Episode 1: The first and last time veteran suicide will be mentioned and finding resilience.

Chris Albert 00:00:03 (link to this point)

Good evening. My name is Chris Albert, and this is episode one of Chris Albert's Warrior Soul. Before I start to introduce myself, I want to give you some context for why I'm starting this podcast. For the past few years, we've been hearing about this number, twenty two. I'm going to say it once because I'm never going to mention it, this statistic, on this podcast again.

And I'll tell you why that is in a second. Twenty two veterans a day commit suicide in this country. A lot of people think it's much more. And this is an alarming statistic and it's especially alarming for those of us who've put on a uniform in our lives and who've served. But it's also a number.

And when we're given numbers, it tends to simplify things. It simplifies things by allowing us to focus on a particular cause. And we focus that cause, we focus on that cause to the point of oversimplifying the situation. The cause becomes fetishized by the media and by groups seeking to take up a cause of their own. And by this, I mean that the media becomes obsessed with attributing that cause to the problem.

Campaigns are started, news specials are broadcasted, and everyone tries to bring light and awareness to that particular cause. Now I'm not saying that we're wrong to bring light or awareness to the situation. And PTSD is an extremely legitimate potential cause for the high rate of veteran suicide. But through all the news specials and the negative coverage that the VA gets, through all the hashtags and charity campaigns, I believe that we miss something. We call attention to that potential cause, but we forget about what all this attention does to the veteran.

The veteran who's constantly had to live with the stigma that he might have this thing called PTSD. The veteran who hears only about his brothers who've taken their own lives, but hears little about brothers who persevered and remained resilient and built beautiful lives and had great successes. The veteran who has the same hopes, dreams and aspirations as many of his civilian counterparts, but who also has more management experience, leadership experience and overall experience than any of his civilian counterparts could ever even hope to have paid for through a college education. That veteran is now given an excuse when he runs into difficulties in life. And he is invariably going to run into difficulties.

That excuse says, well, maybe I am broken. Maybe all the things they're saying in the media are true. I'm not going to talk about veteran suicide on this podcast because this show is not about failings. It's also not about depression. Though one of my concerns and one of my goals is to help alleviate the problems with depression and PTSD and every other difficulty that veterans are having in living their best lives.

This show is not gonna be about failings. It's gonna be about getting you, all my veteran brothers and sisters, and anybody else who wants to listen. We're still living, breathing, and capable humans to succeed and live a beautiful life. And that's what the subject matter of this podcast is going to be. I'm not going to coddle veterans or talk about us needing help because beyond treatment for our injuries and compensation for combat related disabilities, including PTSD, I don't believe we need nor should we expect help.

What we need is the ability to be self reliant. We need the knowledge and the experience and the trials and the pain and the tribulations and the struggle. And we need to integrate all of those into our being so that we can come out of these dark times as stronger, more resilient, and less fragile human beings. And as I said, we need knowledge, but we don't need knowledge from a college professor or some course. We need knowledge about ourselves and what we're capable of.

I think it's the easy thing to do to tell veterans to go to college and be like everyone else. And yes, I agree. Veterans who want to do something that requires a college degree should be given an opportunity to go to college. And the GI Bill is an awesome thing. In a college education, whether it's liberal arts or science, it's going to give you a basic education at a particular knowledge area.

And yeah, that's essential depending on what you want to do with your life. But what's always essential is the ability to work through difficult times, to step up in front of problems and work through them. The problem with just focusing on college is really assuming that one, veterans lack the basic knowledge already that they need to succeed. The fact of the matter is they went through, they've just gone through either a four year or longer crash course in leadership and a crash course on human psychology. You need to know some of that stuff in order to lead people.

But it's also assuming that veterans are just like everyone else. They're not like everyone else. A lot of them are high performers. A lot of them can operate at a higher capability than the average human being. And it's not like they're Superman.

They just have the experience that allows them to do that. And so when you take them and you take them out of a situation where they've been giving tons of responsibility, and they've been given only responsibility, but the burden of leadership, and you put them in a situation where they no longer have that, then, well, yeah, that's gonna put somebody into a place where they might not know what to do with themselves. And so we kind of have to start over. We kind of have to start at the beginning and get beyond the books, the book knowledge, and the course material. And we have to really develop knowledge for living a better life.

For once again being able to be put into a position where you can lead people, where you can interact with people in a positive manner, and where you can influence people to also live better lives. The biggest knowledge I'm talking about is the knowledge that comes from adopting humility. The understanding that we are not in fact born with all we need to know to succeed. And once we adopt this idea we open ourselves up to accepting new ideas and to examining our own lives in a way that allows us to gain the knowledge we need to be the masters of our own fate and heroes of our own stories. This knowledge goes into building a trait that's gonna allow us to live positive and productive lives regardless of what happens to us because we know and understand that it's not what happens to us that matters, but the ways in which we respond.

With this trait, rather than allowing problems to weaken us and break us, we use our problems to become stronger, better, and less fragile people. The trait I'm talking about is resilience. And this is going to be the main subject of today's podcast. And part of the major theme that this podcast is going to be based on for probably almost all of its future episodes. This podcast, as I said, is going to be about getting you to live your best life.

Not just any life, not just existing, but getting you to live up to your full potential and allowing you to live your absolute best life. Building the best version of you. And in order to do this, you have to have a foundation. You have to have the base from which to work. Because no matter what you do in your life, there's gonna be fear.

There's gonna be hardship. There's gonna be difficult times. And there's going to be times when you don't have a lot of people around you that are able to help like you did when you were in the military. You're not going to be surrounded by your brothers or your sisters. You're going to have to handle a lot of this stuff by yourself.

