From Where I Sit: Season 2, Episode 5 With Jason Redman, Retired Navy SEAL, Author, and Leadership Speaker Transcript

Tom McGee:

Welcome to From Where I Sit, the podcast where we explore the forces shaping America's built economy. I'm your host, Tom McGee, president and CEO of ICSC. In discussion with prominent leaders and innovators, we cut through the noise to explore the trends and innovations influencing the future of our communities.

Welcome to From Where I Sit. Today's podcast is going to focus less on commercial real estate and retail, but rather on leadership, resilience and transformation. And today it's my honor to introduce a truly remarkable guest. Jason Redman is a retired Navy SEAL and decorated officer who's dedicated more than two decades serving our country. Jason's leadership was forged on the front lines leading combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he is recognized not only for his time in uniform, but also for his powerful story of overcoming adversity after being wounded in action.

Beyond his military career, Jason is now a resilience coach, keynote speaker, and bestselling author, helping leaders and organizations tackle challenges with courage and optimism. His journey from battlefield to boardroom is a testament to the power of perseverance and purpose shaped by lessons learned through extraordinary service. Jason, welcome to From Where I Sit.

Jason Redman:

Honored to be on, man. Good to see you again.

Tom:

Well, it's an honor and a privilege to speak to you today. Thank you for your service to our country. We had a chance to meet each other a few months ago when Jason spoke to our board. And when I heard Jason speak to our board, I reached out to Jason and said, I'd love to have you talk to our broader listening audience and our membership. So thank you for agreeing, Jason. And as I mentioned, our audience and listeners are comprised of business leaders and business professionals. They face a myriad of challenges every day. And so I think your perspective on leadership and overcoming adversity and being intentional on mindset is highly relevant. So welcome and again, thank you. It's a privilege to speak to you. Jason, you spent 20-ish years as a Navy SEAL. I know I do, and I'm sure the vast majority of our audience is deeply impressed by that. And we all look up to Navy SEALs, but I know becoming a Navy SEAL is a journey and is a challenge and first let's start at the very beginning. Why did you want to be a Navy SEAL?

Jason:

They were regarded as the best, the hardest training and there was something about that that drove me. I came from a military family, so I grew up always wanting to go in the military. My grandfather was a decorated World War II pilot. So originally, I wanted to do that. I'm a child of Top Gun also. So I know there's a bunch of you out there who want to be Maverick too and I did two, man. I thought like that's what I'm going to do, man. Fast mover, this could be amazing. And my dad was an Army Airborne instructor and SEALs, up until about 2001, went through Army Airborne school, including myself and my dad, obviously many years prior, but my dad said there's this group of guys who went through Airborne school with me. They're called Navy SEALs and they're pretty amazing. He said they're really strong in the water, which I was a strong swimmer. And he said, you may want to check them out. I remember looking into it, it's very difficult to find much about them back then. This is in the late eighties, early nineties. The internet wasn't there yet for all you young people. But-

Tom:

I remember life before the internet and before cell phones.

Jason:

Yeah, before Google search.

Tom:

Exactly.

Jason:

So I tried to find stuff about the SEAL teams and didn't, I couldn't find very much, but there happened to be a guy in our church who was a big special operations aficionado and he had some stuff about SEAL teams. And the more I've dug into it, the more I came to find, hey, toughest training, most secretive, which we kind of laugh at now since we're in the spotlight so much and the hardest training in the U.S. military. And there was just something about that. I was a young kid. I probably was not your typical individual you would have looked at and said that guy's going to go become a Navy SEAL. I was a scrawny little runt back then, much bigger dreams than muscles and capability. But it's what I wanted to do. And I locked my sight on it.

And I think that's a big thing with any leaders that are out there, whether it's business, personal, I think individuals who, who are successful in this life are goal setters. They identify a goal and then they reverse engineer. How do I accomplish this goal? What are the things that I need to do? Who do I need to meet? What steps are along this path? And that's basically what I did as a kid. I said, I want to be a Navy SEAL. How do I do this? How do I set this up?

Tom:

You're someone who runs towards challenges and faces obstacles. And one of the things that I think is legendary now is becoming a Navy SEAL and going through Hell Week is not an easy task. And it's something that I think 80% of folks drop out and maybe even a smaller percentage actually complete it. Talk about the Hell Week experience. What's involved in Hell Week? Take away the cloud of mystery of what's there. You're going through Hell Week, you arrive. What's that all like to completion?

