As a Navy SEAL leader, I've always chosen
light and fast over slow and heavy, as such, I rarely wore my side plates into battle,
but on this one mission to neutralize
a high value Al-Qaida leader in 2007, had a little voice in my head say,
”wear your side plates.” I'll tell you what,
thank God that I listened, because that night we were ambushed
and I was shot eight times by an enemy PKM machine gun
to my body and face, leaving me for dead in the middle
of one of the fiercest firefights of my war. A little over ninety six hours later,
I found myself in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland,
struggling as the doctors filled me with overwhelming information.
“Lieutenant Redman, you have no use of your left hand,
we don't know the extent of the nerve damage,
your elbow is destroyed, we're thinking about amputating your arm,
you are trigged, you are wired shut and we are feeding you through a stomach tube”.
“Lieutenant Redman, it's going to take years to put you back together”.
As this information began to sink in, I suddenly was hit with a stark realization.
My military operational career is over,
I'm going to be permanently disabled and I will be forever disfigured.
As I was trying to process this, I suddenly heard a conversation
close by and it sounded a little like this, “what a shame, what a pity,
we send these young men and women off to war and they come home
broken and battered and they're never going to be the same,
they're never going to find success, they're never going to be able to get
back out there and achieve the American dream.
And in that moment, I decided I would not be the victim
that some wanted to put me into, into that box, instead, I was going to step up,
I was going to look at how to go forward, and when my wife came back into the room, I said,
“give me my pen”. And I wrote out this sign,
“Attention to all who enter here, if you're coming this room
with sadness or sorrow, don't bother. The wounds I received, I got in a job that I love
doing it for people that I love, defending the freedom of a country I deeply love.
I'll make a full recovery, what is full? That is the absolute utmost, physically.
I have the ability to recover and then I'm going to push that
about a hundred percent further through sheer mental tenacity.
This room you're about to enter is a room of fun, optimism and intense rapid regrowth,
if you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere”. It is amazing the power of positivity
over negativity, it’s amazing when in the
face of massive adversity, when we choose to drive
forward what it can do for us, because most people are unwilling to do this,
we're so focused on the pain and the misery and on what we lost,
we focus on the end and we get stuck on the X,
failing to realize one of the greatest gifts you have when life ambushes come
that it can become a new beginning. Some of the hardest moments in your life
will become some of the greatest opportunities, you will be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.
And the thing is, that's common for all of us when these ambushes occur,
we all get stuck on a central point, in special operations lingo we call it the X
and the X is that central point of attack, it’s the point of incident, it’s the point
of the the end moments. And for most of us, we focus on the pain,
we focus on the misery, we focus on that stress, we focus on the past and what we've lost.
Instead of focusing on what really needs to happen,
which is what I was taught in my special operations career.
When these life ambushes come we must get off the X as quickly as possible.
And as I wrote that sign out and we hung it, I thought to myself,
“ok, you've set the benchmark, you've said where you're going to go,
how do we go?” And it comes down
to two key principles I learned in my special operations career.
The first one is you have to be willing to overcome,
you have to build this relentless overcome mindset because you see
life ambushes are common for all of us, life is unfair, it doesn't go according to plan,
but if you already have it in your mind that no matter what obstacles or adversity
I come up against, I'm going to overcome,
you're already well on your way. And number two,
when we get on the X, we've got to think about how
we move quickly off of it, and I had learned the
same thing that my teammates and I managed to do that night to come home from Iraq,
I learned to get off the X you have to react. And you see react is an acronym
for what we do with massively hard situations,
these life ambushes, these the end moments. And the first step is you've got to
recognize your reality. And you see this is
really one of the hardest things because when life ambushes come,
when the end moments come for many of us the very first step is we're in denial,
we don't want to admit, we want to push it away like an ostrich sticking our heads in the sand,
we just hope and pray it'll go away on its own.
I got bad news, that doesn't work. Life does not work this way
and I've got to tell you, you will never get off the axe
until you come to grips with the reality, until you acknowledge and
articulate there is a problem. “Houston, we've got a problem”.
And it’s at this point that you are starting the process to move forward.
Number two, now that we know it, we've got to evaluate our assets.
You see, when these hard moments come, we need to think about
“I have my family, I have my friends, I have some money in an account,
or maybe I need to borrow some money to deal with the problem,
maybe I need an accountant, maybe I need an attorney,
maybe I need a priest, counselor, chaplain”, it doesn't matter,
all that matters is we evaluate these assets and take stock of our inventory.
And next one we've got to assess the possible options and outcomes,
and when we look at this
oftentimes when people make it to this step there's this sudden sense of urgency like,
“oh, my God, I'm in a crisis and I need to move right now”,
and so often we tend to put ourselves in a worse situation
because we did not think through the steps. So this is where it's critical to take inventory,
to look at our options and look at the outcome. And one of the hardest parts of this step
is oftentimes when we're in a crisis there is no good option, or outcome,
it is choosing the best of the bad decisions, and so often so many of us don't want
to do what needs to be done, which is the short term pain
for the long term gain. It took me 12 years to get to where
I am now, and I followed this process. Number four, you've got to choose a
direction and communicate, and this is absolutely
critical because one of the things is when you have a life ambush and you're on the X,
you are never on the X alone. Your family gets pulled onto the X with you,
your kids get pulled onto the X with you, your spouse is on the X with you,
if it is a business ambush, your employees, your colleagues, your partners,
they're all on the X with you, and guess what?
In that misery, agonizing stress filled the end moment they feel it too.
And this is where you have to step up and provide something
that is one of the quintessential pieces of the overcome mindset,
when you say, “this is where we're going and
this is how we're going to do it”, you give people hope, hope
is a powerful ally. And the last one,
most important, you have to take action, you have to execute.
I've watched so many businesses, individuals that have gone through
trauma that go through this process and they get into this infinite loop
where they continue to go back and forth through this process
without ever taking action because they are waiting
for the perfect moment. They're waiting for a lull in gunfire,
they're waiting for their next paycheck, they're waiting to close this deal
because it's going to be the tipping point to allow us to get out of this crisis.
I hate to tell you the perfect moment will never come,
the time to move is now,
the time to get off the X is now. And here's an interesting fact,
out of all the thousands of wounded warriors I've worked with,
individuals who have been through trauma, companies that have suffered through
failure, crisis, massive change, the ones who got off the X the fastest
didn't just survive, they thrived, they launched from their ambush
and they were able to drive out of it faster because there's an interesting fact about the X,
the longer you sit on the X it's like quicksand, it gets harder and harder to get up and move.
So the good news is when these life ambushes come for you,
you have a choice, choose to be positive,
choose to put your own sign on the door and choose to get off the X and overcome.