So the essence of resilience is almost being self reliant in trying to solve your problems and trying to use them to become stronger. And before we move on into that subject matter, I want to emphasize this one last time. This podcast is never going to be about veteran suicide. And the reason why it's never going to be about veteran suicide is because you need to hear the positive stories. Need to start seeing the positive side of things.

And while I pray and work to try to end this plague through this end of things, I don't think that continually mentioning the number 22 is going to help you. You'll see it enough. You'll hear it enough from other people. This podcast is also not going to be about curing PTSD, and it's not going to be about anything political or anything even military related. You're going have to get used to me mispronouncing things from time to time.

It's not even only going to be about subject matter that relates to veterans. Probably anybody who listens to the material I go over can benefit from it. But my focus is on veterans because that's the population that I love. I love each and every one of you. Not only because you're my brother and you're my sister, but because you guys sacrificed, you put your lives on the line.

You, at the very least, gave up years of your life in service of this country. But that also doesn't mean that I think you're special. You're still human. Your heart's still beating. You're breathing and someday you're going to die.

And so that means you don't get a get out of jail free card just because you served. What it means is that we all expect more from you. We all expect you to excel and as a veteran, as your brother, I demand that you excel. I demand that you live your best life. But unlike some order you're gonna get from someone, or like my my friend CT Fletcher commanding you to grow.

What I'm gonna try and do here is give you every tool that I can in order to help you on this journey. And I can't promise you it's going to be easy. I can't promise you that you're going to get instant resilience and instant mindfulness and an instant key to the secret of life from this podcast. But I can tell you that I'm going to do everything I can to try to help you go off in the proper direction. The big reason why I'm targeting veterans aside from all my personal feelings is that you guys are the population that needs to hear this the most.

You young people, people in your younger years have gained more leadership experience and on the job experience than almost anybody your age. You have the ability to be leaders in this country, to shape the future of this country. And I think it's a tragedy that so many of you aren't living up to your full potential. And so not only is this a public service to you, though I may be overstating my ability to provide a service, it's a public service to this country that I love. And so again, the subject matter we're going to come to today is resilience.

How to get on the path to start to build resilience. And the book we're going to be referencing today is a book by the same name. It's called Resilience and it's by Eric Greitens. That's g r e I t e n s. Eric Greitens was a Navy SEAL, and he's actually currently a candidate for governor in the state of Missouri.

The book came about because Eric had gotten out of the SEALs, and he was living his own life when one day he got a phone call from one of his buddies, one of his pals from the SEAL teams. And he basically heard from this guy saying that you know, he'd been arrested. He got caught being drunk. He was probably going to go to jail. He was having problems at home with his wife.

He was when he got out of his car he'd hit the deck because he thought he spotted a sniper in the tree line, and he was having a lot of issues. And so the book is basically a series of letters that Eric Greitens wrote to his old buddy from but it wasn't from the teams it was from BUD/S. Now there's been a lot of books about and by Navy SEALs coming out lately and there's two in particular that I absolutely love. I love this one and I love Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Sorry I always mispronounce his name Leif Babin.

And I'll be going over Extreme Ownership probably sometime in the very near future. But with resilience, the big thing I absolutely love about this and that I love about extreme ownership is that it's not just one of those war books where it's like, so there I was staring at the enemy, seeing his red beady eyes gaze upon me as I thumbed the safety on my M4. You know it's not like one of those. This is a heartfelt beautiful book that is not a guidebook for resilience. It's basically almost a philosophy, and it draws upon knowledge given over the ages back from ancient times, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, some of the great American scholars to define this thing that we call resilience and to really impart on his friend this wisdom that was given by all these different scholars and from some really hard earned experience.

And so I start with this book because, as I said, resilience is the foundation for everything. You know, without resilience, you're not going to be able to do much of anything in this life because you are, again, going to invariably face times where you are having a hard time. And so let's start to get into this a bit. I'm not going to go over the whole book because I think you should read it, and I don't expect that you're going to have all the secrets of resilience by the end of this show. And maybe even after I've done every podcast episode that I possibly can, you might not have everything you need to know.

But the point here is that this is going to be a constant quest, a constant journey for you. And unless you see it as a constant quest and a constant journey to improve, unless you see it as something that you're going to have to consistently work on, the idea is almost already lost on you. So before we get into this, make a commitment to yourself. Have an understanding with yourself that, you know, a lot of these qualities I'm going to go over, they're not going be easy to understand at first. You're going to actually have to put in work, real work on yourself to fully understand them and to implement them in your life.

So as we get into the book, the first thing we got to do is really define resilience. Why is it such an important concept? And the big thing that Greitens says, and as I've said, is that you need resilience because you can't have happiness, success, anything else worth having without meeting hardship along the way. And we have to confront pain, hardship, and fear. Because each of these things can provide obstacles for us to get where we to where we want to go in life.

But there are also things that we have to deal with. You know, I mentioned before that at some point, each and every one of us is gonna die. But that also means that each and every person around you at some point is gonna die. Some of them earlier than others. Sometimes, you know, God forbid, people outlive their children.

Sometimes, you know, tragedy befalls us. And lot of times life takes its course on the people we love. And so even if it's not a tragedy, even if somebody dies of old age, that could still leave a really hard impact on us that could keep us from really realizing our potential because of our grief. But unless you're able to work through that, unless you're able to take that grief and work it into your life in a positive manner, you're not going to be able to really move forward from it. And so the first thing you have to realize about pain, hardship, and grief is that these are things that we can't control.

You know, you're living on this planet. You're living on Earth. And a lot of times we worry about things that we can't control if they're going to happen or not. You can't control a lot of times half, you know, probably 75, 80% of the things around you. You can control your mood.

You can control how you accept those things. You can control your relationships. You can control your thoughts, and you can control your actions and try to mitigate the risk of certain things happening. But a lot of times you can't control what's going to happen. You can't control if a loved one passed passes away.

