, I was like, "Oh, look, you're talking about something, damn it. Why do I have to learn everything the hard way? Like, where were you a few years ago?"

I don't know, Greg, you've had that same, because Greg is a military and law enforcement background, and, and with his program, the design of human behavior stuff with military and law enforcement, so he's been doing it even longer than I have. And he's the worst at it where I have to tell him like, "Hey man, like, no, now is the time where you downshift. We can step on the gas tomorrow." You know what I mean? Like, and, and you get it because it's that, that go-go-go kind of mindset.

I like one of the problems is that, that we're a small cadre of people that, that operationalize mindfulness or operationalize resilience. And, and science hasn't fully caught up in many aspects to what we're saying. And, and Doc, what you described at the top of the key was the perfect storm for every law enforcement officer that eats their gun and commits suicide. And, and we dabble, many of us dabble, and many of us have with IARPA and DARPA and programs like the Infantry Immersive Trainer on the on the West Coast. What we did is we played with the brain's chemistry and we said, "Okay, what we want to do is we want to try to make people hyper-alert during these areas. We want to modify their episodic cortisol. We want to increase this part of the human before the performance." But what we didn't do is we didn't remember reading Friedrich Nietzsche when we were growing up where he said, "You know, when you look in the abyss, but the abyss is looking back into you." So what happened is we dabbled so deeply that we didn't say, "Okay, time out. Now is when we need to take the knee and reflect." We never did that. And so it was go, go, go, go all the time.

And if you take a look back at Iraq and Afghanistan during the kinetic combat periods, those Tier One leaders, those tip of the spear people that we were embedded with, we were working with, were trained and every day thought they had to do it all. So they stayed up for for incredible amounts of time. They ate poorly. They didn't work out. And then they crashed and they said, "How can that be? Because we've done all this training to to get this event, you know, and make sure that we perform perfectly."

I think you nailed it because we can't play with one part of our, one aspect of our life, and then manipulate a psychological or sociological stance, and then that and not expect that to influence us for the rest of our lives. So, so when we seek out people like you, it's because I think there's just some common sense basic intelligence out there where a person can improve their human performance. And we like to make people smarter, faster, stronger, harder to kill, but we do it through up-armoring the brain. There's so many programs out there that are at "bang," which is great at the event. But, you know, if you don't wind that tape back a little bit, you're going to miss opportunities to mitigate or to avoid horrible situations altogether.

I've read and and looked at and and heard and seen everything you've done throughout your career, including a couple of things you wrote on like a bar napkin to remind yourself later. I think it's amazing. And and the reason it's amazing is because it's so simple. And I'll give our readers and our viewers an opportunity, you just changed your website. Your old website was great. Your new website is so engaging that in the first couple of minutes, I had to pinch myself to remind myself I wasn't at Las Vegas because it was a play this and look at this and watch this. But it was all right there. It was all right there in one sequence of code that made it so clear that even a dunderhead like me that doesn't understand such a new exactly who you were and what you were all about. That's magic. Humans aren't really good at that, are they? So, so you come into that space and, and that's why Brian mentioned a couple of the key players in that space. You came in the space and you had me at "hello." So I was like, "Okay, I'm so," and Brian did this months ago. Brian's going, "Well, we're going to have Dr. Jannell MacAulay," and I'm like, "Oh my God, I was so excited about it!" So to me, the reason I'm so excited, I'm wearing all black today because I've got to go to a funeral later. Sorry for the downer. But the idea is, is that having you here to simplify this and to talk about your method and handing it hand-in-glove with what we do with other people in our work, that's inspiring to me. And and it's, it's, it's not just a confirmation bias, we're not stacking the deck. There's nothing wrong with that. But I mean, the funny thing is when you were talking about like riding motorcycles fast one day and we were mentioning that exact thing because Marines do that all the time, "I come out of combat, I can't equate that, so let me get a café-style racer and I'm 'Dakar-ing' down to one to try to get that named endorphin rush." So welcome. Thank you. What you're saying, what you're doing, it's so helpful to so many people.

Awesome, well, thank you for all those kind words and compliments on my website. Thank you so much. That has been a work in progress for like a year, so that's great to hear. You know, I just, like a couple things that you both said, I just want to comment on. First, Brian, when you talked about balance, so I use the word "harmony," and I use the word "harmony" because, and it all ties into, you know, I'm really big on this idea of self-discovery: understanding who you are, why you get out of bed in the morning. Like, if we don't have that, I would argue that the majority of people, when they wake up first thing in the morning, they think about all their stressors and worries, right? Even if they were able to sleep that night, because maybe they were up all night thinking about those stressors and worries. That is how powerful our minds are at this mental time travel and catastrophizing.

And so you wake up with this pit in your stomach, and then you try to start your day. And, you know, I found myself in a space where I would be so anxious. Like, I'd look at my phone and I'd check my email and I'd see something that would upset me, or maybe something on social media. And I had my worries that were just sitting in like a pit in my stomach. Then I'd go wake up my daughter and she'd be a little grumpy, and then the next thing you know, I'm yelling at her because my sympathetic nervous system has just been like—I went from, you know, nothing, from eustress to distress like almost immediately. Then we're trying to get out the door, my son can't find his shoes, we hit every red light on the way, the kids are bickering in the back. Like, I am highly anxious at this point, in distress. Everyone's yelling, and I'm like, "Get in the car every day!" And 7:30, right? Start the day from the top into the space. I'm starting the day from that. That's my, you know, my spouse, we're already like intense moment.

And so what I realized is that if you start a morning mindset routine, and you know who you are, what's important to you, what, you know, when you have a mantra, right? And like for me, I, I have my "L"s, my four "L"s, which now I've kind of changed it to five "L"s, but it's: labor, laugh, learn, love, and lead. And I have those "L"s because for so long my days would go by, as you were alluding to in the beginning, Brian, you would like, you mind wander through your day. And at the very end of the day, you're like, "But what did I do? And what was important?" And I saw no laughter, I saw no love, I saw no learning. All I saw is stress. And when you live that day after day after day, that's chronic stress. And it builds up, and it's not going to put you in a high-performing place. It's not going to lead you to happiness and joy. And so my "L"s helped me remember that it's not a balance like every day I laugh and I love, and I'm hard, and I need, and I, you know, labor at the same equal amounts. It's just that I do every single one of those things every single day.

Yeah, otherwise you get to the end of the day and you forget to look around and slow down and contemplate, "Oh my gosh, I have loved here with my family. I have liked learning, right?" Like, I failed at something, right, maybe I didn't do my best. Instead of catastrophizing about it, I can just say, "Okay, what did I learn from that?" You know, the moments that we can just laugh at ourselves or laugh at what's going on. And I lost that for a couple years of my life because I was so gung-ho on the hustle and the stress, and I couldn't even enjoy the moments of success, right? Like, you're standing in a moment where you have something great that just happened to you, and your mind's already thinking, "Okay, what do I need to be doing that? Like, what's next?"

And in the meantime, I always would tell myself—and this is the cognitive elaboration we do, because maybe you guys have even done this too—you say these things and make these deals inside your head, like, "Well, as soon as I'm done with this project, I'll finally start working out." "As soon as I'm done with this mission or this command position, or, you know, whatever it is, getting this degree, I'll finally pay attention to my kids." Yeah, great. No, I, that's, that's you're, you're hitting it on the head. And I want to just pause one second to understand this because I'm glad you gave that example of, you know, in the morning with your kids, because everyone can relate to that. Everyone. And, and I'm actually going to force my wife to listen to this episode. She doesn't, she's got her own podcast she listens to. But that's what I try to explain, and I know that now because of my experiences, right?