Jason:

So for anyone that doesn't know what Hell Week is, it is probably the most notorious block of training in the entire U.S. military. Definitely probably one of the more challenging ones in militaries around the world. It varies, but it is the greatest crucible to overcome to become a Navy SEAL. And it is a week of training where during that week, and not a seven day week, it's about a five-and-a-half-day week. It starts on Sunday afternoon and it goes until Friday midday, later in the day, I often joke about when your class secured Hell Week, the later in the day, it shows how much the instructors hated your class. But during that week, students will get almost no sleep. The average student may get two to three hours at most during that entire week.

Tom:

Two to three hours over the entire week!

Jason:

The entire week. It's brutal. As a matter of fact, you'll start to do micro sleep. So what happens is your body is so sleep deprived. I'll never forget. We were running down the beach on Friday. I'm running with a boat on my head. I'm delirious and we were running by the compound. And the next thing I know, I wake up and I'm three quarters of a mile down the beach. I'm literally slept while running under the boat. My brain just shut down because it needed sleep so much.

You're constantly wet, you're constantly cold, you're coated in sand. It's not uncommon. You'll chafe holes in your armpits and in between your legs and rub hair off the top of your head from carrying the boat around in the sand. It's not uncommon to start hallucinating by Wednesday or Thursday, just from the lack of sleep, but you still have to function as a team and overcome. And we have the greatest attrition rate during Hell Week. During Hell Week, on average, anywhere from 60% to 80% of the class will quit during Hell Week. It's designed that way. It is the SEAL’s largest culling process to show us that you have the ability to endure massive pain and discomfort and still function. And that's what we're looking for at the heart and soul of what makes a Navy SEAL.

Tom:

Jason, at what point in your Navy SEAL training is Hell Week?

Jason:

It's in the very beginning. So my class, it was the sixth week of training. It's varied over the years. I heard now it's the fourth week of training, but it will move. It'll slide back and forth over the years.

Tom:

And how long is the total training session to become a Navy SEAL? To graduate as a Navy SEAL?

Jason:

So there's different iterations, but I would say it's almost, it's probably a two-year pipeline is really what it is. So basic underwater demolition seal training, which Hell Week is in the beginning. It's broken into four phases. You have month-long pre-training phase where they're kind of teaching you all the things you need to know to successively go through training, how to handle the boats, how to do the o-course, where everything is. Then first phase is literally designed to weed you out. It's just kind of a beat down phase, if you will to prove that you have the mettle to do this. And then second phase is all our diving and third phase is you're into land warfare, weapons, explosives. Then from there, you go on to start doing more advanced training. I tell people, BUD/S is kind of like high school. And then you go on to SEAL qualification training, which is kind of like college. You start learning actual real tactics beyond the basics so that we can get you up to the level that as a new guy, you're at least at the basic level to operate in a SEAL platoon. And then from there, our guys go to SERE school. They'll go to Airborne and Freefall school. They'll go to a month of cold weather survival school up in Alaska, along with various other schools before they finally check into their SEAL team. So it's probably a good two-and-a-half-year cycle if you take into account when a young man says, “Hey, I want to join the Navy and become a SEAL” and go through that whole pipeline to go to bootcamp and then SEAL training and move through the pipeline.

Tom:

What an impressive level of commitment. In my non-Navy SEAL perspective, I think Hell Week is the week of hardcore practice in high school football that I went through, which I thought was bad but it’s nothing like what you just described. And let's delve a little bit deeper on that. You said 60% to 80% of the folks drop out during that period. What's the difference between the people that succeed through Hell Week versus those that drop out?

Jason:

If you looked at a man to man, you'd never recognize it. A matter of fact, I mean, the Navy has poured millions and millions of dollars into trying to understand what makes a Navy SEAL, massive amounts of psychological testing and all these different things. And I'll be honest, some of it is just not quantifiable. Some of it, I think, every human has the ability, an innate ability to endure some level of pain and discomfort. I think that for all of us, and that can be learned, you can increase your level. Some people innately have a higher level than others. That's probably one of the most common things that enables special operations operators, because we need individuals who can, a friend of mine calls it embracing the suck. You have to learn how to embrace the suck and still function and make good decisions and operate because we do very high risk missions around the world. We do them in all conditions. I mean, the SEAL stands for Sea, Air and Land. That is the acronym, what it stands for. And those are the environments we operate in. Cold water environments are the most brutal environments you can ever operate in. It corrodes weapons, it corrodes mind and soul. It's just brutal, but you still have to function. The second thing that I think makes special operations personnel what separates people is one, what is your level to embrace the pain and discomfort? So that's obviously the biggest. The next thing that starts to weed people out is I think special operations personnel have the ability to process information very quickly in chaotic environments. Obviously, there are some high level businesspeople that have the ability to do this also. If you have both of those things, you usually make a very good special operations warrior or in our case a SEAL.