You can't control if the economy takes a shitter, you know, and so fear, that big thing that really holds us back in a lot of ways is useless because we fear things that really almost have nothing to do with us, that have nothing to do with our own actions. And when we fear these things, we take our mind off of our ability to control the things that we can control. So we have to understand that these things that we can't control are part of the struggle. And we really have to endure the struggle if we're going to be successful and if we're going to get everything that we can out of this life. The other thing we've got to realize is that the struggle doesn't make us special.

Everybody is going through it. And Greitens writes on page nine, but you have to remember that while they are yours, they are not unique. He's talking about your struggles. Your struggles are very much like the struggles of those who went before you. And they are very much like the struggles of those who will come after you.

Every human being from the beginning of time has suffered pain, hardship, difficulty and doubt. And in the record of mankind's struggles, our forebears have left clues and stories and philosophies and poems and plays and paintings and songs. You know, this reminds me of a speech that General Mattis made, and I can't remember the exact words and I don't have the speech in front of me, but he was talking about what veterans are going through today. And he said something to the effect of, We've suffered no more and certainly much less than many of those who came before us. So we deserve no more than anybody else has ever been given.

All we deserve is a level playing field and care for our wounded. And what Mattis is talking about there is the idea that we as a generation of Veterans are not special. You know, even the fact that there have been a lot of veteran suicides doesn't make this generation special. You know, when we think back to wars like World War I, you know, if you ever get a chance to listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, you know, you realize that in the first days of that war, the French lost, I think first two days they lost over 75,000 people. Suffered 250,000 casualties in the first two days of that war.

You know if you ever get a chance to watch some of the HBO specials like the Pacific or Band of Brothers and it gives you a depiction of what life was like for the average soldier average marine in World War two. Particularly in the Pacific he gives you such a realistic view of the suffering that those Marines went through on the Pacific Islands. You know, dealing with some of the worst conditions on the planet, dealing with jungle rot, dealing with bodies all over you, all over the place, dealing with a ruthless enemy who would do anything to kill you, and then being there for months and months and months on end without, you know, a lot of the modern luxuries we've had on our own deployments. And then you think about, you know, some of the scenes from Band of Brothers, the Battle of the Bulge, and dealing with the absolute bitter cold, dealing with the wall of rounds, you know, flying over you as you're trying to take a machine gun nest. And that's not to mitigate any of the service that any of you have been through.

But it's to give you an understanding that we're no different. And maybe in a lot of ways we've also had much less of an experience. That's not again to say that we're less men. You know, have such respect for you warriors out there. But it is to say that because we're no less of a man, we're no less strong than those classes of individuals who serve so valiantly in those conflicts.

Maybe it's to say that we've got to step up just like the guys who came home from those wars did. Maybe it's to say that we need to really have an impact on this country. And the fact of the matter is in large part a lot of us haven't answered that call. You know we've come home and we've neglected to take a lot of action in our own lives because we can't get around these things. These things called fear, pain, and hardship.

And all we need is a little bit of understanding of who we are, and a little bit of understanding, a little bit of perspective on our situation. Now, a lot of people think resilience has to do with bouncing back from a situation, you know, like a ball, take a rubber ball for instance, or maybe one of those styrofoam footballs that you get from the drugstore that you know maybe your kid plays around with or maybe you played around with when you're you were younger. You know you squeeze one of those balls and it goes back to its original form and in science a lot of ways describes that as resilience. Resilience of an object. The ability to bounce back to its original form.

But resilience for human beings is a lot different. And I think this is really where the media gets it wrong. Greitens writes, What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilient people do not bounce back from hard experiences. They find healthy ways to integrate them into their lives.

In time, people find that great calamity met with great spirit can create great strength. Now the idea expressed here is in a lot of ways looking at the positive end of this but there's also a negative end. And what I think the media doesn't get about veterans with combat experience is that they're not just going to come back normal. You know and and in fact you have to ask what the hell is normal? Parts of your brain were awakened and reawakened from your experience. You know, and you have almost a better sense of or better contact with those parts of your brain than the average human being.

Now some would say that that makes your brain abnormal, but it means that your brain's been developed by an experience. An experience that most human beings today have never had. And so in the sense that you're not like a lot of people, yeah, you're abnormal. But again, we're living things. Natural beings that were native to this planet who didn't evolve wearing shirts and ties and walking around smiling at each other.

You know, we didn't evolve to sit at a desk all day and sit in front of a computer. That wasn't our natural purpose. You know we've done these things based off of you know our ability to ability to evolve as a society but it's not a natural thing and so what I want to do off the bat is get rid of the concept that you are somehow abnormal because again, it's like, what is normal? Do you wanna be like that guy walking around with a shirt and tie who lets everybody walk all over him? Do you want to be like, you know, some kid wearing Birkenstocks and growing your hair long?

Maybe some of you have done that, but that's besides the point. Even if you have, if that was the norm, does does that mean that that's normal and you should feel bad because you don't wanna do those things? And I think that in and of itself breeds a lot of alienation. You know, think the idea that you have to come back and just fall right into a normal life or be expected to do that or be labeled as somebody with a mental illness. I think that's absolutely ludicrous.

And so we have this almost I gotta say it's almost like a it's almost like you guys are being stereotyped just, know, like a minority in this country. Because you don't fit in properly, you don't, you know, maybe your ambitions lie out or maybe, you know, you just act differently from other people. In a lot of ways, you know, you're being put at the disadvantage. And that's nothing not to say that you should be complaining about that, and that's not to give you an excuse, but it is to say that you shouldn't feel like you're substandard or subhuman because you have the feelings that you have. There is no reason to.

They're perfectly normal human reactions to what you've been through. And so the big thing here is getting comfortable with the fact that you're never going to be the same person you were before you went to combat. And that's got to be okay. It's an experience that you've integrated into your life and an experience that if you approach it properly with the proper perspective can actually make you stronger. And the reason there is again because it's not what happens to you that matters, it's how you approach it.

