Recognizing Stress Through Navy Color Codes And Real-Life Leadership Lessons

Stress doesn’t start at the crisis point; it starts the moment the phone lights up. We open with the real baseline most of us carry—pings, expectations, and a mind that wakes up in the yellow—and then lay down a clear roadmap to navigate the day without losing yourself. Drawing on years of Navy leadership and today’s classroom realities, we use the Operational Stress Control colors to name what you’re feeling and the simple stress equation—pressure minus perceived capability—to show where to intervene.

From there, we unpack four practical buckets of stress: worry, fear, anxiety, and panic. Each one gets its own antidote. Worry dissolves when you seek the truth instead of spiraling in the unknown. Fear loosens when you act—build skill, ask for help, or negotiate time. Anxiety becomes manageable when you map objectives, sequence steps, and match resources to goals. Panic needs physiology first: box breathing, grounding, trusted teammates, and, for many, prayer. When you can name the bucket, you can pick the right tool and move from red toward green without pretending the pressure isn’t real.

You’ll also hear straight talk on leadership costs, boundary-setting, and the subtle ways rescheduling can make tomorrow harder. We share personal stories—from damage control drills to teaching cadets—that show how honest status checks, shared load, and clear priorities protect both performance and people. If you’ve been carrying too much for too long, this conversation offers language, steps, and courage to reset. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and tell us: which color are you in today? Your check-in might be the nudge someone else needs to breathe, plan, and move forward.

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Transcript

Welcome And Mission Of The Show

Gary Wise 0:05

All right, hello everybody. How you doing? It's Gary Wise here, Words from the Wise. Welcome back once again. I'm so glad you're here with us today. If you're listening to the sound of my voice, whether you are watching us on the YouTube channel for the Words from the Wise podcast, whether you are listening at one of our different locations, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, BuzzSprout. We just really appreciate the support. We really appreciate you taking time to join us as we figure out life on this journey that we're all going on together and as we talk about things that hopefully can help help you out. You know, our goal is to become your mentor's favorite podcast, right? My goal is to help provide content information for the people that, you know, spend time with us at school, for the people that grow up and graduate, move on with their lives, for people that find us via the World Wide Web, for former shipmates of mine that I served with in the military, you know, just kind of all the above. You know, exciting things are happening for us here at the Words from the Wise podcast team. Here I am once again in our headquarters, if you will, the Wise family, uh Chief Petty Officer's mess. And it's just, it's what I call it, because all my chief swag is in here and it's, you know, makes me feel at home a little bit. I love to be underway on the ship and getting to hang out in the chief's mess. And I think that would have been a really dope place to have a podcast. The other thing would be a repair locker, right? Because of my past life as a damage control type. And so this is an opportunity for me to invite you not only into my home, invite you into my space, but also to have conversations that I really think are valuable. Hopefully they help. Uh lately, I've been talking a lot about emotional intelligence or reframing it as being intelligently emotional. And that matters because if you are not able to manage your emotions day for day, uh, you're gonna struggle. You're gonna struggle. If you're a person who lets themselves get carried away in the moment, if you're a person who uh unfortunately is not in control of your emotions, and I'm not saying to the point where you're dismissing them or to the point where you're not acknowledging them. I'm just saying you need to be able uh to use your brain to discipline yourself to make sure that things that you're doing are things that you're you are proud to stand behind and that you are proud to take responsibility for, and that you are proud to own the consequences of those choices. Today, right? So, today what we're gonna be talking about is recognizing stress. Stress, stress, stress. We are gonna be talking about something that in my life uh has been a significant uh challenge, not just because, you know, I rose up through the I mean, I rose up through the ranks relatively fast in the Navy. I was a chief petty officer in nine years, and I was a master chief petty officer in 16 years, and arguably I was responsible for people. I mean, it was a first-class petty officer six years. So I was responsible for people as an adult most of my adult life. And with that came additional layers of stress. And as a young person, as a young adult, as a young leader, I didn't always understand the negative effects of stress. Actually, I enjoyed the stress. I would purposefully put myself under stress because I had this belief, and I still kind of do, that I operate better in stressful environments. It's part of why I like being a damage controlman or a firefighter, an emergency responder in the Navy. It's part of why I liked entering into the leadership arena because I wasn't afraid to take on stress. But then years go by, you get a little bit older, uh, not everything's gonna go your way, and you're eventually gonna find out that long times under sustained periods of stress can unfortunately have negative side effects that will be with you for the rest of your life. I mean, here I am now, 48 years old, and I am, I deal with significant challenges for the rest of my life due to the levels of stress that I welcomed, that I invited, that I asked for. I mean, I asked for it. I'm not even gonna lie to you. I asked for the stress. I said, put me in, coach, I'm the guy. I never wanted to be the guy you could get the ship underway without, right? I never wanted to be the guy that you could do without. I always wanted to be the guy that you were asking, is Gary gonna be there? Is Yes gonna be involved? What does the CMC say? Is he gonna be available to be a part of this thing? And I still do. You know, I still do as a dad, as a husband, as a teacher, as a as a as a faith, faithful believer in Jesus Christ, I want to be dependent upon and I want to be involved. But with that comes the challenges of life. And then the other day, I'm driving into school and I'm preparing my lesson for the day as I'm working on uh teaching the cadets about intelligent emotions and teaching them about how to balance out things in their life. And this day in particular, we were going to be talking about the United States Navy's operational stress control because in the United States Navy they have color coding for different stress levels, right? So, green, you're good, you're solid, everything's cop aesthetic. And truth be told, I don't always get along well with people that live in the green. I really don't. Like, I personally never am in the green. I don't know that I ever could get to the green. Even when I wake up in the morning, I'm I'm yellow. Yellow is the next tier up. Yellow means you are doing stuff, you are actively engaged in something, and there is stress in your walk. There is stress in your talk. It's not unhealthy, but you're in the yellow, right? Orange, orange is where you start to realize that you are in contact with the opposition, right? You are in contact with the enemy, and they get a vote, and you may not win. And this stress is possibly going to go the wrong direction. When you are in orange, right, based upon what I the training that I received and how I interpret the color codes, you are um actively engaged in a stressful