As a seasoned Marine and former scout sniper school instructor, Caylen Wojcik joined us on the podcast to lay bare the trials and triumphs of his military journey. We traverse the storied corridors of our military experiences, reflecting on the pivotal roles of mentorship and the impactful life lessons that service so generously offers. Caylen cracks open the door to his past, shedding light on his personal decision to step into the shoes of a sniper, and detailing the varied roles he undertook during his service.
Our conversation takes a mathematical turn as we dissect the intricate role of numbers and calculations in the military, before plunging into the riveting nexus of psychology and leadership. We touch upon the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program and the Tactical Decision Games, adeptly designed to decode human mannerisms. Moreover, the chat spotlights Caylen's experience in training for the Marine Expeditionary Unit, his deployment, and the valuable insights he harvested from his tenure at the School of Infantry.
As we discuss the significance of a guiding 'North Star' in life, Caylen and I highlight the importance of aligning personal aspirations with societal expectations as a catalyst for personal growth. We shift gears to talk about the hurdles that military personnel encounter while transitioning into civilian life, and stress the necessity of robust support systems. Wrapping up on an uplifting note, we celebrate the success of the Modern Day Sniper podcast, and its profound impact on veterans who are navigating their way towards a new purpose.
Follow Caylen and the Modern Day Sniper/Rifleman on the links below:
Caylen Instagram
Modern Day Sniper Instagram
Modern Day Rifleman Website
Modern Day Sniper Website
Podcast
Contact Thad - VictoriousVeteranProject@Gmail.com
Thanks for listening!
As a seasoned Marine and former scout sniper school instructor, Caylen Wojcik joined us on the podcast to lay bare the trials and triumphs of his military journey. We traverse the storied corridors of our military experiences, reflecting on the pivotal roles of mentorship and the impactful life lessons that service so generously offers. Caylen cracks open the door to his past, shedding light on his personal decision to step into the shoes of a sniper, and detailing the varied roles he undertook during his service.
Our conversation takes a mathematical turn as we dissect the intricate role of numbers and calculations in the military, before plunging into the riveting nexus of psychology and leadership. We touch upon the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program and the Tactical Decision Games, adeptly designed to decode human mannerisms. Moreover, the chat spotlights Caylen's experience in training for the Marine Expeditionary Unit, his deployment, and the valuable insights he harvested from his tenure at the School of Infantry.
As we discuss the significance of a guiding 'North Star' in life, Caylen and I highlight the importance of aligning personal aspirations with societal expectations as a catalyst for personal growth. We shift gears to talk about the hurdles that military personnel encounter while transitioning into civilian life, and stress the necessity of robust support systems. Wrapping up on an uplifting note, we celebrate the success of the Modern Day Sniper podcast, and its profound impact on veterans who are navigating their way towards a new purpose.
Follow Caylen and the Modern Day Sniper/Rifleman on the links below:
Caylen Instagram
Modern Day Sniper Instagram
Modern Day Rifleman Website
Modern Day Sniper Website
Podcast
Contact Thad - VictoriousVeteranProject@Gmail.com
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to another episode. I'm here today with my former Marine scout sniper school instructor, Kailin Wojcik. How's it going, Kailin?
Caylen Wojcik:It's going good, man. Thank you for the invite. I'm happy to be here with you.
Thad David:Man. Well, I'm beyond excited. I know that you can't possibly know this, because I've been out for about 20 years now and I know you were in for longer, man, but I have. I share so many stories about you and the lessons that you taught me. I mean, you are a huge mentor and I always tell people about the lessons I learned after the military, because I feel like I was a pretty immature kid in the military and I learned far more afterwards reflecting, and a lot of that is you, man. I have so many huge life lessons that you gave me, so I'm thrilled to have you on here, man. Thanks for jumping on.
Caylen Wojcik:Well, thank you, man. It's funny that you bring that up, because that's something that I've been reflecting on quite a bit lately is just how young we were at that point in time in our lives and the amount of responsibility that we had that we, I feel like we managed exponentially well in the grand scheme of things, given the parameters that we have to work inside being inside the military. I was a young kid as well, I think. I mean, I was in my early 20s when I was teaching at the schoolhouse, and so you look at kids now that are in their early 20s and you just go whoa, that's a mirror.
Caylen Wojcik:I think the mindset is definitely different. But I think that when people are in the military, you understand I think the vast majority understands the gravity of what they're choosing to do and the path that they're choosing to take within the military and the seriousness of that path and the consequences, because we both know that choosing the path like you as a reconnaissance marine and me as an infantry sniper, we're both infantry marines at the end of the day, but the risk that you take that is exponentially higher because of the nature of our jobs that we chose to get ourselves into. And looking back at them, I'm just like, yeah, man, I was like 22 years old making snipers. It was crazy. Just like, wow, you have that power over somebody's dreams at that young age and you really do.
Thad David:Well, it's one of the most impressive schools that I've ever been through and I know there's definitely a lot of recon versus scout snipers and that just brotherly feud there. But without a doubt, I was always blown away with the professionalism that all of you guys brought to the table. I mean, you guys were never skipped a beat, just top notch, and it really blew me away. It was something that always stuck with me is how professional all of you guys were at all times. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. So even at a young age, y'all were absolutely crushing it.
Caylen Wojcik:So I really appreciate it. I had some really good mentors, people that set me on a better path, because there are the dudes that show up at that schoolhouse, in any schoolhouse, as protectors of that badge and they show up as teachers or instructors. They're not teachers, because I feel like there's a delineation between being an instructor versus a teacher. Instructors are you haven't yet developed into your own style, your own method of delivering information, and I think that's that transition piece between being an instructor and a teacher. And there's those people that show up and they're like man, I'm here to get mine. Right, I'm here to get mine. I had a rough go as a candidate. We can talk about the whole pig hog thing if that's something that you want to discuss, but you and I both know that there are people out there that are like man, I'm going to get mine, and they show up at that school and they're just there to lay the pain, and that's unfortunate. Now, does it lend to the experience of the student in some ways? Yeah, it certainly does. I would have felt robbed if I had an easy go. I don't feel as though that I did, but I would have felt robbed. Looking back on it, I've been like man. That wasn't what I wanted, because that was my dream, that was my goal when I looked at the military and said this is what I want to do.
Caylen Wojcik:I have some lineage in my family that is from the military. My dad's father was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in World War II. He jumped as well as flew gliders, which was really rad. He participated in D-Day all the way through to V-E Day. He got a couple of purple hearts and did the whole thing with the 82nd Airborne, which was just amazing. I didn't realize how amazing that was until I was much later on in life, because we don't have an appreciation for it until we have some lived experience under our belt. My mom's father was a combat engineer in the army in Korea. Then I would later find out that my dad's mother okay, so this is one of those dad's mother's sisters' brothers' things my dad's mother's sister. So my great aunt, her husband, john, fought with the Marine Corps in the 7th Marine Division in the Pacific Theater. He survived four of the major island hopping campaigns, to include Ewo Jima. He never spoke of it. Nobody really understood. My father's two brothers were Marines as well, one was. He got out for 21 years and then, the younger brother of the four, he did four years in the air wing as an avionics guy. There was a long lineage of military history in my family.
Caylen Wojcik:What I decided to do was I just decided that I wanted to be a Marine number one. If I was going to be a Marine, I wanted to go to the sniper route because I was a voracious reader as a kid and I read a lot of books. I was reading novels by the time I was 12 or 13 years old, like Tom Clancy, wb, griffin, dale Brown, all that stuff. I was kind of a nerd when it came to that, because you jump into those books and you basically go into another world. Right, it's another world and it's a story that you're consuming and living. Tom Clancy was just so amazing at creating a story. It was just phenomenal. I loved it. I also enjoyed hunting. Being a sniper is just the way that. That's the path that I'm going to take and that was exactly what I did.
Thad David:What do you still read a lot of those books today.
Caylen Wojcik:I haven't. I wish that I would have more bandwidth to do so, and that's just me that I need to that. I probably need to reorganize and restructure my life to be able to do that. But a lot of the books that I read today are more centered around leadership, development, productivity management, things like that. My wife studies psychology, and so that's something that we discuss quite a bit in our household the books that she consumes, and then all consume the books. She's kind of like the North Star when it comes to understanding the self, and I've gleaned a lot from that. That's kind of where my focus is right now is more personal development, leadership development, stuff like that.
Thad David:Yeah for sure. Well then, I'm definitely on that path every now and then and I grab one of those books. I used to read a lot of Vince Flynn books similar to Tom Clancy, not as in-depth. His are much shorter, I feel like with. Tom Clancy tells a very in-depth story with many characters, whereas Vince Flynn has always kept it to be a little bit quicker of a read. Yeah, great stories. In any case, I definitely love the leadership books and I can see why I mean a big with this background that you have in your family. Is that really what drove you to join the military?
Caylen Wojcik:I think so More along the lines of I always wanted, obviously, weirdly enough, I mean, people look at this and they're just like, wow, I never thought that, but I got picked on a lot when I was a kid. I didn't really fit in, if you will, and I know everybody has their story about their struggles growing up, because everybody has those struggles. I have a 13-year-old boy right now and he's experienced in those same struggles, and all the other parents that I just that I talked to their kids experience it as well. So for me, where I found solace from that was hunting and fishing and being outside. That was something that I really enjoyed. That was where I felt the most at peace and that I could really be myself. And so I did spend. I mean, I had a core group of a couple of friends that we always did things together. We would always go hunting together or go fishing together, but largely I spent a lot of time by myself in thinking and sitting in a tree stand or sitting in a ground, blind, or fishing, and so I was able to sort things out and say, well, if I didn't have that great a time in school, I had an okay time, I guess, but I didn't like it. It wasn't something that I was waking up and being like, oh, I can't wait to go do this today. I was just like, well, I was on a swim team.
