Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Pushing Limits and Finding New Gears

Welcome back to The Navy SEAL Mindset Podcast. In this episode, we’re taking a trip to the heights of Mount Kilimanjaro as I share five powerful lessons learned from my recent climb up Africa’s tallest freestanding mountain. I’m your host, William Branham, retired Navy SEAL, and today, we’re diving deep into the importance of challenging yourself, making fitness a priority, and tapping into new mental and emotional gears when the going gets tough.

Key Takeaways:

• Have a Plan: Whether you're climbing a mountain or tackling a major life change, having a plan is essential to give you direction and help you visualize the end result.
• Hire a Guide: The value of having an experienced guide, coach, or consultant can’t be overstated. They won't do the hard work for you, but they will steer you in the right direction and help you avoid unnecessary roadblocks.
• Make Fitness a Priority: Fitness is key to thriving, whether it’s on the mountain or in everyday life. I'll share how training for altitude made all the difference in my climb and why building skeletal muscle is essential for longevity.
• Emotional Intelligence in Tough Situations: Emotional intelligence isn’t just for the boardroom—it’s critical when facing physical challenges, too. Stay present, focus on the next step, and avoid getting overwhelmed by the bigger picture.
• Do Hard Things: Push your limits regularly. Whether it’s a yearly challenge like climbing a mountain or swimming the Hudson River, these experiences will unlock new levels of resilience and mental toughness that you can draw on when life throws its toughest challenges your way.

Join me as I break down each of these lessons and share how they can apply to your own life. Remember, the summit isn’t the finish line—it's only halfway. 

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Transcript

William Branum: 0:00

Welcome to the Navy SEAL Mindset. This is episode 028, and I am your host, William Branham. Welcome to the show. I'm a retired Navy SEAL. This is your first episode. Retired Navy SEAL, 26 years of service. I was a sniper instructor. I've led teams across Iraq and Afghanistan, up to 400 people at a time. And, I got a lot of knowledge that this podcast is designed to share with you. I, since retirement, I have become a, I started a CBD company called Naked Warrior Recovery. where I'm actually being sued right now that I've probably talked about in previous podcasts. for the word naked. So stupid, but anyway, it's, it is what it is. And I'm, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be sued. I get to be sued and that, so that's, that's kind of cool. so I still have Naked Warrior Recovery, but I really focused on speaking, delivering the, the Navy SEAL mindset, the get naked mindset. And if you want to learn more about that, go to the website, the number five, five seal secrets. com and, You know, put your information in there. Yes, I do ask for a phone number. I don't care if you give me your phone number or your friend's phone number. I don't care. Most people don't even know their own phone number anymore. Just go ahead and put your phone number in there or 555 1212. I don't care. And, uh, email address. And then I'll email you a copy of what the Get Naked Mindset is all about. Or 5 Seal Secrets. and I'm a business executive leadership coach slash consultant. And, I'm not sure, like, like I think the last podcast I talked about how stupid titles were. When I first retired from the military, I, I started, a consulting business, helping companies navigate the military acquisition system. My last three years in the SEAL team headquarters, I went out and found 16 million of other people's money, to solve problems And create technology that never existed before. And so I was going to use those contacts, those connections, that knowledge to help other companies, navigate the military acquisition system to maybe take their widget and, You know, maybe it wasn't ready for primetime or wasn't ready for an operational unit. I could go and find research and development dollars that would help turn that widget into something that was, you know, an operational capability for the military. And then, you know, I, of course would get paid for, for my part of that. but it was interesting going back to, again, titles. People would not hire me because they did not like the word consultant. Everywhere I turned, consultants are criminals. Consultants get this, they get paid, but we never get any benefit of, out of what they do. And so now I'm a coach, I'm a consultant. I don't care what you call me. I could have had any other title other than consultant, and I could have picked up all sorts of jobs, but because I called myself a consultant, people refused to hire me, for doing exactly the same things that I, you know, I was basically doing in the military, just re engineering it, doing it for, for the. Company, not doing it for the military, but really doing it for the military because, you know, the end user would benefit at the end of the day. Idols got in the way of that. So anyway, this is the Navy SEAL Mindset. Again, I use my, the things that I learned in the SEAL Teams and I, and I want to share those with you. And, and one of the things that I recently did, was I, I flew to Africa. And, To Tanzania, went on a safari and then turned around and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I learned a whole lot about that mountain. Apparently I do, succumb to peer pressure because I had no intention of climbing that mountain. But then a buddy of mine was like, Hey, let's go do that. that'll be cool. And so I caved into his peer pressure but it's good peer