Imagine if you will, we train guys to, when we do close quarters combat, we take, let's just hypothetically say four individuals and we put them outside of a door and they have no idea what's on the other side of that door. And suddenly we use explosives to blow open that door. So, there's a massive shock wave. Your ears are ringing, your sight is blurred. As you go through that doorway and step into that room with a very choreographed maneuvering that occurs. We do live fire training. So, literally as you step in that door, you're starting to, you're searching that room within split seconds, identifying bad guy, good guy targets. What are the things I'm looking at? If it's a target and a bad guy, you're immediately engaging them because literally split seconds make the difference between life and death. Your teammates are shooting their guns within inches of your head. So now you have many explosions going off next to you. If there is a hostage, you're now having to quickly assess, how do I move into this room because protecting the hostage is the most critical thing, no fail mission. And all of this is happening literally within two to three seconds. If you freeze, if you are unable to function, by the way, when we're in combat, bullets are now flying back at you and you still have to function and make these high-level decisions. And there are a lot of people, unfortunately, as we up the complexity of room clearances, we'll do different things to make it more complicated, different scenarios. Individuals who can't process that data and make those decisions that quickly and safely, those are the individuals that end up, they don't move on in their career because they're a safety violation or they're a threat to what we're trying to do.

Tom:

Listening to you talk is just so impressive on so many different levels. But what so many people think, including myself, you think of the Navy SEAL, you think of the physical aspect of being a Navy SEAL. But what you just described so much is about the mental aspect and the decision-making capabilities, which totally makes sense when you're listening to you talk and think about the scenarios the Navy SEALs are in. But it’s so much more than just the physical attributes and physical skill sets and ability to-

Jason:

I would say the physical is such a small component. We tell everybody who's going through training and anyone that's out there and I apply this into my own life and I encourage those who are listening. The machine we walk around in is the foundation of everything we do. So, if you push it to operate at the highest level, if you try to become the elite version of you, now everything we built on top of it is going to be operating at a higher level.

But really, it's this and this that are making all the difference out there. It's our moral grounding. It's our ability to process massive amounts of information. It's our ability to deal with discomfort. And sometimes that discomfort, I mean, I'm going through a crazy growth phase in my life right now with all our businesses. And I mean, even today was a day where I'm like, my God, what am I doing? And it's easy to start to question yourself. No different than stepping in a doorway and bullets are flying at you, but you've got to clear away that noise and you focus on the problem at hand and you start to isolate. You know, what's my most critical problem? it's that bad guy in front of me shooting at me. Let me take that guy out. What's the next problem set I'm dealing with? It's, I've got a hostage right here that I now need to move to and protect. What's our flow? Where are our guys going? So, life is no different. I mean, it's no different in business. We identify what are the biggest problem sets we need to deal with, clear out the noise because worrying and do I have the ability to do this? Yes, you have the ability to do it. You wouldn't be here. Don't give into that little weakness in your mind that's questioning just because you're feeling overwhelmed in the moment.

Tom:

Yeah, and it’s that ability to keep calm, isn't it? So, you can focus.

Jason:

That is a critical component. I often remind myself, because all of us get caught up with the insanity of life, me included, but I always go back to my little reminder, no one's shooting at you and no one is dying. If it doesn't meet that criteria, take a breath and let's navigate through this. Everybody calm down. Let's figure this out.

Tom:

In the case of everything, but what Navy SEALs are facing on the battlefield, don't sweat the small stuff, right? And, most things in life are the small stuff, except for family and life and death kind of situations. Jason, I want to get to an experience that changed your life. But before we get to talking about that in some depth, let's just give a sense of perspective. You graduated from Navy SEAL training when, and then what was your…?

Jason:

Yeah, it's crazy. 30 years ago, when I graduated SEAL training. So we're having our 30-year reunion out there in California next month.

Tom:

So graduated Navy SEAL training in 1995?

Jason:

That’s right. December 15th.

Tom:

And what a period of time to graduate because the world changed shortly thereafter, five, six years later with September 11th. Talk about how many tours of duty did you do in Iraq and Afghanistan and the timeframes around that.