Caylen Wojcik:I started swimming in seventh grade and I really enjoyed it, because I wasn't super into basketball, football or any of that stuff in that realm of athleticism, but I could swim my ass off and that was something that I really enjoyed to do because it was hard and it was not easy and my skill set allowed me to dabble between sprinting as well as distance and endurance, and so I had a pretty decent mix in my training. So some days I'd be focusing more on the short sprints versus, and then some days I'd be focused more on developing my long game for the longer races, like the 500 meter freestyle things like that. So that really allowed me to tap into understood or just like lean into understanding what my body was capable of, along with my mind, and that was kind of like the start of the understanding of the mental game when it came to perseverance. And I wanted to experience what that was like, because I read all of these stories about people's experience in combat and war, because I wanted to know what that was. I wanted to understand what my grandfather's experienced. I wanted to understand what they did and if I could do it, and so that's why I chose that path.
Caylen Wojcik:It's funny because we look at things like mathematics. I stopped taking mathematics in 10th grade because I could, and I was just like well, I'm going to join the infantry, so I don't need all this stuff. The path that I took in the military, with the realm of long range shooting and understanding external ballistics and internal ballistics, it's all mathematics. Internal ballistics is all calculus and statistics, and external ballistics is all trigonometry, physics and geometry. So I kind of shot myself in the foot there, but I was able to have some good people surrounding me. I don't do you remember Owen Mulder?
Caylen Wojcik:Yeah, I do so Owen's big time contributor to modern day sniper and modern day rifleman as well, and we bring him out to teach. He went into the realm of physics for a while because external ballistics fascinated him, and then he decided that after a couple of trips to Afghanistan as a Marsock operator he started to realize that the psychology of how all of this works was more fascinating. And so he decided to split off from physics and go into psychology. And he's brilliant. He's a really, really sharp dude, brings a lot to the table and he teaches a fantastic class that he calls the psychology of observation.
Caylen Wojcik:And he was also one of the guys that stood up the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program. So that combat hunter program, for your listeners, it's a school that was teaching interpretation of human mannerisms through understanding psychology, or the basic level of psychology. And so when you're trying to interpret somebody's body language, when you're trying to interpret somebody's intentions through optics a thousand meters away, you have to understand how does this particular demographic of people or this geographic region of people, their mannerisms, what are they doing and what does that mean? And it was allowing people to make more intelligent and responsible decisions about whether or not they could make an engagement if that was an enemy combatant or not, and so that was really huge for him. But so, yeah, I enjoyed learning all of that stuff.
Thad David:I love that and it just brought me back to because I remember one of the things that I do share that I loved about being in sniper school that and I don't remember how often it was, but it seemed like it was frequent enough that I could recall it.
Thad David:But I remember at the end of some long days y'all would pull us into this room and give us this scenario where we had to split up across. I mean, you had like 10, 15 seconds, I don't remember the timeframe, but basically shoot or don't shoot, and then we would unpack, kind of the ramifications of it. And that was one of the things I really respected about which I brought to the table. It wasn't only how do we do this, but how do we live with this after the fact, Because you've got to live with this. You know the bullet is a instantaneous little pull of a trigger, but then you live with that for a long time. And one of the many things I really respected about which I brought to the table was that. So it's no surprise that he went into this realm of observation and how to do that, because I remember y'all bringing that. So that was really cool to see.
Caylen Wojcik:Yeah, the tactical decision games, the TDGs, right. So you just say, hey, this is the situation that's presented to you, how are you going to handle this? Like, how would you if you were, if you were the only one making decisions? And these are your assets, this is your left lateral limit, your right lateral limit. Here's the commander's intent.
Caylen Wojcik:Go, and that's the beauty of how our command structure is put in place, that the lowest common denominator, the lowest dude, understands at least what the commander's intention is and he understands that mission statement. Well, he's been given the mission statement doesn't necessarily mean that he understands it, but he's been given it and so that is, you know, like witnessing what's going on in current conflict and how these organizations are organized and how they execute their plans. It's very clear, like in the Russia-Ukraine conflict right now, we can learn a tremendous amount of information about how those two organizations are structured and how their leadership is structured or their lack of leadership is structured. And it's very, very clear and it's a great learning point, especially on the very, on the low end of the spectrum, from the strategic to the tactical level. We're learning a lot about the tactical level of things from this conflict.
Thad David:What stands out to you with that for, just let's say, on the Russia side? I mean what stands out to you as far as their leadership and how that's being run?
Caylen Wojcik:It's all centralized command, so most of the men have no idea where they are. Most of them don't have maps. A lot of them didn't understand that they were actually in Ukraine after they had crossed the line of departure and moved into the country. Nobody understood what their mission was. They still don't and it's basically like hey, you occupy this, here's the front line, You're occupying this. Okay, well then that just means that I have to kill the invaders. Okay, well, they don't understand the bigger picture. And that's where the separation occurs with the United States doctrine and other countries that follow our doctrine versus the Russian doctrine of warfare. It's all based upon attrition and the generals and the higher up level officers are the ones that have all of their gatekeepers right. They have all that information and it all depends on whether or not they're going to disseminate that down and how low they disseminate that down on the chain of command.
Thad David:And so just not sharing it, and you can see that pretty clearly, that they have no idea where they're going. And, yeah, that makes a ton of sense, yep. So my buddy's over there right, go ahead please.
Thad David:No, I was gonna say, my buddy's over there Right now. He's one of the guys I was with at first recon and hearing some of the stories, the stuff that he shares about it, is absolutely incredible. It's unbelievable to hear this stuff, but hearing you say that that's how he describes it is like these waves of people that are just kind of like coming. He said it's just an endless amount of people and it's almost like they don't care to. They feel like they have this endless amount of people and so I wonder how much of that drives their lack of you know, because they feel like they have this endless resource of human bodies to throw at it. Yeah, absolutely, there's just waves of people that just rolling in.
Caylen Wojcik:That is their doctrine Historically that's their doctrine.
Thad David:Yeah, so getting back into your time in the military, just so anybody can hear it. What was your time you joined the Marine Corps? When did you join? What did your time in the military look like if you were to have?
Caylen Wojcik:a short elevator pitch of it. I joined when I was 17. I wanted to get out, I wanted to get in as fast as possible, so I spent. I was a I'm a fall baby, so my birthday is in October and I probably should have been held back a year. That's what I did with my son. He's a September baby. But so I graduated very early and I had my 18th birthday when I was in boot camp. I shipped out to boot camp in September of 1997.
Caylen Wojcik:And I went right into infantry school in North Carolina. I was I'm a Parris Island Marine and I went to North Carolina for infantry school and I enjoyed it big time because you know, my infantry school was in January. I've graduated recruit training in December, so I had like two weeks off and then you go right into infantry school and it was cold, it was wet, we got snow, but I had already been taught how to deal with all of those things. And so all of the other dudes that were like living in the suck I was actually partnered up, my hooch mate, if you will. We both understood like how do we water? Because we're still using shelter halves at that point in time and it's like how do we waterproof this thing? How do we make sure that we stay dry? How do we stay, how do we stay warm? And you're living in the field for a month, you know how that works. And I was just like this is badass. This is exactly what I wanted to do.
Caylen Wojcik:So I went to a West Coast battalion, I went to First Marine Division, which was a big surprise for me at the time. When I got my orders, I was only like a 13 or 14 hour drive away from home, being at Camp Lejeune, because I grew up in Western New York outside of Niagara Falls, and so I was like, oh yeah, like you know, 18 years old, I'm still thinking about the high school girlfriend type thing and this is going to work out this way. And then all of a sudden, bam, you open up your service record book and you see Victor 2-1, first Marine Division, and you're just like this is not supposed to happen. What do you mean? I'm going to California and all the instructor? I got super nervous and all the instructors were just like, hey, man, check it out. I would literally give my left testicle to you right now to get off of Camp Lejeune and go to Camp Pendleton. So be happy. And they were not wrong, I was able, I was fortunate enough to get to maintain my short career in the Marine Corps on Camp Pendleton, so and I'm grateful for that. Now, having been to all the Marine Corps bases, I'm like, yeah, they weren't kidding. So I went to Camp Pendleton and I was in the.
Caylen Wojcik:I was in the straight infantry as a as an 0351 anti tank assaultman at that point and I was assigned to a weapons company so I was firing dragon missiles at that time. It's kind of a it's a legacy weapon system and my job was as an assaultman. A tactical weapons company was anti armor and we did do a little bit of demolitions. I got a chance to go through some really cool demolition courses and that was awesome. And then it was kind of like my first reintroduction to math because there was some mathematics involved in doing calculations for charge weights and you know how to, how to shape the charges to. You know defeat whatever obstacle or barrier was that you were trying to do or trying to defeat.
Caylen Wojcik:And that was a tough time because I wanted to go into the sniper program and I didn't really truly understand how it all worked. I kind of knew the the framework of it. I was like everybody that I asked said you got to go to the infantry and then when you get to your infantry battalion you got to find the sniper platoon, figure out when they're going to do a selection. And I was like, ok, well then, that's what I'm just going to do, not understanding that once an infantry battalion has you, that company doesn't necessarily want to let you go, right, and so they have to let you go. And I didn't understand that at all and I was like, well, I want to go take this in dock.
Caylen Wojcik:And my squad leader was was just young man, you know, looking back, really not great leadership, that whole senior Lance Corporal thing, and it was just a bunch of dudes running amok right with with not a whole lot of leadership, and so they were terrible infantry Marines they were. They had no desire to better themselves, they were just buying their time to get out. Right, these guys are on their, on their second deployment, right, they're salty and they're just, like you know, looking back on that, the salty Lance Corporals type thing, and they're just still. You just don't know anything at that point in time. And so I didn't really have a great experience in that realm because the leadership wasn't wasn't that great.
