Navy SEAL Mindset

Solving the Right Problem: Leadership and Chaos Management

• William Branum • Episode 27

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Welcome back to The Navy SEAL Mindset Podcast. In episode 27, we’re diving into the power of solving the right problems, managing chaos, and leading effectively. I’m your host, William Branham, and today I’ll be walking you through some lessons from my time as an instructor in the Modern Day Knight Project and sharing how leadership, both on the battlefield and in everyday life, is about focusing on the real problem—not just the symptoms.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Value of Titles vs. Results: Leadership isn't about your title—it's about the results you create. We explore why titles are just words and what really matters is the impact you have on your team and the world.
  • Chaos as a Tool for Leadership: Hear how we use controlled chaos in the Modern Day Knight Project to challenge participants and test their problem-solving skills under pressure.
  • Solving the Root Problem: Whether in business or relationships, we often focus on fixing symptoms rather than identifying and addressing the real problem. Learn how to dig deeper and resolve the core issues for lasting success.
  • Teamwork and Communication: Effective leadership is about sharing solutions and ensuring everyone knows how to tackle problems together. No one succeeds alone, and real growth happens when teams solve problems as a unit.

I challenge you to look at the problems in your life, both personal and professional. Are you addressing the symptoms, or are you going after the root of the issue? Fix the problem, not just the pain. 

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William Branum:

