Welcome to "The Navy SEAL Mindset," this is episode 017. I'm your host, William Branum, and in today’s episode, I share my personal journey from a 26-year career as a Navy SEAL to embracing civilian life. This transition, I must confess, has been one of the most challenging missions of my life.
Key Takeaways:
The Transition Challenge: I discuss the complexities and emotional challenges of moving from the SEALs to civilian life. It felt like waking up to a completely transformed world, much like a dramatic scene from an Avengers movie.
Finding New Purpose: I delve into the importance of discovering new roles and building a meaningful life post-military. I emphasize the crucial skills of adaptability and resilience in this process.
Applying SEAL Lessons to Everyday Life: Drawing on my experiences in the SEALs, I explore how the lessons learned there can significantly impact and improve everyday life.
Motivation for Life Transitions: This episode is not just about my journey; it’s about inspiring anyone facing major life changes. I hope to motivate and guide not only veterans but anyone transitioning into new phases of their life.
Conclusion: My story is a testament to the power of resilience and adaptability. It’s about facing new challenges head-on and finding opportunities for growth in them. Whether you're a veteran like me or someone stepping into unknown territories, this episode is meant to offer guidance and inspiration in navigating life's significant transitions.
--------------
WANT TO THINK LIKE A NAVY SEAL AND UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL?
Discover the 5 SEAL Secrets to Success
A short read with powerful tactical lessons to change your life
Welcome to "The Navy SEAL Mindset," this is episode 017. I'm your host, William Branum, and in today’s episode, I share my personal journey from a 26-year career as a Navy SEAL to embracing civilian life. This transition, I must confess, has been one of the most challenging missions of my life.
Key Takeaways:
The Transition Challenge: I discuss the complexities and emotional challenges of moving from the SEALs to civilian life. It felt like waking up to a completely transformed world, much like a dramatic scene from an Avengers movie.
Finding New Purpose: I delve into the importance of discovering new roles and building a meaningful life post-military. I emphasize the crucial skills of adaptability and resilience in this process.
Applying SEAL Lessons to Everyday Life: Drawing on my experiences in the SEALs, I explore how the lessons learned there can significantly impact and improve everyday life.
Motivation for Life Transitions: This episode is not just about my journey; it’s about inspiring anyone facing major life changes. I hope to motivate and guide not only veterans but anyone transitioning into new phases of their life.
Conclusion: My story is a testament to the power of resilience and adaptability. It’s about facing new challenges head-on and finding opportunities for growth in them. Whether you're a veteran like me or someone stepping into unknown territories, this episode is meant to offer guidance and inspiration in navigating life's significant transitions.
--------------
WANT TO THINK LIKE A NAVY SEAL AND UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL?
Discover the 5 SEAL Secrets to Success
A short read with powerful tactical lessons to change your life
https://www.5sealsecrets.com/
William Branum:
Welcome to the Navy SEAL Mindset. I am your host, William Branham, and this is episode 0 1 7. For those of you who are new to the show again, my name is William Branham. I'm a retired Navy seal. I spent 26 years in the Navy and retired in 2018. I often say that my transition from the military to civilian life was, and still is, the hardest military mission that I've ever been on. You see, when I was in the SEAL teams, I had a mission, I had a purpose, and I had a team. And it was a badass mission, a badass purpose, and a badass team. I say that I woke up one day and it was like that Avengers movie where Thanos snapped his fingers and half the world's population vanished all at once. I lost my mission, and my team, and my purpose, and I was like, what the hell do I do now? And so it took me a long time to figure out what my new mission was, what my new purpose was, and who's gonna be on my new team, which I call my new SEAL team, or my new boat crew. And I'll talk more about boat crews in later episodes. But really, the boat crew, just to kinda give you an idea of what I'm talking about, Jim Rohn he talked about, you are the sum of the five people that are in your inner circle. And my boat crew were the men that I worked with in the SEAL teams. Now my boat crew, my new SEAL team, are the men and women that I surround myself with in, in this new mission that I'm on. My new mission, I have a couple actually. So I have Naked Warrior Recovery, which is a CBD and supplements company. Our mission is 22 to 0. It's to eliminate veteran suicide. 