And, and I think it's important to understand because your talk is, well, first of all, when people say like, "Oh, I'm a high-performance," or, "I worked with all these people," people are like, "Oh, wow, that's crazy to get," because, because a lot of times, especially with like Dr. Gervais, like, you're taking someone who's the top 1% of the 1% of the 1%, and all you're doing is you're moving them a little bit farther, but, but in that arena, that's huge. So, so you can do the same thing for anyone else. And so the point I wanted to make is that this is coming from you, who's a, at this point, that story you just told, a highly experienced Air Force pilot, which means you've had the training, you've had the education, you've had the experience all together. And so, you know, so I can put you in your C-130 and throw everything at you, and cut a couple of the engines, and start a fire, and you're going to go, "Okay, well, next we go down to this," and you're just going to go through your process and be fine. But, but getting the kids up and taking them to school is like, it's like, "I'd rather bang my head against the wall." And that's universal, right? That's universal across for a lot of people, not even just military and law enforcement, just people that are really good at their jobs and focus on it. Then they're like, "Wait, I can do all this, but I can't bring it home." And, and that was always kind of once I saw that, and my friends and myself going like, "Man, like, if you could just learn to apply what you have here to every part of your life, do you understand how successful and happy and this you'll be?" And, and that's what it is.

And that's the beauty of some of the stuff that we teach is like, "Look, same thing. Like, when we go to like train a SEAL team on human behavior, I walk in, the first thing out my mouth is like, 'Look, I'm here for the next five days to teach you a bunch of stuff that you already know.'" And they're like, "What?" I was like, "It's just no one ever explained it to you. I'm going to give you a lexicon to describe it. Then I'm going to give you a framework to use it for. Then we're going to do some practical application." And it's like, "Oh, damn, that's what that's called." And then what do we get, Greg? At the, "Where was this my whole career? Where was this? Nobody has told." We had really, I don't know his name, he's still active duty. He was like at this point like, you know, 25 years, you know, Master Chief in the SEAL Teams, and was just like, "Brian, can you come teach my family everything you just said because I have done everything in the world, but I can't say the words? Like, I can't articulate it." So the guy had ten times the experience I had but couldn't articulate it well to share that information and how performance works in stress and resilience and all that. And, and it's always like, I found it like hilarious how you can have all that knowledge and experience and just not, not be able to just move, we're just going to move it to a different domain in my life. And, and if we can all learn to do that like you said, I think it's just, we're all going to get more successful.

And, and the other thing about the high-performance stuff, like I mean, you look at operating under highly stressful situations. Look at the country right now. We're locked down because of a pandemic, which is scary because I can't see it, I can't taste it, I can't touch it, I can't smell it, I can't feel it, so I don't understand it. And I fear things I don't understand. And now I can't go to work, and now people are protesting in the streets, and now this is going on the, it's like, you're in a very high-stress environment from the second you wake up in the morning. So I think we sometimes forget that. I always tell my wife, I'm like, "You're not giving yourself enough credit. You understand what's going on in the world right now? Like, that's why you're stressed out." Just like, "No, it's because you left the dishes," and I say, "Guys, like, it was there five minutes, babe, like five minutes." The whole environment we're in right now.

Negative energy and stress and overwhelm are very powerful, and people don't have awareness around it. Like, you know, what I was describing when I was saying eustress and distress, that's the Yerkes-Dodson law and the curve, right? Most people have never been shown that. Most people don't even realize that that's what's going on in their physiology, or how their stress response works, or the amygdala, and right, like, making—what's the difference between making an emotional overreaction and an irrational response and decision? You know, there's a lot of awareness that I think we lack in our overall physiology as human beings, and then how stress affects that.

And one thing I like to tell people is that, because, you know, I'll come in and I'll do a workshop or a keynote, and I think a lot of people are like, "Oh gosh, she's going to take away my stress. This is going to be awesome." And I always say, "I'm not going to take away your stress. I can't do that because stress is a perceived emotion." And people don't even realize that. They just think, "Oh, I have X amount of stress and that's just the way my life is and I have to deal with it." But really, stress is your perception of the environment you're interacting with, the environment around you. That's why two people can be in the same exact situation and experience it in different ways, because a lot of it has to go, goes back to your mindset, and are you seeing it from a rational place or an emotional one? And so that's what I like to say I help teach people, is I get you to a place of awareness, so then you can for yourself, right, take back control of your life. And I'm a big fan of Viktor Frankl, and the book Man's Search for Meaning is probably one of, you know, the top books I recommend to people, because I think it's such an enlightened journey for the reader. Not only is it an interesting story about a Holocaust survivor, but, you know, it really makes you think about where you get purpose, what gives you meaning, and how just taking a step back from your circumstances can change, you know, your whole outlook on that experience.

Is that what's what's going on and what's becoming abundantly clear? First of all, thanks for covering all our yellow and TLOs from the first half of the morning of our class because you just did. And, and the cool thing is, I think that there's certain life truths that all people, they get it, get it. And I, my life is a mess, but this one bandwidth I got. And, and the second part of it is, your focus, overall focus is so much on the internal factors while ours is on the external factors. But it's the same, it's two sides of the same coin. So while we're out there looking and conducting predictive analysis for human behavior that'll lead us to that bandwidth, the persons that may contribute to the violence in a situation, you're saying, "Okay, this is how to own the terrain in your own life," which is amazing.

And what I love is that I remember 40 years ago when I had my epiphany when all of a sudden all the stars aligned and it was like Eureka, right? And you called it a harmonic harmony. And, and science calls it harmonics, harmony and harmonics. And it's not just for music anymore, folks. But the idea is that, that we were calling it back in the day, "frequency." And then the physics side of me learned that listen to, and, and, and friction, and all of these things are all interrelated because of transmissions of frequencies. And, and simply put for the, the street side of me, you know, working on the streets of Detroit, I had explained to people, "Look, we're like two radios." Kids, a radio is a thing that played music. And if I wasn't exactly on the frequency, AM or FM, I wasn't transmitting, you weren't receiving what I was laying down. And therefore, we had this turbidity or turbulence or friction that would lead to sad and problem situations.

You're, you're laying out. You, waking up in the morning, a, a CEO of our company gets me up at 4:00 in the morning and it's boot camp from four o'clock until she leaves up for work. And, and so all these things happen and I get in these knock-down, drag-out arguments. And I look and I go, "Holy crap, it's 4:30. How did this go so wrong so quickly?" And, and it's because I fail to see what frequency things were happening at. So your use of harmony, a discordant song or sound nobody likes. But when things are wavy gravy and Chili Palmer, everybody wants to contribute. So, so you can be, and we say this about your safety and security, you're largely responsible for your own safety and security in your environment. And what you're coming to tell us, and, and what we know is that you're also largely responsible for your inner peace, your mindfulness as well.

Exactly, exactly. You know, it's not easy. You know, I've heard a lot where people say, "Oh, she's trying to teach these soft skills to the military." I hate that term.

Every SF guy says that. "Oh, they're good in the soft skills." I'm like, "What is a hard skill and a soft skill?"