Caylen Wojcik:And so when I did join the snipers, the sniper community, that was like, oh, thank God, I can. You know, I thank God I can get out of that and I can go, I can better myself over in this organization. And I immediately saw that opportunity and it was fantastic, went into the sniper section. I did one Western Pacific float as a, as an infantry Marine, and that was a good thing. And I think it was a good thing because it allowed me to learn how the infantry worked and showed me where, by learning how the infantry worked, it showed me as a sniper how to best support that operation and or then that organization.
Caylen Wojcik:Because if you don't understand how the infantry works, you don't understand the basics of how attacks are formulated, how these, how these things are like, what is a base of fire, what is a maneuver element, what is a support element. You don't learn those things as a stay baby right, and we call them stay babies for the listeners a stay baby. Stay stands for surveillance and target acquisition, and that was what sniper platoons were, were labeled as when I first got into the mix, and a stay baby was a guy that just finished infantry school shows up to an infantry battalion as a drop right. So, like, infantry battalions will receive, you know, 60 men from a graduating infantry school and they're like, hey, you're going to the second battalion. Okay, well that out of that 60 men they're going to figure out what men go to what different companies and what organizations. Right, that's just manpower aspects and things. So sometimes stay babies would be guys that would automatically go from that drop straight into a sniper platoon and then they're going to go through the selection process when they get in that organization. But they they really miss out on understanding how the infantry works, like range 400 at 29 palms. Whatever your feelings are about that training evolution neither here nor there. But it lines out perfectly how an integrated company sized attack on a defensive position is supposed to run, and so if you don't understand how that works, it's very difficult for you to support that operation, if that makes sense. So that was a good thing and going.
Caylen Wojcik:I went right into regimental sniper school, which was horrific. That was a really, really difficult crucible to go through, just because there was no standardization and that that school was six weeks long and it was kind of like pre sniper and we. They just wanted to make sure if you were a Marine in the first Marine regiment you were not getting a slot to the division level sniper school that would offer you the occupational specialty, the numerical designator that says, hey, you graduated. Now you have attained this title. They wouldn't let you go unless you went through the regimental sniper school because they knew that that regimental sniper school is going to prepare you to pass the division level course. So it was very severe, six weeks of again like they were just senior snipers running that program. There's no curriculum, it's not, it's not monitored by anybody and it was kind of like the Wild West over there, camp Horneau in, you know, in 1999, it was pretty wild.
Caylen Wojcik:There were many nights that we didn't get released back to our barracks rooms until 1, 32 o'clock in the morning with weapons draw at zero five the next day and an hour and a half long of quizzes that if you didn't pass with 70% you were getting failed, you were getting dropped. So there's a tremendous amount of physical stress, a lot of mental stress and you know the fear that it was more the fear the unknown, because if you know when something's going to end, typically speaking you can kind of like get your mindset in a way that you're like OK, I know that I have to deal with this up until this point, but if you don't know when it's going to end, that's when the real game gets played and you have to go. How much am I willing to take Right? How much of this bullshit am I willing to take right now? And so that was a big thing for us, because we didn't know they would forget to feed us sometimes and be like, oh man, I forgot to let the pigs go to Chow. And you know, behind the wall, locker wall, you know in the old squad base, because you can hear everything the instructors are saying and you're just like man, they forgot to feed us, like I guess we're like we are pigs, we're like we're farm animals. So, and that was, it was a good experience because moving into combat operations, you don't know when anything is going to end, you don't know there is no definitive to anything, and that will prepare you for understanding or learning how to deal with those circumstances in the future.
Caylen Wojcik:Left that went into, I went to the basic course. I was actually the last scout sniper school that graduated from division schools at the First Marine Division level and we actually moved all of the shit on. My chill week ended up being moving all of the gear from the Margarita schoolhouse over at division schools to School of Infantry over at the 52 area. So that was an interesting thing because that's a lot of history that was getting moved from that schoolhouse to the new one and it was a dramatic change because I mean, you were at Margarita, you were at Camp Margarita, right, you're kind of out in the middle of nowhere there and aside from it being division headquarters, you know you can go behind the barracks and get a lot of things done, so to speak, you know. So, oh, yeah, yeah, there's plenty of training area out there to take care of things. But then being like having the sniper school right at the flagpole of the School of Infantry, like our office when I taught there before we had the Quonset hut, I shared an office wall with the battalion commander of Advanced Infantry Training Company or, I'm sorry, infantry Training Battalion there at School of Infantry. So we were under a lot of scrutiny just out of where we were right. So you had to mind your P's and Q's.
Caylen Wojcik:But after I graduated that course and went through the basic course I was able to get into what we would call the MEW or the Marine Expeditionary Unit. And when you're designated as a Marine Expeditionary Unit and you get assigned to a Marine Expeditionary Unit as an Infantry Battalion, you get a chance to go through some pretty cool training and some pretty cool schools. I got a chance to go through urban reconnaissance and surveillance school. I got a chance to go through the urban sniper course, participated in a lot of in all of the training events that stemmed from those courses. I did a lot of stuff Reconnaissance missions out in, off base, out in town, so to speak.
Caylen Wojcik:We would go out and get mission assignments in like San Jose, los Angeles. Hey, you guys are going to insert here, you're going to link up with these people, you're going to load all your crap in these vans, they're going to take you to an insert point. And they tried to make it as realistic as they possibly could with the resources they had available. And I thought at that point in time, the early 2000s, that was some really realistic training and a bunch of white dudes running around, big, tall, muscle bound white dudes running around East LA you don't really fit in. You don't really fit in, but the nature of the training was very impactful on us even though it wasn't super realistic.
Caylen Wojcik:So got a chance to do that one on a deployment as a sniper team leader. Another Western Pacific deployment had some really cool opportunities on that trip as well. And then when I got back from that, that's when I decided that I was going to go teach at sniper school. It was either going to be the urban sniper course, working for Special Operations Training Group, or it was going to be the basic sniper course at School of Infantry, and at the time it just seemed like the better decision to go teach at the basic course, the Special Operations Training Group route. It just didn't end up materializing and working out. So great experience there.
Caylen Wojcik:I learned a lot about how the Marine Corps worked.
Caylen Wojcik:I learned a lot about how the behind the scenes stuff like range scheduling, training area scheduling, all of the logistical aspects of things that are kind of like you don't really see them you don't really see unless you're the one doing it type thing.
Caylen Wojcik:And so it definitely gave me a bigger appreciation for the leadership on the operational side, like your platoon sergeant, your operations chief, the things that your platoon commanders are dealing with just to get you the ability to train, just to get you the ability to shoot your rifle. These dudes are staying up late. They're doing things after hours because that's when they have the opportunity to do them. They're dealing with all of these bureaucratic little entities within the military that make you want to freaking, gouge your eyeballs out with a pencil. Those are the things that I learned work in at Sniper School that I have now a new appreciation for, because it got you to be able to see the bigger picture, and those are. That's huge, being able to see the bigger picture. The faster you can see the bigger picture and the younger that you can start to identify the bigger picture, the better off you're going to be in integrating yourself into those goals.
Thad David:And how does that apply? So tell me some more about that. So it just caught me off guard. I was thinking of something else. And then you I love what you just said there, sort of the faster you can, you can do that. And and how does that apply?
Caylen Wojcik:So I guess I'll open it up with a little bit of a story. You know, we're all, at that point in time, being young as a young sergeant I was, you know, 21 years old full of piss and vinegar, thought that I knew everything. And we're getting ready to get on board a ship for a training exercise and my team was going to be assigned to the long-range Hilo reconnaissance, a long range Hilo raid reconnaissance. So we were only going to spend maybe like 36 hours on the boat and then we were going to get on helicopters and go, get inserted for the six-day-long patrol and and reconnaissance mission, and so with that comes obviously a lot of planning. You know this, right. So you got a lot of things to accomplish, a lot of things to do, and While we're sitting In the company area, we got everything staged out on the grinder, which is the parade deck, and you have the entire battalion waiting to get on school buses, white buses, and head down to San Diego to embark on ships. So obviously there's a lot of shit going on, right. So I hear that we were tasked with duty on board the boat and Snipers are attached to headquarters and service company and that's where all the pokes are and again, this is that that bigger picture thing, right, those pokes, that's where supply is, that's where admin is.
Caylen Wojcik:So you have all your s shops right. So your s shops, your s1, is admin. They take care of your service record book, they make sure that you get paid, they take care of all your leave. You have s2, which is your intelligence assets. You need to work really, really closely with those guys as as snipers, and you are part of that in the s2 shop as snipers. Then you have s3, which is operations. Those are the dudes that are making sure that you have beans, bullets and band-aids and organizing all of that and how do you get it and how you and how the grand scheme of things works in terms of the operations on the, from the strategic level down to the tactical level, as it would relate to an infantry battalion. And then you have the s4, which is supply. Those are the dudes that are getting you that stuff, or, and then the operations guys are disseminating it out, type thing. And then you have s Calm, and that's where the motor pool is and that's where where chow is. So these are all of the dudes that Get you the stuff that you need right in order for you to do your job, and I think we do a really terrible job at Teaching these young guys that this is like how it all works right. This is. These are how these lines are all connected, and I think the the younger you are that you understand that, the better of an asset you're gonna become.
Caylen Wojcik:So I'm on the grinder and I hear that we have duty and I get pissed and I'm just like this is you know? I'm seeing all these expletives. I'm just being an arrogant punk, right? I'm a 21 year old arrogant punk at that point and my platoon sergeant, robbie, reads them at the time. I still talk with Robbie Now because we're both in the firearms industry, but Very, very mild mannered guy Never heard him raise his voice up to that point anyways, and I'm sure you can probably see where this is going. Robbie gets fed up a here and Kailin run his mouth and Robbie decides to go. Staff Sergeant reads him on me and I completely deserved it. I Got, I got fully dressed down in front of the entire infantry battalion and Robbie did a fantastic job. Doing it Made me feel about that big right and that was exactly what I needed in that moment and because what I didn't understand in the background, what Robbie was doing. Robbie was an excellent diplomat and what he was doing was he was Breaking the cycle of how leadership viewed snipers and recon Marines.