environment. Like literally, you're gonna be tired with this stress. And then red is unfortunately you've you're losing or you have lost. You are cooked, you're burnt out, you are unfortunately probably gonna be a degradation to the team, and you are a risk. And we need to identify you or you need to self-identify as being in the red so that we can mitigate the impact to the organization, mitigate the impact to the operation, best get you the support you need to clear that red from your calendar to get you back to the green to the safe space while we figure out what's gonna happen next, because the show must go on. None of us are bigger than the organization, but if somebody's clearly in the red, and even with the ones that are in denial and just can't see it, we've got to help them out. And understanding these color codes are very important. And this is true even for high school kids, even for teenagers, right? This is why I'm teaching this to the cadets, because I want them to understand that they need to be able to rationalize their decision making and recognize what stress index are they falling underneath. I remember uh when I went to CMC school, when I went to the CMC school up in uh, it was Newport, Rhode Island, up there at the Naval Uh Leadership and Ethics Center. One of the things they did in CMC School was they gave us a personality assessment, right? They do this thing where you you answer all these questions and you give them all this information. And then what they do, they interpret the results to you. And there were three layers to this. There was uh you at your core, right? And these are the things that were your fundamental truths, your fundamental values. And again, this is my interpretation of how I received this debrief. Um, but it was going to be these are your truths, these are your fundamental beliefs. The next thing they debriefed you on was how you were going to be under stress. Because unfortunately, when placed under stress, people made make decisions that are less than best, right? People may do things that they're not always the proudest of. And as leaders that were going to be in a space that the organization was going to be depending on us, the the Navy was investing money in our success, the teams were going to be built upon our abilities, and the commanding officers and executive officers and the chiefs' messes were going to be be dependent upon our ability to operate under stress. We needed to see what areas were going to be different than us and our core, or theoretically your green area, right? So area under stress was going to be your yellows and your oranges. And then the third part was the dark side, right? Or the things that would get you fired, or the things where people are going to either misinterpret what you're doing or uh going to bring you the biggest cause or the biggest challenges in leadership because unfortunately, you do not get to control your leadership style. You may think you're coming across as this charismatic, super energized, super motivated, inspired person, and everybody might just think you're yelling all the time, or they might just think you're mean, or they might think that you don't care about them, or what it could be nothing, it could be all a facade, right? Both yours and theirs, but the reality is still that perception can win the day. And so they wanted to give you access to this information up front, not for you to really change too much, because they had trained us to become the leaders that we were, but at least awareness, right? At least so you had the awareness before you stepped out there into the field and started getting shot at, right? By the the the world of the people with the words, right? Because as a leader, especially in the in the Navy, the words are what people use to hurt you the most. The words and you know, just the ways that they can attack your character or just uh again, their reality, which does not always equal the truth, because again, there's three sides to every every real thing in the in the United in this world. There's your side, their side, and then there's a truth somewhere in the middle, but it still hurts. Um getting that lesson learned was valuable for us because then we got the chance to teach that kind of a perspective to all of our senior enlisted leaders. You know, so I could talk to my chief's mess, or I could talk to my uh cadets about stress and how they operate under stress. And what if they make bad choices or poor decisions when they're placed under stress, right? Because again, I'm a high school student or I'm a high school teacher now, but imagine I'm putting myself in the position of a high school student and I've got uh grades, I've got social challenges and or social things going on in high school, you know, personal relationships, friendships, social groups. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, high school has not changed that much, I promise you. I sit out there and I watch the clicks and I watch the conduct and I watch all the things that can cause social stress andor anxiety. Uh grades are huge, right? And unfortunately, there's a lot of expectations and testing. Testing, oh my God, testing brings so much stress. And the the testing is not the easiest thing for everybody, so that's a lot of challenge. There's extracurricular involvement. There is parents, there is siblings, there is finances. Um, I've got cadets that have immigration concerns and it's literally weighing on their mind. I had a cadet the other day who was he was really struggling because he was, he had moved away from an uncle that he had been living with to move down to Florida to live with some other family members so that he could have better opportunities in life. But some of the things his uncle had said to him as they went separate ways really hurt him. And he's still continuing to grapple with these words because this was said to him by an adult that he reveres. And here is this teenager trying to process this guilt already of trying to go have a better opportunity at life, and this full adult is just dumping on him like he don't know better, right? That's and this this young man is dealing with the stress. And as I was preparing to go in and give this lesson on this day for operational stress control and teach the cadets about the different colors of stress and the Navy's operational stress control matrix, I was listening to a Tony Robbins uh podcast, right? He's still one of my favorite people to listen to to give more education. I've listened to him ever since I was a Navy recruiter when they left the Power Talk cassette tapes in my in my G-Jet, right, in my government vehicle, and I'd listen to Power Talk, and I was a young man, and that really, really, really changed my life. Uh and I was listening to this podcast, and on this day, uh there was this author of a book titled Unstressable. Thank you, God, right? What a blessing. Here I am going into work to give a lesson on the Navy's operational stress control. And on this podcast, that I didn't even ring it up. Like literally, just my phone hooked up, and the podcast started because I had been listening to the podcast the night before. And this podcast, which was the most recent episode, started a new episode, and it was the author of this book titled Unstressable, which I've never read the book before. I've never even heard of the book before. Uh, the author's name is, I believe, Mo Mo Gadot, I believe is his name. And he's not the only author of the book. There's a lady, I believe, her name is Alice Lewis. She's the other author to this book. And they come to this book from two perspectives on the on the idea of stress. There was the Mogadot, is a former executive who comes at it from an engineering perspective. And he uses math and he uses uh logic, and he basically just looks at it from the perspective of a highly educated individual who thinks that the math is going to help it make sense, and it does, right? And so that's Mr. Godot. And then Miss Miss