Yeah, people don't realize this because they just think of it in terms of, "Oh, it's like meditation and taking deep breaths." Like, "How easy can that be?" Or, "What is that really going to do for me as a high performer?" And, and really, as we all realize, that is hard. Like, if it was easy, right, it may be easy to take deep breaths, but it's not easy to disconnect from thoughts. It's not easy to stay focused. If it was easy, then everybody would be emotionally right around the world, have calm conversations and deep focus.

Don't choose PTSD. PTSD. I'm trying to say, "We didn't read and go, 'Haha.'" In doing some of that, Brian and I, we were doing that training once on the East Coast. And here's some high performers and they're all, you know, coming into a room. And I start my hook at the beginning, and then Brian's ready to switch out with me. We have a routine that works very well to get people engaged immediately so we can get some work done. And I, I'm a minute or two into the hook, and the room is emptying out. And I'm going like, "Oh, maybe I'm on the wrong frequency." And what it was is those players were going out and they were going, "Hey, give us a minute. We want everybody in here to hear this, because what you're laying down is making a lot of sense for us." And so we could breathe again and things went very well for it.

And, and I think what happens is I go in sometimes to situations—and Brian knows this too with with Paladini. The very first thing with Michele Paladini, she's a great speaker and a great human and a great law enforcement professional, was that I had goat yoga up to here. And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay." And, you know what, from my timeframe, you know, "You rub dirt on it, you get back in the game." A guy coined it really well, he said, "The old cops, get your hat and get your bat and get out there on the street and, you know, and dispense justice." Well, she, in just a few minutes of talking about it, let those scales fall from my eyes and I could get back on point. That's important. It's important to know what it isn't so you can see what it really is.

A part of that's, yeah, better in terms of the conversation, people talking about it, because that's why I love McCaskill, because he was like, yeah, he called it. When he told his team that he was like meditating and everything like that, he called it, it's like, "Well, I came out of the closet that I was meditating." It's tough because people came up to him and were like, "Hey man, like, you're, you're killing it right now. Like, what's going on? What's changed?" You know? And it's just like, "Hey, look, I started doing this mindfulness and meditation, and like, it's changed me over the last couple months." So I love that. But, you know, the conversation, and you can to bring it back to what he said, is like, it's difficult. But because of kind of how things are set up with communication and social media now, everyone wants what? It's the clickbait. Like, "Give me the three things. Give me the five things." I mean, that's with us. It's like, "Hey, I just want to know like, what do I need to do?" It's like, "Alright, first you need to learn about, you know, what entropy is. Like what, you know, what Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is." "Oh, well, then if you start with physics, we'll get to human behavior in like six months." And they're like, "Well, wait a minute." And we're like, "Alright, let's back it up a little bit here."

And so all this stuff is difficult. And, you know, it takes that, you know, self-reflection, you've got to look at yourself in the mirror. I always saw this, and because I remember this from like, you know, especially in the military when someone has a missing piece of equipment, right? And they go, "Someone stole my whatever." And I was always like, "Someone stole it? Like, there's, there's, there's nine million thieves for an hour? Maybe, maybe you lost it, right?" And so I bring that forward, that lesson learned, to like when my wife goes, "Hey, did you forget to do this?" And my immediate response is, "Yeah, probably. What was it? I'm sure I screwed up." Like, I immediately go, "Yeah, I probably did something wrong. Why?" And then it's like, "Oh, no, it wasn't." And it just, it's a little bit of a way to keep yourself in check, sort of, you know what I'm saying? Like to go, "Maybe I'm the problem."

But I, I want, I do kind of want to get to you like what, what got you to this? Like what led to—I mean, not what you're specifically doing today—did you have like an epiphany moment? I mean, I know you told the story about you bringing the kids to school. Like, but, but did you have some moment or was it something that kind of coalesced to say, "You know what, like, I need to get better at this." And then you immediately took your how you are as a person and went, "Well, I'm going to, I'm going to master this skillset now. Here is the list." So what was the, what was that event for you, or what, what caused that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I grew up in Southern California, the daughter of actually a 33-year police veteran. My dad was a detective and lieutenant in the police force. My mom was a nurse. So kind of a family of public servants. An uncle that flew Marine One for President Reagan, that's cool. Really. And two grandfathers that were also Marines, hardcore. One grandfather was a Mustang. And so I, I just grew up with this idea that public service was in kind of my blood and in my future. And so I was going to serve in some capacity, ended up going to the Air Force Academy. Like I mentioned, my dad gave me a lot of drive. And, you know, when I was, I remember being a little girl and we'd be walking into the grocery store, and I'm like seven, eight years old, holding my dad's hand, and we'd end up talking to some stranger that he would meet. And he would say, "You know what, my daughter's going to grow up and be a submarine warfare commander or a combat pilot." I had no idea what those—neither job was open to women because this was right, early eighties. And then I just grew up with this like, "Yeah, I could do anything I want. My dad said I could be whatever I wanted."

I, I distinctly even remember watching Top Gun with him and thinking, "Dad, how come the girls don't get to fly the planes? Like, that's not fair. It's only the boys that get to fly." And my dad, he used to say this quote to me, and it was, "Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." And it's a Jonathan Swift quote. And kind of what I grew up with this idea that just because I couldn't see it doesn't mean that it can't be achieved, right? Like if I can see it in my own vision, I can find a pathway to get there. And so that's really what I grew up with, it's like just a lot of drive to do something innovative, to serve in some capacity. But I found about midway through my career that, you know, I was hitting a brick wall. Like, I, and I'm looking around at my peers and we all were, right? Because it's like you get to that phase where now you have a family and you're even have a career, and, you know, you're trying to manage everything, your aging parents. Right, there's all these things that kind of put extra stress on your plate, and you want to accelerate your success.

And so it was really out of self-necessity that I found, you know, mindfulness, that I found like this new, new way to look at my health. And right about the same time, you know, I was kind of hitting this burnout point where I was like, "I don't know that I can do this for, you know, ten more years in the military. There's got to be a better way to do life." And so the Air Force sent me back to school at that same moment. I was kind of having this like really burnt out, you know, both emotionally, physically, psychologically, everything, I was just a burnout point. So when I, when they accept me back to school to get my PhD, I was like, "Gosh, this is an opportunity to solve a big problem. Like, what problem do I want to solve?" And it was really, "Why does life have to be so hard?" You know, like why? I'm simple like that. It was like ten years ago when we're all talking about like this, "Women have it all," kind of concept. "Dude didn't want to have it all?" And then I was realizing, "But what does 'have it all' mean?"

And so I wanted to dig deeper into that question. And that's really where my dissertation was on how do you build the most effective human weapons system to execute the high-stress, you know, and high-pressure and operating in the high-pressure military environment? And what I found was that, from a strategic health perspective—and you kind of alluded to this earlier as well, Greg—this idea that we don't value prevention, right? Like we, we don't go left of bang. Right? Like we always think about like we're really good in a crisis as military, law enforcement. Like when that, you know, stuff hits the fan, like we are ready to go after it and do our jobs. What we don't do really well is prepare, especially from a mental standpoint, for that environment. And part of it, I think, is because there's not hard data in prevention, right? There's a lot of circumstantial evidence and it can be hard to prove a negative.

Yeah.

