When we win, we feel like we can keep going, right? You look at the team that wins and it's like, they'll play another game. The Superbowl winners, or you imagine they're jumping up and down and they could probably play another Superbowl. Losing, we know can, sure it can drop things like testosterone and dopamine for some period of time.

But when you were in the teams, what was your observation about how winning and losing would impact people in the short and long-term? In other words, would you observe people that had a quick reset button and could just say that was terrible? And then transmute, I guess I'm getting into kind of the Eastern language now, convert that into energy to go do better the next time.

Whereas we also see people, military and in the civilian world, that a loss, in particular severe losses, basically set them down the path of like less energy. It certainly isn't less calories. In fact, most of the time it's the other way. They start consuming more calories and that doesn't get them going.

So again, this notion of energy, and now I'm asking wins versus losses, what did you observe? And from the perspective of leadership, and maybe more importantly, from the perspective of yourself, how do you work with that? How do you calibrate wins and losses? How do you transmute losses into energy?

Because wins we know convert to energy, but losses oftentimes can sap our energy way, way down. - I think to start with, I think that the selection process to get into the SEAL teams is going to weed out a bunch of people that can't recover very quickly from something bad.

So you probably heard these type of stories before. The kid that was the star of the football team, the star of the basketball team, the captain of this, the captain of that, he's been winning his whole life. He goes to Bud's and he quits. Because in Bud's, you're not gonna win.

You're certainly not gonna win everything. They're gonna find what you're not good at, and they're gonna exploit that, and you're gonna lose. This is what happens. So a lot of guys that may lose and it disrupts their motivation, they're probably just gonna quit. And so that's why you get this massive attrition rate with guys that are studs.

I mean, we're talking Division I athletes. Division I athlete, Division I wrestlers, Division I football players, Division I runners and swimmers, they all come to Bud's, they all quit. Not all of them quit, but there's plenty of examples of the highest level of collegiate athlete in sports that translate very well to what you're doing in basic SEAL training, and they quit.

And sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose, they don't know how to recover from a loss, and they're just, so I think already, and once you get to a SEAL team, you've got people that are, generally speaking, gonna be pretty resilient when it comes to dealing with a loss.

Not only that, I mean, you just get used, you talk about losing people. You're friends with this guy, you meet this guy in SEAL training. Hey, this guy seems like a stud. Oh, he's just gonna quit. And you're gonna lose five, six, seven people, eight people. People quit so fast, you don't even keep track of them.

So you're just gonna lose, you're just gonna get used to it. So there's that. Now, once you're in the teams, and what you're talking about is now you start taking much more significant loss. You're not losing a race, you're losing one of your friends. And this is what, from a leadership perspective, you have to pay attention to.

So when you're a leader in any organization, you're basically in charge of a mob. When it comes to what their morale is, they're a mob, and they feed off of each other just like a mob riding in the streets, going, oh, we can break this window, let's break all the windows.

And they move this mob mentality. And that happens with morale inside of a team. And you as a leader can't get caught up with the mob. You can't let that happen. You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally so that you don't get caught up in their emotions and their morale.

Because if you get caught up in their emotions and you get caught up in their morale, you can't correct it. So we go out on a mission. The mission goes great. We get into a gunfight, kill a couple of bad guys, everyone's okay, high fives, everyone's feeling great. You come back to base, hey, we don't need to debrief, that was perfect.

Hey, we don't need to get our gear maintained. We can just go to bed, we're awesome. That's when the leader has to say, oh, we've got the mob, and the mob is becoming slightly arrogant. Hey guys, real quick, that was a good op, but there's some things we could improve on.

You got to bring that mob back and bring them back to center line. Same thing in the other direction. You go out on an operation, it doesn't go well. You go out on an operation, you take casualties. Now you come back to base, you see guys moping around, you see the spirit starting to break, and same thing.

If you're part of that mob, you'll be with them, your morale will be breaking, your spirit will be breaking. You got to look at them and say, oh, I see what's happening. Hey guys, listen up. That was tough, didn't go the way we wanted it to go. We need to learn some lessons.

Here's some things I can do better. What can we do better to make sure that that never happens again? What can we do to make sure we have the opportunity to go out and avenge our brother on the battlefield? What can we do to move this thing forward? So as a leader, when it comes to winning and losing, you're generally going to be the person countering what the mob mentality is.

'Cause when the mob starts winning, they want to keep winning and they might get arrogant. When the mob is losing, they might start to lose more because their attitude goes down the drain. So that's what you have to pay attention to from a leadership perspective. For me personally, I think, I know what I did when I lost guys was focus on, all right, we need to celebrate the life.

We need to mourn the loss and then we need to go to work. We need to get our gear back on. We need to lock and load our weapons. We need to get back out there. I know that that's what we needed to do. So often, the best way to contend with problems, with issues, with adversity is action, is by taking action.

The more you sit and the more you wait and the more time you spend with that adversity, with the upper hand inside your head, the worse it's going to get. So for me, always taking action, making something happen. It doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be some mammoth triumph that you're going to go and pursue.

But if you say, "Hey, listen, this is what happened. "Didn't go the way we wanted it to. "We're going to get our gear back on. "We're going to go back out. "We're going to do this other mission." And that's what I think. I think taking action, and it's in your personal life too.

You know, something doesn't go the way you wanted it to go. You didn't get the job you wanted. You didn't get the hire. You didn't get the promotion. You can go home and sit there and dwell on it. That's not getting you any progress. Or you say, "Okay, you know what?

"Let me do a quick analysis. "Why didn't I get that promotion? "Oh, it's 'cause I didn't get this qualification, "or I hadn't jumped through this gate. "Okay, cool. "What do I need? "Let me look into how do I get to jump through that gate "so next time I will get the promotion." And you start taking action.

So action for me is a cure for a lot of problems that we have in life. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)