Alice Law is the other author for this book, Unstressible. She comes at it from the place of a therapist, uh a person who understands psychoanalysis, psychiatry, if you will, really just the heart, the mind, and they come together as a partnership to unpack stress for people. They'd gone through some trauma. You know, unfortunately, Mr. God had lost his son. She had lost her father. They were dealing with this this sincerely traumatic time in their life, and they were trying to understand how to best unpack stress. And the reality is, we have an epidemic right now in our society of anxiety. Period. Like, stop. We have constant reminders in our cellular devices, and our telephones, and our cell phones, whatever you want to call your portal personal electronic device. We have constant reminders of all the things going on in the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days out of the year. So there is always stress. You always feel like you're missing something. You got to communicate with somebody. There's a million different chat groups you're a part of. There's a million different social media groups you're a part of. So just day tomorrow, today, pick your day. You're waking up thinking you have things going on, even if you have nothing going on just because of your personal electronic device. So in 2026, there is a constant undertone of stress, right? Period. Always there. So that that is one place where they start with because they say in this book or in this speech that Mr. Gadot was giving on the podcast, he says that the humans in 20 in 2025, 2026 are already constantly carrying the weight of a constant sense of stress, just purely based off of their electronic devices and their social networks that aren't even real, I mean, let's be honest, but that are happening there. So that's that's the starting point of your day. So if you're if you're waking up in the yellow theoretically, just because of your cell phone, how much faster is it going to be to escalate possibly into the orange or into the red? If we don't even, and again, I'm a person who tells you I enjoy living in the yellow. I like being in the yellow. I enjoy having things to do. I do not, if I have a day off, I'm gonna find things to do. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, let's be honest, I created a dang podcast because I was looking at the summer vacation at the end of the school year a year or so ago, and I was like, what am I gonna do for a month with no school? And that was start a real estate business, and that became get into this leadership certification pyramid Ponzi scheme, right? Get behind, get away from those weirdos. And then I end up starting a podcast as a way to continue to find fulfillment in the time in what supposedly was my green area where I probably should be uh recuperating, but I wasn't feeling fulfilled. I feel one of my challenges that I have to constantly deal with is I have been trained that in order to be fulfilled, I need to be accomplishing something. I'm you just don't become who I am after 48 years of life and then just go lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling and think and be proud of that. It's just not a thing for me. I need to find, I need to be able to look back on my day and say, hey, these are the things that I got done. Here's what's going on tomorrow. Yay. Right? And that's where I where I start from every day. And unfortunately, so does the whole world, whether they want to believe it or not. Everybody that has a cell phone device that has access to, I would at least say one to more social media constructs in their cell phone. I mean, in my cell phone, I would just say off the top of my head, I would say. I've got text, I've got email, both personal and work, which is work is like three different email inboxes, right? Just for work because the multiple positions that I fill. Then you have Messenger, which a lot of us use for different, like mine is for Facebook Messenger. Then you've got like WhatsApp. Then you've got, you know, of course, Facebook straight up, Instagram plus Instagram Messenger, plus TikTok, plus TikTok Messenger, right? X plus X Messenger, right? Or X communication tools. Plus, I use Truth Social as another one that I leverage, right? Those are just the ones on my phone, not to mention. Oh, just all the things that I'm working on day for day. And my the teenagers in my class, they have almost all the ones that I just listed, plus they have other ones you never even heard of, like Snapchat. They've got those things where they create their own servers, Discord, and they're communicating there. They have all these chat. It's huge, right? So people are already waking up yellow, if not into the orange. Because what if you had a bad conversation? What if you had a frustrating conversation? Um, and you haven't even really started your day yet. Uh, this is one of the areas they were discussing in their book, Unstressable, because they they recognize this is an epidemic for the humans in the world. And it's not academics. This is not an academic thing. Their goal is to take one million people a year out of stressful situations. And the piece of this is going to be giving yourself permission to not try to manage all of those different social groups. I I I uh I, for me, it's similarly, it reminds me of being on the ship when I'd have the radio on board the aircraft carrier. We all carried around those radios, and I would purposefully leave my radio on my desk because I needed to focus on working on something and not be distracted by emails or by the radio. Um, you've got to be able to neutralize a bunch of these different notifying agencies or notifying different groups that are all vying for your attention to distract you, to get you to want to go shopping on their Amazon Prime, watch something on their Netflix, whatever it is, right? And be able to focus on the things that matter actually in your life day for day. And being able to filter out all of the chatter so that you can prioritize the things that matter are going to be a key part of the stress equation. And as I'm listening to him talk about this on the drive into work this morning, me and my son Hayden are driving into school, and we're listening to this. He they break down stress into four categories, if you will, subcategories, which I thought was brilliant and really helped quantify not only what stress levels or what different components of stress are out there, but then they qualify that by saying, and here's how you address each one of those things, matters. Right? And they said stress is essentially the result of pressure, right? This is the mathematical equation. It is the result of pressure minus your capability to manage all of the pressure. So if you don't feel, if you do not feel capable of keeping up with the pressure or managing the pressure, pressure, or uh, or defeating the pressure, you're gonna be stressed. And then it's gonna fall in one of these four buckets. And you have to understand which bucket you're in, so that you can then do something about the bucket to lower the pressure, to increase your internal capability to defeat the stress. And this is how do I get from essentially from red to orange to yellow to green? And it can't just be by quitting everything. This is something I used to do when I was younger. Uh my wife would recognize when I was stressed out because I would ascend I used to keep running lists of all the things that I had to do. I had one at work and I had one at home. And I would essentially transcribe them day for day. So at work was all the things that I had to get done. At the end of the day, I would update the list and prepare for the next day. Then I would go home, update that list based off what happened at work that day, ensure, and that list at home included not just work stuff, but also the stuff my personal life. This is one of my areas that I I struggled at because at work I did not have my personal things on that list. But at home, I had my personal