22 veterans take their lives every single day. And our mission is to eliminate that number. CBD was a modality that helped turn down the noise in my head. So I believe that it's a modality that can help a lot of people out there. So that's why I started Naked Warrior Recovery. My other company is Five Seal Secrets, and really what it is, it's to help you, it's really what this podcast is all about. Change your mindset, change the way that you think about things, how you think about the world, how you solve problems, and how you are a leader. I believe that we're all leaders. Everything that we do in life, we should be leading. Whether it's our family, our business, our children, our parents, we should be always leading from the front. We should always be leading by example. And we should always be delivering value. And so that's my job now, is to deliver value, to help you become a better person, a better leader, to think about things a little bit differently, just to give you a different perspective on how to attack the world, and attack your goals, and the things that you do. So I woke up this morning thinking about success. How do we define success? What do we think about success? How do we become successful? And I thought about my time becoming a Navy SEAL, and all the people that I've talked to about becoming a Navy SEAL. I've been on over 450 podcasts, not counting this specific podcast that I've created interviews. And everyone wants to know how I became a Navy SEAL, or how you become a Navy SEAL. And really at the end of the day, it's how you become anything successful in life. It doesn't matter if you're becoming a Navy SEAL, a multi millionaire, A parent, a great parent, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, it doesn't matter what it is, there's a process in place. No one wakes up in the morning and all of a sudden they're successful. Becoming a Navy SEAL, it's not like winning the lottery. You don't, throw some money at a problem or throw some money and gamble and you scratch off a thing or wait for some balls to fall down on the TV screen and maybe you pick the right numbers and all of a sudden you're a Navy SEAL. It doesn't work like that. There's a process in place. And that process, it doesn't matter what it is that you're doing, it's one step at a time. Just for example, when I became a Navy SEAL, the first part of the process was I had to take a test to see if I had the aptitude to become a Navy SEAL. If I had the aptitude just to join the Navy. So I took that test. I scored pretty well on the test. I wasn't a great student in high school. I later, later, much later in life, found out that I, have a pretty significant diagnosis for ADHD. It didn't stop me from becoming successful in the SEAL teams, nor in civilian life. It's actually, I would call it a superpower because I always had to work. I felt like I always had to work harder, and now I know why. So now I just accept the fact that I have to work harder than everyone else, and that's a good thing. That means I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to quit. I think that was actually part of the process of being successful in SEAL training. I am used to failure. I fail all the time. That actually becomes a superpower for me. To become a SEAL, you have to join the Navy. So, first I have to take a test to see if I have the academic capacity to join the Navy, and then the academic capacity to become a SEAL. Then you take a physical test, or it's actually a medical physical to make sure that you don't have any issues that could prevent you from serving the country in the capacity of being in the military. So then I had to pass that. So then I went to boot camp and I went through that process. One step at a time, one day at a time. Wake up in the morning, make your bed. Get in line. March to breakfast. Go somewhere else for classes. You don't, there's not a lot of physical fitness that happens in Navy Boot Camp, unfortunately. Then, while you're in Navy Boot Camp, you go and you take the physical fitness test to become a Navy SEAL. I actually failed that the first time I took it. I actually failed it the first two times I took it. And we'll, I'll cover that in a later episode. But eventually so you take the physical fitness test. Once you pass that, then you take Additional medical screening tests to make sure that your body doesn't freak out when you are when you're Pressed down to depth you get in a chamber you breathe 100 percent o2 And it's just to see if your body reacts weirdly to oxygen people pay lots of money for oxygen therapy where they're they go down to 25 You have to do a lot of additional medical screening before you can go to SEAL training, after you pass the physical fitness test, so there's a process. And then when you get to BUDS, there's a process when you get there. A lot of guys look at Bud's or they look at Hell Week and they're like, this is like this monumental thing and they look at, the outcome that they're looking for. They want to graduate SEAL training. You have to have clear, concise goals, outcomes that you're looking to achieve. But if you focus on those outcomes for too long, they can become overwhelming. So becoming a Navy SEAL doesn't happen overnight. For me, it actually took about, once I got to SEAL training, it was about two years before I actually became a SEAL. Which was two years after, three years after I joined the Navy. So it took me five years from the time that I joined the Navy to become an actual Navy SEAL with a trident pinned on my chest. But there's a process to get there. When you get to BUDS, there's a process for getting all of your uniforms, getting all the equipment that you need to go through training. Then, once you start training, there's a process to get you classed up. There's a process to cleaning your room. There's a process to pretty much everything that you do. They don't just throw you in the water and expect you to know how to swim. You need to have some basic level, but they teach you how to swim with fins. They teach you how to