So how do you say, "Oh, I'm preventing suicides," or, "I'm preventing, you know, PTSD," or, or whatever it is? And so that's, I think, where we just haven't put a value on that type of study as much. I mean, I think we're getting there. I mean, even with mental skills, I always like to say, "Physical fitness was started actually in the Air Force." This idea of running came from Dr. Ken Cooper, who is a flight surgeon. And he was approached by the Air Force because they were like, "We can't get our astronauts into space. They're not physically fit enough." And now that we have these fighter jets, we can't get our pilots to pull Gs, right? Like, they're not physically fit enough, Kenny. And so he came up with this idea of aerobic activity. And he's still to this day known as the father of aerobics. But there was a time when running and exercising seemed odd. In fact, there was a prevailing thought that the human body only had so many heartbeats. Once you used up, you were done.

No, yeah, you're saying that's not scientific? No.

You're spot on. You're ever on. Think of Hollywood. Think of the Hollywood portrayal of a happy hour and everybody drinking and carousing and driving around and chain-smoking. And, and, and we can, we can look at seventy years of Hollywood films where that was, that was a lifestyle. You wanted to be, you wanted to emulate that. And so therefore, coming in and telling somebody, "Hey, you have to, you have to do this, and you have to do these things that are hard and take time," nobody wants to do that. So it's going to be a change, right?

It gives you that sense, I think, from my part, like I was an operator my whole career, and no one ever wants to seem weak, right?

It wasn't until John, and I, John McCaskill and I, we both work with Veterans Path, and, and we're working mindfulness into active duty military as well as veteran programs. And one of the things most operators feel like is like, "I want to be a badass, like, get help from a doc." And I think that's one of the ways I was most effective with mindfulness in the military is because I was a leader and an operator, and I was creating a culture around it. Right? You were the badass, and, and, and still people were listening.

Exactly, right.

Because I was like, "This is working." And just as John was saying, he kind of came out of it. You don't know how many speeches I've given in military environments where people will come up to me afterwards and they're kind of like timidly tapping me on the shoulder, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I meditate too. This was so great to hear you do that in the military." And I was like, "Well, don't you tell anyone that this is effective for you?" And they're like, "No, no way. Like, I don't share that. I'm afraid I'm going to get made fun of, or be seen as weak. So I don't talk about it." And that's the problem.

Yes. Start talking about it and saying, "This is a hard skill, or this is a cutting-edge skill that's going to make you a badass." And the same problem will come into a group and they'll say, "Okay, so you're going to boot doors and ram cars and laser plasma charge and blow the..." And we're like, "No, we're going to make you more resilient by up-armoring your brain." And they're like, "But when do we start the shooting? Now, there's no weapons and shooting?" And you'll see a lot of the people are like, "Oh," and they want to go and they think wrongly, but they won't learn unless the leadership, all functions of leadership have to buy in. And, and they have to take an active part and they have to lead by example. And that's been lacking in our country, and certainly been lacking in this realm.

And a lot of that goes back to kind of what we discuss about how we talk about it. And that's why I love it when people like you come in, you know, because it's like, "Look, this is about performance. Do you want to perform better?" Because most people, you have everyone, of course, does. But then when you get to the elite levels that are like, "I will do anything if you tell me, if you tell me that this is going to make me better at this, I will do it." Absolutely. You see that even, turn it to the point of people harming themselves, right? And, and that could send even like performance-enhancing drugs and everything. Like, "I want to perform at the best." You know, a long time ago, someone else decided that there's only 24 hours in a day, and I don't like that. But, but I have to live by that. So what can that...

And so when you approach these skills, like the mindfulness and meditation stuff, like from it, like it's, it's from a performance perspective. And you brought up earlier like it's not easy. Like even for me, because I've tried different meditation stuff before. I tried years ago when I was trying to figure out like, just figure out stumbling through the dark how to get better. Like I actually didn't realize how I was setting myself up for success without even realizing. Like I was living alone. I was like forcing myself to hang out with people that I didn't typically, that weren't in the military, no military background, nothing, but had good, healthy relationships. Like that I just went like, "I need to get out of this bubble that I'm in, because it's going to go down a rabbit hole that is pretty dark, maybe, or it might lead to something." But so, so I had to do that.

And, and one of the things I tried to do, I would always try to meditate, and it never worked for me because I was like, "And now I'm thinking of something else. Alright." So I would started with breathing stuff. So breathing is important because I work out with people that are like stud, stud athletes, a lot more like CrossFit competitor people. So like they started getting me like, "Hey man, this is what about breath? Like, we're not breathing correctly." Like, literally think about how much you've ever—it's one of, it's a perfect example, as my buddy Mark Curtis is an overtired SEAL, still holds the one-mile beach run record down at, at in Coronado. And he's, you know, sixty years old now, and he teaches running clinics. And a few years ago, five years ago, six years, whatever it was, he taught me how to run. He's like, "Brian, did anyone ever teach you how to run?" I was like, "No, what do you mean? It's running, you just run. Like, I used to be able to run three miles in like 17 minutes." You know what I mean? Like, "I can run." He's like, "You're a horrible runner." I was like, "But, but that's the whole thing. It's like, yeah, no one ever taught me that. But that's a skill." I'm like, "Did anyone teach you how to breathe?" Like, "No, you just naturally breathe." Like, "No, breathe correctly." And then I was like, once you look at that, for me, I'm like, "Okay, well, I want to master this. Alright." So now I'm up there with 99, he breathing, feet on the wall, diaphragmatic. Like, it comes into my warm-up process for the gym. And like, you slowly start to feel that affect over time of that positive impact it has.

So it's interesting when you make it a competition, because the first ones I did was, I don't know if you're familiar like, the Wim Hof breathing stuff that he does. Like, I was like, "Alright, this gives me something to focus on and do." And now I get to—so now I'm like standing outside in my backyard naked in the winter like trying to do it. Like everything, like it, I mean, like it's like, "All this is so cool." I'm like, "Oh wait, I should probably step back. The neighbors can see me right now." Like you start to get to that because it's fun and it's engaging. And it's that meditation stuff, it's difficult, but, but I still, I'm still working on it. I've even cracked my code on what works for me.

How to tap into your breath, it really affects a whole bunch of your physiology from that, your mental state, your well-being. But like once I started yoga, like this is where my journey started, is with this idea of like, I needed time on my mat that was just mine. Because my husband was deployed for a year. I had a two-year-old daughter. I was leading a team. I was an instructor pilot. And everybody needed something from me every moment of the day. Like I never had like a free moment where it wasn't the dog, my parents, my, you know, my high-maintenance parents, my kid, spouse that was deployed. So my mat, when I had my yoga class, was that my protected space is where I learned how to slow down and breathe. And it was very uncomfortable at first. Like I had to fight that urge to like get up and be like, "This isn't working. I'm thinking about too many things." And I just had to push through that discomfort to find my comfort. And to really realize that it was necessary for me. And once I did that, it translated to like, I was a better golf swing. Like my weapons qualification shooting was better because I learned how to use my breath in a very proactive way. And it was life-changing.