Jason:

So pre-9/11, I did three cycles and additional deployment down to Central and South America. And then post-9/11, I did two. I did Afghanistan and then I did Iraq and was wounded on the last mission, my last mission, but we were one week from going home. We literally were wrapping things up when I was wounded on that mission in Iraq.

We were going after a high level al-Qaeda leader and my team and I walked into a very well executed ambush, a pre-staged ambush. We were outnumbered. We were outgunned. There were six of us and really five because one, our interpreter made up the sixth guy and then there were five SEALs and we were probably outnumbered. We estimated 12 to 15 enemy fighters, two PKM machine guns and myself and three of my teammates got shot up in that engagement. I was hit eight times between my body and body armor and pinned down. I took a round of the face, two rounds to the elbow. I was pinned down about 15 yards in front of my teammates. And literally this gunfight was happening directly over me. And this is where, this is where you build good teams. And this is a business thing also build good teams and build people you can trust because in that scenario, I had to trust my teammates to save my life. I knew that I was totally pinned down. I was bleeding out, but I believed in them. We had trained hard to be able to deal with adversity like we faced here. And my teammates did an amazing job. My team leader took over and was coordinating things. And then we called in a closest fire mission ever executed where we bring rounds from an aircraft down on top of us. We actually called rounds directly in our position. And in the lull in that fire, my team leader ran forward, got me, got a tourniquet on my arm, saved my life. And we were able to continue to take out the enemy and bring in the medivacs for us to get off the battlefield.

Tom:

For those that aren't familiar with the extent of your injuries, just give an overview of the injuries you suffered that day.

Jason:

So I took two machine gun rounds in the left elbow, which during the gunfight, I thought it shot off my arm. My arm kind of caught on the side of my clothing, I'm assuming, because when I reached over, couldn't feel it. I had no nerve function in any way whatsoever, the lower part of my arm. Rounds off my body armor helmet off my weapon, right side plate. I turned to try and move back to the guys and that's when I caught a round that hit me right in front of the ear, traveled through my face, took off my nose, right cheekbone blew out, vaporized my orbital floor, broke all the bones above my eye, broke the head of my jaw, shattered my jaw down to my chin. Some pretty devastating injuries. Doctors said it was a miracle I survived. I needed eight blood transfusions over the 96 hours, they medivaced me off the battlefield. And definitely life-changing injuries.

The original plan was to amputate my arm above the elbow. But once again, I'm very fortunate. The head of orthopedics at Bethesda at that time was a SEAL, a former SEAL who had become an orthopedic surgeon. And he went against his team and said, hey, I know he doesn't have nerve function. I know his elbow is destroyed, but I'm going to figure out a way to save his arm. And he did. I still have some limited mobility and function in my arm, but I have it.

So it's amazing how life unfolds in that manner and driving forward and figuring those things out. But that night definitely changed a lot for me.

Tom:

Jason, when you left the battlefield that day, you were already on the X. You already started to shift to that mindset. So, for those that aren't familiar with that concept of being on the X, what does that mean?

Jason:

Yeah, I definitely live my life by frameworks. I mean, the military is really built around something we call standard operating procedures, SOPs. So, we take complicated scenarios and then we try and simplify them through steps to follow when everything goes wrong. And then we repeat that enough that you just automatically do those things. One of the slogans in special operations is you have to get off the X. I trained my entire military career to place the enemy on the X and the X is the point of attack. It's the ambush point, it's a sniper attack, it's we conduct a raid, it's a target take down. The flip side of that coin, if you are on the receiving end of that, you have to get off the X as quickly as possible. Our goal in the military is to pin people on the X, no different than the enemy's goal was to pin us to the X. So, I survived this vicious enemy ambush only to step into what I call a life ambush. And everybody out there, you might not be able to relate to the bullets and bombs in battle. Those of you that are out there, I'm sure listening to the story of me describing this and being shot at, like, I can't relate to this. But the reality is everyone can relate to life. Everybody has experienced the bullets and bombs of life. You've been shot down by rejection and failure. You've been blown up by injury, illness, or loss. All of us, at some point, have walked through the minefields of depression and despair. And when those things occur, that's a life ambush. And you were sitting on that X.

And when you're on the X and you're being shot at by the bullets and bombs of life, it's very easy to feel sorry for yourself, to get overwhelmed, to say, can't do this. I call them the big four, to say there's no hope, there's nothing I can do, it's all outside of my control, and it's not fair. Those are the common things that humans think of when the bullets and bombs of life are raining down on you. And the reality is what I explain to people, one, you have to get off the X as quickly as possible. And two, the greatest gift you have as a leader is you have a choice. No one forces you to lay there and feel sorry for yourself when things are going wrong. You choose to feel sorry for yourself and choosing to drive forward and get off that X is an incredibly powerful thing. I call that the overcome mindset. And that's a big framework that I teach. The overcome mindset in coordination with getting off the X are the two components that will enable you to overcome any adversity.