Caylen Wojcik:Leadership in the Marine Corps always looks at us in these specialized Jobs as being special. Oh, you think you're special? Now You're not special, you're actually just a Marine still. And us, being young and immature, we're just like man. I just went through all this BS over here to be special. I am special, recognize me and respect me for being special. But that's not how it works. Nobody cares, right? So like we don't understand that nobody cares. So we show up with this level of arrogance. We're in a black, blu, wearing black sweatshirt in the company area. It's like you as a platoon sergeant, now in a like older with leadership. You know, smack that dude up the side of your head and just be like you deserve what you get. But shit rolls downhill in the military and so Everybody suffers, right? Because now you're grouped into this conglomerate.
Caylen Wojcik:And what Robbie was doing was he was trying to break that cycle by saying no, man, my boys are gonna be different, my boys are gonna integrate and and be be Marines before this, their job, and I know a lot of people I've said that before it at sniper school Graduations being guest speakers and stuff, and I've seen you know gunnies rolled their eyes at me and it's just like, hey, man, even if you're, if you're a gunny, you're wearing all those stripes and you're rolling your eyes at me. With that, you got a lot to learn some and those lessons are gonna, they're gonna come. You're gonna get smacked around by the universe until you learn those lessons Because they'll, they will come. So that whole be a Marine first, that was Robbie. What Robbie was trying to do and he was trying to Get there. He was trying to restructure the level of respect that that these upper echelon command structures would have for us later and and it paid off, man, it really paid off.
Caylen Wojcik:Robbie really shifted things and I I couldn't see that until I had that little, that micro death of my ego right in that moment, and I think that's gonna tie into other conversation. You know more of the conversation later on that we've discussed prior to the shit to us, you know, hitting the record button. But that was a really defining moment in my career and it showed me that, yeah, I don't know, I don't know anything. Right, I have so much to learn. And I took that to. I took that to sniper school and that was the big picture. That was just the the. That was like lifting, just lifting the veil. A little bit of understanding what the bigger picture was and Saying like, hey, man, this is bigger than you. Buddy, like this is, this is way bigger than you. And so teaching younger guys to see that earlier on and embrace that is only going to make things more coherent.
Thad David:And I love that story and where my mind went with it as well as not only obviously, that's a very powerful thing in the military and I saw that in the schoolhouse and Kind of pulling back big picture of everything that we are now as veterans. And I think that one thing that I've seen is a lot of people don't know what they're doing big picture in their own life and it makes it really tough to know what to do today because I don't I haven't laid out big picture. You know, I think a lot of people struggle in life and that's what I love, that aha that I didn't have until you shared it, but that Until you define what, what your goals are in your life big picture, it's gonna be a struggle to know what to do day to day. So I think it, yeah, really applies to star.
Caylen Wojcik:You know, if you, my wife and I talk about this all the time, my wife went through a massive transition in her life and she, you know, she came to realize she's like I don't have a North star anymore. Like, now that I, and now that she's like I, I finally figured out what my North star is, and it will totally reshape your outlook when you wake up every day, right, if you don't have a North star, you wake up every day and you're just like, well, what should I do? What do I have to do? What should I do? But when you have that North star, you can look at it and go, this is what I get to do today, this is what I get to do to reach my goals. Right, this is get to wake up and do these things, and that's a major shift. That's a major, major shift and it can be just that, just that simple right, and you can completely change your outlook on things.
Thad David:Why do you think so many people and and I I say this not pointing fingers, because I was this way for a long time why do you think so many people struggle to get that North star put out in front of them?
Caylen Wojcik:Oh man, I Think this, you know, starts to get into like the psychology of things. But I think that there are a lot of societal structures in place that say that we have to do certain things that don't necessarily align with what our soul wants and what our soul needs. You know, you see people. You see people working jobs, you know, and it's not for everybody, right. So I could not go back to doing the nine to five thing, no way. I've worked for myself for 15 years. Well, I've worked autonomously for 15 years, remotely. I've worked for myself for the past almost six years, but I had a job that allowed me to work remotely with very little, if any, management, and I was just like, hey, you're gonna go teach courses, and this is what you know. Whatever you got to do to teach your courses, here's your resources. Go do that, be successful.
Caylen Wojcik:But the people that are working that nine to five every single day and you're feeling like You're just unhappy, you have no joy, you don't really want to get up and go to work Because it doesn't fulfill you. But society says that you have to. Society says that that's, that's what you have to do. Right, you should just be grateful that you have a job type thing and I think that as we move more into, as our society is continuing to expand, it can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing, right in the sense of like it's going to shape. I wouldn't say permanently, but it's going to temporarily shape the, the direction of the nation and how it's and how it moves in that direction.
Caylen Wojcik:We can see it now with, like, the creator culture. The creator culture says that if you have this thing right, this little rectangle you have like one of the most powerful computers in your hand, you there's literally nothing you can't do with that thing. So if you want to have your side hustle, bring that thing to fruition and chase after your dreams, you can do that nowadays. You couldn't, it was very difficult to do. You could do it.
Caylen Wojcik:It's part of the American dream, but there was just a lot more barriers for entry Years and years ago and now that we know those barriers of entry are, you know, lessened, if you will, it just makes it a lot easier For people to roll into that. And now is, like after like, take for take. For example, does this whole pandemic if you I'll put it in air quotes pandemic, right. What did that show people? That showed people that I don't have to go to work. I can actually work from home. I can do what you and I are doing right now, right, and I can. I can produce revenue from that and it's it's definitely shifting how everything Roles right and so people are able to pursue their own individual Goals and their own individual joy with a little bit more ease nowadays, I think hmm, that makes it.
Thad David:It makes a ton of sense and being able to put it out in front. Hopefully people can grab that, because I think that without having that just as you pointed out that, north Star, you're not gonna it's gonna be really tough to find happiness in life. Yeah, it's gonna be really tough to find fulfillment, happiness, mm-hmm, without knowing what direction that you're headed. You know, whereas you said, if you haven't, you wake up in the morning and you know what you get to do. It's not what I have to do, that's what I get to do. Yeah and honestly.
Caylen Wojcik:My wife was a huge, huge driving factor with that for me, like she helped me To change my, to change my thought process, to change the words that I use to describe the things. You know she, she was. You know my wife had the business side of things. I had the. I had the niche side of things, meaning like I had the. I had the ability to deliver the information and be the subject matter expert. And she had the ability to, to do the business and establish the tech to make it all work, and you know she calls it the trifecta. And so she was like, yeah, we got the trifecta, so we're gonna go ahead and give this thing a go. But so I guess we kind of got diverged a little bit from the military thing. But I think it's all good talking points.
Caylen Wojcik:But so after my tour at school, at the schoolhouse I Got solicited to be so I really wanted to go over to first force my. My path at that point Was I wanted to go to first force recon, I wanted to take the, take the selection, and I wanted to go be a dude, just a dude. I didn't want to be in a leadership role, I didn't want to be a team leader. I didn't want to be an assistant team leader, I just wanted to be a dude and I wanted to learn what that was like to develop myself first without having to worry about developing others. And I think that's really important for everybody to at least have that opportunity to do, because I think sometimes in the in the military, people that display good leadership traits and characteristics and they can perform well, they're constantly being moved in and put into those roles and they're not able to develop themselves first. And that's something that I really wanted to do, and my ultimate goal was to end up at At the unit over at the Army's soft D at Delta, and that was like my ultimate goal. So I wanted to spend a few years over at first force, learn how to be an operator, get some more combat experience and then Apply for a package to be able to go take selection and assessment.
Caylen Wojcik:However, that didn't work out that way. I got solicited to be the chief sniper of third battalion first Marines to go on a trip to Iraq in 2004 and I decided that At that point in time of my career I was a senior sergeant and I was getting ready to be in the zone my promotion zone for staff sergeant and having a combat deployment was pretty important at that point. And so I Was like, well, I could go over to first force, go through that training pipeline, and it will be another year and a half Maybe until I get Deployed into into a combat zone, right, maybe it wasn't the right thought process, but this I'm describing the thought process that I had at that point in time. And so the sergeant major of third battalion used to be my first sergeant at second battalion where Robbie lit me up. Guess what? That sergeant major was my first sergeant in that H&S company, sergeant Major sacks. And so our major sacks was a man, he was a, he was a formidable opponent, let's put it that way.
Caylen Wojcik:But the work, the work that Robbie did is Sergeant Major Sacks. When he became a Sergeant Major, he had so much respect for what we did and he knew that I was raised under Robbie's roof, so to speak, and so he knew and he saw how I was developing as a young Sergeant and he was like, yeah, you need to come here, like you need to come here. And I sat down with him and I said, look, sergeant Major, you know what I want to do. He wanted me to go be a drill instructor, because that's his thing. He was like you need to go be a drill instructor and I'm like I'm not going to be a drill instructor Not me. It's just not in my freaking DNA, man, like I'm not doing it. So, and for those of you guys who are listening, you know, if you guys are drill instructors, I love you guys, but it's just not in my cup of tea. So I told him. I said, if I come here to do this, you know what I want to do. I want to go to First Force and this is my goal, right? And I think because I was able to tell him this was like I had this all planned out in my thoughts, and I think because I had a path and I had a direction, he was like, yeah, I'll help you get there. You come here, you give me one deployment as a chief sniper, pardon me, you give me one deployment and I promise you when we get back from this trip I will cut your orders and let you go. And I said, even if I get promoted staff sergeant on this trip, because I might. And he said, even if you get promoted staff sergeant. I was like, okay, we shook hands and he made it all happen.