pressure that I cave into. not bad peer pressure. anyway, here's, a handful of lessons that I learned from climbing Kilimanjaro. if you don't know much about the mountain, I did not. Kilimanjaro, I believe, is the highest mountain in Africa. It is 19, 300 feet, so the air gets thin up there, and I'll talk a little bit about the altitude in a little bit. it is the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. You know, Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, but Everest is part of a mountain range. Kilimanjaro is a freestanding mountain. It's actually an active volcano that's currently dormant. It is not extinct. I didn't know that prior to climbing it. And you know, as we were coming down the mountain, there were people going up that were planning on, sleeping in the crater. Because it is, it's a giant volcanic crater. So again, interesting, cool. and the more I kind of think about that in the prehistoric ness of Africa and that mountain or that volcano, if you just think about like, The animals that are in Africa, giraffes and, zebras and elephants, and like, they have to have some sort of prehistoric, lineage to be as weird as they are, weirdly shaped, move the way they do. so anyway, it's kind of cool to think about those things, but I didn't know any of that prior to climbing it. Someone was just like, Hey, let's go climb a mountain. And I was like, Oh, okay, I'll go climb it with you. I had a better attitude than that, but you know, I like to sort of play it down. So, here are, five lessons that I learned climbing Kilimanjaro. number one was to have a plan, and I know that seems very, Of course you need to have a plan, but I want to talk about a plan in pretty much anything that you do. A plan basically gives you some direction. So I have some things in my life that are changing in my personal life, very big changes, and one of the things that I had to do is develop a plan. On how to execute those things. Now I'm very good at, doing things on the fly. I can pivot and change directions very quickly, but before I can do that, I need to have a plan so that I know the direction that I'm going, why I'm going that direction. A plan also gives me the ability to visualize where I'm going and what's going to happen when I get there. What does the end result look like? And I think a lot of us don't really focus on the end result. We're focusing on. You know, what's going to happen next, like sort of an, if then, if then, and so plan is just really the, the bigger picture, like, what do you, what do you want it to look like? You know, when I talk about commander's intent, what is the end result that we're looking for and what are the things that we can do in the meantime to get us there? And so, you know, a plan gives you the ability to visualize what is that outcome and what is it going to look like? Maybe on the way there, but it also, a plan also gives you the ability to, it gives you something to deviate from. If you go into a situation without a plan, you don't know exactly which way to go. and I'll tell you on this climb, I was Always questioning the plan or I was challenging the plan. You know, it was a six day round trip for us to get to the top and then get back down. And there were long stops along the way for us to, acclimate to the altitude. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to sit around. I'm someone who's just like, let's just go get it done. Can we go do it in five days? Can we do it in four days? Can we do it in three days? I'm confident at this point, I could do it in three days if I was smart about it. And if I, planned appropriately and did some, a lot of altitude work prior to showing up to Africa. I'm confident that I could have done it in three days. I don't know if I could do it in two, for sure three. With the right guides, with me. but yeah, I was always challenging the plan. And, I also in that challenging, I forced our guides to sort of check themselves. I tried to summit the mountain twice. And so what it would have looked like is we would have gotten to base camp at 15, 500 feet. The rest of the team would have taken a nap and myself and one other guide would go up to the summit, hit it, turn around and come back down and then turn around and do it again, like an hour later. And I thought that was maybe just a little too much to, to bite off because I got the guide to be like, okay, let's go. Well, if you're serious about it, we'll do it. Um, but I didn't, there wasn't enough value in it. Had we gotten to base camp sooner, I might've done it just to say I did it twice and did it in a certain amount of time. so I could have, I could watch sunset from up there and I could also watch sunrise from up there. two different trips. But, you know, that kind of leads me into the next lesson that I learned is hiring a guide, or a coach or whatever. You know, I talked a little bit ago, a little bit ago about, I'm a coach slash consultant, and I didn't get work because of the title that I gave myself that I didn't really understand at the time, Us hiring these guides to take us up and down the mountain was critical because what a guide does or a coach or a consultant, whatever title you want to put on them, really they, they're someone who has the expertise that will make your adventure better. That will give you a better experience at the end of the day. So, and what I mean by that is, you know, we could go, it's actually illegal to climb the mountain without a guide. Because you're paying into the economy and all this other stuff, but in your supporting, you're supporting, you know, businesses there in Tanzania, but it's, and so therefore it is illegal. But what the guides did for us is they took us on They use their experience to