And the overcome mindset is built on three principles. Number one, it's built on awareness. All of these are things that I learned in SEAL training and I now apply in everyday life. I coach people on it. Number one is awareness. Be aware that bad things can happen to good people. You can have the most perfect plan. Your investment portfolio could be rock solid. Warren Buffett himself could say, this is the greatest portfolio I've ever seen. And then something out of the blue like COVID comes along and wrecks everything. Well, you need to be aware of that. Be aware that your perfect plan can go awry. Be aware that things can happen to you physically, personally, mentally, things can happen to your family. Bad things happen to good people all the time. I meet all these individuals that have these plans. And when I say, what about this? They're like, that will never happen. And I'm like, why? There's plenty of people out there that had the perfect plan and everything was good. And suddenly in the blink of an eye it was gone.

Tom:

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, the immortal words of John Lennon.

Jason:

Amen, so awareness. Number two is preparation. So that enables us to put things in place to protect ourselves. That can be as robust as like you’re training for something. It can be robust as you build out a whole risk management side of your team. We have high levels of insurance and protections in place so that God knows the worst happens, we're protected against it. Sometimes it's merely a mental preparation that, okay, an example I like to give is for those of you that have kids, if your kids have started to drive, that's kind of a terrifying thing. We send our young teenage idiot kids out onto the road and you pray that you train them well to make good decisions. But the reality is every day around the world, young teenage drivers get killed doing something stupid or not paying attention. And you'd be living in la la land if you thought, that'll never happen to my kid. I hate to tell you that's not reality. So this is where awareness, now that preparation is merely a mental preparation. When I sent my kids out on the road, I told myself, I need to be ready. I pray this won't happen. I've prepared them, but guess what? I'm the leader. I need to lead my family. I need to lead my other kids. God forbid this happens. I need to be ready, which enables us to take action.

Number three is action. When terrible things happen, awareness makes us identify and entertain the idea this could happen. Preparation, we put steps in place to protect us against it, even if that's just mental recognition and a mental preparation like, hey, I'm not going to shut down because I have to take action when something goes wrong. And then when that moment comes, you go, you take action. You don't allow yourself to freeze like most people do when horrific things happen in their life.

Tom:

That's a powerful framework and mindset, the overcome mindset, awareness, preparation, and action. What a great framework to apply. It's so consistent with everything I've learned about you and know about you through our time together.

Let's go back to the events of that day or post-the events of that day. You're now at a Naval hospital in Bethesda and you've authored a sign that goes over the door. You're still critically injured. You're going through, as you said, early stages of the 40 surgeries that you've had to go through. A lot of people are probably coming to visit you and you have something over the door of that hospital. What does this say?

Jason:

Yeah, I put a sign on my door. Frequently in life when bad things happen to people, they start to treat you like a victim. And that's a really dangerous slippery slope because it's very easy as humans to see ourselves as victim. Remember the four things I talked about. No hope. There's nothing I can do. It's outside of my control. It's not fair. That's moving you down the path of a victim mindset. And there's men, I believe we're living in it. There's a pandemic in this country right now with the victim mindset. People feel like if the world doesn't go their way, if they don't get into the college they want, if they don't get the job they want, it doesn't have anything to do with them and it has to do with them being the victim and people are treating them poorly. Looking inward and saying, you know, what part of this do I own? Very rarely, very rarely do we not have some level of ownership with something that went wrong. So, when bad things happen, no different in the hospital, people were coming into me and like, it's so terrible. You, they'd be shocked when they saw me. And obviously I was pretty hard to look at in the beginning with the level of my injuries. And they were seeing this all through the hospital at that point. We probably had 40 or 50 wounded warriors around me in that hospital at the height of the war, ’06, ‘07. So, these people came into my room and they were like, it's so sad. All these wounded warriors, it's just so overwhelming. They'll probably never be successful again. They'll probably be in some VA home, drug addicts and homeless and alcoholics. I mean, this was kind of what they were pouring out this mindset. And then they left. And I remember thinking to myself like, wow, is that me? Like, is that my future? And don't get me wrong, man. I was struggling with my own demons trying to face this. Sure. And time is relative. I do tell people when something bad happens and you will feel some of those victim mindset things and that's perfectly okay. That is human.