You know, your view of the situation could be that, okay, well, I have this tendency to be hypervigilant. I have this tendency to be maybe a little bit driven by anxiety. But you can see that in one of two ways. You could see it as, okay, I have a mental illness that's gonna plague me for the rest of my life. Or you could see it as, okay, well, this is going on and I understand that it's going on and understand why it's going on, but I'm not gonna consider it a handicap.

And I know that this is easier said than done. I know that a lot of you sitting at home right now and being like, well, that's easy for you to say. But the fact is that this is the perspective you can have to develop in order to get over, in order to move past it, in order to integrate it back into your life in a way that's going to make you stronger. And if you do that, then one day you're going to be able to say, you know what? I have this.

It's it's there. But I can look at it in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm less human. That doesn't make me feel like I don't deserve to be a member of society. And I think at the end of the day that's probably the first stepping stone. You know identifying it and then realizing that it's just an experience and because it's an experience it can make you stronger.

The other thing is, you know, resilience isn't a new concept in and of itself, and you can go back to the stoic philosophers who say the same thing. And I'm going to read you a quote from quotes from two of my favorite stoic philosophers. And the funny thing about these guys is it's Epictetus, I always mispronounce his name, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and they're both on different ends of the spectrum. And Epictetus was a slave who, you know, kind of came out of slavery and he became Marcus Aurelius's teacher. And he became known as a great philosopher.

And we'll read you his quote right now. What disturbs men's minds is not events, but their judgments on events. For instance, death is nothing dreadful or else Socrates would have thought it so. No, the only dreadful thing about it is men's judgment that it is dreadful. And so when we are hindered or disturbed or distressed, let us never lay the blame on others, but on ourselves.

That is on our own judgments. To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete. So that's a big thing.

You know, about what he's saying there. It's about understanding your own responsibility and also about understanding the role that nature plays. You know, again, this concept that difficulty, hardship, pain, and fear, they're out there. They're part of nature. They're part of our nature.

And so a lot of ways we're not going to be able to escape these things. I'm going go to his student Marcus Aurelius. Now the thing about Marcus Aurelius, unlike Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. And one of the things he did was he wrote this kind of book about his thoughts. It was almost like a guidebook for being who he was.

And he sought, even though he was probably one of the most powerful men in the world at that point, he sought to live a simple life. He sought to get more in touch with his human self rather than, you know, kind of bathing in the implements and the pomp and the power of being emperor. And this is what he writes. Everything that happens either happens in such a way as you were formed by nature to bear it or as you were not formed by nature to bear it. If then it happens to you in such a way as you were formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, but bear it accordingly.

But if it happens in such a way as you were not formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, for it will perish after it's it has consumed you. Remember, however, that you were formed by nature to bear everything whose tolerability depends on your own opinion to make it so by thinking that it is in your interest or duty to do so. So that's a big thing there. What he's saying is that you're formed, you're able to take on any hardship that you choose to take on. You know, it's just your opinion there that counts, your opinion about the situation. And in understanding that it's also your choice. It's your choice to take on these problems. It's your choice to be resilient. It's not just going to come to you. You have to make an active choice to make resilience part of your life. And that's something that I've always said.

You can choose to sit there. You can choose to complain. You can choose to not do anything, or you can choose to live the best life possible. And I know a lot of people there, they're saying, well, I don't know my purpose. I don't know why I'm here.

I don't know what I should do. And the biggest thing is that you kind of have to understand that allowing yourself to seek the opportunities to learn is part of what you should be doing. Know, admitting to yourself that you don't know everything. You can either allow misfortune to consume you or you can bear the misfortune and integrate it in your life in a helpful manner. Right?

And integrating it in your life in a helpful manner, that means that you start by sitting there and say, you know what? I don't know everything I need to know to get through this. So I'm going to learn it. I'm going go out there and I'm going to seek answers, right? You're not expected to know everything right now.

You're not expected to know where you should be right now. You're expected to try. You're expected to try to know. You're expected to try to learn. You know, if you pull up your smartphone right now, you have a world of knowledge at your fingertips.

You know, you can get any book from any collection for as little as less than a dollar off of Amazon and it could be at your house within a day or two days or three days and now they got those drones flying around so maybe even in an hour pretty soon. You're living in one of the greatest times on the planet. Seek knowledge. But you start by seeking knowledge about yourself. You know, is the thing and and you might think that I'm taking pulling this out of thin air.

But if you look at the lives of some of the most successful people who ever existed and you read about them through biographies and encyclopedias or Wikipedia. You could do this this second with each name that I mentioned and you can read about their stories. And you can see that each of these guys that I'm about to talk about had their own problems. Know Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie grew up as a poor boy in Scotland. He started working at an extremely young age in factories to help support his family and when they came here to The United States they were even poorer.

But he got his start in steel and he worked to become one of the richest men ever in existence. And by the end of his life, he'd given away more money to charity than most people had ever even earned. I think anyone had ever even earned at that point. And Andrew Carnegie had nothing. In fact, you're holding a smartphone right now, if you're listening to this podcast, you have more than Andrew Carnegie did when he started.

You know, had to go to he had the benefit of the fact that the guy who owned the factory he worked in opened up his personal library to the boys who worked there once or twice a week. That's all he had. You can get knowledge at any second. Know, John Rockefeller, and that's a name that's synonymous with wealth. He grew up in a single room cabin with six other family members.

You know Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren he grew up in The Bronx. Poor family, and again went to work at a very young age and worked his way through odd jobs. I think he left school to try to join the army and today he's one of the richest fashion moguls on the planet. You know Howard Schultz he grew up in a project in New York with nothing.