make our experience better. We still had to do the work. We had to, you know, hike up to each base camp or each camp. Uh, but you know what, they had food for us. They, you know, gave us recommendations along the way. They, Uh, guided us through hard to navigate areas. They did things for us that needed to be done, uh, to get us where we needed to go. They were critical for our success. I mean, I watched guides, you know, I've seen, I saw people that had no business on that mountain. Um, and I saw guides like pushing them up, dragging them up the mountain, carrying them back down, carrying their water, doing all this other stuff, which I, I didn't really appreciate, uh, that, that was taking place, but it, I mean, it was what it was. And, and so, you know, their job was really to get the tourists to the top of the mountain or back down. Um, but our guides were, You know, we, as we were coming back down the mountain and back down to like, I think 12, 500 feet, um, after we summited we got back to a, our second base camp and there was no lodging for us. We were going to have to sleep outside and it was cold and we did not have the facilities to sleep outside. And so our guides went to work and Made sure that we got lodging that we were supposed to have, that we had reservations for, and a lot of things got messed up. And then our guides were like, we don't know where we're going to sleep. And they're not allowed to sleep in the same facilities that we are. So like we were giving them equipment, ground pads, whatever, so that they could go and sleep wherever they needed to sleep. They're like, Oh, we're probably going to sleep on the kitchen floor. Um, and that's just not okay. Cause they're out there carrying more weight than we are doing more work than we were doing. because they knew the systems in place on the mountain, because they had been there many times, they had the network, they knew who to call and what to say, they were able to get us the, the lodging that we needed to get. They were able to get themselves the lodging that they needed to get, but they were also, willing to take, take one for the team, making sure that we were taken care of to make sure our experience was really good. So hiring a guide, Coach, consultant, whatever it is, is critical. I mean, in, in my work now, I'm somewhat of a guide. I'm not, I try very hard with my clients to not give them the answer. Although it's, it's difficult sometimes. Cause I'm like, it's right there in your face. It's in, but they don't see it a lot of times. And so it's my job to guide them into finding the answer themselves. My job, you know, our, our guides didn't carry us up the mountain and carry us back down. They just guided us along the way, gave us the right path to take, helped us when we needed help. We still had to do the work. And so that's what I do with my clients. My clients still have to do the work. They have to go and execute the things that they have to execute. My job is just to help guide them around roadblocks that they may run into, or, you know, struggle, things that they're struggling with, whether it's a people problem, a personal problem, a business problem, a leadership problem, whatever it is, I I'm there to help guide them around those, those obstacles so that they have a better experience in whatever it is that they're doing. So. One of the things that I really dislike are in the, in the service industry are when there's a, a professional client relationship and the professional is not helping the client solve the problem or get better or where they can solve the problem. I see, I've seen this in like sort of the, the mental health world where, you know, that the, the therapist, their job is to help the client, but they're not really helping the client. They're, they're making the client dependent on them. And I don't want my, my clients to depend on me. I want them to rely on me to help solve hard problems, but giving them the tools to go and solve their own problems. So enough about that. you know, if you're going to go do something hard, hire a guide, hire a coach or someone to, to help get you there. Um, fitness, fitness in my life. I make fitness a priority. I'm 50 years old now and I can run circles around my 40 year old self being in the SEAL teams. I look better than I did in the SEAL teams. I probably, I say I can run circles around myself. I don't know if I actually could. I could, I'm for sure as good as I was in the SEAL teams, maybe better. I'm not sure. I didn't do the things that I'm doing now in the SEAL teams. I did different hard things. but I'm not slowing down. I am broken. I am broken, broken, broken. from 26 years of service. So therefore I have to prioritize fitness. I have to prioritize optimizing fitness. So I don't just go and, and, and kick my butt doing, doing hard things. Although I do that, I do do that. I have to prioritize. Optimization of fitness. So, one of my, one of my doctors, Dr. Gabrielle Lyons, she has a podcast. She just wrote a book a little while ago. she says it's skeletal muscle is the longevity organ. basically what she's saying there is if you don't have lots of skeletal muscle, which decreases as you age, then You're setting yourself up for failure. And so what I, what I try to do is I work on skeletal muscle every single day. Now I don't go, you know, run 15 miles and, and lift 300 pounds at a time or 400 pounds. I do a lot of lightweight, high rep stuff just because of all the injuries I have. And I use that lightweight, high rep, those workouts to elevate me. So, you know, for example, prior to climbing, Kilimanjaro, I flew out to Colorado and climb Pike's Peak because I had done altitude before 14, 000 plus feet and I struggled a lot. And so I'm