Caylen Wojcik:So I did the combat deployment to Iraq in 2004. And it was a big trip and I didn't really realize how severe that trip was later on in life until I listened to a couple of podcasts. I listened to Cody Alfred's podcast on the Sean Ryan show. Cody Alfred went over there and participated in the first, the first Fallujah go around in April of 2004. And I would later come into country in June of 2004 and hear about the experiences of. That was Second Battalion, first Marines and First Battalion Fifth Marines. And so we did a kind of like a team leader drop before those guys left in July, go back home. And we came on in June and the stories that I heard from those guys and then what we would later experience going into Fallujah in November later that fall, it was just I didn't realize how much of that I had blocked out and dismissed from my mind Because you know, listening to Cody's experiences in that podcast, I didn't realize that he was. We actually were in a tent together right when we had that team leader drop. We were maybe he was a pig in that platoon and the team leaders were having a chat and he was there, so he had that kind of like you're like, yeah, that trip really sucked. That was we lost. We lost a lot of Marines on KIA, on that infantry out of our infantry battalion and I think something like 260 Purple Hearts were awarded. My platoon alone had 26 of those Purple Hearts. I'm sorry, 23 of those Purple Hearts. Some of those were multiple awards and I was.
Caylen Wojcik:I was wounded on the first day of the Operation Phantom Fury, which was the attack on Fallujah, and I got hit with a piece of fragmentation in my knee and took me out of the fight and it ended up being like a two year long recovery. It was a pretty severe injury. I'm lucky to have my leg. If the piece would have hit me, you know, maybe a centimeter posterior, they would have taken my leg right above the joint of the knee, because all the damage that would have been done so it would have been irreparable. So that dramatically changed my life, obviously right. So my progression, my career progression, my dreams, my hopes, my desires were, boom gone, and hindsight is always 2020. But I look at that and now the prognosis was pretty nasty. The surgeons were basically like, hey, dude, you should be just grateful that you're able to walk right now, much less pick up a rucksack and a rifle again. So your days of doing that should are over. So just get that out of your head right now. That was the messaging that I was getting from the medical professionals and it definitely corresponded with the amount of pain that I was dealing with in the recovery process. So, very reluctantly, I elected to take a separation from the Marine Corps, from a medical board, and it is what it is.
Caylen Wojcik:It wasn't very easy. I know we talked about the discussion of the transition. I didn't realize how difficult that transition was on me in my early 20s until much later in life, now that I'm in my early 40s. That is a death of self and your identification of self. You're losing that and the transition.
Caylen Wojcik:It's not post-traumatic stress. I'm not saying that people don't deal with post-traumatic stress. I dealt with post-traumatic stress but the stigmatism that goes along with that. Everybody deals with that stuff in a different way. You can have these clinical definitions of well, if you have PTSD, you're going to experience this, this, this and this according to the DSM, and it's just like man. It doesn't work that way, man, it just doesn't. Everybody experiences it in a different way. Everybody copes with it in a different way, but I think the majority of what guys like us in the military that are transitioning out of that deal with it's a loss, it's a grieving process and we don't look at it as a grieving process. We look at it as you have to re-assimilate into society. It's like, okay, re-assimilate. So how old were you when you joined the Marine Corps?
Thad David:I just turned 19.
Caylen Wojcik:So just turned 19. So were you assimilated into society at all? At 19 years old, I had no idea.
Caylen Wojcik:No idea man? I certainly wasn't at 17. My only assimilation? I assimilated into the military. So I don't understand how anything else works. I don't understand how society works. I don't understand. What am I supposed to integrate into? I'm not reintegrating, I'm integrating fresh, and I'm also dealing with a loss of an identity that I held very, very dear to me, and it was what fueled me. That was my North Star. That got me up every day. Do I want to get into the ocean at two o'clock in the morning and fin 1000 meters? No, not really, but I get to. So that's that type too fun that we've all grown to appreciate. So that's what happens, I think, when people transition.
Caylen Wojcik:It's a loss, it's a grieving process, and we don't get taught how to grieve and most dudes will revert to whatever they know Booze chasing women making poor life decisions, whatever it is. And really, too, the really, really crappy part about it was when I went through that whole Medevac process. That was in 2004. We had just started. We were just scratching the surface of what it was like to be a nation at war. We were at the fledgling stages of that.
Caylen Wojcik:They didn't know what to do with us. They had no idea there were very, very few systems in place and, honestly, I would go to the hospital and they would hand me two bottles of Perkiset dude at the counter. I'm like 24 years old two bottles, here you go. When these run out, come back and you're like dude. That's no wonder people are lost, no wonder dudes don't have a direction, no wonder so many people are getting hooked on that stuff and wait, okay. Well, I'm going to take some pain medication and I'm going to go throw a few beers back with the boys at the barracks. That's people's existence and it's totally unmonitored, it's totally unregulated and there are very even today. There are more resources out there, for sure, and there's more awareness, but man 20 years ago, no, not even close. And it wrecked a lot of dudes' lives.
Thad David:And I remember, after getting back actually and it just sparked up memories that I didn't happen to you shared it, but actually having buddies that had similar or similar but different experiences where they would have a ton of meds and it would, like you said, just kick it back in the barracks with there's no regulation, no, nothing. I really appreciate though, because I think it's an interesting perspective of it's not reintegrating into society. When you get out, you're integrating, because I think most of us I know I joined because I didn't know what to do. I know I didn't.
Thad David:I grew up in a not a great scenario. We didn't have much growing up and I just knew I didn't want to be where I was, and this was a. You know, I joined up right before 9, 11 happened, and so it was. That wasn't on my, my thought process, but for me it was I don't know what to do. So I'm going to go here, and I love how you pointed out just that it's. You still haven't figured out how to integrate, you haven't figured out what that looks like, and so you said you realized after the fact how difficult it was, and not so much during your time of transition.
Caylen Wojcik:I realized like there was a couple of defining moments. When I got out, I came here to Washington state to work for a family business and a lot of visions of grandeur instilled a lot of hope, and that ended up being an incredibly toxic environment. And what I quickly realized was how important was integrity to us, thad, how important was that to us in the organizations that we, that we, lived in Everything.
Thad David:Everything right, yeah, everything.
Caylen Wojcik:Now you might. We never were exposed to like that upper echelon, like that. You know that. You know that O five and above type echelon, right when you're occupying those positions and you and you are you have to become a politician in certain senses to be able to advance. We didn't really see a lot of that stuff and the the you know, what we saw was dudes that we looked up to and respected and that we knew we're going to frickin do the right thing right. I knew that. I knew that my ops chief, if he said that that shit was going to get done, it was going to get done. If my platoon commander said that it was going to get done, it was. You know what I mean.
Caylen Wojcik:Like we, we relied on that and we took integrity very, very seriously because lives depended on it. And I quickly realized, as soon as I got out, that integrity didn't mean what it meant to me in the civilian world. And I had people like blatantly lie in front of me and it was people that I actually like that would disregard the things that I had to say because it would, it would rock boats or it would be a situation that had to be addressed or handled. And when I, when I realized that they would, that there was a choice, we didn't have a choice, right, it was just like you're going to do the right thing, period, end of story.
Caylen Wojcik:But in that, like outside of that realm, that was just a really rude awakening to me is like is this my existence? Like, am I going to have to continuously navigate all of this? And it got way worse. So it got way worse as I got farther into learning a little bit more about business and dealing with those characters. And it really helps to look at people through the lens of archetypes. I learned that for my wife Instead of trying to make things so personal, you look at them through the lens of that's an archetypal structure and not necessarily taking it personally. But I had to learn that. I had to learn that through trial and error and through a lot of universal slapback, if you will.
Thad David:Tell us about that. What is that? The archetypes? What do you mean by looking at people through that lens?
Caylen Wojcik:So the archetypal structure right, you're going to test my knowledge here, and that's good. So the archetypal structure is something that's kind of based off of mythology, and so if we look back at Greek mythology, roman mythology, things like that, you have these figures, and these figures represent specific models. I guess, if you will, at the very basic core level, we have a father archetype and we have a mother archetype. The father archetype, the archetype, is the characteristics and traits that we would associate with that person or with that character. If that makes sense, then you could have a trickster. You could have an archetype that's a trickster. You could have an archetype that's a dark archetype that represents evil tendencies. You could have an archetype that represents kind of beat around the bush, if you will. And these archetypes, jungian psychology Carl Jung focuses a lot on archetypal discussions and saying, hey, we shouldn't be taking this personally, because every one of us has these archetypal structures within us and we pick and choose. Our persona picks and chooses which ones we're going to put on display to accomplish what it is that the psyche feels like it needs to accomplish in this given scenario. And so with each of those archetypes, though, there's a polar opposite, so you can have the good side of an archetype and then you can have the polar opposite side, the negative aspect of it, and that's that whole Dr Jekyll, mr Hyde type thing. That's that good and evil aspect and that's something that that depth psychology, jungian psychology, focuses on. And Jungian psychology focuses on really the self and understanding, the understanding of individuation. You are your own individual soul and you need to learn what that is by understanding that you have both a dark side and a light side. So you have an ego, you have a persona and you have a shadow. The persona is what we show up Like. When I'm talking to you right now, I'm putting forth a persona and those personas we can have many of them and we pick and choose which ones that we feel as though, or that the ego feels as though, that's going to get us through whatever scenario it is that we're being faced with.
Caylen Wojcik:The ego's job is to keep us safe. The ego's job is to protect us from having the shadow revealed, and the shadow is all of the things that we find, I guess, repressive or undesirable. But we have what we possess, those traits, so what I've learned through this and it's like oh man, we do that when we look at an individual and we pass judgment on an individual, that's literally because we possess the trait that we're witnessing in that individual and we just don't like it. We possess it within ourselves. We see it in somebody else and we're like, oh, look at what that guy's doing. It's like no man. You have it in yourself.
Caylen Wojcik:And so the saying my wife came up with is what we project outwards is what we reject inwards. So anything that we see out there and we're pointing fingers, those are all projections, because that's the ego doing its job and keeping the shadow. The shadow is like the ego's, like man, my sole purpose in existence is to prevent this shadow shit from coming out. So the ego is then going to tell the psyche hey, no, no, no, you got to put this persona on to make sure that this shit over here stays behind the curtain, right? So that's where the projections come out, and that was huge.