You know he got himself a football scholarship and got a job with Xerox after college and he ran into a coffee shop one day in Seattle, Washington, enjoyed the beans. And after a trip to Italy, he stopped and he looked at this Italian coffee shop and he thought to himself, wow. This concept could really work well in The United States. It's because he was able to keep his eyes open, and he didn't let his past get in the way of his vision. And if you wanna talk about veterans, think about the founder of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, who was wounded in Vietnam.

You know, again, he didn't come from any riches. He didn't have a fortunate life. He was able to come home and he started a computer software company. He sold that company for a good amount of money to Intuit and then he went off and he founded GoDaddy. Now, by giving you all these names, I don't want you to think that I'm telling you that all I'm all the advice I'm giving you is just so that you can try to become rich and famous.

It's not about that. What I'm trying to make you understand here is that these are people who found success, who found a life's purpose, and they weren't given everything. You know, they had problems. They had serious problems in their lives. But they were able to integrate those problems and work through them and use the knowledge they gained through those problems to help them find success throughout their lives. You know, and maybe you just want a better family life or just to be better at your job. Maybe being rich isn't for you. Maybe you just want your small business to succeed. Maybe you just want to lose weight and get fit.

Or maybe you're just deep, so deep and whole, you just want to get out of it. And you want to just be happy. Whatever you do with your life, you're gonna need disability. You're gonna need resilience. You're gonna need the ability to adapt, overcome and integrate pain and hardship into your life in a healthy manner.

So now that I probably over hammered and overdrew that conversation, maybe we want to know how you start. How do you begin? How do you start to develop resilience? How you develop this valuable characteristic? Well, there's a clue in what I said and what I read from Marcus Aurelius, that is responsibility.

You have to accept responsibility for your life and you have to accept the idea that no one else, the world, society, they're not responsible for your state of mind. You're responsible for your state of mind. You're responsible for how you view the world and you are responsible for pushing yourself forward. And Greitens writes, the first step to building resilience is to take responsibility for who you are and for your life. If you're not willing to do that, stop wasting your time reading this letter.

He's saying that to his friend. The essence of responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences, good and bad, of your actions. You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you deal with what happens to you. Even when we recognize the limits of our own power to shape the world, we can still strive to be masters of ourselves.

And that is more than enough work to fill a whole life. That's a huge concept there. You know, and for those of you who are wondering, well, I haven't found my life's purpose. I mean, the biggest thing you've gotta do then is to start to try to know yourself, to master yourself, right? You can't sit there and say, okay, but I don't know where to go.

I don't know where to start. I don't know what I'm good at. Well, become good at mastering you. Because there is no job on this Earth that's going to be permanent, right? All the money you earn in your life, you know, you're not going to die with that but you have to live for the rest of your life with you.

And so, you might as well be a really good life partner to yourself. And so you kind of have to go on this journey of self discovery. This journey of learning more about yourself. And knowing you and knowing your weaknesses, knowing your strengths, knowing what you respond to, understanding where your sadness comes from, understanding what makes you happy, Understanding why you react to certain ways in certain situations. You know that these in in and of themselves are steps toward finding resilience.

You know resilience is informed by starting a business plan. You know I can tell you that. I've known plenty of business owners and MBA graduates who've started business plans but lacked resilience and failed in their businesses. But for whatever you want to do, whether that's again, building a multi million dollar company or whether that's just being a better father, just being a better husband or just getting yourself out of that whole depression or finding a way to lose that weight. The first step is building resilience, building mental toughness, and mastering you.

You know, if you want to lose weight, you've got to know and understand how you're going to get through your day without reaching for that chocolate bar, without reaching for you know that jar Nutella or those donuts. You've got to figure that out right? And you've got to figure out how you could do that on a consistent basis every day until it comes time for you to maybe have a cheat day or until you've reached your goal and you lax a little bit, right? But even after you reach your goal you can't lax because you put the weight back on. So you need to figure out how to integrate healthier eating into your lifestyle for the rest of your life.

You know it's the same thing with mental fitness. You've got to develop best practices that are going to keep you mentally fit for the rest of your life because it's not going be a chocolate bar, it's going to be a death, it's going to be a tragedy. It's not going to be a jar of Nutella. It's going to be a defeat that gets in your way. And you need to figure out how to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and move on. And that's the thing, you know. So I'm going to take you to page 33. And this is where Greitens really talks about humility and the importance of humility here. The importance of humility in starting.

Okay? And that's the second thing you need. So you need to take responsibility for yourself. You also need humility. You need to be able to admit to yourself that you don't know everything you need to know to get to where you want to be.

And let me read this. I've been afraid of beginning many, many times. I certainly haven't mastered that fear, but I'll offer you a few thoughts about beginning that I've found helpful. First, when you begin, begin with humility. Start with the humility to recognize how little you know.

I begin with humility. I act with humility. I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart.

With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every person as superior to me in some way, with every person as my teacher. I grow in wisdom. As I grow in wisdom, humility becomes ever more my God. I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. And it goes on to say, that's my humility mantra.

I usually read it twice a day at the beginning of the day. I feel a little exposed handing it to you like this. I wonder what you'll think of it. But I share it with you because I think that humility is the virtue from which true, well rounded, meaningful excellence begins. If you start with humility, you begin you see every person as your teacher.

If you start with humility, you recognize that you have something to learn. And that's a really big thing. I mean, let me just continue reading here. Have the ability to admit yourself that of all the things you need to know and don't, one of the things that you don't know well enough is yourself. You perceive that something is missing in your life.

It worries you that you cannot name it or define it precisely. Welcome to the club mate. That's not an excuse for not starting. That's the point of starting. If you were whole, perfect, without need, desire, or fault, you wouldn't have to begin anything.

Of course, you begin with doubts. We can be in awe of how much we don't know. Quote, this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, unquote, said Plato. Since wonder is only is the only beginning of philosophy, Wonder what you don't know is the source of the wisdom you might one day achieve. So that's the big thing there.