swim with a mask on your face. They teach you how to swim with a side stroke. They teach you how to swim with, as a buddy pair. They teach you how to survive in the water if you're tied up. And they don't do that by tying you up and throwing you in the water. They teach you How to do this thing we call drown proofing, where your hands are tied behind your back and feet are tied together, and you're supposed to survive, and do all sorts of different things, swim, float, bob, do flips underwater, pick your mask up off the bottom of the pool, you do all of those You don't immediately go straight to the test. You have to study for the test. You have to learn how to pass the test, and they give you all the answers up front. And every one of these steps I'll call every one of these steps to be a goal. There's an outcome that you're looking for, but there's small goals that you have to achieve along the way. And they happen every single day. Every day is a goal. Every evolution that you do is a goal. Waking up in the morning on time, that's a goal. Okay, check. I got my first win for the day. I got dressed. I got out. I got in line with my water bottle filled. I'm in the correct uniform. And we run out to the grinder and we do PT for the first time. We finish PT, maybe we're wet and sandy and maybe it was a really hard we spent more time in the surf zone than we did actually doing push ups and flutter kicks and things like that. That's okay. We made it to the end of that. That's one goal of the day. Then we run to chow, we eat, and we come back. That's the second goal. And then we do our next evolution, we finish that, that's a third goal. So you may do 10, 12, 15 goals throughout the day, and I call those small victories. So now you're one step closer to graduating SEAL training. Then you're one day closer to graduating SEAL training. Then you go through Hell Week, then you graduate Hell Week, then you go into second phase, where you learn how to dive. First you learn how to dive and become comfortable in the water. Breathing scuba, regular open circuit with bubbles that, go up and then you put through another test underwater physical test where it's kind of like underwater jujitsu where the instructors come down and you're crawling across the bottom of the pool wearing this double hose Jacques Cousteau style regulator system where And untie the knots which I failed that evolution the first time I took it. It wasn't my fault. I mean, it was 100 percent my fault that I failed it. I knew the right thing to do. I just couldn't reach the hose to untie this exhalation knot. So the deal is, you don't take your tanks off if you have an exhalation knot, or an exhalation problem. You just have to solve the problem yourself. Because you can still breathe just fine. You can breathe air coming in, but you can blow the, the air out of your nose. It's not a problem. For an exhalation problem. I just couldn't reach my hose, so I was just gonna try to fix it anyway. And so I failed because I took my tanks off to fix the exhalation problem. You also take tests during second phase. You learn about dive medicine, what happens to your body when you're scuba diving, you learn dive physics, all the things that can happen and will happen to your body if you do things incorrectly. This is why we have the safety precautions in place. So there's a process. And then, we eventually learn how to dive a closed circuit rig, which there's no bubbles, you recirculate or recycle your own breath, so you can stay underwater for up to 4 hours, still a really long time, swimming underwater on scuba, looking at a compass. Once you learn that process of breathing on a closed circuit system, you learn how to rescue your buddy, you learn how to follow a compass, which I had a really hard time doing that, trusting the compass underwater, which that is, that's also part of the trusting the process. Then once you graduate the second phase of training, you go on and learn land warfare, where you learn how to shoot, move, and communicate. You learn demolitions, you learn small unit tactics, all the sexy stuff that you see in the movies. You don't learn how to, clear buildings or anything like that, because you're still just a dumb, dumb animal out there. Learning the basics of how to shoot a gun. How to maneuver with a bunch of people around and not shoot one another. How to throw grenades. How to blow things up. How to walk and not be detected as a big group. You learn all of those things in the third phase of training. Then you go to army jump school, where it's three weeks of learning how to fall down. You learn how to fall down for three weeks before you actually get to jump out of an airplane. There's a process in place. I don't necessarily agree with that process, but there's a process in place, and it's in place for a purpose. To teach you how to get hurt the least when you land on the ground. But everything in these processes It's about the basics. It's always about going back to the basics of what you're doing. Eventually you become a SEAL. There's a whole process for that. You show up at the team. Then we would go through what we call SEAL tactical training, where you learn actual advanced skill sets, which are actually the basics. So that you're not a complete idiot when you show up to the team and you're in a platoon and you start working up for a deployment. So, they bring you up to the level of a very basic Navy SEAL. And then when you're in the SEAL platoons, you get the basics reinforced, because