things plus my work things. Do you see the problem? That's a dilemma. I would I would very often lose track of my personal things because my professional things were always, was always the priority. And very, very fortunate that my wife understood that of the most of the time. But there were times that I would let her down because I would lose sight of the bubble, right? Which is one of the one of the things that I learned from hanging out with submarine folks is don't lose sight of the bubble. Don't lose sight of uh what's actually going on in the world and what really matters and the operational focus of the mission, which in my life, the mission needs to be keeping my marriage intact, keeping my family intact, and then accomplishing the mission. But unfortunately, for a lot of years, it was mission was first, and then it was family, and then it was marriage, and that was the challenge. Okay, now I want to get into laying out these four different areas of stress because if I had learned this earlier in life, it I don't know that it would have changed a lot. I'll be blunt. I think about this, but I think it might have it definitely as I learned it, listening him speak, it just made so much sense. It offered clarity. It offered clarity. At a minimum, it offered clarity, and I was much better to say, wow, that just makes so much sense. And it gives me peace recognizing all these different buckets and how they fit into stress. Because I was, I struggle with some of my challenges now, right? I I struggle hearing that I have a hard time managing stress. That sucks. I don't want to think that way. I don't want to hear that truth. I don't want to have to admit that. That was one of the hardest things that I had to deal with when it was time for me to retire from the military, was to learn that unfortunately things had finally pushed me so far into the red. I mean, I was in purple. The red, nothing. I was in purple. There is no purple. I made it up, but I was in the purple because of how bad things had gotten in that organization. And unfortunately, you just never come all the way back to you. I don't believe I can ever get back to the green. I just don't know that I it can never happen. Um and that that's hard to deal with. That's hard for me to deal with. That's my reality. But when I when I heard the things they were talking about, I just thought, wow, I want to share these with the students because this is powerful to at least understand what you could do as you're operating under stress and what's what area of stress are you in, not just the color coding, but also uh which one are which factor are you operating in? And there's going to be fear, there's gonna be panic, there's gonna be anxiety, uh, fear, panic, and anxiety, and the fourth one right now. Uh I'm I'm losing it, but uh well, I'll talk I'll cover it in a minute. But the first one I want to cover is fear. Fear, if you are afraid, panic, panic is the other one. So fear, anxiety, uh, panic, and then there's one more, I'll get to it. Uh, but if you are fearful, if you are afraid, it means that there is something going on that you do not believe that you have the capability to accomplish. Okay. If you are afraid, it means there is something, some challenge that you do not know that you have the ability to accomplish it. And and the antidote to that, to fear, is you must take action. If you're afraid, if you're if I if there's an animal that I think is going to attack me, right, and I'm afraid because I don't think I can defend myself against this animal, then I must run. Or I must attack and fight, right? Fight or flight, right? It's fight or flight. If I am afraid that uh I cannot accomplish the things that we need to accomplish to to satisfy uh this inspection that's coming up, or to to do good on a test that's coming up, then I must take action. I must prepare, I must get mentorship, I must get a strategy in place to help myself better understand the problem. You must take action if the stress that you are dealing with is fear. And fear can be paralyzing for some people because they struggle coming up with a plan under that pressure. But the plan is what they have to have. If you do not have the ability to take an action, uh unfortunately, you're probably gonna always run. That's you're gonna deflect and you're gonna run. And that is, unfortunately, not always the best course of action when you're operating in fear. Right? But step one is recognizing you're afraid. You are afraid and own it. I am afraid that I'm not prepared to take this test. Well, here's the other thing: you often feel like you're out of time. Right? If you're afraid that you don't have the capability to accomplish something and there's no time with which to deal with it, huge problem. All kinds of warning signs are gonna go off. You might mess around and just completely hard reset. So if you cannot resolve the issue about skills, capability, then look at the time problem. Can I reschedule? Can I re can I negotiate? Can we adjust? Now, time is the biggest it is the most important commodity in the world today. There's not going to be more time. There is only so many minutes, only so many seconds in every day. And if you are a person who fails to manage your time, you're probably going to quite often be operating fearfully. You must be able to manage your time strategically to accomplish the things that you say you're going to do. And if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready. But when things come up and you are afraid of taking that step or taking on that opportunity or taking on that challenge, or however you frame it, you need to learn in those moments and figure out why I am not ready, because sometimes you don't get second chances. Sometimes you, if I would have not, the day I saw my wife Erica, right, March 2nd, 2001, right? If I had not gone up to her and said, hey, my name is Gary, and I would like to get to know you better and started a conversation with this young lady, I might not be who I am today. Period. I if you do not have the courage sometimes to step out and even though you're afraid of the of the outcome, to still try, you are going to unfortunately miss a lot of every opportunity. And so understanding that it's okay to be afraid, it's okay to be fearful. Now, if you're afraid because you know you were supposed to do the work and you know you were supposed to prepare for that test, or you know you were supposed to prepare for that, your mom to come look at your bedroom to see if it's clean, or your work, your boss said you go clean the shop, but you didn't clean the shop, or if you know you were supposed to do something and you were afraid because you know you didn't do the thing, that's your own fault. And I got no pity for you there. And you got to learn how to not continue to put yourself in that space. But for the people that are authentically afraid, because life's challenges are catching them flat footed, you need to recognize it's either going to be you're concerned about having the capability or the time. Good news is typically with capabilities, you can grow them, you can learn them, you can develop them, you can prepare them. And when it comes to time, it can be negotiable or you can choose not to do it. Now, when I was on the ship, uh people would always want to reschedule things on us. They'd always come up to the captain of the XO and myself and say, hey, we need to reschedule this as an inspection or reschedule this evolution or reschedule this operation. And we would always say no. We would always say no. Um, matter of fact, we would almost want to do it sooner because the reality was it never gets easier when you're always rescheduling things to a later date. All you end up doing is adding on more things for you to do later for an immediate sense of stress relief, which is not true. Right? Ask the cadets that work with me at the school if they ever come up to me and ask me to reschedule something, I almost completely want to cancel the whole thing. Just