You know. You've gotta really begin in wonder. You have to have a curiosity to get to know yourself. That drives you to get to know yourself. A curiosity to understand who you are.

Right? And as I've always said you know we have this focus on what we are. You know, the identity given to us by society and you know, it's big with us Marines because we always say, you know, we earned the title and that's important, right? We did earn that title. Same thing with soldiers.

You know, you earn the title of soldier. You earn the title of airman. You earn the title of sailor. You know, SEALs earn the title of SEAL. But what you always got to remember is that what you are is never going to be as important as who you are.

Right? And you have to know and understand who you are. Right? It's easy to learn about what you are because somebody comes up and, you know, you go through the crucible, you go through boot camp, recruit training, you go through the crucible, somebody hands you an Eagle Globe and Anchor, and they says, you know, welcome, Marine. You know, you've earned your EGA.

Alright? And from that point on, you're a Marine. And then, you know, in the army, from the time you finish basic, you're a soldier. In the navy, you're a sailor and SEALs you're SEAL, Unless you're a stolen valor guy and that's joke for another time but we focus so much on what we are because that's the easy thing for us to identify. But rarely in that process do we ever really think about who we are.

You know you've got to really understand that if you're going to chart a course for yourself through your life. You know what you are is your title. Who you are is based more on your values. You know the things that make up you as a person. And some of those values might match the Marine Corps, the Army, or the Navy.

Some of those values might match other organizations that you're a part of. Maybe you're a Catholic. Maybe you're a Jew. You know. Maybe you're a Baptist.

Maybe you're an atheist. Maybe you're a whole bunch of different things. You know, but you're going to develop core values throughout your life. And those core values are really your guide for who you are. So one of the things you really need to do if you're going to start this is after this podcast maybe you should take a piece of paper and write down your core values.

Right, and as I said maybe some of those match the Marine Corps, maybe some of those match other organizations, maybe they're your own. But the thing about it is if you get to a point where you're violating any of those core values then you're going to be uncomfortable. You're going to really not feel right in your own skin. And so that's why it's important to know what those core values are. Because they tell you who you are and they're gonna be your kind of compass for when you're getting yourself into a situation where you don't feel comfortable in your own skin.

Without them, you're not going to know why, right? And I would assume that most of you who listen to this maybe don't have your core values written down. Maybe you don't know what they are. And I would suggest that one of the reasons why you're uncomfortable right now. Maybe one of the reasons why you might be in a bad place right now is because you don't have a good grasp on that yet.

So the first step is to to get one. To start to know it, start to study yourself, to start to understand your core values and how they make you make up you as a person. You know finding your purpose it begins with this quest, knowing and understanding yourself. It also really entails you opening up your eyes to the world around you. And what that means is that in a lot of ways, you've got to stop thinking about all the ways the world is wronged you.

Stop thinking about all the problems in your life and maybe just for a change, think about everything you're grateful for. You know, think about the fact that you have a roof over your head. Think about the fact that you have shelter. Think about, you know, if you have a family, think about them. Think about all the ways in which you're grateful for your family.

You know, if you don't have any of that, maybe think about the ways in which you're grateful for living in this part of the world in this country. You know, if you've been to the areas of deployment that a lot of us have been through, then you know that one of the biggest things that I thought about when I was in Iraq was the fact that I was only there for a few months. But the kids I saw, the children, the people, they had to live there. You know? And so every day I look around my neighborhood and one of the things I do is I tell myself how grateful I am.

And I think that from the times when I was homeless, when I was living out of my car, I was still grateful because at some point in my life, I'd seen those children playing in sewers, raw sewage all over the street. I knew that I was fortunate because someday I was gonna get out of that car. Those kids, they're still gonna be probably in that same village they were in, that same neighborhood. And I got to come home. You know, a lot of you suffer from survivor's guilt, and I've been there before too.

Know? And I'd say, you know, my my deployments to Iraq were pretty uneventful. But when we got back from my deployment, I I got out. You know, I went to school. But a lot of my friends stayed in, and, you know, a couple years later, they ended up in a much worse situation in Fallujah.

And, you know, I've lost friends there. I lost officers who I looked up to there. I lost former marines. I lost, I didn't lose, but, you know, one of my fellow NCOs from my last platoon got hit in the face while trying to save an officer. And I felt immense guilt for that.

And I told myself these lies, these dumb lies. When my life started to go down the shitter, I told myself that I deserved it. I told myself that this was the hell that I should have gone to. And I told myself that I had to endure a horrible life. And so I made no effort to try to know myself, to try to know my difficulties, to try to be resilient and get myself out of that situation.

I sat there and I did nothing for a long time until I came to my senses. You know, don't do that to yourself. Those are things that you're making up in your mind. And for lack of a better word, they're an excuse. They're an excuse to pull you off the hook to be responsible for yourself, for your own success.

Back to the subject matter here. You know, another thing is you have to really see where you can add value. That's another aspect of opening up your eyes to the world. Right? You know, people aren't just going to come up and pull out their pockets and give you money.

And if you wait for a miracle in your life, you know, God, no matter what religion you're in, if you're one of the three major religions, you know that God gives you free will. Free will to do what you may in this life. And, you know, whether it's a sin or not, you have the free will to do it. And so he's or she or whatever you believe, he reserves the judgment until you die. And that also means that, you know, fate, the idea of fate, is a dangerous concept to put in our minds because it causes us to wait.

It causes us to wait for some sort of miracle to happen when the reality is because we have free will, because we have the ability to make our own decisions, we need to really make our own miracles happen. And one of the best ways to get started on helping yourself is to help others. To add value somehow to people's lives. And that's true whether you're in business or in charity. Right?