everything, no matter how complex or how fancy you get or how tired you get or how high speed you get, everything comes back to the basics. You come back to the basics, and then you build on those basics. So then we would deploy, we may have, 40, 60 guys on a target, maybe some guys are fast roping onto the roof while other guys are coming in through the front door, clearing different rooms, meeting somewhere in the middle. And then when we come back from that deployment, we come back to two guys going into a room with no bullets and no additional targets. And we always come back to the basics, because if you don't drill the basics, if you don't do the simple things masterfully, you can't do the complex things masterfully. If you can't do the basics things, the basic things with mastery, you can't do the complex things at all. You're gonna fall on your sword. You're gonna, you're gonna trip up. So even in An analogy that I heard a while ago was, when I was taking Muay Thai kickboxing, is when we would warm up, or we would shadow box, we were very crisp in our, like, chin down, rolling our shoulders over, rolling our punches, going very slow, going through the process, really understanding, like, where our feet should be, where our hands The guys that focus on the basics, they master the basics. When you get tired, you're gonna, you're gonna revert back to your lowest level of training. And if your lowest level of training is mastery of the basics You will win. And it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how tired you are. Both opponents are very tired. The person who masters the basics are going to win. The person who, maybe you're in a fist fight, and they're just throwing these big haymakers, they're using a lot of energy. And if you're sticking to the basics, and you're covering, and sticking, and then even though your punches are not nearly as strong, you're probably going to win that fight. Because you went back to the basics. And mastered them. So how do we become successful? What is the secret to success? The secret to success is to not rust the process. I couldn't become a Navy SEAL any faster. Actually, I could have, had I not gotten hurt. But I got hurt because I didn't train well enough prior to showing up. I didn't master the basics of running. Was the beginning of it taking 13 months just to get through that 6 month block of training. So maybe I could have sped it up by approximately 7 months. Which would have been awesome. Maybe. Maybe I would have sped it up. Maybe not. beCause there are waiting periods, waiting for more guys to show up at the team before they run the next class of SEAL tactical training. So maybe I wouldn't have got there faster, I would have gotten through SEAL training faster. But I wouldn't have gotten to become a Navy SEAL any faster. Just based on timing and things like that. Or maybe I would have gone to a different team, a different route. So that would have changed the course of my my career. Maybe I would be here right now, and maybe I wouldn't. Who knows. But, anyway, you have to follow the process. And the most successful people I know, the most successful people I know. Multimillionaires, I Know One Billionaire, 100 percent of them, 100 percent of them from the SEAL teams, Green Beret Marine Special Operations, Air Force Special Operations, to leaders in business. They always focus on the basics. They always come back to what is my routine, what is my daily routine, what is my morning routine, what are my habits. They don't deviate from what works. If it works, you just keep doing it over and over and over. And it could take you 10, 15, 20 years to be that success that you're looking to be. But if you keep doing the same thing, the same thing that works, the same thing that gets you results, you keep creating those small victories. Yes, maybe, maybe your, your end result is I want to make a hundred million dollars a year. You gotta make 100 first, and then you make 1, 000, and then 10, 000, and then 100, 000, and then 1, 000, 000, and on and on and on. But the thing that's going to get you there are the basics. The basics of sales, the basics of leadership, the basics of solving problems. So when I'm coaching businesses, I'm coaching leaders, there's only a handful of things that every single organization struggles with. It's less than 10 things, which makes my job vastly easier, but I had to go and figure out what those 10 things were so that I could help them solve them and the right way to solve them. Every solution, every organization is a little bit different, but the basic principle is the same. That is always a solution. And I, and I share these solutions with you guys during these podcasts so that you can take them and you can figure out what your own solutions are so that you can be successful in whatever it is that you do in your life. So becoming a Navy SEAL, it's not complicated. It's actually very simple. You just have to follow the process and you follow the process all the way to the end. If you want to be a multi millionaire, it's very simple. It's not easy. It's simple. You just follow the process all the way to the end. No matter what that end looks like. You just keep going all the way to the end. Creating small victories. Creating these small goals and completing those small goals every single day. That's how you become successful in everything you do in your life. It's not a one and done. It's not a, I woke up this morning and I won the lottery. Most of those lottery winners, I