like, I don't want that to happen to me in Kilimanjaro. So let's go in and, you know, part also, this was part of the plan go out to, Pike's Peak, go out to Colorado Springs, climb Pike's Peak solo. and some of the things that I focused on were, you know, I focused on my legs. I focused on how to. Climbing, you know, steep hills. I focused on my energy output, how much exertion I was, putting out. And, uh, all the things that I thought I needed to do, how much water consumption that I needed to climb an even bigger mountain. And so when I was on Kilimanjaro, I did not struggle with altitude really at all. Outside of like a splitting headache, uh, you know, waking up from a nap at 15, 500 feet prior to like an hour before, you know, tackling the summit. I didn't struggle with altitude at all. I think it's 17, 500 feet. I had a little bit of shortness of breath, but outside of that, I was pretty good to go. I can't say that for everyone on the team. As a matter of fact, there's a buddy of mine that I climbed with because we were going a little bit slower or he was going slower. And so I just stayed back with him. We actually started about 30 minutes before the main group and, man, altitude, uh, Kicked his butt. I just read a, an Instagram post that he, he put out there. He was like, it was like COVID, but worse for him. Uh, I never had COVID, so I don't know what that was like, but, he was like completely drained of energy. Like it was hard to breathe. He had, you know, gnarly coughing fits and, and he is, he is an incredible athlete, but the altitude got him. I would say because he didn't prepare for the altitude and I'm on my fitness journey. I prepared for altitude To prepare for the the higher altitudes of 19, 000 plus feet so I make fitness a priority in my life, so therefore it doesn't matter if I'm climbing a 1920, 000 foot mountain or Or if I'm, you know, hiking the Grand Canyon or if I'm swimming across the Hudson river, which I'm going to do, later on this year, in another month, it That was taxing. And if fitness was not a priority in my life, my recovery would be so much longer. So I would encourage everyone to make fitness a priority in their life. No matter what that fitness looks like, it could be just getting up, just drinking a gallon of water a day, going for a walk, doing, you know, a handful of pushups and sit ups and squats, body weight exercises, that's all you need. And if you want to get even, more optimally fit, start adding weights, lifting, you know, I would say lighter weights, higher reps. And then as you progress, maybe adding heavier weights with, with lower reps. Fitness has to be a priority, walking, running, whatever it is for you. so I'm going to get off my soapbox there. Holy moly. I had no idea I was just going to pontificate so much. Um, number four is. The emotional intelligence of doing hard things. And I don't think it's about doing hard things specifically. I think it's about emotional intelligence across the board. You know, a lot of us, like some sort of certainty in our life. And I'm going to tell you that there's no such thing as certainty. Certainty is, is an illusion. Again, I was, I was talking to one of my coaching clients and, he was talking about some people in the organization that they don't like change because it's, it disrupts their daily, uh, battle rhythm or their, their daily thing. And, and because they'd like the certainty of knowing like what time, what's, what's going to happen when they show up to the office, what they need to do and when they're going to go home. They like that certainty. While the organization, is about to change. there's a lot of change that's, that's going to happen in this organization or in his organization. So that certainty is definitely out the window. And so we're, working on how to navigate that. But, you know, on this climb, certainty could be something like, Oh, well, the goal here is the peak of the mountain. And I'm going to tell you that the peak of the mountain is only the halfway point. You can get up the mountain, but you still got to turn around and come back down the mountain, which can be almost as hard or harder than going up the mountain. A lot of times coming downhill is, is a lot harder. It's more taxing on your body, on your legs, on your knees, on your back, than the, than the walk up or the hike up or the climb up. so focusing on the peak. Or the goal that you're, you're setting for yourself. I would, I would recommend focusing on being present. Where are you right now? You know, a lot of times that peak can be overwhelming. That big, audacious goal that you're looking for. It can be overwhelming. It can be so big. You're like, what I will, how can I ever get there? And so you, what you really should be focusing on, it's good to like look up and see it, but then put your head back down and then focus on the steps that you're taking, focus on the breath that you're breathing, you know, like going up the mountain, the air became thinner. And so breathing became more work. It became more problematic. You had to take smaller steps. You had to be more conscious about what you were doing, more purposeful. You had to be more intentional with, with what you were doing and how you were doing it. And that came even more relevant coming back down the mountain. So the interesting thing about climbing Kilimanjaro is you go through several, three or four, four different, uh, sort of eco zones. You start off in a rainforest and you go through the rainforest up to like You know, less vegetation. And then you end up on like, you know, a moon landing, like there's no vegetation. And then you climb the mountain and you come back down and going through all, all those, uh, environments again in