The closest and fastest way you can add value is to add value to the lives of your loved ones. Right? By being a better father, by being a better husband, by being, you know, a better spouse, a better son, maybe a better friend. But there's also this larger concept of adding value, right? And some of you might be able to add value through your story by talking to other veterans, by talking to other people.

You know, we're always I always hear veterans talking about civilians and people who never served and how they act differently. Maybe one of the things we need to be doing rather than complaining about them is educating them, you know leading. Maybe rather than just reacting to them, maybe we need to be setting an example as Veterans and as exemplary citizens in The United States. Maybe people are attracted more to an example of somebody who's living a good life than they are to somebody who looks at them with disgust. You know, that's one way you can add value by leading.

You know another way you can add value is through your own job or business venture. You know, if you're in your job you can lead others, you can, you know, form a career path for yourself by adding value to a company. You know, I haven't worked for somebody else in a long time, but that's how you start. Right? That's how you start.

That's how you you know and you can have a beautiful career, a beautiful living by building value for another person's company. Or if you are in business and you do want to be an entrepreneur, the only way to really be an entrepreneur in this day and age is if you're adding some sort of value. Right? And some people might be like well what value do big companies give people? Well think about this, you know look at your iPhone, all right?

You can like I said look up anything on there. You can get in touch with anybody on the planet. You can log on to Facebook. You can see what your friends are doing and you're getting value out of that. And so their innovation has brought value into your life that would not have existed before had Apple never existed.

You know with my own business I didn't grow up wanting to sell t shirts. The way I got into this business the way I started Warrior Soul was because I wanted to figure out a way that I could add value to the lives of veterans. Know and at the time I was a trainer and my first thought was to try to do fitness plans which I tried to do. But the thing is there's so many trainers out there and it's really hard to get people's attention just by saying I have this plan or by putting knowledge out there. But when you put a really cool t shirt out there and you put out some cool graphics that that gets people to notice.

And so when they notice that they also notice things like my videos, like the advice I give out on Instagram, you know, and that's what I spend most of my time doing. I think I spend maybe less than 3% of my time designing t shirts or counting sales. Most of my time is spent developing content, trying to produce stuff that people are going to be interested in that's going to add value to their lives and that's going to help them. And so that's how I started with my purpose. I wasn't specially trained to do this.

I didn't, you know, have any advantages coming in this. I've never been to school for business before in my life. But I knew that I wanted to add value. And so I found a way. And that's another way you can start.

Once you have once you get humility down and you get the idea of personal responsibility down, the concept of adding value, figuring out how you can add value to other people's lives. You know, and then the other thing you have to understand is that nothing in our life is guaranteed. And a real big thing about humility is that, you know, you come to this kind of understanding about the world, that the world is a lot bigger than you are, that the world really doesn't consider you as being important. And yeah, that's almost a grim prospect, but it's the reality. And understanding that can give you some really good realizations and perspectives on your own situation.

In the grand scheme of things, you know, if you're nothing more than a fart in the wind, then a lot of the worries you have, a lot of the pains you have are also really non existent. You know, a few years ago, and this is one of the things that changed my life. A few years ago, I went to Greece, and somebody paid for me to go there because at the time I was I was in my PhD program. And they went over there. They they sent me over there to help teach the kids who are on this trip philosophy, you know, discussions on some of the readings.

And we did this one day trip over to the Oracle at Delphi. Now if you ever been to Delphi, it's kind of this ancient collection of ruins that used to be this like kind of ancient Disneyland that's set up in the mountains. And there's Upper Delphi and Upper Delphi's where they had the Pythian Games which was a lot like the the Olympic Games almost as big. And then Lower Delphi is where they had the Oracle. People would come from all over the ancient world to hear the to see the Oracle and hear her speak.

And it's a lot like if you saw the beginning of the movie 300 where he goes and he consults the Oracle who is this, you know, young girl that was getting sexually molested. And, you know, he didn't get the answer you wanted from the Oracle. But that's what an Oracle looks like. And so we're up there, and, the kids were having a discussion about religion. And I kind of took a back seat because I wanted them to discuss.

And I was looking around, And there were all these ruins. And then it wasn't really busy season there at Delphi, so there weren't a lot of tourists. It was just us and this column of ants who was going off to hunt. And as I looked around at the ruins, and at the time I was really I was in a kind of depressed state because I just had a relationship end. And I realized something, you know, those ruins, those spots that we were standing in, millions of people from the ancient world had come to be at that spot.

It was a really important spot. And each of those people had their own lives. They had their bills to pay. They had their problems. But this spot that they once held so important was now just a pile of rocks.

And those people are long dead and nothing more than dust. And their problems, well, problems no longer existed. And I realized something at that point, you know, all this worry I was having, you know, the fact that I just ended this relationship, the fact that, you know, I felt like I was getting older, and I hadn't found the right girl, the fact that I had all these bills to pay, the fact that I wanted to finish this PhD dissertation, I realized that my own life, all of our lives are short. You know, if we're lucky, we get seventy to ninety years on this planet. Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less if we're lucky.

But if we're not doing what we wanna do in this short time that we have here, then we're really wasting a gift. We're wasting something beautiful. And so I came back for that trip and that's when I quit going to graduate school to try to get my PhD and decided to open up my first business. Knowing over the next few years, that this is what I want you to understand. That epiphany, it was an epiphany and it still stays with me.

It was still really important but didn't mean automatic success. You know, because the years after that, I started a business that eventually bankrupted me. I met an awful, not an awful girl. I met a really awful match for me. And married her.

And ended up with a really nasty divorce. And the whole situation left me so poor. I was living out of my 2007 Ford Focus for a while, homeless. But then I gained another lesson from that situation. And that lesson was this.