think probably 70 percent of them, I think the statistic, is within five years, they're flat broke because they didn't learn skills, they didn't learn processes to preserve their wealth or to invest that wealth to make them actually successful and help other people along the way. At the end of the day, if you want to be successful, you have to focus on small victories. Have a big goal, have a big audacious goal, what you want to do in the background. Know what that is. Get out there and go attack that thing every single day. It should be something bigger than what you think. It should be something that overwhelms you when you think about it too much. Write down the processes, the things that are going to get you there. What are the steps that are going to get you there? And attack those steps every single day. You just put your head down, stop looking for Any sort of recognition, any sort of praise, and do that for the next 10 years, you're gonna be there a lot sooner than what you think. But if you start looking for, you do a little bit of work and you want to be praised and you wanna be you want accolades for some work that you did, you're probably not gonna get there. And that's okay. Maybe those goals are not for you, but if you want to achieve the biggest things, the hardest things. If you want to be the 0. 01 percent of people in the world, then stop looking for praise. Stop looking for accolades. Stop looking for immediate gratification. Just put your head down and do work every single day. Embrace that grind. Embrace that suck. It's a slay, it's a saying, it's a slogan for a reason. So success comes from continuing to attack very specific goals every single day. Be like a laser. You know, I had this Master Chief In the SEAL teams. He had so much energy, but he was like, and he was, I mean, he was a great guy. And he eventually found his calling in, in the SEAL teams, and it wasn't leading men. That's okay. We're not all supposed to lead men. We lead in other ways. But he had so much energy and so many good ideas. And I was like, Mike! If I could just take all that energy and focus it down on one to five things instead of the thirty things that you're trying to do every single day, you would be so fucking effective. But he was very scattered. It was like shooting a laser beam through a prism and like lights, like things are going everywhere. But if you remove that prism And I could get him when I got him focused on something, man, it was, he was unstoppable. And the funny part was I worked for him, which is another interesting part of leadership is. So what am I, one of my leaders actually hired a his negotiation professor from Harvard. He came down for him gave us a three day course in negotiation, which when he left, he was very shocked that He'd never seen any class that he's ever taught operate the way that we operated. He's like, because we don't think like everyone else. And we broke a lot of rules that he thought were pretty hard and fast, and they weren't for us. So again, this is just about changing the way that you think. Maybe you're not in a leadership position. You can still lead your leaders. Lead by example. Number one, but, and I'm getting a little sidetracked here, but I think this is important. The definition for negotiation was to let them have it your way. So when I would just talk to Mike, and I wanted him to do a very specific thing, this Master Chief that I worked for, when I wanted him to focus his energy on one thing, I had to figure out the right language, the right, Things to get him to focus on that one thing. The one thing that he was going to be way better at than me. I knew my skill sets and I knew his skill sets. And so I was like, Mike, can you do this for me? Would it be, could you like, help me out and do this thing? And it's interesting, you also, it, the very same language that I use as a leader to get my, junior guys to do stuff for me, or not to do it for me, to do it for the team, I would use the exact same tools to get him to do the things that I needed him to do. Because Doing those things is It was important for the deployment that we were coming up on. And I was not good at the things that he was good at. He was much better at this, a lot of these sort of admin pieces that we had to work on. And and he went and he crushed it. And he was running circles around me because he had so much energy and had so much focus. Because I got him to focus on one thing. And so that also was a lesson to me in, I was always trying to multitask. You know, I can say multitask like a Navy SEAL. There's no such thing as multitasking. You can do one, only one thing really well at a time. And so when I watched him do that one thing better than anyone on the East Coast, I was like, dude, I, maybe I should take some lessons from that. Really, what I was thinking was like, I'm so glad I don't have to do that, and I'm glad he went and crushed it. And he actually got, he got a bunch of awards for doing that, because again, he did it, he did something that no one else wanted to do, and he did it better than anyone else. Another definition of success. So anyway, no matter what you're doing, focus on the small things, focus on the details, focus on the basics. And that's what Mike did, he focused on the basics. And he destroyed it. And I was so proud of him. So anyway, you guys stay awesome. Focus on the basics. That is the secret to success. My opinion as a Navy SEAL. You guys stay awesome. Don't forget to get naked and I'll talk to you soon.