reverse. And so this time when we were coming down the mountain, it's day six. And we're super tired and the path is not smooth. Lots of boulders and rocks and great ways to twist your ankle and, and rip your knee out and, and, you know, really hurt yourself on the way down because you're being complacent and you're like, okay, we're almost done. We're almost done. We're almost done. I just want to be done with this. it was raining in the rain forest. Imagine that raining in the rain forest. So it was just mud everywhere. Super slippery. I slipped many times. I didn't use hiking, uh, poles. Very much on the way up, but I for sure use them on the way down because I think it's like eight pounds of pressure per pole, per knee, something like that. but they saved my, legs or my knees or my ankles many times. Uh, and so I had to be coming down the mountain through the, through the rain forest in the mud became not only a physical. It became a cerebral challenge as well. So I was mentally exhausted and physically exhausted by the time we got to the bottom. But, that was part of that, that emotional intelligence. Don't focus on like the end result. Don't think that you're going to be done anytime soon. Focus on the next step. Focus on the next breath. Focus on What are you going to do to not get hurt going down the mountain? So you can have the end result in mind, but when you're on your way there, you need to be very present and very focused on being deliberate and intentional about what is your next step? What is your next breath? Where are you going to put your hand if you're climbing up or down or, or whatever it is? Okay. So there's four. So we have, have a plan, make a plan. Number two is hire a guide. Number three, make fitness a priority. Number four is, is really focused on that emotional intelligence. not the, goal at the end. It's being intentional about what you're doing to goal. And then the last, lesson is, is really go out and do hard things. I accidentally started doing these yearly, challenges. about three years ago, uh, when, when a buddy of mine was like, Hey, let's go climb, the Grand Teton. And I was like, Okay, that's awesome. Let's go do that. And I didn't realize how hard that was going to be, nor did I realize The people that I was going with were going to be just amazing, amazing, amazingly great shape, uh, for altitude. Now I was in better shape than them in other ways, but at altitude, they just left me in the dirt, which, you know, really kind of mentally prepared me for the, for Kilimanjaro. So I did the Grand Teton, uh, I do the swim across the Hudson river. Uh, this year, it's going to be August 10th, New York City. Um, my book comes out the same day, August 10th, uh, called Mission Ready. I'm a co author in that book about building high performing teams. And I talk about, leadership through the lens of a gunfight. We can also call it gunfight leadership if you want. And maybe I'll do a whole episode or a podcast on that. But these, these yearly challenges, they, what they do is they keep, keep me sharp. They keep my sword sharp. They keep me as a weapon sharp. Physically, mentally, emotionally, all the things that you, you need to do, because what they do, going and doing these really hard things, you have sort of this workup where you're preparing, you're planning, you're preparing your body physically and mentally to go do it. But then when you go do this really hard thing, It's, it is physically challenging. It is mentally challenging. And then it becomes emotionally challenging because you can't, you can't really plan for the emotional piece of it. And emotions will hit you in, in, in different ways. Um, especially when you start pushing yourself. farther than you thought you were going to have to. And you have to go into this dark place, this place of darkness where you find another gear that you never knew you had. And so every time I go and do these really hard things, and then I suffer and I, and I find, um, I find myself questioning, what am I doing here? Why did I do this? And really having to dig down, not only physically, but into my soul, into my heart. How big is my heart? How big of a desire do I have to complete this thing? And can I just stop feeling sorry for myself at any moment? Um, you know, are the growth that I've had, is doing these really hard things where I'm like, I feel so sorry for myself. I'm feeling sorry for myself. I'm mad. I hate the world. I hate everything. But when I get to the other side of that, even if it's just completing the challenge, I have another gear that I'm able to use for the next challenge and to use for life. I have this gear that I have that I just didn't have before that I can use for life. It doesn't matter how hard life gets, how difficult things are, because I did these really difficult physical challenges that tested me physically, mentally, and emotionally. It doesn't matter how hard or how weird or how crazy life challenges bring you, you can always go back to this darkness that you went through that will help propel you to a new place where you, where you actually want to go or, or get you to the other side of this really hard thing that you're struggling with in life. Anyway, those were the five, five of the lessons I relearned climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Have a plan. hire a guide or a coach, make fitness a priority. Really focus on that emotional intelligence and go and do hard stuff. Go do yearly challenges. They will make you a better person at the end of the day, and they will prepare you for life. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. episode 028, of, the Navy SEAL mindset. You guys stay awesome. Don't forget to get naked and I will talk to you soon.