And you, you guys mentioned, or I forget which one of you mentioned the idea of language around some of this for high-performance teams. And one thing that I found especially with mindfulness is people are like, "No, I would never meditate. I can't do that." Yet when I ask them something like, "Well, what is your favorite activity?" And they would say something like, "Oh, I love fishing. I just love it. I'm by myself on the boat and it's quiet, and it's just there with my fishing line. And it's like the most enjoyable moment of my life." And I'm like, "That's meditation! That's it! You're not thinking about anything else except that moment right there as you're fishing. That's why you love it." Like, I love skiing. I love being on the beach and hiking and being outdoors. If every time I went skiing I was skiing down the mountain being like, "Oh my God, I have so many stressors, my worries, like, this is what's going on in my life, my life sucks." I would then tie it to skiing and be like, "I hate that activity really anymore. It's too stressful." But because when I'm on the mountain, I'm just breathing in the oxygen, and I'm taking that fresh air, and I'm in the moment, right? Like, that is where I get a lot of my mindfulness, even today, is when I'm doing my outdoor activities. Yeah. And so that's why I tell people, you know how to do it. Your body knows how to do it. You just have to bring language and awareness to it.

Yeah, you're talking of mindfulness, and, you know, I was the author of the Architect of the Combat Hunter program for the Marine Corps pre-deployment training to increase situational awareness. And it's still around in ways, shapes, and forms, and I'm very proud of that. But what happens is situational awareness and mindfulness are, that's the same thing. It's just you're situationally aware about you in this moment now. And what I try to tell people now, because there's still people, you know, riding that Combat Hunter train, you know, using the stuff that, that we all did years ago and saying, "Oh, this is the thing." Look, it evolves. Psychological de-escalation has evolved. It's not the seventies anymore. The instructors that were teaching the judo on the mat at the police academy, you listen, we were in violent times and that's all we knew. So every person that worked with me that was in Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb Police Academies and I was the guy that was in charge of the, you know, the, the police training to keep you alive on the street, every one of us was black belts in three or four disciplines and all this were shooters with our own schools. Because we're in the moment, we're at that moment. We didn't think about globally and locally how we could impact things by psychologically being okay before we walked into this situation. And that was the epiphany moment, it was like, "Hey, wait a minute, if we fought every single person that wants to fight, you can tell us by the trail of dead behind us and the size of our knuckles and our scars that was our strategy. Our strategy was we're going to arrest our way out of this, we're going to fight our way out of this." And, you know what, that, that's gone. And, and some old soldiers, I don't mean that term recklessly, and, and some old administrators cannot see that that policy is outdated and we have to go away with that. And that's where a lot of the problems that we're having currently in agencies come from. "Hey, back in the day, you didn't call me officer, you got the clipboard up the side of the head on the side of the thing." It was "serve and protect," "I know what's better for you." "Here's the rope. You stay behind it. We'll tell you what you need to do." And, and that is so pervasive in society and business. So whether it's a battlefield or the boardroom, if you can control yourself, if you are good in you, then you can control everything around you. And you can't, if there's violence and turbidity and, you know, high emotion, you just can't, you're not going to be able to control the environment if you can't control yourself. You just can't.

Exactly. Because in that internal environment, you build psychological flexibility, right? It should be to face adversity and challenge and not get thrown by it. You know, that I'm more adaptable. You know, it's not a natural tendency for the human brain, especially in the environment today, right? Like even our primitive brain that was wired for the stress response when you were faced with the saber-toothed tiger, like, I equate that I've experienced that primitive brain triggering in a combat zone, but it goes experience it in the carpool lane. Right? Like, we're hopefully all of a sudden zero to sixty and you're about to lose your, you know what, you feel like you're out of control. And the, the problem is, is that even going back to what you were just describing with our society today, this idea that, you know, every conflict is now emotionally driven, right? Like most people, sides of the argument can only see the emotions, and so they're letting it drive their behavior instead of, you know, and that's the amygdala, right? Like that, and, and it's normally an overreactor. You're going to regret this.

Especially with how we communicate today too, right? There's no, not a lot of context behind digital conversations. There's not a lot of feeling. There's a new person's not right there, so there's immediately emotional disconnection, right? So, so it gets different. But I think that's what people don't realize sometimes too. Right? You talk about your, you know, the diet is always a good analogy, right? So everyone will read the calorie content, and some people focus on their diet and go, "Oh, I can't put this in my body," or, "That's important." But you, when you're on your phone scrolling through Twitter, that's the same thing. Like, what diet, what's the makeup of your diet? Because I get a lot of people who are like, "Oh, it's terrible on there," and people always say this. And I'm like, "And you've got to follow the people I follow." Like, I get on Twitter and I laugh for 20 minutes and I put it away. Like, it's my life, because like, there are some people just right now, like just normal people saying the funniest, funniest stuff about what's going on, their takes and like, even meme culture, and how this, how we talk to each other. Like, it's, it's hilarious, and it's showing the hilarity of of everyone, not just like comedians who have this space. Like, people like to laugh at the situation they're in, so that's a, that's a good coping strategy.

But I kind of wanted to get your on what's just going on right now in our country with everything. Right? We've got a pandemic, which is fear. We loss of identity, maybe loss of job for some people, political unrest, and maybe—and I wasn't sure how I wanted to ask the question, but like, I guess it would just be this—this affects us. Like, you, it's funny, because you bring up your Datsun, and we're like, "Yeah, we do that every class," because it's, it's a hundred years old and guess what, it's, it still holds true today. So relevant. What a stop making up new stuff. Like, stick with what works, right? And then, it, and I don't think people realize sometimes the effect it has on us, or we overreact, we have those emotional responses to things that we shouldn't really have an emotional response to. So what do you do, because everyone has tough times? Like even like we, we do human behavior profiling, and, you know what, I'm not always right. Sometimes I miss stuff, and I, I'm the guy teaching the class. So you're, you're that, you're the, you're the woman teaching this subject. So what is it that you do to cope with this environment, to cope with everything? Because you still have a family to raise, you still have need to have a job, you've got to put food on the table. And so how, how do you do it then? What's your daily kind of routine or, or your perspective on things?

Well, first, the two areas, you know, in situations like we're facing around the world today, you know, I just like to focus on two things: One is what I can control, and what I can't control. Because I think too many times we try to focus on controlling things that are not actually within our span of control, and that leads to frustration and missed expectations and various things. So that's probably the first thing is I always try to step back and ask myself, "You know, what is making me anxious in this moment, and what are things I can control versus what I can't?" And most of the time you can't control another person's response. You can't control some of, you know, the external things that are going on in the world, right? But I can control how I'm going to see and interact with that environment, and how I'm going to control the internal environment inside my mind. So that's usually like the foundational piece that I remind myself of.

Along with that is, I alluded to it before, this idea of self-discovery and knowing who you are, why you get out of bed in the morning. A morning mindset routine, I think, is vitally important, having a purpose statement. So like my purpose statement is that I want to help people achieve peak performance with a focus on passion, purpose, and presence. And so when I wake up in the morning, like I think about, you know, my "L"s and how I'm going to manage to hit all of them today. And then I think about my purpose. And some days it's doing things like this, like I want to help reach your audience and maybe give them some information to make their lives better and to help them get a step closer to the peak performance for them. But other days, I want to do that just for my family, right? Like I want to help my kids be the best they can be. You know, we go on a lot of mountain biking rides or paddle boarding or hikes or different things, and I just want them to continuously learn new skill sets and challenge themselves in new ways.