Caylen Wojcik:That's like one of those things where you're just like, oh man, really I got to do with that now too. So that's that personal development part of things, and as long as I think that you can bring it into your awareness, it's a game of awareness, right. It's saying, okay, I do these things and these are the traits that I have. This is the deck of cards that I have in my pocket and this is the hand that I got dealt this morning. How are you going to play that hand? And that's learning how all of those three aspects of the psyche work together.
Thad David:I love that. Have you read the book or heard of it? That loving what is.
Thad David:No, I'm going to write that down Loving so it sounds like it, very similar and on the level with what you're talking about. She describes it as a projector and it's very much a buddy of mine read it and it's she's out there. She's way, way out there. So just as you listen to it, it's an interesting read. But she describes it as a the like we look at the world, it's a big screen and we see imperfections, just like as you're pointing out there, and we point it out and we say there it is. But what we don't realize is that we're the projector and the reason we see it so clearly is because it's not out there it's, on our lens.
Thad David:And it's our lens that's causing us to see it so clearly out there is because it's on us, and so she takes everything and turns it around and says why need to find this on me to fix?
Caylen Wojcik:I'll read that book.
Caylen Wojcik:I'm gonna say I'll tell my wife about it, she'll get a kick out of it. That's right up my wife's alley, by the way. Yeah, like, and I learned this stuff. I learned this stuff from my wife, like that. I have to give my wife, cassandra, credit for this, because she was the one who really kind of like, structured it and formulated it through her own trials and tribulations in life. And she was just like why is this shit happening to me, like, why do I? And so she went on this path of trying to figure this all out. And it's deep, but it's within. Every single one of us has to deal with it in one way, form or another. And it's weird because, you see, some things are just like what doesn't bother you, that might bother the shit out of me, and what bothers the shit out of me, you might look at and be like what's he getting all spun up about? That's because you're not unresolved in that area, or you are resolved in that area and you're just like that doesn't bother me.
Thad David:Well, and having the ability to look internally. It's pretty fantastic because everything I just did a big race two weeks ago that I wanted to train up for and do all the stuff, and my wife was very supportive she's the most supportive and that's awesome, man. We had a big conversation about it and I remember thinking like I feel like she could be more supportive with this, you know, because she's tolerating. You know, I got to go to 20 mile run on the weekend, which means she's got the kids for, you know, six extra hours on a Saturday, and I remember thinking about it, flipped it back on myself. I'm like, well, did I include her? Did I tell her I wanted to sign up for this? And like include her in the prep? And the answer was no, I didn't. And like, at the end of the day, went right back to me of I could have done a better job of communicating with her on my game plan. So it's pretty great, it's a great topic. So, yeah, sure, so you ended up getting out you struggle with getting out.
Caylen Wojcik:Just trying. I moved up here and I became a steel fabricator and that was kind of cool because I was learning a new skill and I went back to hunting and fishing. I didn't really have any time or opportunity to do that in the Marine Corps, but it was. You know, I didn't. I realized I was pretty bitter about leaving, leaving the Marine Corps, and so I didn't really. I didn't really have a desire to get to go shoot. I didn't really have a desire to continue to do that.
Caylen Wojcik:I thought in my mind. I was like if, if I'm going to deal with this and I'm going to navigate this, I need to. What I thought I was going to do is like I need to pretend like this is just another, this is a chapter that I've closed and I've moved on, and it just doesn't work that way. And so it just kept poking me and poking me and I was like man, I don't really want to do this, I don't know what I want to do. I had met some friends that were like in sales and there was just a little kind of schmucky and I was like man, that's not, I don't want to do that. Like what is it that I want to do, and I know that I don't want to. I don't want to be a welder for the rest of my life, and that was kind of when I started teaching. People had found out like who I was, my background, and they're like, hey, will you take me out to the range and take me shooting? Sure, yeah, no problem. I got to the range and then I started to realize that I was teaching people a lot more than I would anticipate and it led for it led to me starting a really small business just teaching rifle classes on the side, and eventually that worked into.
Caylen Wojcik:I posted a. I posted up a class on sniper side that I was going to teach and I got a phone call from this guy from Surefire and his name is Derek McDonald and he was the, the, the honcho for marketing for Surefire, and he said hey, I saw the class that you put up on sniper side and you put up some of your you know, some of your job history and I saw that you worked for first special operations training group and I checked up on you and I reached out because the guy that used to be my OIC there his name is Andy Christian, and Andy Christian ended up being a really, really well respected commander in Marsock, and Andy was my last CEO and he wrote my final fit rep. And so he was like hey, andy said good things and I want to give you an opportunity to help you with your business and I would like to host a writers. I would like you to host a writers event for Surefire, pardon me. And I was like I don't know what. I don't know what. That is Sure, what do you? So what do I need to do? He's like Well, you need to give me like eight slots for free to your class. And I was like Okay, and I go. What am I getting out of it? And he said you're going to get I can't really put a finger on it how much advertising you're going to get, but each of these guys is going to write like two to four articles and they're all going to get tied back to doing what you're doing. I was like All right, that sounds like a, that sounds pretty decent.
Caylen Wojcik:My, my ex wife at the time was not very happy about it and she really couldn't see. She just was like Well, you're going to work this weekend for free. And it's just like well, it's not. It's like I'm not working for free and there's a lot of, you know, residual that's going to come from this, and well, there's plenty of residual that came from it. I think we ended up, you know, if I kind of added it all up, it was probably upwards of $300,000. And if I had to pay for that now as a company for marketing, it is probably about 300 grand worth of marketing that I got from just working for free for four days and then that's really what set me, that's what got my foothold into the firearms industry and it actually helped me get my job at MagPool, working at MagPool Dynamics as the precision rifle guy, and that's. I started working at MagPool in 2011. And I've been doing this professionally, full time ever since.
Thad David:It's incredible, I love. One of the things that I talk about often is just doing something, even if you're not sure what it is doing something because oftentimes the pathway we are going to take in life is one that we don't see. But the moment you step forward and I always think of it as you step forward the motion scent, lights, that brief morphete you can see, and that is what I saw with that is that you stepped into this thing.
Thad David:I'm just helping people out and then all of a sudden, bam. Then here you are doing what you do, and that's incredible to see.
Caylen Wojcik:So it's been a fun journey, man.
Thad David:That's amazing. I love it. And so that is I mean currently, right now, you're running. I don't know the structure of it, but you are running modern day sniper, modern day rifleman.
Caylen Wojcik:Yep. So we started, I had a consultation, I left, I worked for Magpul for almost seven years and Magpul went. Magpul had a major shift in culture and that major shift in culture occurred after the company was purchased by a private equity firm. Go Figure right. That's just kind of the nature of the beast of some things. And it took full hold in this situation and the leadership structure was drastically changing.
Caylen Wojcik:I started to witness a lot of things in the corporate world that were new to me that just I did not have a palette for and I wasn't willing to tolerate it. So I said I said my piece and realized that in the corporate world that doesn't go over very well and so I was like, okay, well, it's just time for me to leave. And there was no way that I was going to continue to allow my whole existence to be poisoned because it was a machine that I had no chance of even making an impact on. So I decided I'm out of here. So I started a small consultation company, worked for several companies as a consultant in the firearms industry in the long range shooting side of things, and my current business partner, philip Belayo he's a Marine Sniper as well and I saw him receive the Scout Sniper Instructor of the Year Award and I want to say it was 2017 at Shot Show and we just kind of met in passing. I shook his hand, said congratulations, man. I mean, that's really, that's awesome. And I started following what he was doing and I realized that he had the same kind of he had the same kind of passions and he had the same ability to communicate information and he was a rock star on the competition scene and so he was looking to get out of the Marine Corps and start doing what I was doing and lo and like, what I didn't realize is that he was actually looking to me and saying I want to do what that dude does.
Caylen Wojcik:And so another guy, another friend of ours, was like hey, would you get on the phone and chat with Phil? He's looking at getting out and starting his own thing, and I couldn't think of a better guy to talk to about it. And when I got him on the phone, I was like, well, here's my recommendations. And if I could do it again and if I had a mentor, this is the way that I would do it. And so Phillip and I ended up starting a podcast together and I was a consultant for gunworks at the time and I brought Phillip on as an instructor for gunworks and Phillip and I decided that we wanted to start talking about sniper stuff. And so that is the genesis of the modern day sniper podcast.
Caylen Wojcik:And so that was the main brand. That was what was just like, well, that's it. Okay, well, this is it. And then that podcast exploded we're about to hit a million downloads and like I think, yeah, we started it in January of 2020.
Caylen Wojcik:And so then Phillip was we just we started running training classes and Phillip was still working at gunworks and we just got to a point, business wise, that it was like, okay, we can, we can bring somebody on, we can start expanding the team. And and Phillip came on board and modern day sniper was born, and modern day rifleman is another offshoot brand. And what we started to realize was that people would send us messages and say I love your brand, but I don't feel comfortable wearing the word sniper. I don't feel comfortable with that and I didn't even, you know, I wasn't thinking, I wasn't that forward thinking when we set this up right, and I was like, oh shit, that is potentially a problem If we want to expand into the civilian market.
Caylen Wojcik:And so what we did was we held a summit and we called the summit the modern day rifleman summit. And that's that stuck. Modern day rifleman stuck. And now we have to. We have modern day sniper and we have modern day rifleman. Modern day sniper is going to move more into government training contracts, professional professional training, and then modern day rifleman is going to focus on the civilian aspect of things the competition, the hunting and the enthusiasts.