cancel it. If it's so unimportant that we can just reschedule it to another day, why are we doing it to begin with? If I have something on my calendar that is so unimportant that I can just reschedule it, why am I doing it anyway? I my time is way more valuable than that. So before you ever come ask me to reschedule something, be prepared for me to possibly say I don't want to do it at all. We'll just quit. We won't do it, period, because it's not that important, it sounds like. Or I want to do it as soon as possible so that we can get it done with. Because typically there's a fear factor there, and I'm that makes me want to do it in more because what are we afraid of? Let's have the let's have that tough conversation. Let's talk about what the organizational fears are. Let's talk about what the personal fears are. Let's talk about how we can resolve the issues because there's enough people typically in the family, in the team, in the organization, that we can satisfy the fears if people work together. It's usually people are operating in silos or they're operating in independent areas and they don't want to communicate their insecurities. Guess what, ladies and gentlemen, leaders do not get that luxury. If you have an insecurity that's causing your team to fail, you need to take care of that. Do not just continue to reschedule things out of your insecurity. That's not gonna work. Oh, then you know the one I was thinking about that I didn't get to is worry. Worry was the next one, right? Worry, right? So there's there's fear, there's panic, there's anxiety, and there's worry. I didn't get to worry because unfortunately, people minimize it. People minimize worry. Worry is the most base level of stress. You are just worried about something. But here's the thing: typically, when you're worried about something, it's because you just don't know. It's because you don't know if you need to be afraid of it or not. You don't know if you need to be anxious about it or not, you don't know if you need to be panicked about it or not. So you're worried. You know how you resolve worry? You go find out what the heck is going on. You go find out the truth. You you quit through all the chatter, you cut through all the stuff that everyone's talking about that's getting each other spun up, and you go find out the facts. You go find out what's really going on, and you find out do I got something to be worried about? Do I have something to be afraid of? Do I have something I need to be anxious about? Do I have something that we need to be in panic mode about? And we need to be doing things to resolve the issue. And if not, what are we worried about? Right? Like, do not let worry put you in the grave early. And unfortunately, it's one of those things, you know, that all of us live with. I uh every day I deal with it. You know, when I tell you I live in the yellow, it's because I'm always worried about stuff, man. Worried about my kids, worried about the future, worried about, you know, my personal health, my wife's health, my kids' futures, my organization, my JRTC cadets. They're gonna graduate, are they gonna be okay when they move on? We had we have a drill competition. I'm worried about that. I'm worried about practice, I'm worried about all these different people's personal lives. I'm worried about am I doing a good job? Do they value what I'm doing? Do I value what I mean? All the how do the other instructors feel? Are they okay? Worry. All the worries. One thing for me when I'm dealing with worry, you like to do a little box breathing thing that you learn from the military. It's simple. You breathe in for a count of four, you hold the breath for a count of four, you exhale for a count of four, and then you breathe no breath in for a count of four. It's essentially a fore count of breathing to try to get your mind off all the things that you're worrying about. And then the you must remember that I'm worrying about things because I'm uncertain about the truth. I don't know what the reality is going to be. None of us know what the future is gonna have in store. We do not know um what the day will bring. And just overloading yourself, allowing yourself to go from green to yellow to orange to red because of worry is a bad plan. It's a bad plan. So if you've got something that's such a big deal that you cannot get it off your mind, you need to go find out what's true. You need to ask the tough questions, you need to have the difficult conversation, you need to look in the mirror, be honest with yourself, and then decide, okay, do I need to be afraid of it? Do I need to be panicked about it? Right? Because if I'm afraid, well, then I can face it, I can run from it, I can earn fix the capability, I can adjust the time, I can whatever, right? I'm gonna talk to you about what panic and anxiety can be done to handle those, but you need to know that with worry, you either have to choose to let it go or ratchet it up a notch and take it serious and get to work. That's all you can do for worry, folks. You cannot, if you dismiss it and act like it's not bothering you, yeah. Lying to yourself. And it sucks because there's a lot of things to worry about every day. And you're not alone. You're not alone. I struggle with it every day. Uh, the grand here's the big one. The big one is anxiety. This is the one that's just, I mean, it is taking our nation, our our country, our world uh by the throat. Living in a state of constant anxiety is exhausting. I I will tell you from personal experience. I tell people that, you know, you you see me and you see all the energy and the whatever else that it comes across to you. I get a lot of different people that say different things about me, either to my face or not, right? And they all got different impressions of what the energy means. And I always say, you know, this is me on medication, right? Imagine if I wasn't on it, because I'm just so pegged all the time, just from years and years and years and years and years and years of pressure and having to always find the answer to accomplish the objective, to lead the team and not to fail. And it's just once you get to a certain level, you it's hard to turn it off. I just, it's not realistic for me, unfortunately. And so I need help balancing that all out, which is, you know, why I no longer drink alcohol. What that's a piece of it, right? It's why I no longer serve on active duty, had to put a boundary on that and step away because unfortunately it was not healthy any longer. Had to, you know, really manage my time appropriately and effectively and prioritize the things that we're going to do. Because, again, there's a lot to have you anxious in this world, right? And there's a lot to have you, to have you worried about. And when you have anxiety, uh, you've got to understand that it's real. It's real. There's going to be physical challenges in your body that are going to indicate to you that you've got concerns. And the real concern is not that you have stress. The concern is you look at all the things that you need to do and you worry that you don't have what you need to get them done. And you know, when I look back on my time in the military, especially in the Surface Navy, especially on amphibious ships, right? You know, because in the Surface Navy, there's hierarchy, right? Let's be honest. There is hierarchy. And the amphibious ships are not in the top of the list, right? And I'm a gator sailor. USS Bellewood, USS Ogden, USS Ashland, three of the ships that I was on. Um I'm not, and then I was also on an aircraft carrier, which they're at the top of the hierarchy. The stress level was even worse there because they have all the money on the world, but but they do not have all the, you don't have all the people and the training and the other things that you need to accomplish the mission. They'll throw money at you, but that doesn't buy you bodies, right? That doesn't buy you the parts you need. I digress. I was always living in a space where there was way too much