That fear I had about money and about losing everything was useless because even after losing everything I was still here and I was still ready to work and I didn't lose my spirit. You know, that's a big thing. You've got to get over that fear. You've got to get over that lie that you're telling yourself. That lie that your brain is telling you.

That's telling you not to seek humility. That's telling you you don't want to explore that part of yourself. That's telling you that it's safe to stay on your couch and to feel sorry for yourself. You know, you gotta stop listening to that lie and start listening to the world around you. Because again, when you open your eyes up to the world around you, you realize how small we are and you realize that we are only here for a short time and that this time we have here is a gift. And so that drives you to make the most out of every day. Yeah. And that's another thing.

If you ever get a chance to listen to the Jocko podcast, and I mentioned him earlier, he's one of the co authors of Extreme Ownership, which is a book I'd like to go over, in a future podcast. And also if this podcast ever gets popular enough to have him here on here with his co author as a guest. But if you listen to his podcast and you follow him on Twitter or Instagram, you see he puts a puts a picture of his watch every morning. Wakes up at 04:30 to work out. He takes that picture of his watch because he's he's trying to show everybody that, you know, he's working, he's disciplined.

He's got this saying it's called discipline equals freedom. But if you listen to his podcast you hear from him and you say, you hear how much he cherishes and how grateful he is for being here. Because when he was in Ramadi, and he witnessed death, and he witnessed evil, you know, it allowed him to see how good his life is. And so he still gets up at zero four thirty every morning to work out because he's trying to maintain that discipline. And it's through discipline that he enjoys his life more.

And that's a concept for another podcast. But again, I'm trying to show you what's possible when you open your eyes up to the world. Then you integrate your hard experiences like Jocko's experience in Ramadi into living a better life. You know, I could think and I'm gonna wrap wrap this podcast up here in a second. But I can think of so many different times when I've been down.

And and the thing is, I don't want you guys to think that I'm talking to you because I'm perfect because I'm still on this journey with you guys. There's not anything about my life right now that's perfect. You're not expected to be perfect. What you're expected to do is to be on the journey, to be on the road. And it starts with that concept, the concept of taking responsibility and living in humility.

And because it's a process, it's gonna take time, and there's gonna be a journey, and there's gonna be steps forward, and there's gonna be steps back. But know that with each problem you come across and with each obstacle you come across. And every time you work through one of those problems, what you're going to see about the next problem and the next problem after that is that your problems aren't bad things. Your problems are actually like old friends. They're going to teach you lessons, and they're each and every one of them is gonna teach you something new about you, about the world, and about life.

And so once you commit yourself to this form of lifelong learning, this idea of resilience, this choice of having resilience, Everything you do is going to add to your wisdom. Not just the smart things you do, but the dumb things you do, the mistakes you made. And so fear should go away. You know, it's it's not gonna go away entirely, but you'll understand that fear is not a real thing Because all of these things that are happening to you are part of part of life, part of the experience, and part of the library of knowledge that you're gonna going to eventually get. Now, before I wrap up, I want to go over just two things that I found that have really helped me in starting to develop resilience. Just two tools. The first one is meditation, and I know that sounds like some hippie dippie, you know, yoga wife type stuff, but it's actually got a lot of precedent precedent in the Warrior class. You know, the Shaolin monks meditated, the US military was experimenting with meditation, a lot of special forces meditate. And the reason why I found meditation so helpful is because it allows you to get within yourself and search your mind for the sources of anxiety.

You don't have to make it a supernatural or spiritual event. You don't have to recite, you know, a mantra or anything like that. But one thing that really helps me, and I'll put this in the show notes, is, you know, using a binaural beats app on my phone and putting it out in a specific frequency and, you know, just lying down for fifteen minutes while kind of searching my thoughts and trying to reset my brain. And that's helped me in kind of identifying the parts of myself that I'm not entirely comfortable with and coming to grips with them. And then a second thing that I found really helpful is journaling.

And again, journaling has a big history in the warrior class. I mean, like, General Patton kept his memoirs. Pretty much every combat leader, since World War II that I can think of was kept in journal. And it allows you to keep a real record of your thoughts on paper, and it allows you again to search your brain. I journal about two different things.

The first thing I journal about is what I'm grateful for. Because as I said, that's important, right? You know, it's important in getting your perspective on where you are in this world and understanding that the world isn't against you. You have a lot of good things in your life. So I journal about what I'm grateful for every day, every morning, one of the first things I do after I wake up.

The other thing I journal about is the opposite end of the spectrum, my problems. And I just ask myself the question, what problems are you facing today? And the thing about writing out problems though is that for each problem, I also write out a potential solution. And for that day, I will try that solution to see if it solves the problem. If it does, if it solves it, great. If not, I write the problem down the next day and I try another solution. And that allows me to keep trying different things that are going to start to sort things out, you know, and I might make a million mistakes.

But if I find the one solution, that problem is going to go away and I'm going to learn something new. Even if it doesn't, I've learned something new anyways. I learned that that solution didn't work because a lot of the ways we keep ourselves in the same spot over and over again is by making the same mistakes over and over again. So I hope this episode was helpful for you. And, I'm gonna try and keep this concept of almost making it like a book review.

But I also wanna work in some of the other things in which I'm an expert. Not expert, that sounded really stupid and cocky, but work in some of the other things that I know about. You know, I've been a trainer for years. I used to coach a lot of athletes. And so I guess my request to you is this, one, if you have any books or particular areas that you want me to go over, please let me know, and I'll I'll put a question and answer section in this in this podcast for you.

Two, you know, if there's any other subject matter, whether that be related to fitness, whether that be related to business, whether that be related to anything, you know, let me know, and I will either get material on it and go over it here if I feel like I know enough about it, or I'll work to get an expert on this podcast that I can talk to. Because my main goal here, like I said, is to help you to live your best lives. And so until the next time, thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed my first podcast episode. Semper Fi. Peace.