And so when I focus on those things, I find that I can have more of an optimistic lens for what's going on in the world. And I realized that there are some people out there who life is really, really, really crappy. So it is hard to find that positivity. And so I'm not trying to like, this is not Pollyannaish or like this like, you know, you can talk yourself into positive thinking. It's hard to do that. That's why that foundational work of what's most important. So like if maybe you lost a job or maybe, you know, you're having some financial downturn for your life, what can you control right now? Where do your passions lie? And how can you maybe give back to your community to just stretch outside yourself a little bit? Like there's definitely ways, I think, that we can change our mindset and and shift it despite the circumstances. And with that, it's how do you see uncertainty? Like, I think most people are freaking out right now because I can't plan. I have no idea what's going to happen. But here's the thing about life in general: there's a lot of normal uncertainty in life. Like we never really know what's going to happen. Right? And so like it just, it's like because we're in a pandemic, because there's some, you know, social injustice discussions, there's politically charged discussions that are happening, we feel like the world is completely out of control, and that there is so much uncertainty. But it's really no different, like no one really knows what's going to happen. And the fact of the matter is is that the majority of innovation, creativity has come out of these type of challenging circumstances. People have had to innovate, right?

Yes.

Things differently. And so maybe this is an opportunity for a lot of people out there to create, right, something they've wanted to create for a while and just haven't had the moment. But it's also okay if during this time you just survive. Yeah.

It's important as well. That's a good, that's a good point because, you know, if the only thing you can do right now is put one foot in front of the other, then that's fine. You're still moving forward. It's not fast, it's not, you know, you're, yeah, it's a lot slower than it was a few months ago. But you may just have to survive right now. But if you just focus on that, well, it's going to get easier, and then you're going to go, "Well, hey, you know what, I can actually improve in here." And I, I try to tell that to, to people like, you know, how do we cope with this and what's going on? And I was, people say, "Hey, you know, you know, you don't worry about, don't put too much pressure on yourself. If you gain a couple pounds, it's okay. If you don't work out as much," and like, I take almost the opposite. It's like, "Look, if you can work out and stick to a program right now, during a very, very difficult time, you're always going to do it." And the meaning, if you can do something right now, you'll build such a good habit during really times of stress that it'll be programmed into you. So, so what do you want that to be? What, what, what is that, that habit of thought and, and habit of action that you want to build right now? Because you'll build it a lot faster during times of stress, right? And, and you'll fall back on it. You'll always fall back on that. So if it's a good thing, you're going to fall back on something good. If it's, you know, hitting the bottle of Jameson and a pack of cigarettes, well, then it'll be...

Look like this, I'm only twenty. The idea is, you cannot, your brain's chemistry is not hardwired to allow you to be empathetic or to be compassionate if you don't engage your mirror neurons and turn off the transmit and put it on receive or at least meet somebody fifty-fifty. But we're not doing that. And we're walking around with our cup being full and therefore we've got a chip on our shoulder already. And we're looking for instances where we can interject what we've practiced and rehearsed all night long to say, "Oh, that's racist. Oh, that's this. Oh, that's whatever." And when we're, when we're coiled like that spring and we're ready to jump, we're going to find exactly that amount of resistance.

You put it so well, Doc, when you were talking about whether you're, you know, in a fighter pilot or you're driving on the freeway. Well, listen, if that freeway suddenly stops in a parking lot, now you have slower speeds and more chance of a confrontation. If the speeds remain high, you've got a higher chance of road rage because people stop thinking. They're on transmit and, "I want my way, not just my say." And anytime that we have those incongruent mental statements, they all come from the amygdala. The amygdala is set up to send out ten thousands of more messages than it receives. Why? Because it's sensing our environment and determining how people's emotional quotients and intelligence quotients will, you know, involve me and in what I have to do to get out of them. And if we're not paying attention, if we don't have the situational awareness and the mindfulness, we're going to miss those opportunities. Opportunities to de-escalate, opportunities to communicate. Humans are more alike now than they've ever been and they're more in touch now than they've ever been. But we've convinced ourselves that this situation is the worst ever and it's apocalyptic and we'll never come back from. So I love what you do. I love what you're saying. I hope you can reach where we're coming from because it's all the same boat, right?

Oh, yeah. What you guys are doing too, this is so great.

Yeah, so I kind of want to get into one of your programs. And I don't want to take too much of your time, but we'll stay on for as long as you can, because you do have that, this, this Warrior's Edge that I want to get into. But to kind of just one, one quick story I've told on here before, but that both of you were hitting on about how sometimes we don't realize, you know, what's what's really going on, or we don't, the effect it's having on us, is I always told Greg, he laughs every time he hears this story. It's back to when I was a student on campus in today, and doing some work. And there was during this whole big kind of experiment that was going on. So I'm obviously at the very bottom of this, the guy on the ground doing stuff. But they have all these behavioral therapists, specialists, human performance folks, cognitive psychologists doing testing on this training that we're doing, right? And so I would always talk about different performance issues or mental health or different things as it related on the battlefield. And I just returned from another deployment overseas, and, and I, and they're like, "Well, Brian, what about this?" And I go, "Well, I go, I'm doing pretty well. Like, I'll give you an example. The other weekend I was out with some friends and we were at the bar, and we were drinking. And this guy said something really pissed me off. And like, man, all I could think about doing was just grabbing him by the back of the head and smashing his face on the bar. But I didn't. I calmed myself down. I paid my tab and I went home." And they were like, "I'm like, 'So, you know, I'm doing well.'" They're like, "Okay, Brian, no. Do you know that you don't have to feel that way when someone says something?" And I was like, "What?" They're like, "What he said didn't, didn't need that type of reaction." And I was like, and I literally, like, for everything wrong in it, I was like, "Go on." I never even thought of it that way. Literally walked away thinking like, "Hey man, you know, I'm doing well. I calmed myself down. I got myself out of the situation. I didn't do anything stupid." Like, I go on it's real. Like, "No, no, no, no, no." So it was just like how sometimes we don't realize it unless we have those moments where someone explains it to us. I guess, I don't know.

Well, isn't that, isn't that what your website's all about? Isn't that why you do the keynote speaking? I mean, we, you know, it's, it's like John Edward, you know, the, the guy that used to read the people. "I'm getting somebody that's a sister that died from cancer." What we do is, is we're hooked into reading this emotional intelligence and others and seeing when there's a gap that, that can make them perform better. I mean, I, I've devoted my life to this because it's the only thing I can do. Absolutely. Every other factor of life is a mess. But when it being able to read that and fix that, I can do it. That's why I immediately felt a similar feeling, a cataclysm, when I saw your work and saw what you did. Because birds of a feather, hey, we're of that same mindset. But here we represent—and I'm not trying to pat any of us on the back—but we represent going forward and moving the bubble. I think that's the important thing. I think it's, if we want to create homeostasis, if we want to keep doing the same thing that we've always done, our nation isn't going to come out of this better. And I think we have the opportunity to come out of it better, even though a bunch of things are stacked up together, the coronavirus being one, the, the mistrust with authority figures in inner cities which has come to a head now. And every time that somebody makes a traffic stop, it's a life-or-death decision. We don't have to. There's a Powderhorn old mining town close to me. I'm in the middle of nowhere and they used to have what's called a Deadman switch. So the person that was riding the train leaned against it and if he fell asleep or died, it would slow the train down before it came in and killed everybody in the village. We're rapidly approaching situations where the anxiety level in the normal human is to those proportions and it doesn't have to be. Programs don't cost a lot of money. Improving your mental health and getting the help and finding a great guide like the Doc that doesn't take a lot of work. And sometimes it's just reading or investing some time, a little bit of time, Brian. Like your investment in breathing, that can change a life, that can save a life.