But recognize this, the most powerful weapon you have is you have a choice. We choose to be a victim or we choose to be a victor. And when bad things happen, it is a choice to drive forward. And they take a little time to navigate through that. One of the biggest life ambushes I've seen is the loss of a child. It's going to take time to grieve and come to grips with that. But you can't sit on that X forever. And when I was in that hospital, I realized in that moment, like, okay, you know what you need to do. There's some other interesting parts of my story. I failed as a young leader, which started to build all the different frameworks that I lived by. And I realized that everything I had done to build myself back up as a leader applied in this situation also. And it really was no different. I mean, the injuries were pretty grievous, but guess what? The action steps in the framework were no different. And I chose to drive forward. And when my wife came back into the room, I said, you know what? I will no longer feel sorry for myself. I refuse to feel sorry for myself, but no one else is allowed to come in this room and feel sorry for me also. And I wrote out that sign on the door that said: Attention to all who enter here. If you're coming into 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 will overcome, which is basically what it says.

Tom:

That's the genesis of, or the early stages of your overcome mindset. You're putting it in action for sure. What an inspirational thing. I would think anybody that walked into that room after you posted that sign and saw that had to just be floored at the resiliency and the grit that you showed.

Jason:

Yeah, it garnered a lot of national attention. The media got ahold of it. It earned me an invitation to the White House to meet President Bush who signed it that day. I didn't keep it. I didn't feel like it was mine to keep. We had it framed. The sign hangs in the Wounded Ward at Walter Reed. After President Bush signed it, that has a message of hope and inspiration for the wounded warriors. And it's been pretty amazing the impact it's had. It's motivated and inspired millions of people. There's documentaries about it. It's been written about in multiple books, Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates wrote about it in his book. First Lady Michelle Obama wrote about it twice in her book and even sent me a handwritten note saying how much it moved her. So pretty amazing. We never know the power of choice, choosing to be positive in the face of negativity, what ripple effects that will have on others around you.

Tom:

Well, I'm not as prominent as the names that you just made reference to, but I'll tell you, it certainly motivated me and moved me. It's just inspirational. There's just no other way to say it. It's the epitome of being inspirational for other people.

Jason, you mentioned leadership and that you had failed at leadership at certain stages and now you've become and have been a successful leader throughout your life. Talk about your leadership journey a little bit and when it began, some of the obstacles and adversity that you faced and then how you overcame it.

Jason:

Once again, I'm big in the frameworks. I failed as a leader because I think oftentimes we see leadership in some ways as being one-dimensional and leadership is definitely very multi-dimensional. So often individuals step into a leadership position and what they're immediately thinking about is how do I influence or tell these people that I should be leading what to do or how to drive forward? And really, I think that's a downrange effect of leadership. It was a mistake that I made as a young leader. Oftentimes, young leaders have the desire like, I'm a leader, I must say something, I must do something, I must put something in place. And oftentimes, there's an evaluation period, but the reality is first and foremost, as a leader focusing on you, I was definitely following a path and many leaders make the same mistake, hey, do as I say, not as I do, in every aspect of your life.

I often tell people, there's three components that make you into the leader you are, your physical leadership, your personal leadership, and your professional leadership. So, and I personally believe that if any of those things are out of whack, you'll never be the best version of yourself as a leader. And as a matter of fact, the areas where you're merely average, even good, prevent you from being elite and no different in teamwork within yourself. You will always revert to the lowest level that you tolerate within your leadership cycle. So if you tolerate average on your team, you will only ever have an average team. If you tolerate average in your life, you will only be average. You may get good in some levels of professional, but you need to take care of this machine. You need to take care of your relationships because all of it has an impact. So those are things that I started to recognize after I failed. My three rules of leadership, lead yourself, lead others, lead always.

75% of leadership is your ability to lead yourself. It is setting goals. It is going after those goals. It is being positive and facing negativity. It is building that structure and dedication and discipline in your life. By doing that, that tees you up for success for leading others. And so often we think, and I made that same mistake, that telling people what to do was leadership. The reality is, if you're effectively doing rule one and leading yourself, it typically tees people up naturally to want to follow you, which was some great advice I got along in my career.