Welcome to the Navy SEAL Mindset. I am your host, William Branham, retired Navy SEAL sniper instructor turned, business leadership coach and consultant. I guess I'm also, CEO of some companies and, it's funny, I was talking to one of my coaching clients. And he was wrapped up around his idea of, titles, I guess he used to work at a large company and the sort of the C suite, the executive suite, they were completely detached from what happens at the ground level of the organization. And now he's has a title of vice president and he was having a hard time with that. He was. he thinks of the executive team that he is now a part of is this pretentious, whatever group of people, because he's has this title thing stuck in his head. And, and I was like, so look at me. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see what I'm wearing. I'm wearing a blue shirt that has red and white writing that says Get Naked 22. And I said, speaking of titles, do I look like a CEO? And he was like, nope, not at all. I said, but I am actually in the CEO of two companies, Naked Warrior Recovery and then, my coaching consulting company, Five Seal Secrets. And he was like, yeah, I would never have guessed you as a CEO because he has that idea of the title of being like this weird, pretentious, like holier than now, or we don't get our hands dirty kind of thing. And, I give zero, like one of the reasons I come on and I say, retired Navy SEAL sniper instructor, blah, blah, whatever other nonsense that I say. I don't care about titles. Titles are just their words. All I care about are the end results. I don't get paid more money based on my title. I could be the CEO of a company that is losing money and I'm losing even more money, it could be my own money. I don't care about titles. I care about the end result and the impact that I'm having on either my clients. my customers or, the world making the world a better place. That's what I care about. And I do care about the bottom dollar, because this is not free. I'm not a nonprofit. and don't be fooled by nonprofits. They do create a significant amount of money. And I know people who work for nonprofits that get paid a lot of money. So don't be fooled by the word nonprofit. anyway, yeah, my job is to create change in a positive impact in the world. But anyway, this is episode 027. I have to first apologize. I have been remiss in my, making of podcast, recording a podcast, life showed up and I had to deal with those parts of those aspects of life and, it required most of my attention. I could have, yes, I could have. broken away and recorded some podcasts, but I didn't. And so there is no excuse for that. But now I'm back on, most of that life stuff has been solved. And so now I can focus my attention back on the things that are going to create impact in the world. And I believe this podcast is part of it. So one of the things I wanted to talk about today is I posted a video of a few weeks ago in my YouTube shorts. I posted on my Instagram reels and this was a YouTube short of an event that we do in the modern day night. We have one class left, in October. So if you're interested in being a part of the project, it's men only, it isn't, it is an investment, but it's an investment for a lifetime and, you're going to, learn a lot of really important life lessons because really the project is a metaphor for life. and you're going to meet a lot of great people and you're going to expand your network. So if you're interested in the project, reach out to me. I would go to 5sealsecrets. com. Or you can go to the modern day night project. com, fill out an application and I will get on the phone with you and see if you're a good fit. Anyway, so we're doing this event. This is night number two of the project. And before I came on as an instructor of the project, really what the guys were doing is they're just, you know, it's the second night they've had almost no sleep, maybe a couple of hours. And, They've had some downtime. They've, we run them through a bunch of classes. We do a lot of hard stuff and then we soften up and teach them actual real world things that we want them to learn and take with them. And then we go back to being hard again. And so this part of the event, it's, originally they were just going to carry a bunch of heavy stuff around up and down hills and stairs and all this other stuff. And when I was a part of this, I would get bored. I'm like, what am I doing? I'm just watching these guys carry heavy things around. And it's, it is technically challenging, because you have to practice leadership. You have to practice load management. You have to practice a bunch of other stuff and keeping up, with the instructor that's leading the evolution. But, I don't like being bored. So what I started doing is anytime the students would set, one of these pieces of, equipment or weights or whatever, logs or sandbags, that they would set it down to maybe readjust and they would take their focus off of it, I would walk up and steal it. And then, maybe I would run away with it and force them to chase me, or, I would take like a kettlebell and throw it down this hill and they would have to go find it. My job at that point just became to. Introduce a tremendous amount of chaos into the evolution. So they have, number one, they had to keep up with the instructors. Then they had to carry all this extra weight. Then now I come along and I create more chaos in this evolution. For me, it was fantastic because now I'm not bored anymore. I get to run around. I get, I get a little workout in there as well. And, and I get to see how the guys are solving problems. And really when I went back and I looked at this video, I, I, one of the things I thought was what problem are they trying to solve and how are they trying to solve the problem? and if you go back and you watch the video and it's, again, it's in my YouTube shorts or it's in my Instagram in the reels somewhere. And it's, the guys are, they're wearing backpacks. They're carrying big, heavy rocks. We didn't bring out the weight equipment this time. And so we just had them carry big, heavy rocks around, which made it harder for me to steal stuff. So I had to be creative and solve my own problem of, I started stealing the sledgehammers that they were, required to carry around. And so what they would do is they would tuck the sledgehammer into the loops of their backpack or whatever they needed to, anyway, they could carry it so that their hands were free so they could carry like the heavy rocks or logs or whatever. We had them, them carrying around. And so then at some point I'm like, I, it's hard for me to steal the big heavy rocks, so I'm just gonna seal their sledgehammers. And I don't exactly remember how the whole thing started. Again, go back and watch the video, but I went up and I grabbed one guy's sledgehammer and I started to pull it out of his backpack and then the whole group dogpiled on that sledgehammer and wouldn't let me grab it. So I was like, okay, that's a problem. They solved that problem. Let's create another problem. So I grabbed someone else's sledgehammer and then someone else's. And eventually they worked less and less to try and keep me from stealing the sledgehammer. So I went back and watched this video, and I was like, how, what is another way to solve this