I think that probably has, or someone else who pissed me off. But, you know, I'd love for you to kind of, if you've got some time, to talk about the Warrior's Edge and what you're doing. Just like I said, there's a lot of folks on here who are first responders or law enforcement or prior military, and I know it's, it's somewhat geared for that. So, so please give a, let's talk about what you're doing with that.

Yeah. So, you know, what you guys were just talking about, this idea of, you know, placing value on mental skills training. I think we're, we're, we're still a little slow, right? Because it is seen as prevention, it's hard to kind of prove it, it seems fuzzy, and there's an even stigmatized at times. So that's challenges I think we're working to. I think we all would agree, if you look at the science, there is a gap, right? There is a gap that exists in most human beings that we don't invest or train in the mental space. And so that's what I really found at the end of my dissertation work and my research, you know, just like when we were talking about physical activity, today there are hundreds of thousands of published articles within the physical exercise space. So it's a common cultural understanding, right, that you need to physically exercise and public policy recommendations are made around it. We're just very, we're at the nascent side, I think, of that evolution with respect to mental skills. And so it takes people like us to just continuously talk about it, press it, like, you know, advocate for it, break some glass around it a little bit, which is what I felt like I had to do as an active leader. I mean, I got a lot of criticism and skepticism with my bold leadership style, as people would call it, when I was a commander teaching people mindfulness, right?

Right.

They were like, "What is she doing? She's making everybody in her squadron meditate! How could you do that as a leader?" And, and what I found was that you're never going to get a hundred percent buy-in, but the majority of people were having life-changing experiences from it. So we need to continue to have these conversations and not be afraid, right, to talk about it and, and really call out the gap that exists.

The crazy thing is, though, if you think about the ancient warrior, this was what they did, right? Like they knew they were the protectors of their, their tribes. They were the people who went out there and experienced that high stress, and had to come back into that tribe environment. And they realized they had to have mental skills to do that centuries ago. We just have lost our connection with that. And so that's really what I'm trying to inspire, especially with warriors, that just this idea of not being this like gung-ho warrior, as far as a warfighter that's out there to conquer. I'm talking about a templated warrior, a warrior who can make split-second decisions that are rational and not emotional. A warrior that whether you're serving and protecting in your communities or you're out abroad, like you have the mental capacity to make rational decisions when pressure and stress is applied. And that's really what Warrior's Edge is about. It's about giving those tools and resources to those communities where a gap exists currently and reconnecting with, you know, where we need to be as human beings to execute this really high-risk mission.

And so that's kind of the, the reason behind it. I, I knew I wanted to build some type of program that kind of went along with the work that I was doing consulting and giving keynotes. And as I kind of scanned the tenants as a couple years ago, my network and who I wanted to partner with to potentially scale some training, I had been on Dr. Mike Gervais's podcast while I was a sitting squadron commander. And he and I just bonded over this idea. Neither of us, I think there's two prevalent thoughts with respect to how you execute mindfulness programs. There are some people that are trying to study and research like the most effective dosing, right? Like, "Do I teach you over an eight-hour course in the up to fifteen minutes a day?" Or, "Do I just teach you in an hour of course?" And you, and there's a lot of research going into that that is very beneficial and necessary. Mike and I kind of bonded where we were like, "We just do it. We just lead it. We just do it. We just got to introduce it to people, and we got to set, you know, habit patterns around it and create spaces as leaders." And so Pete, Mike, you know, Pete Carroll (the Seahawks coach), he was doing a very similar thing with his program. And so we just bonded over this shared passion for wanting to help people with mental skills and then also our idea of leadership being important for culture change. So we built Warrior's Edge together.

And so it's basically a high-performance mindset training program, given the perspective of the military operator in high-stress situations, as well as that elite athlete who has tested many of our methods in competitive environments. And so we've combined. Yeah, when you think about like what you're talking about Mike working with that elite 1%, when you look at the people who are the best in the world that push the boundaries on human potential, there are common themes, right, with what kind of mental skills have helped them push past, you know, everyone's pumping iron and, you know, studying their craft. What makes the difference is really who is prepared mentally for those moments. And so what we really discovered, there's no real secret to it. It's just hard work, yeah, specific mental skills and hard work. And they're not superhumans, no, they're human beings just like all of us. So why can't those same skill sets be given to people who are police officers, who are first responder paramedics, who are military operators? And so that's really why we built the program is to help unlock those resources and that potential. So mindfulness is a big part, it's a big platform or pillar within our training, but we also teach a total of sixteen principles of mindset. Recovery is a big part of it, building a psychological framework for success and high performance. And we teach it as an eight-hour live training or virtual workshop, taught in teams of two by an elite military operator and then an elite athlete. And so that's kind of how we teach it. And we use videos and interaction. We also have digital content, so it's self-paced and you can kind of go and on your own journey, but all this information's on the Warrior's Edge.

Yeah, I'll post all that stuff, so don't worry. You actually have, so we have people follow us on Facebook Live. First of all, Michele Paladini actually hopped on for a minute, she was like, "Hey," she said hi. She had to go back and get research for CPR, so she's doing that right now. And actually Dr. J.J. Walcutt hopped on too, because we were talking about her. So Greg, she even quoted you on here: "Humans are more alike now, but we've convinced ourselves it's apocalyptic." So there, it's on, it's on social media to have you.

And I'd like to hit on, on one thing that Dr. MacAulay said, and you know, I'm so honored to be here with you. One of the things I sent Dr. Gervais—I always mispronounce his name—I'm horrible. But I always do, we have to disabuse this, this notion that warrior culture is about killing. And I sent him a couple articles about that. There was another one that came out overnight I sent to Brian. And what happens is people are conflating that, that warrior and kill-ology. And that's what they're forgetting. My, the earliest logo that I ever designed for our dojo, the SMOBM, was a samurai warrior. And, and the samurai wasn't carrying a bow, he wasn't carrying a katana. He was painting because calligraphy and art and science and philosophy and musical instrument making, that was all part of it. So to be the samurai, you had to be elite in all of these social skills because that was how, you know, you, you also had to defend this village against invaders, but that wasn't all you were. And I'll tell you what, the best cops and, and every agency has coppers that they cringe when they, you know, say that guy's going to show up. Trust me. But, but the warrior, the samurai culture that is pervasive in first responder and coppers and, and soldiers is the good side of that, folks. So don't get hung up when you hear, "And then the door boot and car ramen guide, it's just itch and to use their weapon or female officer," because that's not what it's about and that's not the direction it goes. And in the website that Brian's going to put up in moments, in just seconds, you'll be able to see what their culture is all about and stop using those terms incorrectly.

Yeah, and that's, that's exactly, and that's what kind of people forget, right? We get that, you know, "Oh, I just want, I just want to be the hammer and everything is the nail." It's like, "No, you've got to be the hammer, you've got to be the screwdriver." You've got to be...

Raise the three letters that are war. It's hard for them to see past that. They don't look deep enough.