Thad David:Okay and you have and congratulate. I mean I'd love to hear the podcast. A million downloads is. I mean that's a very, very impressive feat that that not many podcasts get to. So that speaks volumes to both of you guys, thank you. And then your platform. Here I also want to point out to the humility that because it that you guys have with it, because you started it up just as a you know we're going to do this thing and and you were open with with people sharing it and you didn't see it it was. It was cool that that people stepped up and said I don't really feel comfortable with it and I respect that they did that. But also your humility and that you know you all weren't even thinking on that level, which is yeah, it's course pretty cool.
Caylen Wojcik:Yeah, we were just. You know, it's like man, that's, that's awesome. So Philip actually Philip was came up with a name and it's been a fan. It's been a great ride. It's been. It's been a lot of fun. We've learned a lot.
Caylen Wojcik:We were the first to bring a digital master class, meaning like a full fledged hey, this is like five hours long, five hours of content and we're going to cover all this information. We were the first ones to bring that to the table and we have a monthly training subscription service. It's called modern day rifleman advantage and we have a. We have a community that was built grassroots. I think there's over like 6,800 people in there now and that's it's essentially, it's our own community. That's behind a firewall.
Caylen Wojcik:It's not a social media platform, it's not a Facebook group, it's not anything other than its own thing and it's modern day rifleman and you can find it at moderndayreifermancom and in there is where we host all of our master classes. It's where we host all of our live question and answer sessions. It's where we host our monthly subscription service and it's fantastic to just watch. I mean, it literally turned into its own monster, right. So we're in there and we're seeing questions. It's very kind of social media. Ask the way that the structure is set up in terms of like, how you view information, but it was designed the platform was designed with administering instruction at the forefront Right, so it's really good for that, and the byproduct is we have a growing community of shooters in there that are all after one thing, and that is to improve and further develop themselves both, you know, with their skills as well as being better human beings.
Thad David:Well, I joined it recently and I've just really been blown away. I've been able to jump in as deep as I want to, but I've loved the content. I got to jump into one of the heroes journey zoom meetings where you brought somebody out Just a really cool, really cool perspective. I love it and I also challenge I've done several episodes a good buddy of mine that I met, another Marine. I met him out at just a local competition, a long range competition match, and we ended up becoming good friends. He's come on twice but I always recommend to people, any veterans, that if you don't know, if you're kind of struggling of what to do next, the long range community is very, very open.
Thad David:I guess I guarantee, no matter where you're at a guarantee you've got a local, a very basic local club match which you can go jump into the sport and I say that because I would definitely go check out this website. Jump on the modern day rifleman, get into the sport. It's a great platform just to have community, to have something that's driving you a goal, and there's so many good things with it.
Caylen Wojcik:Absolutely, man, absolutely. And so the book that you brought up, Lanny Bashams, with Winning in Mind, we are going to be doing a book club reading. We have a book club inside there. I know people are just like a bunch of nerds doing the book club thing, but we're going to do.
Caylen Wojcik:I think the event is already in there. The exact date escapes me. I think it's like late in December that we're going to do it. But we're going to go. We just gave everybody an assignment. You got three months to consume Lanny Bashams with Winning in Mind and we're going to take it all apart and that's going to be for me, anyways, like well, my goals are. I've always wanted to take a shot at a national title on the competition side and I really I've dabbled in it and so far I've been able to rely on talent. But right now, with the shooting pool, the way it is, talent ain't going to cut it anymore and that's great. That's awesome. There are some really phenomenal shooters out there and it's amazing to see and this next year, 2024, I want to kind of immerse myself into that and structure my season so that I can go chase after a national championship. I think it'll be fun. Oh man.
Thad David:So that's going to be 2024?.
Caylen Wojcik:Yep, yep, we'll see how 2024 shakes out. So how will we?
Thad David:be able to follow you on this journey, because I personally would love to see you chase this down.
Caylen Wojcik:Well, I mean social media. I have an Instagram account, it's Kaelin8541. And I pretty much that's where I post the majority of the updates of what's going on at modern day rifleman. Modern day sniper has a YouTube channel. I don't have a personal YouTube channel, I just use modern day snipers, so we post up things there.
Caylen Wojcik:And obviously, within the modern day rifleman network, we'll be doing things like a lot of people do match debriefs in there that are very comprehensive, very focused on things that, like Lanny's book focuses on.
Caylen Wojcik:You know, trying to focus on that mindset aspect of things, because it's not something that is at the forefront of everybody's mind in this world. A lot of people are chasing gear, they chase the gear, they chase the gear and that's fair. Like the saying is, you should buy as many points as you can afford, but there comes a hard stop where it's just like okay, you can't buy any more points. Now you actually have to put the rubber to the road and apply yourself and in this day and age, with the level of shooter out there, you have to train and you have to focus on training in order for you to stay in that mindset, because putting together two days of upper echelon level. Performance is where kind of things fall. You can do it for a day, but being able to do it for two days is another story, and so there's a lot for us to learn from Olympians such as Lanny in his book.
Thad David:I know you. In our first phone call you recommended it and I usually have people recommend the book. I put it in the list and it'll go wherever it goes. But that was then immediate. I ordered it, I got the audible and I had a big long run. I started listening to it right away. I absolutely loved it. I digested it. I mean I think I was done with it in two days.
Caylen Wojcik:It was just a fantastic reading. Yeah, it's not a big one, it's easy to get through.
Thad David:Easy to get and it's just great content. I was stopping. I have a hole in my iPhone. So many good takeaways. What are your top takeaways with it? I know you're I don't want to take away from your book club debrief that you all are going to do, but what are your top takeaways with winning in?
Caylen Wojcik:mind. The top takeaways are having a bulletproof mental structure that you can fall back on, and then the affirmations. The affirmations are big. I think that the affirmations are. There's more credit should be given to those affirmations than I think a lot of people do, because they work. It absolutely works.
Caylen Wojcik:And the self-image aspect of things, because if your self-image is not aligned with your performance, then we're going to have major problems. I'm going to go shoot a match tomorrow and I'm going to go down and shoot the regional finale for the Precision Rifle Series up here in the Northwest. And if you need one or two stages to get warmed up and get the jaders out, that's because your mental program is either kind of crappy or it doesn't exist at all. So you can't afford to have two stages where you're just like I'm going to take the first two stages and match and iron myself out, get the bugs, get rid of those butterflies. We shouldn't have butterflies. We should be able to have a strong mental structure in place that I can fall back on. That takes me to visualizations. The other thing that Lanny's big on is visualizations, and I think in shooting, because shooting is such a visual activity that visualizations are really, really important for us to do and obviously just the dry practice aspect of things.
Caylen Wojcik:He tells a story in there about how he had to go to school in Texas and he didn't have a range within a reasonable driving distance and he had based upon his schedule in order for him to qualify. He had to take nationals in order to be able to qualify for the Olympic team and he only had like three days to do it or something like that. He practiced dry fire in his room after his family went to bed, for three to five hours a night, five days a week, and boom, he goes in three days at those matches and he takes them all Because he was able to visualize everything through dry practice and have a rock solid mental plan in place to fall back on. And that's your only focus, right? I'm not worried about anything else externally. I'm solely focused on what's going on internally, because my skills have been committed to subconscious competence and I'm executing that with my subconscious mind and I am able to problem solve with the things that are in front of me externally with my conscious mind, and that's the ultimate goal.
Thad David:I loved his breakdown of getting these actions that we take into the subconscious mind and how he sends us there and how much depth he has with it. Well, I would share. It's one thing that we talk about just in my day-to-day work that I do as I travel and train. We talk about the mental side of things and one example we share, because people sometimes struggle with how powerful your mind is, your imagination and affirmations, and I think that one thing that can't be understated is how you have to be really intentional about it.
Thad David:Your mind is really powerful and I love the example of I stole it from a buddy, but that if everybody's kind of had it, where either you or your spouse or significant other woke up the next morning having a dream that the other one cheated on you or that you cheated on them, and how does that conversation go? You can tell them all day long and it is real and it's really tough to shake that feeling and that's how powerful our imagination is. And so when you do the drive-thru, when you're having this, you've got to be intentionally focused on not thinking this is fake. Not thinking it's not where you have to be. That's a real, vivid walkthrough. It's powerful.
Caylen Wojcik:Well, because your mind, your psyche, doesn't know the difference between what you tell it versus what perceives as reality. So my wife's been trying to get me to do this. I'm thinking about it. She's like let's go do a darkness retreat and let's go spend three days in the dark alone. And I'm like, damn, that's okay, all right, because your brain doesn't know the difference. You know what I mean. What are you going to do? And so that's pretty intense. I mean, the longest I've spent by myself without any human interaction is 10 days, and 10 days in the mountains. I was on a hunting trip and that was a super powerful experience, super powerful. Not having any human contact for 10 days is pretty. It's pretty powerful because it's just you.
Thad David:What did you take away from that?
Caylen Wojcik:Number one that I love mountains. That's where I do all of my, that's where I work on myself the majority of the time. That's like the mountains are my medicine and just perseverance, like ultimate perseverance. The weather on that trip was garbage. It rained probably 80 to 90% of the time.
Caylen Wojcik:Everybody who spent that much time in the rain you know that everything's wet, it's uncomfortable, it's cold and you really you know it defines who you are in the sense of, like, your level of discipline and commitment, because there's nobody else to get you up out of the tent in the morning, right? So alarm goes off at 430. It's freaking, 12 degrees outside, the wind's blowing. It's really easy to stay inside that sleeping bag. You know what I mean. It's really easy to stay inside that sleeping bag and say I'm going to get up when the sun comes up, so I'm not freezing so bad. Or like, okay, I finished my breakfast, I finished my morning meal, so now I got to strip off all of these warm layers, go down to, you know, just a couple of layers, because I got a ruck three or four miles to my glassing spot. I know that's going to be super, super uncomfortable. It's just having the discipline to do these things without being told to right. That's all it has to come from you.
Caylen Wojcik:If you want anything in the mountains, you got to go. Do it yourself. Everything's work. If you want to eat, you got to work. You want water, you got to work. You kill a deer, okay. Well, I got to go to where I shot it and I have to cut it up and I have to put it in bags and I have to put it on my back and I have to get it where it needs to go. So that's one of the reasons that I just love doing it, many of the reasons I love it.