mission, not enough people, not enough resources, not enough training, not enough time. And after you know, 25 years of that, you just develop a sense of, oh my God, how are we gonna go? And you can figure it out. I remember when I was on board the USS George Washington, I would have I had a poster up in my DC, my damage control classroom, and this was a picture of a frog getting swallowed by a snake, and the frog still had his hands, his pizza, his hands around the snake's throat as he's halfway down the snake's mouth throat, right? And I tell my sailors, that's us, right? Again, I was supposed to have a master chief, a senior chief, two chiefs. I was supposed to have nine first class petty officers, 12 second-class petty officers, and then a division of arguably 50 to 60 E4 and Junior on an aircraft carrier. Here's what I had me, senior chief, one DC-1, and one DC two at a time. And the rest were all E4 and junior. That's what I had for about eight months. And it just, I could keep on telling you more about that story, but it was just not a good manning situation. And this is on a forward-deployed aircraft carrier. Of course, everyone understands this was like 2010, so it's not like yesterday, but still, that was my truth. And oh, by the way, every day I always felt like my career was being threatened, and we had to go find success. And then I had to carry, you know, 20 temporary assigned duty stations for all my people. So now you're gonna not only not give me the correct flavor of people that I need, but now you're gonna take people from me so I can give them to other places to work that they're not even building it here to do those jobs. It was crazy. That's just an example of the chaos that I had to deal with during my my military adventure. You know, my favorite, and I had I had multiple favorite, I had three favorite duty stations, and the George Washington was one of them, just so you know, because we were very successful there and we found ways to work through it. It was also the USS Ogden and the USS Ashland. These were my these were my favorite ships that I served on, and it's because I was a leader in all three of those ships. And what I learned was this it's not about the rules of the world or even of the Navy, it's about the way the team that's really on the deck plates chooses to work together to get the job done. If you can get the real people that are really on the team to come together to accomplish the mission, however, you all can agree to get it done, that's what matters. And that was exactly what we did on board the USS Ashland. Our chief's mess knew we didn't have the manning, we knew we didn't have the budget, we knew we didn't have the time, but we came together as a unit, as a mess, and said, we are not going to fail, we are not going to let this ship not meet mission and not pass every inspection that comes our way, and we are going to support one another. And we did everything we could think of out of the box to find success. Then I get out of the Navy, I come here to my high school ROTC unit, and there's there's three instructors, right? Supposed to be three instructors. Well, when I get hired, it's because one of the instructors was leaving, so I get the backfill. Well, the other instructor decides to leave before I get here. So they hire two new instructors. So me and another guy start the same time. A lot of the students left the program because they did not want to have to meet new instructors, right? So there was almost no sophomores and juniors my first year in the program. There were the seniors who had organizational positions, and they did not want to lose that senior year that they had worked so hard to get to. And then you had a bunch of freshmen that had come into a program not knowing what to expect. And you had two brand new instructors to this school, and you had the senior instructor who was there, and you had a huge disparity. A bunch of freshmen, some seniors, about 10 of them, very few sophomores and juniors. And then halfway through the school year, the other new instructor with me, he leaves, just quits, sends me a text message one day, says, I'm out of here, I'm gonna go somewhere else. Because in the civilian world, you can do that, right? And I had to go from just retiring from the military, not having a lot of organizational depth in my unit. Not all the seniors were happy with the changes that had come into place by the two new instructors. And but I will tell you, in high school, your their senior year, once you hit the holiday time period, it gets hard for them to focus on high school things because they're really looking at the door. And I don't blame them. I mean, life is calling, right? And it was just me and a bunch of freshmen, and we had to figure it out. And thank God for Chelsea James, who was my master that year. Thank God for Cadet Smith, who was the commanding officer. I mean, we had to, we took over the commanding officer for the unit, had to change out. It was just a lot happened that year. Uh, but these young people and myself, we figured it out. And now here we are, four years later, kicking butt, taking names, because by the way, I mean, we're in portables. We're not even in the building, right? We're out then and I love my portable, so don't get me wrong. I love my location. I enjoy my portable. It sucks when the weather's bad. It sucks when it's hot outside and the air conditioner doesn't work. Those times are kind of crappy, but I I love the freedom. I love having access to the field. I love the independence of being out there. That part is grand, right? And I love the schools that support for our program, the administrative support, the leaders, the cadets, so many great things, so many amazing things about my program, our program there. But that first year, I had no clue what I was doing. And me and these young people had to figure it out, but the same rule applied as when I was in the Navy, right? The team that's on the deck plate, here's all the objectives, here's all the rules you gotta follow. You guys get to figure out how to make it work. And that's what we did. And I will tell you that when you're anxious, your anxiety is such that you feel like uh it's gonna overwhelm you. The challenge is probably you don't know that if you have the training and the skills to accomplish the goal. And my advice for you to resolve that anxiety is to recognize the skills you need, recognize the objectives you've got to satisfy, recognize the challenges that you have, and then come up with a plan, a strategy to achieve them. That's it. That's it. And you can manage the anxiety. And then you need to categorize do I need to be fearful of these ones? Do I need to be panicked about these ones? Do I need to worry about these ones? And kind of bucket them in that area. So if you're worried about stuff, resolve it. Is it real or not? If it's real, then am I panicked? Am I afraid? Or do I just have a healthy respect for it? And then give yourself time to accomplish the different objectives. And it will, it will really start to resolve itself. But anxiety is real, and don't discount it, you know, because I've seen unfortunately way too many of my friends and myself personally have real-world challenges with anxiety. Next up is gonna be panic, right? Oh my God. Panic is a total physiological, like damn near shut down. People have panic attacks. I've seen kids have panic attacks before taking tests. I've seen adults have panic attacks uh going into fire, right? I when in the Navy, as a damage controlman, we train people to rush to their repair locker, to hurry, get dressed out as fast as possible in their gear, and then to be prepared to respond to whatever the casualty situation is going to be and to not overthink it because we want you to we want to train like we fight, fight like we train. Same thing with with daily life, right? Because but I've seen people when it came time to actually engage the casualty, have a panic attack. And the thing is, I try to always remind them is