And everything you talk about it, we always throw back to, even kind of brought up earlier with some of the references, but like, we always throw back that's why we're called Archaic Agora. We throw back to the Greeks, because like that was the whole, they were the ones who, and they were just copying from what they learned from previous civilizations. They were just able to articulate it, right? And, and, and, and that's what it comes down to. And it's all about personal development, which is difficult. Or you get, I see it all the time with people that they get really, really good at one area and they put so much time and focus and effort. I'm like, "Man, like, just take what you do there and apply it over here. And you like, you already have the skill, you already have the capability, the ability to do that. Just go, just gotta build the capability," right? And, and so that's why I get it. And I always want to remind people too because we've had, you know, you on and Dr. Gervais and all these other people. And they're like, "Oh, what you're talking about like, hey, Dr. Gervais, he's like, he's a coach for the Seattle Seahawks. They have the best funding and the best player, or best, you know, this. And they can, they have their pick of who they are. Like, I'm just so on the street." And well, you kind of alluded to, but you didn't actually say it, is like, "Well, no, like, we take these concepts and test them there because, because if it doesn't pass there, it means it doesn't work," right? And, and so it's just a validation process. And we go, "Alright, if the top of the top of the top says, 'Hey, this is good. Let's do it.' It means it works for everyone. Probably going to work for you, maybe not specifically, but in a prototypical fashion, right? You can take those lessons learned and apply it." So I always like to remind people that it's like, you know, you talk about performance under stress and high performance. I have to remind my wife, like, she's got a sales job who works for a major company. She's got a lot of pressure on her. She's got this going on. She wants to do that. I'm like, "Do you understand where you're at? Like, you're past the point of human performance for any human. Like, you cannot be, you've got to let something go. You've got to let me do that. Alright, you have to pass that off because you're, you're exceeding your limit." So this is for all of us too.

I not just that it really is top tier. That's why Shelly throws in all the time, once a week, my, and my wife looks at me and goes, "Stop for a minute and celebrate the small wins." Because I forget. I too, I'm so much driven by, "What am I going to do next, Brian? What's our next milestone? Where are we going tomorrow?" And, and we forget the moment. And, and that's what this is all about. That situation where being in that moment internally and, and not just on transmit, that's great.

I think, and it's, I think it's cultural, right? I like to live in a competitive stress culture where people like to one-up, right, with their stress, busyness, and their over-scheduling. I mean, we're doing it with our children today, right? How many activities are your kids involved in? And so it's part of the culture of this idea of like, if we're not busy, we're doing something wrong. And we need to change the value proposition around that. And if you look at the people who are the best in the world at what they do, yes, they are hard-charging, committed, they go all in in their craft. But they also make space for restoration and recovery. But we never heard those stories, right? Like Serena Williams doesn't get to be amazing at what she does without spending as much time in recovery as she does in the active, you know, pursuit of high performance. And so it all fits together. But the average human being, we don't see that. We think we have to be superhumans, or we hear the stories of the CEO who only needs four hours of sleep. Like that, that is like bragging. You're suboptimal.

We work, it's exactly like what you do in the Air Force. If the average person knew how much ground time that that helo took before it went up in the air, the fixed-wing took on the ground before it did fifteen minutes in the air, they would go, "You've got to be kidding me." But they don't want to know that. This is the Hollywood lifestyle. "I just want to see that son of a gun at the air show." So your life is a lot like that. And, and if you don't take care on the ground, then, you know, Brian and I say all the time, problems aren't going to get easier at 30,000 feet. So it's a great analogy, I think.

Yeah. Well, I'll let you, I, I don't want to take too much more of your time, you know, I know you're busy too, right? So, so good. But I'll let you kind of, like, give us a round, like, last words and, and what, anything else or message you want to send out, and then I'll kind of wrap it from there, I guess.

Yeah. You know, I love sharing all this information to help people be high-performing, but where I think it has the most is in your daily life. And so I'm going to share a perspective and then a story. You know, when I was a commander, and the senior NCO corps was probably like my toughest crowd, right, to get bought into these types of new concepts we've never done before, that seemed, you know, stigmatized a little bit. And at the near the end of my, and I was doing some exit interviews with some of them, and I just wanted to know, did this matter, right? Did it matter that I shared these skill sets with you, and I taught you these things, I focused on human performance as a leadership initiative? And the majority had the same exact story, and it was, "Man, we didn't really know how to take you when you first got here. But we trusted you." You know, because they started with building trust and setting an example. And they would always say, "We trusted you and we went along for the journey, and it not only changed my life, but it was changing my family's life." Right? Like, "I was, I was sharing some of these ideas and tips and resources with them, and we were connecting more like with my spouse, with my kids." And that was making a difference, right? Because when your family's good, now your work's going to be good too. It all works together. So that meant more to me than any other data or like stats that we collected, or rewards that we won, because when it was like meaningful to people.

And, you know, the moment in my life where I realized how important this was was when—and I mentioned it in my TED Talk—when I was giving my three-year-old son, he was three at the time, a bath. And I thought I was killing it as this badass commander. And I'd be home every night for my son and daughter's bedtime routine. And as I was missing a lot, but I was sure as heck I could do my best to make it home for those moments. And in my mind, the story I was telling myself was like, "Man, I'm killing this! Like, I can do this parenting and commanding and leadership thing." When one night I was giving him his bath and he just like stops me and puts his tiny little hands on my face and looks up and with his big brown eyes, he just says, "Mommy, why are you so sad?" Oh my gosh, Mommy. And that was the first time I really got like knocked down by this little three-year-old. And I realized instead of being present with him, like, and in my head, I was saying, "I'm physically present with him, so that's all that matters." But I was emotionally and mentally disconnected and disengaged. And I was missing the opportunity to connect with one of the most important people in my life. And I realized how often many of us do that, right? We're physically present, we're okay, like we're making connections, we're there for our families, but we're thinking about our to-do lists, or we're still on our phones in our email, and, you know, worried about these catastrophes that we're building up inside our minds. And we're not actually mentally engaged. And I think that that if I can impress anything on any of your listeners today, like bringing awareness to that and catching yourself quicker, because it's going to happen. Like, it still happens. From that, my mind wanders, right? And the stat is that fifty percent, almost fifty percent of your day, your mind is wandering and distracted. And, and those are your waking moments. Right? I think I'm paying attention, but my mind is elsewhere, I'm unintentionally. And so bringing an awareness to that, I think, is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves, for our families, for our relationships, and for our overall health. And so if anything, I hope that, you know, hopefully people will start trying mindfulness. But if not, just please at least try it with more awareness in your life around how present you're being with your family.

Well, I appreciate all that. I'm sure the, the listeners do as well. You already had people commenting on Facebook Live, like, "Please, please post the link to our website and all that." So that's all good stuff. Thank you so much for everything you do, Jannell. Hopefully we can have another conversation, we can go into detail about it again sometime down the road. We'd love to have you back on, and, you know, appreciate what you do. Thank you for your service and thank you for just bringing all this stuff out in the light in a scientific manner and going, "Hey, this is what we need to focus on, folks." And having these conversations, because it's important for everyone, I think, in right now. If, if everyone in our country took a breath and focused on themselves, I think a lot of these problems would work themselves out very quickly. But, you know, it's, it's, it's tough, it's a process. So I really appreciate you coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a joy. I love having these conversations, and yeah, I'd be happy to. Anyone can reach out to me on all the social media platforms that are out there as well. And I look forward to continuing to engage with both of you and your work, and maybe we can collaborate on something.

Yeah, I'd like that. Good to see Pete Carroll again. We did, we didn't have a good ending for a different time. Greg was, Greg was the only one in the room who was going, "Who is this guy? God, he's incredibly, is it great? They've given this guy so much time to talk."

Honesty, guy. Thank you so much. Don't forget, every great dream prompted. Thank you. Training changes behavior.