Thad David:You said mountains are your medicine.
Caylen Wojcik:Yeah, mountains are medicine.
Thad David:Really, really that's great. Very, very powerful. You said earlier and you shared a really really powerful. I mean your time in the military was very impressive and really powerful. I mean you did a lot and I know you said you joined up with the hopes of understanding a little bit more about what your grandfather did. I really wanted to ask you if you felt like you got that.
Caylen Wojcik:You know it's interesting. That's a good question to ask, because when I came back, when I was able to finally get back to my hometown after I got through with the Medevac process, my grandfather was still alive and he was super emotional and I remember him looking at me and going I can't believe what you went through because you're watching it on TV, right, because they didn't have that stuff back in his day. They weren't watching the war on TV and it most certainly isn't even like it is today. I mean certain Instagram sites you can go to and Telegram sites you can pretty much watch combat all day long if you wanted, which is new. This is a new thing.
Caylen Wojcik:I remember thinking to myself my grandfather fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Dude, there was never a point in time where we were freezing to death. There was never a point in time where I was down to my last magazine of ammunition. There was never a point in time where we were getting shelled to the point of driving men to insanity. We never experienced anything like that.
Caylen Wojcik:There were definitely intense moments of combat and witnessing really, really horrible things in terms of the effects of IED blasts and indirect fire, but nothing on the scale that those guys experienced and for the length of it he would tell me stories like, yeah, there were times where it was just hours of being pummeled by artillery, and not little artillery either, not like 82 millimeter mortars. I mean an 82 millimeter mortar is you don't want that thing landing next to you? Let's think about 155 millimeter artillery shell. Those dudes went through unspeakable, unfathomable experiences and they totally pale. I believe they pale in comparison to what I went through. I try to convince most, like grandpa, like nah man, I love you and I appreciate this, but it doesn't hold a candle to you, man for sure.
Thad David:I think I remember after my second deployment, the 0405, I was in Najaf and there was a huge battle there at this mosque and people were comparing it to some World War II battles. I'm not taking away from what we just went through. There's no possible way that this compares to any of that stuff.
Caylen Wojcik:Could you construct or compare it? Yeah, yeah.
Thad David:I completely agree. I'm always grateful that for me. I'm grateful I got to be a part of our generations war and for whatever capacity, because it seems like every generation has one.
Caylen Wojcik:I think what I learned also something that I've been contemplating lately is we might not always, as we grow and as we start to learn and establish our own points of view and our own opinions when we're outside the constraints of the military, we might not exactly agree with how a particular conflict started.
Caylen Wojcik:I think that's safe to say. I think that's completely safe to say. However, what we will never stop is the flow of young men that are eager to not only serve their country but to seek adventure and to gain through experience what that's like test their metal. Can I do this? Can I put up with this? Can I be within this? Can I establish my own rank within this fraternity of savage brotherhood? We're never going to stop that, from the time of history, from history's recordings, young men were always and always have been pursuing this call for adventure. The way that I look at it is, it's our job, or where I'm at and what I do, it's my job to train those men to be as effective as possible so that, hopefully, they can survive, to continue on that transition, continue on that evolution of understanding, because it's not going to stop, it's going to continue to perpetuate. They need it. They certainly need it.
Thad David:I know that's what drove me to it. I had this, exactly what you were saying. I just felt this calling to go do it and I'm grateful I did. It gave a lot to me. It was a really good thing for me as a young man, not knowing what to do. You also mentioned something earlier and actually before I even ask that. I want to just make sure that what are some ways that people because I have one more question I want to ask you about and talk to you but what are some ways that people can follow? I know you mentioned Instagram obviously check out modern day riflemen. I definitely encourage everybody to join that. What are some ways people can get in touch with you or follow you?
Caylen Wojcik:Yes, so the Instagram route again, and the modern day riflemen and I do have a YouTube channel. Moderndaysnipercom is our main website. Websites nowadays are more of brochures of what we do, but you can come to an in-price, in-person class. We teach in-person classes all over the country and now all over the world. If you want to check out a schedule and you want to come hang out with us for a few days and get some in-person instruction, go to moderndaysnipercom and look at our events tab and you can see where we're going to be.
Caylen Wojcik:Our 2024 schedule is going to be released here shortly. We're finalizing some other ranges that we're going to go to. Our time might be starting to become limited because we are working on some military contracts, which is where we want to direct the majority of our efforts. Anyways those contracts, should they come to fruition our time is going to be at a premium with regard to other activities. So come check us out, see if we're coming to a range in your region, in your area. We'd love to spend some time with you. Our classes are not necessarily a class, so to speak. It's more of an experience. You're going to hang out with us and we're going to teach you some of the things that we know and you're going to have just a great time. You're going to have an experience.
Thad David:I thank you for sharing that and cannot recommend it enough. I would definitely recommend to anybody jump into it, especially if you're new to the sport. Jump into it. If you're into the sport, definitely jump in and check out everything they're doing, because it's fantastic With this too and this just hit me, not the question I was going to ask you I know that the last time we talked, you're really focusing on the hero's journey. As you've shared your entire archway, I can't help but see the hero's journey inside of everything that you're doing. You talked about being this kid in high school, maybe picked on a little bit, I don't want to misquote you.
Caylen Wojcik:No, no, no.
Thad David:You're going to military and then you had your rebirth. Have you pieced that together and looked at that and where you're at now, absolutely 100%. You can look at that full circle and see it as an amazing thing.
Caylen Wojcik:The cool part about the hero's journey and this is where you referred to him earlier. This was when Dr Chalkwist came on as a guest speaker and talked about it. We're getting in and out like the hero's journey. You remember the Oodaloop right, observe, orient, decide, act. The Oodaloop is something that we should be getting into. We want to get into it as quickly as possible, process the information, get out of it as quickly as possible and then get into it again as quickly as possible.
Caylen Wojcik:It's a constant, it's a continuum. I believe that the hero's journey, those 12 steps of the hero's journey, and you can break them down into three parts. You have the normal world, you have the darkness that you go through and then you have the return. The return is back to the normal world, but as a new version of you. It's based upon the things that you've learned through your darkness. We're constantly in and out of this hero's journey loop with every major aspect of our lives. Every trial and tribulation is its own little miniature hero's journey. As we go through that continuum, you can look at it from a wide, 30,000-foot view, or you can even narrow it down to more granular and say that these last three months I've been in this loop or processing something You're processing, something that happened with a family member, or something that happened at work, or something that happened in your personal goals Any number of things we can find ourselves in that continuum. I have learned a tremendous amount about myself as a result of associating what my experiences are with this structure.
Caylen Wojcik:If you will, if your audience hasn't heard of the hero's journey, I would start in this interest you look up Joseph Campbell in the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell was pretty much the driving force behind breaking apart the hero's journey and understanding what it is. It's very, very interesting, joseph Campbell. He's a brilliant mind, or was a brilliant mind. He's not listening anymore, but still his work is. Just listening to the man speak is impressive.
Thad David:It's powerful stuff. I love seeing everything that you're doing your entire pathway. I'm just happy and grateful that I've gotten to cross your paths on this journey now to separate times in my life. One thing that we talked about in our previous conversation, and you even referenced it earlier was the death of the ego and leaving your ego at the door. Why do you think that? Just as a parting message, why do you think that's so important to leave your ego at the door?
Caylen Wojcik:I think that's a common term that people use is leave your ego at the door. It's more of a blanket term, but we have to understand that the ego never leaves us. The ego's always there. We have to understand what the ego's purpose is, because it does have a purpose. It's not always a bad thing. The ego keeps us safe. The ego keeps us in line with our morals and with our values, but it can also be something that can grow and evolve through awareness of what it actually does for us and the things that it protects.
Caylen Wojcik:When you leave your ego at the door, like when you come to a training class, that's specifically just being open to learning, open to new information and not allowing the shadow aspects of yourself to get in the way of that, because that's all the ego's doing is protecting the shadow aspects from coming out. The teacher might be telling you something that trips something in your shadow and you get pissed and you're just like. I don't agree with that. Being aware of how that all works is going to allow you to be aware of saying oh yeah, now I'm getting tripped up, I know what's going on, but I'm going to redirect. I'm going to do a redirect and I'm going to do an offset with navigation. We've come to this limiting train feature. I know it's here. I have to get around it, so I'm going to plot around it. That's all you're doing, with leaving your ego at the door.
Caylen Wojcik:In order to learn that, you have to have the experience. You've got to get smacked around a little bit For real. You've got to get smacked around a little bit, Even smacked around. What I mean is you're getting these life lessons and you're going to continue to get those life lessons until you learn them. If you don't learn them, they're just going to keep on coming. It can get pretty old. So I learned your lessons. It gets pretty old.
Thad David:It's one of my Somebody shared with me recently that all the things, the problems you have in your life, they keep coming at you until you learn from them. That's when you get to move past them, then understanding that you get another one that's going to hit you right in the face.
Caylen Wojcik:Yeah, it's a continuum.
Thad David:It's not over Once you hit the next level. You never stop with that. John Maxwell obviously he's the grandfather of leadership always shares that he can tell where you're at in your life and what level of leadership you have based on how many problems you're dealing with. Because if you know leader, nobody gets to a high level and is like I don't have any more problems. It's like once you graduate to the next one, your problems just multiplied. You don't get to go to that next level until you figure out your current ones. That's right.
Thad David:Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure taking the time to jump on here. You're welcome Absolutely. I really appreciate it.
Caylen Wojcik:You're welcome, man. This is a great conversation. I'd love to continue it.
Thad David:Yeah, man, I would love to deep dive into a lot of this stuff. Man, you're always welcome back on the show. If I can do anything to help out with you guys, just let me know.
Caylen Wojcik:Thank you very much, Dad. This is great.