that, well, first of all, if they're full-blown panic attack, they're probably out. You gotta go. You can't be here anymore. But if you have faith in your gear, if you have faith in your team, and if you have faith in your ability to defeat the opposition, maybe don't panic. Right? And faith is so important for me in this life when I try to remember that I'm already fighting for victory, right? My Lord and Savior has already defeated the enemy. So on the on the level of how bad things are, right? On the on the level of how bad things are, as long as I'm not doing something that's going to compromise my soul, my spirit, it's probably not worth panicking, right? Um, but I'm also one of those people that wakes up every day, you know, ready to die. You know, I'm not I don't want to die. I love living my life. But I I mean, I've grown up though, raised in a space where if there's a fire, I'm gonna go. If there's a toxic gas, I'm gonna go. If there's a personnel casualty in a bad situation, I'm gonna go, right? That never gonna change. But now I go to a place where I know every day if my family was put in danger, I would do whatever I had to do to resolve that threat. If I was at school and my kids were put in danger, I would do whatever I could do to protect them and defend them and to help keep them safe. Period. I wake up every day ready for that, right? And because I have faith that the battle's already been won and that I have been saved, I get to have freely, freely this piece of that piece of mind. I don't panic about those things, right? At least not daily. Um, but I do see people panic about things that they just really feel like uh they are not prepared for and they're being hunted. And unfortunately, you cannot think your way out of panic because you are freaking out when it's happening, when you're really having a panic attack. Now, remember I said earlier, if it's worry and you fit you you you figure out it's true, it's real, this is a problem, then we need to are we afraid or are we gonna panic? Right? Again, it comes back to time, right? If I'm afraid, I can maybe fix the things I gotta fix to resolve the issue. I can have a plan, I can learn things, I can strategize, I can whatever. But if time is a challenge and there's not enough time left for me to accomplish the thing, then that's where panic sets into play. Um, and so again, having your time managed will prevent a lot of the panic concerns. The other piece of this is if you feel like this something is such a big deal that it may change your life. And that's true, right? There is some, especially for these teenagers, man, they are going through some huge transitions during this time. There, especially when it comes to SATs, ACTs, ASVAB tests. Do I join the military? Do I go to a technical school? Do I go to a junior college? Do I go to a four-year university? Do I just get a job? Am I, I mean, it's there's a lot on their plate. And especially senior year, it gets really real, really quick. And trying to help them not panic matters. How do I do that? How can we do that? It's helping them talk through what are their options, what are their opportunities, what makes the most sense, and how can they continue to grow because life doesn't end just because you're graduating high school. It's a as a matter of fact, it's the reverse. Life is actually just starting. Like it's a launch point. It's not it, I mean, it's it's a serious transition and it's very sad. I'm not gonna lie to you, it is. But I also we should want them to be so excited because they are now stepping out into a whole new part of their life that hopefully will be amazing, right? But panic is serious. We again, if you're having the panic attack, do the box breathing, you know, four seconds in, hold it for four seconds, blow it out for four seconds, hold for four seconds, try to recognize is is the is there really a tiger or lion that's gonna bite you? You know, what are you really worried about? What are the real fears, right? Is it seriously going to be something that changes your life? What's the what's the relativity of the threat? What's the consequences that we're fearful of that we're panicking about? And try to put it into reference as to what what your real goals are in life, and do your best to try and manage it. But I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen, a panic attack is real. And beware of panic because if you are panicking, you're in the red. You're in the red. And you and unfortunately, you probably slammed in there. You probably went from yellow to red quickly. That's trauma. You know, trauma, and there is a difference between trauma and like pity. You know, I pity is where you're just feeling bad about yourself. You're feeling bad because you knew you should have done better or you should have planned better, and things just didn't go your way, or you missed an opportunity, or you just didn't, it didn't work its way out. And again, I I would like you to not have a whole lot of pity on yourself. You know, the other day my son uh went to do his physical assessment for getting into the fire college, and I'd been talking to him about getting online, looking at what's on the test, planning for it, preparing for it, training for it, right? Uh and then what what I did, what we did, was we booked him an opportunity to go do a practice test, right? And he went to go do it, and they put you in this weighted vest, and they put you up on this stairmaster, and you've got to do it at a certain speed for a certain amount of time without touching any of the bars. And he can do it, but he had never done a stairmaster yet, right? And he didn't understand how far in your feet could go on the stairs. And that kind of caught him off guard. And a period of time as he's going through it, he stumbled a little bit and had to steady himself with the bars. Well, immediate failure. Okay. They gave him the opportunity to work through the rest of the test so he can get the experience. And then he's gonna go back tomorrow and he's gonna do it for real now and he's gonna pass it. What have we done since then, right? We went and got a gym membership. He went and does the stairmaster, he's done the stairmaster probably hours since then, just practicing because this is an important test for him to go and to complete, right? Uh, but I remember when he came to see me the day that he failed it, and he was very upset. And I told him, hey man, you know what? Ain't no reason to be upset, bro. You had an opportunity to go get some experience to prepare for it. We're not done. So get over it. Like, let's stop, let's not be too upset about this because that was why it's a practice test. We're gonna build the muscle miss memory, build the strength. You're gonna go back and you're gonna, you're gonna do good, and we're gonna keep. This ball going, but I had to kind of give him that baseline of I need I need you not to be too hard on yourself about this. Now he has friends that care about him, and as they figured out that he did not pass that day, they gave him some love and some tenderness, which I appreciate that. I mean, I gave him some love too, right? Hey man, I feel I feel for you. Now get over it. Now get over it, bro. Let's get back to work. We got things to do today. We will go back and get that. And that I think that's pity. Now, grief comes from trauma. Trauma comes with stuff, it just slams you from green yellow into the red. There's just no way you could handle that much stress, that much panic, that much fear, that much what you whatever it was that took you all the way from zero to a hundred, it's going to be traumatic. And that's going to take time for you to handle grief because grief comes from trauma. And there's just no timeline for that. And as leaders and as parents and as people that work with other people, we and that care about other people and that are empathetic with other people. We have got to be understanding of people and their trauma and their grief. And what I tell people about grief is