And the last component is leading always. And that's the hardest. It's leading on the good days. It's lead everybody. We have a saying in the SEAL teams, everybody wants to be a SEAL on a nice sunny day. No one wants to do it when people are shooting at you and it's negative 20 degrees and you can't feel your fingers because frostbite is setting in. But guess what? You still have to lead. You still have to function. You still have to guide. And it's no different in life. I mean, when everything's going wrong, you need to lead. You're a family, yourself, you need to still be disciplined. Just because things aren't going well doesn't mean you stop taking care of yourself. You got to function in those three areas. So that's the leading always principle. And I really encourage people to do it. So no different from when I was in that hospital bed. You can lead from any situation, including a hospital bed. Your attitude and how you drive forward is going to be the biggest impact.

Tom:

Well, it's not only what you say, but it's what you do.

Jason:

It's way more what you do.

Tom:

Yeah, absolutely. And particularly if you think of, I mean, what an illustrative example is you overcoming these injuries. You've led by example, you didn't let adversity take you down. You've thrived and you are thriving today. Talk a little bit about your post-military career now. You have a lot of different interests, a lot of different business interests, consulting, speaking, investment. Talk a little bit about that, Jason.

Jason:

Yeah. So, I got out and I started off running a nonprofit. I just, I think that's a common thing that many of our military members do. We see a need. It becomes a business opportunity. How can we help others? I really recommend anybody to run a nonprofit. You learn a lot about business running a nonprofit. Ridiculously hard. I like the for-profit model much better.

Tom:

Not-for-profit doesn't mean for loss. You still have to raise money.

Jason:

Oh, and you're always raising money. I mean, it's, you're having to convince people that what you're doing is of value as opposed to in a business, you're providing something of value. And I think it's easier to sell. If you do a good job of providing something of value, it doesn't take much to sell people on it. And they're like, yeah, you have great value. I want to buy this. So, I learned a lot with that. I started speaking, we wrote books and the books did pretty well. And I got very good at speaking, which started to bring in a significant amount of money. I'm not, I didn't come from money. I did not have a whole lot of money. So, suddenly I started making a decent amount of money and we weren't putting that money to work and COVID happened. And I will never forget, I had already done probably 40 events leading up to COVID in mid-March of 2020. And I was scheduled to have almost a hundred events that year. And overnight, everything dried up and was gone. And we didn't have anything else. I hadn't built anything else out. And I'm very fortunate that we had made some money, but we hadn't done anything crazy. So, we were able to survive off my military retirement income. Because literally overnight, everything went away. So, we had to pay the mortgage and eat ramen and basically make ends meet while we navigated this. And it made me realize like, hey man, you are way too one dimensional. You need to start diversifying and looking for other things. So, when speaking comes back up, you need to start putting your money to work. During COVID, I read the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. And one of the biggest principles that stood out to me was successful people with money turn their liabilities into assets. And that really stuck with me out of anything from within that book. And I started to look at real estate. Well, okay. Well, how do I buy stuff that I like, but turns into growth and I gain equity. I came up with once again, frameworks.

Tom:

You're a military guy.

Jason:

If you want to be successful, you got to embrace DEI. The D stands for diversify your income streams. So, at that time, all I had was my military retirement and speaking. So, I said, okay, where can I go to start getting different income streams? The E stands for look for opportunities that have equity and have a potential for exit. So, I can sell them. One of the biggest things I learned with speaking is there was no exit. I was the product. No matter how much I tried to duplicate myself with other speakers, they wanted me. And even in my courses and some of the other things I was speaking just didn't reap the same reward of standing on a stage and delivering that presentation. And then the I stood for increase your income straight. So, the I is for income. How do we increase that? By bringing in more income, we're able to put more money to work and rinse and repeat.

So yeah, my wife and I were big skiers and every year we would drop probably $10,000 at least, if not more for a family of five to go skiing. And yeah, if we went West Coast, it was probably double that at least. And we said, well, this is crazy. What if we bought our own condo and now we just saved a whole bunch of money because we're not paying somebody else to go skiing. We have our own now. Not only that, we're able to rent it out all the times that we're not using it. So, we did that and very quickly we liked the model. We were very fortunate to have an ex-Green Beret who was our property manager and he did a great job. So we said, well, hey, let's do this again. So, we ended up in about a two-year period buying five ski condos and then putting that to work.