problem? And I'm not going to give you the answer, because I know there are guys that are getting ready to go to the, the October project class that do listen to my podcast. And, if this scenario arises, I don't want them to have the answer. actually, you know what? I can give the answer, but they would still have to make it happen. And, you know, by giving them the answer and they're only focusing on that one answer. There were many answers. There are many ways to solve this problem, but, no one decided to solve the problem in any real capacity. They were playing whack a mole and when you're in business, you're in leadership, when you're doing anything that you're doing in life, problems are going to come up. Maybe they're employee problems. Maybe there are communication problems, maybe networking problems, maybe relationship problems. I like to talk about leadership. Leadership is a person, people is a people problem. And so it's all about relationships. It's about communication. It's about how you're handling the communication, how you're handling the relationships. And so I like to, to bring in the relationship aspect of it, because I think there's no difference between your relationship that you have at home and your relationships that you have at work. There's still the same things apply. Are you putting the effort into the relationships that you're having at work to make those grow? And then are you going home and are you applying that same level of effort into your relationships at home? I can be, I'll be very honest and vulnerable with you. I have put a lot of effort in at times into relationships at work and very little, effort into relationships. Relationships at home and have paid for that. you need to be, anytime you're talking about people, everything is a relationship, everything is leadership, and you need to lead yourself first. That's the first rule of leadership, lead yourself first. But as I was going back and looking at this video, I was looking at how would they solve the problem or how would I solve the problem and what are the different ways that I could solve the problem where they could solve the problem from me to prevent me from doing what I was doing to them. So I'll just give you one of the answers, because we're going to change the scenario anyway for the last class.. So, I would come up in their in their hammers are in their backpacks on their back. At any point, they could have just surrounded me and prevented me from stealing their stuff. Not a good idea, because the other instructors would step in and start stealing their hammers, or anything else that they're carrying around. So another option that they would have is if they were to all like go back to back with one another, and then, putting the instructors on the outside of their circle, we wouldn't be able to steal their equipment, at least the equipment that's on their body, we would, you'd be forced to find a new problem to attack. And so that's really what the kind of sort of the point of this evolution is what problem are you trying to solve? How are you solving that problem? they were looking at it as, Trying to prevent me from stealing one person's hammer. I'm going to steal the next person's hammer and the next person's hammer. And eventually I stole one guy's hammer. you had 15 or 20 guys trying to keep me from stealing a hammer all the way down to one guy was left that I drug around in the dirt until I sold his hammer because they just kept giving up. And one of the ways that you know, the lessons that we're teaching here is. You can't solve the problem by yourself. You can't solve the problem alone. You can, maybe you can, but if you don't share the answer on how to solve that problem with your team, then It doesn't matter that you did a great job of solving yourself. You have to help your team solve that problem. Teach your team how to solve the problem in the future. When that comes up, everyone has to do that. So maybe you find this is the right answer. This is the way to solve the problem. You have to share that with your whole team. So the whole team knows exactly what to do and what not to do in solving that problem. And again, when we're doing these events at the project, we're collapsing time. We're trying to take something that could be like a, weeks or months of a problem that you're having in your business, in your organization, with your family, whatever it is, That's, it's been elongated and you just keep this problem pops up and this problem pops up and it's the same problem, but you never really learn Focus on the main. What is the real root of the problem? The root of the problem was me as an instructor trying to steal their stuff. they were so focused on the hammer. They weren't focusing on. The root of the problem. The root of the problem was me and keeping me away from their stuff. And at times they did a good job, but again, my job is to, see how they solve the problem and then create a different problem for them and see how quickly they can come around and solve that problem. it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you're doing, an event like the project or you're, you're working through your relationships at home, you're working through relationships at the office or at work, figure out what the problem is and solve the actual problem. I think the thing that, that really resonates with me is, let's say, if you go to the doctor, you have a pain like, Oh, your back hurts. And they just give you some, some painkillers to address the symptoms that you're feeling. They're not really addressing the problem. So let's say maybe they give you some painkillers to address the pain, but then they write a prescription for you to go to physical therapy or go to a chiropractor, and then that physical therapist or chiropractor actually goes in and they find where there's dysfunction They didn't fix the pain or they fixed the problem and the pain. they addressed the problem, not the symptoms. And so in this, me sealing equipment. I'm just the symptom. I'm not the pro I'm actually the problem, but they're only addressing the symptoms. And so if you can figure out what the problems are, not the symptoms, figure out what the problems are in your relationships, work, home, whatever business, when you can figure out what the problems are and you can address the problems, then you will have, you'll have an unstoppable leadership model. And those are things that we do in the SEAL teams. We, We have the symptoms, but what's the actual problem? Maybe we have a mishap. What was the cause of the mishap? We're not addressing that someone died free falling, in, in a parachute, accident. We are addressing that, the symptom, but what caused that accident? And we go back and we peel back layers and layers and do deep investigations to figure out what was the problem and how can we prevent it in the future. So as you're going through life and you're figuring all this stuff out and you're faced with a problem, or maybe you're faced with symptoms, go out and figure out what the problem is and fix the problem. Don't fix the symptoms. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the Navy SEAL Mindset. Again, I'm your host William Branham and uh, this was episode 027. You guys stay awesome. Don't forget to get naked and I will talk to you soon. Boom.