that it comes in waves. You can't just say it's over. People are some people are really good at compartmentalizing it, and people are some people are good at handling it. We're all different. So don't judge yourself against other people. But just remember that there is a significant difference between pity and grief. Right? Trauma and just day for day, pound for pound, stress, and people that are not prepared as they should be for things and get caught off guard. That's all I'll say about that. Because I mean, one person's challenge is another person's trauma, right? For me, for something to be traumatic, it's got to be pretty significant. For other people, it cannot be something that I find is that challenging, but for them can be traumatic. And we all have a personal experience lens that we've got to be open to adjusting as we work through things. And as leaders and as mentors and as people that care about other people, all we can do is sometimes show different opportunities and give them the chance to get up off the deck and want to move forward. Right. Now, if you really know the person, you really know the situation, you might be able to be a little more candid with them, right? But at the end of the day, people have got to make the choice to want to make a move. They have got to do it under their own power. If you are always depending upon an external motivator to inspire you to want to move forward in life, you're going to be sadly let down. You have got to figure out internally what are the reasons, what are the things that excite you about living your life. You know, one of my favorite analogies is using Rocky Balboa. And when you watch Rocky Balboa get knocked down, he's on the floor of the ring. You know, you're watching the movie. My favorite Rocky movie is still Rocky V. I'm a Rocky V guy. I love it. I love the street fight because that, you know, a lot of that's the way my dad taught me how to go outside and scrap, right? It wasn't about boxing, it was more about being creative with the things that you had in front of you because we have got to neutralize things that we don't have, right? And that fight was the epitome of something that I can appreciate, right? Getting outside and just doing whatever you got to do. And I remember Tommy has knocked Rocky down, and Rocky's laying on the ground, and he's remembering all the training. He's remembering his son, his wife, Mickey telling him to get up because he loves him. And he, you know, he hears the dun dun dun dun dun dun dun. He hears the music and he hears the bells. And hey, Tommy, I ain't hear no bell. I got one more round, right? And you have got to have something inside of you that's gonna inspire you to want to get up off the deck. You cannot always depend upon other people, other people. It's a bad, that's a bad place to be. You do not need to always rely upon external motivators for you. And I know it feels good when people feel sorry for you, and I know that you appreciate people loving you and just being there for you. But in the long run, you'll thank me when you really sit down and think about why I am doing something. And that's where the whole finding your why comes from, because you must have that dialed in. And if you're struggling with that, then you're dealing with panic or worry or anxiety or fear, then that's going to be a challenge for you, and you gotta resolve that. You must be able to resolve not feeling like you have a why. Okay. And I think it's okay to not fully understand it. You know, my why. I've got different whys for different things. It's okay. You can you can have more than one. No one says you can only do one thing in this world. You can have a few things that you get excited about that inspire you to want to go out there and do things that matter. Um as I close out today, I really appreciate everyone listening with me, uh sharing this time. I want you to understand that I know this stuff is real. I will tell you, I've learned not just through my own life experiences, but through the reality that I have got to recognize I struggle with dealing with all of these things. And it's embarrassing still to say that, but it's just the truth, right? I remember when they told me, hey, Master Chief, did you? I thought for sure I was gonna have a heart attack. I thought for sure I was having a heart problem. And they did everything when I was in the Navy. They would go look, they would just do EKGs on me. I went the other day to an EKG spot uh here in Ocala because I was in the Navy. I could just go get an EKG for free in the emergency room and then they'd let me go. I went to the EKG spot here the other day, the emergency room area. Said, hey, I feel like I'm having a problem with my heart. I just don't want to have a heart attack and die while I'm driving. Can you guys please take a look at it? And uh they check it all out. And they said, honestly, you're not having a heart attack, so we don't know. And I said, Oh, then I'm I'm it's just my mental health. I'm good. Right? They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we want to check you into the hospital. And I was like, no, you I do not, I need to go to work. I got to get back to school. I got students that are depending upon me. I've just got a lot of different things going on in my life right now. I'll be okay. Had some medications I was changing off of. And this was all, you know, a month or two ago now, all resolved now. But it just reminded me of number one, I was not in the Navy anymore. I could just go get free EKGs and they'd leave me alone and say, all right, Master Chief, have a good day, right? These guys wanted to check me into the hospital. Uh but the other thing was just the reminder that mental health continues to be a challenge. And I've got to continue to make sure that I'm taking my medication, I'm on top of my things, and that I'm honest with the people that are in my life, that I can only do the things that I can do, right? And that's it comes with the world. And we all owe that honesty to each other and to be proud of our abilities to handle the different layers of stress that are on us as we attack life, right? As we l as we work to live the best life possible. So as I'm closing up today, I just want to remind you guys it's okay to not be okay. Please share with people in your space, share with people in your world, tell them what's going on, especially when we're all living under stress. Don't let your cell phone, your personal electronic device, be the thing that's getting you so stressed out. Uh remember, uh don't do inappropriate things on your electronic devices. I tell this to my students all the time, would tell this to my sailors. You do not need those problems, right? Just be careful with those dang things. Trust your parents, trust in your teachers, trust in the people that care about you to support you. And talk. That's the other good thing, you know. Whenever you're dealing with any of these things we talked about today, panic, stress, worry, anxiety, fear, man, pray. If at minimum, at minimum, pray. Take it to God. Let him have a helping hand here. Let him take some of that off of you. I struggle with that same advice. I need to listen to it myself. Drop to your knees, ask God for help. It will make things better. It will take at least take the edge off while you figure everything else out, okay? Uh, hopefully y'all got something out of this today. I really appreciate you listening to us here on Words from the Wise podcast. Uh, please stay tuned for our upcoming episodes as we continue to hopefully bring you information and insights into things that uh that we think are valuable. If you have anything you would like us to speak about or you'd like to be on the show, please let me know. I always look forward to talking to people. I've got a couple of cool episodes coming up here in the near future with some more teammates from my Navy time. So look forward to those. And I hope you guys all have a very, very, very great and blessed day. Thank you.