And from there, we said, well, we want to increase our portfolio. We needed a new office and we found a commercial building and I definitely wasn't looking for something. One, I wasn't going to give my money away to somebody else and I want to put it to work for us. So, I said, how can I purchase a commercial building that once again, other people are helping pay for it, turn their liabilities into assets. And there was kind of a unique thing we had learned over the years in speaking. I needed studios to record things. I needed a space to do events. We needed offices. Frequently, I was having to do pictures and different things, record videos for content. So, we found a building that was significantly larger and it was kind of older and outdated, but we were like, wow, this is pretty amazing. We could turn this into a coworking executive office space, creative space with a large event center that meets our needs for when we need it, which isn't all the time, maybe only a few times a year, but now we rent it out to everybody else. And we have an impact in the community that has equity. We split the businesses. So the property is one business. The new event center is another business. So, now we have the ability to either exit both of them together or separate them. So, then this was all done with research and finding people who done it before and saying, hey, here's what I'm interested in. Can you tell me how you did this? So, I can figure out how to do it.

Tom:

Well, first of all, you have a lot of real estate people listening to this podcast. So, they're all going to be impressed by your investment in real estate and interest in real estate. I'm actually impressed just in the speed upon which you did that too. The pandemic was 2020. We're sitting here in 2025 and you diversified, I mean, even implementing your DEI model, diversify income, equity and exit strategy and increase income pretty quickly over a very short period of time. So that speaks to your focus on execution as well.

Jason, as we get near the end of our time, you have had a partner throughout most of your life. I know you mentioned your wife early in our conversation. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about her because I know she's been by your side throughout all of this.

Jason:

Yeah, she is absolutely incredible. I met her early in my SEAL career. I'd been in for maybe six years when I met her. We were married at the eight-year point and we've now been together for 26 years, married for 24. She has been through the highs and lows of almost everything I've been through. And I think in this life, having that ride or die, that person who's with you through the good, the bad and the ugly is a really critical thing. And it's tough. We're at a 50% divorce rate in this country. And I think some of that is a combination of it's too easy to quit today. We've kind of turned this into a, a mindset and number two, probably some people need to do a better job of making sure they're totally aligned. My wife and I ended up writing a relationship book that came out last year just around all those things, because they want to know how have you guys done it? How have you guys navigated through all this? She has been with me not only in my military career, but she's always been a natural entrepreneur. So, when we launched the speaking company, she is my partner and my manager and we make all our business decisions together. She runs all that. I’m the outward facing. She's the inward facing. I mean, even today as we speak, she was like, hey, there's another ski condo available. What do you think of this one? It could be good for our portfolio. And literally we pulled it off this morning. So, she's driving a lot of that and her and I together, we're a great team and I'm just blessed to have that.

You can find that right one. We've raised three amazing kids. I'll probably be a grandpa within the next 12 to 18 months. My daughter and my son-in-law, he graduates the Fire Academy. So yeah, we're just blessed. Life continues to go, but it doesn't happen. You have to make it happen. That's the thing. So I appreciate you saying how quickly we executed, but hey, execution is key. That's the thing. I meet all these people who will say to me, I wish I could do, I wish I could do this. I wish I could do that. Well, you can, you know, the difference is you got to take action. And what's within the realm of possibility, Tom, if you told me, know what, Jason, I'm really inspired by your story about being a SEAL, I'd like to become a Navy SEAL. I'd tell you, know, Tom, I don't know that ship might have sailed.

Tom:

What, you think? Really? Wow, they're not looking for 58-year-old middle aged guys.

Jason:

They’re not. I will tell you, it is definitely a young man's game. So, figuring out where our best resources can be put, I often talk to people in leadership is when I coach, one of the questions I like to ask is what are your hopes, goals and dreams? And is your leadership taking you where you want to go? That's a really pivotal question because reality is a lot of people we just churn along thinking we're going to get to this level. When if you really peel back the onion, what you're currently doing is never going to take you.

Tom:

Yeah. I often say there's a difference between managing something and leading. And leading is about the future and where you're going and aspiring people to come along with you. So, I totally agree with you. Final question. 20 years from now, you've already built a legacy that has inspired many, but 20 years from now, what do you hope people say about the impact you've had?

Jason:

I hope they will say he made me better. Whether that's my spouse, my kids, my friends, someone who listens to this podcast, the different business opportunities that I'm involved in. I hope they will say, hey, being around that guy from either things he was teaching or things he's providing value he's providing, those things made me better.

Tom:

What a great goal. I'm pretty confident people are going to say that, Jason. So, thank you for taking the time today. It's just, as I said, it's a privilege to talk to you and you are an inspiration. Thank you for your service to our country. Thank you for the example you've set in your life, both in service and post-military service. You're an example to so many including to me. So, thank you for taking time today.

Jason:

My honor, good luck to everybody out there. Keep crushing it. Have a plan. Execute. Overcome.

Tom:

Super. Thank you, Jason.

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